Roman culture
Vern Peterman · Oct 31, 2004
Bible Backgrounds, No. 18
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/48262314552959

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

We're going to move into Roman culture here. And as we look ahead here, we've got Jewish culture and then other biblical cultures. We've got things like, you know, we were joking about before, you've got the Amorites and you've got the Hittites and you've got the Termites and the Satellites and everything else. But you've got a bunch of other cultures that get mentioned in scripture and who are they and what difference do they make? And so we want to take a look at those.

Then we get to the really good part. The last part in case studies is where we say, okay, now let's just look at things that are in the Word and how does the background help us? How does the background help us see what this means? Sometimes if you don't have the background, you read it and it's like, huh, why did you tell me this?

In Revelation, for example, He says, and I'll give you a white stone. You say, good, what am I going to do with a white rock, you know? If you understand that the white stone is your invitation to the victor's banquet, it means a whole different thing, see?

Big difference. Okay, let's move into it. By the way, you've got color and black and white. And what I did, because I'm kind of bouncing you between the two, the C is for the color sheets that are kind of the back section. And so you'll have to hop back and forth, because I pruned them separately. But at least that'll tell you which one, OK? So this is the first one, the color.

And this is kind of a picture, an ancient, well, it's a new map, but with the ancient names. And this is the area we're looking at here, which is the area about Rome. And this is a map that looks a little closer. And you see Roma about there, close to the middle. Rome was initially a small city.

We've talked here about Alexander the Great. When Alexander the Great was moving out, Rome was just a small city and nothing of consequence. He didn't even think about it. It never crossed his mind that his empire would be taken over in great part by the Romans.

By 63 BC, however, the Roman armies had gone moved around the northern Mediterranean and consequently then moved into the southern Mediterranean. But by 63 BC, that's the time to keep in mind, that's when they took over Israel. So by the time the New Testament was written, decades had passed. Basically, a lifetime had gone by by the time the New Testament era had begun, that they were under Rome.

It was a given. It was already, you know, hey, they've been here for decades. And so the Roman environment was definitely well in place. It wasn't a question. Okay. And this is kind of the sequence we've been working through. You've got the Persian Empire. You've got the Greek Empire. The Hasmonean rulers, those are the Jewish rulers that ruled for about a century. And then the Roman Empire moving in and saying, okay, guys, we're in charge. And they like to do that. Okay.

Latin didn't dominate the Roman Empire until the empire was beginning to disintegrate. Isn't that interesting? It's a real odd thing that Greek, which as we noted before, was for half a millennium plus, controlling the language of much of what became the Roman Empire, and especially the eastern half. The Roman language, Latin, didn't really become dominant until the Empire was starting to fall apart. And then Latin lasted for centuries while the Roman Empire was becoming but a memory. So real interesting how that phenomenon tends to take place.

Here we are speaking what we call English anyway. I'm sure the British would disagree. what we call English and we haven't been under the British crown for well over two centuries here. So it's a similar kind of thing. It's real interesting. The language tends to lag the empire. In the New Testament era, remember what we said? The Jews were speaking Aramaic and when did that start? Under the Assyrians. Look at all the empires that had come and gone. Empires come and go but languages hang around.

Christ was born during Augustus' rule of the Roman Empire. Augustus was the first one who really acted in the sense of an emperor. Before that it was just, okay, we're kind of expanding this thing. Now finally we're really consolidating our hold on the empire. So Christ was born during that time. 31 BC is when Augustus came in. Herod the Great, had already been put in place to hold the Parthians on the east. See the Parthians there in the sort of orangish part? And he continued on through the time when Jesus went through his boyhood and into his teens. So here was Augustus. Augustus was able to establish things because he was there for a long time. See how many decades went by with Augustus at the helm.

That was unusual. Some of the Roman emperors didn't last but months before they said, hey, enough with this guy. They got rid of him. OK. Here's a little Judea off in the corner. Isn't that interesting? Here's this far-flung little place. It's going to be a lot of trouble for the Romans. I'm sure at various times they thought, why did we do this? Because these people are a real headache.

Remember also, we've got a lot of Jews around the area of Ephesus and Colossae, and then another gathering of Jews in Alexandria. So within the Roman Empire, those are the three main concentrations of Jews. From there, they continued to spread in other places, including Rome. But those are the main concentrations that you find the Jewish population.

The other part is right over here, but that was outside the Roman Empire. Okay. Here's the Roman Empire from space. How about that for a shot? You imagine, you know, the Roman Empire, we think of here's this ancient empire where, you know, hey folks, no cell phones. You can't, you know, get on a plane or a train or get in your car, but you got to get out from space to see the whole empire. Isn't that amazing? I mean, it's phenomenal.

All the way from Southern Britain over to on this end, getting into the, area around Israel and in Egypt. The Romans were really big on their military. Really big on their military. If anything, it was boy, fight, fight, fight. When they had the Roman soldiers, when they had them in place and fighting, it was just absolute determination, we will and must win.

This is just so they can hear. Don't turn that on. Okay. Because that's feeding the recorder. This is the room. So I need to wear two of them. I'm sorry. Okay. I got a complaint that they couldn't hear you in the back row. You could move forward. Yeah. All right. Okay.

So here's this Roman soldier. The Roman soldiers, they had them all over the place. They had certain places, of course, where they were stationed, but they made sure Roman soldiers were going everywhere because they wanted you to be aware you're under Rome.

A couple decades back, I was doing business over in Germany and made several trips back and forth over in Germany. And at the time particularly, I haven't been there in recent years, but at the time particularly, there was a NATO presence and they were, of course, wanting to make people very aware that they're there because of the Soviet threat over the Iron Curtain. And so everywhere you would go in West Germany, what it was called at the time, you would see constant NATO presence. Nancy and I stayed with the fellow who was in charge of logistics for NATO for several days.

We were his guests. Interestingly, some of the other people that we visited there, they had a sign on their driveway. It had a tank and then a red circle and a red cross, no tanks. And it wasn't a funny way of saying no thanks, okay? It was because the tanks were everywhere. And the problem was if you had cobblestone streets that were, you know, on a slant or a cobblestone driveway, the tanks would just chew up your driveway. so he didn't want his driveway chewed up, so he had no tanks.

Anyway, the Romans, they would march them everywhere. One of the things that we mentioned previously in our main service is that they had Romans passing through Colossae all the time. Even though there was no Roman station there, they were constantly passing through because it was the intersection of two Roman military roads between Ephesus, where there was a Roman military installation, and two Roman colonies, so constantly traffic with Roman soldiers going by. So this kind of scene that people like Colossae, Ephesus, and actually everywhere, they want to make people very aware, hey, you've got Roman soldiers everywhere, don't think of anything, don't try anything, just keep on living life and paying us. And then finally, of course, you had Roman ships as well. The Romans could get across the Mediterranean, move around, and all that. This is Interestingly enough, any guesses what that is?

It's the Roman equivalent of a minefield, because what they would do is they would have these pits dug down and a whole bunch of them like this with stakes sticking up, so that if you fell in a pit, you'd get poked through. So anyway, you don't see the stakes, but you see the pits. And so that was their idea of a minefield. And so when the Romans wanted to protect an area from attack, that's what they would do. So it was, again, part of the Roman military approach to things. Boy, they really went all out.

So this is their 2,000-year-old minefield, if you will. Roman coinage. Of course, the Romans were not only a military power, and what a lot of people forget is they were also an economic power. What Rome wanted to do is, they said, let's make building of the economy high priority because we want to tax it. We want to be able to tax it, so we don't want to suppress the economy. We want to build the economy so we can tax it for all its worth. And that's exactly what they did.

This is a hoard of Roman-era coins. Here's another one. This is 2,000 coins they found in one stash there. Somebody really packed a lot away. This is a coin, we'll take a little more attention to it in a little bit, but this was a coin that when they came to Jesus and said, should we pay taxes to Caesar? He said, show me a denarius. Anyway, that's the coin, we'll take a look at it in a bit. That's the backside of the coin.

Okay, here's some of the Roman roads. We pointed out before, Roman roads, what they would do is they would dig down and they had a standard construction for Roman roads. You dig down several feet, you start laying down sand, and then you lay down some bigger rocks, and then bigger rocks, and at the top you have slabs. And many of these Roman roads are still there now. They built enough Roman roads that way, and we're talking all by hand, no earth moving equipment, all that stuff, this is all by hand, enough roads to go two times around the globe. A lot of roads to build by hand. And what they did is the main people that they had on the work was Roman soldiers. Roman soldiers.

They just said, you know, you're going to work yourself to the bone because this is all by hand. You're going to dig, you know, if it's hard digging, tough, dig, you know, and then come in with all these materials by hand, okay? Load everything in by hand, get it all in place, compact everything down, get all the rocks in there. Hey, you big bulky guys, get the big rocks, lay those there. make them work really hard, very hard.

Here's an example we pointed out when we were studying Philippians of some of the roadways that they'd have through the area. 2,000 years and some of those roads are still in use. What they did in Philippi, in Philippi you can drive on paved road now. You know what they did? They just put the pavement right over the Roman road because the Roman road was in such good shape after 2,000 years that the pavement was fine.

Here is, and you have again a reminder, this is in your color sheet. Here are some of the trade routes and empires of the first century so you get a sense of what's happening in the world. The Roman Empire ruled much of the western part of civilization. Then you have the next one over is the Parthian Empire. I apologize for the color on that. On yours I tried to lighten the purple a little bit. It's just, you know, I can't change their color. That's what they built in. But that's the Parthian Empire that's purple there if you want to make note of it.

Then there's the Kushan Empire, next one to the east, and then finally the Han Empire of China. So you have a series of empires and what you notice here is the Silk Road that runs between the Chinese Empire and the Roman Empire. They call it the Silk Road because they would bring silk and spices and things from China and then things going back the other way as well. So there's trade going back and forth Notice how the people trading had to cross several empires to bring these things back and forth.

And there's one focal point. It's a little hard to see, but let me point it out to you so you can make note of it. What's this? Antioch. Where were the Christians first called Christians? Antioch. And that's where Paul was sent from. His first missionary journey was sent from Antioch.

So this is interesting. Here's this pivotal city on the Silk Road network. possibly has some explanation for why, just in recent decades, it's come to the forefront that the gospel appears to have gotten to China within the first century. Some of the evidence that we have now points to that. Anyway, that's the key point. This trade that's going back and forth here, Antioch is a key place. Isn't it interesting how the Lord puts those things in place?

Here are some of the things, and I didn't make a copy of it because I couldn't figure out how to make a good print out of it. Here are some of the different products that are traded in different areas. So there was trade of different products in different places. We think of all the trucks and things going back and forth now. This was done, they had carts and ships and things of that sort as well. But all sorts of things to trade within the empire and between empires. Lots of trade going on.

But for all that trade, The Romans wanted to make sure they got their fair share, anyway, their share of all that economic activity that was going on and that they encouraged by their building of all the roads. Here is the area, here's Egypt, of course there's Alexandria where the Jews had established and that was the primary Jewish colony. There were others, more minor ones as well. And then, of course, you have Judea that was under the Romans.

Now, we've talked about the philosophy of empire and how that philosophy has kind of shifted. With the Greeks, the idea was, boy, we're going to teach everybody Greek. Matter of fact, we're going to customize our Greek. That's something that Craig brought out, that you customize the Greek to kind of get it simplified and a little more unified, less dialect. And so we're going to teach everybody Greek and we're going to teach everybody Greek philosophy since we think it's so good. That was the Greek idea. So infuse that into everybody.

The Romans came along and they had a little different approach. They said basically, hey, we don't care what you guys do. You just allow the present culture. But they wanted a couple of things. The Jews were given special exemptions. They wanted, for example, people to worship the emperor as a deity. The Jews said, no, we're not doing that. They gave the Jews exemptions.

Everybody else had to do it. Later on, when the Christians were recognized as not being just a Jewish group, they ran into a problem because they didn't have the exemption. And Rome said, then you must worship the emperor as deity. And that was pricey. It was costly to be a Christian.

So the Jews were given special exemptions. Allow the present culture, but just worship the emperor as another deity. And pay us. After that, we don't care. Pay us money, tip your hat to the emperor as a deity, and after that, do what you like. Pretty much, that was their idea.

New Testament books, where a Roman background is important. This is important to remember as you're studying. Throughout the whole New Testament, there's some Roman background that's to be kept in mind. But there are particular books where it's especially helpful.

One of them we point out here, the Gospel of Mark. The Gospel of Mark, there are four Gospels, right? That's the one that is most written with a Roman mind. One of the words you see repeatedly in the Gospel of Mark is immediately. And you don't see it anywhere near as often in the other Gospels.

Immediately. Immediately. Immediately. Why? What do you think the Romans wanted things done? Immediately, right? They wanted things done right now. Get it done. A lot of the Jews and the Greeks sit there and jabber and talk and debate stuff. The Romans said, I want stuff done. Get it done. It's like the Rhodes. They don't sit there and philosophize about Rhodes. You get doing it. And that was the Roman mindset.

So what did Mark do when he wrote the Gospel? He wrote, Jesus did this, and did this, and did this, and did this, and he got this accomplished, and that done, and that's the way the Gospel of Mark is written, to a Roman mindset. Luke wrote both the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts to what appears to be Theophilus. You see that name in there?

No other evidence of Theophilus, but much evidence within both books that they were written as a legal submittal by Luke on behalf of Paul. because of his legal trouble. One of the reasons why the book of Acts, in the last half, has so much conversation with Roman officials. Lots of intensive conversation with the Roman officials. And that's why. It's because it appears to be a Roman legal submittal. Luke writes, almost excellent theophilus. What a weird way to write somebody. But that's what you would say when you're writing to a Roman legal bureaucrat. Romans, of course. Why would Romans be so important that you understand the Roman background? Yes? No? Written to the Romans, right? There's a church in Rome.

Alright, and then finally Philippians. Philippians, as we studied when we were looking at Philippians, was a Roman colony. It was a young Roman colony. It had only been established as a Roman colony about two generations before the New Testament era when Paul was writing. So the founders were the grandparents, the grandfathers, if you will, of those that Paul was writing to. A very young colony by usual standards.

Okay, so we've got those things to look at. All right. The Roman tax system, if you're looking at it, the Roman Empire was an economic system. Its philosophy of empire was to require payment. So what do we find? The tax system was basic to Roman's rule. We go through lots of different documents from the New Testament era. You know what we find? Lots and lots and lots of tax records.

Piles of them. I was just looking at them this last week to the point where I said, man. Let me tell you how many they've got. The universities in Europe and the United States have to have a cooperative system where they've begun scanning documents from the New Testament era and those centuries around. And you can see them online, even to fine detail. And lots of information, so you can search the Greek. I mean, it's great. I was just having lots of fun, but not near enough time. As I was looking through it, I was amazed how much of these were just piles of tax documents. Example.

UC Berkeley in California from one discovery, this is just one discovery, made around the year 1900, has 21,000 New Testament era documents, or around that time. These are papyrus documents, 21,000. A century has gone by, and a few more years, what percentage of those that they've actually looked at and translated? 5%. because they've got 21,000 of these documents. It takes a while to get through 21,000 documents. So there's lots to work with.

Many of them are tax records. This is one that I found, and I put 11 through 16 because they had three of them. They actually had a specific date for each one because they were dated well enough that you could tell what each one was. This is the first one of the three.

It's a receipt for a tax on pigs. They would come And then a tax guy would come through, and he would say, you've got five pigs there. Here's the pig tax. Oh, you've got a garden over here. We charge by the plant. And he'd go and say, OK, you've got so many beans. You've got so many of this. And they'd go and tax your garden. And then you'd go along, and you'd say, well, you put a fence up. Oh, we tax fences. We have a fence tax. And so they would tax everything under the sun.

And the people resented that like crazy. But what do you do? The penalty for refusing to pay the tax is you get the business end of a Roman sword. So it's not something people objected to too frequently or at least not too many times after that, believe me.

Here's a tax collection in each region. Here's the way they did it. It was a privatized system. Rather than having a big central IRS like we have, they had a system of districts and what you would do is you would take bidders And the bidder would say, I can get this much money for Rome out of this district. And the person who said that they could get the most got the job. Whatever the tax collector who got the job collected on top of that was his.

So if they came to you, let's take Craig here, they come to Craig and they say, You've got this house here and I notice you've got this little fence up front. That's cool. You've got some dogs. We have a dog tax. You've got the fence, you've got the house. They're going to come and they're going to tax everything they can on the property.

Now if Craig comes and says, oh man, I can't pay that. They say, oh, well, would you like the alternative? And that's the business end of a Roman sword. Maybe you can't, but you're going to pay it because you have no choice. You're going to do that. And that's exactly the way they would do it. Now, let's say you disagreed with the amount. That still doesn't matter. There wasn't some appeals court or something of that kind. You're going to pay it.

And so the tax collectors, of course, were well hated. Thoroughly hated because of what they did. Here's an import tax receipt in Memphis, Egypt. It's where they'd come into the port and say, ah, you're importing it. Now we've got to tax it. So they'd catch you there. Here's the first mention of the impact of the Roman tax system. Mary and Joseph were required to go to Bethlehem for a tax census. What they would do is they would say, okay, in this area we've got so and so many people, but rather than let the people register where they are, they made them all go back to the place where their family came from. Really inconvenient. The Romans didn't care. They didn't care that Mary was pregnant. Makes no difference. There was no appeal, no postponement, you know, you didn't register, you're in trouble. So you go back and you do it. We have numerous census documents and declarations, lots and lots of those, because again those are tax documents, right?

And so here's this guy from May 10th, 91 AD. John has not quite written the book of Revelation yet. And this guy says, Son of Horus, a resident of village of Bacchius, there belongs to me in the village three quarters of a house in which I dwell. In other words, the idea is he owned three quarters. There was another family member that owned the other quarter, right? And then he declared, I have this so-and-so and so-and-so.

One of the other interesting things you'll find is these kinds of records frequently make note of a unique scar. We have picture IDs. Well, they didn't have a way to take pictures, right? So what do you do to identify people? is you have unique scars. And so many of these records would list, you know, I so and so have a scar on my inside left ankle and my wife and she has a scar on her forehead, whatever.

And so they would list all these peoples and the scar mark would be the typical declaration. If somebody didn't have a scar, usually typical of an infant, then they would say so with no distinguishing marks. But that's what you find. You find just hundreds of these things and that's the way they would list them. listing all the scars and then those without them.

Okay? Lots of them. Okay, so Roman taxes are brought up again with the calling of Matthew, otherwise known as Levi, and you find a couple of references there in Matthew and Luke that he was a Roman tax collector. Oh boy! Everybody loved that, right? Here's this Roman tax collector. He sits in a tax booth. What they meant by a tax booth was that he was sitting alongside a road and when people would come by with something, they're going to tax it. So here's an example.

Here's this fellow who's paid the customs of this particular village two drachmas for exporting two pack donkeys. You've got to pay your pack donkey tax. It wasn't anything that the pack donkeys had. It was just that you got the donkeys. You're going to pay for it. So you don't just make a trip into town with your donkeys, you're going to pay taxes on it, right? Isn't that interesting? If you've got two donkeys going by, I'm sorry, we charge for those. But you get receipts too. Oh, isn't that nice of them?

They give you receipts, so that's why if somebody stops you down the road, you can say, hey, I paid, here's my receipt. So, Matthew's job before being called a disciple was collecting taxes, this customs duties. He'd sit in a booth alongside the road and look for, okay, he'd have this list. We've got these pack donkeys and you've got pigs. We see you've got two bushels of this. So they'd go down and look down the list and see, here's what we tax you for. Collect the money, write out the receipts, and on you go. That was Matthew's job. No wonder when somebody called him to something else, he just jumped at the opportunity. Okay.

Tax collectors and sinners. is a frequent, particularly in the Gospels, a frequent phrase meaning the scum of the earth, the worst of the worst, morally and ethically awful people are tax collectors and sinners. There are also some variations. Sometimes they just said tax collectors and prostitutes. Tax collectors of the sinners.

Different variations on the phrase come up, but the idea is the same. These are some of the passages, and you can look it up for yourself. There's this coin here, we'll get to it. This was one of the ways in which taxes were paid, of course. This is an example, Luke 19. Even the worst can be saved. This is the story of Zacchaeus, the first ten verses. The passage notes that he was wealthy, Now, this really caps it.

He said he was a chief tax collector. Oh, that was like the worst of the worst of the worst. A chief tax collector! I mean, this guy's really, really horrible. This guy's in charge of all those filthy pigs that tax us for every jot and tittle. Okay. Given that he was a Jew who held a high position in collecting taxes for the despised Romans, this was very remarkable. Very remarkable. Amazing.

But I think Scripture particularly includes it. Notice it's Luke that includes it. Remember, he's the one who's writing to a Roman bureaucrat. Here's a Jew that's collecting taxes for the Romans. But even the very worst can be saved, I think, is the message there. Now, here's Jesus.

He's asked by the Pharisees and the Herodians Is it proper to pay taxes to Caesar? Of course, what they would like him to do is to get him divided one way or the other. If he says, no, don't pay taxes to Caesar, then he gets the Romans down his throat, right? Or if he says, sure, go ahead and pay the taxes, then some of the Jews, particularly those who are kind of the extreme anti-Roman ones, the Zealots, and as we mentioned the Sicarii, those groups, would be after him. So either way, they wanted to kind of peel off support for Jesus and get him hung up on this question. So, what does Jesus do? He says, show me the coin. They will produce the tax coin, the coin that you pay the taxes on.

The possession of the coin showed that they were under the Gentiles. At the end of Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 28, that's where the Lord through Moses is saying, if you obey me, you'll have all these blessings. If you disobey me, you'll be under other nations. By showing the Gentile coin, which taxes are paid with, it was confession. You have not obeyed. You, by showing me this coin, are admitting that you're under the Gentiles and therefore evidently by the evidence that you show me by pulling it out of your own pocket, or admitting that you're not obeying the Lord.

The next thing, it had a graven image forbidden under Mosaic law. Here is an image of the Caesar. We mentioned last time that it was about 129 BC when the first coin with a human engraving on the face of the coin, or stamping on the coin, was accepted as temple tax. So the Jews had begun to compromise on this. But that was the second problem. The last thing is that Caesar is claimed to be divinity on the very face of the coin.

So there are three things profoundly wrong with this coin. And he says, you produce it. You pull it out of your pockets. therefore making confession about what's wrong with this coin. Here's the coin itself and the backside of it. Now, here's the way to look at what the Romans did, and I think you've got a printout, yeah, on C2, your second color sheet, so you can look at it more closely and make any notes. The way they did it was this, a little different from our coinage.

It's capital letters, of course, The first two are the first two letters of Tiberius, so it's kind of like a shortcut abbreviated. So here's Tiberius Caesar, so they put the T-I for Tiberius, and then here's Caesar right here, see that? D-I-V-I, short for divine. So here's Tiberius Caesar claiming divinity right on the coin.

This was Livia, the Emperor's wife, on the back. And right in here it says Maxim. By the way, this reads this way and this way. This is Maxim Pontiff. Pontiff is the title for what in our current culture? For the Pope. And where did the name come from? The title used for the Roman Emperors who claimed divinity. Wow, what a title to take, huh? So, anyway, that's the tax coin.

Okay, Rome had this horrible, cruel punishment. Only the worst criminals and the lowest, the slaves, got this punishment and staros and the various other family of Greek words that were used, those were all considered foul language. in the Roman culture. As a matter of fact, the Roman governors were allowed to use alternate wording to describe the sentence when they said, crucify this guy, because the word was considered so foul that in polite company you wouldn't say that word.

So for Paul to write, I have been crucified with Christ, was shocking words. They'd read that and they'd just... gag, choke. It was stunning stuff to read and to claim you have been identified with Christ in his crucifixion. A startling thing. This was grab you by the throat and by the eyeballs kind of writing.

Abuse before crucifixion was both unlimited and common. The floor of the fortress Antonia, where Jesus was sentenced, you can see it today, and it has games scratched out on the floor where the Romans played games between crucifixions. And then when the crucifixion was pronounced a sentence, then they played games with the person who was to be crucified, as they did with Jesus. The condemned person was typically stripped of clothing.

Frequently our crucifixion pickers will sew Jesus in a loincloth. That's probably on the polite side. Probably on the polite side. Typically they were stripped. It didn't matter if it was a woman. Nailing was variable. We typically see nails will be shown through the wrist at the base of the hand and into the foot.

The Romans didn't care. As long as you get them up there, they don't care. We have one where the nail went through the heel bone. If they went through bone, they didn't give a hoot. If it hurts, so what? So the Romans didn't really care as long as you just nailed them up there. And they weren't profusely bloody.

Not profusely bloody. Why? Because the nail would kind of seal up and compress the area where the puncture was made. So he has some blood not bleeding all over the place typically. Blood loss was typically minimal. But the death could take days, and one of the reasons being that they had minimal blood loss. People typically died of suffocation, sometimes, you know, just dying from dehydration. So that was typical.

What would happen is we'd study in engineering how if you had straight overhead, you'd have each arm holding half the body weight, assuming the feet weren't nailed, When you go out to the sides, you greatly increase the tension on the arms, and the ability to take in a breath becomes much more difficult. And the only option for doing so was pushing up on the feet, which were nailed. And so the thighs, where you do the pushing, would become exhausted. And if there's no food, you're running out of water, you get this twitching, jerking motion.

So it was a really ugly thing to watch. Unclaimed bodies are simply dumped in a refuse area. So for Jesus, for example, to have Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus come and prepare the body was somewhat exceptional, but not unheard of. We have other evidence of other criminals getting something other than the dumping in the trash kind of treatment. But that was the typical thing. If nobody claimed the body, they'd just dump it. It would be just dumped in a trash area and that would be the end of it.

Okay, New Testament cities were Roman colonies. Philippi was one that we've made note of because we studied Philippians last year. It's the only one named as a colony, but we know that these others were. It was different in that it was a young colony with much less Greek influence than the others. Here are the colonies, and notice what one of them is.

Again, Antioch. Antioch was a Roman colony as well as being an international trade way. It had lots of people from lots of different backgrounds because of its being kind of at the crossroads between international trade, between the Roman Empire and many of the empires to the east. Letters were written to Corinth and to Philippi, those two. Timothy came out of the area around Lystra and Antioch, so those Roman colonies.

First Gentile converts were in the house of Cornelius, who was a Roman centurion. Here's Acts 10. It records that Peter first delivered the gospel to Gentiles. So he's a centurion. Century, the idea of a hundred. He was over a hundred men. He was an officer over a hundred men. So the centurion was told along with the others, Peter rather said, through his name everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins. and delivered the message of the gospel to the people at Cornelius and his household.

This is the excavation. It was right along the edge of the Mediterranean. There's about 3,000 Roman soldiers that were stationed there. Pilate, who reigned from 26 to 36 AD, and we have several different records of his reign, Pilate was instrumental in bringing some of these soldiers to the fortress Antonia, where they overlooked the temple, which of course made the Jews even more ticked off. Now you've got Romans overlooking our temple activities.

Boy, that just really burned them. Chapped their hide, as we would say, right? Here is the amphitheater at Caesarea, and as they looked around the amphitheater, they found a stone, and the stone here, right here, is the end of Pontius Pilatus. See that there in the capital letters? See that? Does that make sense? So at the end of his name, Pontius Pilatus, it's inscribed. So that's just one of the historic references to his name.

Citizenship is another one. By the way, how are we doing on time here? I think we're kind of running short. The idea of citizenship had been around for a long time. You'll find evidence of And what they would do, the list of citizens was called the Book of Life, the Book of the Living. And so they would keep a list of citizens if someone died or if they committed a serious criminal act, their name would be blotted out or crossed off of the list. And so that was kept for any major city. And so it particularly became important because in Rome they had extra rules and laws.

Here's Paul, who was actually of Tarsus, But by reasons we're not quite sure of, he had Roman citizenship. And so he could claim his Roman citizenship, which by the way was a serious crime if he did it falsely. He could claim his Roman citizenship and in doing so, without a trial, he could not be whipped. So that's why the magistrates in Philippi said, leave and we won't bring this up anymore because it was capital punishment for them for having whipped him. So they were really anxious to have him leave without bringing any charges. So he just brought up, hey, we're Roman citizens, and they just started shaking in their boots and trying to get him out of town and away before he could claim anything. So they had specific privileges. There's a special family of words, and we brought those up going through Philippians. Early on in Philippians, there's actually a word, a verb, that communicates acting like a citizen. So he says, behave as citizens. Then he says later on, you have citizenship in heaven. And then in chapter four, he talks about the book of life. And it is the list of those who have citizens in heaven. Okay.

So citizenship was a big thing. That's why I brought it up at Philippi, which is a Roman colony, right? Big deal. Oh, by the way, Roman colony means there was lots of Roman soldiers there. And the reward for being a Roman soldier when you're retired, assume you live that long, when you're retired, you got Roman citizenship. So it was a privilege of being a Roman soldier. So for him to tell everybody in the church you've already got citizenship in heaven was like a phenomenal thing. Amazing thing. I mean, we'd have to work decades to get this Roman citizenship, and you mean by believing? I already have this phenomenal citizenship that I'm working decades for on planet Earth. Amazing stuff.

Here is a wax tablet birth certificate. Isn't it interesting? They had wax tablets that they would write onto What they would be is they would be like a board, and then they would put wax on the surface and write on that. And sometimes that was even used for permanent records, a wax birth certificate.

And the claim on it was, here's records as a Roman citizen, my son Lucius, da, da, da, da. So here's this birth certificate, and he wanted to make sure that birth certificate had, he's a Roman citizen. He gets this citizenship by birth, okay? So he was born into this Roman citizenship, and he wanted to make sure that that was recorded. Here is an apparent book of life, and I'm sorry it's a little hard to read. I kept trying to play with it and it was really hard to do, so my apologies.

But they have a bunch of names, and I stopped because the list of names goes on, but you might be able to see through some of them. They crossed them off. See that a little bit? Some of them, they crossed the names off. So what is that? That's the person who either died or committed a serious crime. So, real interesting. Something else to notice here. There's a lot of father and son stuff. Here's Petras right there. Here's another one. Another one here. So, real interesting. And I'm not sure why those brackets are there. Maybe it's just hard to read. But nonetheless, an example of that kind of thing. Here's another one.

He was writing to the church at Rome. He says, for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Wages was of course something that the Roman soldiers got. But if a new emperor came on board, the new emperor would oftentimes seek to win the favor of the soldiers by giving them a free gift. And so here he says, the wages of sin is death. You want death? Fine, you're going to have to work for it. All the hard work that the Roman soldiers had to do.

The free gift of God is eternal life. That's charisma. That's a grace gift. So when Paul was making this statement, it was something they looked at and they knew exactly what this was about. They said, yeah, you want to work like a dog your whole life and do all the roads and do all the training for fighting and everything else? You don't have to work for that. That's death. The free gift, the grace gift, that's eternal life. But it only happens when the new emperor comes on. See that? Interesting.

He drew from the Roman culture in order to say this. And then finally, and this is the chapter 6 of Ephesians. Paul draws upon the example of the Roman soldiers. Ephesus was not a Roman colony, but it had a major installation of Roman soldiers, about 2,500, because there was a Roman governor there. It was the capital of Asia, which is that end of what is now Turkey. So here, what does he do? He draws upon what everybody at Ephesus knew well, and that is the various pieces of armor of the Roman soldier. through the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness.

These are the Kalige, the shoes with the spiked feet so that they'd stand firm. So what does he talk about there? Having your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. Stand firmly. And then here's the shield. that they would have, similar to what we see in this picture up here. And then the helmet, the Helmet of Salvation, and the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. So that's what he drew upon. He drew upon something they all saw and knew in order to illustrate to them the position that we have in Christ. And that's what the armor is. It's our position.

Isn't that neat? That's neat stuff. So anyway, just quick examples. We can go through lots and lots of different things, but this is just an introduction to the Roman background for the New Testament from Matthew to Revelation. And obviously some key books that are pivotal in that.

Now, questions? Way too many questions, right? Yeah, yeah? Yes. A name for tax collectors. You're talking about something other than the Greek word? You know, I don't know offhand. I'd have to take a look at it. I heard that there were levels. There were the underling tax collectors and the chief tax collectors. Oh, yeah.

There is a different one, for example, for Zacchaeus. And basically what it is is a prefix that puts him as head. And Zacchaeus was, of course, the worst of the worst because he was the chief of that. Paul takes that and he takes it the other direction, or parallel if you want, and says, I'm the chief of sinners. And so he puts himself in that same hierarchy, if you will.

Other questions? Thoughts? Bafflings? Okay. Let's pray. Lord, we do thank you for the free gift that we have the grace gift that we have of eternal life and Lord you've used the illustration that meant so much to the people in Rome and in understanding that now we see that since you are the new one in charge the new one with the old one having passed out of the way for us we give you thanks for that and we thank you for this free gift that we could in no wise earn And Lord, what a marvelous illustration. We thank you for the position that we have in you, and that that indeed is our defense. It is our protection as we stand the ground that you paid the price to gain. Thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.