Background to Jesus Christ's Galilean Ministry

Thank you very much, Mr. Lockwood, and good afternoon to all of you. It's not only a packed house, it's a little bit overflowing here. I think we saw the personnel bring in some extra chairs here because we've run out of space. But that's a very nice problem to have. Welcome to all of you. Welcome to our visitors and guests. I might give a little bit of background since I do see a number of new faces here today, new visitors who maybe haven't been with us before. I thought I would comment a little bit on one thing we've been doing here in the Front Range Congregations over close to two years now. And that is covering a harmony of the Gospels in chronological order. One of the things I prepared for that was this book, which I believe most of you have. I know a few people have moved into the area or started attending in recent months. If you need a copy of that, please see my wife afterwards. There we're giving out one per family for that. And extra copies are available for $10. Special price today, two for $30. So we are going through... incidentally, I might explain what a harmony of the Gospels is. It takes all four of the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and shows them chronologically across the page. For instance, this particular incident is described in all four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Then the next incident is described in only three of the Gospels, and then three, and in some cases only one or two Gospels. So it's laid out in that format so you can see and compare because different Gospels writers include different details that the others leave out. So it's very helpful to compare them side by side and get a better, more full picture and understanding of what is taking place. And that is the purpose of today's sermon today, is to give you a more and fuller understanding of some of the things that are taking place. We won't be covering a specific passage in the Gospels today, but where I left off last time, several months ago, was when Jesus Christ moves from Nazareth to Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee and begins what is called his Galilean ministry. This is fairly early on in his ministry, several months in. And today we will take a look at the background to Jesus Christ's Galilean ministry. I have been doing these presentations with PowerPoint, showing a lot of maps, graphics, illustrations to help us get a better understanding and idea of what is taking place. And we'll be doing that today. And be prepared. You may get writer's cramp today because we're going to cover an awful lot of material in the message this afternoon. So why is Galilee important? Why is it important that we understand the background and the history of that area? I sent out a number of study questions a week ago and again last night. If you're not on the email list to receive those, please send me an email. scottashley at gmail.com or scottashley at ucg underscore org and ask to be added to that list. I know there are a few people who I don't have your email addresses for, so if you would like to receive that, please send me an email here.

But why is Galilee important? It's actually where most of the events that we read about in the Gospels take place. It's where Jesus Christ gave most of His teaching. It's where He performed more of His miracles than any other location. And this is the region of most of Jesus Christ's ministry that we read about in the Gospels. A lot of us may have the misconception that most of His ministry took place around Jerusalem. Not so. Not so at all. Jesus is only in Jerusalem for what are called the pilgrimage feasts when He goes to Jerusalem to keep the Holy Days. They are of Passover, 911 Bread, and Pentecost in the fall Holy Days. The rest of the time He is generally around the Sea of Galilee and, as we'll see later, in a very specific area on the Sea of Galilee.

So one of the study questions I sent out last night for this sermon was, Did Bible prophecy indicate where the Messiah would do His work? Anybody know the answer to that? Anybody? Anybody read that? Okay, I'll go ahead and show you then. It's from Isaiah 9, verses 1 and 2.

Actually, let me move on over. It's Matthew 4, verse 13. It's the next passage in the Harmony of the Gospels. It's quoting from Isaiah 9, verses 1 and 2. Let's read that. This is where we left off last time, several months ago.

It's quoting, The land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, By the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, And upon those who sat in the region and shadow of death, light has dawned. So here's a prophecy that the Messiah would appear specifically in the area of Galilee. So this was foretold about eight centuries earlier, from when Jesus Christ appeared, foretold by the prophet Isaiah about eight centuries before that. Let's take a look and notice something about the tribal allotments. We'll be covering a lot of history today. Hope you like it. If you don't, please don't snore so loudly that you disturb everyone else. But the tribal allotments of Zebulun and Naphtali were... Okay, pointers, start working here. It's working fine before service. Here we go. Here's the... just to orient us, here is the... Oh, come on. Here's the Sea of Gala... excuse me, the Dead Sea here, the Jordan River Valley, and the Sea of Galilee up to the north. And here is the tribal allotment of Zebulun and Naphtali. Zebulun, incidentally, is where the city of Nazareth was located, the town of Nazareth. That's where Jesus grew up. Spin his childhood there, on up to the point that he started his ministry. And Naphtali, if we look at that, we see that it encompasses much of the shore of the Sea of Galilee, including the city of Capernaum. So not only was it foretold the general region of Galilee, in which the Messiah would appear, it also mentions the two specific tribal allotments in which Jesus would do the bulk of his ministry.

And again, this was foretold eight centuries before that.

Moving on to another map I want to share with you here, and this is, I hope you brought your harmonies today. I should have mentioned that in my email update last night. But what we'll be looking at quite often are the maps at the back of it, specifically the map on the very last page.

And the reason I included these maps is to help us see the relationships between the different places that are mentioned there in Christ's ministry.

So we're going to be referring to this particular map on the back page quite a bit today, so you may want to keep that handy there.

Galilee, again, is in the far northern area of what is today the land of Israel, and anciently it was the land of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

The area...excuse me...

is the Crow Flies Galilee, the Sea of Galilee, is about 75 miles north of Jerusalem. So that gives you some idea of the scale there, about 75 miles. It would have taken...however you can't walk is the Crow Flies there. So it would have taken about a week to walk each way, going to and from Galilee to Jerusalem there. It's also very near Lebanon. If you're familiar with that geography, Lebanon is this coastal area up here.

And Syria, where there are so many problems taking place today up here in this direction. And off to the north. Anciently it was close to the lands of Lebanon and Syria, and it's still very close to the modern borders of those countries as well today. And let me turn to another map. This also is one that's the fourth map in from the back of your Harmony. And we'll look at this one quite a bit as well today also.

And the province or area of Galilee that we're looking at here is roughly 30 miles north and south and about 30 miles east and west. So to put that in perspective, the whole area of Galilee that we're looking at right here would fit within the area of Denver and its outlying suburbs. It would fit within there quite comfortably. So we're not talking about a terribly huge area here. It's not like Jesus traveled hundreds of miles throughout his ministry. It was actually quite a small area in which he carried out his ministry. And we see on this map a number of different places that are mentioned in the Gospels. Capernaum, which we'll be talking about the most today right up here on the northern shore. Betsiada, about five miles to the east of it, was another fishing port. Corazin, about three miles to the north of Capernaum. We also see places like Magdala. That was where Mary Magdalene is called. Magdalene means one from Magdala. It was a fishing port here. We also see places like Nazareth over here, where Jesus grew up, spent his childhood and early adulthood. And Kana, where he performed his first miracle over here. All of these are in the area of Galilee here. So I might also mention where did Jesus' disciples come from? We're not told about all of them. Four of them, Peter, Andrew, James, and John, came from Betsiada, this fishing village over here along the shore of Sea of Galilee.

Betsiada, incidentally, in Hebrew, means beta, meaning house or place of. And Saita would be literally hunters. Why is it called a place of hunters? Well, a fisherman in that day was a hunter. He was a hunter of fish, as opposed to deer, elk, antelope, something like that.

So that's where it gets its name there. Capernaum, incidentally, in Hebrew, would have been kfar nachum. In Hebrew, kfar, meaning town or city. And nachum, nahum, as in the prophet nahum. We don't know that the prophet nahum was from there, but apparently some people thought he was. And that's where the city of Capernaum gets its name, kfar nachum, as it would be in Hebrew.

Or close proximity to that. Let's see, another of the disciples came from Kana. That was Nathaniel. Came from there. And, of course, Matthew Levy, the tax collector, came from Capernaum itself. He was a tax collector there in that town. So the Galilee region gets its name from the Sea of Galilee. The Sea of Galilee has several other names mentioned in Scripture. Numbers 34, 11, and Joshua 12, 3 refer to it as kenereth, or kenereoth, which is Hebrew from harp. And that's because of the shape of the lake. It was like the Hebrew harp instrument, or lyre, we might say, today. In Luke 5 and verse 1, it's called Gennesaret, which is a great transliteration of kenereth, or harp. In John 6, 1 and 21, 11, it's called the Sea of Tiberius, after the major city that was on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. We'll talk about that a bit later in the sermon. And in John 6 and verse 16, it's simply called the Lake. And although it's called the Sea of Galilee, it was, we would view it here in North America, more as a lake, because it's nowhere near the size of the Mediterranean Sea, or Adriatic Sea, or North Sea, or any of those. Let's talk about the background of the Sea of Galilee a bit here, the lake itself. It's a freshwater lake, fed primarily by the Jordan River, coming in from the north, and actually flowing out from the southern. It's fed by rainwater from Mount Hermon, which is the highest point in Israel. It's actually covered with snow much of the year.

It's nothing like our 14ers, but for that area, it's quite a high mountain. The sea, this is quite interesting, is nearly 700 feet below sea level. Nearly 700 feet below sea level. And if you've ever been there, you'll recognize all the humidity there, because the air tends to sink and stay there. It's very, very humid, quite warm, quite a temperate climate.

The lake is only about 8 miles wide, and its weight is 0.12 miles long. We have reservoirs out west that are much bigger than that, so it's not terribly huge there. It is about 200 feet deep in some places, so it's very deep. It's in what's called the Jordan Rift Valley, which is a big crack in the Earth's crust that runs basically from Turkey all the way down through Africa.

They are a very deep valley, and that's why the Sea of Galilee is 700 feet below sea level. The Dead Sea further south is 800 feet below sea level.

It's quite interesting that the Sea of Galilee is so small that from basically any point along the shore, you can see the entire shore of the lake.

From any point, anywhere that you're standing on the shore, you can see pretty much the entire lake and the shore. This is rather interesting because there are times in the Gospels when Jesus and his disciples get in a boat and start sailing across the sea, only to be met by big crowds there. Well, as soon as they left one place, the people could see the boat and see where it was going and walk around the shore and meet them on the other side. So that apparently seems to be taking place quite a bit. That's one reason it's very hard for him to get away from the multitudes, the crowds who keep following him, to hear what he's teaching. Because they can tell where he's going. They can see his boat going out in the direction that they're going and get over there to meet him there. The climate of that area is quite tropical. Winter daytime highs are generally in the 50s, and in summer the highs are in the 80s or low 90s.

It gets about 20 inches of rain a year, which is considerably more than we get here, typically about 14 to 15 inches here along the front range. The soil is quite fertile there. And in Jesus Christ's day, there were a lot of crops that were cultivated around there.

Grain, wheat, barley, figs, grapes, olives, different crops like that were produced in the fields and the hills around the Sea of Galilee. And because the land was quite fertile, the people were generally a little better off than average for people of that day. Not many people were very wealthy, but on the other hand, not very many people were poor as well.

It was a pretty easy area to make a living and make a good living farming the soil there. So, there weren't a lot of poor peasants who were just barely eking out a living for the most part. For the most part, people would be very much middle class, as we would call them today. Now, earlier in our series of studies on the Gospels, we talked a bit about Bethlehem, where Jesus was born, and then talked about Nazareth, where he left off last time, and left off with Jesus again, beginning his ministry there in Capernaum. So, to understand the events that follow chronologically in Christ's ministry, we need to understand the history and the background and the culture of this particular region.

One of the things we need to get in mind is that the history of this area of Galilee is quite different from the area of Jerusalem, which again, many of us tend to think Jesus performed most of his ministry around Jerusalem. Again, not so. In the first century, Jerusalem was part of what was called, again referring to our map, the Roman province of Judea.

Judea, there, named after Judah, or the Jews, the Judeans, as they would have been called, there in the first century. And this Roman province of Judea roughly corresponded to the ancient kingdom of Judea from a number of centuries earlier there. After the Kingdom of Israel split off the ten tribes of the north and the two tribes of Judah forming the Kingdom of Judah in the south, that happened about nine centuries earlier from where we are in history. And of course, we know what happened to those two kingdoms. We know that in 721 to 718 BC, the northern ten tribes were invaded and taken captive by the Assyrian Empire. And the people were deported, taken to the lands of Assyria, and then disappeared from history to become known as the Lost Ten Tribes. And so that's what happened to the northern ten tribes, including the entire area around Galilee. That was actually one of the first waves of Assyrian invaders that came into Galilee, took the people prisoner and carted them away approximately a thousand miles over into the Assyrian Empire. The southern kingdom of Judah didn't learn the lesson of the sins of the idolatry, of the Sabbath-breaking, and so on, of their northern neighbors. And they continued on for a little more than a century after that, during which time the Assyrian Empire fell and the Babylonian Empire rose up. And then in 586 BC, Judah, the kingdom of Judah, the two tribes centered around Jerusalem, were invaded by the Babylonians and conquered. And they too were taken away captive over into the area of Babylon, of the Babylonian Empire. That's in modern-day Iraq. The Assyrians basically took the Israelites over into the area of what is modern-day Iran, incidentally there. So history is still very much alive in that part of the world. So many of the people when the Babylonians invaded fled. Some of them fled down into Egypt, fled to other areas. And that is one reason why you see scattered pockets of Jews scattered in Egypt, along North Africa, in places like Syria, Iran, and Iraq to this day. There are very small Jewish populations that are shrinking all the time because of the persecution from the Muslims there, which occasionally I share articles with you about that. Here's a map that illustrates that, to help us place it geographically, what was taking place there. This is a map of the Assyrian Empire in dark green. They invaded, took the northern ten tribes captive, and brought them out and settled them throughout various areas of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrian Empire fell, was replaced by the Babylonian Empire, centered in Babylon down here again in modern-day Iraq.

Pretty much the same thing happened to the Jews of the Kingdom of Judah as well. Babylonians invaded, took them captive, and brought them out and settled them in the Babylonian Empire. This gives us some idea geographically about roughly a thousand miles that they traveled there and were scattered in these foreign lands there because of their sins.

When the Babylonian Empire fell, defeated by the Medo-Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great, King Cyrus, then allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem, gave them permission to return. This is a story that's spelled out in the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah. You may remember the story of how they're rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem in the temple and they're having to work with basically one hand holding their weapon, their sword or their spear or bow, and the other hand on their tools because of the danger and the conflict and the hostility of the surrounding nations around that area there. This is a depiction from a model of the Jews rebuilding the city walls there in Jerusalem. The people realized that what all of this is leading up to is the mindset of the people there, the culture of the people in Galilee. Because when the people there realized that they had been taken into captivity because of their sins, again Sabbath breaking is as the heel spells it out. Idolatry, worship of other gods, these type of things. They'd been taken into captivity because of that and they were determined not to repeat their mistakes. So the Jews who returned from Babylon here under Nehemiah and Ezra and rebuilt Jerusalem, rebuilt the city and so on, were of a very religiously conservative mindset.

They were very determined, again, not to repeat the mistakes. That's why they went overboard in many ways in interpreting how God's law was to be kept. That's why they came up with a lot of very picky rules, for instance, regarding the Sabbath. That you couldn't spit on the ground, for instance, because that was the same as plowing, because you were disturbing the soil.

If your house was on fire, you couldn't grab up all your clothes and run outside your house. But you could stop and put on your clothes and walk out from the fire. This is how picky the rules got. You could not wear sandals that had nails in them on the Sabbath because that was carrying an unnecessary weight.

The weight of the iron nails, holding your sandals together. This is how ludicrous some of this got. But this is what drove it. The understanding that they had been sent into captivity and were defeated because of their violations of the Sabbath. Of course, we see in the Gospels a lot of conflict between Jesus and the Pharisees and other religious groups over how do you keep God's law. What are the priorities? We'll be discussing that a lot more in future lessons here. Let's see, where was I in my notes? Get off on that digression there. Jerusalem then became the religious center of the nation for those people who had returned there from Babylon. Herod the Great, of course, built the huge magnificent temple there. This was the center for the priests and for the scribes and the Sadducees. Different groups that we see mentioned there in the Gospels in particular. You might say that Jerusalem was the center for the, I call it the Jerusalem religious establishment there. These people were very entrenched. They had a very huge power base there built around the temple. And the money they were taking in from that, I've talked about that when I discussed Jesus cleansing the temple. There in the background of what was going on, how they were making a killing off the sacrifices and exchanging the different currencies for offerings there and the temple tax and so on like that. Don't have time to cover that again. But there was a very entrenched religious establishment there that was very hostile to Jesus, as we've seen and we'll see again throughout these studies here.

So, and incidentally, it's no coincidence, this is where a lot of the persecution for the early church we read about in the early chapters of the book of Acts comes from. Comes from this Jerusalem religious establishment because they feel threatened by this new movement called Christianity that is starting up there.

To the, let's back off a little bit and start looking at some of the other background of groups in this area because there are a number of different cultures. I mentioned some of that in my email update last night. To the, here's Jerusalem again, to the north of Jerusalem and Judea is the area called Samaria.

Talked about that a lot when I covered the Woman at the Well in Samaria there. But I'll just briefly mention that. It gets its name from the city of Samaria, which was the capital of the northern tribes, the Ten Tribes, the Kingdom of Israel there, which again was invaded and destroyed by the Assyrians.

There's a depiction of, a contemporary depiction by the Assyrians of their army surrounding and capturing a town and murdering the inhabitants and stuff like that. So it's very, they're very, very bloody people. So the Israelites, again, were taken away and other peoples brought in to replace them.

And those became, the exiles were exiled and lost to history and other people were moved in and became known as the Samaritans because they settled again in that particular area of Samaria right here after the Assyrians exiled all of the people out of there.

So these people were brought in and they blended their pagan religions with remnants of the true religion that survived in that area. And the Jews viewed them, the Jews of the first century, rightly viewed them as pagans. They actually viewed them as worse than that. There's a lot of antagonism that we see in the Gospels between the Samaritans and the Jews.

The Samaritan, excuse me, the Jews looked down on the Samaritans as essentially half-breeds. There was actually a big debate going on in the first century Judaism as to whether Samaritans were human or not. They were viewed as essentially subhumans who did not have a soul or a spirit by a lot of Jews in that time.

Consequently, if you were a Samaritan who was walking through the land of Judea, you could easily be killed. And by the same token, if you were a Jew walking through the area of Samaria, you could get killed there also. We do find Jesus traveling with his disciples through the area of Samaria, but you don't see them traveling alone. They're traveling in a group of 10 to 20 people where there would be some safety in numbers there.

So it just simply was not safe to travel alone if you were a Jew traveling through Samaria or Samaritan traveling through the area of Judea. North, let's talk about... I won't cover this area of Samaria more than that. If you have any questions about it, feel free to ask me later. Again, I covered a lot of this in an earlier lecture about Jesus and the Samaritan woman.

North of Samaria and around to the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee is the area called the Decapolis. The Decapolis, most of which is today in the Kingdom of Jordan. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The Decapolis is a word that doesn't appear in the Bible, but the area is referred to on a number of occasions there.

But just because it's not mentioned often doesn't mean it's not important. It's very important when we understand what is taking place there. And it clears up a lot of questions that we may have about some of the events that take place in the Gospels there. Now, the culture of the Decapolis is quite a bit different from Judea, which we've talked about, and Samaria, and Galilee as well.

The Decapolis...well, what does the word Decapolis mean? Anybody know? 10 cities, yes. Very good. Thanks, Larry. Yeah, break it down. Polis, we're probably all familiar with things like Metropolis and so on. Polis is a Greek word for city.

Decca is 10, as in the decimal system, based on 10. So 10 cities is what it means in Greek. And so Decapolis means 10 cities. You may have heard of a few of them. Some of them were indicated on this map, like Gadara, right up here.

Sithopolis, here. It's called in Old Testament times Bet-Shon. Philadelphia, down here, is the city of modern-day Ammon, the capital of Jordan. It was called Philadelphia in the first century there. So those are cities of the Decapolis that are specifically mentioned there in the Gospels or the Bible. Not necessarily in the Gospels, but they are mentioned in the Bible.

So how did this area, the Decapolis, get a Greek name? How did that happen? Again, we need to go back in history a bit. We've mentioned the Assyrian Empire, we've mentioned the Babylonian Empire, we've mentioned the Medo-Persian Empire. Which empire came next? Greek Empire. Greek Empire is the empire that overthrew the Medo-Persian Empire.

So that, of course, was led by a famous general called Alexander the Great because of his military prowess and his conquest. Alexander founded the cities of the Decapolis in the year 333 BC. The 333 BC founded the cities of the Decapolis. You might actually more properly refer to them as city-states because they didn't control just the city, but the territory surrounding them as well. So they might control 100 square miles or something like that around the cities as well. Alexander is known for being a great military genius, and indeed he was. He conquered basically the known world of his day. But something that most people don't realize about Alexander is that he was also a missionary. A missionary. Not a missionary in the traditional sense that we would think of, spreading a religion in other words. But he was a missionary because he wanted not just to conquer the world, but also to transform the world. And this is a very important concept that we need to understand. He wanted the whole world to adopt Greek culture, which is known as Hellenism. Everybody say Hellenism. Hellenism. Okay, good. When I introduce a new vocabulary word like that, I'll want you to register it in your mind a little bit more. But Hellenism basically means Greek thought and culture. Greek thought and culture. It's a word you should add to your vocabulary because it had a huge impact on the world that exists down to our day. As we'll see as I discuss this here. The Hellenists are a group that we see mentioned in the New Testament as well. Hellenists. And what this means is it's a group of people who had adopted Greek thought and culture. They adopted the practices of that day of the Greek culture and in some cases even adopted its religion. And its influence on that part of the world was very, very powerful. This is how a lot of, frankly, pagan ideas, pagan philosophical ideas, religious ideas, such as the immortal soul, such as going to heaven or hell after you die, those concepts came straight out of Greek philosophy and Greek religion. And they were adopted into the early Christianity around the end of the first century and have been perpetuated to this day. But those ideas came actually out of this concept of Hellenism, of Greek philosophy, Greek culture, Greek thought. And again, this whole idea was introduced into this area, and virtually the entirety of the Middle East, by Alexander the Great. So Alexander was a missionary of Hellenism, of thought, of culture, not necessarily of religion, although religion was part of the package.

At the center of Hellenism was the belief that man was the center of the universe. Man was the center of the universe. Your mind, your body, your thoughts, your creations are all that really mattered. The human mind, human thought, human essence, human soul, all of this.

So Alexander basically took the approach that if I can control four things, I can control the world. Four things, and those four things were sports, entertainment, religion, and education. Sports, entertainment, religion, and education. And he knew that if he could control those four things in any culture, he could control and transform that culture, and that people, and that part of the world. So the way Alexander put this into practice is that as he invaded and conquered an area of the world, and again he conquered virtually the known world of his time, as his soldiers reached the end of their enlistment period, or after they had stopped fighting, some of those soldiers would be mustered out of the army, and they would be given a certain amount of territory, kind of like after the Civil War, people were given 40 acres and a mule. It would be essentially like that. They'd be given land to settle in and settle down as part of their service, part of their reward for having served in the army there. And they would then establish Greek colonies throughout that area. So throughout the area of the Decapolis, what you had was essentially 10 little Greek city-states modeled on Athens, in Corinth, in Philippi, at Thessalonica, in places like that, in Greece. You had these little Greek cities, these little pockets of Greek culture, of Greek thought, of Greek religion, of Greek entertainment, of Greek sports, of Greek education. And this whole system was founded by Alexander the Great, and this is how he carried out his missionary campaign, his effort to transform the world.

And it was incredibly successful. Two, that also is why you find cities such as Alexandria and Egypt. Where did Alexandria, Egypt, get its name? Well, it's named for Alexander the Great, who conquered Egypt. That's only one of many cities by the name of Alexandria, throughout the Middle East. So in these Greek cities, when these soldiers mustered out of their military service, when they ended their term, they would build four things.

First thing, they would build, well, not necessarily an order, but they would build these four things. They would build a gymnasium. A gymnasium. We're familiar with that term. It had a different meaning in that day. Today, we think of it as a gymnasium, like a school gym, where you play volleyball and basketball. And that day, it meant, I guess in broad terms, a school. It was where you went to educate and train both your mind and your body. And that's why a gymnasium today is where you play sports, like volleyball, basketball, wrestling, things like that. We have one just right out here through the window. A gymnasium here. So that of itself wasn't bad to train the body, educate the body, and train the mind there. That of itself wasn't bad. But the root word of gymnasium is the Greek word gymnos. Anybody know what that means? It means nude. It means nude. A lot of the education in the Greek system of both the mind and the body was done in the nude. It involved nudity. There, that was just the way it was done. For instance, when they were training the body, they would do wrestling matches, things like this, in the nude.

After the gymnasium for training the mind and the body, they would build something else. They would build an arena for sports. Different configurations. Some are round, some are oval, some are very oblong, like this one that is designed for chariot racing here. But they would build these theaters for sports. Not all that different from a pugetifice. A couple of them right down I-25. They are about 10 or 15 miles south of here. You see them in the major cities. They are built on the same exact design. A lot of these are dog tracks, racetracks, horse tracks, and so on. Copied from great culture, 300 BC. Exact copies of that. Sports were practiced for entertainment in these gymnasium arenas. The athletes competed again in the nude. The human body was the ultimate. It was what was worshiped. It was very highly thought of by the Greeks. That is one reason why we see so many Greek statues without clothes. They were wanting to glorify and show off the human body. Some of you may have read the book by James Michener about the Middle East and about the history of the Holy Land. It is something highly recommended for anybody traveling to the Middle East. There is a chapter in there about this aspect of Greek culture. It is called the gymnasium. It is all about the huge corrupting influence it had on the Greek culture of the time. To the Greeks, the human body, the human mind, human thought, human expression was everything.

But to the Jews, what was most important? God. God was most important. There is this huge conflict butting heads between these two very different and irreconcilable worldviews. Which is greatest. The human mind, the human thought, or God. It was a huge area of conflict during that time. Another thing that would build after the gymnasium and the arena would be the theater. Theaters weren't known in the Middle East until the Greeks came through.

Now virtually any city worth its salt there in the Middle East, you can go and find the ruins of a huge Greco-Roman theater. Some of these are enormous. The biggest ones would seat 30,000-40,000 people. In some cases, the theaters were bigger than the entire population of the cities there because people would come in from the outlying areas there.

For their entertainment there, for the gladiatorial contests, things like that. They would also have theatrical productions. There are a lot of ancient playwrights and so on who wrote and performed plays that were to be blunt pretty raunchy. They are much like today's entertainment that we see on TV and the movies. Concerts, that type of thing. This is a Roman mosaic of a play being performed there with a number of actors there on the stage.

They would also build one-fourth type of edifice, and that was the temple. Or temples, plural, because it would build temples to the different gods that they worshipped. The religious worship of the Greeks, we study anything about it, involved a lot of sex there to be blunt. It involved male prostitution and female prostitution. Male on male, female on female. Anything you wanted. It was done there because the way you worshipped the gods, the way you got close to the gods in spirit, was to have sex with the temple priest or priestesses who were really nothing more than prostitutes because you paid for the privilege of going to the temple for that.

The money you paid was an offering to the god or goddess of that particular temple. It was a very degenerate, corrupting influence. You see that reflected in Paul's writings, in Corinth, in particular places like that. This was just a hugely corrupting influence. The early church had to combat there. With these four things, with sports, entertainment, religion, and education, Alexander transformed the world in the areas that he conquered there, which included, again, most of the Middle East. He said basically that if the people could see what happens when you make a man the center of the universe, they'll latch onto it and they'll never let go.

And sure enough, that's exactly what's happened. Those trains of thought, those same four influences, are still very much with us today. It's very much where our culture is combating. Those are ancient Greek concepts that have been around more than 2,000 years. Entertainment. What's our entertainment like today? A lot of it's filthy, disgusting. Sports, the violence there. Religion, education. You can trace all the common threads of those all the way back here to Alexander. There and even beyond, in some cases there. So Alexander knew that people would fall in love with this Greek philosophy, this Greek thought, this Greek culture, if he would expose them to it.

And he did change the world. And all those things have survived to this day, long after Alexander's been dead and buried there. And just as in the first century, the Jewish children, the Jewish teenagers, Jewish young adults, had to combat that influence in their culture, that same battle is being waged today. Our children, our teenagers, our young adults, even our adults, there's a constant temptation to give in to that old philosophy of self above all else, of if it feels good, do it.

There, that same cultural battle has been fought for the last 2,000 years. It's still going on today. All bows down to which God are you going to follow? Are you going to follow the God of this world, the God of this age, the God of this culture? Or are you going to follow the true creator God, the God of the Bible? It's the exact same battle being fought today as it was being fought 2,000 years ago in Galilee there. So some Jews of that day embraced this Hellenism or this Greek culture, which we see reflected in the New Testament. There are several references to the Hellenists. But many Jews, again, were horrified by that, and rightly so, by things like the gymnasium, where again, the kids are being taught in the New, they're conducting all their sports, in the New, that type of thing.

Again, the prostitution in the temples there. I won't go through that again, but again, this was the whole worldview of Hellenism and Hellenistic thought. It was popularized by the Greeks. And then when the Greek Empire was absorbed into the Roman Empire, the Romans simply adopted all of that as their own, and it continued. And again, it's continued down right down to our day. So what does this have to do, though, with Galilee and Capernaum and the lands that Jesus ministered to in that day? Well, we have to realize that this is part of the culture that Jesus wasn't necessarily immersed in, but he was certainly rubbing shoulders with it.

He was rubbing shoulders with it, because when we see things in the Gospels, how many of you have wondered about this? When Jesus sends 2,000 pigs, cast demons out of a man, and since 2,000 pigs running down the hillside, and they drown in the Sea of Galilee, how many of you have thought, why aren't Jewish farmers raising pigs? How many of you thought that? I know I did for years.

But they weren't Jewish farmers. They were Greeks. They were Greeks, 7 or 8 miles from Capernaum. I can show you later where that miracle took place, right on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

It's because this area of the Decapolis was very pagan. They had all their temples to the pagan gods and goddesses, and so on like that. And pigs were a very common sacrificial animal for the Greeks. Here's a piece of Greek pottery. You can see two men here preparing to sacrifice a pig on this altar there. The Romans came along and adopted Greek culture, pretty much wholesale. Here's a fresco from a Roman house, and they're preparing. Here's an altar, and a priest, and a priestess, and a guy is bringing a pig to sacrifice on the altar. It was a common sacrificial animal among the Greeks and the Romans. And in this area of the Decapolis, it was probably the most commonly sacrificed animal there.

So why such a huge herd? Why 2,000 pigs? I mean, that's a big herd of animals there. Why 2,000? Well, probably because these pigs were being raised specifically to be sacrificed at some of these Greek temples overlooking the Sea of Galilee in one of the cities of the Decapolis there. That's what the animals were there for. They weren't raised to be eaten as such. They were being raised for sacrifices. Of course, many of the sacrifices were later eaten by the people. We can read about that in Paul's writings there. And we know from archaeology that these Gentile cities of the Decapolis to the east of the Sea of Galilee had temples there. You can go and visit them to this day. Temples to the various Greek and Roman gods. And sacrifices of these pigs was a part of that worship. Very commonly done. And if we don't understand that cultural background, we're puzzled or confused by or totally miss key elements to the stories that are recorded, therefore, in the Gospels. That's why it's very important, very helpful, very beneficial to understand the background of the culture of that day to put together the missing pieces of the puzzles there.

So, for instance, from the city of Capernaum, and this photo is taken very near there, if you looked across to the east, this is what you'd see. Today it's called the Golan Heights. In the first century it was called the Decapolis. You see these big high bluffs like that, that the pigs would have run down and drowned in the Sea of Galilee. So you had this very, very religious Jewish culture on the north side of the Sea of Galilee, while on the east side you had one of the most decadent pagan cultures of that day. Again, huge cultural clashes there going on. This area, the Decapolis, the Jews of Capernaum, Bethsaida, Corazin, places like that, viewed it as a totally corrupt place, an evil place, a place of demons, in fact. Where did Jesus cast the demons out? This area. This area there. Let's take a look at another story from the Gospel that ties into that. It's the parable of the prodigal son. Again, the Jews, because of the paganism of this place, viewed it as very, very evil. One of their terms for this place was called the Other Side. We see that from Jewish writings of the first centuries. Called the Other Side because it was on the other side of the Jordan River and on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, from where the Jews lived. Another term that is used for it in Jewish writings of the day is a far country. We find that specific term used in Luke 15, in the parable of the prodigal son. We won't go through that, but if you remember the story, a certain young man went to his father and asked for his share of the inheritance. He got the inheritance and went to a far country. We read that and think, the guy traveled 100 miles away or whatever. No. He traveled about 7 or 8 miles away to the far country, the pagan territory on the other side of the Sea of Galilee. It has a lot of implications to the story there. Now, it was called a far country because, religiously and culturally, it might as well have been in a different universe. Because essentially it was. It was in the land of demons, of pagans, of false gods and goddesses. What's heartbreaking about this story is the man's father, the young man, who had given him the inheritance, his son went to the far country and the father can stand here on the shore of Galilee and know that his son is up there 8 or 10 miles away. And what's the son doing? He's blowing his inheritance on wine, women and song. Good food, late nights, good times, prostitutes, temple prostitutes, that type of thing. And what does the son end up doing after he's blown all of his inheritance? If you remember the story, he's out slopping the hogs. Again, where are the pigs? Why the pigs? Same story as with the herd of two thousand swine. They're pigs being raised to sacrifice in the pagan temples of the far country of the eastern side of the shore of Galilee there. Again, the son isn't in a Jewish area at all. He's just gone to the other side of the lake, to the far country over there where he's raising pigs that are going to be sacrificed in the pagan temples there. Where raising pigs and eating pigs and sacrificing pigs is very common. It's the most common type of meat there at the day. So when we understand this background of the parable, it gives an added dimension to Christ's teachings.

We can better understand the anguish and the hurt of the father, whose son has rejected him and turned against everything the father tried to teach him. He instead has chosen a degenerate lifestyle and living in a pagan culture that is an abomination to everything he's been taught. Sometimes we as parents can understand and identify with that when our children reject the truth that they've learned and go out and choose a different way. We feel that hurt and that pain and want to do something about it, but they've made their choices. They'll suffer the consequences, as this man in this parable did. The father of the parable, representing God the father, what is his reaction? He never loses his love for his wayward son.

Yes, he knows his son has gone the wrong way and done terrible things, made horrible mistakes. But when the son finally comes to his senses, what happens? The father welcomes him back with open arms. And that's the way God views us. That's a lesson of the parable. That's the way God views us when we make our mistakes and turn our back on him and so on.

It's a profound story and all the more profound when we understand this background and the culture and what's going on. It adds a whole other depth of meaning and understanding to the story there. So again, this is why it's important to understand the geography, the history, the culture, the cultural background of these areas. Because if you don't, you miss out on important elements of the story there.

That's a quick background to the Decapolis. There's much more I could say about it here. The Decapolis, which is the area again to the east and to the south of the Sea of Galilee. But what about other areas? The areas on the north side, for instance, where Jesus did most of his ministry. What is the history of this area? We talked earlier about how Jerusalem was a center of religious fervor for the Jews, but Galilee was also an area of religious fervor, like Jerusalem. And that also has to do with its history. We touched on a little bit of this earlier that the Northern Ten Tribes inhabited this area and were taken away into captivity at the hands of the Assyrians. And again, here's an Assyrian depiction of these peoples being taken away into slavery with the Assyrian description of what is going on there. And although the Assyrians moved some people from other regions back into the Sea of Galilee, Galilee itself was largely deserted and uninhabited for several centuries there. And when the first groups of Jews, Jewish refugees, whose parents, whose grandparents and great-grandparents have been taken captive by the Babylonians, returned back to Jerusalem, as I described earlier, they settled around Jerusalem and rebuilt the city and the temple. But what we probably don't realize, but it's very clear if you read the books of the time, is that most of the Jews stayed in Babylon. Most of them did. About a million at this point in history stayed there in Babylon. Only, I don't recall the numbers, but I think it was less than 100,000 who returned back to Jerusalem. Now, why did they stay there in Babylon given the opportunity to return back to their homeland, to Jerusalem? Well, life was good! Life was good in Babylon. They'd lived there several generations. They had houses, they had businesses, they had homes, they had fields, they had things like that.

So even though they'd been given permission to return to Jerusalem, if they return to Jerusalem, as allowed by Cyrus the Great, who was the king of the Medo-Persian Empire at that time, if they return to Jerusalem, they're still going to be part of the Persian Empire. They're still not going to be independent. They're living in Babylon under the Persian Empire. So why got all the effort and danger of traveling a thousand miles to go over to Jerusalem and settle there? When you're still going to be under the Persian Empire. So to most people, it just simply didn't make sense. So they stayed there in Babylon. They stayed there in Babylon, where they had been established and quite prosperous there at that time. Now, eventually, the Persian Empire fell again to Alexander the Great. We talked about that a little bit.

Alexander died in Babylon at age 33, having run out of worlds to conquer, as it was put at the time there. And his empire, which included the land of Israel, was divided up among his four generals. And you may remember the story of Daniel 11. It talks about the conflicts for centuries with the kings of the north and the kings of the south. This grew out of that division of Alexander's empire, with the kings of the north being centered in Syria, and the kings of the south being centered in Egypt. That's where two of Alexander's greatest generals got their inheritance, their share, not a literal inheritance, but with a kingdom being divided up since Alexander had no heir. It was divided up among his generals there. And that's where the kings of the north and the kings of the south come in. So by the year 200 BC, this is where we are in history now, about a million Jews lived in Babylon, but only about 150,000 in the area that had been the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. But then came a group of people called the Maccabees, or a movement called the Maccabees. The Maccabees were Jewish freedom fighters who rose up and overthrew one of the worst of the descendants of Alexander's generals, a fellow by the name of Antiochus Epiphanes. You've probably heard about him in history. He was so bad and evil that the Jews rebelled against him and drove out his forces. And in the year 168 BC, the Jews gained their freedom for the first time in more than 400 years, dating back to the fall of Jerusalem under Nebuchadnezzar in 586. And this changed everything as far as the Jews were concerned.

Now, some of those million Jews, now, at this point in history, some of those million Jews who are living in Babylon decide it's time to go home. Because they've thrown out the pagans, they've thrown out the Gentiles, and now there is at last an independent Jewish state and nation and kingdom there in the land of Judah. So some of that billion Jews in Babylon say, okay, this is it. Now we're going home.

So there's a migration that starts from Babylon into the area of Judea then. In that period between 168, 167 BC, and the birth of Jesus Christ, a little over, a little slightly less than 170 years, more than half a million Jews left Babylon and moved to the areas, the ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah.

Where did they move? Well, obviously a lot of them moved down around Jerusalem. But a huge open area was the area of Galilee that had been largely uninhabited since the Assyrian invasion back in 721 to 718 BC. About 600 years it had been largely vacant. We know this archaeologically. There just aren't many archaeological remains from that period there.

Pretty empty. So there's lots of empty space there. And again, this is the map that's just inside the back of your Harmony of the Gospels. So about 40,000 of this half million people settle in this area of Galilee. And during that time, that is when, and we know this archaeologically, that's when all these little towns that we see mentioned in the Gospels are founded. Places like Capernaum, Corazin, Betseidah. Betseidah is actually built on ruins of a town that the Assyrians destroyed, but most of these towns are started from scratch. Around this period, places like Nazareth, Lake Kana, Magdala, Gennesaret, places like this. These are all brand new towns, built by all of these Jews returning from Babylon. And they are very religious. Devowel-y religious because, again, like their ancestors, the others who come back, they knew the reasons why they were taken into captivity. And they don't want to repeat those same mistakes. So they go building new towns. Here's an artist's conception of the little town of Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee, looking out over it there. And most of these towns are quite small. They're anywhere from about 100, 150 people up to, in the case of Capernaum, maybe 2,000, 3,000 for some of the larger towns. Not very large. They're quite small. Now, another thing we see from the Gospels is that the Jewish religious establishment in Jerusalem really looks down on these Jews from Galilee. We see snide comments in the Gospels there. Like, can any good thing come out of Nazareth? That type of comment there. The Jerusalem Jews, who were there first and viewed themselves as more righteous, looked down on the Jews of Galilee as a bunch of country hicks. A bunch of bumpkins up there. So that's one reason they were quite prejudiced against Jesus and His teaching and His disciples there. They just weren't viewed as as smart or as educated as the Jewish religious establishment there in Jerusalem. So again, we see this conflict play out a few times in the Gospels, and this is what it traces back to. The Jews in Jerusalem, since they had come back earlier, viewed themselves as more righteous than the Jews whose ancestors stayed in Babylon longer. And were corrupted and this kind of stuff as they viewed it there. So Jesus then is a Galilean Jew who grows up in Nazareth. And then He begins choosing His disciples. And He chooses them primarily, well, almost entirely from this area of Galilee.

From Bethsaida, fishing port. Again, He chooses four of His disciples, Peter, Andrew, James and John. From Capernaum, He chooses Matthew. It's a fishing port, but He chooses a tax collector. Cana, He chooses Nathaniel. The others, we don't know where they lived. It's just simply not told. Here is what this area looks like today. The area of the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee. You can see a few of the places marked. Like here's Capernaum. Here's Tagba. The Mount of the Beatitudes. Supposed Mount of Beatitudes. Magdala is right down off here. Bethsaida is up here. The Golan Heights is covering this whole area here. This large upper plateau over there. It gives you some idea and you can see everything leads down. It's a big basin there with a sea of Galilee. Again, about 700 feet below sea level there. We also need to understand another cultural group that plays into this. We've talked about the pagans. We've talked about the Samaritans. We've talked about another group. These are the people who are called the religious zealots. We find reference to them in the Gospels as well. As a matter of fact, we're probably familiar with the story of how Jerusalem was destroyed in 70 AD by the Romans. It's part of a Jewish revolt. How did that revolt start? Where did it start? It started right here. Two of the hotbeds of the Jewish revolt were the city of Magdala, which again is just off the picture right down here. A city called Gomelon is just about 8 miles the other side of Bethsaida. Those were two of the hotbeds. When the Jewish revolt broke out in 66 AD, it broke out in Galilee. It broke out right here, right where Jesus Christ was conducting his ministry there. You may remember the story of Masada, a very tragic story where these zealots barricaded themselves in this mountaintop fortress.

What happened? A siege. They were besieged, surrounded by the Romans, the Roman legions, for several years. Finally, the Romans built an enormous ramp, using Jewish slaves to get up there and attack the walls. They broke through the walls, finally, by fire and by battering ram. The next morning, the Romans came through and found that the Jews had committed mass suicide, hundreds of them.

Rather than become slaves to the Romans, they chose death over slavery. That was the end of the Jewish revolt. Several years before that, in Masada, the city of Jerusalem was destroyed. There is part of that revolt. You can see dramatic evidence of that in the city of Jerusalem today. But again, this is where that revolt broke out. I'll show you the location of those two places on your map. Here is Gamla, one of the sinners of the revolt, and Magdala. You can see Capernaum is kind of right in the middle of that area. So you had these pockets of zealots, people who were very nationalistic, very anti-Roman during Jesus Christ's ministry here. They hated the Romans. They wanted to throw the Romans out and re-establish Jewish rule. They were known as zealots, which is a term that is used in the Bible. In contemporary culture, they are called the sikari, which means dagger men. They were called that because in the clothing of that day, you wore this loose-fitting tunic and a coat or cloak around you, kind of like a blanket wrapped around you, like a poncho or something like that.

You could easily hide a dagger inside that cloak. They were called the sikari or dagger men because if given the opportunity, say walking the streets of Jerusalem or on one of the roads out there, if you met a Roman or a collaborator with the Romans, you just slip your dagger out and stick your shiv between the guys' ribs, leaving them bleeding and dying there by the roadside.

This was an enormous problem, an enormous source of conflict between the Romans and the Jews that day. They would kill people who were viewed as collaborators with the Romans as well. So in the Gospels, how does that play out? Where does that show up in the Gospels? Well, if you remember, there are times when people want to proclaim Jesus as king. Who was it?

It was probably these zealots, in my view. Now consider something here. Who, too, of Jesus' disciples are? Who's the one he chooses from Capernaum? Matthew Levi, Matthew Levy, the tax collector, who's collecting taxes for the Romans? Another of his disciples is called Simon the Zealot.

Zealots who would like nothing better than to catch a tax collector in a dark alley and give him a knife in the ribs. How did that play out? I don't know, but you can imagine being a fly on the wall. Now that's not to say Simon the Zealot was always like this. He obviously believed Jesus Christ's message of nonviolence and so on and supported that. But I have to wonder, some of the tensions and some of the conversations that must have taken place around the campfires and some of those nights between those disciples. One guy who'd been a former collaborator of the Romans and one guy who'd been a former possibly killer of Romans. We don't know that, but it's rather interesting there. So, have you ever wondered, again, one of the study questions I sent out, when Jesus performed a miracle, why there were times when he told people to tell others about the miracle and others, when he said, shhh, keep quiet, don't tell anybody. Why did he do that? Why was he inconsistent? Was he schizophrenic? What's going on? Why sometimes would he tell people to tell about the miracle and others not? Well, the answer seems to be, in the cases I've looked at, it's where he performed those miracles and who was around. For instance, when he heals the demon-possessed man in the Decapolis, what does he do? At the end of the story, he says, go and tell everybody about this miracle. And yet, there are other times and places when he's there, along the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee, where he says, don't tell anybody. Don't tell anybody who healed you. And it seems to be that in those cases, he was trying deliberately not to get the masses stirred up there. So, they would want to proclaim him as king or Messiah or something like that. Let's notice an example of that in John 6. Verses 11-15. This is one of the miracles. There are two miracles of feeding thousands of people with bread and loaves. So, John 6 and verse 11. And Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to the disciples, and the disciples to those sitting down, and likewise of the fish, as much as they wanted.

So when they were filled, he said to his disciples, gather up the fragments that remained, so that nothing is lost. Therefore, they gathered them up and filled twelve baskets with the fragments of the five barley loaves, which were left over by those who had eaten. Continuing on, verse 14. Then those men, when they had seen the sign, the same word is used for miracle, that Jesus did, said, truly, this is the prophet who is to come into the world, or the Messiah. Therefore, when Jesus perceived that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he departed again to the mountain by himself alone. In other words, he ran off from the crowd to prevent them from taking him and making him king by force. Who wants to make him king?

The zealots are people who have bought into that mindset there. People who are being influenced by that.

Now, have you ever... let's see, where am I on my notes? Yeah, yeah. Let's put yourself in the mindset of a zealot there. You've seen some of Christ's miracles. You've seen him feeding thousands of people on a few small loaves of bread and a couple of tiny fish. You've seen him feed thousands of people. If you're a zealot, what are you thinking? Oh, man, I want this guy as my general. He can feed a whole army just on five loaves of bread and two fish.

They'd also heard of his miracles, raising people from the dead. If you're a zealot, what are you thinking? Oh, man, I need a general like this. If one of my soldiers gets injured or killed, he can raise him from the dead and he goes right back into the battle. So from their logic, they're thinking it makes perfect sense. Who could be a better general, a better leader for you, than a guy who can raise soldiers from the dead and who can feed an army off a boy's lunch? It made perfect sense to them. And no wonder they wanted to take him by force and make him a king, a general, a leader.

So again, this isn't spelled out in the Gospels, but the disciples certainly understood it. They lived in that culture. They knew what was going on. They knew the undercurrents, the thoughts. of the different people around there. So Jesus would have been a perfect general, a perfect leader for a movement like that. To rise up and overthrow the Romans and march on Jerusalem and reestablish the Jewish kingdom. But Jesus would have none of it. He wouldn't have anything to do it. So he was judicious. And when and where he performed miracles, and when and where he told people not to tell others about the miracles. I think that's very much an unstated factor in what we read about there in the Gospels. A couple of other examples. I won't go into these in detail, but when Jesus is crucified, who is he crucified with on either side of him? What's the Bible term that's used there? It's robbers. However, it's very interesting. In contemporary writing of that time, the same word, robbers, is used for zealots. Same word. Was Jesus crucified with two zealots on either side of him? Quite possibly so. Quite possibly so, because these were men who were quite likely being put to death for rebelling against Rome, for advocating rebellion and overthrowing the Romans. What accusation did the Jewish leaders make against Jesus to have him crucified? Let's notice that in Luke 23, verses 1 and 2. Luke 23, 1 and 2. Then the whole multitude of them arose and led Jesus to Pilate. And they began to accuse him, saying, and notice what they charged him with, we found this fellow perverting the nation and forbidding to pay taxes to Caesar, saying that he himself is Christ, a king. Now, the Romans didn't care if Jesus said he was a son of God or Messiah or blasphemed as the Jews accused him among themselves when he was on trial. When they brought him before Pilate, they changed the charges. It's very evident, if you read the stories in the Gospels, they changed the charges to sedition, to forbidding people to pay taxes and saying that he's a king. They were essentially accusing him of being in league with the zealots and trying to overthrow the Romans.

That's what's going on there. And this threat of rebellion, that was something that really got the Romans' attention, believe me.

And it wasn't long, just a generation later, that again, this zealot movement broke out into full-scale war against the Romans and led again to the destruction of Jerusalem. The raising of the temple, as we see depicted here in a painting there, there was actually a battle fought right there in the temple courts. It was the result that the temple was destroyed. The Romans actually wanted to preserve the temple as a prize to their conquest of the Jews, but the Jews wouldn't surrender it and fought right there in the temple courts. And as a result of that, the temple was set on fire and destroyed. And the Jews were scattered for 2,000 years until the modern state of Israel was established in 1948, setting the stage for end-time prophecy.

So history is very much alive and well in that part of the world. One continuous thread that keeps coming back. So this story of the zealots is another thread that's going on in the background of the Gospels. It's not, again, explicitly spelled out, but it's something that's there. And we read about it, read references to it. Let's talk about another subculture of people who lived along the shore of the Sea of Galilee.

Another study question that I sent out last night was this. In Jesus' day, Tiberius was by far the largest city on the Sea of Galilee, and only a few miles by boat from Capernaum, yet the Bible gives no indication that Jesus ever set foot there. Why would he have avoided this city when the Gospels make it clear that he visited various other cities in Galilee?

So here's where they are on a map again. Here's Capernaum. Here's Tiberius. Biggest city, about 50,000-60,000 people there. Just about maybe eight miles by boat, around the shore, maybe 12 miles, 10-12 miles, an easy day's walk. Why didn't Jesus ever visit there? Why didn't he ever visit there?

He visited all these other cities and towns around there. Why not Tiberius? Why not the biggest city in the area there? Well, what was it about Tiberius that kept Jesus from visiting there? Tiberius is named after the Roman Emperor Tiberius, same name. But it was very different from the other areas that we've talked about. Very different from the areas where there were a lot of zealots, for sure, that we just talked about here.

At the time, Tiberius was the home to a lot of non-religious, secular Jews. They were Jewish, but religion really didn't mean anything to them, because they were pretty much in bed with the ruling establishment. They were generally quite wealthy people, very pro-Roman, very pro-establishment. And they were called the Herodians. Herodians, because they supported the sons and descendants and family of Herod the Great, who had ruled the area earlier. Herod the Great had been supported by the Romans and supported them in turn. And these people, the Herodians, also supported the Romans. Now, what do the Gospels tell us about this group called the Herodians? They're mentioned... Well, let's see. Actually, here's... I wanted to show you this illustration of the city of Tiberius, laid out like a Roman city. You can see the gate, the main street, called the Cardo, the theater. I'll show you some archaeological photos of this in a few minutes here. But the biggest city, by far, on the Sea of Galilee, Capernaum, would have been just right up there up the shore. So, what does the Bible, what do the Gospels tell us about the Herodians? They're mentioned three times, Matthew 22, 16, Mark 3, 6, and Mark 12 and verse 13. Notice the common thread in these mentions of the Herodians. And they sent to Jesus their disciples with the Herodians, saying, Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not? But Jesus perceived their goodness and altruism, no, their wickedness, and said, Why do you test me, you hypocrites? Next mention, Mark 3 and verse 6. Then the Pharisees went out and immediately plotted with the Herodians against Jesus how they might destroy him. And the third mention, third and last mention, Mark 12 and verse 13. Then they sent to Jesus some of the Pharisees and the Herodians to catch him in his words. So, the common thread we see here in all three mentions of the Herodians is they're plotting to either discredit or to kill Jesus.

So, they're not a reputable lot. They've adopted a lot of the Roman culture. They live in a Roman street. I'll show you some of the archaeological ruins of Tiberius here. Here's the main street, or the Cardo, as the Latin term was, for it that's been excavated there in Tiberius. Here's ruins of the theater that's currently being excavated right now. It was only started excavating in that about two or three years ago.

You can see the seats there in the Sea of Galilee in the background, the area of the Decapolis across on the other side.

All good Romans loved a good hot bath, so they built the city of Tiberius because there were some hot springs in that area. So, they had these luxurious Roman baths there that the citizens of Tiberius really enjoyed.

So, again, why did Jesus not visit there? Well, an obvious answer is the Herodians there would have been a danger to them. But there's also another factor at work here, and that is that Tiberius was the capital of the ruler of that area, a fellow by the name of Herod Antipas.

We've encountered him earlier. We'll encounter him again. This is a coin showing Herod Antipas. This is an artist's depiction of how he might have looked in his kingly royal robes and so on in that day.

Who was Herod Antipas? And where have we encountered him before?

He is the Herod who has locked John the Baptizer up in prison and will execute him.

So, one reason I think Jesus avoids Tiberius is this is where Herod Antipas lives. And he knows that if he visits there and word gets around that the same thing that happens to John the Baptizer may happen to him. That he'll be locked up in prison and executed well before his time.

So, I think those are factors in why Jesus never visits Tiberius because of the hostility and the threat to his life from Herod Antipas who is living there in Tiberius.

So, had Jesus gone to Tiberius and performed the kind of miracles that he did in the other series around there, Herod would have likely viewed that as a major threat to his power and would have had Jesus executed.

So, this is another question, though. As we saw on the map, it's only 8, 10, 12 miles from Tiberius to Capernaum. So, why doesn't Herod Antipas just march up that 8 or 10 miles to Capernaum and take Jesus by force? Why doesn't he do that? Well, that's where an instance of the understanding of the geography. We've talked about history, we've talked about culture.

We haven't talked a lot about geography, but the geography plays a role in this here because there was a huge mountain in the way, a mountain that came right down to the shores of the Sea of Galilee between Tiberius and Capernaum.

Capernaum is right up about right here, and you can see this massive, massive mountain here.

Tiberius is off the screen, off to the right.

So, you couldn't just march along the coast to get to Capernaum from Tiberius. No, you had to take a quite circuitous route to get around this mountain. You had to go 20 or 30 miles out of the way. And if you were doing that, that would give plenty of time.

For instance, if Herod Antipas was sending his soldiers to arrest Jesus, it would have been plenty of time and warning that they're coming for him there.

And again, from any place on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, you can see all the other ports. You can see if Herod is sending a small flotilla of ships over to Capernaum and so on.

So the geography plays a role here, too. And what is going on, and what happens, and what doesn't happen at times in the Gospels there.

For those of you who are students in history, you might be interested in knowing something. This mountain is called Mount Arbel. It's very prominent, very huge. It also was a hideout for the Jewish zealots during the rebellion against the Romans. In fact, if you look carefully, you can see various caves in these mountains where the Jews hid out there from the Romans until the Romans smoked them out and killed them. But this is also the location of a very famous battle during the Crusades.

This is a location of something called the Horns of Hatin. How many of you have ever heard of those? Horns of Hatin. Okay, a handful of you, yeah. Horns of Hatin are two volcanic cones up on top of this big, flat-topped mountain up here.

They're called the Horns of Hatin, and there was a famous battle that took place. How many of you saw the Crusader movie, The Kingdom of Heaven, that came out several years ago? Okay, quite a few of you. You may want to read that. It's actually a pretty good movie at capturing the essence of the time. I won't say it's all that historically accurate, but the climactic battle in that movie, at which Saladin, the great Muslim conqueror, defeated the Crusaders and marked the end of the Crusader rule, and Jerusalem took place on top of this mountain at the Horns of Hatin up there. What they did is the Crusaders are on horseback and marching. They've got their heavy armor. This battle took place in summer. I don't remember which month it was, but the Muslim forces, who are mounted on horseback and not wearing heavy iron armor, can run rings around the Crusaders. The Crusaders were trying to get down to the Sea of Galilee to get fresh water, because there's no water up on top of this mountain plateau. The Muslims actually set fire to the dry grass all around there, and the heat from the fire, where these men clad in iron armor, weighing many pounds, and the smoke from the burning grass and all that just totally disoriented them. The Muslims were able to slaughter them and defeat and put an end to the Crusader reign and rule there in the Middle East. So that's just a little bit of the history. There's just so many layers of history everywhere you set foot around there. Darris McNeely and I visited that battlefield there in 2006 after the feast there in Israel. It's just fascinating all the history there that I don't have time to begin to cover all of it. We're getting close to wrapping up. I'll end with one final group of people there that I haven't mentioned in passing, but I'd like to discuss those briefly. That is most of the Galileans. We've talked about the Samaritans. We've talked about the Herodians. We've talked about the Hellenists. We've talked about the pagans, the Decapolis. We've talked about the zealots. But we haven't really talked about the average Galilean to whom Jesus communicated, to whom he preached and ministered to. And as I... well, let's see. I actually got a hit on my slide here. Here's an artist's depiction of Saladin's forces defeating the Crusaders there on the horns of Ahtin ending the Crusader rule.

But, yeah, back to the Sea of Galilee. What about the average Jews who lived in Capernaum, Betsiadoc, Corazin, places like that? What were they like? Well, again, these were people who were very religious. They attended synagogue regularly there. They were very serious and tried their best to live by God's Word as they understood it. And you see, this reflected in the Gospels many times. They were the people who asked probing questions of Jesus about the law, about the application of the law. They were people who went to him for healing there, who followed him and the thousands of people listening and hanging eagerly on every word of his teaching. They were a devout people who loved God's Word and taught it diligently to their children. And the center for this group of religious Jews was also the center for Jesus Christ teaching and ministry there. It was an area that scholars refer to today as the triangle. The triangle. You may want to indicate this on your map when you get home. The triangle referring to these three cities where Jesus conducted most of his ministry of Capernaum, Betsiadoc and Corazin. It's amazing how small this area is because it's roughly three miles by five miles. Three miles by five miles. Measure that out in your mind and something you can relate to. It's a very small area. Most of us here could walk across it and back quite easily in one day. There, that's how small the area was. About three miles by five miles. This area is mentioned again and again in the Gospels. Most of Jesus' miracles are recorded for us. More of them took place in this small area than anywhere else recorded in the Gospels. Most of his teaching, if you go through and count out the teaching verses in the Bible, in the Gospels, most of them took place in this one small area here. About three miles by five miles. About 70% of his words, of his teaching that's recorded for us, took place in this one small area here. Consider that for a moment. We probably have had the impression that Jesus covered dozens, maybe hundreds of miles during his ministry teaching all over the place, but he didn't. He didn't. Most of his teaching, most of his ministry, most of his miracles that are recorded for us took place in this one very small area here.

On occasion, he did go further afield, like when he went up north to Caesarea Philippi, about 30 miles or so, or the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee, like the area of the Decapolis we talked about earlier. In one case, he traveled about 40 or 50 miles to the coast of Lebanon there. And repeatedly, he traveled to Jerusalem, about 75 miles one way and back. But again, most of his teaching took place in this one small area here.

That's why it's important that we understand the culture and the history of that area. And even though it was a small area and a short length of time, what he did in that area changed the world, transformed the world. And we're all here today as a result of that. So that's all for today. I did leave out one question and answer that I sent out to you, and that's about Capernaum, but I thought I'd be better to start with that next time when we pick up the series that are probably giving you enough to absorb right now. Hopefully you don't have writing cramps from all of that. Any questions? Do we have just a minute or two for questions, or if you'd like to, kiss me afterwards? Yes, Michael?

I'm sorry, where is Jerusalem? From here, about 75 miles... well, from the center of the Sea of Galilee, about 75 miles south and slightly west from there. Yeah. Any other questions? Yes, Larry? Just one thing to add, at least the way I read Josephus was like you said, Titus's original attention was trying to try to keep the temple intact.

But the way I read it, at least in Josephus, was that by the time the Romans broke through into Jerusalem, Titus was so irritated, about the Jewish resistance, that's when he told his soldiers, literally, destroy the temple, destroy everything, because he was so angry that it took so long for them to break into Jerusalem.

Right. Yeah, Larry's comment, if you didn't hear that, was about the Roman general Titus, who was commanding the Roman soldiers in the battle for Jerusalem, was so angry at the fierce Jewish resistance there that by the time he finally broke through, and the Jews did put up multiple walls of defenses and actually used the temple.

Larry didn't say this, but this is my addition. They actually used the temple as a base for holding off the Romans because it was a fortified platform. It had walls all the way around it. It was a great place, a defensive place. It was elevated above the surrounding areas there, the rest of the city. So it was a great fortress there. There was actually the Roman fortress Antonia, I've talked about before and will mention again.

Titus was so frustrated, so angry, that the Jews held out that he ordered them just to destroy everything. And indeed they did. If you go there today, you can see the platform on which the temple was. The Romans essentially just bulldozed everything off there and threw all the rubble down. You can see where it fell off. The archaeologists have excavated piles and piles of rubble all around the temple mouth there as a result of that. Titus himself wanted to spare the temple. It was common in the Roman military. You kept things as trophies, essentially. And there were actually at least three major towers along Jerusalem's outer defensive wall. And you can visit one of them today. It's called the Tower of David. But it's a base of a tower that was built by Herod the Great as a defensive fortifications. And the Romans actually preserved that tower and left it in place as a monument, as a trophy of their defeat of Jerusalem there. And they would have done that for the temple had not the Jews resisted so fiercely there and ended up losing everything. And there were estimates that up to a million Jews were slaughtered in the battle for Jerusalem and its aftermath. And anyone who wasn't slaughtered was sold into slavery. As a matter of fact, there's a current theory, and I think it's probably accurate that the famous Roman Colosseum that some of you may have visited was... The funds that came to build that Colosseum actually came from the sale of the slaves and from the plunder and the booty of the Roman forces there who conquered Jerusalem. So very sobering story. A lot of history there. Anyway, we'll wrap it up there and have another closing hymn. And then in about 10 minutes after, we'll start the women's discussion group, the men's sermonette class, and the teen and pre-teen studies. So we'll have another hymn then.