>> (choir singing) >> "The angel Gabriel
was sent from God to a city of Galilee named..." >> NARRATOR: Every Sunday,
in every corner of the world... >> "...the virgin, betrothed
to a man whose name..." >> NARRATOR: ...people gather
to hear a story. >> "...and the virgin's name
was Mary." >> NARRATOR: For more than
2,000 years, that story has been told
and retold. >> "...and to bear a son." >> NARRATOR: Along the way,
each generation has found in its telling its own meaning
and interpretation. >> "'...you shall call
his name Jesus...'" >> NARRATOR: That story,
of a man called Jesus of Nazareth,
a man who became Jesus Christ, was originally told
by his first followers... >> "'...and be called
the Son of the most high.'" >> NARRATOR: ...and then retold
in accounts by later believers in the Gospels. >> "The Gospel
according to St. Luke." >> NARRATOR: So began
the building of a religion. Now it is our turn,
with the help of scholars and historians,
theologians and archaeologists, to return to that time
and use our best efforts to understand that story... Of a man born in obscurity
in whose name a faith was made. (singing) We know so little about him--
that he was born more than 2,000 years ago,
and that he lived in Palestine. We know he was baptized
and became a preacher. And we know that
he was publicly executed. >> (dramatized):
What manner of man is this that even the winds
and the seas obey him? >> NARRATOR: With so little
evidence to go by, archaeologists must sift
the clues, and scholars decode
the stories told by the first followers of Jesus. >> The problem for any historian
in trying to reconstruct the life of Jesus is simply
that we don't have sources that come from the actual time
of Jesus himself. >> The historian's task
in understanding Jesus and the Jesus movement
and early Christianity is a lot like
the archaeologist's task in excavating a tell. You peel back layer after layer
after layer of interpretation, and what you always find
is a plurality of Jesuses. >> History isn't made
to record the deeds of a person like Jesus. Jesus is very much like most
people, statistically speaking, who have ever existed
in the world: poor, obscure,
no pretensions to royalty or distinction of any kind. They live under
less-than-desirable conditions, and they die that way. There's nothing historically
remarkable about that. Billions of people pass through
this veil of tears in exactly that way. >> We can tell the story
by looking at the way the earliest Christians
themselves thought about Jesus, by the way<i> they</i>
kept his memory alive, by the way that<i>
they</i> told the story. >> NARRATOR: Central
to the story is the fact that Jesus was born a subject
of the Roman empire. >> (dramatized):
And in those days, a decree went out
from Caesar Augustus that all the world
should be taxed. >> Jesus was born
during the reign of the emperor Augustus
in the sort of a booming economy of the<i> Pax Romana,</i>
the Roman Peace. And on every coin that Augustus
had were the words, <i> divi filius,</i>
"son of the divine one." Julius Caesar, son of God. >> This is on every billboard
in the Mediterranean world. He is the savior of the world,
and he brings the peace. Now, you may have scruples
about how he brings the peace, but he brings peace to Rome,
and as the saying goes in Latin, "Peace to the Rome
and quiet to the provinces." >> (dramatized): This is he,
Augustus Caesar, son of a god, who shall restore the golden age
and spread his empire. >> NARRATOR: Rome's empire
spread across the Mediterranean, sweeping through North Africa
and reaching as far west as Spain. To the east,
it encompassed Egypt, Turkey, Greece, and Palestine,
where Jesus was born in the Jewish land of Judea,
then ruled by King Herod. >> In Judea, the king, Herod,
was in effect a client king. He ruled
almost in place of Rome. He was the voice of Rome,
the instrument of Rome, probably "instrument of Rome"
is best in that, because he had his own
independent notions certainly. >> Herod the Great was probably
one of the greatest kings of the post-biblical period
in Israel, but you wouldn't want your
daughter to date him. He was ambitious, brutal,
extremely successful. >> And it is one of the real
untold ironies of Jewish history that this man,
who's the guy you love to hate in Jewish history, really,
leaves the most indelible mark on the face
of the land of Israel. >> It appears that Herod thought
of Jerusalem as his showpiece. He really wanted to make it
a place where people would come, just as people would have gone
to Athens, or Rome, or the great cities
of the Mediterranean world. >> NARRATOR: A meticulously
accurate model of ancient Jerusalem shows
the extraordinary scale of Herod's building program. >> And so,
when Herod built the city, or helped to rebuild the city,
he did so on a monumental scale. And this can be seen
in the rebuilding of the temple. ♪ ♪ >> NARRATOR: We know exactly how
Herod rebuilt the temple because detailed descriptions of
the architecture have survived. Along the coast,
Herod constructed an aqueduct 40 miles long. It brought water
to a new seaport he had built. In honor
of the Roman emperor Caesar, Herod named the city Caesarea. >> We really need to get
a feel for a city like Caesarea Maritima
at the time of Jesus precisely because it shows
the crucial intersection of Roman rule
in Jesus' own homeland. >> NARRATOR: In this thriving
seaport, the power of Rome, its culture and commerce,
commanded every aspect of daily life. >> In the middle of the city
was a Roman city, complete with the capital,
temples to the deified Roma-- that is, the personification
of Rome itself. The political reality of the day
was of a dominant power overseeing the life
on a day-to-day basis. >> NARRATOR: Into this political
climate, Jesus was born. The Gospels present the familiar
account of his birth. >> (dramatized): And she gave
birth to her firstborn son, and wrapped him
in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger because
there was no place for them in the inn. >> Our best guess for the birth
date of Jesus would be 4 BCE. In other words, he was born
before the death of Herod the Great,
who died in 4 BCE. But I emphasize
"best" and "guess." >> NARRATOR: The Gospels claim
Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Historians think it is
more likely that he was born and grew up near
the Sea of Galilee in the village
called Nazareth. >> The region was known
for being a hotbed of political activity,
and some of it violent. In the last few generations
of New Testament scholarship, the Galilee has achieved
this reputation for being
the hotbed of radicalism, you know, the, I don't know...
'60s Berkeley of Palestine. >> The Galilee, by most of
the traditional accounts, is always portrayed
as a kind of bucolic backwater-- peasants on the hillsides. And yet our recent
archaeological discoveries have shown this
not to be the case. Nazareth stands
less than four miles from a major urban center,
Sepphoris. Sepphoris was founded
as the capitol of the Galilee. And so it was really invested,
much like Caesarea Maritima, with all the trappings
of Greek or Roman city life. >> NARRATOR: Recent
archaeological discoveries at Sepphoris challenge
the conventional picture of Jesus' life. >> One of the more exciting
discoveries that we made at Sepphoris was
a magnificent Roman villa with a gorgeous, gorgeous mosaic
on its floor, in a banquet hall. The lady was dubbed "Mona Lisa"
by the press when we found her because she is really
an extraordinary depiction of a beautiful woman
of Roman antiquity. And the picture we get
is a community very much in the mainstream, but
on the high end of the scale. Sepphoris was not just a city
with houses and with waterworks and things like that, but it had
satellite settlements around. Nazareth, to all intents and
purpose, was a satellite village attached to the region
or municipality of Sepphoris. >> The findings really
are requiring us completely to rethink Jesus' social,
economic setting, because we really had
thought of Jesus as being really out in the hinterland,
utterly removed from urban life, especially Roman-influenced
urban life. What the excavations
at Sepphoris suggest is that Jesus was quite proximate
to a thriving and sophisticated urban environment that would
have brought with it all of the diversity
of the Roman empire, and would have required,
just to get on, you know, as the price of doing business,
a level of sophistication that one would not have
thought characteristic of Jesus, the humble carpenter. >> NARRATOR: Scholars today
question the image of Jesus the humble carpenter, and disagree
about his social class. >> (dramatized): They were
astounded, and said, "Where did this man
get this wisdom? Is not this
the carpenter's son?" >> The difficulty for us in
hearing a term like "carpenter" is that we immediately think of
a highly skilled worker, and, at least in North America,
in the middle class, making a very high income. As soon as we take that
into the ancient world, we are totally lost,
because, first of all, there was no middle class
in the ancient world. There were the "haves"
and the "have nots," to put it very simply. And in the anthropology
of peasant societies, to say that somebody is
an artisan or a carpenter is not to compliment them. It is to say that they are lower
in the pecking order than a peasant farmer. >> NARRATOR: Very few scholars
now believe that Jesus was
of such lowly birth. >> I'm not entirely convinced
that we could characterize Jesus as a peasant. I think that that probably
miscasts Jesus, especially in view of the more
recent discoveries at Sepphoris and elsewhere. >> He must be someone
in the artisan class if he's working
in the building industry. And in all probability,
that would mean where he might grow up
and live in Nazareth, he likely went to Sepphoris
to earn his living. And this puts him in
the interesting mix of cultures that would have been
the daily life of a city like Sepphoris-- through the marketplace,
in the building. And Sepphoris itself, as a city,
was built precisely at the time that Jesus was growing up
and living just next door. >> You couldn't deal and wheel
either in the workplace or in the market without knowing
a good deal of Greek. And I can hardly imagine
anybody worth their salt who wouldn't know some Greek. Jesus was trilingual. Jesus participated in both
the Aramaic and Hebrew culture and its literatures,
as well as the kind of Hellenistic Greek
that he needed to do his business
and his ministry. >> NARRATOR: Despite
its Greek and Roman influences, Sepphoris was
a thoroughly Jewish city. And Jesus remained faithful
to his religious heritage when he left Nazareth
to become a preacher. >> (dramatized):
Then he began to speak, and taught them, saying, "Do not think I have come to
abolish the law or the prophets. "I have come not to abolish
but to fulfill." >> What we learned
from the Gospel stories is not that
Jesus was not Jewish. Quite the opposite. He's completely embedded
in the Judaism of his time. >> Was Jesus a Jew? Of course Jesus was a Jew. He was born of
a Jewish mother in Galilee, a Jewish part of the world. All of his friends, associates,
colleagues, disciples-- all of them were Jews. He regularly worshipped
in Jewish communal worship-- what we call synagogues. He preached from Jewish texts,
from the bible. He celebrated Jewish festivals. He was born, lived, died,
taught as a Jew. Nowadays, there are temples and
synagogues everywhere you go. There's not a Jewish community
in the world that doesn't have a synagogue, and many
of them are called temples. In this period, however,
we should always remember that there is only one temple. And that's
the one temple in Jerusalem. (people conversing
in background) >> NARRATOR: For Jews living
in the time of Jesus, the temple in Jerusalem
was the center of their religious life. >> The Jewish historian Josephus
has a very memorable line. He says,
"One temple for the one God." The Jews saw themselves
as a unique people with one God, one God alone,
and this one God of this one special people
had one temple. And that's a very powerful idea,
reflecting-- accurately, I think--
the historical truth that the temple was
a very powerful unifying source within the Jewish community. This was the one,
most sacred place on earth, the one place on earth
where the earth rises up and the heavens somehow descend just enough that
they just touch. This was the only one place
on the entire earth where this was so. >> The temple in Jerusalem was
the symbolic heart of the country. Jews everywhere,
if they chose to, if they were pious, would
put aside part of their income-- it's sort of like, oh, the way
Christmas clubs operate now-- you'd put aside money
explicitly to be spent having a party in Jerusalem. >> NARRATOR: Although the temple
was the centerpiece of Jewish life and worship, Judaism was not
a state religion. >> There's no such thing
as a state church. It's not a monolithic religious
or cultural entity at this time. Indeed, what we're seeing more
and more through the research and the archaeological
discoveries, is how diverse Judaism was
in this period. >> Sometimes reading ancient
sources is like overhearing family quarrels
in a distant room. (whispering) And some of
the most endearing aspects-- I can say this because I don't
live in the first century-- but the most endearing aspects
of reading this evidence that we still have is
overhearing the lively quarrels. I mean, people who weren't
priests at all would have absolutely firm opinions on how
the priests should be doing their business. (distant conversations) >> There will have been
a whole wide variety of groups in Jerusalem, and perhaps
in the countryside as a whole. These are
the revolutionary groups who took their religious
understanding of what Judaism was and turned
that into political program, political agenda. "We must destroy the Roman
empire or we must destroy Jews "who cooperate
with the Roman empire." >> NARRATOR: We now know
that other groups had even more extreme views,
and their ideas shed new light on Jesus' own message. >> One of the best examples of
the vibrantly different thought that's at work in Judaism
in this period is, of course, now what we know
from the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. As you leave Jerusalem and
go to the south and to the east, toward the Dead Sea,
the terrain changes rapidly and starkly. You move off gradually
from rolling hillside through the ravines, and it becomes
stark and desolate. It's dry, it's arid,
it's rocky, and it's rough. And then, all of a sudden,
within a span of only about 13 miles,
the entire terrain drops out in front of you
at the surface of the Dead Sea. It is in that rugged cliff face
on the banks of the Dead Sea that the Dead Sea Scrolls
were discovered at the site known as Khirbet
Qumran. The Dead Sea Scrolls are usually
thought to have been produced by a group known as the Essenes. And the Essenes are a group that
literally abandoned Jerusalem, it seems, in protest
against the way the temple was being run. And they go to the desert to get
away from what they see to be the worldliness of Jerusalem and
the worldliness of the temple. >> The manual of discipline,
or in Hebrew,<i> sera-hayachad,</i> envisages a community living
in almost total isolation, a community that is
self-contained, that is governed very strictly. There is an oath of entry. It is very much
a monastic community. >> (dramatized): Everyone who
wishes to join the congregation of the elect
must pledge himself to live according
to the rule of the community: to love all
the children of light, and to hate
all the children of darkness. >> The Essenes are
what we might best call an apocalyptic sect of Judaism. An apocalyptic sect is one
that thinks of itself as, first of all,
the true form of the religion. (whispers) >> By apocalyptic expectation,
I mean that some group has an<i> apocalupsis,</i> in Greek:
a revelation that God is going to finally solve
the problem of injustice, unrighteousness,
evil in the world, by totally eradicating the evil. That's the terrible price
of apocalypse-- there's going to be a lot of
very dead people-- totally eradicating evil,
and we, the good, whoever we are,
are going to live with God, be it heaven on earth,
or earth in heaven, forever, in justice and holiness
and righteousness. >> Among the Dead Sea Scrolls,
we hear not of just one messiah, but at least two messiahs. Some of their writings talk
about a messiah of Aaron, a priestly figure who will come
to restore the temple at Jerusalem to its proper
purity and worship of God. But there's also
a messiah of David that is a kind of
kingly figure who will come to lead the war. >> The Qumran scrolls reveal
a variety of scenarios for the end of days. The best known one, perhaps,
is the scroll called, "The War of the Sons of Light
Against the Sons of Darkness." And, at some point,
there will be a major battle, a cataclysmic struggle,
not just between people, but also between cosmic forces-- the cosmic forces of evil
and the cosmic forces of good. And, needless to say,
this will end with a victory for the sons of light-- in other words,
for the group itself. >> Now, we typically think
of this as reflecting a belief in the end of the world, but,
in fact, that's not exactly what they thought. They use language like
"the end" or "the last things" or "the last days,"
but what they mean is the present evil age
is coming to an end. This is really more
in the vein of a transformation of the present social order,
and a return to a kind of golden age
of statehood and independence. So it's really kind of
a political expectation. It's not otherworldly. In fact, when it comes,
it'll be right here and right now. >> NARRATOR: History offers
no evidence that Jesus was influenced by the Essenes,
but their apocalyptic challenge struck chords that reverberated
throughout the homeland and echoed through
the message of a prophet known as John the Baptist. >> (dramatized): In those days,
John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea,
proclaiming, "Repent, for the Kingdom
of Heaven has come near." >> John the Baptist was
a renowned kind of eccentric, it appears, from the way
that Josephus describes him. But he seems
to have had this quality of a kind of prophetic figure,
one who was calling for change. So he is usually thought of
as being off in the desert wearing unusual clothes--
a kind of ascetic almost. >> John is taking people out
into the desert. Crossing the Jordan,
he is recapitulating the exodus, and he is planting
little ticking time bombs of apocalyptic expectation
all over the Jewish homeland, waiting for God to strike,
as it were. (faint whispering) >> NARRATOR: It was as John's
disciple, the Gospels say, that Jesus submitted
to the ancient Jewish rite of baptism. >> The evidence that Jesus
was a follower of John is as strong as anything
historians can find about Jesus. The reason is a certain
embarrassment in the texts, trying to explain why on earth
would Jesus be apparently inferior to John. If he goes
and is baptized by John, then somehow we have to explain
how that can happen. >> The Gospels then go on to say
that Jesus was the one predicted by John. Most contemporary scholars would
see that to be a construct developed by the early church
to help explain the relationship between the two. >> The difference I see between
John the Baptist and Jesus is, to use some fancy
academic language, John is an apocalyptic
eschatologist. An eschatologist
is somebody who sees that the problem
of the world is so radical that it's going to take some
kind of divine radicality-- God is going to descend in some
sort of a catastrophic event-- to solve the world. There is another type
of eschatology, and that's what I think
Jesus is talking. I'm going to call it
ethical eschatology. That is the demand
that God is making on us-- not us on God
so much as God on us-- to do something
about the evil in the world. >> NARRATOR: We don't know
to what extent Jesus remained faithful
to John's apocalyptic message, but at some point after
his baptism by John, Jesus seems to have embarked
on his career as a preacher. >> (dramatized): Jesus went
throughout Galilee, teaching in the synagogues
and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom,
and curing every disease and every sickness
among the people. >> Jesus' career apparently was
centered mostly in the towns and villages and a few small
cities in the area of the Galilee, his home region. >> Jesus' ministry in the
Galilee is rather complicated, but I think we can begin to get
the real better understanding of it through archaeology and through higher literary
studies of the Gospels today. Those villages there
were absolutely essential to his ministry. He's avoiding the big towns,
or cities, probably because the elements
who run those cities are of such a high class that
they're probably not interested in Jesus' message. >> NARRATOR:
Whether he was himself a simple man of the people or
someone far more sophisticated, Jesus does seem to have pitched
his message at ordinary people and to have impressed them
with his healing powers. >> Healings, seems to have been
something of a specialty of his, for which he had
a great reputation, people would bring-- from miles around,
judging from the Gospels-- they'd bring their sick,
the frail, to Jesus to be healed. >> I love the story
about Jesus reaching down and picking up the dust and
mixing it with his own spit and forming a kind of healing
balm that he applies to someone. And it's also interesting that
in one healing case, Jesus sort of misses the mark
a bit and has to refine the cure that he's applying. So one finds the intrusions
of popular culture in these Jesus traditions
that are being elaborated through natural processes
of storytelling. >> Now, we need to be aware that
there are other miracle workers around at the time, so just
the idea of performing miracles is not in itself unique. >> In the first century,
in one sense, everyone-- including, later in the century,
Vespasian, when he was becoming
the emperor-- were miracle workers
if they were important enough. What really was unusual
about Jesus is, why would God work
through a Jewish peasant? That sort of struck
the Roman imagination as unbelievable. Not that there would
be miracles, but that miracles
might be performed by a Jewish peasant. >> Jesus limited his circulation
to the agrarian populace. And his teaching was
characterized by metaphors that would be readily understood
by agrarian populations. >> (dramatized): Jesus said
to his apostles, "Give them something to eat." They replied: "We have nothing here
but five loaves and two fish." And he said,
"Bring them here to me." >> The feeding of the multitudes
is one of the few stories that's told in all four gospels. That's a story near and dear
to many people's hearts. Jesus goes into
the Galilean hillside. He takes
about 5,000 people with him. And it's there that
they have a picnic, even though there are
no provisions made for that. He multiplies
five loaves and two fishes to feed
this multitude of people. Well, I don't think
it takes rocket science to figure out why
that kind of story is so endearing to poor people. I mean,
that's dinner and a show. >> NARRATOR: Behind the simple
rustic imagery was the message of the coming Kingdom of God, an enigma Jesus
did not attempt to simplify. >> Jesus tells a parable about somebody
who takes a mustard seed, plants it in the ground,
and it grows up to be a great tree,
or a bush at least-- a weed, though,
in plain language. Now, imagine an audience
reacting to that. Presumably the kingdom
is like this, and they have to figure out,
what's it like: "You mean, the kingdom is big? "But you just said
it's a big weed. "So why don't you say
a big cedar of Lebanon? "Why a big weed? "And besides, this mustard... "we're not certain
we like this mustard. "It's very dangerous
in our fields. "We try to...
we try to control it. "We try to contain it. "What do you mean the kingdom
is something that "the people try to control
and contain?" Every reaction in the audience,
the audience fighting with themselves, as it were,
answering back to Jesus, is doing exactly what he wants. It's making them think,
not about mustard, of course, but about the kingdom. But the trap is that this
is a very provocative, even a weird,
image for the kingdom. To say the kingdom
is like a cedar of Lebanon, everyone would yawn, say,
"Of course." "It's like a mustard seed." "What's going on here?" >> Either people will tend to
focus on Jesus as some sort of social reformer,
or as an apocalyptic firebrand preaching a coming
Kingdom of God on earth. And yet, it must be recognized that those are
very different images, very different kinds
of individuals, and yet both are reflected
within the Gospels' tradition. >> NARRATOR: He may have
preached social change. He may have preached
a new kingdom on earth. Either way, Jesus was bound
to find himself in conflict with the Roman authorities. >> The core of Jesus' preaching
is the Kingdom of God. And the difficulty for us
is to hear that term as 100% political
and 100% religious. Not one, not the other. In the first century, those were
inextricably intertwined. <i> The</i> kingdom, if you used that
expression in the first century, would, meant the Roman kingdom. It meant the Roman empire. When you talked about
the Kingdom of God and were somehow setting it up
in some tension with the Roman empire,
you were making a very caustic criticism
of the Roman empire, and you were saying
that its system was not the system of God. >> The Jewish historian Josephus
tells us a number of stories about characters whose career
could be crudely summarized as following: some guy wakes up in the morning
and he thinks he's the messiah or something,
or he's a prophet, and he says, he gets a group of people
to follow him. He says, "We're going to go out
in the desert and we're going to "wait for God to do
something for us." So, a whole bunch of people may
go with him-- maybe thousands-- go with him out to this
deserted, unsecured place, and they wait for
what Josephus calls "the tokens
of their deliverance." And the Romans send a vicious
police action out there and kill everybody. When that kind of police action
is perpetrated against what we might consider
harmless fanatics, the Romans are really giving us
a very good historical lesson in how domination works. >> All the time
that Jesus is talking, I cannot not imagine
the fact that he's going to be put to death. Everything that he is doing
is politically dangerous. If you are following Jesus' life
from day to day, you should be
saying to yourself, "Somebody is going
to kill this man." >> (dramatized): After he had
said this, he went on ahead, going up to Jerusalem. >> Moving to Jerusalem, Jesus
was moving from the territory ruled by Herod Antipas
to the territory ruled directly by Rome through a prefect,
Pontius Pilate. >> Pontius Pilate was
the governor from 26 to 36, and so that places us
very clearly within the early period
of Roman rule. These are some of our most
important and clearest dates for the activities
of Jesus' life. When Jesus actually died
we're not absolutely sure. Some people would say
as early as maybe 27, maybe some others as late as 33, but we do know
it's under Pilate. >><i> Pontius Pilatus,
praefectus Judea.</i> Pontius Pilate,
governor of Judea. >> And we know of him
as effective and a fairly ruthless
administrator of his territory, the area of Judea. And there are several episodes
recorded by Josephus where eschatological prophets emerge,
and Pilate has no hesitation in eliminating them,
or in suppressing episodes of potential conflict
or revolt within that territory. (murmur of crowd) >> People from
all over the empire went to Jerusalem on Passover. It's one of the most populated
times in the whole city. It's a madhouse. There are extra animals being
brought up-- sheep-- because of the Passover holiday. There are pilgrims coming in
from everywhere. And Jesus comes up to town, too. He could have stayed home
and had Passover in the Galilee, but he didn't. He's up in Jerusalem
because this is important. Pilate would get nervous when
there were crowds of Jews, and, of course, he was legally
responsible to be up in Jerusalem when it was
the most crowded of all. He would leave this very nice,
plush, seaside town in Caesarea, which was, you know,
a nice pagan city, plenty of pagan altars,
all the stuff he wanted-- and have to go up
to Jerusalem where... where all these Jews
were congregating, and stay there for crowd control
until the holiday was over. He was in a bad mood already
by the time he got to town, and Passover would fray
anybody's nerves. (murmur of crowd) >> If you were a pilgrim coming
to Jerusalem in these days, you would walk
through the streets of this magnificent city. As you approach
the temple mound, you come up to this massive,
monumental complex that we call the temple,
and there are grand staircases up which one can go
and get up to the top. And you come out up
on top of the platform in the outer precincts
of the temple complex. (singing) The soldiers that were
garrisoned in Jerusalem would have been stationed
in the nearby fortress called the Antonia,
which literally stands adjacent to the temple complex
and kind of looks over it. They could keep an eye
on things there, and, of course, everyone in the temple knew
they were there, too. >> Particularly at Passover,
which is a holiday that vibrates with this incredible
historical memory of national
creation and freedom, and the Roman soldiers
standing along the colonnade of the temple looking down
at Jews celebrating this. So it's a politically and
religiously electric holiday. >> (dramatized): Then, Jesus
entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying
in the temple, and he overturned the tables
of the money changers. >> The difficulty with the story
of Jesus and the money changers in the temple is that
the story is told in slightly different ways
in different gospels. For example, in Mark's gospel,
and, in fact, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke--
all three-- this event occurs
in the last week of Jesus' life and is clearly the event
which brings him to the attention
both of the temple leadership and the Roman authorities. It is, in effect,
what gets him killed. John's gospel,
interestingly enough, though, puts the story of the cleansing
of the temple as the very first episode
in Jesus' public career, more than two years earlier,
and no mention is made of it near his death. So, there are a few problems
with the story itself, although it is
one of the stories that appears in all the Gospels,
so something is going on there. >> It's unclear how he actually
gets into trouble. He wouldn't have
wandered into the crosshairs of the priests because,
compared to how the Pharisees are
criticizing the priests, what Jesus is doing
is fairy minimal. If he had been complaining
about the priests, or criticizing them,
or criticizing the way the temple was being run,
this would just... it's business as usual. This is one of the aspects
of being a Jew. >> Another possibility, though,
is that Jesus sounds more like the Essenes, who were really
criticizing the whole way the temple is run as having
become too worldly, too caught up
in the money of the day, or maybe just too Roman. And if that's the case,
then his action looks much more like an act
of political subversion. >> Try and imagine
the temple for what it was. It was both the house of God
and the seat of collaboration. It was the high priest Caiaphas
who had to collaborate with the Roman occupation. Now, how would Jesus,
as a Galilean peasant, see the temple? I think
with ferocious ambiguity. On the one hand,
it was the seat of God, and you would die to defend it
from, say, a Roman emperor like Caligula putting
a statue in there. But what would you do when
it was also the place where Caiaphas collaborated
with the Romans? Was the temple<i> really</i>
the house of God anymore? What Jesus does is not
cleanse the temple; he symbolically destroys it. >> If you really think the end
of the world is at hand, that has a kind of
liberating and frantic energy that goes along with it. It's not good for quiet crowds
and social stability. And given the emotional
and religious tenor of this holiday anyway,
to have somebody preaching that the Kingdom of God
was really on its way-- perhaps it was going to be
coming within, you know, within that very holiday-- preaching that
in the days before Passover, it's the equivalent of shouting
"Fire!" in a crowded theater. >> NARRATOR:
The Gospels agree that this politically charged
climate was the occasion for his arrest,
but what happened next, and the role played
by the priests, remains unclear. >> I think
there's some kind of cooperation between the chief priests
and Pilate. The chief priests
always had to cooperate with Rome
because it's their jobs. They're mediating
between the imperial government and the people. Then there was a perceived
danger that Pilate was on the verge of some kind of
muscular crowd control. People would get hurt or killed
when Pilate felt so moved. And perhaps for this reason,
Jesus was turned over to Rome. >> The most difficult thing
for us, after 2,000 years, is to bring
our imagination down when we're looking
at the passion of Jesus, because we want to think
the whole world was watching, or all of the Roman empire
were watching, or all of
Jerusalem was watching. I take it for granted
there were standing orders between Pilate and Caiaphas
about how to handle, lower-class especially,
dissidents who cause problems at Passover. >> Jesus would have represented,
you know, a kind of activist and resistor
in Pontius Pilate's experience that he had been dealing
with for years, and with varying degrees
of success and effectiveness, obviously. But Jesus would have been a blip
on the screen of Pontius Pilate because the unrest
and the uprisings were so common--
a part of daily life for the Roman
administration of Judea-- that Jesus would have been seen,
I think, as very, very little
out of the ordinary. >> Now, I don't for a moment
think that Pilate would have been worried
that Jesus could've challenged the power of the emperor. That's not the point. The point is, any challenge
to Roman authority, any challenge to the peace
of Rome would have been met with a swift
and violent response. >> In dealing with a person
who was guilty of sedition, Pilate had considerable leeway. He was probably driven
by convention, and that is the process
of executing state criminals through crucifixion. >> There is no doubt in my mind
but that the persons responsible for the actual execution
of Jesus were the Romans. The Romans practiced
crucifixion. It was, while it was not
unknown to the Jewish people, it was not a form
of Jewish execution. >> (dramatized): Then they
brought Jesus to the place called Golgotha, which means
"the place of a skull." >> A crucifixion site
was usually near, say, a main road into the city. It was a warning location. The uprights for the crosses
were usually left there permanently. And you have to think of
that site as not a place where people would go regularly. It's an abhorrent site. It's supposed to be a warning, even when nobody
is hanging there. So the idea that there would be
crowds around the crucifixion-- leave out Passover
or anything like that-- just watching,
I think most people would probably avert their eyes
and walk away because they don't
want to be on the side of the Romans who are killing
and crucifying one more good Jew
among the thousands who had been crucified in the
first quarter of that century. >> Death by crucifixion
was certainly an awful, awful experience
for the persecuted individual. It was slow, it was painful,
and it was public terror. >> It's not from bleeding. It's not
from the wounds themselves that the death occurs. It's rather a suffocation because one can't hold oneself
up enough to breathe properly. And so, over time, really, it's the exposure
to the elements and the gradual loss of breath
that produces death. >> We don't have
that much detail about the actual crucifixion
of Jesus. What we have are the stories
in the Gospels. And they're,
interestingly and appropriately, the gospel writers
are drawing on psalms, psalms that,
in the Jewish canon, are often cries to God. And that's, they're grabbing
onto that literature to shape their narrative
presentation of the crucifixion. Those are cries
of terror and loneliness. They're really appeals
to God for meaning. The words that are put
in Jesus' mouth in Mark, "Why have you forsaken me?" It's the religious power
of the psalms that is really one of those wonderful moments
of concrete continuity between what this very
passionately religious first-century Jew
might have been thinking as he was dying
this horrible death on the cross
as the finale to this week of passionate religious
excitement and commitment, and asking God what happened. (singing) >> The plaque
that was nailed to the cross is one of the few clear pieces
of historical evidence that we have. >><i> Iesus Nazereno, rex iudorum.</i> >> The plaque, which names him
as Jesus, the king of the Jews, suggests that the charge on
which he was executed was one of political
insurrection, a threat to the<i> Pax Romana.</i> But he's also now a victim
of the<i> Pax Romana.</i> (singing) >> NARRATOR: In the year 51
of the Common Era, by the shores of the Aegean Sea,
a visitor arrived at the Greek city of Corinth. His name was Paul of Tarsus. >> Let's imagine Paul going up
the main street of Corinth, through the monumental Roman
archway, into the forum, the center of city life,
the place where all the business and most
of the political activities are done in the public life
of this Greco-Roman city. Here are the shops. Here are the offices
of the city magistrates. And we are standing
literally in the shadow of the great temple of Apollo. >> NARRATOR: Apollo,
the sun god, watched over
the fortunes of Corinth. Like Zeus, Hera, Artemis,
and Athena, Apollo was one of
the Olympian gods, that family of divinities
who presided over the ancient
and diverse pagan universe. >> Paganism is our designation
for what 90-something percent of the people
in the Mediterranean were doing. Jews are a visible minority. And then, everybody is doing
lots of other things. >> One would have found
a rich array of deities meeting the various
needs of individuals. It's like going to a supermarket
and being able to sort of shop for god. And you have them at various
times in your life and for various functions
of your living. >> NARRATOR: By the time
Paul arrived in Corinth, pilgrims had been worshipping
for centuries at local shrines, like the sacred spring
of the Pierenne. To devout pagans like these,
Paul's message of a Jewish messiah come
to save all mankind, Jew and gentile alike,
must have seemed outlandish. >> And so
when we hear Paul say, "I've determined to know
nothing among you "but Jesus Christ, Jesus
the messiah and him crucified," that must have struck
an interesting chord among these
cosmopolitan Greeks who would've inhabited
Corinth at that time. >> (dramatized): I am a Jew,
born in Tarsus in Cilicia, educated strictly according
to our ancestral law, being zealous about God. >> The apostle Paul is,
next to Jesus, clearly the most intriguing
figure of the first century of Christianity,
and far better known than Jesus because he wrote all
of those letters. >> (dramatized): For as long
as you eat this bread and drink the cup,
you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes. Wait for his son from heaven,
whom He raised from the dead. Whatever is honorable, whatever
is just, whatever is pure... if there is anything
worthy of praise, think about these things. >> We're beginning to get,
for the first time in the New Testament,
the language that will become the hallmark of all
the later Christian tradition. You see, it's Paul who starts
the writing of the New Testament by writing letters to these
fledgling congregations in the cities of the Greek east. >> Paul alludes in a number
of his letters to the message that he would have communicated
verbally, probably. He emphasizes two things:
on the one hand, very clearly,
the importance of the death and resurrection of Jesus;
on the other hand, he also emphasizes
the importance of understanding the end time and the immediacy
of the end time, and that one must be
prepared for it. And the way one prepares for it
is to be good. We find a lot of ethics
in Paul. And it's around this issue of
how one lives in anticipation of the end time that's just
around the corner, for Paul. >> NARRATOR: The death
and resurrection of Jesus lie at the very heart
of Paul's preaching, but it is a story
that pre-dates Paul and goes back
to the first followers of Jesus in Jerusalem. >> (dramatized): Joseph took
the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth,
and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock. >> The movement
that originated around Jesus must have suffered a traumatic
setback with his death. Not so much that
a messiah couldn't die, but that nothing happened. The kingdom
didn't arrive immediately, as they might have expected. >> The effect that
the crucifixion had on Jesus' followers
was the desired effect, from the Roman perspective. That is, that people
who were associated with Jesus were terrified. I mean, before the Easter
proclamation, there must have been
some kind of Easter panic, that folks were hiding out,
as they should have, because now they
were accomplices of an executed criminal. >> The followers of Jesus,
who don't go away as they're supposed to
when Pilate does this, have to deal with that
fundamental question: What does this mean
that the one that we had all of these expectations
about has been crucified? How do we deal with this,
not merely the end of this life, but the shameful end
of this life? >> The only place they can go,
eventually, is into the Hebrew scriptures,
into their tradition, and find out, "Is it possible
that the elect one, "the messiah, the righteous one,
the holy one," any title they use of Jesus, "is it possible that such a one
could be oppressed, "persecuted, and executed?" They go into the Hebrew
scriptures, and, of course, what they find is that it's
almost like a job description of being God's righteous one,
to be persecuted and even executed. >> And the amazing thing is,
they said, "Hey, Pilate's right. "He<i> was</i> the king of the Jews. "And, moreover, God has
vindicated this claim "that he is the king of the Jews
by raising him from the dead." >> (dramatized):
An angel of the Lord, descending from heaven,
came and rolled back the stone. He said to the women: "Jesus who was crucified,
he has been raised. "Come, see the place
where he lay." >> The stories about
the resurrection in the Gospels make two very clear points:
first of all, that Jesus really, really
was dead; and secondly,
that his disciples really, and with absolute conviction,
saw him again afterwards. The Gospels are equally clear
that it's not a ghost. I mean, even though
the raised Jesus walks through a shut door
in one of the gospels, or suddenly materializes
in the middle of a conference his disciples are having,
he's at pains to assure them, "Touch me, feel me,
it's bones and flesh." In Luke,
he eats a piece of fish. A ghost can't eat fish. As an historian,
this doesn't tell me anything about whether Jesus himself
was actually raised. But what it does give me
an amazing insight into is his followers and,
therefore, indirectly, into the leader
who had forged these people into such
a committed community. >> NARRATOR:
According to the Book of Acts, Christianity began
at a single place, at a single moment in time. 50 days after the death of
Jesus, now known as Pentecost, a miraculous event took place. >> (dramatized): And suddenly
from heaven, there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind,
and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire,
appeared among them, and a tongue rested
on each of them. >> That's the picture
that we get in Acts. The historical reality
is probably much more complex. And the Christian movement
probably began not from a single center,
but from many different centers where different groups
of disciples of Jesus' gathered and tried to make sense
of what they had experienced with him
and what had happened to him at the end
of his public ministry. >> The Acts' account of early
Christianity presents a very cogent, coherent image
of earliest Christianity, when, in fact, the more we find
out about early Christianity, the more wildly variegated
a phenomenon it appears to be. >> As far as we can tell,
the beginnings of Christianity occurred in
many different places, in many different groups. There were wandering
charismatics who went around from door to door preaching
without an ordinary occupation, depending on people with whom
they stayed for hospitality, for food. There were settled groups
in little towns. There were radical groups trying
to give up ordinary occupations and family life following
the teachings of Jesus. It must have been
an amazing mixture, amazingly diverse range. >> It's clear from the very
beginning of Christianity that there are different ways
of interpreting the fundamental message. There are different kinds
of practice. There are arguments over
how Jewish are we to be? How Greek are we to be? How do we adapt
to the surrounding culture? What is the real meaning
of the death of Jesus? How important
is the death of Jesus? Maybe it's the sayings of Jesus
that are really the important thing,
and not his death, and not his resurrection. (singing) >> And I think we're right
to call it the Jesus movement here,
because if we think of it as Christianity, that is,
from the perspective of the kind of movement
and institutional religion that it would become
a few hundred years later, we will miss the flavor
of those earliest years of the kind of crude
and rough beginnings, the small enclaves
trying to keep the memory alive. >> We're hampered
by our vocabulary. We know that this group
will eventually form a gentile community, and
they'll be known as Christians. But this group
didn't think that. This group expected
Jesus to return and establish
the Kingdom of God. >> He is a Jewish messiah. They are followers of
a Jewish apocalyptic tradition. They are expecting the coming
of the Kingdom of God on earth. It's a Jewish movement. >> The Jewish sect,
then, is a group which sees itself as Jews,
recognizes that there are other Jews out there,
but claims that those other Jews out there have it all wrong. They don't fully understand
what Judaism is all about, and only the members
of the sect do. >> Sectarian groups
are always in tension with their environment. That tension is manifested
in a tendency to want to spread
the message out, to hit the road
and convince others that the truth is real. >> (dramatized): Go nowhere
among the gentiles and enter no town
of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep
of the house of Israel. >> One of the characteristics
of the Roman empire is, there is suddenly
great freedom of movement, more so than in any period
before that. And, in some ways,
more free than any period that will happen again, until
the invention of the steamship. >> (dramatized): As you go,
proclaim the Kingdom of Heaven has come near. >> One would have encountered
on the Via Egnatia, or any other other
major Roman road, a wonderful variety
of journeyers. Some would be certainly engaged
in commerce, taking their commercial products
from place to place. Some would be involved
in goods and services, taking their particular services
to different places. One would have found
philosophers. One would have found persons
such as Paul-- preachers, missionaries
of particular religious views and religious movements. What, in a sense,
is sort of ironic is that the network that was established
for the mobility of the Roman army finally became
the network that was probably most instrumental
in the spread of Christianity. >> NARRATOR: Jews had traveled
along this network for centuries,
and Jewish communities were spread throughout the empire. >> By the time
of the first century, there were probably then,
as now, more Jews living outside the land of Israel
than within the land of Israel. There's a very energetic
Jewish population in Babylon. There is a very wealthy,
vigorous Jewish population living in the major cities
around the Mediterranean. It's because of
diaspora Judaism, which is extremely well established,
that Christianity itself, as a new and
constantly improvising form of Judaism,
is able to spread as it does
throughout the Roman world. >> NARRATOR: Paul himself
was a diaspora Jew. Convinced that God had chosen
him to spread the word about Jesus,
he traveled to Antioch, the capital of Roman Syria. >> Antioch has one of
the largest Jewish communities outside of the Jewish homeland--
it's been suggested that maybe something like 40,000 people
in this Jewish community. So we can, we must imagine
a number of different Jewish congregations
and subsections of the city in and through which Paul
could have moved and still felt very much at home
within the Jewish community. >> Wherever you have
a sufficient number of Jews, you would have
a Jewish community. Wherever you have
a Jewish community, you would have
a Jewish synagogue. >> NARRATOR:
By the fourth century, the synagogue had become
a formal place of worship. But in Paul's day,
especially the diaspora, it was more
of a community center. >> Another remarkable feature
of the synagogues in the diaspora is not only
that they attracted large crowds of people,
but among these crowds will have been gentiles. There is no barrier
between Jews and gentiles, and gentiles found
the Jewish synagogues-- and the Jews themselves,
apparently-- as open, friendly,
and why not go to the Jewish synagogue? Especially because there
are no non-Jewish analogs. There's nothing equivalent
to this communal experience anywhere in pagan
or Greek and Roman religions. >> NARRATOR: Gentiles attending
synagogues would have been exposed to
Judaism's variety of beliefs. In Antioch,
this new Jewish sect, the Jesus movement,
found a following in some synagogues. Paul felt that the time
was right for these Jews to bring the gentiles
into their movement. >> Paul's message
of the conversion of gentiles seems to be predicated
on the Isaiah language of what will happen
when the kingdom comes, when the messiah has arrived,
and there will be a light to the nations,
a light to the gentiles. And in that sense,
Paul views the messianic age, having arrived with Jesus,
as being a window of opportunity
for bringing in the gentiles into the elect status
alongside the people of Israel. >> Why do gentiles
join the movement? There's this tremendous
religious prestige, thanks to the antiquity
of the Jewish bible. By entering into the church,
these Christians enter into that history, as well. That's tremendously
prestigious and important. >> I think perhaps, originally,
they were attracted to the claims of salvation,
regeneration, eternal life. You're baptized,
you're illuminated. Probably they were attracted
to the rituals and to the communities. >> NARRATOR:
Like most Jewish communities, the early followers of Jesus
assembled for worship in each other's homes. >> Among the things that make
the Christians different are a couple of rituals
which they developed early on, before the very earliest sources
that we have about them. One of these
is an initiation ceremony, which they call baptism,
which is simply a Greek word that means "dunking." The second major ritual
which they developed is a meal, a common meal
which they have together, which is designed as a memorial
of the last supper, which Jesus had
with his disciples. >> Now, the situation seems
to be that initially when people were attracted
to the Jesus movement, they first became Jews. >> NARRATOR: Becoming a Jew
was no easy matter. It meant conforming
to strict Jewish laws. >> (dramatized): This is
the law, to make a distinction between the unclean
and the clean, and between the living creature
that may be eaten, and the living creature
that may not be eaten. >> There are several issues
involved here. One is the notion
of the dietary laws, the eating restrictions
that would have obtained for eating certain kinds of food
if one was an observant Jew; also with whom one could eat. >> NARRATOR: In Paul's view,
it was now possible to allow gentiles who didn't observe all
the Jewish food laws to participate in the communal
meals of the movement. >> But because it's at a meal,
it also runs headlong into some Jewish sensitivities
about what kind of foods you can eat
and with whom you can eat. >> NARRATOR: Dietary laws were
not the only regulations that marked Jewish identity. >> (dramatized): Every male
among you shall be circumcised, and it shall be a sign
of the covenant between me and you. >> Of course, the major issues
in converting to Judaism for a gentile, for a non-Jew,
is that one must, if a male, become circumcised. And, of course,
this was an obvious distinction if one is working out
in a Greek gymnasium, where everyone was nude
to begin with. So, the ritual of circumcision
is one of those major hurdles that people would've thought
about from the Greek world. >> NARRATOR: Paul argued
that the rite of baptism could replace circumcision. This breakthrough allowed
gentiles to more freely join God's chosen people. >> We now have, Paul says,
a new map of the world. The old distinctions
between Jews and gentiles are now obliterated. They have now been supplanted
by a new and truer and more wonderful
and more beautiful map, in which we have a new Israel
that will embrace both the Jews and gentiles,
all those who now accept the new covenant
and the new faith. >> (dramatized): There is no
longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer
slave or free. There is no longer
male and female, for all of you are one
in Christ Jesus. >> And that would spark one of
the most important controversies of the first generation: do you have to become a Jew
in order to be a follower of Jesus as the messiah? >> (dramatized): I went up
to Jerusalem with Barnabas, and I laid before
the acknowledged leaders the gospel that I proclaim
among the gentiles. >> Paul says explicitly
that he went down to Jerusalem to meet with the leaders
of the church there. He calls them "the pillars." >> We have some names of people
who must've been the big shots in the movement:
Peter, James. Now, this James is not
the James who's in the list of the apostles. This James is the brother
of the Lord. >> It's somewhat surprising
that we should hear of Jesus' own family members
among this earliest group in Jerusalem precisely because,
in the Gospels, the family is usually portrayed
as being antagonistic toward his public ministry. At one point in Mark's gospel,
they think he's gone crazy, and they try to take him away
before he can do himself some harm. And they go down to ask
the question of how do we deal with these gentile converts? And they manage to get
some sort of rough agreement with the Jerusalem leadership. They agree that it's okay for
Paul to convert these gentiles and yet not to force them
to be circumcised. >> NARRATOR: As part
of the compromise, Paul agreed to collect money
from his gentile congregations to support the church
in Jerusalem. >> So when Paul goes
back to Antioch, he seems to think
that he's won a major victory in the understanding of what
the Christian message will be. Shortly after his return
to Antioch, however, Peter arrives from Jerusalem. >> One of the most vivid
episodes he sketches is in the epistle to the Galatians,
when he's talking about a face-off
he and Peter have in Antioch. >> A classic showdown
in the history of earliest Christianity. And Paul tells the story
this way: he says that in Antioch,
he encountered Peter, who was having a meal
with non-Israelite Jesus people. Peter thought
this was all right until the contingent
from Jerusalem came. >> And they tap Peter
on the shoulder, and Peter stops attending
these banquets. And then we get a great passage
of<i> esprit de l'escalier.</i> It's probably what Paul wishes
he had thought to say to Peter at the time,
but in the letter, it's presented
as what he says to Peter. And he's yelling at Peter
for not being true to the gospel and not being true to Christ
and not being true to this vision of things,
and what he's really yelling at Peter about is food. >> And the way Paul tells it is,
he says, "Well, you know,
I confronted Peter publicly. "I told him he was a hypocrite. "I told him off to his face. "I told him off
in front of everybody." End of story. Well, the story
doesn't really have an end. You know,
we'd like Paul to tell us that, after he told Peter off,
he sort of skulked back to Jerusalem with his tail
between his legs, and then Paul gave James
and his party the what-for, and then he threw them out,
or something like that. Nothing like that. Paul's completely silent. Now, this suggests to us
that Paul had indeed had a showdown in Antioch. He did face off with Peter. He didn't win. He didn't carry the day,
at least not that day. So, this suggests to us that
James' party was influential, and influential outside
its Jerusalem jurisdiction, and that perhaps James' posse
were there because they felt that their authority
should be exercised outside of the jurisdiction
of Jerusalem. >> The blow-up in Antioch over
eating with gentiles probably is the turning point
in Paul's career. Paul left and went
to western Turkey, or Asia Minor, and Greece. For the next ten years,
from 50 to roughly 60, Paul will concentrate
all of his efforts in this region
of the Aegean basin. It's probably Ephesus
and the areas immediately around Ephesus
that will be his most important base
of operations. Ephesus was
a cosmopolitan environment. The inscriptions
and the statues and the artwork and the buildings
all tell us that this is really a crossroads
of culture and religious life throughout
the Mediterranean world. >> When you read
Jesus' parables, you immediately think of
agriculture, you think of peasants,
you think of landowners, you think of farming. When you read Paul's letters,
you think of the school, you think of the philosopher,
you think of the orator, you think of the city. >> In Paul's view, at least, the city was
the natural environment, if you will, for Christianity. He has a way of coming back
to the same city. He has a way of
visiting new cities and talking about
visiting new cities, and it was cities
that he was going to, not just general
geographical areas. It's important to understand,
I think, that it was
from these cities that Christianity
ultimately was spread. >> Paul mostly travels around
in a kind of circuit of these congregations
around the Aegean rim, or he sends out his helpers
and his coworkers, people like Timothy and Titus,
to take information, or check out what's
happening over in Philippi or some place like that,
sometimes perhaps even to go and help start a new
congregation someplace over in, say, Colossae, or maybe up
toward the interior in Galatia. So, we have to imagine
the Pauline mission as a kind of beehive
of activity. >> (dramatized):
Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were
in prison with me. Greet my beloved Epaenetus,
who was the first convert in Asia for Christ. Greet Apelles, greet Ampliatus,
my beloved in the Lord. Greet Urbanus, our coworker in
Christ and my beloved Stachys... >> The traditional view
of the composition of the early
Christian communities is that they are
from the proletariat. Early Marxist interpreters
of Christianity make a great to-do with this. It's a movement
of the proletariat. It's essentially
from the lowest classes. But if you actually look
at the Book of Acts, and you look at Paul,
and you begin to collect the people who are named
or identified in some way, here you have Erastus,
the city treasurer of Corinth. >> NARRATOR: An ancient
inscription with the name of Paul's follower Erastus
can still be seen in the ruins of Corinth. >> You have Gaius of Corinth,
whose home is big enough to let him be
not only Paul's host, but the host to all
of the churches of Corinth. All of the little household
communities can meet in his house at one time. You have Stephanos
and his household who have been host
to the community. You have Lydia in Philippi,
who is the seller of purple goods,
a luxury fabric. You have Prisca and Aquilla,
and we wonder why the woman is usually mentioned
before her husband. She must be a woman
of some consequence. You begin to get
the impression that you have quite a variety
of different social levels represented in these
early Christian communities. Not people
at the absolutely top level. You have, with the exception
possibly of Erastus, no one
from the aristocratic orders; no one who would be
a member of the city council. You have no agricultural slaves
who are at the bottom of the hierarchy. But in the rest of the social
pyramid, everything in between, you seem to have representatives
in these early Christian groups. So we begin to get a picture
of upwardly mobile people, to use a modern anachronistic
way of describing them-- people who have mixed status,
who probably will be viewed by the aristocracy outside
as nouveau riche; not people who
don't quite belong, but in their own eyes
perhaps deserve more status than they are getting
from the larger society, and have found within this
community a role of leadership and a role which is recognized. >> The worship of an early
Christian house church probably centered
around the dinner table. The term "communion"
actually comes from this experience
of the dining fellowship. We also know that all other
aspects of worship that we think of as going
with early Christian practice probably happened
around the dinner table as well. Paul refers to
one person having a song and another person
bringing a prayer. Everyone is contributing
to the banquet-- whether it's
in the form of food or in the form
of their piety and worship. >> Throughout the New Testament,
particularly in Paul's letters and the Book of Acts,
we find out that women owned the houses in which
the early Christians met. This, I think, is significant
because I don't think the women who owned the houses were simply
providing coffee and cookies, in effect,
for the Christian community. I think that this probably gave
them some avenue to power in actual roles in the church. >> Paul speaks of women as his
fellow evangelists and teachers and patrons and friends,
as he does of men. But I don't see a picture
of a golden age of egalitarianism back there. I see a new, unformed, diverse,
and threatened movement which allowed
a lot more fluidity for women in certain roles--
for a while-- in some places
and not in others. (singing) >> NARRATOR: Paul's way of
building a community was just one
of the many interpretations of the Jesus movement. He had to fight
a running battle to keep his fledgling congregations
from falling under the influence
of rival preachers. >> (dramatized):
You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? >> His relationship
with these folks is not entirely unproblematic. For one thing,
he's got to manage a long distance relationship-- and we all know
how difficult that is-- and he has to do this
by letter. >> In his letters, he's often recapitulating
for the recipients fights he's had prior
to the fights he's having currently with his congregation. >> The early Christians did have
turf wars over who had it right, and you see this
from the very beginning. The apostle Paul,
his opponents in Galatia, who say:
"Wait a minute. "If you're really going
to be a<i> real</i> Christian, "first you have to be
a real Jew, "and that means you have
to be circumcised, "and you have to keep certain
regulations out of the Torah." So Paul has not got it right. Paul has to say,
"No, you don't understand how radically new this thing is
which God is doing here." >> NARRATOR: Paul preached
the imminent arrival of God's kingdom on earth,
and salvation for those converted to Jesus. >> (dramatized):
You know what time it is, how it is now the moment
for you to wake from sleep. Salvation is nearer to us now
than when we became believers. >> It's clear that
one of the concerns that keeps showing up
throughout this period of Paul's ministry is, "When is this kingdom
going to arrive? "What's going to happen? "How soon?" >> They are still,
25 years after the fact, anticipating
the imminent return of Christ, and the imminent arrival
of the kingdom. And it's this kind of, you know, "Don't slow me down
with the facts" impatience and energy
that we get in Paul's letters. >> Paul's very first letter--
the earliest single writing that we have in the New
Testament-- is I Thessalonians. And already in I Thessalonians,
Paul is having to console them when people are starting to die
within the congregation and the kingdom hasn't
arrived yet. >> NARRATOR: Paul believed
the earthly world order was about to change,
that time was running out, and the end was at hand. >> Clearly, the message
about the coming end time was the part
that would've been threatening to a Roman official,
and would've been threatening to any native population
that had vested some authority in Roman officialdom. >> NARRATOR: Paul attacked those
who preferred peace and security to the coming Kingdom of God. >> (dramatized): When they say,
"There is peace and security," then sudden destruction
will come upon them. >> Scholars have wondered who
this people is who are saying "peace and security." Some interpreters think that it's the first
lapsed Christians, and they're no longer serious
about the end time coming immediately. I tend to think, though,
that it refers to those who are supportive of the imperial rule,
the peace and security of Augustan
and imperial governance. Paul is saying:
"Those who are on the side "of Augustus
will reach their end first. "Divine wrath
will come upon them first." So, Paul is very clearly drawing
here a remarkable antithesis between the rule of the emperor
on the one hand, and the rule of God--
the Kingdom of God-- on the other hand. >> NARRATOR: Apocalyptic
expectations were fueling political turmoil
throughout Judea. Jewish resistance to Roman rule
was growing daily. >> The situation in Jerusalem
was becoming increasingly tense through the mid-60s also. Josephus tells us that there was
growing tension over the last few governors
of the countryside. He tells us that they were
pretty abusive and corrupt administrators,
robbing the people, as it were, for the, in order to
line their own pockets. Josephus also tells us that
there's another source of growing tension
in the country at this time, because there's
an increasing number of bandit and rebel types
coming out of the woodwork in the country. And so between growing banditry,
the rise of the zealot movement, a politically active
insurgency movement, and then the corruption
of the administration, the situation
in Jerusalem is becoming very, very tense indeed. >> NARRATOR: In the year 60
of the Common Era, after a decade building
communities in the Greek east, Paul decided that
his work there was done. >> (dramatized): Now, with no
further place for me in these regions,
I am going to Jerusalem in a ministry to the saints. >> Paul wants to fulfill
the promise that he had made to Peter and James back
in the Jerusalem conference. For these ten years that
he's been in the Aegean, he's had his congregations
collecting monies together to take back to Jerusalem. Now we find him
gathering all that up, each congregation sending
an emissary with their part
of the contribution, and they're all going
as an entourage to lay it at the feet
of James in Jerusalem. >> (dramatized): I know
that when I come to you, I will come in the fullness
of the blessing of Christ. >> What seems to
have happened is, when he went back to Jerusalem
with the contribution, he was arrested
as some sort of rabble-rouser. >> NARRATOR: According to
the Book of Acts, Paul was taken to Rome
to stand trial before the emperor. Within a short span of time,
the leading figures of the early Jesus movement were wiped out. >> The tradition holds
that Peter and Paul both died in about the year 64. About the same time,
Josephus tells us that James, the brother of Jesus,
at Jerusalem, has also been killed,
all in about the same two- or three-year period. With the passing
of this first generation, the expectation that all
of those coming events must be close at hand
probably was a concern for a lot of people. >> NARRATOR: In the year 66
of the Common Era, Jewish resistance broke out
into open conflict against Rome. The rebels seized Jerusalem. The first Jewish revolt
had begun. >> (dramatized):
Truly, the battle is thine! Their bodies are crushed
by the might of thy hand, and there is no man
to bury them. >> NARRATOR: It seemed
that the fiery predictions of the Essenes
were about to come true. >> Most people in the first
revolt really thought it was the apocalyptic event. It was the coming
of a new kingdom on earth. Several of the leaders within
the revolt really claimed to have messianic identity
or prophetic identity. >> (dramatized): They shall be
a flaming torch in the straws to consume ungodliness. >> NARRATOR: True to their
beliefs, the Essenes marched out to fight the Romans,
and were annihilated. >> Even many Christians thought
that the war was the actual
apocalyptic event. >> (dramatized): Valiant
warriors of the angelic host are among our numbered men,
and the hero of war is with our congregation. >> NARRATOR: A prisoner of war
who defected to the Roman side, the Jewish historian Josephus
personally witnessed the sack of Jerusalem. >> Josephus describes walking
around the walls of Jerusalem and pleading with people
on the inside to give up rather than go through
the suffering and agony that would come
from a long, protracted siege. For two years then,
Jerusalem was under siege. Starvation, disease, murder
were the order of the day. The loss of life
must have been catastrophic to the Jewish population
as a whole. By the month of August
in the year 70, the fate of Jerusalem
was a foregone conclusion. The Roman armies were massed. They were ready
to break through. Everyone knew it. It was just a matter of when,
but they were going to fight to the death,
and many of them did die. So, on that fateful morning
when they broke through, Josephus describes the events of them breaking
through the walls, the Roman soldiers running
through the streets, going into every house. >> (dramatized): Pouring
into the alleys, sword in hand, they massacred indiscriminately
all whom they met, and burned the houses of all
who had taken refuge within, running everyone through
who fell in their way. They clogged the alleys
with corpses, and drowned
the whole city in blood. The dead bodies of natives
and aliens, of priests and laity,
were mingled in a mass, and the blood of all manner
of corpses formed pools in the courts of God. >> It's a pretty awful
slaughter, and we have lots
of evidence of it now, between the artifacts
that one finds of the first revolt that are
scattered throughout this layer of the archaeological record--
arrowheads, spears, other kinds of indications
of pretty serious hand-to-hand combat
in all parts of the city. >> (dramatized): Toward evening,
they ceased the slaughter. But as night fell,
the fire gained the mastery, and the dawn broke in flames
upon Jerusalem. >> One of the most recent
and poignant examples of this comes from the archaeology,
something called "the burnt house,"
which actually shows us one of the houses that apparently
was burned during this. All of the furniture
and the implements are here in place,
with a layer of ash and residue of the burning
still quite clear. (flames crackling) >> (dramatized): The Romans
set the temple on fire. All that was left
was the platform wall that once supported
the symbol of the center of the nation of Israel. >> NARRATOR: Roman troops
sacked the temple and carried off
the sacred symbols of Judaism. >> Jerusalem, the sacred city; the temple, the center of piety
and identity is gone. It's very important
that we remember that up to and through
the first revolt, Christians are still
part of Judaism. And the revolt and its aftermath
is just the beginning of a split,
as each group tries to rethink its earlier traditions
in the light of the failure of the first revolt. We have to imagine
the refugees fleeing from the burning ruins
of Jerusalem. And as they looked back
at the smoke rising against the horizon,
they might have remembered the words of the psalm
from the first destruction back in the time
of the Babylonian exile: "By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept "when we remembered Zion." >> NARRATOR: Next time... >> (dramatized): The Romans
expected to make an assault upon the fortress... >> NARRATOR: Masada. >> (dramatized):
...which they did. >> NARRATOR: The end
of Jewish resistance to Rome. >> The failure of the first
revolt really was a traumatic event for everyone
living in the Jewish homeland-- Jews and Christians alike. As a result,
they had to start rethinking their own assumptions. >> NARRATOR: And the beginning
of the Gospels. >> (dramatized): I am
the light of the world. He who follows me
will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. >> The Gospels are very
peculiar types of literature. They're not biographies. They're a kind of
religious advertisement. What they do is
proclaim their individual
author's interpretation of the Christian message. >> NARRATOR: Telling and
retelling stories about Jesus. >> (dramatized): "Why are you
afraid, have you no faith?" And they were filled with awe,
and they said to one another, "Who is this, then, that
the wind and sea obey him?" >> NARRATOR: And it is the story
of the broken relationship between Jews and Christians. >> (dramatized): But
the unbelieving Jews stirred up the gentiles and poisoned their
minds against the brothers. >> Luke is reflecting
the development of the Christian movement more
away from the Jewish roots. >> NARRATOR: And the conflict
between the Roman empire and the Kingdom of God. >> Christians could be arrested
simply because they bore the name<i> Christianus,</i>
Christian. That was enough,
under Roman convention, to convict one
of a capital crime. >> NARRATOR: Next time on "From Jesus to Christ:
The First Christians" on<i> Frontline.</i> >><i> Frontline's</i> "From Jesus to
Christ: The First Christians" is available on DVD. To order, visit shoppbs.org
or call<i> 1-800-PLAY-PBS.</i>
Link to part 2 which follows the story of the first attempts to write the life of Jesus in the Gospels, and chronicles how the Christian movement would face new challenges both internal and external.
edit: Note that the original documentary was broadcast in 1998 but was published here again by the channel in 2020.