NT History - The Life & times of John

We'll go on this time to New Testament history, the life and times of John. Alright? And this fellow John here, he, now, one thing I've got to preface, we're going to be kind of taking off from the period of the death of Peter and Paul and moving on from there. I don't mean to imply that John didn't live before that, but John was the apostle who we know continued to be around and to be present while the other apostles were either being killed off or in foreign lands. And we'll take a look at that here this morning as to where they ended up. This is your Chronology of the New Testament Bible books, and we're really looking at the last books of the New Testament, and Revelation being the last one written, just about a year before John's death.

Last week, we were looking at the Book of Acts, which is from Pentecost. That's in Acts 2, so actually, technically speaking, Acts 1, but it gives us a good milestone. And Paul in Rome, Acts 28. The evidence seems to indicate that Paul was released after his appeal to Caesar, but then later on taken back in, and extra-biblical evidence indicates he was beheaded.

Let's go through, we'll be looking at this balance of the time. And key to that will be about 64 to 70 AD, a terrifically tumultuous time for Jews and Christians both in the Roman Empire. And Paul writes his last New Testament letter to Timothy in about this time frame.

He says, for I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come." I mean, he knows, he's seen his last days. Okay? I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith. In the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only me, but also all who love his appearing.

Peter finishes his last New Testament letter, You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, be on guard so that you are not carried away. By the way, that be on guard is in the last chapter of Paul's letter to Timothy and in the first chapter of Paul's second letter to Timothy. He ends up first Timothy and starts first Timothy with Timothy, guard, be on guard. Peter has the same thing, be on guard. so that you are not carried away by the error of unprincipled men and fall from your own steadfastness, but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen." That's how Peter writes his last letter, at least the last we have in captivity. Christians endured persecution in earlier decades from the Jews. We read early in Acts that Peter and John particularly suffered some difficult times.

And it was under the Jews, but as time went on, you got into the 60s, all of a sudden the Christians kind of hit the Roman radar screen. All of a sudden the Romans are saying, who are these guys? And they didn't treat them nicely when they discovered them. So Tacitus, who was writing a little bit later, wrote of the Christians in Rome under Nero. He says, in perishing, they were additionally made into sports. They were killed by dogs by having hides of beasts attached to them, where they were nailed to crosses or set aflame, and they were used as nighttime lamps. That was the Nero's treatment of the Christians.

Anybody volunteer? Nothing like being a light of the world, literally, right? OK. The other thing is the zealot. And Sicarii, the Zealot groups we heard of directly because Simon the Zealot was part of that group before he became a disciple. And the Sicarii were even a more extreme group only referenced by their acts in Acts 21-38. Those two groups pushed things to the limit and eventually brought about a rebellion against Rome. It reached a peak of anti-Roman fervor so that by 66 AD outright rebellion against the Romans had begun. The Romans said, oh yeah? And their response was definitive and intense.

What's interesting is that before the Romans took out a whole lot of Jews, a whole lot of Jews took out a whole lot of other Jews. The Zealot and Sicarii groups killed thousands of Jews, some would say tens of thousands of Jews, for refusing to fight. You're not going to fight? We're going to take you out. So right on, here's Jerusalem, kind of this dark scene that you see. When the Romans came in, thousands and thousands of Jews had already been slaughtered for refusing to fight by other Jews. That was a horrible time.

By 70 AD, the Romans had crushed the rebellion, totally demolishing the temple in Jerusalem, taking it apart stone by stone. We today can look at some of those stones. They cleaned up some of it and left some of it for people to look at. The Romans just took every stone apart and dumped it off the edge, and where it got dumped, that's where it was found. Including some that had markings on the temple, like the one we showed previously, warning the Gentiles, don't come in here. We found one and a half of those. One of the places on the stones was a place where they blow the trumpets, and the marking in Hebrew up at the corner is, this is the trumpeter's place. So anyway, they found these stones piled up that the Romans had just shoved off the edge. They took every single stone off the Temple Mount. So, the question now is, what happened to the apostles? What happened to those guys?

Turns out, we know what happened to Judas, of course. He took his own life, hung himself. To James, brother of John, killed by one of those Herod folks here in Acts chapter 12. By the sword, it says. We don't know whether they just ran him through or whether they beheaded him. But it just says by the sword. And then John records the Lord talking to Peter and recording how he would die.

So that's as much biblical indication as we have for each of the apostles. Once we get outside of the New Testament, it's important to recognize the reliability. A lot of the documents varies and kind of drops off from the biblical reliability. So you've got records that kind of vary in reliability amongst them. Some of them even conflict. Let's figure, how would you have a conflict that would occur, and it wouldn't necessarily be anybody's fault, it's just unsure. How would that happen in the accounts of what happened to the apostles? How many James's were there? You got a few of them, right? So if somebody said James went here and here and here, you know, it's great, which one? So that would be one example of why we have an ambiguity. Some of the Apostles had multiple names there, therefore adding further confusion. Matthew is also called Levi, okay. Peter, we mentioned last week, had two other names.

What were those? Simon and Cephas, okay. So you've got things like that that when you start looking at records and somebody said, okay, this happened to this guy, just the differences in names and if it wasn't clarified, you might have a question. Is this the same guy?

We have, for example, copies of a guy by the name of Clement, writing about the same time as the book of Revelation was written. We don't know whether he is the Clement mentioned in the New Testament letters or not. So there's things like that that it's tough for us to be certain we put it together. So now, here's Peter.

Some scholars would dispute that Peter ever went to Rome, but the written records we have say that he was crucified there upside down under Nero, and that upside down crucifixion would seem to fit what was described of Peter in what our Lord told him in the Gospels. Apparently, the story says that Peter did not wish to be crucified as his Lord. He wasn't worthy of it. And so they crucified him upside down. They don't care. You're going to die anyway, no matter how it happens. So upside down.

Paul is sought by many scholars who have gone to Spain. Here's Romans 15, says he intended to do that. But the extra biblical accounts have his life ending in Rome, beheaded about the same time as Peter. It seems to be like under a general persecution.

Okay, now that the Christians are on the radar screen, let's take out their leaders. Okay? This is the Mamertine prison. And by the way, Ben and Autumn are taken off to Rome Tuesday. And I said, be sure you take a look at that. Apparently you can go inside it now without being dropped through that hole in the top. Would you do to me like they did to Paul? Well, please. Okay. All right. Andrew. Traditions have Andrew traveling and spreading the gospel to Scythia. And this is kind of the southern part of what used to be the southern Soviet Union. Eastern Europe.

The Scythians were, if you called somebody a Scythian in the Roman Empire, that was kind of like a way of saying you're the scum of the earth. The Jews fought the Scythians about two centuries before the New Testament era. That's when the Scythians came in with drunken elephants. That was a bizarre thing, and of course the Jews had never fought drunken elephants before, so that was a little different. It appears that he was killed in Greece, not too far from Corinth, according to the records that we have. He also went in the area of Asia Minor there, the western part of what we now call Turkey.

Thomas, the doubter, he didn't keep on doubting, and he seems to have gone to India. I got to meet this fellow, Dr. Fox, who went over to India to serve as a pastor in one of the Indian churches there. And the people in the Indian church will tell you that Thomas was the founder of these churches.

That's what they say. So they'll tell you. Plus, it's written externally. So the evidence seems to converge in terms of pointing to him actually having gone to India. So the information seems pretty good, especially with that convergence. So anyway, he was also killed there as the extra-biblical account goes.

Philip, tradition says that he was instrumental in the salvation of the wife of a Roman proconsul in Hierapolis. See, there's Colossae that we're studying about the Book of Colossians. Laodicea is the church mentioned in the Book of Colossians and also in Revelation. Right across the valley is Hierapolis and that was where the Roman proconsul He said, you converted my wife.

I am not happy about that. You're going to pay. And that he did. So he was cruelly put to death. Other than the description, he was cruelly put to death. We don't have details on it. But it appears to be the reason and the place and who pulled it off.

Here's Hierapolis. There's a street scene on the left there. Here's the theater. That theater, by the way, is still used for concerts. They'll hook it up with lights and whatnot. We'll have concerts in it. Here's Domitian's Gate. Domitian was the emperor who sentenced John to first boiling in oil, and as we'll read in an account later, the boiling didn't kill him. So he said, okay, now you're exiled to Patmos. Took a while to get the oil off, I guess. Anyway, that's Domitian's Gate. So this was not there when Philip was there, but built during the lifetime of John. And then finally, here's the mineral baths at Hierapolis. Hierapolis is known as sort of a resort town because you could go there for hot mineral baths and that sort of thing.

Now, Matthew, the author of the gospel by his name, also called Levi, is said to have preached the gospel in Parthia and to have been killed with wooden stakes in Ethiopia. The account says that they drove wooden stakes through him into the ground to kill him and just kept putting him in. And while he was dying, He screamed out the gospel with the last words that he had. Think of it, several of the apostles, as we go through this, you'll find went to Parthia. Can you think of some reasons why that would be a logical conclusion?

What language was the language typically spoken in Israel during the New Testament era? It was Aramaic. Where did they get that? That wasn't the language that they didn't get previously. They spoke Hebrew. When did they pick up Aramaic? When the Jews were exiled. Jews were exiled and so they picked up Aramaic and then came back to Israel and continued to speak Aramaic. So here's Matthew and others heading off to Parthia.

Why? There's some language commonality from where a lot of them came from. Plus there's a bunch of Jews there. So it'd be a natural place for them to kind of gravitate to because of language familiarity and because of lots of Jewish culture. for them to be able to communicate with.

Here's Bartholomew. He's credited with spreading the gospel in India, Armenia, Arabia, and Ethiopia. It sounds like he just went all over the place. The accounts vary as to his death. One of them, and I would say probably one of the more reliable ones, is the one up in Armenia. That's the area where we have the cross up there. So that seems to be where he made his end.

James, the son of Alphaeus, and here's one of a few again where we have a few different Jameses, and went to Syria as reported by Josephus. Now that's a fairly reliable report because that's written by a Jewish author within the New Testament era, before the first century. The book of Revelation hadn't even been written when this guy's writing, so we're writing talking about writings that are pretty close to the time and local to what happened. He records that James, the son of Alphaeus, was both stoned and clubbed to death. They went after him with both. What's interesting is there's also an account of a death down in Egypt. I mean, we'd make note of that, too. But again, here's the conflict and which James isn't. So there's where you have some questions.

Simon the Zealot. Remember I mentioned the Zealot group and the Sicarii group. Those two groups together were the ones that brought about this rebellion in Israel. Now here's Simon the Zealot is killed in Parthia for refusing to sacrifice to the sun god. So he goes there and of course the Parthian religion is focused on the sun god and he didn't do that and of course the Parthians are thinking we can't have that We're going to get anger from the Sun God if he doesn't do that, so they have to kill him. So that's the end of Simon the Zealot.

Matthias. Interesting, the only mention we have of Matthias in the New Testament is where? Yeah. Yeah, so you've got Acts chapter 1, that's it. We don't find him mentioned in the Gospel. We don't find him mentioned anywhere afterwards. But real interesting, you might have thought, well, he's a nobody. But he is said to have gone with Andrew and with Matthew to Ethiopia, but burned to death down there. So there's there's Matthias' account here.

The Colosseum in Rome, I mean, because a lot of people get the idea, OK, we got this Colosseum in Rome and that's where, you know, all sorts of persecution took place. It was built in the late 70s A.D., prior to 80 A.D. And you see this little moving diaphragm. That is a sunroof that was built, and they could actually lift that up in place to keep the sun from baking. So if you see pictures of the Colosseum and the sun's open, that's not the way it was. They actually had a cover that they had, and this is a big structure, so it's kind of amazing. They lifted up this cover. The pictures on the right are what's there now. Inside the Colosseum, where you have the Christians being persecuted, that actually didn't happen until later, until after the New Testament era. So the immediate use was not for persecuting Christians. That came sometime after the New Testament.

John, as far as we know, was the only apostle to have died a natural death. And even that was what came about from what appears to be a miracle, at least from the extra-biblical accounts, that Domitian ordered him to be boiled in oil, and that didn't work, according to the account. And so then he said, well, then you're exiled in Patmos. And that worked. Except when Domitian died, what happened frequently is when a new emperor would come in, partly out of just sort of saying, I'm in power now, they would reverse whatever decisions were made by the prior emperor, commonly. And so John was released from Patmos.

Tradition says he cared for Jesus' mother Mary. Why would that be? Why would he be the one to care for Mary? Yeah, on the cross, Jesus, John, Mary, there's a connection to take care of her. He wants to see that she's cared for. And by the way, Mary, in spite of what some churches do to try to elevate Mary's position, Mary is never mentioned by name in the New Testament after Acts chapter 1. No further mention of her. The closest is in Galatians, where in the fullness of time Christ was born of a woman. That's the closest to any subsequent reference to Mary in the New Testament.

Anyway, John is said to have taken care of Mary. This is the traditional home of John and Mary in Ephesus. Whether it is the exact one, well, it's open to question. But at least traditionally, that's the place. John is said to have spent his last years in Ephesus, except for a time of exile on the Isle of Patmos. This is a view from a cave in Patmos. Of course, the tradition says this cave is the one where John wrote the Book of Revelation and spent his days there on Patmos. As John wrote Revelation, and this is an early copy of it, John wrote in simple, consistent Greek. As a matter of fact, it makes it very easy to interpret, assuming you know the key principles to interpret.

But it makes it very easy to interpret, because whenever he latched onto a term or an identification, he was exceedingly consistent with how he used that. In the book of Revelation, he called Christ the Lamb, and he kept calling Christ the Lamb all the way through. He talked about loud voices, and he kept talking about loud voices all the way through. Now, the Greek, by the way, in a few places is a little choppy. It may be an indication of his advanced age. It's not that it's not understandable, it occasionally is not smooth.

Revelation is certainly a prophetic masterpiece, as I mentioned more than once as we were going through it a couple years back. Okay, Revelation's historical and cultural background is drawn 70% from the Old Testament. So here's John, what's he going to write? He's writing, if you look at it, 70% of it, over two-thirds of it, comes out of the Old Testament. So have you gotten additional help in understanding what it means? Certainly, yes, by all means.

John showed a fine awareness of local historical detail and that's why one of the last things we'll do is go through Revelation chapters 2 and 3 and look at John's awareness of that detail of local history and culture because there's repeated reference. It's fine-tuned and focused on each of the seven cities and their backgrounds as we'll see. Revelation has a symbolism that is Jewish, and it's important to understand the difference. Have you ever read the book of Revelation and maybe looked at it and said, what on earth is this guy talking about? Or talked to somebody who's asked that question?

One of the reasons is, in our culture, we are brought up with a Greek mind. Whereas John is writing with the Jewish mind. In the Greek mind, we want our poems and songs to rhyme. at the words that end. In the Jewish mind, they don't care if the words rhyme. To us, it just grates on the ears. But to the Jewish mind, they want the meanings to rhyme, not the words, not the sounds.

When John wrote, it wasn't a question of what does this look like when you put the symbols together. So you describe Christ with these eyes that are on fire, hair like wool, and a five-foot barbarian sword coming out of his mouth. That looks grotesque. John isn't writing, what does it look like? He's writing, what does it mean?

Difference. The Jewish mind is not asking, does it sound good? Does it look good? The Greek mind is. So that's a key point, and as long as people understand that, you'll get miles farther along in understanding the Book of Revelation. Okay. So it's look for what a symbol means. Blessings. All right. Now, putting this together, here's the book of Acts and the life of John. John, it appears, died about a year after writing the book of Revelation. So that ends the apostolic era. That also ends the New Testament books. So we've got them all written by this time.

One question, did the apostles take the gospel to China? We brought this up in church history class. A Chinese professor, so this isn't Christians digging it up and saying hey, we found something there's a Chinese professor Said he's been looking at tombstones in China dating from 86 AD and he's seeing Bible stories on the tombstones How did that get there? Okay, so it is possible that that either let's say some of Maybe Thomas or some of the other disciples that went you know with Thomas to India I went farther or maybe some that Thomas Spoke to from India went into China, but however it got there here Here it is before this is almost a decade before John has written the book of Revelation We're finding tombstones with Bible stories and for that to be true It can't have just occurred in 86 and what it must have gotten there before them.

I So real interesting. There's also some evidence, although I have to admit it's scant, that the gospel got up to Britain as well, before the end of the first century. So it's real interesting how far, I mean, the gospel went everywhere. Fascinating that when Islam began, okay, what was the result?

632, Muhammad dies. By 732, they're fighting the Islamic hordes in France and finally holding them off towards France. So a century goes by and what do you have is the sword. Here, less than a century goes by and what do you have? The gospel. Amazing contrast. Amazing contrast. Do you come with the sword or do you come with the sword? See the difference? Amazing difference.

Christianity by 100 AD, this is just a few years after the life of John. These are some known areas, and by the way, it excludes some outliers that go to the east, for example, in India, down into Ethiopia, but those particularly around the eastern Mediterranean. Here are the areas in kind of orange shading where it's known that there was substantial gospel influence, and known churches are marked there with kind of the red dots. What we find is that Your Christianity had definitely gotten planted in in these areas plus some other outliers that are off the map and Then we get into this area look this is where the Christian message started in Jerusalem the better part of a decade it really remained focused in Jerusalem didn't it and Where did the Christians meet in Jerusalem they met in the temple? Because there was that kind of perimeter court, a portico they call it, that goes around the edge of the temple area, they'd meet there. You know, here's a place everybody knows where it is, it's a nice covered area, you know, we can meet here.

Now, what we find is by the end of that century, and we're talking about 70 years, the end of that century, Rome has the largest church. Of all the churches, Rome's is the largest within 70 years. the church in Jerusalem is virtually gone. Why? Why would the church in Jerusalem be gone? Yeah, there's no temple to meet in.

When the Romans came in, see in the first century there was about a million Jews in Israel, at least twice that many elsewhere. Okay? So, here Judaism has kind of a center, even if it's not the population center, a center there in Jerusalem. And Christianity is first beginning there. The Christian message is first introduced there.

But then when the Romans came in, they said, there's no temple. And by the way, you Jews, you're moving out of here. We're not having a big cluster of Jews here. You guys are done. And so the Jews that survived and thousands died, the Jews that survived were just sent elsewhere, Christians included. So you started off with the church being founded and centered in Jerusalem. And by the end of that century, not even a place to meet in Jerusalem, not even any Jewish Christians allowed there. And everybody is scattered everywhere else, John included.

So this is really amazing. You look at it within that period of time, and it's basically within a person's lifetime. That huge shift from let's all get together in Jerusalem to Now the Church of Rome being the largest of the churches. Okay, next time, what happened after the New Testament era? Okay, questions? Ponderings. Yeah, Gail. Yes. Okay. And by the way, in some of the material we handed out, a full page copy of this, I think, is included.

The green material there is the area of the Roman Empire under Augustus, who was the emperor from, make sure I get it right here, 31 BC to 14 AD. So during the time when Christ was born, up until his early childhood, would have been the time of Augustus. Later on, you'll see these areas that are in purple. Those would have been added after the New Testament era, that is, during the early part of the second century, first half of the second century.

The area to the right that you see that's in kind of an orange and tan color would be Parthia. That's the Parthian Empire. So anyway, that's the color code there. The area that's in purple, obviously, is outside the New Testament era. So it's the green area that has a greater effect. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Oh, to Ephesus. To Ephesus.

Oh, by the way, I forgot two things. Let me go ahead and tell you those two brief things. We have two extra biblical accounts of things that happened to John during his latter years. One of them is that in his very later years, he would be at the church at Ephesus and the church would be gathering together.

And they'd say, John has some words for us. And of course, John's very old. And the description is that a couple of guys would help him to the front. He would get up to the front, and he'd look at everybody and say, love one another. Then he'd sit down.

The other extra-biblical account of John is that he told one of the leaders in one of the churches, he says, there was a young man who had become a Christian, and he told that leader in the church, he said, you make sure that man gets discipled and learns God's word.

Sometime later he came back to the leader and said, where's that young man? I don't see him. And the leader says, I didn't disciple him. And John said, where is he? And he said, he is a thief out on the highway and he leads a band of thieves. John went out and walked the road back and forth. until the thieves got him. And then he said, who's your leader?

And there's the young man. And he talked to the young man. He says, let me disciple you. Let me teach you God's word. And the man did. Isn't that cool? Major neat. So anyway, those are two extra biblical accounts we have of John and his latter days. Both of them are really neat. And so I had forgotten that. I wanted to make sure I introduced that. Other questions? Other thoughts? You know, what's really interesting is that in spite of all the attention that is paid to Mary in later centuries, All we have is that Mary is recorded the last time in Acts 1. So the whole New Testament doesn't really put any big emphasis on Mary.

And then subsequent extra-biblical accounts is that John cared for her in that house that we saw in Ephesus. And it's real interesting, that's where he cared for her and the signs they have and all the maps and everything say Mary's house, but it's John's house. And obviously John was much younger, but there's no real indication of what happened to Mary. Roman Catholic tradition, and my assumption is it's probably carried over in the Orthodox churches as well, is they describe an ascension of Mary and go into all sorts of things of that sort, but it doesn't appear to have any historical basis, obviously. So what happened to Mary? We don't have any specifics other than some very vague and later records. Anything else?

Oh yes, they make a big deal of it. Yeah, what tends to happen is they'll take the facts and then build a lot more on it than there's any basis for. Of course, the way the Roman Catholic basis of authority stands is where for us we're saying give me something factual Roman Catholic Church can simply say this happened, you know, ex-cathedral, or the Pope says this is the way it happened, and that's to be accepted as authority, equal to Scripture. So whether there's any historical basis is not the issue. If they say it happened, that's what happened.

Just like Peter being a Pope in Rome. Historically, we have no basis that he was ever a bishop in Rome. It's debatable whether he ever was in Rome. Badam being a bishop in Rome for 25 years. And then when he writes his letter, he calls himself an apostle and a fellow elder in chapter 5 of 1 Peter.

But he doesn't call himself anything highfalutin if you want to go for that. Anything else? We're done kind of early, which is okay. But I would just say, don't disturb the other classes, but we'll go ahead and call it quits. Let me pray and feel free to ask questions, whatever.

Lord, thank you. As we look at what happened to these apostles, as we look at what took place here, Lord, certainly there are questions that we would like to ask that don't It seemed to have easy or clear answers, not abundant detail. And yet what does come out of it all is that here, Lord, were men who were absolutely convinced, though cowards at first, absolutely convinced of your death and burial and resurrection and ascension. And Lord, what marvelous things you've laid out through these men. Humble though their beginnings were. I just pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.