1st Century Judea ｜ History of Christianity

Hello everybody and welcome back to our studies in the history of Christianity. We are continuing talking about the early development of and the origins of the basic principles of Christianity in and around the first century CE. And this first collection of videos that we're going to be doing, and the next four videos specifically, are going to be concerning the cultural, social, and theological, i.e. the religious foundations for which a religion like Christianity would eventually emerge, before we start thinking about how the birth of Jesus and the influence of Jesus' ministry and the crucifixion will obviously have a major impact on the development of Christianity, hence because Jesus is obviously the most important figure within all of Christianity. And we're going to begin in this lesson by just taking a nice overview to the historical context in which Christianity would begin to emerge. This involves looking at the first century Judea and looking at the Roman occupation, looking at the nature of the occupation specifically, examining the governance, before we start thinking about arguably another very important foundational aspect of Christianity, which is of course the idea of Judaism and the different sects of Judaism and the different ideas within Judaism and the influences from Hellenistic Greece and all these different kinds of things also in and around the first century CE. And so it's important that what we do here is examine the historical and the religious context of the first century, specifically first century Judea, as a crucial understanding when we think about the Now the majority of this series of videos is going to be concerned with the development of Christianity, the establishment of the Christian church, the establishment of Christian doctrine, the various different church fathers that contribute to the establishment of further Christian doctrines, so things like the Trinity and the Trinitarian debates, things like the Council of Nicaea, the Council of Constantinople, and then eventually moving into the sort of more medieval periods thinking about the impact of things like the Great Schism and the Crusades and all these different kinds of things. But now we're actually thinking about the history of Christianity, in fact before Christianity even exists. First century Judea is a period of time in which Christianity doesn't actually yet exist, or at least this part of first century Judea. This is a period that was marked by complex social dynamics, political upheaval, and a diversity of You have to sort of think of Judea as a sort of mixing melting pot of a variety of different beliefs, influenced quite substantially by the invasion of and occupation of Jerusalem by the Romans and the establishment of Roman dominance in this particular region. Of course Roman dominance is important not only for exporting Christianity across the rest of the world when Emperor Constantine converts to Christianity with the edict, but also it's very influential for the exporting of a variety of other different religious and mythological and cultural traditions. So we're going to talk in a future lesson time for example about the influence of Alexander the Great, who was essentially expanding across a variety of different areas within the as we know today as the Middle East and most of Persia, a few a good 400 years prior to first century Judea, and the influence of Hellenistic religion and Hellenization when we think about the influence that has on Judaism and then subsequently on the issue of Christianity. So this is the environment essentially that we're going to be exploring that sets the stage for the teachings of of Jesus and the emergence of the Jesus movement, the new religious movement that will essentially develop into the religion that we know of as Christianity. And the beginning stages of this conversation is in relation to the establishment of Roman occupation in Judea in and around just before the first century. So in 63 BCE we see that Judea comes under the control of the Roman Empire when Roman general Pompey captured Jerusalem. Now this was initially a period of time in which the occupation by Roman rule allowed quite a significant amount of autonomy of the local rulers. So the people who were essentially administering and ruling the area before 63 BCE, before the establishment of Roman occupation, were allowed to maintain a certain degree of autonomy after the occupation by and the conquest of Judea by the Romans. However, eventually you see the transformation of Judea into a Roman provenance. And so with the capture of Jerusalem and the slow reform of the area from local control and a varying degree of autonomy to quite substantially a Roman provenance with quite substantial Roman control, we start to see it formed under direct Roman governance. Around 60 or 70 years later in 6 CE we see that the area of Judea and specifically Jerusalem come under the direct Roman governance with the prefect or governor overseeing this particular part of the empire, this particular part of the territory. And so when we think about where Judea was at the turn of the first century, at the point at which we're starting to think about the development of Christianity, where in the empire it was and the sort of position it had within the empire, we know that it was very much firmly integrated into the Roman Empire as an occupation and or a reform into a Roman province. So this idea of occupation would just sort of initially then start to morph into the establishment of a full-on province, of an established Roman province. Now Roman occupation had a number of important characteristics because on the one hand you have a number of individuals who would be appointed by the Romans and are Romans who were appointed as governors. Obviously the most famous Roman governor appointed to oversee Judea in this period of time was of course Pontius Pilate who would be the governor from 26 to 36 CE, who famously of course was the individual who put Jesus to death by crucifixion, which we'll get to in future lessons time. We'll talk about his motivations, we'll talk about the sort of the historical evidence to support his existence. We sort of know now at least that Pontius Pilate almost definitely did exist and it should be just an interesting point of reference to note that as we go through looking at first century Judea and then we start thinking about the influence of Christianity and Jesus and the ministry of Jesus and then the crucifixion of Jesus, there will be points in time in which we are sort of doing something of a mixing between what we could know to be true in terms of history and what we believe could be true or might potentially have been true as the result of mythological or theological teachings. So we will be referring to biblical passages in this early period of time, we'll talk about the gospel of Luke and the gospel of Mark, in being able to explain parts of the history and our understanding of the historical Jesus, but it should also be important to remember that at this very early stage, in this sort of embryonic stage of Christianity and Christian development, it's not always easy to clearly delineate between what was in fact history and what is actually theology or embellishment or something of a metaphorical interpretation, remembering as well that the gospels of Luke and the gospels of Mark were written a good 50 or so years after the crucifixion of Christ, and so you have to bear that in mind when you think about the sort of textual, doctrinal and historical distinctions that exist between those two different texts, and then obviously things get worse as things go on, as more and more of the New Testament gets formed and developed and written, again a lot of it by word of mouth and a lot of it some decades, even centuries, after the actual period of time in which we believe Jesus to have been crucified. So in terms of occupation and Roman occupation, we see that there was a military presence which exercised quite a significant amount of authority in a number of these provinces. This is not just unique to Judea and Jerusalem, however, this was the case in a lot of parts of the Roman Empire and a lot of parts where we see the expansion of the Roman Empire, but specifically in terms of thinking about Judea, there was a military presence that exercised a considerable amount of authority, although there would often be the reliance on local leaders to manage local affairs, and the local religion that existed and was developing in this period of time in Judea was of course Judaism. You have no Christianity at the time, you definitely have no Islam at the time, and so Judaism is the major religion of the time. The rule of the Romans, however, was resented by many Jewish leaders and Jewish individuals, and so we see Roman occupation as being viewed quite pejoratively among the local population in Judea, and they see this as a desecration of their land and their religion. There will be, as we will see in future lessons time, the imposition of certain religious practices and the oppression of certain religious practices as well taking place in and around, and as the result of Roman occupation, Christianity itself of course was very heavily persecuted in its early period, in the early years, and we're going to spend quite a lot of time talking about Roman persecution of Christianity, which takes place before the conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity and the establishment of the Byzantine Church. There was also heavy taxation that was in place by the Roman authorities, creating a significant amount of economic hardship during this period. Often the tax collectors were viewed as corrupt and exploitative, often very disliked by the populace, and in fact these kinds of ideas would be imbued eventually into some of the teachings of Christianity, where debt collectors and tax collectors are seen as quite negative characters within the Gospels of the New Testament. So we'll get to that as well in future lessons time. Generally speaking then, if we sort of finish off this lesson thinking about 1st century Judea, we see that there was a significant amount of economic strain that is increasing social unrest. This is particularly the case when we think about this from a class perspective. When we look at the lower classes within society of 1st century Judea and the contribution to widespread desire for liberation from Roman rule, essentially you start to see quite a ripe and ample opportunity for Christianity to start to develop a new religious movement. And this is one of the things that we can think about the development of Christianity in relation to, because you can sort of examine Christianity from a theological perspective, which is what we do and have done at multiple stages on this channel and will be in the future, but there's also the anthropological and the historical and the sociological understandings and underpinnings which establishes religions such as Christianity. You could easily explain away, for example, the reasons why a religion such as Christianity was so easy to take hold, at least compared to that of other parts of the world, despite the amount of persecution that came as a result of firstly Jewish leaders and Jewish officials, but also and quite significantly, of course, the Roman Empire. And so this idea of social unrest and economic strain and a sort of class divide and an inequality that exists in 1st century Judea are all ample reasons why something like Christianity would start to emerge and why the teachings of the Gospels become very, very prevalent and prominent and converters to Christianity of a number of people. So bear that in mind that when we go through looking at the history of Christianity, there's a lot that can be said not just about the theological development, but also thinking from an anthropological, from a historical, and specifically as well from a sociological perspective. And now, of course, we know very little about this period of time, surprisingly little given how much attention is given to this period of history, because, of course, what is, like I said, history and what is theology or mythology or embellishment or metaphor is obviously something of a great amount of debate that is, again, subject to debate from not only theologians, but also historians and historical theologians. And so we have to all bear that in mind when we traverse this very, very early embryonic stage of Christianity.