The New Testament In Its World – Chapter 6, “The Jewish Context of Jesus and The Early Church”

Dean’s Sunday School – February 16, 2025

The New Testament In Its World – Chapter 6, “The Jewish Context of Jesus and The Early Church”

All of the notes in this post are taken directly from the chapter mentioned above by NT Wright and Mike Bird.

If Israel were to keep two Sabbaths according to the rules, they would immediately be redeemed.

Language and literacy

Palestine was a trilingual environment. Aramaic was still the majority language, as it had been the lingua franca of the Persian empire. It persisted for centuries, despite Greek and Roman conquests of the region. (It is closely cognate with Syriac, whose ancient form some still use today as a living language.) Hebrew, relating to Aramaic rather as Chaucer’s English relates to ours, was found in liturgical settings where scripture was read, but was also spoken by some, and used in writing and inscriptions. Greek, too, was also spoken widely, particularly among merchants and the ruling class. Since Jesus grew up in Nazareth, it is certain that he spoke Aramaic; the transliterated words attributed to him in the New Testament are all in Aramaic (see, for example, Mk. 5.41). It seems he could at least read Hebrew (see Lk. 4.16–20). As we suggested earlier, he will almost certainly have been competent in Greek, maybe conversing in Greek with gentiles like the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark 7.24–30, or indeed like Pontius Pilate.{Wright and Bird}

Economic life

Palestine, including Galilee and Judea, was an agrarian society.⁷ The majority of people lived in rural villages and small towns, rather than in the larger cities like Tiberias and Jerusalem. Agrarian societies generate various socio-economic models of power and privilege, but all of them emphasize the stratification between various tiers.

There is, first, a ruling elite, comprising a ruler, his or her immediate family, and a wider body of dependents. Second, there are regional elites: royal officials, large landowners, military leaders, and wealthy merchants. Third, there are municipal elites, those with smaller but stable land holdings, merchants, and some veterans. After this, fourth, there are lower-level retainers like governing officials, scribes, and priests. Then, fifth, there is a professional class of small merchants, shop-owners, fishermen, and skilled artisans like stonemasons or silversmiths. Below this, sixth, there is the peasant class, consisting of subsistence farmers and unskilled labourers. Finally, seventh, there are the destitute: beggars, prostitutes, widows, the disabled and infirm, orphans, and untouchables like lepers.9 Slaves would be in a different category again, and we moderns need to remind ourselves that in the ancient world anyone could become a slave; all you had to do was to be on the losing side in a battle, or suffer a major business failure. Slavery had nothing to do with ethnic background or skin colour.

Jesus was a ‘craftsman’ (tektōn) living in the rural village of Nazareth.¹⁵ He seems to have largely identified with the peasant class, frequently teaching about the importance of generosity to the poor; he warned severely about the dangers of wealth. Another interesting fact is that Jesus seems to have avoided large urban centres like Sepphoris and Tiberias during his Galilean ministry. This may have been to avoid arrest by Herod Antipas’s security forces. It would be wrong, though, to idealize Jesus in modern terms as a kind of proto-Marxist prophet preaching a ‘kingdom’ to the ‘proletariat’: his disciples and followers were people on various levels of the economic scale, ranging from prostitutes, to fishermen, to tax-collectors, and upwards to synagogue rulers and the like. Jesus’ wider body of supporters and sympathizers could include wealthy women who supported him out of their own means, like Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod Antipas’s household manager,and even a member of the Sanhedrin named Joseph of Arimathea.  Clearly the appeal of Jesus’ message transcended economic divisions. {Wright and Bird}

Cultural values

Among the various important social factors in first-century Jewish life are those related to family and kinship, honour and shame, and finally, purity and pollution. Knowing about these reveals various significant dimensions of Jewish life in both Palestine and the wider Diaspora.

First, ancient perceptions of family and kinship were markedly different from modern and western conceptions of family, which tend to be much more individualistic. Families were extended household entities, normally comprised of a male head, wife, children, dependants, freedmen, and slaves. The household head, paterfamilias or materfamilias, was the ultimate source of power and identity for the household, and largely determined the social, economic, and religious activities of the family. His or her political allegiances were those of the family; his or her religion was that of the family.  There developed in the greco-roman world particular ethical ‘codes’ on how to run a household, promoting order, honour, piety, and preparation for life in commerce, agriculture, civil leadership, military achievements, and nurturing a family.  Even when children married into other families, their marriage functioned largely for the benefit of their own family in securing an inheritance, dowry, or prestige. If a couple divorced, the woman returned to her father’s house until she might be married off again. Families were a means of distributing wealth and property through inheritance and intangibles like honour, the family name, and the family cult. Family member

The family metaphor for the church requires both solidarity and demonstrable affection among believers as Paul instructed the Thessalonians: ‘you do love all of God’s family throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers and sisters, to do so more and more’.  Evidently the early church was comprised of people with an ethnically mixed and socially diverse fictive kinship, devoted to Jesus and united by a common concern to love and support one another as a single family.

Second, ‘honour’ and ‘shame’ refer to social values that were foundational for Jewish, Greek, and Roman societies. (There are modern equivalents, and any attempt to suggest that the ancient world cared about ‘honour and shame’ while we do not is blind to contemporary reality.) Honour, then and now, was and is the public affirmation of a person’s value by his or her peers. Honour in the ancient world could either be inherited by a noble birth, a product of one’s gender or social rank, or acquired through social advancement in public accomplishments and by excelling over others. Shame, in contrast, is the lack or loss of honour due to one’s social position or through actions that cause one to lose face (there are, again, plenty of modern equivalents).

The gospels emphasize that Jesus is, in the world of his day, ‘honourable’ by virtue of his prestigious genealogy, his miraculous birth, the sign of his divine sonship at his baptism, and his teachings and prophetic works that received widespread acclaim. A significant feature in the gospels is that Jesus challenges the authority of the Pharisees, scribes, chief priests, and Herodians to speak for God. In each confrontation with such people, Jesus out-performs them in wisdom and ability, and so increases his own honour while shaming his opponents.

The evangelists also construct the Passion narrative in such a way as to show that although Jesus died in an utterly shameful manner, namely by the dishonourable method of crucifixion, nonetheless he died in such a way that even a Roman centurion might acknowledge his noble death, calling him a ‘son of God’ or, according to Luke, ‘a righteous man’.

The early Christians thus attempted to renegotiate what ‘honour’ and ‘shame’ would actually look like. They exhorted one another towards honourable patterns of behaviour, defined by new codes of holiness and outward-looking love.

Third, ancient cultures exhibit concerns about purity and pollution, which constitute a symbolic code for distinguishing the clean from the contaminated and the sacred from the profane. (Again, we should not suppose that this is irrelevant in modern western society; we all have purity codes of one sort or another, some connected with hygiene, others with implied social practices, and so on.) Purity codes are the attempt to put things in their proper place for their proper time.

The Pharisees themselves took seriously the task of Israel to be a ‘kingdom of priests’, adopting the purity regulations originally intended for the priests and Levites: for them, all of life had to be lived as if one were in the Temple, in the very presence of God. The existence of miqvaot, ritual baths, across Judea and Galilee shows how widely the Pharisaic views of ritual cleansing were held and practiced.

It appears that Jesus may have entered this debate in the parable of the Good Samaritan, and in his censure of the table-fellowship practices of the Pharisees.  Jesus was not saying that scriptural categories of clean and unclean were silly or irrelevant. He presumably purified himself, like other Jews, before entering the Temple (see Jn. 11.55!). Rather, he was insisting that moral imperatives override ritual imperatives, something with which many other Jews would have concurred.  Third, Christian leaders did not abandon the language of purity and pollution. Rather, they adopted the language to describe the saving work of Jesus and the holiness of the Christian assemblies. At the Jerusalem council, Peter testified that the reason why gentile believers did not have to be circumcised and convert to Judaism was because God ‘did not discriminate between us [Jews] and them [gentiles], for he purified their hearts by faith’.

THE JEWISH SECTS

The demise of the Hasmonean dynasty, and the advent of Roman rule, together spawned several mutually antagonistic Jewish groups, each with their own vision for Israel’s future. With a certain over-simplification we can trace easily enough the four options open to Jews in Jesus’ day. If you travel around modern Israel, you’ll find archaeological remnants of these sects. First, there is the zealot option. The Sicarii took over Herod’s old palace-fortress of Masada, near the south-west corner of the Dead Sea, during the Roman–Jewish war. For them, the rule was clear: say your prayers, sharpen your swords, make yourselves holy to fight a holy war, and God will give you a military victory over the hordes of darkness. Second were the Pharisees, the community activists. (The more strict a Pharisee you were, the more likely you might be to sympathize with the zealots; Saul of Tarsus is a good example.) In their earlier days the Pharisees had sometimes been able to ally with the Jewish leaders, but in Jesus’ day they held no political position. They were more like a pressure group. Their aim went like this: when ejected from the halls of power, start a grass-roots campaign to get your vision for Israel adopted by the masses, tell everyone to have their own ritual bath if they can, have your bones buried in ossuary boxes waiting for resurrection. If we can be obedient enough, get pure enough, keep Torah most accurately, then maybe the ‘son of David’ will come. Third, the quietist and ultimately dualist option, taken by the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran: separate yourself from the wicked world, say your prayers, and wait for God to do whatever God is going to do. Fourth, the compromise option taken by the Sadducees: keep the Temple going, offer sacrifices pleasing to God, maintain the peace, get along with your political bosses as well as you can, do as well out of it as you can, and hope that God will somehow validate it all.\

REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS

The fragile social stability deteriorated when the Romans took over control of Palestine in 63 BC. Economic pressure created a new class of brigands, desperate bands of Jews who found no way forward from their poverty except by living outside normal society and sustaining themselves through raids on those who still had property that could be stolen. As we shall see, such brigands were not simply anarchists. A fierce belief in the justice of their cause, and in divine backing for it, sustained them in their desperate lifestyle. By the middle of the first century BC the problem of brigandage had become so acute, helped by the power vacuum while Rome was occupied with civil war and the threat from Parthia, that it was a major achievement to bring it under some sort of control, albeit temporarily. Credit for this was given to Herod the Great, whose rise to power in the 40s BC was marked by his putting down of serious brigandage, notably killing the chief brigand Hezekiah, whose family appears to have continued the struggle in later generations.

Josephus narrates a story of how a riot broke out in Jerusalem during a certain Passover festival while Ventidius Cumanus was procurator of Judea (AD 48–52). It shows just how easy it was to provoke an incident, in this instance when a Roman soldier ‘mooned’ some Jewish pilgrims and released some obnoxious flatulence.

The usual crowd had assembled at Jerusalem for the feast of unleavened bread, and the Roman cohort had taken up its position on the roof of the portico of the temple; for a body of men in arms invariably mounts guard at the feasts, to prevent disorders arising from such a concourse of people. Thereupon one of the soldiers, raising his robe, stooped in an indecent attitude, so as to turn his backside to the Jews, and made a noise in keeping with his posture. Enraged at the insult, the whole multitude with loud cries called upon [the governor] Cumanus to punish the soldier; some of the more hot-headed young men and seditious persons in the crowd started a fight, and, picking up stones, hurled them at the troops. Cumanus, fearing a general attack upon himself, sent for reinforcements. These troops pouring into the porticoes, the Jews were seized with irresistible panic and turned to fly from the temple and make their escape into the town. But such violence was used as they pressed round the exits that they were trodden under foot and crushed to death by one another; upwards of thirty thousand perished, and the feast was turned into mourning for the whole nation and for every household into lamentation. (Jos. War 2.224–7; cp. Ant. 20.105–12)

Josephus describes the broad messianic hopes of Jewish resistance fighters, perhaps based on the book of Daniel, and expresses his own view that the prophecy in fact referred to the accession of Vespasian as Roman emperor.

But what more than all else incited them to the war was an ambiguous oracle, likewise found in their sacred scriptures, to the effect that at that time one from their country would become ruler of the world. This they understood to mean someone of their own race, and many of their wise men went astray in their interpretation of it. The oracle, however, in reality signified the sovereignty of Vespasian, who was proclaimed Emperor on Jewish soil. (Jos. War 6.312–15)

The Pharisees

Out of all the sects of Judaism there is none more important for the study of the New Testament than the Pharisees.  That is for three reasons. First, the Pharisees are depicted in the gospels as Jesus’ primary adversaries. Second, the apostle Paul claims to have been once a zealous Pharisee. Third, the Pharisees eventually came to dominate the Jewish world after the capture of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the failure of the Bar-Kochba revolt in 135. There are, however, several problems about the Pharisees, and many intractable debates concerning them.

Yet the reality is that Jesus’ debates with the Pharisees would be better seen as torrid insider debates between different visions of the same goal: the coming of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. Jesus was thus in some ways closer to the Pharisaic movement than to any other sect. This is evidenced by the fact that Jesus had Pharisaic sympathizers like Nicodemus; Jesus received and accepted dinner invitations from Pharisees; some Pharisees warned Jesus that Herod Antipas was trying to kill him, and many Pharisees joined the early church.

First, in terms of size and spheres of operation, the Pharisees probably numbered several thousand. There is good evidence from literary sources for their activity outside Judea. There is nothing strange (as some have asserted) about Jesus coming across Pharisees in Galilean villages.

Second, the Pharisees, due to their political marginalization in the Herodian period, became largely concerned with manufacturing the conditions necessary for Israel’s eschatological restoration through a strict regime of Torah observance as seen from within their specific tradition. In other words, they were not a separatist religious club. Rather, they were a Jewish renewal movement, seeking to draw Israel towards the conditions that would hasten its restoration before God and its elevation over the surrounding nations. The Pharisaic agenda, then, was to purify Israel by summoning the people to return to the true ancestral traditions; to restore Israel to its independent theocratic status; and to be, as a pressure group, in the vanguard of such a movement through the study and practice of Torah. The Pharisees aimed to demonstrate, in the present time, that they were the ones whom Israel’s God would vindicate when, as expected, he acted to rescue his people.

Their ardour in this task is documented by Philo who speaks of there being thousands of individuals, ‘full of zeal for the laws, strictest guardians of the ancestral traditions’.  Such phrases function in Philo, Josephus, and Paul as regular code for the Pharisees, filled with intense fervour to win the hearts and minds of the people to their programme, and merciless towards those whom they saw as subverting the national customs. 

Jesus was announcing the kingdom in a way that did not reinforce, but rather called into question, the agenda of revolutionary zeal that dominated the horizon of the leading group within Pharisaism.  The coming of the kingdom, as Jesus announced it, put before his Pharisaic contemporaries a challenge, an agenda: give up your interpretation of your tradition, which is driving you towards ruin. Embrace instead a very different interpretation of the tradition, one which, though it looks like the way of loss, is in fact the way to true victory, the way of the cross!

It was this challenge, we suggest, which generated the heated exchanges between Jesus and the Pharisees and resulted in the plots against Jesus’ life. Jesus’ clash with the Pharisees came about not because he was an antinomian, or because he believed in ‘grace’ and ‘faith’ while they believed in ‘justification by works’, but because his kingdom-agenda for Israel demanded that Israel leave off its frantic search for national purity and regional hegemony, reinforced as it now was by the ancestral codes, and embrace instead the proper vocation to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth.

The Sadducees, priests, and aristocrats

The great majority of the priests were not aristocrats; nor were they particularly wealthy. They, and the Levites who served as their assistants, were dependent on the tithing practiced by the rest of the population. Most of them lived away from Jerusalem, going there in groups, by turn, for the performance of the regular rituals. For the rest of the time, they functioned in a way which has often been ignored: they were the main teachers of the law, the group to whom ordinary Jews turned for judgment and arbitration in the case of disputes or legal problems.  It should be no surprise that Jesus tells the cleansed man to ‘show himself to the priest’.  That would have been normal practice, and it would not involve a journey to Jerusalem; the man would go to the priest residing in the local town or village. The priests were thus the local representatives of mainline ‘official’ Judaism, as befitted those who had both studied Torah themselves and, from time to time, had the privilege of serving Israel’s God in his Temple.

First, according to Josephus, the Sadducees believed in free will. Just as I am inclined to think that Josephus’s description of the Pharisaic blend of fate and free will is a de-politicized code for their balance between waiting for Israel’s God to act and being ready to act on his behalf if necessary, so I am inclined to think that the Sadducean belief in free will has little to do with abstract philosophy and a great deal to do with the politics of power: Israel’s God will help those who help themselves.

Second, the Sadducees had no time for laws, or scriptures, other than those in the Torah (that is, the Pentateuch, the first five books of Moses). This viewpoint is set over against those who followed ‘the traditions of the elders’, a pretty clear reference to the Pharisees, who certainly maintained, and applied to themselves at least, a large body of such traditions.

Third, and connected with this, the Sadducees denied the doctrine of the resurrection.  The best explanation for the Sadducees’ view is that, by the first century, ‘resurrection’ had long functioned as a symbol and metaphor for the total reconstitution of Israel, the return from Babylon, and the final coming redemption in which God would put everything right—always a worry for those wielding power.

The influence of the aristocrats in general and the Sadducees in particular has been controversial, for the same underlying reasons as the question of the influence of the Pharisees. To cut things short, we are inclined to accept Josephus’s verdict: in terms of party effectiveness, the Pharisees were far more successful in persuading the mass of people of their views than the Sadducees were. 

The Essenes

Another Jewish group is named as the Essenes. We know about them from Josephus, Philo, and Pliny. They are not mentioned in the New Testament, though some have speculated that John the Baptist may have had links with them.  They appear to have been known for their ascetic way of life, concern for ritual purity, corporate reading of scripture, refusal to own slaves, sharing of property, and communal meals. Some Essenes lived in the south-west quarter of Jerusalem, hence the ‘Essene gate’ that Josephus mentions, which has been identified by archaeologists as probably adjacent to what is now the protestant cemetery on Mount Zion.

They probably emerged in the fragmentation of Jewish social and cultural life during the Hasmonean dynasty. Observing the political corruption of the Hasmonean rulers and rejecting their usurpation of the high priesthood for themselves, the Essenes retreated from mainstream Jewish institutions and life and engaged in a quasi-monastic existence, either in urban centres or—as one group did—out by the north-western shores of the Dead Sea at Qumran.

The Qumranites appear to have had several characteristic beliefs. To begin with, the symbolic world of the group was focused on its own existence as the rightful heir of the Jewish traditions and hopes. The particular form of interpretation used in the biblical commentaries in the Scrolls, usually called pesher, focuses attention on the sect as the people whose story and hopes had already been described in scripture. For instance, in the commentary on Habakkuk 1.5, we find:

This passage refers to the traitors with the Man of the Lie, because they have not obeyed the words of the Teacher of Righteousness from the mouth of God. It also refers to the traitors to the New Covenant, because they did not believe in God’s covenant and desecrated His holy name; and finally, it refers to the traitors in the Last Days.

Thus, the Qumranites saw themselves and their struggle as the true subject of scripture’s promise about God’s deliverance of Israel from the effects of exile and his bringing of Israel into the new covenant. The focal points of the sect’s own life, seen as the fulfilment of prophecy and the means whereby the divine purpose would finally be realized, became some of its central symbols.

The scriptures were searched, read, prayed over, studied, copied out with the focus on the present and immediately future moment. Israel’s history had entered a bottleneck. The return from exile had not yet really happened. Yet this little group was the advance guard through whom Israel’s great day of restoration would come about. Thus the prophecies written before the exile, predicting a future return and restoration, were in fact starting to come true in the history of the group itself. The story of Israel had turned into the story of the Qumranites.  An interesting feature of the Scrolls is their eschatology or hopes for the future.

The sect thus held a form of what later scholarship has called ‘inaugurated eschatology’. What would happen in the future would be the dramatic unveiling of what had already been started, just as what had already been started was the fulfilment of prophecies hidden from long ago. At the moment, the rest of Israel would look and look, but never see; the day would come when the righteous would shine like the sun in the kingdom of Israel’s God.

The ordinary Jews

Not every Jew living in the Galilean countryside or inhabiting a Judean town necessarily identified with any of the religious parties. Most ordinary Jews were consumed with the daily struggle of human existence: farming, trading, paying taxes, putting food on the table, dealing with family matters like births, marriages, and funerals, and not continually gossiping about the newest teaching and the latest heresy. Yet even without identifying with any particular party, it remains likely that the great majority of Jews cared sufficiently about their God, their scriptures, and their Jewish heritage to take a fair amount of trouble over the observance of scriptural commands. They prayed, they fasted, they went to synagogue, they travelled to Jerusalem for the regular feasts. They did not eat pork or shellfish, they kept the sabbath, they fasted, and they circumcised their male children. Many regarded the Pharisees as respected, though unofficial, teachers, ensuring that some of these basic duties were carried out in a more or less Pharisaic fashion. We may therefore take it that the majority of Jews in Palestine during the Roman period kept more or less faithfully, as far as they were able, to the Jewish way of life. 

JEWISH BELIEFS: ONE GOD ONE PEOPLE

As we have seen, the Jewish world was anything but monolithic in its views, beliefs, and aspirations. If we were to collect together people like Ben-Sirach, Philo, the Teacher of Righteousness, Rabbi Gamaliel, and the apostle Paul and ask them, ‘What makes a person a good Jew?’, there would be a rather free and frank exchange of ideas. Added to that, we must remember that the Jewish way of life was just that, a way of life; people did not think of it as a ‘religion’ in the modern sense. It was a totality, comprising ethnic identity, geographical focus, shared history, customs, and traditions. (Indeed, people did not think of it as ‘Judaism’, which is a relatively modern term. The Greek word Ioudaismos, which looks as though it might mean ‘Judaism’ in our sense, was in fact an active noun, denoting the zealous propagation of the Jewish way of life.)  Yet, despite all their diversity, the Jews who practised their ancestral customs would have had several things in common. They shared a commitment to Torah as both story and instruction, even though they disagreed fiercely with one another about what that involved in detail. They recognized the Temple as the intended place of the divine presence, even though nobody in the first century seems to have thought that the full, glorious ‘Shekinah’ had returned after the exile in the way Isaiah had promised.  They recognized the importance of the traditional ‘land of Israel’ as the people’s divinely given inheritance, even though it had been many centuries since the boundaries allotted in the book of Joshua had borne any resemblance to actual Jewish presence. They followed the annual calendar of festivals like Yom Kippur and Passover, even though there were disputes between different groups as to how the calendar should be organized.  All this is given. However, if we want to get down to the ultimate core of Jewish beliefs, and see what had been sustaining them over several centuries, despite domination by one pagan kingdom after another, it would be this: monotheism and election, or, one God and one people!

Classic Jewish monotheism thus came to believe that (1) there was one God, who created heaven and earth, and who remained in close and dynamic relation with his creation; and that (2) this God had called Israel to be his special people. This latter vocation was sometimes explicitly linked with the former belief: YHWH had chosen Israel for the sake of the larger world. Election, the choice of Israel, was the focal point of the divine purpose to act within the world to rescue and heal the world, to bring about what some biblical writers speak of as a ‘new creation’.

Part of the story was precisely the discovery of what God’s faithfulness and rescuing power would look like in practice. This God would be known as the rescuer, the one who would then accompany his people through the wilderness, leading them in the pillar of cloud and fire, coming to dwell in their midst (or at least, after the ‘golden calf ’ incident, in close proximity to the camp), and giving them his law, his own self-expression of the way of life for his people. The story of the exodus thus included within itself the story of two ways in which the one true God was present and active within the world and Israel: the Shekinah, the glory of God ‘tabernacling’ within the tent in the wilderness and later within the Temple in Jerusalem; and the Torah, the expressed will of God for Israel, the law of Moses. In addition, a strong strand in the story was the belief that God’s own spirit had rested upon and indwelt Moses, enabling him to be the leader of God’s people. Some later traditions referred to the strange pillar of cloud and fire in terms of the divine spirit.  Thus these three manifestations of YHWH’s presence and rescuing love—God’s presence, God’s law, God’s spirit, all seen to great advantage in the rescue-story, the freedom-story, that is, the exodus narrative—mark off the Jews’ sense of who their God actually was from the theologies of the surrounding nations.

There is a complex range of Jewish texts from different periods that speculate about the exaltation and heavenly enthronement of a figure who may be either an angel or a human being. These speculations grow from meditation upon, and discussion of, certain key texts such as Ezekiel 1, in which the prophet receives a vision of YHWH’s throne-chariot, and Daniel 7, where ‘one like a son of man’ is presented to ‘the Ancient of Days’ and shares his throne. Such speculations formed the staple diet of a whole tradition of Jewish mysticism, along with accompanying theological and cosmological enquiry.

How far these speculations were taken is a matter of continuing debate. But the point should be clear: things like this were thinkable; they were not obviously self-contradictory, nor were they necessarily seen as a threat to what second-Temple Jews meant by ‘monotheism’. They were attempts to find out what that monotheism would actually mean in practice: how was the one God going to fulfil his promises and purposes for Israel and the world? Thus, out of a much larger and highly complex set of speculations about the action of Israel’s God through various mediator-figures, one possible scenario that some second-Temple Jews regarded as at least thinkable was that the earthly and military victory of the coming Messiah over the pagans would be seen in terms of the enthronement-scene from Daniel 7, itself a development of the chariot-vision in Ezekiel 1.

One thing should be clear from this brief survey of first-century Jewish beliefs. At their core is the conviction of the Jewish people that their God was the creator God, not a tribal god or a local deity, but ‘God Almighty’, the ‘maker of heaven and earth’. He had called Israel to be his special possession, the people of his pasture, a kingdom of priests, and a light to the nations. Though the world was ravaged with evil and savaged by dark powers, it would not always remain so. Many Jews cherished, and brought to various expression, the hope that this one true God would deliver Israel through his agents—prophets, priests, and kings—to bring about a new exodus. This would utterly transform Israel’s fortunes and future; and, through this transformed Israel, God would one day transform the entire world.