Rediscover Your Christian Roots: Plato to Jesus, Part 2

I'll just make a couple more quick comments. One about the Romans and the Jews. The Romans found Jewish religion baffling because why didn't you just get along with everybody? Seneca wrote that the Jews were lazy because they wasted one-seventh of their life because they took a day off to keep the Sabbath. Tacitus was really upset because he said, there's even Gentiles, non-Jews, converting to Judaism, why would you do that? Because when you do that, you become unpatriotic. Your Roman citizenship didn't matter much anymore because you had a different citizenship. So they were unpatriotic, which I think is interesting. I want to just mention one other thing, too. When we look at the New Testament, we look at the different Jewish groups that are involved. We know about the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the Herodians, which are mentioned. The Herodians are not a religious group. They are supporters of the Herod family. They're a political group. You have the zealots.

The zealots weren't a religious group. Well, they were. They had religious reasons, but the zealots literally were people dedicated to overthrowing the Romans. They would do sometimes guerrilla warfare against the Romans. Of course, one of Jesus' disciples had been a zealot. You also have the Essenes. Now, the Essenes aren't mentioned in the New Testament, but we know the Essenes existed at the time. The Essenes considered themselves, their hedger around the law was so complex that they considered the Pharisees way too liberal and outside.

So, they do believe the Essenes wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls, which makes sense because there's things in the Dead Sea Scrolls. One thing that the Pharisees and the Essenes had in common, they believed the Messiah was coming. They believed He was coming soon, and that they helped drive some of the ways they looked at things. Now, in all that mess, I want you to think about one thing about Jesus Christ. Can you imagine in that world the Sermon on the Mount? The Sermon on the Mount was an expansion of the mind. You're under the heel of the Roman sandals.

They wear boots. You're under the Roman sandals. There's a legion in Caesarea, and if you had any problems in Judea, they actually had a garrison attached to the temple. That garrison could hit any place in that city just like that. He gets up and says, blessed are those who are peacemakers.

I never know how to use the word blessed. I originally came from Pennsylvania, and blessed is one syllable. I moved to Texas, and it's two syllables, blessed. I moved to Tennessee, it's three syllables, it's blessed-a. So every time I say blessed, it comes out in a different way, because I've lived different places. Blessed are the peacemakers. Wait a minute, can you imagine the zealots, the Pharisees, the Essenes? No, no, no, no, no, we will never make peace with the Romans. Jesus tells them all, blessed are those who mourn, not because He wants us to be unhappy, because you will be comforted.

And then you look at what He taught throughout that, the Sermon on the Mount, which is sort of the summation of His teachings. Everything else sort of comes out from that. And you just have this remarkable set of teachings. And you know who really it appealed to? Now there were some of the rabbis, there were some of the educated class, but you know who really saw that as meaningful? It was poor people. Poor people, slaves, they saw that as real, because they lived in the world differently than the rich.

And that's why Jesus said, it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to come into the kingdom. They didn't mean they wouldn't. It just means they have their own problems. You know, you poor people have your problems getting into the kingdom. They have, you think it's easy for them? They just have a different set of problems, that's all. They just have a different set of problems. Yours might be envy and theirs might be greed. You want what they have and they want to keep what they have.

So there's still problems. So I just want to mention how the Sermon on the Mount is so important. I have people ask me, how do I learn about Jesus Christ? And the teachings of Jesus Christ, I always tell them first, just go read the Sermon on the Mount. Read Matthew 5, 6, and 7. Read that as your starting point. Study it. Write it down verse by verse. And ask God to help you understand that, what it means to become a disciple of Jesus Christ. Now I want to talk about the Roma role a little bit. And you think, well, why do I have Plato up here?

Because he wasn't Roman, he was Greek. You have to understand the impact of the Greeks on Roman society. And we have to go clear back to the 400s BC when there was in Athens this explosion of culture. Athens became a key power. They controlled much of the Mediterranean and they set up marketplaces all over the place, trading places. And the result was Athens became a place where wealth just flowed into. They became a very wealthy society. They became a very educated society. In Athens you have the first real, almost book-length writings and poetry. You have plays that are written out, tragedies and comedies. You have music and the expansion of musical instruments, new farming methods.

You have school set up. You even have the first democracy in Athens. First democracy was it. Now tribal systems tend to be democratic, but this was the first time a nation state tried to have a democracy. Now, of course, to vote you had to be a free male. You could be a slave and you could be a woman, but it was a form of democracy because every man was involved in the government.

It's where they called the assembly the ekklesia. It's where we get the word church. They called the assembly and they came together. So you have this growth in philosophy, too. A new way of looking at things. Now they were very religious people. I mean the pantheon of Greek gods. Zeus was the greatest god, became Jupiter for the Romans because all the Romans did was take the Greek religion and adapt it with Latin names. That's all they did. And they'd accepted everybody else's religion, too.

But they did things like the Olympics. Every four years, all the city states in Greece had to stop wars and they had a different kind of competition. The city states had to fight a war with each other every once in a while to keep their soldiers trained. So you didn't want mass slaughter. You just wanted to go out and fight a battle with your neighbor and a few men would get killed and one would be declared the winner and you would train your men that way.

And you would show your dominance over the other city states. And Athens became this dominant city state. They had an army. They didn't have a military-like Sparta, but Sparta became a very strange and brutal place. Athens became this place of culture and learning and literature and literacy and it expanded out. And you have Plato. Socrates, there's no proof Socrates existed except Plato wrote that he existed, so we believe he existed.

People say, well, what proof do you have of the Bible? There is a whole lot more proof of the Bible than there is of Plato. I can tell you that. But we believe Plato existed. But the proof that the Bible was written, the proof about the people in it, especially the New Testament church, Jesus existed. We have Romans talking about Jesus, this crazy guy that they killed, and yet people still follow him. Plato, and I'm going to say, you know, okay, Platonic philosophy is, I'll just put it this way, I tried to read one of his books.

I've read some of his writings. I tried to read Timotheus. I thought I'm stupid. I didn't even understand the sentences in English. And then I read a philosopher's review of it, and he said he thinks he had actually lost his mind and it was insane at the time.

I thought, oh, well, maybe it's good I didn't understand it. But to break it down into its simplest forms, and this is going to be important in the second century he believed there were two realms of existence, spirit and matter. Now, you know, okay, we can sort of accept that. I mean, there's a spirit world God lives in, angelic beings, and then there's matter, the stuff, right?

Now, but he took this to another viewpoint that would actually become part of a philosophy in the second or third centuries that would even be on what he said. And that is the Creator God, or the God, he believed the one God who created all the other gods. This is going to affect early Christianity. This is why Hellenization is important. All the great writers of the second or third century were trained in platonic philosophy. It was their training, and then infiltrated into how they thought.

But, okay, the Creator God, he created in this spirit world perfect images. Excuse me, the perfect horse is in heaven. It's made of spirit. The perfect palm tree, the perfect oak, everything that you see, the perfect what he made there.

Then he had a demiurge, a lesser God, create everything else. Excuse me, boy, that coffee went down. He made it to the universe. He also created the deities on Mount Olympus, and the souls of lesser beings. And human beings were originally spirit, and we got in trouble with God, so he put us in a body.

And the whole purpose is to be reincarnated over and over again until you finally reach becoming a philosopher, and then you get to go back to heaven. So many people get to go to heaven are people who become philosophers. Actually, some of this you'll find in Hinduism. So this became the highest form of understanding of how the universe was made, that there is one unknown God, so wonderful, so incredible, so invisible, nobody knows Him. Nobody knows Him.

Now there's two philosophies mentioned in the New Testament in Acts 17 verse 18, the Stoics and the Epicureans. I'll just mention them briefly. The Stoics believe that, well, we talked today, if someone, boy, they live a very rigid lifestyle, well, they're Stoic. Well, that's the Stoics. The Stoics believe that the best thing to do is be self-controlled, rigid lifestyles, and be very economic with everything you do, and spend your life learning knowledge and wisdom and rigid lifestyles. Therefore, you might be able to attain the status to go to what we would call heaven. They had different viewpoints of that.

The Epicureans had the opposite. You know what? We are made to explore life. So go try everything. And if something doesn't work, don't do it anymore. In other words, it wasn't debauchery. It was debauchery on a limited scale. You can try it. Okay, that doesn't work. So get that out of your life and do something else.

And you discover good and evil by going out and experiencing good and evil. So they're mentioned, so I just thought I'd mention them here, because there were dozens of Greek philosophies, and you see them in the Roman world. And the reason why is that when Alexander the Great – see, I'm going back to get the backstory here. We could talk for an hour about Alexander the Great and the Greek – the Grecian Empire. Alexander the Great didn't really create an empire. We called it the Greek Empire.

He just – every place he went, he conquered them, said, here's Greek culture, you have to accept it, and let some Greeks there to teach them Greek culture. And so you would find throughout the world all these different cultures clear over in the India in which there's elements of Greek culture. They may know about Plato. They know – well, they wouldn't have known about Plato. But they knew Greek culture and things that they taught them. And so you have the spread of this culture, and the Romans come along, and they begin conquering all these peoples, and they absorb them into the empire.

And they come to Greece, and they are shocked. These people are smarter than us. They're amazing! So the first thing they did was they looted as many statues and so forth from Greece as they could and sent them back to Rome. But they wanted to absorb and learn the Grecian way of life. Greek philosophy became central to Roman philosophy, especially inside Rome itself. So Rome itself – in fact, one of the Roman historians says that captive Greece took Rome captive.

We might have conquered them, but we became Greeks. And so the Roman Empire now absorbs all these Greek ideas. If you were a middle-class person in ancient Rome, you could afford to have slaves. Slaves were cheap. Now, Roman slavery wasn't based on race. Roman slavery was based on, we defeated you. So a certain amount of your people become slaves. So you could have a home where you might have an Arab slave, you might have a German slave because they would have these wars with the Germanic tribes.

And if you really were moving up in this world, you'd have a Greek slave. But the purpose of the Greek slave wasn't to do an annual labor. It was to teach your children. Now, one of the results of this is that the language – because you wonder why.

Why do the Romans speak Latin? And why is it that in the first century, the language throughout the Roman Empire, the business language that ties people together? It's like English today. You go almost any place in the world, you're going to find people speak English. Why is it that they didn't speak Latin? Because they spoke Greek. Because that's what the educated people do, so we show up and we speak Greek. And there was Greek pockets all over the place where these little pockets of Greek culture had been planted by Alexander the Great.

Like you said, it's not an empire as we know empires. It's just a planting. And one of the most important places they planted was in Egypt. People don't realize that when Julius Caesar goes down and meets Cleopatra, she's not Egyptian. She's Greek. The Greeks still ruled Egypt. Now, she dressed and acted Egyptian, but she wasn't. She was Greek. The Greeks that's the one place that they had not lost control of from their empire was Egypt. So they had planted these seeds all over the place. So Rome comes along and conquers Greece.

The Roman Empire then in the first century extends from the Euphrates River to basically England and from what would be northern France today down into... Let's see if I have a slide of this. Yeah. What you're looking at are either people that are conquered or become allies. Now, you start to look at this and you got clear up here in Britain. Now, they never conquered, by the way. They never conquered Scotland. The Romans built a wall all the way across, Hadrian's Wall, all the way across that was in the second century. England said, you stay on that side and we stay on this side because you know what? You don't have anything we want and we're tired of killing you. Besides, they thought they were crazy because the Picts and the Scots would paint themselves blue and attack them naked. You can imagine legionaries marching forward with their armor and all this and there's a bunch of blue naked people. They said, you just stay up there. We want nothing to do with your people. That's how the Scots survived. They built a wall all the way across. In fact, they even have Hadrian's Wall up here on this map up there. But you look at this area. That area here in Germania, they actually didn't keep that, mainly because they figured they looked at Germany, what's modern Germany, and said, this is all forests. Once again, fighting the Germans are different than even fighting the Picts because these people won't give up. We take casualties. There was an entire Roman army destroyed in Germania. Just destroyed. It was like, okay, it's not worth the casualties that conquered these people. They don't have anything to give us. But the rest of it is amazing because this whole area Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, Italy, we have all over here, which is Macedonia and Greece, what is now Turkey and Armenia, Syria, Judea, all this area that's now Lebanon. What else would be there? Jordan would be included in that. Egypt. Here we have what's now Ethiopia and Libya. All this area is the Roman Empire. But you have to understand population, then.

The Roman Empire at this point, first century, is 60 to 80 million people. There's many people in France today than there was in the entire Roman Empire. Well, maybe France and Belgium.

So what you have, now we think of these masses of people, 60 to 80 million. So Augustus comes along after Julius Caesar, and this is in the early part of the first century, and he takes Rome, which already, you know, I'll just tell this quick story. I don't want to tell too many personal stories because we've got so much information, but I was in Rome, and I'm walking along with my kids and my wife, and we're walking through the Roman Forum, and I'm just like so excited. And I'd say, right around here someplace, there is an altar that was built by Julius Caesar, and it's here in this area, and I looked, and it was right in front of me. I said, there it is! There was a plaque in Italian and English. There it is, right there! And I heard this person in a really heavy Italian accent say, I thought it would be bigger. One by one, the kids had peeled off, and my wife had peeled off, and now I had become a tour guide. And I'm walking along, and there's people around me thinking I'm a tour guide, as I'm telling them about Julius Caesar. This day, they tease me about that. But anyways, Augustus comes along, and he creates Rome as a city that is not like anything else in the world. Now, just one thing to think about. Sixty to eighty million people, one million of them, live in Rome. So on the low end of that, if there's only sixty million, one out of every sixty people in the Roman Empire lives in Rome. On the far end, it's one out of eighty. There's nothing like this place in the known world.

There might have been a city this size in China, no one quite knows. But in the known world, Western world, there's nothing like this. And it's the center of the world. Everything comes to Rome. All the wealth comes to Rome. Of course, they had a lot of other problems, too. And you start to understand, when you go to, it's about Augustus here, the pantheon, you go in here, and you think, how did they build that dome? They're still debating how did they build that dome. Engineering was amazing. Considering the tools they had, it's just amazing what they did. You have, now this is just ruins today, but in the first century, this would have been the Circus Maximus in Rome. In fact, this area up here, the ruins of this all still exist. This is just, you can see the outline of it, but the ruins of these buildings still exist. All over the empire, Rome built buildings. They wanted people to understand and enjoy Roman culture and to enjoy Greek culture. They were, in their minds, they were bringing civilization to the barbaric world. They were bringing civilization to the barbaric world. And if the barbaric world didn't like it, then they'd do it by the tip of a sword. One of the things that's very interesting, these are all over Europe.

The aqueducts. You could have running water. Of course, part of the problem in some of the cities, they ran it out of the aqueducts in the lead pipes, and then after about 10, 15 years, people were starting to have serious mental problems from the lead that was in the water. But most of the entities just ran into a common area inside of a city. So you have to understand the world they lived in and the world they brought to people. It was like nothing else people had ever seen. And they had this belief that they were going to make the world such a better place. And that this is where, if everybody would just participate, of course the Jews wouldn't, and the Christians wouldn't. In their mind, the Christians wouldn't. The Christians actually were good citizens. They never rebelled. They didn't kill Roman soldiers. They just wouldn't sacrifice to the emperor. They wouldn't participate in state religion. You could be an atheist in Rome, and as long as you participated in the state religion, they didn't care. You could say, I'm an atheist, but you just showed up at the ceremonies because that meant you were patriotic. You were patriotic. You showed up at the ceremonies. Let me tell you a little bit about Rome itself, because the impact this would have on the future. It's a consumer society, as I said, all the wealth from the world is coming into one place. But it's actually good for everybody else, because they're manufacturing things, they're selling things, there's trade. They built at least 50,000 miles of roads throughout Europe. There was a postal system throughout Europe. There was water. There was things happening that no one had ever dreamed of because of the Roman Empire. Inside Rome itself, there was also a lot of poverty. You had this dichotomy. You had a large, rich class and a middle class, but you also had a large, rich class and a middle class. You had a poor class. Part of that was because the farmers, they collectivized the farmers in order to create around Italy, in order to create enough food. You've got a million people, how do you feed them? Well, that put all the small farmers out of business. So guess what they did? They moved to the city, and there was no jobs for them. So they became what was known as the mob. They would riot. They learned using the circus maximus, and later they built the Colosseum. One of the reasons why was because, oh, there's going to be a riot today. We get 50,000 people out on the street and there's going to be a riot. Oh, tell them we're going to have some gladiators hack themselves to death. They would show up and they'd give them bread and they'd go in and keep them entertained, and then they would have a riot. Because they created a poor class and didn't know what to do with them.

And so they kept them entertained. I'm not going to say that. There's some things about Rome that fit into our modern world some. They had a patron-client system. If you were a poor person, you would go to the richest person on the block and you would tell them, patrol them, father, I need help. What is it? I've been out of work. Don't worry, I will get you a job. And you would find him a job. And then, whenever that rich person needed a favor, he would call in his favors. Sound like the mafia? You bet. The entire Rome system was the mafia. So we talk about why were so many Italian peoples involved in Sicilians, involved in the mafia, and the mafia formed in the United States. It's because they came from a world where that was somewhat normal. The Patron system. And that was how they kept society stabilized. There was interaction between these classes of people and their favors and there were things given and help given, and that's one of the things they did. Slaves were all over the place because they kept conquering more people. So everybody could own a slave. Family was the foundation. It's interesting. You might be able to have an affair, but you're expected to stay with your wife. She might have to put up with you having an affair, but she would stay with you because the family was the center of society.

So it was an immoral society in one way, but it was also one that it looked and appeared to have strong families. Abortion was absolutely acceptable. In fact, one of the problems they had in Rome and one of the reasons why they produced so many soldiers that came directly from Rome is because so many young women died either in childbirth after having ten children or from abortion, botched abortions.

When you have an average lifespan where forty is the middle, only half the people go beyond forty, you have a lot of people dying in there earlier. Of course infant mortality was very high. You also had an interesting thing in their society.

They loved children, but what happens if you gave birth to a child that had a birth defect? A child was not real until accepted by the father. He had to hold him up and say, I accept this child.

If he rejected the child, there was a place in Rome where you would take all the little babies and abandon them. And the slavers would come by, oh, that is healthy, let's take that one. And the rest would die. They would abandon them. So there was a hardness to this society. With all of its culture, there was a hardness and there was a brutality to this society, too.

Two last things I want to say. Adoption. Adoption is very interesting in the Roman world because Paul uses the word adoption. You could be adopted into God's family. We think of adoption differently. You go, you have a child. I've talked to many people that have told me, oh, yeah, I was adopted. They tell about their experiences. Or maybe I was adopted as a little child.

Or I tried to find my blood parents, my biological parents. That would be a conversation that made no sense in ancient Rome. When you were adopted, you were considered blood. Absolute. When you were adopted, you now weren't adopted. You were a member of the family. 100% complete. In fact, there's cases where rich, wealthy Roman people didn't like the son. Now, this kid can't run the business. So you adopt the manager of your business. And now he's your son. So that when you die, your manager gets your business, not your son.

Because he now had full rights as a son. And property rights passed on through the family. He's my son. I give it to him. So this term of adoption, so when Paul talks about being adopted, that wasn't like, okay, I'm a secondary child. There's the sort of non-adopted children and the adopted children. Now, in Rome, when you were adopted, you were a full, considered blood member of the family. So that sort of plays in the way Paul uses that word. Roman religion was basically Greek, plus anybody else. If you go to Rome, you will find still the ruins of, like, Isis, a temple to Isis, who was a Greek goddess.

You'll find temples for every god and goddess you can imagine. Because they didn't want to make anyone mad. No, if we don't make anyone mad, all the gods will be on our side, even if we have to go fight their people, sort of their philosophy. You will find also that the emperor was the Pontivus Maximus over all religions. Now, the Pontivus Maximus over all religions. We're going to end with Constantine, but I'm going to jump there a little bit.

When Constantine became the first Christian emperor, he did not do away with paganism. That would take a while at Theodosius in the early 380s, which was mentioned at the Heritage Center. That was called the Amish Heritage Center we went to yesterday. Theodosius was mentioned in their presentation. He's the one who came along and said, okay, if you're not a Christian, we're going to persecute you.

We're going to shut down your churches. We're going to shut down your synagogues, temples. Constantine, on the other hand, sort of saw himself as the Pontivus Maximus over all religions. So, you'll see his coins, where some of them, his face is on the front, and Apollo, the Sun, God is on the back. Or he's on the front, and there's some Christian emblem on the back.

Because he's the Pontivus Maximus, because that's what the emperor is. So he actually tried to sort of create some kind of religious peace between everybody. And in doing so, amalgamated religions together, to a certain degree. One thing that's interesting, there is a record of a letter written by a town, and I don't remember what it was. I think it was in North Africa, to Constantine, saying, we've all converted to being Christians, so we deserve a tax break. Now that tells you something about the system right there, right? Oh, wow! We convert to Christianity. He's a Christian emperor. That means he's going to give benefits to Christians. Yeah, let's do that. So they, quote-unquote, converted the whole town, and then asked the emperor for a tax break. Interesting. The Roman Empire, think of it as a giant corporation with an army to enforce what it wants. And, of course, a civilization to a very sick world. Because when you get to the end of the day, oh, I'm going to mention this. This is a historian, a modern historian, who has written some really good books about ancient Rome. And he says this about the first century of Rome. In the days of Augustus, about a million people lived in Rome. Most of them jammed into stuffy, odorous apartments. They smelled so bad, plenty was a writer from the time, suggesting, disguising the odor by burning bread. They had no sewage system in the... They had public sewage, public restrooms. I won't even go into that. You don't want to hear that. People complained about the housing shortage, soaring rents, congested traffic, polluted air, crime in the streets, and high cost of living. Sounds like New York to me! Los Angeles, Chicago, right? A million people in a city that just kept sprawling out. And so part of it is magnificent.

I mean, to walk through today, in parts of Rome, there are structures that are 2,400 years old. And yet, two blocks from there, there might have been a lot of people who had 50,000 people living in a slum. So, it's a very... The Roman Empire is a large attempt to bring this philosophy of Pax Romana to the world. And here's how they did it. The Roman army only lost a few battles in about a 500 or 600 year period. And so, the Roman army, they were the most highly trained, motivated army in the world at the time. And they had amazing equipment. They had amazing equipment. Usually when they'd lose a battle, they'd just rebuild another army and go back and defeat the people just to say, we don't lose to anybody. That happened in Germania. I'm not sure the German should have won the battle, because two or three years later, another army shows up and it's like, we're killing everybody we find. Because nobody defeats us. This is the power of Rome. Let's go back to the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is... He doesn't give it as an anti-Roman speech. Even Jesus said, look, Caesar's on the coin. Give him his taxes. So once again, I'm not going to cause trouble here. I'm just telling you, but though a real Christian has a different allegiance, he never spoke against Rome. And that's why Pilate didn't want to kill him. I can't find out what's wrong with this guy, because this is a local matter. All I'm here for is to make sure nobody's against Rome. And this is just one of your crazy preachers. You take care of it. I'm not going to kill this man. And then you read through the crucifixion story, and it's a political nightmare. They're maneuvering Pilate. Pilate's not afraid to kill people. But this sense of Roman justice was, he didn't do anything against Rome. So I'll just leave him up to you. But we can't kill him. Well, that's true.

You're just going to go around killing people. Only Rome was going to go around killing people. And so it's a political thing that gets maneuvered, and he ends up killing them. Not necessarily because he thought he was a criminal. It was just politically expedient to do so, because I don't want to deal with the Sanhedrin. Because you know what happens? The Sanhedrin, there'll be a riot. And then I'll have to call out the legion from Caesarea. I'll kill a thousand Jews. And then Rome's going to find out, and I'm going to be in real hot water because why aren't you keeping Pax Romano?

Why aren't you keeping Roman peace? What, you're probably going to kill a thousand people? This is a political nightmare he's in. And he's not an ethical man. He's a political man. So when you understand Rome, that crucifixion story becomes so real. Okay. I know once again that's a lot of information, but if you start looking at bits and pieces of that, you're going to see it influencing the first century. You're going to see why the Apostle Paul said, by the way, you can't beat me up.

I'm a Roman citizen. And the Roman officer in charge, it says, became very afraid. He had just broken a Roman law. You just can't beat. There was due process to all Roman citizens. By the end of the empire, they basically made everybody in the empire practically a citizen. Except the Germans. Some did, but they didn't make most of them. But I tell you what they did do at the end of the empire, they drafted the Germans into, not drafted them, they hired them as mercenaries into their army.

So by the end of the Roman Empire, half of them were Romans, they were Germans. Which is an interesting story in itself, because it was a Germanic tribe that brought down the Roman Empire because a huge part of the Roman army changed sides. Wait a minute, we won't fight our brothers, and they changed sides. That's a whole other story. So, any questions? And once again, that's a lot of information all over the place. But if we can understand a little bit of these bits and pieces of this history, there's all kinds of things in the New Testament that just start to make sense.

Okay, another question over here. Did Pymot suffer any repercussions from his choices concerning the crucifixion of Jesus, or as far as political? I can't hear it. Did Pilate suffer any political repercussions from the... Oh, from his trial with Jesus? Did Pilate suffer any political repercussions from his trial with Jesus? He didn't with the Sanhedrin, because they were happy Jesus got killed. They didn't find out about it in Rome. Well, they did, because it's mentioned. But it didn't make a ripple in Rome, because who cared about a Jewish crazy man? So he saved his political career by doing what he did, even though there was part of him that didn't want to do it.

So no, he saved repercussions because of his actions. So that's a good question. What did Pilate suffer from? Pilate really is an important person. He's in the Bible, and he's only mentioned in one other Roman source that I know of. He wasn't really a high climber in Romans. When you got sent to Judea, your political career was probably over to begin with.

It was a backwater in the Empire. Okay, any other questions? We'll take another break here. Oh, down here. What size would the city of Rome be in comparison to the US? Okay, so we take Rome of that time, and what size would a US city be? Remember, you've got 60 to 80 million people in this huge area. We have 340 million people in the United States. They had 60 to 80 million in North Africa, the entire Middle East, and most of Europe. So it's a smaller population. But if you take New York City, I don't know what's New York, 8-10 million? If you take Chicago, you've probably got 5 million?

4 million? 3 to 4 million? You take Houston, that's 3 to 4 million? We have a lot of cities bigger than Rome. That's what Rome was at the time. It's just that if you have a city of 30,000 at that time, you've got a big city. So a city of a million people is unbelievable. So it's hard to compare it. What's a city with a million people? Anybody in Indianapolis have a million people? I don't know. Philadelphia has a lot more, Pittsburgh has a lot more.

What's Cleveland have? They probably have over a million. Less than 500,000. So twice the size of Cleveland in terms of numbers of people. But the difference is Cleveland would be spread out over a bigger area. Rome was more compact in the way people lived. They lived in apartments that weren't very sturdy as far as the poor people.

So it's hard to compare. But yeah, a million people lived in apartments. There's a lot of people at the time. Okay, well, oh wow, I did real good this time. I'm quitting two minutes early unless we get another... Okay, good. Let's take a break. If you have some questions, write them down. Mr. Miller, if you think of a question, write it down on your pad or something and give it to him. And we'll try to... Because questions may come up as we go on. But it's time to... Restrooms are back over here. There's still coffee and so forth over here. We'll get right back at 11 o'clock.