(16) Dr. Luke; Historian or storyteller?
Vern Peterman · Jan 29, 2006
Apologetics, No. 17
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262342564584

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

All right, we'll be looking at Luke, historian or storyteller here. Dr. Luke is the author of the book of Acts and the Gospel of Luke, both written to a fellow otherwise unknown named Theophilus. And so how do we approach the question? One of the things that we said before is there's this term minimalist and maximalist, okay? So a minimalist is a little tiny guy and a maximalist is a really big guy. What's that all about? Remember? Yes? Okay. Alright, so the maximalist, he's innocent until proven guilty, right? And the minimalist, he's guilty unless you prove him innocent. So yeah, that's the difference.

Basically, what you'll see is those who look at scripture with regard and respect will generally be somewhere in the range of a maximalist. By the way, not all maximalists are necessarily Christians. You will have maximalists who just hold a general regard for Scripture, but are not necessarily saved. Minimalists are those who are skeptical of Scripture, and they'll trust the confirmation that they find before they'll trust Scripture.

All right, so Dr. Luke wrote these things, and so the assumption that we come at these with definitely makes a difference. Then is the approach that we have to the data. In our fifth meeting, we asked the question, how do we know what we know? Remember that? Okay. When we did that, we had this maximalist, minimalist issue come up because we look at the evidence that's out there and we apply tests.

Now, just to give ourselves a framework, The maximalist for Luke and Acts will generally look around 60 AD. Give or take, you know, a couple of years as the date for Luke and Acts. That fits the context and the time frame and that's when Luke would have had a chance to have met with people, talk with people, examine things, check the eyewitnesses that he said that he wrote from. Then the other point being is that he in the latter part of Acts uses us and we numerous times, which means it's written as if it were a first-hand account. The minimalist frequently looks at somewhere after 100 AD for the authorship. And why would they look at 100 AD?

Why would that be an interesting time to them? Tom? That's right. Time went by. Boy, if Dr. Luke wrote this, he was ancient, right? No? Basically, they give it a time after it's even possible that Dr. Luke would have written it. Yeah? I would say senile. Senile, yeah. And so the approach that they take is very much a, you know, this isn't a real book. It's phonied up. So, very different.

We have the three principal tests of classic historiography that we looked at in the initial look at this. This was our fifth meeting when we asked the question, how do we know what we know? And these approaches here are the bibliographic tests. How did it get to us? How much evidence do we have? What's the quality of it?

One of the points that we made is that for the New Testament documents in general, the number of documents that we have compared to other ancient documents is massive. Over 5,300 New Testament, handwritten New Testament documents to work from. And that's if you don't consider things that are outside the Greek language. If it's written in some other translated from the Greek language, then That's even more. If I include all the handwritten documents, it's more like 24,000.

Okay. The other thing is the internal evidence test. Does it make sense within itself? Is it internally consistent? One of the claims and intent quotes they'll be looking at for Luke, because we'll be here shortly, and that's specifically something we'll be looking at. Did Luke have an opportunity to investigate? Does it make sense they would have a chance to check out the things that he claims to have looked into so that Theophilus would get the testimony of eyewitnesses? Or, finally, the external evidence test, and we'll take a look at quite a bit of that.

How does this book of Luke and how does this book of Acts compare to external archaeological findings? documents outside of the New Testament. Here's Luke having written a little over a quarter of the New Testament. Luke, based on chapter 4 of Colossians, was probably the only New Testament author that was a Gentile, but nonetheless wrote just over a quarter of the New Testament. Here's what Luke says.

He's writing to this fellow Theophilus. And by the way, one of the implications from the most excellent Theophilus there at the end of verse three is that he was probably someone of either a Roman higher political status or some other higher socio-economic status. That that was a term elsewise used when you address like a Roman governor. But look at this.

He claims eyewitnesses investigated everything carefully. Exact truth. Does that sound like somebody who's sloppy? Does that sound like somebody who is making it up decades later? It doesn't square up. But what you would want to check, is that consistent with everything else? I believe the answer is clearly yes, but that's the question we want to ask. Let me look at an instance as we kind of do a sweeping view.

Sir William Ramsey was educated at Aberdeen and Oxford. This was back in the late 1800s. He initially was figuring on writing a study intending to show that Luke and Acts were quite unreliable, but he was going to go to the archeological sites himself and check things out thoroughly. So his intent was to demonstrate this book is just full of all sorts of falsehoods. He started that about 1890. Five years later, he published the book, quite convinced that Luke was indeed a reliable author. So it's interesting. His intent was to prove it false, and instead he came persuaded to the contrary.

In our own era, We have an instance of the writings of Dr. Darrell Bock. Now, I will admit to you, I don't agree with this theology at every point, but he did write a couple of substantial pamphlets. These brochures that he produced reflect a lot of pretty deep scholarly study. And let's take a look at his opinion.

Luke is a first class historian. Luke is careful with his material. He is not careless, nor is he a fabricator of events. That's on page 13. I'll let you read the rest of it. Okay. Evidence and Paul's journeys is another one. I looked at Amazon has got this listed, of course, is one of theirs that they sell every single reviewer. Five stars out of five. I mean, this guy's got some good work.

I used this a lot when we were studying through Acts for the elective. We took nine months to go through the book of Acts. And as I went through it, I found it was quite good. There were just a couple of things where I thought he could have shown some proof or backing for something that he didn't. Other than that, I thought he did pretty well. So, if anything, the evidence was better than what he presents, and what he presents is pretty good. But it's also pretty honest, too. If the evidence is inconclusive, he notes that as well. Okay, let's take a look.

What kind of author is Dr. Luke? Does he pay attention to the detail? He wrote to Theophilus saying, I'm writing for my witnesses, I'm checking out everything carefully, I am giving you the exact truth. Notice the detail that he picks up. He writes the details of the birth of John the Baptist and his relative, Jesus. Notice he says, uniquely by the way, that Mary is Jesus' firstborn son. And that's part of a bigger pattern because Luke is the only author that keeps picking out only children. It's very interesting that he notes that. He notes family relationships very carefully.

And here, for example, here's a reference in Luke 7.12, only son of his mother and she was a widow. So he's noting particular details like that about the family status.

And one of the reasons I think why he shows that is not only his personal attention to details reflected in that, But also it shows that Jesus was helping people who were at a, you know, this is my only son, you know, I don't want to lose him. Or someone who had already, in the case of the widow, lost a husband. And so when Jesus came in to do a miracle in the situation, it was preserving something that was very fragile. An only daughter, about 12 years old. And then the next chapter, look at my son for he is my only boy. And saved his only daughter, but that's the only boy. Okay. Here's another one in Acts.

Dr. Luke mentions the son of Paul's sister heard of their ambush and came, he came and entered the barracks and told Paul. And what we find is through verse 22, it continues to describe what happens with Paul's nephew. But if we look at the detail there, because he came into this fortress Antonia, that's the same fortress, by the way, where Jesus was sentenced by Pilate, right? Similarly to the Gospel of Luke, the family relationship details are recorded. The Greek text has the son of the sister of Paul.

So it's actually even a little bit more specific than the English comes across. The implication to that might be only son, only sister. He doesn't use the word for only, but by using the singular definite article, I would say it implies it. That's a safe thing to say. And I think as you look at it, these are some of the things that point to Dr. Luke's attention to detail. All right. One of the things when we've got kind of a string of them here is attention to specific titles. So bear with me here.

Political titles and boundaries were constantly shifting, and there was no overall pattern. There was no, hey, we always call this level of guy this thing. They followed all sorts of local customs, as we'll see with the guy who's the head of the island of Malta. They call him the chief man of the island.

And so you get that. What they did in some particular areas is they had a title that would only be around for a few years. And before that and after that, it was a different title. And Luke catches the title that's around only for a few years. So he catches just the right one, one that would easily be missed or mistaken if you weren't right there and checking things carefully. Look how carefully he checks. By the way, all the titles on the next, I say two slides, The following slides, because I've broken it up into more, but all the following slides having to do with titles, those have all been confirmed. Let me be careful with that statement.

It does not mean that we've confirmed the name and the title together. Some of the names, for example, of the chief man of the island, for instance, we don't have the name connected with the title, but we do have the title confirmed. In other cases, we do, and so we'll try to point that out.

Herod Antipas called a tetrarch. And then in the same verse, Lycianus called the tetrarch of Abilene. Those titles have been confirmed in archeological. Here's the Herod family tree. And by the way, you've got a supplemental handout last page. You've got the Luke and Acts references in red there so that those stand out. What you see is Luke ends up picking up most of Herod's family. in his writings at some point or another. Now, what we see here is Herod Antipas, who's referenced there in Luke, and Herod Agrippa in Acts 12. Herod Agrippa is the fellow who died of worms.

And what's interesting, Josephus also gives an account. Luke's account and Josephus' account agree entirely. except that they give complementary information as well. So it's very interesting. They provide information that the other did not, but both of them agree on the points where they overlap.

Now, Sergius Paulus was recorded in the Acts as the proconsul of Cyprus, and that's exactly the title. As a matter of fact, here's Sergius Paulus. There's an inscription with his name there. Now, the magistrates of Philippi were called Praetors, and their disciplinary aides were called Lictors. The title for Praetors was the one I mentioned that was only around for a few years. And Luke picked it, that title, and he was there at the time. He went to Philippi, because that's the place where he was using we and us, and he got the title right.

Not the title from before, not the title from after. If you'd written it decades after missing that one, it'd be real easy to do. He didn't. He got it just right. So, here's the maximalist, here's the minimalist. To have picked the exact right title, the maximalist is in a better spot.

The likelihood of somebody better than a half century later picking, you know, because you're not talking about a place where you can do internet searches, right? traveling around the Mediterranean to get all these titles right, that's tough to do. But to be able to go in after the fact, confirm each and every one, especially in cases where the titles are only used for a narrow few years, that's some good detective work. All right, here's another one.

Magistrates of Thessalonica recorded by Lucas Politarx. And Galio was titled a Proconsul of Achaia. And again, the title matches. Here is the Gallio inscription. It looks busted up, but basically by putting the parts and pieces together and comparing what they know, they've basically been able to reconstruct the whole inscription with fair reliability. Here is the Politarch Thessalonica Gate. This is in the British Museum. It's inscription number 171. Politarch is over at this area here. capital letters, six polytarchs are listed on that gate stone.

Then the local authorities in the city of Ephesus were known as Asiarchs, and I make a particular point that it's plural because the heads of, they actually had a priestly role, the heads of the certain Roman priesthood each of the areas had a regional name, a local name, and of course those in Asia were then called Asiarchs, right? Ordinarily it was singular, but Ephesus had plural Asiarchs at one time, and so it was different, and Luke picked up on that. Not only getting the title right, but getting it plural instead of single. So it matched beautifully. I saw one summary, a fellow had been able to pick out from records in Ephesus, the names of 144 Asiarchs, and they had basically held their position in plurality over a stretch of time.

Okay, Chief Official Malto was the Protoss, the first man of the island. So notice the variation in all these titles, and some of these are really obscure. This one in Malta, for example, is very obscure. By the way, Malta is a place that has its own language, and it's a very curious place. It has its own separate culture, obviously, a history that goes along with it. And yet, here's Luke, who does write with the idea that this is firsthand knowledge, and he gets the title right. All the islands throughout the Mediterranean did not have a chief man called a protos, but Malta did, and it's the one place where he calls it, and it's the right one.

Now, how about prominent and leading women? As it turns out, the Roman Empire, women were typically granted lower rights than the men. By lower rights, I mean, typically, for example, we've mentioned before what to us would seem rather appalling, and that is that in the Roman Empire, the men could dictate that their children be abandoned or killed at their will. And they may even tell the wife, make sure that this one's dead when they come home. Really awful things. but they had the right to do that. Women were frequently denied the right to, for example, own a business, vote.

In the Greek games, the Olympics, it was a death penalty for a married woman to show up. Now they can go ahead and be a participant, but then it was death penalty if a married woman showed up. So having privileges that were above that kind of standard, if you will, throughout the Roman Empire, was an exception, an exception in the area of Thessalonica and Philippi, and then over in this area in the middle of what is now Turkey, the area of Galatia. Those two areas were social exceptions, where the women had a different status.

And notice when Dr. Luke writes about it, here's Acts 13.50, women of prominence. And where is he? Right in the middle of Turkey, That circle is there when he writes this, okay? It's the right place.

And we go down there, 1614, Lydia is a seller of purple. Now, here's something very interesting. Lydia is a seller of purple. What does purple mean in that culture? It's royalty, okay? So this is expensive stuff. This is really expensive stuff. The dye for the purple goods would take thousands of shells to make a dye batch. It would take thousands of shells. So here's Lydia with this very expensive material, just the dye itself being expensive, and they'd have expensive fabrics. And Lydia is selling these very expensive goods.

She is a seller purple, which means she's a businesswoman. And later on, she invites Paul and the others that are with him to spend the night at her house, right? To stay at her house. It means she owns something. Besides a business, she owns a house big enough to invite all these people to stay.

It fits the culture in that particular area. If you had talked about right across the water, it wouldn't have fit. If you had talked farther down into the peninsula where the Greeks were, it wouldn't have fit. It's the right place. And we're not done.

Here's Act 17-4, the leading women in Act 17-4, 17-12, the prominent Greek women. That is also that area, and it's in the right area, where the prominent Greek women were. He doesn't mention it in the other areas where the women are not allowed to be prominent. He does mention it in each of the places where they are allowed to be prominent. He gets it right each time. He doesn't misstep. And every place where they did have that particular standing, he brings it up. That's pretty good.

Now, Roman citizenship. Paul brings up his Roman citizenship less often and with lower profile than we might expect. But, what would be some of the reasons why Paul would not go around flashing his Roman citizenship all the time? Pardon? OK, yeah, one thing is that would be something that would cause a lot of anxiety. And so that would be one reason. What would be another reason? Ah, yes, he was a Jew. For a Jew to go around saying, I'm a Roman citizen was very unusual. And how would that put him in standing with the Jews? Not so good. Yeah, not so good. OK. Why else might he not want to go around claiming Roman citizenship? Why didn't he just go into all the towns, hey, I'm a Roman citizen! Why didn't he do that? Alright, they wouldn't listen, alright. What was he wanting them to listen to?

The gospel, okay. So one reason is, and that's one of probably a few, but one reason is he didn't want to get the you know, the heart before the course, the cart before the horse, and get, you know, what am I all about? Well, he's all about being a Roman citizen. No, he's all about Jesus Christ and Christ crucified. And so he wanted to communicate that message clearly. In the middle of the first century, being a Roman or Roman citizen brought a lot of rights and some social standing with it. If you were in any kind of legal trouble, it brought you rights that might mean the difference between surviving and not.

By the beginning of the second century, which is the time when those who are minimalists like to put the date for the books of Luke and Acts, by the beginning of the second century, There was a decline in the respect for Roman citizens. As a matter of fact, some of the Roman authors were lamenting that Roman citizenship didn't mean what it used to by that time. One author, for example, wrote about the horrible things they did to a Roman aristocrat who had Roman citizenship and they just neglected it. So there was quite a difference. The regard that Luke indicates for being Roman fits the time and the context of Acts with the maximalist position, right?

But not with the minimalist. If you were somebody who was trying to fake a book of Acts, if you were trying to fake the book of Acts and trying to make it look like it was from an earlier era, but didn't have access to all the historical information, you wouldn't necessarily know. As a matter of fact, a good chance you wouldn't know that the respect for Roman citizenship had changed. By itself, not a big thing, but when you start stacking up the evidence, it does make a difference.

It is substantial. Now, here's another one. Dr. Luke records that Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome about 50 AD. That's Acts 18.2. And this is confirmed by secular authors, Suetonius, Dio Cassius, and Orosius. I should mention, just as a cautionary point, Dio Cassius' quote is sometimes contested whether that refers to the kicking the Jews out of Rome.

All right, get rid of that one if you want. We've still got two more. So the point being, here's something that Dr. Luke wrote, two other secular authors confirmed it, three if you include the one that's debated, and a good confirmation. It fits the information. Well confirmed.

Luke records the name of Erastus as does Paul in Romans 16.23. Erastus was there called the treasurer.

In 2nd Timothy 4.20 the name comes up as well. Here is the name and it says Erastus for his treasurer ship and his own expense laid this. All right, and where was Erastus?

Corinth. Now, excuse me, this is the site in Corinth where the inscription is found. Now, if you are looking for confirmation, is this helpful confirmation? Is it? Yes? No? Pretty good. All right. If you were saying, if you're skeptical, what would you claim? No, this doesn't get there. What are the reasons for saying, no, I'm sorry. That doesn't prove anything. What's that?

Well, we don't know for a fact that that's the same Erastus. Okay. We've got, we've got, you know, other guys named Erastus. So it's possible that somebody else, it may also be, How many organizations have treasures? You don't know if it's the local Lions Club, right? So anyway, it's not a for sure thing.

It certainly seems to fit even culturally. If that's all it does to confirm, it confirms things culturally. You have here's Corinth. There's the right place. Here is the name. Does that show up there? Yep. Do they have a guy who's a treasurer? Yep. So some things seem to match up at least as a general cultural connection, even if that's not the same guy. Great is Artemis of the Ephesians.

Remember the account in Acts? How long did they do this? How long did they yell? Two hours. Could you do that? Would you do that? Probably not. But they yelled for two hours, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians. Why those words? Well, it turns out These words are found in several inscriptions from Ephesus. So they went and inscribed it and put it all over town. Of course, everybody's got it memorized. So when you go yelling in the theater, what do you yell? The thing they got inscribed all over town. Great is Artemis of the Ephesus. All they did is repeat the words that are on these multiple inscriptions around the city of Ephesus.

Now, here's another point that would tend to indicate an earlier date and not a later date. One of the things we pointed out, and actually several different electives here, is the word for elder, presbyteros. As a matter of fact, we've got a Christian denomination that's based on that, right? Presbyterians, right? But presbyteros, and then overseer is episkopos. Well, that sounds like another one, doesn't it? Okay. Episcopos, and then you have shepherd, and that's the verb form, to shepherd, poimenum. So you've got all three of those showing up in Acts 20 written by Dr. Luke.

What you see is, because it says an elder, and the word for overseer, episcopos, by the beginning of the second century was a bishop was higher than an elder. And a lot of the traditional churches began adopting this. But what are some churches now that have bishops and the bishop is higher than a local pastor or elder or priest? Methodist, what's that? And what else? Episcopal, all right. And others? The Catholic, okay. Basically, you have a number of churches that follow that kind of mainline tradition for centuries.

But that wasn't true in the first century. It wasn't true in the biblical accounts that we have for the first century in the New Testament. Elders and bishops were the same thing up until just about the year 100. And it was after that time that we started seeing bishops show up as over other churches. Clement of Rome, as the first one, wrote about the same time John had finished revelation, wrote from Rome to another church hundreds of miles away, Corinth, and wrote about everything that Paul wrote except for tongues. Somebody was a bishop telling somebody at some other church, not an apostle, at some other church, here's how to do things. Ignatius was another one that you see there about the year 100 who also wrote a church hundreds of miles away and said, you can't even have the Lord's table without a bishop present. Started getting heavy handed like that. That pattern continued and continues now in a number of denominations.

So what we see is reference to elders and overseers and shepherd. This is the one word today we use the word pastor. It basically means a sheep herder. This is the verb for it, and Paul says, you elders who are also bishops, episkopos, need to be shepherding. He gives them the verb for them. He doesn't give them the title, pastor. He gives them the verb, get shepherding. But that didn't turn into a separate term, bishops, until the beginning of the second century.

That points to an earlier date for Acts and not a later one. Funny we keep running into that pattern, don't we? Now, how are we doing for time here? We're doing okay. So it fits the maximalist viewpoint for the Book of Acts. It doesn't fit the minimalist. Minimalist has a little bit of explaining to do. Why does this thing not fit the way it was done during the time that he says it was written? Here's on Felix.

By the way, a Felix coin, Josiah showed us one here in the Acts class. So there, one I've got pictured there, Josiah brought one in so we can take a look at it. Acts 24 records details about Felix that are confirmed by other historians. Josephus and Suetonius, we mentioned them earlier here, wrote that Drusilla was Felix's third wife and the chronology confirms her marriage to him. In other words, the marriage took place such that the time it's recorded in the Book of Acts, it fits. It's easy with multiple partners and all the shifting around that took place to have gotten it wrong.

He didn't. He got it right. Josephus and Tacitus likewise record that Felix was prone to taking bribes, which is the exact same thing that Luke comments in Acts 24-26. in which he said Felix was said to be hoping to receive a bribe from Paul. That's why he kept him in prison for two years. One reason. Keep him in prison because, boy, he hasn't given me a bribe yet. And so the expectation was something that was recorded by two other historians, secular historians, at least non-Christian historians.

Here is Drusilla, and boy, this is really crazy. Look, here's the Herod family, and these people are And by the way, this chart's a little simplified, because it gets real complicated if you show all the lines and relationships. This is one of those things where you could be your own grandpa. So anyway, here's Drusilla.

Later on, we see an ax. Herod Agrippa is married, well, sort of to Bernice. Well, that's his sister. And then previously, the wife of Herod, king of Chalcis, over there, and Agrippa II, so over here. So anyway, a whole family reunion here when you have everybody together. Now, here's another one. I found it at Dugathuga.

It's a place that has two different alternate spellings and pronunciations. So if I put it that way, it just sounds a little strange. Anyway, Dr. Luke said that there was a wind and he called it a uraquilo. And for a long time, a lot of historians who are skeptical said, Luke just made this up, you know, because it's a combination of a Greek and a Latin term. And so he says, Luke just cooked this up. This is Luke's out of his imagination. He just dreamed up this word.

Well, that's what they thought until they found it. in this place called Duga or otherwise known as Thuga. They found this same word in the northeastern position. Matter of fact, give you a little orientation here. Here's Duga, Thuga. And here's Carthage, just so you have some point of reference. This is Tunisia. This is due south of Rome, by the way. If you go from Rome across the Mediterranean, due south of there is where Duga or Thuga is, right?

And then here is the theater off to the right, and then a wall mosaic that was found there. So a lot of neat, interesting stuff. But this is the part I wanted to show you. See that circle off to the right and the lines coming off of it? The whole area, let me show you, this is found on this part of the picture.

So I'm a little offset, but I didn't take the picture, you know. A little offset, but it's over in that area over there. And it's there at the corners where they have the different names of the directions and right off at the northeast part, they've got your Iquilo. And so they thought, my heavens, Luke didn't make this up.

He's not smoking something, you know? So at any rate, it's something that again, confirms the reality of the term. Oh, by the way, the place where he uses it is fairly close. to this area. So he didn't pick it from across the Mediterranean. He picked it from fairly close to where they found the word inscribed. Okay. So here's the book of Acts. If we were to go through the book of Acts and look at Peter and look at Paul, here's Paul's first missionary journey there shown roughly 47 AD.

If you look through that, we can go through the locations of each of those and track them. I mean, they're real places. You can go to varying degrees. These have been investigated and excavated. And you can check them out. They're real. They're there. They're not made up. They're not phony.

If we look at his second missionary journey shortly thereafter, and this is the one without Barnabas, Again, you can track where he went, you can follow it to Ephesus, Rhodes, Troas, you can see where he went, Philippi, Thessalonica, all these places are known, real places. If you look at his third missionary journey, same thing, you can go to the locations and see where each of those places is located. Paul's journey to Rome. We've got a record of these various places.

And then until you finally get into, he's in Rome and Luke is with him there. And they're in the forum. This is the ancient part of Rome, the kind of the forum, the middle of the ancient city. Now I've gone through a lot of stuff real fast, questions, comments, Okay, he's the one right at the top. Okay, that's the scoundrel at the top.

The way it worked was this. Rome had had in 63 BC come around the the eastern end of the Mediterranean, and They'd established Israel as one of the lands that was part of their empire. Well, that was fine. In 40 BC, the Parthians, that's an empire to the east, came in and boy, they beat the pants off of Rome. I'm obviously using figures of speech, but they beat the pants off of Rome. They came all the way into Jerusalem and actually held Jerusalem for a short period of time. And then the Romans, very upset that this had taken place, came and drove them out.

When they drove them out, they gave Herod the assignment. They said, Herod, you keep these Parthians out. As long as you do that, we don't care what you do. And so they gave him the title king. They gave him all kinds of power and resources. And he set up a line of basically fortresses and observation posts along the eastern front. And the idea is to watch for any Parthian invasion. That's the Herod we're talking about. And so guess what? The wise men or the Magi come from Parthia.

So he's going to want to talk to these guys, right? and hence he would be also very concerned because he was very much an egotist. He would be very concerned that somebody would come in and call themselves the king of the Jews because that was his title and his role, right? He didn't want to be displaced.

Yeah, the Parthians were, you know, if you look at it in the area to the east, you had, you know, Assyrians and Babylonians and, you know, the Persians, these other empires to the east. Basically, the invasion of Alexander the Great, Alexander the Great went all through there, all the way to the edge of India. This was just prior to 300 BC. Well, Eventually, that all fell apart and the people that were more indigenous to that area came together and developed the Parthian Empire, kind of re-cementing what had come apart of Alexander's decayed empire. And so when they came in, I mean, they were people of a very different culture.

One of the reasons the Romans had a real hard time with them is that they were very good horsemen and they were very good archers. Here are the Romans, and of course, we've seen some of the pictures of how the Romans would make their formations and that kind of thing. These, the Parthian soldiers would come by on horseback, riding backwards, shooting arrows accurately. So the Romans, they'd never seen anything like this. Here's this guy riding backwards, shooting arrows at them, and they just, they had no way to know how to deal with that. So for a short period of time later, they actually, this was just after the New Testament era, They actually came and took all the way down to what is now Kuwait, the Romans did, from the Parthians and then lost it again. But it was very costly to them because the Parthians were a kind of enemy that they had no idea how do we take these guys on. It's real tough. You got a bunch of soldiers riding past you, riding backwards, shooting arrows very accurately while they're riding.

They just had no idea what to do with that. I don't have in front of me, so what are the notes? Oh, OK. Yeah, I haven't cross checked it with the Schofield notes, so I'm not quite sure, but I did check with several different references and I put this together because I wasn't happy with the way some of them presented things. One of the charts I saw had an obvious error in it. And so anyway, I don't know what the Schofield note says, but this is pretty well checked out. Let's put it that way.

Oh, OK. Yeah, but the only comment that I would make is that it's is it simplified? Because I mean, it was just like you see, you know, they, somebody would marry a sister and uncle, you know, it was crazy in terms of who is related to who. And I haven't got all of Herod's wives on there. Yeah.

Yeah, well the Roman Emperor made a joke, he made a joke in Greek and he had this little play on words and he said because Herod actually had a son killed just for political advantage and he said in Greek, he said it's better to be Herod's pig than Herod's son. And it's because the word between huyas, the son, and the word for pig is very similar sounding. He thought that was a good joke. But Herod could kill his son or kill all the babies in Bethlehem and that didn't bother the Romans any, as long as he kept the Parthians out.

Comments, questions? Yes? Half Jew. Well, if you look at it, there was some advantage, because he was half Jew and they thought, well, that's an advantage. Of course, Jews don't have respect for half Jews, but the Romans thought that was helpful. He was a half Jew, but he had also had some connections with the Romans. And so, you know, and they also said, you know, this guy is malicious. which is of course what we see, you know, slaughter the babies in Bethlehem, that doesn't bother them at all. So they wanted somebody that would be able to relate to the Jews, and they thought that being the half-Jew connection would help. And then the other thing is that they were looking at somebody that would be connected with Rome and malicious, because they were looking for that characteristic against the Parthians. They didn't want to go through that 40 B.C. incident again, and they never did until Rome you know, fell apart, but they just didn't want that happening ever again. And Herod was the right guy. It didn't.

Yeah. No, a different name, different name. Yeah. One of the, I don't, let me see if I can find the chart quickly here. Yeah. The question is whether, is this the Cleopatra? that we hear about, and the answer is no. That's Anthony and Cleopatra, which is an earlier era, but it was a name that was carried over. One of the wives I'm trying, I'm thinking it's Marianne II. I'm not certain of that. I'd have to check it.

One of the wives was descended from some of the rulers that were Jewish from the time of about 160, roughly 165 until the 63 BC takeover of the Romans. And so she was descended from that family, and of course that was one of those cases of marrying for political advantage. And there were other wives I didn't get listed here, because like I say, it just gets really complicated if you put all the lines and boxes in here. It's a cobweb.

Other questions? Let's call it good, okay? All right. Lord, as we look at this, we thank you that you've left ample evidence that the author whom you inspired, Dr. Luke, is indeed the one you intended to write these books that we have by his hand, and that these are indeed profitable for us, and we've seen evidence that supports the authenticity and reliability of these books. We've seen evidence that confirms it. We know ultimately that our confidence can be and is to be in you. And we thank you, Lord, for all that you've blessed us with and shown us through these writings. We thank you for your faithfulness. In Jesus' name, amen.