Lecture 2: The World of the New Testament: Its Literature, Its Society, and Its Religion

The lecture, section by section

1. Charts for the era, and two corrections

   Essex opens by walking House's reference charts: the chronological flow from 600 BC to AD 135, the high priests, the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, the Maccabees become Hasmoneans, the Herodian family tree, and the emperors, governors, and client rulers. He offers two corrections of his own: Paul's death belongs at the end of the Neronian persecution, around 67 or 68, not 64, since Paul was released from his first Roman imprisonment in 62 and the events of the pastoral letters need room; and Ezra belongs before Nehemiah, returning in 458 BC, not near 400. The Hasmonean era of 142 to 63 BC is still remembered by Jews as a golden age of independence, though the last lecture deflated how independent it really was, and from 63 BC the stars on the high-priest chart tell the truth: every high priest thereafter held office under the authority of Rome.

2. The Septuagint

   First among the seven literary sources is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament made under the Ptolemies in Alexandria from about 250 to 125 BC, the first religious book ever translated from one language into another. Its style ranges from quite literal in the Torah to paraphrase in later books, and since our earliest copies come from the third and fourth centuries AD, its original text must be established the way New Testament textual criticism works. New Testament writers sometimes quote it and sometimes translate freely, and as Greek displaced Hebrew among the Jews of the dispersion, synagogues read it alongside the Hebrew. By the second century the Jews had come to regard their own translation as a Christian book, and new Greek versions were made to match the emerging Hebrew text.

3. Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

   A large Jewish literature in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek survives from roughly 200 BC to AD 100, kept alive not by Jews but by Christians. Certain works, the Apocrypha, were later ranked by the Roman Catholic Church as deuterocanonical; the wider body is called Pseudepigrapha, falsely labeled, because many works claim authorship by Old Testament figures, Enoch, Solomon, Manasseh, the twelve patriarchs, who did not write them. Essex refuses to grade the Apocrypha above the rest: none of it is Scripture, and all of it is equally valuable as background. Even the early codexes betray the church's real estimate, filling leftover pages at the end of a Septuagint with apocryphal works that simply stop mid-sentence when the pages run out; you do not treat canon that way.

4. The Dead Sea Scrolls

   Found from 1947 in eleven caves near Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls give us our earliest biblical manuscripts, including the complete Isaiah scroll from the first cave. The collection holds biblical texts, apocryphal and pseudepigraphic works, commentaries such as the pesher on Habakkuk, and the sectarian rules of the community itself, which we believe was a separatist Essene settlement. The cave-and-number shorthand, 1QIsaa or 4Q, simply names the cave and the document. Whether the caves preserve a rescued library or a discard heap cannot be finally settled, though Essex leans toward a library hidden with some care as Rome approached.

5. Philo and Josephus

   Philo, an Alexandrian Jew of about 20 BC to AD 50, fell in love with Plato and labored to synthesize Greek rationalism with faithful Judaism, arguing that Moses understood Platonism before Plato; where the two collided, he sided with the Jewish understanding, and he opens a window into the mind of a Diaspora Jew of the New Testament era. Josephus fought Rome in the revolt of 66, read the outcome by 67, and crossed over, marching with Vespasian and then Titus at Jerusalem's destruction. As a client of Vespasian's house he wrote the Jewish War, an apology insisting only a small band of zealots had rebelled, and then the Antiquities, summarizing the Old Testament and the Maccabean period before detailing the events he knew firsthand. For the intertestamental period Josephus fills in what no other source records.

6. The rabbinic writings and the Targums

   In AD 200 the rabbis codified their oral traditions in the Mishnah, which became Judaism's authoritative interpretation of the Old Testament, and Essex sets the date beside another: the New Testament, complete by about AD 95, had already given a different understanding, anchored in what God had done in sending Jesus the Messiah. Pharisaic Judaism, surviving Jerusalem's fall, answered with the Mishnah, then commentary upon it, the Gemara, and the two together form the Talmud, completed in its Babylonian form around AD 500, with which Jews today interact more than with the Scripture itself. How accurately the Mishnah reflects pre-70 conditions is debated, which is why even Edersheim is now kept at arm's length; the New Testament remains the one authoritative check. The Targums, Aramaic translations and paraphrases read in synagogue because Aramaic had displaced Hebrew for all but the learned rabbis, round out the seven sources, and exegetical commentaries cite this whole literature by standard abbreviations a student must learn to read.

7. Aristocrats, priests, and the people of the land

   Even by New Testament times more than eighty percent of Jews lived outside Palestine. Within the land society was rigidly layered. The lay aristocrats, the landed gentry whose families had risen by accommodating the Ptolemies, supplied the elders, at least half the Sanhedrin. Beside them stood the religious establishment crowned by the chief-priestly families, though ordinary priests like Zacharias in Luke 1 lived poor among the people and came up only for their two weeks of temple service and the feasts. Together aristocrats and establishment made up perhaps three percent of the population. The other ninety-seven percent were the people of the land, the am ha-aretz, the common folk, most of them poor and kept that way by the landowners who hired them, as in Jesus's parable of the laborers, dismissed by the aristocrats as economically unworthy and by the Jerusalem clergy as untaught and unteachable. That hostility frames the Gospels: when the multitude follows Christ, it is the elders and chief priests who become his opponents.

8. The dispersion: Hebraists, Hellenists, proselytes, God-fearers

   Jews of the dispersion tended to be more affluent, which is why they stayed dispersed, but their commitment ran at different levels. Hebraists dealt with Gentiles in Gentile tongues yet kept Aramaic and Hebraic ways at home, even sending sons to Palestine for education; Paul's claim in Philippians 3 to be a Hebrew of Hebrews places his family here. Hellenists spoke the Gentiles' languages, and their fidelity to ancestral tradition was more debated, though in practice both kept the same Judaism, and both appear inside the earliest church in Acts 6. Proselytes were Gentiles fully converted, renouncing their gods, washed, sacrificing, and circumcised, and thereafter received as completely Jewish in everything except tribal descent. God-fearers, perhaps up to a million in an empire of twenty-five to thirty million, form a broad band from near-proselytes down to Gentiles who merely respected Israel's God, drawn especially by Jewish ethics; the term will matter again in Acts.

9. Why circumcision became the battle line

   Essex pauses on why Gentile circumcision will convulse the early church in Acts 15 and Galatians. Before Christ, this was all a Jew knew: a Gentile joined the people of God by renouncing his gods, embracing Israel's God, and being circumcised. So when uncircumcised Gentiles embraced Israel's God through the Messiah, some Jewish confessors of Jesus, men Paul will call false brothers, pressed the old uniformity on the church. The background makes the stakes intelligible: what Paul resists is not a detail but the whole inherited definition of belonging.

10. The synagogue

    Synagogues arose during and after the exile, and by New Testament times stood wherever Jews lived; the Mishnah's rule, probably accurate for the period, was that any ten Jewish men must establish one. Its first purpose was the education of children in Judaism, and from that base it became the place of Sabbath worship, Scripture reading, and teaching, and the center of Jewish social life. Rule was orderly but surprisingly open: the president oversaw the assembly and hired the teacher, and after the reading could call on a recognized rabbi, the teacher, or a seasoned layman to bring a word of exhortation. Essex draws the line forward: the early church, which owned no buildings, mirrors the synagogue in being first and foremost a teaching institution, and a seminary exists only from the church, to the church, for the church.

11. One temple, and the parties

    Many synagogues, one temple: the place of worship and sacrifice, to which men of Palestine went three times a year and Jews of the dispersion aspired to come at least once in life, often taking a whole year to keep Tabernacles, winter over, and stay through Passover and Pentecost. Four parties divided Judaism. The Sadducees were associated with the temple and controlled Israel's worship, the chief priests being Sadducean; the Pharisees were a lay movement with standing among the people and welcome in the synagogues, which is why Jesus meets Pharisees in Galilee and Sadducean opposition in Jerusalem. The Essenes judged the temple's priesthood illegitimate and its sacrifices invalid, wanting it not destroyed but purified, some living apart like the Qumran community. The Zealots were less a religious party than a commitment to Rome's overthrow, and Josephus insists they were a small group.

12. What united Judaism: belief, and above all practice

    Beneath the parties lay unifying convictions: creational monotheism, Israel's God the one true God and Creator, at work in Israel's history; Israel his elect people; the Torah his given way of life, however disputed its interpretation; the land and the temple his gift and focus; and a hope of restoration in which Rome would fall, the Gentiles be converted, subjugated, or destroyed, the temple purified, and all of it resolve around someone anointed by God, messianic in nature. Yet a Jew was recognized, by Jews and Gentiles alike, less by belief than by practice: circumcision, which Greeks despised aesthetically and Romans athletically while Jews gloried in it; the Sabbath, which made Jews look lazy to their employers; prayer at nine and three; and the feasts, crowned by Tabernacles, of which the rabbis said a man has not truly lived until he has kept it in Jerusalem.

1. Essex insists the New Testament judges the background literature, never the reverse. Where do you see the opposite instinct at work today, and what does it cost a reader to let outside sources overrule Scripture?

2. The synagogue existed first to teach, and Essex says the church is first and foremost a teaching institution. Measured by that standard, what does your own week of church life say about what you believe the church is for?

3. Judaism's unity lay more in shared practice than shared belief, and its practices made Jews conspicuous and sometimes despised. What visible practices mark Christians off today, and when has bearing that cost tested you?