There is a lot to say about the introduction! Quick to read, takes some time write about
it. These are my pre-thoughts.
Whenever I try to think about the
first century, I always have remind myself that Hollywood has created this
enduring image of the period that makes me think Conan the Barbarian is going
to show up. The time of Jesus is not
the time of Moses.
It was the time of
Imperial Rome, the most powerful, advanced nation to exist in the West. They had toilets. They had running water. Public baths.
Cookbooks. Social security. And they had literature.
During the life of Jesus, some amazing literature
was created. And it wasn’t new in the
first century; Literature and civilization dated back centuries with its predecessor
Greek Civilization. Ovid wrote
Metamorphoses during Jesus’ life, a quote:
In
the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and
that is our true strength.
Greek geographer Strabo?
Or Greek historian Siculus? Plutarch? Literature was abundant! Not to mention all past Roman and Greek works
in circulation.
So, here it is Imperial
Rome of the First Century. Books,
toilets, and running water.
Now we have Palestine, ruled by Rome. Home of the Jews, who had a religion that predated Greek and Roman
civilization (on that I have taken to call "cave men" religion after reading the Old Testament). However, their last five
centuries were hard on them. First the
Babylonians, then the Greeks, finally they had gotten their freedom to practice
their Ancient religion, when Rome marched over them and made them a client
state and then a province of Imperial Rome.
The Jews were unhappy, but really had no realistic chance of defeating
the Romans, and would remain a province until it was reorganized under the
Byzantine Empire until the defeat of the Byzantines by Muslims in the 7th
Century.
Why wasn’t there anything written about Jesus, a Jewish
rebel whose name would go on and become the foundation of one the largest
religious movement to ever exist?
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