And the chief priests and the scribes heard it and sought a way to destroy him; for they feared him, because all the multitude was astonished at his teaching.
–Mark 11:18

The gospel did not just happen. The events which marked the onset of a new stage in the world’s redemption happened in a time and place with three main cultural backdrops. Parts 1 and 2 introduced Greek and Roman influences on these events, both in Yeshua’s time and the later time the gospels were written. What about conditions and social structures in Israel itself? What are some basics readers need to know about conditions and groups in Israel? What about Jewish concerns in the times of the evangelists?

First, it cannot be over-emphasized, and it rather has been under-emphasized, that Yeshua was Galilean and his movement was primarily a Galilean one at the beginning. For more about this, see “Yeshua the Galilean” by clicking here. In Galilee itself, Yeshua was safe unless he ran afoul of Herod Antipas. It was primarily in Judea and Jerusalem that there was danger for Yeshua. Galilee was rural and had no aristocracy. Judea had powerful people with statuses to protect so that prophets and upstart messianic brigands were quickly eliminated.

Second, we must locate Yeshua among the common Jews and not see him as part of any of the parties. In an overreaction to centuries of neglecting the Jewish context of Jesus, some studies in recent decades have aligned Yeshua with the Pharisees. This is a misunderstanding of what the Pharisees represented. Yeshua did not belong to any of the parties. Of the parties, the Pharisees may have been closest to Yeshua’s way of thinking, but he himself was not a Pharisee.

As one of the people of the land, Yeshua’s common belief with his countrymen centered on monotheism, covenant, the election of Israel as God’s people, the Temple, and the way of life laid out in the Torah. Readings of Yeshua overturning laws of the Torah are without basis and should be rejected. A more sophisticated reading of Mark 7 and Matthew 15 is called for, a reading based more in Jewish discussions about how to keep the food and purity laws, not whether to keep them.

Second, we can and should accept the picture of the gospels that there was some degree of literacy in Galilee and synagogues with some education. It is not difficult to believe that Yeshua could read the Hebrew text. But we should not imagine him as a scribe with the kind of training found in Judea in the small movement of Pharisees and scribes. Yeshua would have been a literate, but by Judean standards, poorly educated layman.

Third, we should understand the times of Yeshua in Judaism as formative. The last decades before the First Jewish Revolt in 66-70 CE were a time when Israel was looking for an identity, for a way to be Israel. The powerful chief priests and Sadducees held nearly all the power in Jerusalem. Galileans paid tithes to the chief priests out of duty to Torah in spite of corruption and the fact that the Temple-state in Judea was abusive of wealth and power. The Pharisees were seeking to bring their own kind of renewal, but it too was a movement defined by power and status, not righteousness in the mode of the prophets of Israel.

Israel was seeking to be Israel, to recover some sense of what Torah had expressed as the ideal. The common people were powerless. From time to time, groups of the common people would follow an upstart messianic or prophetic leader. None of the small revolts inspired a wide following.

It is in this sense that we should understand Yeshua, who worked wonders in Galilee and attracted crowds. People were ready for change. They wanted to see something from God. Some of the people were ready for a revolution. Otherwise the various brigands who led small revolts would have found no followers. Yeshua seemed to be a person who could make things happen at long last.

Yet nearly all of Yeshua’s teaching and his actions were calculated to overthrowing popular messianic notions. Yeshua found a people so out of touch with the vision of the prophets for the world to come, the kingdom of God, that he set about overturning sacred cows. He dined with sinners. He healed impure people. He praised the faith of non-Jews. He warned that being the Chosen People would not bring inheritance by itself in the kingdom. He denied the idea of power and status as a way for Messiah or Messiah’s followers. He spoke of a long delay in the coming of the kingdom. He established a renewal movement, a group within Israel to be True Israel. He claimed to be of very high and exalted status which people would only understand when he was glorified. He gave many hints and signs of his identity. He left a group of disciples to lead a movement after his death and glorification when these things would become clear. He spoke of coming in the future as the Son of Man.

Yeshua’s vision of Messiahship and kingdom is a Jewish vision, but different in many details from other Jewish ways of imagining the kingdom.

In the days of the evangelists, division with synagogues throughout the empire heightened the distance between the Yeshua-movement and Jewish communities. The evangelists emphasized the origins of their movement as Jewish but with a view to spread to the nations. Yeshua had other sheep. Yeshua called for his name to be proclaimed to the gentiles. The Abrahamic promise was at last being realized.

“Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Should we pay them, or should we not?”

But knowing their hypocrisy, he said to them, “Why put me to the test? Bring me a coin, and let me look at it.” And they brought one. And he said to them, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?”

They said to him, “Caesars.”

Yeshua said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesars, and to God the things that are God’s.” And they were amazed at him.
–Mark 12:14-17

What has the gospel to do with Rome? As in the first installment about Greece and Hellenism, we’re considering Roman background in the life and message of Yeshua as well as in the time of the evangelists who wrote the gospels and their audience.

First, and very importantly, we should rid people of the notion that the Romans controlled daily life in Israel or even in Jerusalem. Many imagine Roman legions marching to and fro all the time as Israelites tried to live in peace. Rome ruled from afar and kept a small number of troops in Jerusalem and a few other places. Here is how E.P. Sanders summarizes it in The Historical Figure of Jesus:

The situation varied from time to time and from place to place . . . but Rome generally governed remotely, being content with the collection of tribute and the maintenance of stable borders; for the most part it left even these matters in the hands of loyal local rulers and leaders.

In Galilee, Rome ruled through Herod Antipas, who had his own guard. During the time of Yeshua, there was little civil unrest in Galilee. Antipas collected tribute for Rome and let the towns of Galilee exist as Jewish towns, with Jewish education and synagogues (house synagogues, perhaps).

There were three kinds of taxation: tribute to Rome, taxes to Herod Antipas, and tithes to Jerusalem. The tribute to Rome was one-fourth of the produce every second year (so 12.5%), according to Richard Horsley’s study in Archaeology, History, and Society in Galilee. Add taxes to Caesar and perhaps 20% or more in tithe (depending on how tithing was interpreted and there is uncertainty) and the farmers who struggled to produce enough to survive were strapped with taxes. (And since the Temple-state in Jerusalem kept the tithes and did not redistribute them as in Torah, this was a heavy burden making Judeans rich off of Galileans).

In Judea, Rome ruled through the High Priest and his entourage of chief priests and, to a lesser degree of power, the Sanhedrin. Most of the soldiers in Jerusalem were Temple guard, not Roman soldiers. Pilate maintained a small garrison and in event of a major incident, had to call troops down from Syria (with a considerable time delay in help arriving).

How much trouble was brewing against Roman rule in Yeshua’s time? Most historians agree that older ideas about a wildly revolutionary populace in Israel has been overblown. There were a number of small movements of revolt, but the people in the land were not anywhere near the point of revolution yet. There was resentment and certain messianic or prophetic hopes could arise in small resistance groups. But the so-called Zealot party was not about overthrowing Rome at the time (they are mentioned in the gospels and possibly their zeal was for Torah and not revolution).

In Mark 12, Yeshua’s opponents attempt to trap him into either being arrested for making public statements against Rome or losing followers by sounding too supportive of Rome and taxation. Yeshua turned this around and shamed his opponents. He asked them to produce a denarius. The Roman denarius had an image of Caesar, already thought by many to be an idolatrous image due to the Roman imperial cult, and said on it pontifex maximus (highest priest) and DIVI AUG[ustus] F[ili] AUGUSTUS (son of the deified Augustus, see Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth, pg. 423). The coin, like the one used for the Temple tax, was idolatrous. Pharisees would normally not carry such a coin and Galileans definitely not.

What about the influence of Rome on the gospels at the time they were written, in the lives of the evangelists and their readers? The influence of Rome on the gospels is felt much more here.

First, the gospels and other literature of the early Yeshua-movement could circulate between cities precisely because of Rome. Roman roads and imperial order made for what some have called the Roman internet. That is, people would send messages from city to city with travelers on the roads. Copies of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John would have started circulating, so that many people could read them. Richard Bauckham edited a collection of essays all about the nature of circulating documents and how this should affect our view of the gospels in The Gospels for All Christians.

The major point for us in this is that we should not assume each gospel was written for a narrow audience. Some have greatly exaggerated the idea of a Matthean school of Jewish-Christians and a Johannine school with its own ideas about who Yeshua was. Some wish to depict the early Yeshua communities as greatly divided in matters of faith. Yet the circulation patterns of letters and documents on the Roman “internet” suggests a much closer communication between believers in different cities.

Finally, the Imperial Cult, the worship of the Roman emperors (or of their genius, as it was termed then) is a subject worth greater study. The term “Son of God” in the gospels cannot be read without keeping in mind it was a term used for Augustus and other Caesars, usually after they died. The images of Yeshua in the gospels as a highly exalted figure have to be read as especially important for the evangelists writing in the late first century, as the movement spread outside of Israel. The Roman cry “Caesar is Lord” was met with the cry “Yeshua is Lord.”

As Yeshua himself said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, but to God the things that are God’s.”

Read Part 3, “Greece, Rome, Israel #3.”

Now the woman was a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth. . . . He said to her, “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
-Mark 7:26, 27.

Our reading of the gospels should take into account three streams of culture. In particular we can says that the times of Yeshua were affected by: (1) the reaction against Hellenism or Greek culture in Israel that had come to the fore in the days of the Maccabees from 165 BCE on, (2) the influence of Rome both for good and bad in the life of Israel, and (3) the struggles of Israelite groups and cultures to define themselves in a changing world.

The three cultural streams of the gospels should come even more into focus as we think, not of the times of Yeshua and his band of disciples, but of the time of the evangelists and their communities.

How do Greece, Rome, and Israel enter into the times of Yeshua and, even more so, the times of the evangelists and the gospel audiences? We’ll explore Greek influences in part 1 and then Roman and Israelite in parts 2 and 3.

Hellenism and the Gospels

Yeshua and his disciples would almost certainly have been able to converse in Greek. In Mark 7:26-27, Yeshua has a conversation with a Syro-Phoenician woman. A simple kind of Greek was commonly known throughout the empire. We might compare it to the way many people in the world today speak at least rudimentary English.

Alexander’s conquests in the 300′s BCE had spread Greek culture (Hellenism) and language all through the Middle East and beyond. The confrontation between Israelites and Greek culture came especially in 165 BCE and following with the Maccabees revolting against compromisers leading Israel to become Hellenistic or to syncretize Hellenism and Torah.

The parties of Judaism developed through this reaction. The Pharisees arose as a kind of reform movement, establishing new traditions to further separate Jews from Greek ways. The Sadducees arose as a priestly and aristocratic movement making the Temple service the key separation between Jews and Greeks. The Essenes were the most separatist of all, insisting on no interaction with gentiles. Common Jews and Israelites were influenced in various ways by these parties.

Yeshua was opposed overwhelmingly by the Sadducees and with some mixed reactions, though mostly opposition, from the Pharisees. In turn, he differed with the Pharisees on some key points:

• Their reaction to Hellenism involved new traditions to further separate Jews and Greeks; Yeshua criticized new traditions that were about anything other than heightening worship, justice, and love.
• Their reaction to Hellenism defined Jewishness with narrower circles of association; Yeshua associated more broadly with sinners and even gentiles.

Yeshua was a critic of gentiles, to be sure. He said:

If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? . . . when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do . . . the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all . . . the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant.
-Matthew 5:47; 6:7, 32; 20:25-26

Yeshua also reacted to Hellenism. We might say his reaction was to call Israel to be Israel in a certain way. The way Yeshua called Israel to be Israel was found in the Torah. What was the essence of Jewish identity, the thing that separated Israel from the nations, as Yeshua saw it in Torah?

It was to pursue greater righteousness, justice, and love than was naturally practiced by humanity. The Torah revelation given to Israel should make Israelites rise above human evil.

Hellenism affected the evangelists even more than Yeshua and his band of disciples:

• The evangelists wrote in Greek for a broad audience throughout the empire.
• The evangelists usually quoted the Jewish scriptures from the Septuagint (LXX) or Greek version instead of the Hebrew text.
• The evangelists wrote using Greek ideas about historiography, Greek forms such as the chreia (short episodes of narrative and sayings as we especially see in Mark), and in Luke’s case, specifically mentioning a Greek (Theophilus) as the primary recipient of the document.

Greek ideas and culture to some degree lie behind the gospels and Judaism in general. What started in Torah as a Middle Eastern movement became, in the time of Yeshua and those who followed him, a message with application to the entire Greco-Roman world and beyond.

Read Part 2, “Greece, Rome, Israel #2.”

Read Part 3, “Greece, Rome, Israel #3.”

Israel’s story begins with Abraham, the one who was chosen by God. His children would be in covenant relationship with God without regard to merit (free election) and forever without condition (irrevocable election). Being an Israelite meant secure covenant standing with God.

Yet the story of Abraham is not merely about national privilege for Israelites, but blessing to all the families of the earth as well. At several places in the gospels we see how this dynamic idea, being a child of Abraham, means holding a special place in God’s covenant. But there is more. Both John the Baptist and Yeshua hint that Abraham has other children. Paul, who wrote after Yeshua said these things, but before the gospels were written down, has much to say about the “child of Abraham” theme and Jews and gentiles in covenant with God. This very Jewish issue is very much alive for gospel readers with eyes to see.

ABRAHAMIC COVENANTAL LANGUAGE IN THE GOSPELS

…do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’ (Matt 3:9; Luke 3:8).
John the Baptist knows his audience assumes a special place with God by virtue of being Israelite. But he indicates that there is more to being right in God’s eyes than covenant membership.

…as he spoke to our fathers, to Abraham and to his posterity for ever (Luke 1:55).
…the oath which he swore to our father Abraham (Luke 1:73).
The first is in Mary’s song. She sees the birth of the messiah-child as part of God’s covenant with Abraham, to bless Israel and make Israel a blessing. The second is in Zechariah’s song. God has shown mercy to Israel to raise up the messiah-child (Yeshua) and the prophet-child (John). Israel does not deserve these blessings, but the promise to Abraham is the reason they have come to pass.

CHILDHOOD IN ABRAHAM IN THE GOSPELS

See Matt 3:9 and Luke 3:8 listed above.

…ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen years, be loosed from this bond (Luke 13:16).
Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham (Luke 19:9).
In both of these references, Yeshua applies the childhood in Abraham to people who were marginalized. This is perhaps ironic for his critics who had a tendency to be elitist. The Abraham doctrine could become national pride but could also be used to include the outcast in Israel.

We are descendants of Abraham, and have never been in bondage to any one (John 8:33).
A simple example of national pride. The comparable sin today is Yeshua-followers who assume that Yeshua came for “my personal salvation.” Owning the promise is not our calling but giving it away and setting people free.

REMNANT THEOLOGY AND ABRAHAM’S CHILDREN

See Matt 3:9 and Luke 3:8, listed above.

…when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God and you yourselves thrust out (Luke 13:28).
…he lifted up his eyes, and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus in his bosom (Luke 16:23).
In a sharp and cutting reversal, Yeshua indicates that being a child of Abraham is not sufficient to be right with God. This does not go against the free and irrevocable election of Abraham’s children, but simply indicates that election as a nation is not the same as being right with God.

If you were Abraham’s children, you would do what Abraham did (John 8:39).
The principle, stated here simply, is that Abraham had faith and a heart to seek God. This is virtually identical to Paul’s repeated talk of being children of Abraham by faith, Jew or Gentile (see Gen 15:6).

LANGUAGE CONCERNING ABRAHAM’S GENTILE CHILDREN

…many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven (Matt 8:11).
Certainly Matthew has a theme of the legitimacy of gentiles being included in God’s plan (the story of Israel, properly understood, has always been about blessing overtaking the whole world). Yeshua utters this saying in response to a gentile’s amazing faith. Some of the language is from Isaiah 49 and 59, in both places the role of the nations in God’s salvation is in view.

YESHUA AS THE SEED OF ABRAHAM

The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham (Matt 1:1).
…all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah fourteen generations (Matt 1:17).
The prominence of Abraham in the genealogy has to do with the theme of Yeshua as messiah (son of David) and the Israelite who will at last bring the Abrahamic covenant to its completion (son of Abraham). In Abraham’s descendant (can be plural or singular) all the families of the earth will be blessed. Matthew more than hints that this is who Yeshua is.