NT History - The book of Acts - Peter & Paul
Vern Peterman · Aug 22, 2004
Bible Backgrounds, No. 08
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262311375172

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

We're looking at New Testament history, looking specifically at the book of Acts this morning. Good morning! Make sure you get a handout over there, okay? So we're looking at the book of Acts. Peter and Paul are, of course, the focus of Acts. Before we jump into that, a couple things. One is just some books to make you aware of.

This is a book, Chronological Aspects of the Life of Christ, and it's one that's free to take a look at. It's a little technical, but not incomprehensible. So you might want to look at that. And this has got some charts here that I find are handy, and I refer to this quite a bit. So be aware of that.

Another one that's more relevant to what we're looking at here, Paul on Trial. This is a book. This guy is an attorney, Christian attorney, and he's amassed a bunch of evidence we'll take a look at briefly in a bit. He seems to feel, and I think he's made his case pretty well, that the Book of Acts is Luke's legal submittal on behalf of Paul. Now, here's the difference that that makes.

It means that everything in it has to be detailed and factual. Which also goes to underscore the historicity of the Book of Acts. And lastly, evidence in Paul's journeys. And this is particularly in the last half of Acts, obviously. Alright, some of you can take a look at when you have a chance there. We looked last time at the life of Christ. And this time I'll be looking at the Book of Acts.

And it focuses on the first part on Peter. And interestingly, you get to a certain place in the Book of Acts and Peter, his name just drops off. Real interesting. His name just drops off. And we see Paul becoming increasingly dominant in the book. So here's the Book of Acts. It starts in Jerusalem. and takes us at the very last chapters to Rome. So he's going between the two. Obviously a lot of things in between, but locationally, that's where the Book of Acts takes us.

For your appendix handout, we have the chronology of the New Testament Bible books. This is kind of the section that we're talking about from just before Pentecost, or about the time of Pentecost, up until Paul ends up in Rome in the early 60s, probably about 61 AD. That time frame. So the Book of Acts, if we look at this book, it's about 30 years of history.

Now, let's ask an important question. Why the Book of Acts? Why is it of any value to us? We see the transition from Israel to the new creation, to the church. What are some questions you'd be puzzled by if you went, okay, I just finished reading the book of John, and now the next book I read is Romans. What am I going to be puzzled by? All of Romans, yeah. Romans is written by whom?

Who's he? Who on earth is this guy Paul? Is this thing disconnected? What's the matter here? The book of Acts is like a backbone. Everything else builds off of that. So it answers a lot of questions about how did we get here? It covers a period of transition.

It's interesting, we're not used to thinking of it. Remember I passed out this chart previously that showed Here's how the law was introduced, and then here's how the church was introduced. And it's a report on the transition period. Just like the law wasn't introduced overnight, neither was the church begun and introduced in an overnight fashion. Both of those took time. And so what you're seeing is a transition period.

And that's key. We'll take a look at that in a minute. One thing to note, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are listed together for the sake of simplicity, but in fact their writing is spread out, and you'll see from the dates on there, just so you're aware of that. I've also given you this, Josiah put this together, and also given you this in color in the back of your section for this week. We won't be referring to it, but you might find it handy in your own study, and the fact that it's nice and color-coded, All that may be real helpful. Lots of nice detail.

The thing that we'll be looking at, obviously, is language, history, and culture. We're going to be putting those things together. That's why we're studying. We want to know those three things so that we know what the Bible means. We know what God's Word is saying by learning about the language. What does the language say? What does the history tell us? And what does the culture tell us? And the Acts is no exception. All right.

Acts was written by Dr. Luke. He was a Greek medical doctor. He's not Jewish. If you look at the Bible, a vast majority of the books are Jewish, right? Luke was a Greek medical doctor. Not certain, but some evidence points to that he was trained in Philippi.

And we also brought up the fact that it appears from the evidence that John Malkus brought together that it was Luke's legal submittal That's one of the reasons why you see, you know, almost excellent Theophilus as the address. That's the way you would address a Roman legal bureaucrat.

Okay? Almost excellent. The other thing is we have no other information on Theophilus. But what you find, remember the last book of, last chapters of the book of Acts have a lot on Paul's legal proceedings before, speaking before different, you know, courts and whatnot. And that's why. Okay.

Acts is a transition. We brought that out before, and it's really important to look at that. The law includes a description of its transition. This is the Church's transition. Now, why is it important to recognize a transition? Why does that matter to us? Yeah, we know we are with respect to the transition. Is the transition the norm for the rest of the period. No. Childhood is a transition, isn't it? It isn't the norm for the rest of the time. We're not changing diapers on and on and on for years, at least not typically.

Now, if we look at here, the initial actions take place in and around Jerusalem. We find that story, and up until the very beginning of chapter 8, that's basically what you see. It's largely around Jerusalem. That's the picture. Why do you think it all starts around Jerusalem? Why is there this tendency to orient everything around Jerusalem?

Yeah, for the Jews, hey, here's where the temple is, and where do the Christians gather? They get gathered around the temple, yeah. And so the whole mindset was, you know, here's a nice place to gather. They had public porches that were all the way around the perimeter, large public porches. You could have substantial gatherings around there. And they were looked at as sort of just sort of a sect of the Jews. And they didn't have any real reason to go anywhere else yet. Yet. Okay.

What we see, though, in Acts 1.8, you receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you should be my witnesses both in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria, even to the remotest part of the earth, you are going to go somewhere else.

But initially, that's not what happened. The better part of a decade was spent with the church not understanding that the Gentiles were to be a part of the picture. Isn't that amazing? If we were to give some kind of a comparison, it would be like the church started in the middle 90s, and we just now got the idea. Isn't that something? Go on for the better part of a decade, and then, oh, suddenly get the realization. Oh, this is a whole lot bigger and different than we thought. So this was really a real eye-opening thing for them to come across here.

Acts 2, we point out, goes from Jerusalem. And in Acts 2, what I'm looking at here, these squares or rectangles that I'm going to be clicking on, these are the places that the Jews came from for Acts 2. So one of the things that happened in Acts 2 was they didn't just get believers right around Jerusalem. They got them for all over the place. Including Parthia. You see that? Showing up in different places. These are the different names that are mentioned. So anyway, lots of areas spread around. Lots of areas spread around.

So what happened is these people didn't stay in Jerusalem that were from these other areas because they're visiting, right? What are they going to do? They're going to go back. So initially, but what was interesting is while it spread to all these places, it still was not understood that the Gentiles were part of the picture. So what did they do? They went back to the Jews with this.

Real interesting. Okay. From Acts 8-4 to 8-40, we find most of the text focusing on Philip, and you see him evangelizing kind of friend groups, but not necessarily really getting the idea of going to the Gentiles yet. He talked to one fellow who was a court official in a Gentile country, but the guy appeared to be kind of a Gentile convert to Judaism. He went up to the Samaritans. He went up to the Samaritans, and so there was an introduction there. He went also over to Caesarea, over on the coast, which is a Roman city, but still, it's still French. All right.

Acts 9-1 begins the chapter on the conversion of Paul. He's the church's archenemy, excuse me, conversion of Saul, later to become Paul. This is Straight Street in Damascus, by the way, where Paul was told that he could be found, Ananias. Can you imagine Ananias? All right, you're supposed to go and see this guy, Saul. Saul! You know?

Paul later on in his court testimony in Acts says that I persecuted the church to death. He wasn't out to just give them a hard time. He wanted them dead. So here's Ananias giving this message. You go find this guy. You'll find him on Straight Street. There's the street where he found him on. So he's gone from Jerusalem up to Damascus and as he's approaching Damascus the Lord confronts him.

Then what we see Acts 9.32 through 10.48 brings Peter to preach the gospel.

This is Caesarea This is an excavation at Caesarea. It brought the first Gentiles into the church. Caesarea was a Roman military installation. Three thousand Roman soldiers stationed there. Right along the coast. And so that's where there was a centurion, a Roman centurion. The centurion, of course, was in charge of a hundred Roman soldiers.

And he wanted to know the gospel. And the Lord had to really you know, work with Peter to convince Peter that you ought to even go talk to them. So, now, Peter has spent time with these Gentiles and now he's going back to the church in Jerusalem and they're saying, hey, this is great, right?

No. He's got some real explaining to do because this is like not in the picture. You're doing what? This is shocking stuff. So anyway, he goes back to Jerusalem and he has to explain to them that what happened when he presented the gospel to the Gentiles was just like what happened back in the Acts chapter 2 Pentecost experience. He says, what happened to the Gentiles is like what happened to us at the beginning. That's the way he tells them. And they catch on, but at first he's on the hot seat until they understand what's happening. You've got a chart like this.

It's one that I also distributed in the church history class, but a number of you may not have had that. But even so, it's good to have. It gives you a kind of a range or a spectrum of reactions of Jews to the gospel. One of the things that's interesting is you've got Saul on the far end as the extreme anti-reaction to the gospel, and that red line means here's that guy turns into Paul who is way at the other end of the spectrum. Isn't that interesting? So, anyway, that's something for you to take a look at as you find time. What we're looking at here is we've got Jerusalem.

Now, the church moves up to Antioch. Now we're getting outside of Israel directly and we're getting among Gentiles. Antioch The next move, Antioch, was the church where the believers were first called Christians. It's also, by the way, we brought up in the Ephesians-Colossians study, it's the first contact on the Mediterranean coast from the spice road that comes in from the east, from China and from India.

So it's real interesting. This is a very international city. It's also a Roman colony. So the Roman government established a colony there. So it's a crossroads of a lot of things. It's from there, we see Paul brought on to the scene here. It's from there we start seeing some other things happen. Now, we get into Acts, chapter 12, and you see the martyrdom of James. Who is James? There's a few James in the Bible, so we better clarify who this is. Who's James?

Which one? Which one is killed? the disciple and and which one is he because there's more than one James brother John remember it was James and and John who are the sons of Zebedee and the mother comes up and says hey this guy you know these two I'd like to have them sit either side of you on the kingdom and no it's instead his honor to be the first apostle to be martyred martyred under the reign of Herod. Oh, we've got one of the Herods. Which one is it? Under the reign of Herod. Herod dies shortly thereafter.

And that's also reported in Acts. Here's your Herod chart. If you want to refer to this, that's fine. Otherwise, just make sure that you're aware it's there. Herod the Great, the one that ordered the babies killed, and the early story in the Gospels is at the top. What you see there, this is a grandson who is now stepping into this role. And 37 to 44 AD, his death is reported in Acts 12. Now, that would be simple, except that remember how Craig introduced the idea that this is a family where you could be your own grandpa?

Pretty close. Here's Herod Agrippa, and it would be nice and simple if he died there, but let's kind of step our way through it. Herod Agrippa, down here, ends up taking over as king. And that's not all. Then you have Bernice, who is the wife of the wife. Well, she was married to her uncle. And then that didn't work out. So she switched and married her brother. And so anyway, and then we're not done, we still got Drusilla, who was the wife of wife of Roman Governor Felix that we read about later on the Book of Acts.

So boy, this thing just the heritage just gets sewn into this thing horrifically. That's why you've got to keep the chart handy, because if you hear the name Herod, you don't know who you're talking about until you check it out. So anyway, that chart should be real helpful to you.

Now, Paul takes off on his first missionary journey, and we see him going through, in Acts chapters 13 and 14, he makes a fairly tight loop. Notice that he starts off from Antioch, and as he starts off from Antioch, that's the sending church. And that's something interesting, by the way. There seems to be a pattern of ascending church, and we see that in each one of his missionary journeys.

And where does he take off first? He heads for Cyprus. Lands on one end, travels across it, takes off on the other, and then goes through what we now call southern Turkey. And what does he do? He makes a loop. Goes into Turkey, and the part that he went into in the middle of Turkey there are a couple of them Roman colonies again. So notice he heads for the Roman colonies, starting from Antioch, a Roman colony, and he goes into the middle there, which is a Roman colony.

And what does he do? He loops back, and as he loops back, he goes and appoints elders in each one of the churches. A key thing. Appoints elders in each one of the churches. Elders, plural, in each church, singular. And then he heads back to Antioch. That's the first missionary journey, a fairly short trip by length that takes up chapters 13 and 14 of Acts. All right, now, then we've got this issue coming up because, all right, we've just recently brought the Gentiles in.

What do we do with the law? What have we been studying in Ephesians? Christ died to put the law out of commission. So now, one of the questions is what are we going to do? Now we've got these Gentiles and we've been We've been kind of living, as if the law was okay, and now we're finding that it's a problem. So this council in Jerusalem, Acts chapter 15, the apostles are getting together and they're saying, we're not going to put these believers under the law. We're not going to do that. So that's the next step in here.

Paul starts his second missionary journey after that, and now he starts making a bigger loop. Where does he start from this time? Jerusalem. He starts from Jerusalem and heads north, goes through Antioch, and then instead of doing this heading for Cyprus thing, he curls around and goes through Tarsus. Here's something real interesting. Where's Paul from? Do you see him making a big missionary effort in Tarsus? Isn't that interesting?

The Lord didn't send him exactly where he was from and would have felt like, hey, I'm on home turf. He went through there, but it just seems like he traveled through. He heads up there into some of the, initially, some of the same churches that he had established before. He's kind of saying, how you doing? Okay, so now he's having gone through once, now looping back, and now going through a third visit to those churches.

And as he does so, he picks up Timothy. of Lystra, except Timothy whom we find all the way to the end of Paul's writings. Second Timothy was Paul's last letter. Timothy is from here on out involved. You have in the back of your package a legal size sheet that Nancy has very kindly folded over a couple of different times so that it doesn't stick out of your binder like a sore thumb.

And what that is intended to do is you can look up the name of any one of the key players through the New Testament particularly those who are believers, and Timothy is an example, and see where does the guy show up? And it's an easy way to see how is the Lord growing people? How does the Lord work in people's lives? So anyway, you've got a tool there that hopefully will be helpful.

But Timothy gets picked up here in Lystra, and then they move on to Troas. That's one we've got a picture of here off to the lower right. And from there, Initially, Paul was going to go where? Where was he going to go heading from Troas, from that area? He was going to head off to the east, kind of to the east-northeast, and head off that direction.

This is the one instance. It's really curious. Some Christians are inclined to get real carried away with lots of special revelations and stuff like that. What you see in the book of Acts is exceedingly rare that God says, do this, not that, in terms of some specific action that's not moral by itself.

So, instead of heading up where they were going to, heading east and staying on this large peninsula that we now call Turkey, the Lord says, nope, I want you to head over to Macedonia. Then they went left from Troas and headed over and ended up at Philippi. So Philippi was the first church on the European continent and was established because the Lord said, I want you to go here, not there.

So then he goes through Philippi, heads down the peninsula and goes through where they're having the Olympics now. and heads down through Athens and Corinth, and then makes a loop back that includes Ephesus. That loop back through Ephesus was more than two years long. He stayed more than two years in Ephesus, just staying there. And he says in Acts 20, his last meeting with the elders in Ephesus, he says, I stayed with you and taught you the whole counsel of God, day and night.

And then he comes back, loops back, and we have roads there, one of the islands, and then loops back and heads back to Israel again. Now, Paul takes off on his third missionary journey, and there, where does he start off from? Antioch again. And he's heading through Tarsus again.

Again, what we see is he goes through there, No description of spending any significant time there, or even establishing a church there. Real curious. Well, it's interesting. It doesn't explain why, but it may be why. Yeah, it may be, hey, you're going to light the forest on fire. Yeah, he just didn't go there. It doesn't explain, but that may well be what happened. He heads up through, guess where? Same place. He's checking on those churches again. What's going on with these churches? He's heading up in that same territory again.

Then he heads through Ephesus, north of Colossae and Laodicea, Hierapolis. So he doesn't go through there. There's a Roman road that heads to the north of there. It seems, as far as we can tell, that he didn't go there. But he did go to Ephesus there. And it was the last time in Ephesus, it wasn't the last time seeing the elders from Ephesus. So then what does he do?

He goes up to Troas again and then heads back through Philippi, makes this loop, down through Athens and Corinth, loops back, and then he makes a run along the coast and he meets the elders from Ephesus in Miletus, which is kind of the town to the south. be like being at Castle Rock and asking the elders from Denver to head down there and see him. And meets with them there. Acts 20 is the longest discourse in Acts between one Christian and another. And he talks to the elders at Ephesus, Acts 20. Some interesting things to point out.

We never find the name, in fact this is true of any And all the churches, we don't know the name of any elder in any of the churches by name, any of them, except for those, a few of them in the church at Jerusalem. Aside from that, no elders anywhere, anonymous. None of them are ever given a title. And when he talks to the elders at Ephesus, he never you know, talks to specifically the pastor or anything of that sort.

It's interesting what our culture has done, and we've shifted it in great many churches, but the picture they have in scripture is multiple elders, but they're anonymous. The focus is upon Jesus Christ, and no title is given to any of them. By the way, the pastor as a noun given to pastors that have that gift is only given once in the whole New Testament. and not as a title, just simply as an office, as a role for them to play. Okay. Now, Paul's journey to Rome.

What happened? How did he end up doing this? When he was in Jerusalem, at the end of this prior journey, he gets in there and gets in trouble. They had thought that he had violated the rule of don't bring a Gentile into the where Gentiles are not supposed to go past. He ended up having, from that, because he ended up appealing on the basis of his Roman citizenship, he ended up having to stand before different councils, including the Sanhedrin, and then before various Roman officials, because now he's going to have to make this appeal to Caesar. But the Romans did not have an expeditious way of doing that, so he's going to spend a couple of years in the prison Caesarea on the coast, which is that Roman colony, that Roman military establishment. When Paul shows up before the Sanhedrin, he knows how to light their fuse. What does he do?

Remember, there are Sadducees and Pharisees, right? More Pharisees, because Sadducees are a minority. There are several points of difference between the Sadducees and the Pharisees, but one of the biggest ones is the Pharisees believed in, after this life, there's a resurrection. The Sadducees, when this life is done, we're all done. No resurrection.

So what does Paul do? He gets up to stand before them and he says, I'm here today because I believe in the resurrection. The meeting explodes. He knew exactly what he was doing. Gamaliel, one of the guys that are there, we don't know that he was still alive by then. but one of the guys that had been in the Sanhedrin was his tutor, and he was not ignorant of what was going on. He knew how to light the fuse, and he did.

So, at any rate, he goes through a series of legal appeals, and that's kind of the first at the front end there. But he goes through these accounts, and you read the account of the shipwreck, and through the rest of the Book of Acts, a great deal of legal appeal before different courts. Felix is one that we mentioned here. And Felix is married to one of the Herod family, right? So anyway, it's real interesting. That's why you see a lot of the legal appeal towards the end.

I think this fellow John Mock is on to something, that there's something going on here besides just telling the story, that there's a legal reason for including all the details of, you know, Paul said this and Felix said that, and that sort of thing. They end up landing at Puteoli, which is kind of a coastal port entry, and they go on the Apian Way to Rome. The Apian Way is still there. You can still see it. So anyway, here's Peter and Paul. Peter drops off the scene after Acts chapter 15. Does he drop out of the New Testament? No, where else do we find Peter showing up outside of the book of Acts after Acts 15? Where else do we see him?

Pardon? First and second, Peter. Good. Alright. So there's a couple of places. What's that? Galatians. Okay. Paul mentions him. And what's the mention, by the way? There's a couple of different things. Pardon? Rebuking him. Isn't that interesting? Rebuking Peter. Why? What was the problem? Yeah, see here's Peter had been the one to introduce the gospel to Gentiles, but when he got together with the other Jews, it was kind of like, you know, they're Jewish Christians, but the peer pressure was too much for him, and he started separating himself from the Gentiles. And Paul said, whoop, we got a problem, you know, and dealt with it. It was also a matter of Paul just talking to Peter and agreeing with him as well.

So there's that mention. Also, when Paul writes to the church at Corinth, he mentions Peter as well. Something to bring up, just as you're going through it, Peter has three names. What are they? There's Peter, Cephas, and by the way, the Greek is Kephas. So we've Anglicized it. But Peter, Cephas, and one other, Simon. So you hear them called Simon, Simon, Peter. Any three of those, you're still talking about the same guy.

Now, so here's Paul, he ends up in Rome, Acts 28. From there, Paul's history, it's important to note, Paul's history becomes a little speculative because we don't have the sequence of, you know, here's exactly what happened. And so what happens after that is a bit, it's pieced together from clues we have from the New Testament as well as extra biblical writings, writings outside the New Testament. These are called Paul's release journeys. He talks about, for example, wanting to go to Spain. I think that's in the Book of Romans. These are kind of based on some speculations.

The accounts that we have point to Paul and Peter both ending up in Rome. Peter is more of a maybe, but nonetheless ending up in Rome and both losing their lives there. As you get to the end here, we've got We've got these books here that are written, and notice that there are some, of course, written after. So 1 and 2 Peter, for example, have been written after the time of the end of the book of Acts. And other books written as well, including 2 Timothy, Paul's last letter. The indications we have are that Paul eventually ended up in Rome again, only this time it was his last time, and was beheaded.

Peter, extra-biblical account again here, and the reliability is not absolutely accepted by everyone, but that he was crucified upside down. That he refused to be crucified as his Lord and said, no, I don't deserve that. Crucify me upside down instead. So next we'll be going into the last part of the New Testament period, including up to the time of Revelation.

Here's Rome, where Peter and Paul are spending the last of their days, and again, even Peter's being there is somewhat open to question. This is the Mamertine prison in Rome, the inside, and this is where it's believed, and this is again an extra-biblical account, Paul spent his last hours.

What they would do, you see the entrance? They'd just drop you in. Open up the hole, drop you in, boom! And they didn't care if you broke your legs or smashed your head or anything, because you're going to get killed in a few minutes anyway. So that's just kind of a holding tank until they do you in. So anyway, that is believed to, again not biblical evidence, but just piecing together things, to be Paul's last home. This is something you also have in your package. It's a chart there that shows kind of the record of where Peter was.

Contrary to what the Catholic Church teaches, there's no sound evidence that Peter was ever a bishop in Rome. He spent too much time in Jerusalem for one thing. Paul wrote to the church at Rome and never mentions Peter. That would have been rather bizarre. He wrote at least four letters from Rome and never mentions Peter in any of those letters. So it's just the whole thing seems very puzzling if Peter was ever a bishop in Rome to have not mentioned this guy, Peter, when he mentions him in other letters.

The information there, you can take a look at it at your leisure. We'll be looking at New Testament history, the life and times of John, including answering some questions about, whoops, excuse me, malfunction here. I have no idea why that happened. including what happened to all the apostles. Where'd they go? And it's real interesting. By the way, we don't have the record in the Bible about what happened to all the apostles, only some of them. Why does it matter? Why does it matter what happened to all the apostles? Well, it mattered to me personally.

Yes, in other words if these guys were just faking it if they let's let's say let's let's paint a hypothetical scenario where they said Hey, let's get together here and talk this thing out. And I'll tell you what, you say this, and I'll say that. And we'll go on and make a really good story and everybody will believe us and we'll be famous and all that. Now, one of the testing points, is that what they did, is are you willing to die for this phony story?

And Craig's point is quite valid, that what we find is every indication is that these guys, John was the only exception, and that's by any evidence we have, possibly a miracle. All of them pulled the gospel to the point of losing their lives. One of the accounts we have of Matthew is he was screaming the gospel as they drove wooden stakes through him. These guys, there is exceeding value in knowing what they did and that to the point of death they would say, I saw Jesus Christ risen from the dead.

I believe it, do you? That is exceedingly valuable. The other point, and it's almost less dramatic but equally as valid, is did they get what Jesus told them? When he said to preach peace, did they get it? Where did they take it? When Jesus said, you shall be my witnesses, Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, the end of the earth, Did they go to the ends of the earth? Did they get it? Did they understand?

And so we'll take a look at that. Something else. I want to answer a couple of questions since we have some time. Last week there were some questions people asked me either in the time together or separately. And I want to make sure we try to get to those.

This is a typical peasant home in New Testament times. And so there'd be this like one room house. I mentioned Jesus was in Nazareth. raised in a peasant's home and probably a one-room house like this and that oftentimes if his father being a carpenter would just operate around the house and if the weather was bad particularly just do the work in the house, which wasn't all that big. There would be things to kind of prepare meals and they'd store things like food preparation things and wood and supplies like that just around the house. if they had any room for it at all. On the top would be not only a place to just kind of spend an evening time, but also food drying and things of that sort. Sometimes they had racks of things for drying food so you could save it up.

Typically, stairs on the outside. The Mosaic Law, Deuteronomy 22-8, required that they put a parapet around the outside. You shall not build a house and not have a parapet because people go up there and you go on falling off and just stumbling off the side. A parapet, and that's what that little wall is on the outside, was required by the Mosaic Law. Not just, hey, it's a good idea, you will do it. So a good Jewish peasant home would include that. It would be common, and it doesn't show it in this picture, it would be common for people walking by to just kind of stick their head in the door.

If you were eating, they'd watch you eat. That was considered normal, you know. Even polite practice, you can watch eat. Hey, what did you eat? That looks pretty good. Hey, can I have some? Oh yeah, sure, you know. And food preparation, sometimes you see that little area under the stairs. People come by and everybody share that. You know, can I taste it? Yeah, that's pretty good. That's great. Hey, John, come over here and taste this stuff. This is good, see.

I mean, that would be fairly normal. To us, that would just be appalling, you know. But to them, that would be fairly normal stuff. Another reason why sitting down in chairs, you know at a formal table To us that would be first the normal way to do it to them that that wasn't the way to do it you know when you're standing you're having to be sitting down that would be just fine and Forks knives and spoons weren't the norm either Okay another there was a question about Mary and Joseph and how long after would would Jesus have been presented?

I didn't have the answer off the top of my head Leviticus 12 2 through 8 gives the information on the baby shall be circumcised if it's a male on the 8th day. After 33 days the woman is to present herself at the temple for purification if it's a male. Twice that if it's a female. How about that? So the answer to the question is about 33 days after then would mark the time that she would present herself at the temple. which Bethlehem is about seven miles from the temple and there's a main road going so they would have walked that seven miles and presented you know Christ there perhaps stayed with some company at least overnight and then you know come back after the birth would be the the way to clock it yeah and so anyway you can check that out yourself And that's it.

Now, any other questions? Remember, I love questions. Yeah. Right. Yes, yes. In other words, here's Luke writing to the same guy. And he's continuing on, because he says, in my prior account, And he refers to the prior account in Acts. So it's a continuation. Here's the middle part one, part two. And basically, think about this. Christianity, which we look at the Gospels and all that as the norm.

Here's Theophilus, who's a Roman legal official. And by the way, some of those legal officials were actually slaves owned by the empire. So here's Theophilus, and he's reviewing all these legal cases. He doesn't know straight up about what Christianity is about.

How did this whole thing get started? What's the background? And so the Gospel of Luke would have been written as legal background so that theophilus had some idea of what is this message these guys keep going around talking about. And so, anyway, that would be the thought. Just the same way we say, you know, what's the value in Acts? It's a connectivity.

If you showed up and started talking about Jesus Christ and he was raised from the dead and all that stuff and didn't have the background that you have in the Gospel of Luke, Theophilus is going to say, what's this? Because you don't know. Why are these guys all wound up about Jesus Christ? Why is that such a big deal? So that's why you would have both accounts and Acts makes reference back to the Gospel itself. What Theophilus would be aware of is the Roman officials. Beyond that, it's hard to tell whether he'd really give a hoot about anybody else, even Paul. It may have been like a, you know, I never heard of the guy until he got into trouble.

They'd check on lists to see if he was really a Roman citizen because it was a death penalty. falsely claiming, okay? So they check on the list, is he really a Roman citizen? They'd look in, you know, anything that Luke wrote down that, you know, was verifiable, they'd look through it and say, Pontius Pilate, yep, you know, he was from 26 to 36 AD.

He was there, so, but he's off the scene by then. So they'd be able to check things like that. But a lot of the things on the Jewish scene, probably not be real important. This guy is doing a preview for the emperor. So remember, this guy's more Rome-centered than centered on Jewish things. The Jews were on the far eastern end of the empire, and if the Romans didn't have to deal with them, they probably wish they could do so. I mean, they were not thinking about Jewish things unless they had to. They were interested in Rome.

Any other questions? Yes. Yes. That's speculation, however. And I mentioned that's on the map that from the time it appears that he was, after his first appeal at the end of Acts 28, he appears to have been given a pardon and then traveled around. His travels since then, since they're not in the Book of Acts, are pieces that we put together from different things in the rest of his epistles, including the desire to go to Spain, and then looking at 2 Timothy, which is his very last letter shortly before the end of his life. He's writing to Timothy. He says, I'm poured out. I'm nearing the end. So he's realizing he's close to the end.

What happens in between is some evidence, but also speculation, and you have to leave it at that. Yeah. Other questions? Fascinating stuff? I think it's marvelous stuff. This next time we'll be looking at the rest of the apostles. We'll be looking at John particularly. Think of it. Here's John who ended up in his last days, as far as we can tell, in Ephesus. And all the other apostles have been taken out. And some of them, you know, he may not have had any real evidence of even how they ended. So here's John, and he must have been just downright amazed. Downright amazed.

Here I am still here. Why is the Lord having me still here? He's got one last book to write. So anyway, let's talk about that next time. Lord, thank you. As we look at your Word, the story that you have unfolded, here, this very special story. As we look at it, it is the transition here in Acts into the time of the church and the time when this precious body of people whom you've called out, those who would be heavenly seated with you. Lord, what a neat thing that you have passed on to us and how marvelous and wonderful it is that we can have these truths. Thank you for this time. We do pray for Ruth and her job search here. In Jesus' name, Amen.