Words for Board: Jesus, Messiah, Pilate

This lecture is on early Christianity. It's based on historical facts which you are not required to believe -- just know them for the test. It may offend some of you who are very much into religion. Sorry about that. All I can say is that religion of any kind takes faith. Believe what you want.

Jesus Christ was born during the reign of Augustus. No one can tell accurately what day, year or even season he was born. (More on that later.) He grew up in Judea. Preached for awhile and did some miracles in the area. (There's a lecture on miracles coming up later.) His followers claimed he was the Messiah.

The concept of Messiah is one that needs explaining. The idea started after Alexander the Great conquered the Persians and stuffed them in a big sack. Supposedly, your god loves you best and should be on your side, especially if you're a major world power who takes over other people. When you are beaten there's several positions you can take: either there is no god, or there is a god and he didn't love you best after all, or there is a god and he'd just testing your faith, or there is a god and he will send you a leader and angels to overthrow your oppressors -- that's a Messiah. As in "the south shall rise again," most nations believed there was somebody coming to lead them back to victory. Thoroughly defeated people who hang on to their national religion adopted the idea of a Messiah as the hope for the future. This concept runs all through the East for a long time as they are conquered by first one power and then another.

The Jews adopted the idea of a Messiah easily. To them, it meant "hero king" and was always said in the same breath as "like King David," their big general/king of long ago. He was the man of the family that was the most probable place the Messiah would come from. The early Christians had to square Jesus with the Jews concept of the Messiah and so they got Jesus born in Bethlehem instead of Nazareth cuz Bethlehem was the city of David. In his teachings, Jesus claimed to be the Messiah and everybody was waiting for him to lead an army against the Romans. He did a little fudging on the definition as the Jews knew it. Lots of Jews had popped up and claimed they were the Messiah and the Romans always knocked them down. Jews just didn't have anywhere near the power to take on Rome even with a Messiah.

The Romans didn't really worry about a Jewish Messiah cuz there weren't that many Jews and besides, they lived in a cruddy part of the world. But there were certain times of the year when Jews celebrate religious ceremonies that were always a danger. The worst one was the ceremony called the Feast of the Passover. Jews all gathered in Jerusalem which was the Jewish capital but it wasn't the Roman capital of the area. The feast was a celebration of a time when enslaved Jews with the help of God escaped the tyranny of a foreign oppressor (the Egyptians). The feast was about the escape of the Jews from the Pharaoh of Egypt under the leadership of Moses. Jews, who were all small-time farmers with no education and were hopped up with religious fervor, were all gathered in Jerusalem where they had never seen so many people at one time muttering "We did it before and we can do it again" on the street corners. It worried the Romans so much they pulled all the available soldiers in the area into Jerusalem at the time of the Feast each year in case of trouble.

The local procurator of Judea (which wasn't big enough to even rate a governor) was Pontius Pilate, from 26-36 AD. He was supposedly bad news. The nicest things said about him are what's printed in the New Testament. When he got the job, he wanted to do something good for the area so he decided to build an aqueduct to bring in fresh water. He didn't have enough money in the treasury so he took some money from the Jewish temple fund to finish it. That caused demonstrations by the Jews who apparently, didn't understand the idea of it being for their own good. He had to beat down the demonstrators with Roman soldiers. He's the only person to put Roman religious symbols on the coinage of the area which offended the Jews.

Now along comes Jesus of Nazareth entering Jerusalem claiming to be the Messiah at the one time of the year the Romans don't want any trouble of any kind. He was a dead duck as soon as he crossed the city line. Apparently his followers tried to warn him not to do that -- to keep a low profile, but he said it wasn't part of the plan. The top Jews didn't want any trouble -- cuz they'd seen a Texaco map and knew the size of the Roman empire they'd be taking on so they turned him over to the government officials promptly. He was convicted and crucified before the holidays were over.

Crucifixion was kind of like a visual aid to deter crime. You were nailed up on a wooden cross and left to die. You die cuz of the body weight suspended from your arms. Your breathing mechanism is strained by the weight pulling down. How long you live nailed up there depends on how much weight is suspended and how you were hung up there. There's the long way where they put nails in your palms (which won't suspend you and you'll just rip off the cross) and a peg between your legs to hold you up. The peg takes some of the weight so it takes longer. The short way only takes a couple of days and they put nails between the bones of your wrist. The followers of Jesus say they saw him after he was dead and that changed the concept of the Messiah. It also changed people to think that Jesus was a god. Jews don't believe in man/gods. Christianity was a branch of Jews that spread well to pagans who do believe in man/gods and that's why Christianity spread where Judaism didn't.

You know that each teacher has his little pet peeves??? Well, Stockmyer does too and his pet peeve is Billy Graham. Graham drives him crazy. BG doesn't require proof. Stockmyer reads his column in the paper along with the funnies for his humor of the day. One of the columns asked why pray for world peace when God can take care of it without the help of the prayers. Billy says because the Bible tells us to. He says the cause of world unrest is cuz people aren't following Jesus. He said that during the 33 years of Jesus' life on earth there was no major warfare in the world, implying that it was cuz Jesus was on earth. What he doesn't mention is the 40 years before Jesus was born or the 250 years after his death when there was also no major warfare cuz of the Roman Empire controlling everything.

When was Jesus born? We now have Stockmyer vs Graham! BG says the early Christians were not concerned with the date. (True!) He was born during the reign of Augustus which is 4 AD to 20 AD. (Huh? Anybody can look up and find the reign of Augustus was from 27 BC to 14 AD.) He says most biblical scholars put the birth of Jesus at 4 AD (No, most put it at 4 BC). He says the birth of Jesus marked a change in the calendar from BC to AD (True, cuz we kept changing the calender in the Middle Ages to try to find the date of Jesus' birth.). He said the time of the year was changed to the mid winter to coincide with the winter solstice which was a pagan holiday. (True.) He says a leading historian claims the 25th of December as the date. (What he doesn't tell you is the 25th of December was the popular date of another man/god religion's hero).

Stockmyer says: There is no secular history at the time of Jesus' birth in existence any more. Flavius Josephus was a Jew who wrote in 70 AD and was not alive during Jesus's time on earth. Did he mention Jesus?? GB claims Josephus mentioned Jesus in a way to hint that he was a god (the direct words were, "If indeed you can call him a man." Actually, the earliest copy we have of Josephus was copied in the 9th century AD by monks and they may have practiced a little pious fraud to fix up the copy to say what they wanted it to say. We know at least parts of it are forged. For sure, Josephus didn't say Jesus was the Messiah. (We know because we have another historian commenting on Josephus a couple centuries later, and he had a more recent copy of the history of Josephus, before it was doctored up by the monks.)

The New Testament was done by supporters of Jesus. Of the 4 gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), only 2 talk of the birth. Matthew says it took place when Herod was King which was 37-4 BC. Luke is the major source. He says it was under Augustus, during the time when everyone was counted for the census and the first taxing of the Jews when Carinus (sp?) was Governor of Syria. (That's 6-12 AD.) Rome never shuffled people around to tax them cuz it didn't make sense to send them back to their ancestor's place (which they may not have even known) to count them and then tax them when they got back home. Josephus says the first counting of the Jews was 6-7 AD. So 2 of the dates kind of say around 6 AD. But that makes about 10-15 years difference between those dates and the dates of Herod so there's a possible 15 year mistake in the texts. Stockmyer thinks Matthew made a mistake about Herod.

As a matter of fact, we can't even promise what time of year. A historian 200 years after Jesus said December 25th which was the date of another popular man/god religion. Clement of Alexandria, who also wrote 200 years later said it was April 19. Actually, April makes more sense if you accept the story of the shepherds tending their flocks by night cuz it was cold in the winter in Judea and the sheep weren't out in December. There's no way to know! There aren't even any contemporary (around at the time) non-secular historians either. The 4 gospels were not written by the disciples but by people who didn't even know Jesus personally and not ‘til 40-50 years after his death.