February 9, 2025 The New Testament In Its World Chapter 5 – Notes taken from NT Wright and Mike Bird
THE HISTORY OF THE JEWS BETWEEN THE PERSIAN AND ROMAN EMPIRES
The land of Israel is a small country. You can walk its length, north to south, in a few days, and from its central mountains you can see its lateral boundaries, the sea to the west and the river to the east. But it has had an importance out of all proportion to its size. Empires have fought over it. Every forty-four years out of the last four thousand, on average, an army has marched through it, whether to conquer it, to rescue it from someone else, to use it as a neutral battleground on which to fight a different enemy, or to take advantage of it as the natural route for getting somewhere else to fight there instead. There are many places which, once beautiful, are now battered and mangled with the legacies of war. And yet it has remained a beautiful land, still producing grapes and figs, milk and honey. {NT Wright}
Timeline of the Persian and Greek Period
Babylonian period 597–539 BC
• 597
Jerusalem taken by Nebuchadnezzar II
• 587
Jerusalem destroyed, inhabitants taken into exile in Babylon
• 539
Babylon defeated by Persian king Cyrus
Persian–Greek period 538–323 BC
• 538
return of exiles from Babylon; rebuilding of Temple begun (completed 516)
• 450s–440s
Ezra and Nehemiah in Jerusalem
• 336
Alexander the Great rises to power
• 332
Alexander conquers Palestine
• 323
Alexander dies: his empire divided
Egyptian (Ptolemaic) period 320–200 BC
• Palestine under Ptolemies; administered by high priests in Jerusalem
Syrian (Seleucid) period 200–142 BC
• 200
Antiochus III defeats Egyptians
• 175
Antiochus IV Epiphanes enthroned
• 167
Antiochus IV desecrates Temple: builds altar to Zeus Olympus
• 166
Judas Maccabaeus leads revolt
• 164
Judas Maccabaeus cleanses Temple
• 164–142
running battles with Syria
• 160
death of Judas Maccabaeus
• 160–152
Jonathan leader of Judean forces
• 142
semi-independence from Syria, start of Hasmonean dynasty {Taken from Wright and Bird TNTIW}
The story of the Judean exiles’ return is recounted in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and in the prophetic books of Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, and Daniel. This post-exilic period included Ezra’s religious reforms and Nehemiah’s eventual rebuilding of the Temple and the city wall. But although the Judeans were now back in the land, the full, glorious sweep of prophetic promises about Israel’s restoration had not yet materialized (see box: ‘Israel’s post-exilic restoration hopes’). The twelve tribes had not been regathered, there was no new Davidic king, the rebuilt Temple was a pale comparison with Solomon’s original Temple, the glorious divine presence had not yet returned, the nations were not swarming to Zion to worship God, and unrighteousness still abounded. Instead of living under the reign of God, the Jews found themselves living under the power of one pagan kingdom after another. The effects of the exile still lingered; and things were about to get a whole lot worse. {Wright and Bird}
By the time of the first century, in fact, there were three times as many Jews living outside Palestine as in it, and their main language was Greek, not Hebrew. Jesus grew up in Nazareth, only a few miles from Sepphoris, a Galilean city with Greek influences. Actually, the territory we think of today as ‘Israel–Palestine’ contained many non-Jewish cities, with significantly different cultures and religious traditions. It is highly likely that Jesus and his first followers would have been able to speak Greek as a second language. If he had wanted to take his disciples to see Euripides’ plays performed, he might have only had to walk down the road from Capernaum to Beth Shean. When Paul was kept prisoner in Caesarea Maritima, he would probably have been able to hear, from his prison cell, the shouts of the crowd in the large amphitheatre, or the applause of the audience in the theatre beside the shore. Nearby there was also a temple to Caesar and probably shrines to other pagan gods. Even with the ascent of the Latin-speaking Romans, the east remained linguistically and culturally Greek until the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries.{Wright and Bird}
Alexander the Great’s Empire
The Ptolemies and Seleucids in the third century BC
People who believe this sort of thing tend to act with desperate daring. One strand of Jewish self-understanding, belief, and hope coalesced into a single movement. Judas Maccabaeus and his companions accomplished the unthinkable, and organized a protracted insurgency that routed, and eventually wore out, the Seleucid forces. Antiochus IV abandoned the campaign against the Judean rebels, rescinding the ban on traditional Jewish worship, and turned his attention to recovering lost provinces beyond the Euphrates. Then, three years to the day after the Temple’s desecration (25 December 164 BC), Judas cleansed and reconsecrated it (see box: ‘Judas Maccabaeus rededicates the Temple’). A new festival (Hanukkah) was added to the Jewish calendar to celebrate the event. The Maccabean revolt became classic and formative in the same way as the exodus and the other great events of Israel’s history. It powerfully reinforced the basic Jewish worldview, as you might find it in many passages, for instance Psalm 2: when the tyrants rage, the one who dwells in heaven will laugh them to scorn. YHWH had vindicated his name, his place, his land, his Torah—and his people.
The power vacuum created by the decline of the Seleucid kingdom meant that by 142 BC the Hasmoneans were finally able to achieve complete independence from foreign rule for the Jewish nation for the first time in half a millennium. Consolidating their power and wealth, they gradually extended their borders over the surrounding tribal areas of Galilee, Idumea, the Trans-Jordan, and parts of Syria, where they forcibly converted some peoples to Judaism. However, as with most ruling dynasties, internal power struggles and political machinations eventually began to eat away at the kingdom’s strength. The Hasmonean dynasty began to crumble under the weight of civil wars, even as it faced external threats from Rome in the west and Parthia in the east. {Wright and Bird}
The ambiguity of the Hasmonean dynasty, in which the heirs of the successful revolutionaries ruled as priest-kings, initially under Syrian auspices but later independently, did not dim the Jews’ sense of the victory of their God, but created the same sort of puzzle that was left after the so-called ‘return from exile’. A great vindication had occurred, but it now seemed as though there must be yet another one still to come. The great prophecies had not, it seemed, been fulfilled.
The Romans’ arrival in Judea in 63 BC coincided with the confusion of a civil war between rival Hasmonean brothers. Pompey’s ability to simply wander into Jerusalem, without anyone putting up much of a struggle, and to then violate the sanctity of the Temple left people with a lot of questions.4 If God had defeated the tyrant Antiochus Epiphanes when he presumed to desecrate the Temple, how could Pompey walk right in to the Holy of Holies and escape unscathed? From that moment there were bound to be Jews who would identify the Romans as the new great enemy, the Kittim, the power of darkness ranged against the children of light. They were now seen as the archetypal idolaters, and would eventually reap the fruit of their wicked and blasphemous ways.{Wright and Bird}
Herod the Great, the most powerful Jewish monarch in the Roman period, ruled from 40 BC until his death in approximately 4 BC. He had been faithful to his patron Mark Antony in the Roman civil war; but, after Octavian’s victory over Antony and Cleopatra at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, Herod swore allegiance to Octavian (later given the honorific ‘Augustus’) instead. Herod proved to be a loyal client ruler and was duly rewarded. During his reign he amassed great wealth, and engaged in a mammoth programme of building; if you go to the middle east today, you will still see some of the results. His central achievement was to reconstruct and wonderfully adorn the Jerusalem Temple; but he also erected several fortresses, such as Antonia and Masada, established great cities including Sebaste and Caesarea, erected public buildings in cities as far apart as Athens and Antioch, and even built temples for the imperial cult, such as the one at Caesarea Philippi, demonstrating in decisive fashion his loyalty to his Roman overlords.
Herod bequeathed his kingdom to his three sons, Herod Archelaus, Herod Antipas, and Herod Philip. Despite a power struggle among the sons, Augustus upheld Herod’s will, through which Archelaus was made ethnarch over Judea, Samaria, and Idumea; Herod Philip was appointed tetrarch over Batanea, Trachonitis, and Auranitis; and Herod Antipas (the one who had John the Baptist beheaded) was appointed tetrarch over Galilee and Perea. Archelaus’s ten-year reign (4 BC–AD 6) was a disaster: he infuriated his subjects with his oppressive measures, prompting a Judean delegation to travel to Rome to get him removed (this is alluded to in Jesus’ parable of the wicked nobleman in Luke 19.11–27).
Herod Antipas is the Herodian ruler most mentioned in the New Testament. His chief accomplishments included rebuilding Sepphoris after it revolted upon his father’s death, and building a new Galilean capital named Tiberias on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. Antipas also had family issues that proved to be his undoing. He divorced his first wife, Phasaelis, the daughter of King Aretas IV of Nabatea, and then married his niece Herodias, who had previously been married to two of Antipas’s half-brothers. This incurred the criticism of the popular Galilean prophet John the Baptist and drew a military reprisal from Aretas, whose victory over Antipas was regarded by many as God’s punishment for Antipas’s execution of John the Baptist.
Pilate:
1. Pilate tried to bring Roman standards into Jerusalem, but backed down after a mass protest.9
2. He used money from the Temple treasury to build an aqueduct, and crushed the resistance that this action provoked.10
3. He sent troops to kill some Galileans while they were offering sacrifices in the Temple, presumably because he feared a riot.11
4. He captured and condemned to death Barabbas, the leader of a murderous uprising that had taken place in Jerusalem; he then released the man as a gesture of goodwill during the Passover feast.12
5. At the same Passover, he faced a quasi-messianic movement, having some association with resistance movements; he crucified its leader along with two ordinary revolutionaries.13
6. He provoked public opinion by placing Roman votive shields, albeit without images, in the palace at Jerusalem, which according to Philo annoyed Tiberius almost as much as it did the Jews.14
7. Finally, he suppressed with particular brutality a popular (and apparently non-revolutionary) prophetic movement in Samaria. For this he was accused before the Roman legate in Syria, who had him sent back to Rome.
Titus Destroys Jerusalem:
Titus, aided by the counsel of a Jewish defector named Josephus, initially tried to starve the city. But then, hoping eagerly for a significant victory that would bring glory to the new imperial regime headed by his father, he launched an all-out assault on Jerusalem (AD 70). It worked. The Temple precincts were gradually taken over; the Temple itself was burned; most of the rebels were either killed on the spot or captured and crucified.
THE JEWISH WORLD RECONSTRUCTED AT JAVNEH:
The period after AD 70 was, obviously, of great significance for the future direction of the Jewish world. It has also often been regarded as of great significance for the development of early Christianity. A good many theories about the way in which Christianity developed, particularly about how it came to separate itself from the Jewish world of the synagogue, have hinged on the belief that in the post-destruction period certain events took place which introduced a new factor into the equation. According to rabbinic tradition, a Pharisee named Johanan ben-Zakkai escaped the siege of Jerusalem and surrendered to the Romans. He ingratiated himself to Vespasian by predicting his accession as emperor, and Vespasian in turn permitted Ben-Zakkai to found a Jewish academy at Javneh, a small town near the coast about fifteen miles south of modern Tel Aviv and about twenty-five miles west of Jerusalem.
It is more likely, in fact, that the destruction of the Temple created not one single reaction, but a variety of reactions. It is over-simplistic to think that all forms of ‘Judaism’ were wiped out except a particular type of Pharisaism, which then, transmuting itself into rabbinism, grew and developed in a new way, unhindered by Sadducean pressure on the one hand or revolutionary fervour on the other. We must, rather, envisage a Jewish world which included at least three strands: (1) the anguish apparent in the writings of 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, whose authors lament the fall of the Temple as if their hearts would break; (2) the pragmatism of Johanan ben-Zakkai, calmly recognizing that Hosea 6.6 had long ago spoken of Israel’s God as desiring deeds of loving-kindness rather than sacrifice; and (3) the smouldering fire of rebellion, crushed once again by pagan might but seeking nevertheless the way by which to reverse the catastrophe and build the true Temple. There is good reason to suppose that position (2) was more or less the position of the great sage Hillel, from the Herodian period, while position (3) was the hard-line position taken by his rival Shammai—though simplifying hindsight, and the fact that the relevant texts are all from a much later period, may well be masking many complex diversities. These rivalries, resulting in two ‘schools’ seen later as ‘lenient’ and ‘strict’ in terms of keeping the detail of Torah, may well have originally had to do with political attitudes, Hillel seeking compromise with the ruling pagans and Shammai urging revolt—but, again, this may well be over-simple. (We should note that one of the results of the events of AD 70 was the complete disappearance of the Sadducees, focused as they were on the old Temple hierarchy. In addition, the Romans seem to have destroyed the Essene movement; Qumran was uninhabited thereafter.) To what extent these three main points of view might have overlapped in the post-70 period, and to what extent they stood in continuity with various movements from before the destruction, must remain in question for the moment. What matters is that we recognize the non-monolithic nature of the new situation in the Jewish world following the disaster of AD 70.
We might also include a fourth strand in the Jewish world at this time: (4) the young Christian church, still thinking of itself as the fulfilment of Israel’s great story, following Israel’s true Messiah, and interpreting the fall of Jerusalem in terms of the divine vindication of Jesus’ claims. Since Ignatius of Antioch, writing in the early second century, speaks of Jews attending churches and Christians attending synagogues, it looks as though whatever happened at Javneh did not result in total separation.
What, then, was the significance of the Javneh period for the newly emerging form of Judaism, and for its daughter religion, Christianity? It seems that the period was as much a time of uncertainty for those who lived through it as it has proved for the scholars who have tried to reconstruct it. For Jews, the attempt to re-establish an authentically Jewish way of life in the absence of the Temple produced, as we have seen, a variety of responses ranging from revolutionary determination to the study and debating of Torah. For much of Christianity, which by AD 70 had spread far beyond the borders both of Palestine and of the Jewish communities of the Diaspora, there were pressing questions and issues quite other than that of relationships with the synagogue community. It was a period of transition, when many ambiguities existed side by side; and many people, on both sides of what was to become the great divide, seemed content to let it be so. We should not forget that early Christianity, claiming the high ground of Israel’s heritage, was first and foremost a movement that defined itself in opposition to paganism, and only secondarily in opposition to the Jewish movements whose adherents refused to accept Jesus as their Messiah.
The Carpenter's Nail 