The Time Of Christ

[William Schryver]

My wife and I were requested to speak in Sacrament Meeting last week (the Christmas program). We were allotted five minutes each. My wife spoke concerning the origins of the hymn I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day (as the ward organist, I selected that hymn to be sung immediately prior to her talk).

As the closing speaker, I decided to speak on a topic that has vexed me for many years: what conditions were really like at the birth of Christ. I say it has vexed me for the simple reason that, in movies concerning this time, Judea is almost always portrayed as a dirty, dusty, backward country dominated by wandering tribesmen and their herds. Even the city streets and the buildings are portrayed as little more than ruins from an ancient time. The problem is that this is not what the Roman province of Judea really was like at the birth of Christ. Quite to the contrary, Judea was typical of the Roman empire in general during the reign of Augustus. It was a highly advanced society, replete with many of the amenities we enjoy today. In my opinion, we cannot fully appreciate the words of Jesus and his apostles (as contained in the New Testament) unless we fully appreciate the true nature of the world in which they lived.

With that preface, then, here is the text of my address, entitled The Time of Christ:

We know very little concerning the birth of Christ, and even less of his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. What little we do know is recorded in the gospel of Luke, where we read the following (cited from the New International Version of the Bible):

… Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. And everyone went to his own town to register. So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

The exact year of Jesus' birth is not known, but we do know that King Herod the Great died in 4 BC. Herod is the king with whom the "wise men from the East" met about two years after the birth of Christ, meaning that Jesus must have been born no later than about 6 BC, and probably a year or two before then. So apparently there have been mistakes made somewhere along the way when it comes to our calendar.

In any case, we do know that Jesus of Nazareth was born during the reign of Caesar Augustus, first emperor of the Roman Empire.

Belinda and I served our missions in Italy, not too long after the fall of the Roman Empire. In part because of that, I have been, throughout my adult life, an avid student of the history of ancient Rome – arguably the most advanced civilization of the ancient world. It was during the lifetime of Augustus that ancient Rome was approaching its apex. Let me briefly list some of the facts regarding Rome at the time of the birth of Christ:

Rome built superbly constructed roads to connect its entire empire. The Roman equivalent of our modern interstate highway system consisted of 53,000 miles of excellent roads, many miles of which survive to the present day, over 2000 years since their construction. By comparison, the United States' interstate highway system is only 47,000 miles in length.

In addition, the Romans built thousands of miles of aqueducts to transport water into its cities. Impressive portions of this aqueduct system still survive today. The water systems in a typical Roman city (of which Jerusalem was an example in the time of Christ) consisted of underground sewers, indoor plumbing, hot and cold water, flush toilets, baths, fountains, sawmills, flour mills, and various other kinds of water-driven power systems.

The average Roman bathed every day, often more than once; they were clean shaven and fastidious in their grooming and dress. In the city of Rome itself (the population of which at the birth of Christ was in excess of one million) there were underground sewers beneath its streets, 1500 public fountains, 900 public baths (most with heated water), 150 public toilets, and hundreds of other public facilities such as libraries, theaters, huge arenas, and huge apartment complexes that made the population density of Rome greater than that of modern Manhattan.

The technological capabilities of Roman civilization included sophisticated farm machinery, all of the components of the steam engine, complex gears and bearings, pumps, surgical instruments, and many more things that would require hours to describe in detail. Quite simply, ancient Rome was so advanced; so modern in so many ways that, after its fall, its level of civilization would not, in most respects, be equaled again until the late 19th and early 20th century.

At the time of Christ, Roman culture had assimilated all of its client states in the Mediterranean area, including Judea. King Herod the Great had entirely embraced his Roman patrons and adopted their ways, as reflected in his extensive civic building projects throughout Judea. In their travels throughout Judea, Jesus and his followers would have often walked on newly built Roman roads; passed by one of the three huge, new Roman amphitheatres, while gladiators plied their trade inside; and just like in the great Circus in Rome where charioteers raced to the cheers of tens of thousands screaming fans, tens of thousands of the residents of the city packed the Hippodrome in Jerusalem to watch the races.

The crown jewel of Herod's decades of aggressive building was the great temple to Jehovah. The temple where Jesus gave some of his greatest sermons was a beautiful, newly constructed building. It was the civic center of a huge, sophisticated, cosmopolitan major city of the Roman Empire. In the days of Jesus, the population of the city of Jerusalem was over a half-million people! It was an important trade crossroads, and Jewish merchants bought and sold the finest goods available in the empire.

This was the world of Jesus, his apostles, and those who would hear him speak. At the time of Christ, the Roman province of Judea was an extremely prosperous, thriving part of one of the greatest, most advanced civilizations to ever appear on this planet. It was a world in which the most important things were power, riches, fine clothes, fine wine, and an expensive villa in the best neighborhood. It was a world obsessed with sexuality and popular sporting events. It was a skeptical, scientifically driven, secular culture in which religion was viewed as a quaint relic from "ancient times" and where the only "miracles" were those constructed by the hands of men. In many ways, it was a world much like the one in which we live.

It was in this world, outside the gates of the Roman city of Caesarea Philippi that Jesus, shortly after having performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes, and shortly after having healed a blind man, inquired of his followers:

"Who do people say I am?" They replied, "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets." "But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?" Peter answered, "You are the Christ, the son of the living God."

He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again.

… Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But Jesus … rebuked Peter. "Get behind me, Satan!" he said. "You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men." Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father's glory with the holy angels."

We live in a world where these things are increasingly looked upon as nothing more than the foolish traditions of our ancestors. But I testify that they are true; that Jesus Christ is the son of the living God, that this is his Church, and that he will yet return in his glory to confirm the faith of the Saints and reign personally upon the earth for a thousand years.

With that said, here is my question for all of you: When you think about the world in which Jesus lived, what does that world look like?

[sethpayne]

With that said, here is my question for all of you: When you think about the world in which Jesus lived, what does that world look like?

I had always thought that Judea was thoroughly Hellenized until I read this book:

http://www.amazon.co...h/dp/0521814871

I think you may enjoy it.

If the book is to be believed, the surrounding areas Galilee were multicultural while Judea remained primarily Jewish. This makes the claims and teachings of Jesus all the more incredible because they were most likely NOT influenced by the philosophy and culture of the Roman empire.

Edited December 28, 2012 by sethpayne

[nosmelone]

I think it was exactly like the Luke II video. I'm positive of it. j/k

I haven't given the Roman Empire their due respect as far as my studies are concerned but your discription of Rome and the "typical Roman Cities" does spark my interest. How did they go about heating these public baths? Did they have some equivelant of our modern waterheater that ran off of steam somehow?

[volgadon]

With that said, here is my question for all of you: When you think about the world in which Jesus lived, what does that world look like?

Will, while we've had our disagreements, this is an excellent topic.

I must say though that it is and was a dirty and dusty land. I've grown up there, so I speak to what I know. Love it dearly, but it is what it is. Very dusty, plus sand gets blown in from neighbouring lands.

I think it very important to remember that at the time of Jesus (and a bit before and a bit after) you could find rustic backwater brushing shoulders with buzzing metropolis with every shade in between. If we look at just one small area, there was the large, mixed, and advanced Sepphoris, the middle-sized village of Yiphath, and the tiny, entirely Jewish villages of Nazareth and Cana.

Another typical example was the major city of Tiberias, which was bounded on its northern end by the small Raqath, and by the small Hamath in the south.

When I was a little kid my mom volunteered at the dig in Sepphoris, we went with her a lot, and I even got to explore the cistern, as the archaeologists saw some bones and needed to figure out if they were human or not (ultra-orthodox were protesting most archaeological digs intensely in those days). They were canine, and not particularly ancient, either. Sepphoris has a really interesting cistern system, which is an incredible work of "primitive" engineering.

While Rome did have running water and plumbing, we are talking of a society where a mark of great wealth was having an indoor lavatory. Even in Sepphoris at the height of its prosperity this was a relative rarity.

.

December was a pretty green month, when most of the rain fell, but come April-May, everything turns dry and yellow. Lots and lots of dust.

Capernaum was very prosperous, exporting fish all over. Magdala was a major producer of pickled fish, consumed in Rome.

I'll have much more to say later.

[volgadon]

I've shared this here before, but it is a good one.

On pp. 9-10 of Morton Smith's notorious "Jesus the Magician," there is a vivid, powerful description of why it was Christ's healing powers which attracted the masses more than anything. Indeed, why Christ made healing the sick and casting out devils a central part of his earthly mission. Alma placed a lot of weight on it, too. Morton Smith's description of life should not be neglected when discussing the numerous technological advances of the Hellenistic and Roman times. Life still had a very ugly side.

To understand their importance, we must remember that ancient Palestine had no hospitals or insane asylums. The sick and insane had to be cared for by their families, in their homes. The burden of caring for them was often severe and sometimes, especially in cases of violent insanity, more than the family could bear—the afflicted were turned out of doors and left to wander like animals.

This practice continued to the present century; I shall never forget my first experience in the "old city" of Jerusalem in 1940.

The first thing I saw as I came through the Jaffa Gate was a lunatic, a filthy creature wearing an old burlap bag with neck and armholes cut through the bottom and sides. He was having a fit. It seemed to involve a conversation with some imaginary being in the air in front of him. He was pouring out a flood of gibberish while raising his hands as if in supplication.

Soon he began to make gestures, as if trying to protect himself from blows, and howled as if being beaten. Frothing at the mouth, he fell to the ground on his face, lay there moaning and writhing, vomited, and had an attack of diarrhea. Afterwards he was calmer,but lay in his puddles of filth, whimpering gently.

I stood where I had stopped when I first saw him, some fifty feet away, rooted to the spot, but nobody eise paid any attention.

There were lots of people in the street, but those who came up to him merely skirted the mess and walked by. He was lying on the sidewalk in front of a drugstore. After a few minutes a clerk came out with a box of sawdust, poured it on the puddles, and treated the patient with a couple of kicks in the small of the back.

This brought him to his senses and he got up and staggered off, still whimpering, rubbing his mouth with one hand and his back with the other. When I came to live in the "old city" I found that he, and half a dozen like him, were familiar figures.

Such was ancient psychotherapy. Those not willing to put their insane relatives into the street, had to endure them at home.

Also, since rational medicine (except for surgery) was rudimentary, lingering and debilitating diseases must have been common, and the victims of these, too, had to be cared for at home. Accordingly, many people eagerly sought cures, not only for themselves, but also for their relatives.

Doctors were inefficient, rare, and expensive. When a healer appeared—a man who could perform miraculous cures, and who did so for nothing!—he was sure to be mobbed. In the crowds that swarmed around him desperate for cures, cures were sure to occur. With each cure, the reputation of his powers, the expectations and speculations of the crowd, and the legends and rumors about him would grow. Such crowds and their needs, not the later Christian communities, were the earliest matrices of gospel stories and continue, even now, to produce similar stories, for example, see the New York Times (Oct. 10, 1977, p. 31, col. 1):

A Lebanese monk was proclaimed a saint by Pope Paul VI.

Sharbel Makhlouf, a hermit who died in 1898 at the age of 70, thus became the first Lebanese to be canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. . . .

Thousands of fhe faithful went to the rocky peak of Annaya on Mount Lebanon to pay homage to the peasant monk who was canonized in Rome.

Many thousands had trudged the steep 17-miIe road ftom the ancient port of Byblos.

Religious fervor reached a peak when onlookers said they had seen the bronze statue of Saint Sharbel bless the crowd, after which several paralytics had risen and walked and a blind girl had regained her vision.

From this social and medical background of the Near East we can understand why the gospeIs represent Jesus as attracting attention primarily as a miracle worker, and winning his followers by miracles.

The gospels do so because he did so. These facts have been neglected as unedifying by liberal exegesis; we must look at the evidence.

[William Schryver]

I've shared this here before, but it is a good one.

On pp. 9-10 of Morton Smith's notorious "Jesus the Magician," there is a vivid, powerful description of why it was Christ's healing powers which attracted the masses more than anything. Indeed, why Christ made healing the sick and casting out devils a central part of his earthly mission. Alma placed a lot of weight on it, too. Morton Smith's description of life should not be neglected when discussing the numerous technological advances of the Hellenistic and Roman times. Life still had a very ugly side.

I am inclined to believe that, had Jesus been born in 1982, and this very afternoon, December 30, 2012, had, in Central Park, NYC, performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes, or healed a blind man, or raised Lazarus from the dead -- it would have produced a stir at least equal to, if not greater than that which was seen in Roman Jerusalem during the reign of Tiberius. In other words, I believe a publicly performed miracle similar to those Jesus performed two millennia ago would have been just as astounding to a doubting populace as they were then.

The only difference is that CNN, Fox, and MSNBC would all have cameras and reporters on the scene. In fact, I wonder if that's the only way the following prophecy could ever truly be fulfilled:

Revelation 11:3-13

And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth. These are the two olive trees, and the two candlesticks standing before the God of the earth. and if any man will hurt them, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if any man will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed. These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will.

And when they shall have finished their testimony, the beast that ascendeth out of the bottomless pit shall make war against them, and shall overcome them, and kill them. And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the great city, which spiritually is called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified. And they of the people and kindreds and tongues and nations shall see their dead bodies three days and an half, and shall not suffer their dead bodies to be put in graves. And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry, and shall send gifts one to another; because these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth. And after three days and an half the Spirit of life from God entered into them, and they stood upon their feet; and great fear fell upon them which saw them. And they heard a great voice from heaven saying unto them, Come up hither. And they ascended up to heaven in a cloud; and their enemies beheld them.

And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven.