From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians | Part 3 (Full Documentary)

Jewish resistance was not completely snuffed out after the sack of Jerusalem. Rebel fighters held out for four more years. The Jewish historian Josephus, who had taken part in the war, recounted the story. There was a fortress of very great strength, not far from Jerusalem, which had been built by our ancient kings. It is called Masada. The Rock of Masada, one of the most glorious places in all Israel, became the major refuge point for some of the most extremist elements opposing Rome. The Zealots and their most ardent supporters fled right in the middle of the war to Masada. Here had been stored a mass of corn, amply sufficient to last for years, an abundance of wine and oil. There was also found a massive arms of every description, hoarded up by the king and sufficient for 10,000 men. From the heights of Masada, the defenders could see the Roman army surrounding them. The outlines of their camps and siege works are still visible from the air. If you were a Roman soldier approaching Masada, I think your heart would sink, because you know that you would have to first spend a lot of time building a lot of ramps, massive ramps, to move the army up the sides in order to breach the walls. But you would know in the process that you were on a suicide mission, because all the while the fortifiers and guardians of Masada would have been pelting you with any number of lethal objects and no doubt great losses to the army. Josephus described the siege and its aftermath. The Romans expected to make an assault upon the fortress, which they did. But they saw nobody but a terrible solitude on every side, as well as a perfect silence. The irony, of course, is that when the soldiers breached the wall, finally, it was not they who had been subject to the suicide attack. It was those who had been guarding Masada who had committed suicide. According to Josephus, the defenders had killed themselves rather than submit to the Romans. But modern archaeologists have found little evidence of mass suicide among the ruins. What really happened there remains a mystery. But Josephus' version of the story turned Masada into the powerful symbol of a noble failure. The failure of the first revolt really was a traumatic event for everyone living in the Jewish homeland, Jews and Christians alike. As a result, they had to start rethinking some of their own assumptions. When Jerusalem was destroyed, a whole new series of questions had to be asked. What do we do without the temple? Where is the source of our faith and our authority? What does God want us to do? This era was an age of definition not just for Christianity but also for Judaism. It marks the emergence for the first time into the light of history of a new group and a new culture and a new literature and a new way of thinking and writing. Without the temple, the priesthood that had presided over its rituals lost its power. There emerged new leaders, the Pharisees, rabbis who would lead the Jewish people in a new direction. And the rabbis represent for us a new age of definition. It is the rabbis who now emerge as a new kind of Judaism, and it is this Judaism which will endure from the second century of our era down to our own age. The failure of the first revolt also created a crisis for early Christians who were still a part of Judaism. The kingdom had not come. The Messiah had not arrived. The followers of Jesus coped by telling stories about the man they had expected would deliver the new kingdom on earth. We have to remember that Jesus died around 30. For 40 years, there's no written gospel of his life until after the revolt. During that time, we have very little in the way of written records within Christianity. Our first writer in the New Testament is Paul, and his first letter is dated around 50 to 52, so still a good 20 years after Jesus himself. But it appears that in between the death of Jesus and the writing of the first gospel, Mark, that they clearly are telling stories. They're passing on the tradition of what happened to Jesus, what he stood for and what he did orally by telling it and retelling it. Meeting in each other's homes, early Christians told stories of Jesus' parables and miracles and of his suffering and death. These were not historical accounts, but shared memories shaped by a common past. Legend and myth and hymn and prayer are the vehicles in which oral traditions develop. One could, for example, imagine that the oldest way in which the early Christians told about Jesus' suffering and death was the hymn that Paul quotes in Philippians 2. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Paul quotes this hymn in the early 50s of the 1st century. He quotes this as a hymn that probably was sung in the Christian communities 10 or 20 years earlier. That is the way in which you first tell the story. And that you tell the story in the form of a hymn also shows that the telling of the story is anchored in the worship life of the community. So here is really the beginning of the oral tradition. It seems that over time, some of these stories came to be written down. And are what came to be thought of as the gospel, the good news, the story of Jesus. The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as it is written in the prophet Isaiah. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make his path straight. The Gospel of Mark is the oldest in the New Testament. It was written soon after the failure of the first revolt for a community that was struggling to reconcile its expectations of Jesus with the loss of the temple. We know a little bit about Mark's community from some things in the gospel itself. Mark's audience reads Greek and not Aramaic. Mark always has to explain the Aramaic phrases that Jesus uses. Taking her by the hand, he said to her, which means, Mark is written for a Jewish Christian audience living somewhere outside the homeland and thus reflecting on the events of the first revolt from that vantage point. Mark's audience may have watched Roman soldiers parading through the streets bearing plunders stolen from the temple. They would certainly have seen, even been forced to use the coins that depicted the terrible defeat. Mark is clearly reflecting on the destruction of the temple as part of his understanding of the significance of the life and death of Jesus. In Mark's story, Jesus predicts that the temple will be destroyed because it has been desecrated. Jesus is standing against the temple in Mark's gospel. And Mark wants us to understand that that's significant to why he must die and why Jerusalem will be destroyed. Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another. All will be thrown down. The gospel of Mark is extraordinary and strange. The story, if you read it apart from the others, it's a story of this country teacher coming from nowhere with incredible power descending upon him, healing people, exorcising people, speaking strange, bold, astonishing things and startling everyone. He said to them, Why are you afraid? Have you no faith? And they were filled with awe, and they said to one another, Mark was the first to write the story of the life of Jesus. He took disparate elements of oral tradition and a few early written sources and wove them together to create a new narrative. Mark seems to have a knowledge of at least one and maybe two or three different collections of miracle stories. The fact that Mark takes these early sources of Jesus' miracle stories suggests that, in fact, one of the earliest ways of understanding Jesus is as a miracle worker. But miracle workers are a dime a dozen in the ancient world. We hear about all sorts of people who can perform miracles, so that doesn't really seem to set him apart. It seems to be one of the points of Mark's gospel to say he's not just a miracle worker, he's more. Jesus emerges from Mark's gospel as a strange and somewhat enigmatic figure. Jesus is mysterious. Jesus intentionally keeps people from understanding who he really is at times. He said to them, For those outside, everything comes in parables, in order that they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand. The Jesus in Mark's gospel both reveals and conceals his true identity, a paradox scholars call the messianic secret. It seems to me that the messianic secret is indeed that the true messiahship of Jesus cannot be recognized in his miracles, and that the messianic secret of Jesus is that he is the son of man who has come to suffer, and not the messiah who is going to do great miracles. And that that will become clear only at the very end of the story of Jesus. The suffering and death of Jesus reveals the secret. Since the destruction of the temple, Mark's community has come to see the death of Jesus in a new light. Mark is challenging the pre-war image of Jesus as an apocalyptic figure. Mark, coming out of the experience of the first great war with Rome after the destruction of the temple, Mark sees Jesus, like many of the Christians that Mark knew all about in his own community, as God's persecuted one, dying, almost feeling abandoned. It's a very unromantic Jesus. It's a terrifying image, because that's what their experience was. When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until 3 in the afternoon. At 3 o'clock, Jesus cried out with a loud voice. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Mark tells us that Jesus died being mocked and in agony, and I think Mark is writing for the experience of people in the 70s who are dying like that and who need the consolation that Jesus had died that way before, feeling abandoned by God. In Mark's original gospel, Jesus dies and his body is placed in a tomb. When the tomb is discovered, Jesus is gone. Mark ends with an empty tomb and a waiting for the return of Jesus. He ends almost with an absent Jesus, because that's what his community has experienced in persecution, an absent Jesus. Now, nobody after Mark is going to accept that. Matthew will change it, Luke will change it, John will change it. The scribes will even change the gospel of Mark to put other endings there. Mark creates the empty tomb, as far as I can see, as his way of ending the story. And the last words of the original gospel are, and they were terrified. It would be very bad news if it weren't that underneath this rather dark story is an enormous hope that this very unpromising story and its terrible, anguished ending is nevertheless not the ending, that there's a mystery in it, a divine mystery of God's revelation that will happen yet. And I think it's that sense of hope that is deeply appealing. Mark began the gospel tradition with his dramatic story of the life and death of Jesus. The later gospel writers would continue the tradition by drawing on the story told by Mark. Matthew and Luke both use Mark as the core, sort of the basic storyline that they tell, because Mark is completely incorporated, 16 chapters, into both Matthew and Luke. Matthew and Luke depend on Mark, which is why those three gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are called the synoptic gospels, because they can be understood together. Once scholars had decided that Mark's gospel was used by Matthew and Luke, it was possible to compare them and to realize that there was also material with a common sequence and a common content that wasn't in Mark. Scholars observed that there's a part of the sayings in Matthew that are exactly identical with sayings in Luke. In fact, they're identical in Greek, sayings of Jesus. Now think, Jesus spoke Aramaic. So if you were translating Aramaic, and if I were translating Aramaic, they'd come out different, these translations. So you would only have identical, you would only have Jesus speaking identical sayings in Greek if you had a written translation in Greek of his sayings. And so scholars suggested that there must have been, besides Mark, something else written down. That would have been a list of the sayings of Jesus translated into Greek. And they called that Quella, which means source in German, and they call it for short Q. Nobody ever has found this source written. We can reconstruct it because we guess that there was such a written source. Q was composed before the war. It would have presented Jesus as an apocalyptic figure, the very image of the Messiah that Mark felt compelled to change. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and you yourself thrown out. But this is also a complex Jesus who sometimes speaks words of wisdom. Consider the lilies and how they grow. They neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you even so... Q does not tell the stories of the life and death of Jesus. It contains only his sayings, so it reveals a different way of understanding Jesus. Whoever collected the sayings of Q wasn't interested in the death of Jesus, wasn't interested in the resurrection of Jesus, thought the importance of Jesus was what he said, what he preached. Now, other people thought it's not enough to have the sayings of Jesus. You have to tell about his death and his crucifixion and his resurrection. That's the important thing. Now, somebody put that all together, and we call it Matthew, and we call it Luke. Blessed are you poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you that hunger now, for you shall be satisfied. Q was probably composed in the Jewish homeland of Palestine. Scholars do not agree on the location of Mark, Matthew, Luke, or John. They were separated not only by geography, but also by time. Writing decades apart, they composed their gospels for tiny communities that were developing their own ideas about Jesus, independently of each other. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. About 15 years after Mark, Matthew wrote his gospel for a community caught up in the transformation of Judaism, after the fall of the temple. Matthew's gospel is clearly written for a Jewish Christian audience living within the immediate proximity of the homeland itself. Matthew's is the most Jewish of all the gospels. Matthew's community lived in villages in the Upper Galilee or Lower Syria. After the war, many who had been forced out of Jerusalem moved north and settled in these villages. New leadership was evolving here with the Pharisees, the rabbis who gave fresh interpretation to the ancient Jewish traditions. Matthew's community felt threatened by these changes. The fathers of Jesus were certainly very much on the fringe of the Jewish community. Obviously, the early preachers had hoped that they would convert the whole majority of their people, but they were bitterly disappointed to find that only a very few accepted their rather improbable stories. And they remained very much on the fringe of the Jewish communities. The gospel of Matthew is concerned with the position of these early Christian churches within Israel. And it's very important that Jesus, for Matthew, is fully a man from Israel. Therefore, Matthew begins his gospel by taking probably older genealogy of Jesus and now traces this back to Abraham. For Matthew is the son of Abraham, that is, he is truly a man from Israel. The way Matthew then tells the story of Jesus draws on a lot of symbols from Jewish tradition. Jesus goes up onto a mountain to teach, and there talks about the law. He looks like Moses. When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up to the mountain and began to speak and taught them, saying, You are the light of the world. Jesus delivers five different sermons of this sort, just like the five books of Torah. Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have come not to abolish, but to fulfill. In Matthew, Jesus is a proponent of Torah piety, just like the Pharisees. Whoever breaks one of these commandments will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. The Jesus of Matthew singles out the Pharisees for a bitter attack. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and all kinds of filth. Now, in Jesus' own times, the Pharisees weren't that prominent a group. Why does Matthew tell the story this way? So that a group that was less consequential during Jesus' own lifetime now becomes the main opponent. It's precisely because that's what's going on in the life of Matthew's community after the war. The Pharisees are becoming their opponents and we're watching two Jewish groups, Matthew's Christian Jewish group and the local Pharisaic groups, in tension over what would be the future of Judaism. In Matthew, we see a debate between two Jewish groups. Tensions created by this debate will eventually fracture Judaism and lead to the split with Christianity. Most of the Gospels reflect a period of disagreement, of theological disagreement, and the new narrative history that evolves in the form of the New Testament tells a story of a broken relationship. And that's part of the sad story that evolves between Jews and Christians, because it is a story that had such awful repercussions in later times. By the time Matthew was writing, the trauma of the war was receding. Now his followers and the Pharisees were competing for the hearts and minds of the Jewish villagers over the future direction of Judaism. This may be one of the reasons Matthew's account of the death of Jesus is so different from Mark's. Matthew was saying to himself, I have to conclude this Gospel. I'm talking about something that happens, say, in the year 30, but I have to bring my Gospel up to the year 85. Now, what's the last climactic statement of Jesus? Where do I locate it, and what does he say, and to whom? Matthew is reading Mark. There's a massive consensus of scholarship in that. He finds that Mark ends with the women fleeing and telling nobody. Is that the way Matthew tells it? No. He has Jesus meet the women, and now the women then go and tell, because Jesus sort of corrects Mark's Gospel. And the last scene in Matthew, of course, is Jesus who meets the disciples on a mountain in Galilee where the story began, the Sermon on the Mount, and they're told to go out and preach to the world. The Gospels are very peculiar types of literature. They're not biographies. I mean, there are all sorts of details about Jesus that they simply are not interested in giving us. They're a kind of religious advertisement. What they do is proclaim their individual authors' interpretation of the Christian message through the device of using Jesus of Nazareth as a spokesperson for the evangelist position. For somebody who thinks that the four Gospels are like four witnesses in a court trying to tell exactly how the accident happened, as it were, this is extremely troubling. It is not at all troubling to me, because they told me, quite honestly, that they were Gospels. And a Gospel is good news, good and news, updated interpretation. So I did not expect journalism. There are several different portraits of Jesus enshrined in the shape of the traditions about him, and that these seem to go back to very early times. The major issue for me is whether the people who told us the stories in the ancient world took them all literally, and now we're so smart that we know to take them symbolically. Are they all intended them symbolically, and we're so dumb that we've been taking them literally? And I really am with the second option. I think we have been misinterpreting these stories because the people who write them don't seem the least bit worried about their diversity. We see the problem, and then we want to insist that they're literal. I think we have misread the Scriptures, not they have miswritten them. Since many have undertaken to set down the events that have been fulfilled among us, I too decided, after investigating everything carefully, to write an orderly account. Luke's Gospel takes the separation from Judaism one step further, because Luke was almost certainly a Gentile, writing for a mainly Gentile audience. And the story he has to tell is how word of Jesus reached the rest of the world. The Jesus of Luke is an enormously powerful figure. He comes on the scene as a prophet straight out of the Hebrew Bible. At his first appearance in his hometown synagogue, he quotes the prophet Isaiah. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free. Jesus goes into the synagogue. He takes the scroll of Isaiah. He is literate, of course. He can read. And he's a scholar. He can find his way around an unpointed Hebrew scroll and find exactly the place he wants and reads it and comments on it. Jesus is a scholar. Jesus is rather like Luke, actually. Tradition claims that the author of Luke was a traveling companion of the apostle Paul and probably lived in one of the cities where Paul founded a Christian community. Luke wrote a story about Jesus, but he also wrote the Book of Acts, the story of the growth of the early church and its spread throughout the empire. It's very important to remember that the Gospel of Luke is only one half of a major work. And we make a mistake by reading the Gospel of Luke just as the story of Jesus. What Luke wrote was a story that began with John the Baptist and ends with the arrival of Paul in Rome. So the author of Luke, Acts, and that's what we call them now, that's a two-volume work, is telling us a bigger story, a grander story. In fact, it's such a good story that many scholars have compared it to the novelistic literature of the time and have interpreted Luke, Acts, as really a Christian, early Christian romance with all the ingredients of romance, down to shipwrecks and exotic animals and exotic vegetation, cannibalistic natives, all kinds of embellishments that one finds in the romance literature of the time. We were being pounded by the storm so violently that on the next day they began to throw the cargo overboard, and on the third day, with their own hands, they threw the ship's tackle overboard. When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days and no small tempest raged, all hope of our being saved was at last abandoned. The style of Luke's gospel is probably the highest literary quality of anything in the New Testament. So it's very different than Mark on that score, which has a much cruder quality to the grammar. So anyone from the literary culture of the Greco-Roman world who might have picked up Luke's gospel would have felt much more comfortable with it, much more like reading a Greek novel. Tradition holds that Luke was a physician. He clearly possessed a fine command of Greek. And his composition addresses a dilemma faced by Christian communities across the empire. One of the major concerns that the composite work of Luke and Acts addresses is whether Christians can be good citizens of the Roman Empire. After all, their founder was executed as a political criminal, and some people would have thought of them as incendiaries, as revolutionaries. Luke in his portrait wants to show that Jesus himself taught an ethic that was entirely compatible with good citizenship of the empire, and that despite the fact that Paul was himself executed, all of that was a serious mistake and had nothing to do with a political program that was in any way dangerous. In fact, in Luke's version of history, the Book of Acts, Paul is treated kindly by his Roman guards. The death of Paul is not told. It ends in a triumphant note, in a way, that Paul is speaking, preaching freely the gospel unhindered. The counterpart to the realization that Luke is telling the story for a Greco-Roman audience with a kind of political agenda is what happens to Luke's treatment of the Jewish tradition. Luke is much more antagonistic toward Judaism. When Luke describes Paul's visit to a synagogue, he shows the Jews in a hostile light. Paul and Barnabas went into the Jewish synagogue, but the unbelieving Jews stirred up the Gentiles and poisoned their minds against the brothers. Luke acts is also the first time we see the followers of Jesus explicitly called Christians. This ethnic self-consciousness that's being reflected by Luke acts is beginning to say that we, the Christians, the ones who are telling this story, are no longer in quite the same way just Jews. Luke is reflecting the development of the Christian movement more away from the Jewish roots and, in fact, developing more toward the Roman political and social arena. As you read the story in the Acts of the Apostles, you get the impression that everything moves westward from Jerusalem to Rome. That's where the story ends when Paul gets to Rome. You wouldn't know, for example, really, that there was an Egyptian church. You wouldn't know there was a Syriac church. Everything would be a Roman church, and that's the story that Luke wants to tell. When the Gospel gets to Rome, the capital of the empire, that's the end of the story. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The fourth and last Gospel now contained in the New Testament is the Gospel of John, written about 70 years after the death of Jesus. It is the story of a community where the relationship between Christians and Jews has become more virulent, almost to the point of breakdown. I am the light of the world. He who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. In the fourth Gospel, Jesus is a very serene figure who can speak at length about matters divine, a very different kind of speech from the speech we hear of the synoptic Gospels, which is usually much more pithy, much more directed, much more witty. In John, it's reflective and revelatory. John's Gospel is different from the other three in the New Testament. That fact has been recognized since the early church itself. Already by the year 200, John's Gospel was called the spiritual Gospel precisely because it told the story of Jesus in symbolic ways that differ sharply at times from the other three. Let me compare Mark with John to explain how two Gospels do it differently. We call it the agony in the garden. Now, there is no agony in John, and there is no garden in Mark, but we call it the agony in the garden because we put them together. Mark tells a story in which Jesus, the night before he dies, is prostrate on the ground begging God if this all could pass, but I will do what you want, and the disciples all flee. That's an awful picture. That makes sense to me because Mark is writing to a persecuted community who know what it's like to die. That's how you die, feeling abandoned by God. Over to John. Jesus is not on the ground in John. The whole cohort of the Jerusalem forces come out, 600 troops come out to capture Jesus, and they end up with their faces on the ground in John. And Jesus says, of course I will do what the Father wants, and Jesus tells them to let my disciples go. He's in command of the whole operation. You have a Jesus out of control almost in Mark, a Jesus totally in control in John. Both Gospels. Neither of them are historical. I don't think either of them know exactly what happened. Jesus dies on a different day in John's Gospel than in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In the three synoptic Gospels, Jesus actually eats a Passover meal before he dies. In John's Gospel, he doesn't. The Last Supper is actually eaten before the beginning of Passover. So here's the scene in John's Gospel. The day leading up to Passover is the day when all the lambs are slaughtered, and everyone goes to the temple to get their lamb for the Passover meal. In Jerusalem, this would have meant thousands of lambs being slaughtered all at one time. And in John's Gospel, that's the day on which Jesus is crucified. So that quite literally, the dramatic scene in John's Gospel has Jesus hanging on the cross while the lambs are being slaughtered for Passover. Here's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Jesus doesn't eat a Passover meal. Jesus is the Passover meal. My flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my mortal flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I. But the idea of drinking blood is absolutely abhorrent to Jewish dietary regulations. So the very language and the symbolism that is so rich within John's Gospel also has a decidedly political tone to it in terms of the evolving relationship between Jews and Christians. Throughout the Roman Empire, Judaism itself was evolving. The role of the synagogue was changing from a meeting place to a place of worship. Worship in the synagogue increasingly centered on Torah as the Word of God. But John's community saw Jesus as the Word of God, and for this conviction, they would be forced out of the synagogue. The Jews had agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be expelled from the synagogue. As I read John, I come to two conclusions. One is that this is a Jewish group. If you want to call them Christians, they're Jewish Christians. They're one group within Judaism. The second conclusion is that they are being more and more marginalized. That is, their appeal to lead all of Judaism is becoming less and less likely. They're becoming smaller and smaller and smaller. And they can refer to their fellow Jews as the Jews. They are feeling profoundly alienated from their own Judaism. In plain language, they're losing. And that means the language of invective gets nastier and nastier. The Jews answered him, Abraham is our father. Jesus said to them, if God were your father, you would love me. You are from your father, the devil. So Mark talks about the crowd being against Jesus, but by Matthew, 15 years later, say in year 85, it's all the people, and by the time you get to John in the 90s, it is the Jews who are against Jesus. The conflict between Jews and Christians that John described in his story of Jesus was still a local experience. But it soon would be swept up in the rising political conflict between Jews and Romans over Roman rule in Jerusalem. The relationship between Judaism and Christianity after the turn of the second century would become more and more hostile as time went on, partly because of other political forces that continued to develop. In the year 132 of the Common Era, Jerusalem bristled with rumors that the emperor Hadrian planned to rebuild the city and the temple dedicating it to Jupiter, the patron god of the city of Rome. For many Jews, this was an abomination worthy of divine vengeance. The political expectations of apocalyptic did not simply die out after the first revolt. Some people, both within Christian tradition and within Jewish tradition, still expected a cataclysmic event to bring a new kingdom on Earth soon. Behold, the days are coming, and it will happen when the time of the world has ripened, and the harvest of the seed of the evil ones and the good ones has come. Within 60 years after the first revolt, there would arise a new rebellion. We typically call this the Second Jewish Revolt Against Rome or the Bar Kokhba Revolt. And it's named after a famous rebel leader who really becomes the central figure of this new political period. He's called Bar Kokhba. Bar Kokhba was a pseudo-messiah supported by large segments of the population. He claimed to be a descendant of King David. He claimed to be the messiah himself and was supported by none other than one of the major figures of the day, Rabbi Akiba. So this war was very different. It was a millennial revolt. It was a messianic revolt, and it touched cords that were not touched in the first revolt. The Earth's inhabitants and its rulers will hate one another and provoke one another to war. Apparently, he did take Jerusalem for some time, and coins are found now that say the year one of the redemption of Israel. They really think they have established the new kingdom. You might think that there would never be another war like the first war, but the second war with Rome, the Bar Kokhba War, was probably even worse than the first war. Even though Jerusalem wasn't destroyed, the devastation might have even been greater. Some people in the second revolt tried to press other Jews, including Christians, into the revolt, saying, come join us to fight against the Romans. You believe God is going to restore the kingdom to Israel, don't you? Join us. But the Christians, by this time, are starting to say, no, he can't be the messiah. We already have one. Not long ago, in these inaccessible cliffs, only a few miles from the fortress of Masada, archaeologists hit on a discovery that has finally revealed the ultimate fate of Bar Kokhba and his followers. Apparently, the rebels that followed Bar Kokhba hid in these caves during the last stages of the war. But we know that the Romans knew where they were and simply camped up on top of the hill, waiting for them to starve to death or come out and give up. Rubble from the Roman lookout post is still there, blocking the only escape route. One of the caves is called the Cave of Horrors, and it contains over 40 skeletons of men, women and children who preferred to die rather than give in to the Romans. Another cave is called the Cave of Letters, and in it were found caches of pottery and coins and other things of daily life. Now, among the letters found in the Cave of Letters is at least one from Bar Kokhba himself. And it's a very interesting letter because it asks his friends and followers to bring certain things to the caves. So they're expecting to hold out for quite some time. 60 years after Masada became a symbol of failed expectations, the Cave of Horrors now stood for the final failure of Jewish resistance to Rome. With the death of Bar Kokhba, Jewish expectations of a coming messiah receded, and Christians now looked to the distant future for the return of their messiah. The kingdom of God was becoming less an apocalyptic vision than a spiritual abstraction. The self-consciously apocalyptic and messianic identity of Bar Kokhba forces the issue for the Christian tradition. And at that point, we really see the full-fledged separation of Jewish tradition and Christian tradition becoming clear. It is a defining moment in history. The two heirs of an ancient faith, rabbinic Judaism and upstart Christianity, would now follow separate paths.