How to Study the Bible, Culture lI: New Testament Cultures
Chris Smucker · Dec 2, 2007
How to Study Bible (2007), No. 09
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://www.hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/4926046174927

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

Today we're going to talk about New Testament cultures. And last week, for those of you who were here, you remember Vern talked about the Old Testament cultures. And there's a little note here at the top of page 32 that go back to the chart on page 31. The last two cultures, Greece and Rome, are the two that carry over into the New Testament as well.

What's that? Open in prayer. Oh, okay. Yeah, let's open in prayer. Dear Lord, thank you for this chance that we have to come today in fellowship with each other and get into your Word. And please guide us today and through our week. In your name we pray, amen. Alright.

So Greek culture, their idea was to infuse the culture and language in every aspect and you see that in that Greek had become the common language and that's what the New Testament was written in was Greek and then also the Roman culture allow present culture but require payment and Rome was in power during the New Testament and So that required payment, we're going to talk about Matthew 22, 15-22. The passages where the Pharisees and the Herodians try to trap Jesus by asking Him if it was lawful to pay taxes. And for the benefit of anyone who might listen to the tape later, I'll just read this. Matthew 22, 15-22. Then the Pharisees went and plotted together how they might trap him in what he said. And they sent their disciples to him along with the Herodians, saying, Teacher, we know that you are truthful and teach the way of God in truth and defer to no one, for you are not partial to any. Tell us, then, what do you think?

Is it lawful to pay the poll tax to Caesar or not? But Jesus perceived their malice and said, Why are you testing me, you hypocrites? show me the coin used for the pultax. And they brought him a denarius. And he said to them, whose likeness and inscription is this? And they said to him, Caesar's. Then he said to them, then render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and the things to God the things that are God's. And hearing this, they were amazed, and leaving him, they went away." And this is a really cool account about how Jesus kind of turned this plan to trap him back on the Pharisees and the Herodians.

But if you don't understand some of the culture behind it, you might miss some important elements. Taxes in the first century Roman culture were a big deal. Some estimates say that the typical Jewish family paid about 49% of their income in taxes. So about half of what they made went to taxes. They paid taxes to the Romans and also to... there were Jewish taxes. as well.

So, in this account, the Pharisees and the Herodians send their disciples, and that was interesting because the Pharisees, they kind of had their start during the Babylonian captivity, and they were separatists who tried to distance themselves from anything that was pagan. But the Herodians were supportive of the Herods who the Romans had put in power over the Jews. So normally these two groups wouldn't get along, but since they were both after Jesus, they decided to put their differences aside and unite.

And they start by saying, Teacher, we know that you are truthful and teach the way of God in truth. And that was a flattering statement. And Jesus caught on to that. That's why he called them hypocrites. But the reason that they started that way was if Jesus didn't answer their question, then he'd probably look like he was hiding something.

And the question, is it lawful to give a poll tax to Caesar or not, is phrased in a way that demands a yes or no answer. So they didn't want him to deviate into all these details, they just wanted yes or no. And if he'd answered yes, he would have alienated himself from the Jews because they resented the fact that Rome was over them and they didn't like paying taxes. But if he said no, he would bring condemnation from the Romans who would label him as a tax rebel. And this poll tax, you know, if they're giving half their wages in taxes, this poll tax was fairly insignificant. The idea is not that, hey, this tax is breaking us. The idea is, hey, do we go with Rome or are we against them?

So Jesus answers and says, whose likeness and inscription is this? And we've included at the bottom here a picture of a denarius. And on the face side is the portrait of Caesar. And that inscription is Latin and it says, Tiberius Caesar, son of the divine Augustus. Now on the other side of the coin is the Roman goddess of peace and the inscription Pontifus Maximus. And Pontifus Maximus literally means chief bridge builder and the Jews would interpret that as high priest.

So we have this coin. that the Jews had in their possession. Both sides bear graven images of pagan gods, and both sides have inscriptions that are offensive to Jews. So, you know, Jesus has kind of got these guys trapped, and by giving him that coin, they were admitting that they had possession of graven images, that they were disobedient and that they were under the rule of a foreign power, which they viewed that as a curse. So, does anyone know, in the Jewish mind, if you're cursed, what's the reason for that? Not following the law. Not obeying God's commandments.

That's right. They would get that from Deuteronomy 28, which if you've ever read that chapter, about the first 15 verses, it's really great. It's like if you... God's speaking to Israel and He's saying, if you keep my commandments, this is how I'm going to bless you. And He goes on and on and it sounds really, really great. And then you get to a point where it says, and if you don't keep my commandments, this is what will happen. And then the book's not so pleasant after that.

So... So he says, render to Caesar that which is Caesar's, because it has Caesar's image, and render to God the things that are God's. Does anyone know what has God's image? Or what was made in the image of God? This is an easy one. What's that? Yes. So render to God the things that are God's. Exactly. So, one more thing I'll mention before I turn it over to Vern.

The question that the Pharisees and Herodians posed, they said, is it lawful to give the Poltax? The Greek word there for give implies that it could be a gift that you could give if you wanted to, or you could keep it if you felt that those receiving it weren't worthy of your gift. But Jesus' reply is, render to, which in the Greek carries the idea of give payment where payment is due. So he's basically saying, pay the tax, whether it's to the Romans or to the Jews, whether they're going to use it wisely or whether they're going to use it to come in later and destroy your temple. And I mentioned that you might be thinking, why is this guy telling me about Greek? We studied language six weeks ago. But it's interesting because this passage is only eight verses long and you see how history, language, and culture come into play. Those studies give a broader understanding about what's going on and they yield some benefits. That's all I've got. Thank you. Thanks for listening. Okay, this is called Tag Team Teaching.

One point before we move on is that as we go through talking about language, history, and culture, the key and principal resource for studying these things is the Bible itself. So that's a key point to make. In other words, people say, Heavens, do I have to have all these books on culture? Well, those are helpful, and we give some recommendations. But one of the examples we had last week was, for example, we looked at this word gate or gates, and basically all the information about a gate or gates that gave you cultural insights about gates were all from the Bible.

Mostly from the Old Testament, but even some very important ones in the New Testament. And so, one of the things that you're saying, well, how do I learn about history, Bible history, Bible culture? The Bible itself is the principal resource on those things. God has had scripture written in such a way that it becomes the principal tool, the guiding tool for everything else that we do, okay? So, strongly recommend we kind of keep that principle in mind, you know, what are some study tools that I need? Well, start with the Bible, okay? Alright, let's take a look here at the upper middle of page 33.

It has a subtitle there, Adoption, Only Sons and Not Babies. This is an instance where the word picture that we tend to get in our mind conjures up one thing and the biblical use of the word means something quite different. And understanding the cultural difference is important to understand what Paul is saying.

Paul uses this idea of adoption of sons, or adoption as sons, depending on the translations, in Romans, Galatians, and Ephesians 1.5. Now, one of the points we make here is that he writes using that adoption of sons or adoption of sons with three different groups. Romans, which is written to the capital of the Roman Empire, Rome, the church there, or Galatians. Galatians was a group of churches, two of the four major cities in southern Galatia were Roman colonies.

That is, they were colonies with a great number of Roman citizens and Roman soldiers and they were to be very much Rome-minded, even though they're miles away from Rome. And the third one was Ephesus. Ephesus was the capital city of the area of Asia on what's now the western end of the country of Turkey. And so all three of those had a Roman influence. At Ephesus they had 3,000 Roman soldiers stationed there and a Roman governor.

So all of them had lots of Roman influence and it was only at those three letters that he used this term adoption. Okay, because when we think of adoption, oftentimes we'll think of a little baby, you know, or some child and a child was just about never what they thought of when they heard this adoption of sons.

As a matter of fact, we look at it and we think, ah, right? But for them, when they read that, their jaws dropped. They were astounded. They were just mind-blown. We have what? Wait a minute, stop reading. Let me soak this in. Because it was so phenomenal, okay? It was so phenomenal.

Let me give you some examples here. This Greek word, and let's kind of go through the bullets. Euthysia. was sun position, in the position of a sun. And by itself, it kind of tells you that's the place that the believer is placed in compared to and relevant to how it was used in Roman culture. Let's move on.

The procedure was initially set up, it was used with Augustus Caesar and the next Caesar following, those two in a row. The procedure was set up from the beginning of the line of emperors in order that someone who was an emperor who did not have a male heir to the throne could put someone in that place. So that's the first thing.

When people saw adoption of sons, they're looking at, this is to put an heir in place on the throne. This is an exalted place. It was something that the Emperor himself asked to have put in place. And to have an adopted son put in place was something that the Emperor had to make special requests for.

It was approved at the highest levels. The Roman Senate, the whole Roman Senate had to vote on and approve that adoption. So it wasn't some, you know, just some sort of a low-level administrative procedure. This was at the highest levels had to be approved. Instead of the usual witness or two, seven witnesses had to witness the adoption process, okay? So way, way high up there.

Now, the Roman law had a, we think of an adopted person is sort of, well, the normal thing might be looked at as a natural birth and then an adoption into the family that might be the exception. What happened under Roman law was the adoption process was far better than anything else you could have. The adopted son had a place better than any either previously or a subsequently born son. You see, here's the situation with a natural son.

With a natural son in the Roman Empire, and this was true of all families, the father had the right to either kill or declare to be killed any son, born son, even into adulthood. We have one written account where the born son was in his twenties and the father in front of a bunch of other people just killed the son right in front of them and nobody flinched or asked questions or said, hey I'm calling the cops or anything. Why? It was perfectly legal to do that. The only way that that would be avoided for a born son is if they go through a legal acceptance procedure where the son is legally accepted and in which case the son would not be eligible to be killed legally. But aside from that, a father could choose at any time to kill his son or have his son killed, to tell somebody else to do it.

An adopted son, you could never do that. How about that? If you were adopted, there's no question, you're automatically accepted. You're as accepted as you can possibly get. So when they read this adoption of sons, this was like, whoa, this is a phenomenal privilege that we have. That's why Paul used it with each of the churches where there was significant Roman influence there in the community. It's interesting, everyone, he used it every time he had a chance. Okay, one more thing.

That wasn't necessarily Jewish? As a matter of fact, I read a write-up on it, and it's not Jewish, and the Jews did not actually have a legal procedure in place, although they had something kind of like it. The Mosaic Law didn't actually put a procedure in place for adoption. The Greeks did have adoption but it wasn't the same and this Roman adoption appears to be more the one they used and that's confirmed by the fact that he wrote it to Roman-influenced churches and communities. So it appears of the three to be specifically Roman.

Yeah? What about daughters? What was their status? Well, the interesting thing is that he says specifically her adoption of sons But you notice he didn't say, you males. He essentially gave that to the daughters as well, to the whole church body. So he's not trying to be sexist. He's drawing upon an image that was used.

This adoption of sons was specifically for males. Why? It's because it particularly was set up for putting Roman emperors in line. And that was the main reason why. But the way Paul applied it, it included both males and females having that privilege. Isn't that something? Here's the amazing thing.

He was a full heir. It was irreversible. That is, you couldn't undo the process. The adopted son was severed from any prior sonship. What did Paul say of the unbelievers in Ephesians 2, verses 1-3? He called the unbelievers sons of disobedience. Any prior sonship was gotten rid of. Here, he says, you have this position. Your history is wiped out. You now have a new history. Your history is connected with your new family. And that's true of us as believers. Do we not each of us have a history in Christ where we've been identified with Christ?

The adopted son lost all rights in his old family and gained all the rights of a fully legitimate son in the new family. The Roman law allowed a father to kill a born son at any age with impunity unless legal acceptance procedures had been completed. As a matter of fact, this is the significance of accepted in the Beloved. You're accepted. There's no way the Father is going to back out of that or reverse it. So when they read that, we think, well, that's nice. But when they read it, they say, whoa, this is great privilege. We have a standing that's incomparable. That's what he was talking about.

An adopted son, became an heir to his new father's estate even if the other sons were born afterwards. Even if they had natural born sons, the adopted son was the one that got the priority and the privilege. So this is wonderful news. This is great stuff. I thought the adopted son was after the firstborn. It didn't matter. The adopted son was ahead of any other born before, after, same time, anything else. The adopted son always got top priority and first preference. It is astounding stuff. That's why he kept repeatedly saying it. He says, you guys have amazing, astounding privilege. and it's not going to get lost or backed out of. This is just phenomenal.

The old life of the adopted son was completely wiped out so that the adopted son was regarded as a new person entering into a new life. Any debts or criminal history that might have existed were erased from the record and totally forgiven. How much do you owe? Doesn't matter. It's all gone. Did you have a criminal history? Did you do this and this and this and this? It's all forgotten and wiped out.

Okay? This is wonderful stuff. This is great stuff. And really this is the reason for the huge significance. Here we have adoption, you know, adopted as sons. Adoption of sons, adoption of sons. And we put it in three words. He just put one word down. Huthesia. And with that one word, I can imagine them, they'd say, whoa, stop the reading. Let me soak this up.

This is astounding privilege approved at the highest levels possible. This is amazing stuff. With that one word, I'm sure they were practically mind blown. It was unbelievable that you would have that much privilege. Why? Because you believed. Isn't that something?

All you did is believe God and now this astounding privilege, mind-boggling privilege. The adopted son was literally and absolutely the son of his new father. The maximum privilege possible, the maximum forgiveness of all past debts and criminal history and everything else, all offenses completely behind you. One of the things I think that this is more than just academic, and that is, is the Lord going to bring your past up in front of you and shove it in your face and rub your nose in it?

No. That's not God's doing. The world may want to do that. In fact, the sin nature may want to even do that. Because guilt is a powerful sin nature tool. But the Lord says no. That is all wiped out. I paid the price. When he said it's finished, he meant it. This is neat stuff.

So the adoption of sons in Paul's letters, only said with one word, has huge significance. And the distinction between our understanding of adoption And what we have in our culture is a good thing. And what they understood is massive, is huge. And it's really valuable and important for us to understand, again, what's the cultural background, okay?

Let's take a look at the next page here. Thoughts, questions, ponderings, exasperations? Yes? Yeah, Debbie's point is that some groups teach that we're going to stand before God in judgment. There is a judgment for believers. That judgment is different than for unbelievers. And I think scripture repeatedly says that there is a judgment for everybody. But the distinction between the believer's judgment and the unbeliever's judgment is universes apart.

It's a wonderful thing. We're going to stand before the Lord, and it won't be a matter of irresponsibility or something, but ultimately, what's the Lord looking to do? The Lord's ultimately looking to, how can I reward you? How can I reward you? There's a verse or two in 2 John, a brief letter, but it just talks about maximum reward. And one of the last times that the Lord speaks in the end of the book of Revelation, He says, Behold, I am coming quickly and my reward is with me.

He is eager to reward us. That's what He wants. He wants for you, the believer, to have maximum reward. And the maximum reward comes in depending upon His resources and not doing anything more than the work she's prepared beforehand. Isn't that amazing? That's phenomenally gracious. He says, I want to reward you. And yeah, that's a key point with us looking at adoption of sons.

The Lord isn't there to say, Vern, you really blew it, and boy, are you going to pay. That's not what the Lord's got in mind. Instead, when we stand before the Lord, and He's telling us ahead of time, He says, I want to reward you to the max. That's what He's wanting to do. That's how He's motivated. He's not there to rake us over the coals. Yeah, crowns is one word that's used in about five different contexts of reward. And then the word reward. So both of those. Some people say, well what good are rewards?

Is that some sort of heavenly hoard? And actually the picture we get out of the book of Revelation is it's a repeatedly glorifying the Lord. So rewards can be looked on as a capacity to glorify the Lord. And to that extent, see, every believer is going to glorify the Lord for eternity to the maximum of their capacity.

And we're not going to sit there, you know, tearing our hair out. I don't know if I have any, but anyway. carrying our hair out or beating our breasts or anything like that, thrashing ourselves because we didn't get more reward. And yet, there is a sense in Scripture of glorifying the Lord to the maximum. And to that extent, each of us may indeed have a different capacity. Not that we're going to spend eternity regretting what we didn't have. But there is a joy. There is a joy for eternity. in glorifying the Lord. Okay, let's take a look here at the top of page 34.

Slaves of all sorts. This is another area where there is slavery in the Old Testament. You see it in various places and in various cultural contexts. Who are some Old Testament slaves that you can think of? Who had positions of slavery in the Old Testament?

Pardon? Joseph was sold into slavery. So he was an individual slave sold into slavery. Good. Any others you can think of? Pardon? Alright, in what sense are you saying Jacob and Esau? In what sense are you thinking of that? Ah, yes. Yeah. And even we see that throughout Genesis where there's an owning of slaves.

A couple of generations earlier than that, Abraham had a slave Eliezer, right? He sent Eliezer to go out and find a bride for Isaac. Pardon? Daniel was not quite in a slave position, but he was taken captive and put in amongst the Chaldeans, the trained people to serve the throne. How about for four centuries, the Jews slaves in Egypt, right?

So there are Old Testament examples. Particularly, I'd like to focus our attention on the New Testament examples. And one of the things that you'll note, slavery is used frequently. We have some instances, for example, Onesimus is the slave that's spoken of in the brief New Testament book of Philemon. So we've got instances like that. We do find that particularly Paul addresses the behavior of slaves who are Christians in a general sense.

And then in the bigger picture, though, a lot of slavery terminology is used to describe our spiritual standing. And so here's an example of, remember what we said earlier, that the Bible itself contains much of the cultural background material. in order to be able to understand what it means. And we're going to start next week into biblical principles of interpretation. And one of the things we'll underscore there is that the Bible contains the biblical principles of interpretation that we need.

Cool, huh? All right. Let's take a look at some of the examples. Bought. 1 Corinthians 6. By the way, the end of chapter 7 also has the same word. You are not your own, you are bought with a price. I remember that because that was engraved on the front of the church where Nancy and I got married. You are not your own. You were bought with a price. This is agorazo. The agora was what in the New Testament era cities? What was the agora? The marketplace, right. The agora is the marketplace and so agorazo is to buy in the market. But now ex-agorazo, why is that anything different?

What's ex mean? It means from or out from. So to buy, instead of just buying at the market, it's to buy out of the marketplace. And the particular point there is to be taken basically out of the slave market altogether. No longer to be put back into that place of slavery that we had as an unbeliever. The word Lutro is another one that is used translated redeemed. We studied not too long ago in Galatians this word that's translated tutor or schoolmaster, pedagogos. It was a slave who was bought in order to tutor a child in the Greek system. Now here's a couple of words for take captive and they have a different meaning, slightly different meaning.

The first word Sudagogeo is to kidnap and it's to capture by pirates or thugs, Colossians 2.8. They actually had problems with that and it might be out in the open sea. People could be taken captive and kidnapped out in the open sea and it was also along various remote roadways particularly. Someone might be captured and then turned around and sold as a slave.

So that was the word that was used in Colossians 2.8.

In 2 Corinthians 10.5, a different word, and that's military capture.

When the Roman soldiers went out to battle, they would have right behind them a large group of slave traders ready to take military captives. So the Romans didn't have to fuss with how we're going to support this military prisoner. They would have right behind the Roman soldiers a bunch of these slave traders and the slave traders would have their chains all ready and they'd just take the military captives chain them up and get them all in a row and they'd sometimes get as many as 10,000 of these military captors in one time. And that was a part of the way that they added slaves.

In the Roman Empire, about a half million slaves a year were added because of those who died, retired, were freed, bought their freedom, etc. So it was a constant demand for these slaves, and that was one of the ways it would happen. So those two words for take captive are different.

Another word that is used frequently is freed, and that's the one used in Romans 6-7. Freed from slavery. Some context is translated justified. Declared righteous. Galatians 2-16 and Romans 6-7 are a couple instances there where it's used. And the other one is Master. It's in most places translated Lord. But that's also a slave term. So we have all these slave terms.

They're used right in the New Testament repeatedly. You can study the usages of the word in the New Testament. You can look up word definitions to get an understanding. And there's an example of how you can study the Bible itself and use that to understand the cultural background. Now, suppose that you wanted to say, well, those are all good things. And we've given an example in the Old Testament of studying gates. Just look up in the concordance the word gates.

Here in the New Testament, there's all the slavery terminology. You can study that and gain understanding that's helpful. There are some supplemental resources we could point you to. One of them, this is a book that is kind of broken down by category, and this is this one by Jeffers, the Greco-Roman world of the New Testament, New Testament era, and that way you would look at things like home life, slavery, politics, money, look up categories of things, and then in that you'll find references to certain scripture passages. So that's one approach to studying it with an additional resource. There's another that we can easily suggest here.

The Zondervan-Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary Volumes 1-4 is for the New Testament. It goes in the New Testament order. That is, you go through Matthew, Mark, Luke, just like that, and verse by verse, chapter by chapter, it does that the same way. So you just look it up just like you would look up in the Bible the sequence. So if you wanted to find out the background on Matthew chapter 1, you'd open up to the very front of it. If you wanted to find the background under Romans, you'd go to the section on Romans. It's right in the same sequence as the New Testament and even broken down chapter and verse in the same order.

So both of those take different approaches, but both of those can give you some additional information. Thoughts and questions so far? All right, now, if you like to get a resource that has a lot of information in it, is pretty good, with lots of good pictures.

In fact, some of the pictures I've found nowhere else. And it's really cheap. Great people of the Bible and how they lived. It's a Reader's Digest production. It's out of print, but there are a great many of them available. And one of the things, I tend to get a lot of books from Amazon used because they've got things there. Here is a copy of Great People of the Bible and How They Lived.

The price is one penny. Okay? One penny. However, I have bad news. It's $3.99 shipping. Okay? So for four bucks, you get this great book. It's a good resource. Elishka once bought this thing and she found it for two or three dollars, you know, and she just came to me and she said, is this a good book? I said, Elishka, you did a great buy. I said, this is a fantastic book. It's very well done. I highly recommend it and you got a good price on it, okay?