The history surrounding the time and ministry of Jesus is fascinating, and provides enlightening details to the importance of Jesus’s ministry, and we can make many connections between the people he was ministering to in His day, and people we can minister to today.
The stage is set for Jesus’s ministerial period starting in the Persian period from 539-334 B.C. The last major events in the Old Testament are the return from Babylonian exile and the rebuilding of the temple. This period allowed the Jews to regroup and worship God in the second temple period.
This period was followed by the various Greek and Roman conquests that explain the historical and political landscape of Jesus’s ministry. It began with Philip II and Alexander the Great, who strongly believed in the spread and conversion of the world to Hellenistic ideals and culture. He not only promoted the building of Hellenistic structures and practice of culture, but encouraged his men to marry local women, so that these Greek ideals would be literally inbred into these conquered local cultures. The Jews did not resist this conquest, and were allowed to practice their own religious traditions, but they were no doubt influenced by this culture shift. The adopted the common “Koine Greek” dialect, and in the later Ptolemaic Period from 323-198 B.C, they translated the Septuagint into Koine Greek.
However, the greatest cultural shift for the Jews under Antiochus IV from 198-166 B.C. The Hellenistic culture was strongly enforced by Antiochus IV who called himself “Epiphanes” or “god revealed”. He wanted Israel to fully submit to Hellenistic ideals, and forced this culture on them, greatly contaminating the Jewish religious structure and authority. Priesthood was sold to the highest bidder, circumcisions were reversed through surgery, eventually leading to what was prophesied as the “domination of desolation” through the paganization of the temple and abolishment of Judaism. This lead to the Maccabean Revolt in 166-135 B.C. to resist the pagan practices enforced by culture and seeped into Jewish practices. Some Jews justified pagan sacrifice to avoid punishment from the Syrian government at the time, but others gathered and rebelled, and won in 164 B.C.
This ushered in the era of Hasmonean Dynasty from 135-63 B.C. Priesthood was appointed through family lineage, and caused political tensions between the surrounding territories when Hyrcanus sought to expand, and conquered Edom and Samaria. This caused Hasidsm to branch off and oppose politically-motivated and Hellenistic Hasmonean rule. This is the landscape in which Roman rule entered the picture.
From 63 B.C to 135 A.D, Judea was conquered by Rome while it was weakened by this split in Jewish division between Hasmoneans and Hasidics. This era was marked by political turmoil among leaders at the time, many of which are recorded in the gospels. The paranoid and blood-thirsty Herod the Great caused Joseph and Mary to flee the slaughter of infants decreed in Bethlehem. His dynasty was tainted with thoughtless vengeance, markedly towards Jews who opposed or questioned his view. Herod Antipas adopted a similar legislative ideology when he executed John the Baptists and sought Jesus’s life. The other Herodian leaders are mentioned in Acts, and are largely responsible for the trials and martyrdom of the early apostles.
However, after the political instability of these rulers, once August became emperor of Rome, the region entered the period known as “Pax Romana”. While this time was hardly peaceful, especially for the early church, it did provide a freedom of movement among the regions of the Roman Empire, allowing the perfect setting for the Gospel to spread freely. Eventually, this political hotbed in the Palestinian region came to a head in A.D 70. Many rebellions cropped up, but were quickly suppressed, but in A.D. 70, the temple was taken, destroyed, and may Jews brutally overtaken, starved, and slaughtered. Once the temple was destroyed, this forced Jews to rethink their methods of worship, turning to rigorous study of the Torah instead of the Levitical sacrificial system, becoming what is now practiced as orthodox Judaism.
However, the fulfilment of Jesus’s prophecy of the destruction of the temple gave Christianity the perfect stage, since the temple was gone and traditional sacrificial offerings could no longer be practiced as they always had been, the message of Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice resonated even deeper with Jews at the time.
There are many players in this history that set the stage for the ministry, death, and rise of Christianity, filled with many opposing political and religious movements, ethnic groups, all within the geographical landscape of the Eastern region of the Mediterranean. Knowing all of the players in this story, and how they influenced the early Christian movement is crucial to understanding the true power fo the Gospel for the time it was written.
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