Q&A 43: What happened between the time when Old & New Testaments were written?

The study question we'll be looking at here today is this one, what happened between the times of the Old and New Testaments? You end up with questions like this, where did the scribes and Pharisees come from? I never, Sadducees, I never heard about those in the Old Testament. Ever hear about the Sadducees and the Pharisees in the Old Testament? No, no, where did that happen?

Here's another one. Why is it that the Old Testament is written mostly in Hebrew and a little bit of Aramaic, and occasionally that some Greek words show up, kind of coming through the text? And then when you get to the New Testament, it's all in Greek, and the Hebrew and the Aramaic occasionally come through. That's real different. Why that change? And why all of a sudden do you have the Romans are a big deal and the Greeks are a big deal in the New Testament and the Old Testament, whoever heard of them, right? So why all those changes? Well, it's you've got four centuries of time when a lot of things happened between the times of the Old and New Testament, okay, four centuries of time.

And that's what you see on the chart there. Basically in round numbers from about 400 BC until the year zero. By the way, I have to bring this up. Nobody lived during the year zero. And I don't mean that everybody died. There just wasn't any such year. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, isn't that crazy? Yeah, here's the year zero, and it just, everybody was dead, I guess, you know. But anyway, it doesn't exist. There isn't any year zero. They put that on time charts and things like that, but it never existed. It's always from 1 and 1, right? 1 BC, 1 AD, all that.

So anyway, that's what we want to take a look at. Here is this 400 year period of time, around 400 BC, the Old Testament was completed. Malachi, one of the last books there, the last of the Psalms was written and added to the book of Psalms. The whole Old Testament was completed. The Jews didn't add any other books to their Old Testament after that. It was all done. And then a 400 year period of time took place.

We want to take a look at that. One of the things that you'll see on your handout there, There's the close of the Old Testament, actually it's about 430, but in round numbers about 400. So, what you find is the Persian Empire is apparent towards the end of the period of time of the Old Testament and continued on as an empire into the time that is between the Testaments, if you will.

And you have this in color on the chart on the first page. Everybody got a handout, by the way? Everybody that needs one and wants one? Then here's the Persian Empire at about its greatest extent. You also have that in the center of the first page there. Notice how far it extends. It goes over into Egypt. and over into a portion of Greece, all the way to the east to India. So there's the Persian Empire. It continued on to the time between the Testaments. And then what we find here are the Persian kings during the end of the Old Testament period.

Here's Cyrus, who is prophesied about in the book of Isaiah. He's the one who wrote the letters to people saying, you get to go back to your homeland. One of the things we mentioned previously was a very odd, but I think divinely directed feature of the religion of the Persians was you don't take people from their homeland. I mean, it's just like if you look at our doctrinal statement, that would be write in their doctrinal statement for the belief of the Persians is you don't take people from their homeland and the other consequence is if people have been taken from their homeland you give them every opportunity to go back. So the Lord used that to send the Jews back and to reconstruct Jerusalem and the temple and the walls. Okay, so Cyrus was used as a lord. Cambyses, the next one, he temporarily stopped work on the temple And then Darius the next one authorized the completion. Then you have Xerxes, that's the one who was king when Esther was the queen.

And the Hebrew pronunciation of that, because the pronunciation we have comes from the Greek, the Hebrew pronunciation was Ahasuerus. Now, have you ever talked to somebody who speaks a different language and they can't say some particular word? And that's kind of the way it is. Basically, we get our term Xerxes from the Greek, not from the Persian, but from the Greek. That's the way the Greeks pronounce it. But the Hebrews pronounced it Ahasuerus.

And if you think that's funny, Nancy and I one time knew a very nice young lady who was from the Orient, and she kept talking about her Camelot. That's the way she pronounced camera, right? So anyway, that's the reason for the difference in pronunciation.

In the next one, Artaxerxes I authorized Nehemiah to rebuild Jerusalem and its wall. So what you find is each of those kings has some relevance to the biblical account and is either directly or indirectly included in the biblical account. Here's the Persian kings after the end of the Old Testament period and so we go through those from Xerxes II all the way to Darius III who is the one defeated by Alexander the Great at the Battle of Arbela near Nineveh. Also the modern name for Nineveh is Mosul and in his previous military assignment, that's where Matt Kirby went. It's Mosul. So you have that, and that completes page one of your handout. Let's switch over to page two. Page two, what you see at the top there, is the start of the Greek empires. Now, Greek empires didn't start out plural, they started out singular, and here's how it happened.

Alexander the Great, Alexander was the son of Philip II of Macedon, who had conquered Greece but was rather mysteriously assassinated. Alexander had been tutored by Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, and so there was an influence and connection there. In 334, Alexander began his attack upon the Persian Empire, moving rapidly, though typically outnumbered in many battles. Sometimes he would win, though outnumbered, by ten to one. How could that happen?

Here's what Alexander the Great did. Instead of relying on just massive numbers, he relied on skill and training and strategy. That was the big difference. Military battles were largely thought of in terms of, here are the number of people that I have, I'm going to outnumber them and overpower them. Alexander the Great didn't subscribe to that. He said, I'm going to train, I'm going to have very highly skilled, very well-coordinated troops, and I'm going to use a superior strategy. And it worked. He would be outnumbered greatly and still be overwhelmingly victorious in battle. So here's the progression. You have the map there. And it actually shows this line, essentially starting first in Greece, going through what is now Turkey. And you see the circuitous route that he took. Then he headed down the coast.

What was interesting is when he came to Tyre, And that's T-Y-R-E, not the things you have on your wheels, right? When he came to Tyre, the people of Tyre had a city on the coast and they had an island where they would go out and they had lots of ships. And so initially Alexander the Great couldn't reach them because all he had was land troops, right? So what did he do? He told his troops, he said, we're going to go out to that island by taking this part of tire that is on the land, and we're going to dump it out in the ocean until we get to that island. And that's what he did. And so to this day, that peninsula is created by Alexander the Great telling his troops Just take the whole city of Tyre, take all their buildings and their streets and their columns and everything, and dump it out in the ocean.

We're going to make a causeway out to that island, and they are not going to get away from us. So that's how I defeated them. He came to Jerusalem, and it was real interesting. He came to Jerusalem, and rather than a battle, oh this is amazing, rather than a battle, Jadwa, The high priest said, Alexander, we were expecting you. Yes. Yeah. He said, here in the book of Daniel, here in the book of Daniel, it says that you are coming. We were expecting you.

And of course, Alexander the Great was so surprised and impressed that he actually had a favorable relationship with the Jews, granted them special exemptions, both right there in Jerusalem and in the surrounding area, and he made a deal that the Jews that lived to the east in Babylon and Persia, those areas, when he reached there would get special exemption as well. and get favorable treatment.

And that also set up for Alexander the Great, who, by the way, named nine different cities Alexandria. I wonder why. He named nine different cities Alexandria, but he convinced a bunch of the Jews to move down to Alexandria in northern Egypt, where they established a major Jewish colony. which is not certainly but likely where Joseph and Mary went when Jesus was an infant in order to escape Herod. So there's Alexandria where he convinced a number of Jews to move. Josephus writes about Alexander the Great.

This is not in your handout but this is basically the account that I just told you about where the high priest said Hey, we were expecting you. The prophecy of Daniel, given many, many years before, said that Alexander the Great was going to come. And the Jews, reading the book of Daniel, were not at all surprised that he would come, right after the Persians. Not surprised at all.

The Greeks had a number of shipping routes and colonies that they had established. all over the, not just the Mediterranean, but all the way up to Britain. Okay. The end of Alexander the Great and the disintegration of his empire. Alexander the Great survived battle after battle, eventually succumbed to two things, alcoholism and some other disease that they believe is likely malaria, based on the descriptions. Malaria and alcoholism took this guy out in his 30s. after surviving battle after battle after battle, being horrifically outnumbered in many cases. And surviving all that, but the booze and the mosquito took him out.

Okay. Four of his generals each took portions of the empire. By the way, here's Alexander on his deathbed. And they said, well, how would you like to have your empire dealt with? Who would you like it to go to? And his answer? it goes to the strongest. He had no plan for how this was supposed to get sorted out and settled out after his own empire building. So it went to four different ones and here are those empires, I believe. Yeah, top of page three. Pardon? Well, what you will see is different colors on those empires.

The main thing you have on there is in the area of Egypt going up into the area around Israel is the Ptolemaic Kingdom. And then the next one that you see colored there trying to locate it here, is the Antigonid kingdom. That's up around Macedonia, fairly small. And the next one is the Seleucid kingdom. And that one is fairly large, included a great deal of the Persian empire all the way from what's now Turkey over to India.

What's interesting is although this map shows it with the kingdom out of Egypt ruling over Israel. The reality is that the two kingdoms shown in kind of a tan or orange color and the green color fought over Israel and it went back and forth about twelve times. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and the Jews were just sick of it. And that's one reason why things began to change.

But here's some of the impacts that Alexander the Great's extension of his empire had, and impacting how the Bible was formulated. Alexander distributed the Greek language over the eastern Mediterranean. He said, you will speak Greek. He did that, but he also took all the different Greek dialects and made them all one. And guess what dialect he said you will use? It's the one that the New Testament is written in. So, Alexander also simplified the language leading to shorter, more easily understood sentences. So, when we study the New Testament in the original language, Greek, It's very much a result of what Alexander the Great brought about, because he said, we're not doing all these funny little grammatical changes and dialectical differences. This is the way it will be done everywhere. All right. The other thing, let me get positioned here. I'm going to skip that. OK. As Jews outside of Israel lost familiarity with the Hebrew, they said, we can't read our scriptures. We can't read them. And so what's going to happen is we need to have our Hebrew scriptures translated into Greek.

Because by New Testament times, about two-thirds of the Jews between the area around Babylon and Persia The area in northern Egypt, Alexandria, and the area up around Ephesus and Colossae and Galatia and Pergamum and all that, those contain two-thirds of the Jews. So only a third of the Jews by this time lived in Israel. And the two-thirds of the Jews were living in areas that were Greek-speaking. So they said, we've got to have our Old Testament in Greek. And the term that is used for that is Septuagint. That's because the term Sept is referring to 70 scholars that supposedly did the translation work from Hebrew into the Greek.

So, now we come into the Hasmonean rulers. This is at the bottom of page 3. The Hasmonean rulers, remember I told you that two of the Greek empires kept fighting over the nation of Israel and Israel went back and forth about twelve times. Well, after a while they just had enough of it. And one of the Greek rulers started coming in and saying, you're going to do Greek religion too. And so he forced Jews, the ones that wouldn't comply, he forced them to do ceremonies to the God of wine, Bacchus. He started enforcing pagan rituals in the temple. And they said, that's enough. We've had enough. So he was overthrown. So now you have, following many decades of the land of Israel, changing hands between successors of Alexander's kingdom, the Jews rebelled against Antiochus, that's Antiochus Epiphanes, who had forced pagan rituals.

This began a period of varying degrees of self-rule under the Maccabees, known as the Hasmonean dynasty. Now, some of the things that came from this. Ever heard of the books of 1st and 2nd Maccabees? Those are books that are in what is called the Apocrypha. And those are accepted as holy books in, for example, the Catholic Church. Those were adopted.

But there's something else that came out of it, something that's not in the Old Testament, and that is Hanukkah. Hanukkah came out of this battle against Antiochus. The only mention of Hanukkah in the entire Bible that we have doesn't mention it by that name, but you'll find it in John chapter 10 verses 22 and 23. It's called the Feast of Dedication, where they rededicated the temple after throwing out the vile things that Antiochus had done. So that's another one of those Between the Testaments things. The Hanukkah showed up from between the Old and New Testament times, mentioned only there in the book of John chapter 10. Now, this began a period of varying degrees of self-rule under the Maccabees, known as the Hasmonean dynasty. It lasted for about a century.

From the time of Ezra, a group of Jews known as the Hasidim, Asadim held to the Old Testament Scriptures. These were the roots of several groups that began in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. The New Testament reveals several of these groups. The Pharisees, that's where they came from. It's this time between the Testaments, the time when the Jews were able to overthrow some foreign rule for a period of time. The Sadducees came from that period of time.

The Sadducees and Pharisees were different groups in that the Pharisees were more missionary. They believed in what we call the entire Old Testament. They believed in the Messiah and in miracles and the resurrection. The Sadducees only believed in the first five books. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Only those books. But even with that, they didn't believe in the resurrection, they didn't believe in miracles, they didn't believe in angels.

Just like in Christianity now, you have groups that are skeptical And they'll say, yeah, we like this Christian thing, but we don't believe Jesus really resurrected. Jesus really didn't die for your sins. It was just sort of a really nice gesture on His part.

And so just like we have people who are skeptical and don't believe the very things that are written in Scripture and testified to multiple times over, They had the similar kind of thing. The Sadducees were very skeptical people and they had a limited set of books that they considered authoritative, but even in that they wouldn't support the resurrection, miracles, angels, everything was just, that's it. There was no afterlife for the Sadducees, which is hard for us to imagine. What motivates you? It's like, okay, I believe in God, but when we're done, we're done.

That was Sadducees. Isn't that? Yes, which is why they're so very sad, you see. Okay, so we also have the Zealots. These are the ones who, in other words, here are the Hasmoneans during this period of time. They're free of, excuse me, free of foreign rule. But then you have the Romans come in, and of course these people have had some period of freedom, right? And so he didn't like the Romans coming in, and so they want him out of there.

So you have the Zealots, you have an even more extreme group, not mentioned by name, but referenced Acts 21-38 is the Sicarii, Jewish terrorists. Terrorists. They want to go in and do sneak attacks. They want to come in on some Roman tax station. and kill the guy and take all the money. They want to take some Roman ruler that's traveling from one place to another and do an ambush and take him out.

So you have these different groups that were developed. The Essenes are another group. That's where the Dead Sea Scrolls appear to have come from, in great part. But the Essenes are not mentioned by name, but made reference to in Matthew 5.43. Jesus says it talks there about hate your enemy. Well, only the Essenes talked about hating your enemies. The Pharisees and the Sadducees did not teach that you should hate your enemy, but the Essenes did. So far as I know, that's the only genuine and undeniable reference to the Essenes.

Kind of a recluse group, in great part, in the New Testament. Pardon? Okay, you're thinking of the Bedouins? The Bedouins are a more nomadic group. The Essenes actually had established kind of outposts and developments of their own. The Bedouins were more nomadic and not necessarily Jewish. The Essenes, very interesting, they thought that the scribes and the Pharisees and the Sadducees were just disgusting, vile people.

And by the way, they believed in double predestination, like some Calvinists do. That double predestination is God chose us, the Essenes, to go to heaven, basically, to be saved. And everybody else, God chose them to go to hell. And so that's double predestination. And it's just like many of the hardline Calvinists hold to today. Jesus didn't subscribe to that.

Very interesting. Okay, now finally we get to the Roman Empire. 63 BC is when the Romans came in. Here's what's very interesting. While Alexander the Great was moving to the east, remember that Alexander the Great's map? He moved generally to the east. The Romans began moving to the east as well. But Alexander the Great never knew about that. so that the Romans came in and essentially started taking over the western part of Alexander the Great's old empire.

Okay. So now we have the Romans. The city of Rome had begun military exploits west of the Greek empires in the 3rd century BC. And by the 2nd century BC, the Roman military had begun encroaching upon the western portions of the Greek empires. In 63 BC, the Roman army had overtaken Israel, which had been under a century of Hasmonean rule, and the Romans allowed limited self-rule and exemptions in the areas impacted by the Jews' religion.

Jews got certain exemptions. In other words, they said, OK, you can have your high council, your Sanhedrin, composed of Sadducees in a minority and Pharisees in a majority. And in order that there be some kind of balance, since the Sadducees were a smaller group, they let the Sadducees be the ones who had the high priests. They let the Jews have their temple and things of that sort, and have certain exemptions. For example, Jews were exempt from military commitment and activity.

Just think of what it would be like, imagine You are trying to head up a Roman military command. And guess what's for dinner? Pork. Yep. And you just got a problem, right? What's the matter? You won't eat this. What's the matter with you, right? Or they say, hey, guys, we've got this great new bunch of clothing for you to wear. What's the matter? You don't like the mixed fibers? What's wrong with the mixed fibers? You don't like that. It was too much trouble to try to comply with the Jewish dietary and clothing requirements. Hey, we need to march. What do you mean it's Sabbath? So there were too many things that just didn't work.

So they gave them an exemption. So the Jews got various exemptions. Then, here's something very interesting. In 40 BC, the Parthians, which was an empire to the east of the Romans, made a quick thrust into Jerusalem about 40 BC. So it's very interesting here. They were under Roman rule for a couple of decades, and then the Parthians came in and actually liberated Jerusalem from the Romans, briefly.

Well, the Romans, guess what they thought about this? They didn't like it, right? So what do they do? They force them back, and then they say, we don't like that happening, so we're going to fix it. We don't ever want the Parthians forcing their way into that part of our empire again. So how are they going to fix it? I'm going to go there.

They put in Herod the Great. Herod the Great, they said, we're going to put him in there to guard against the Parthians because he's nasty. I mean, he's paranoid, he's nasty, he's perfect for the Romans' purposes. And they knew he was nasty. As a matter of fact, one of the things that Augustus Caesar said He made a play on words in Greek. He said, it's better to be Herod's pig than Herod's son. The words in Greek sound similar. Because he actually would have sons killed and any other people, if he thought they were threatening his kingship.

Which fits, right? Because what was Herod's concern when the guys came in from the east saying, where's the king of the Jews? So what's Herod's response? He's paranoid, right? And although he pretends to be interested in worshiping this king of the Jews, he really wants to do what?

Kill them. Make sure there's no opposition. Right? That's just typical Herod. So what you find is what's described in the Bible fits what we know, right? It fits perfectly. And that's not all. It makes sense that he would go and have all those babies slaughtered because he'd rather slaughter hundreds. And by the way, by demographic estimates and whatnot, he probably had about 300 babies slaughtered just to make sure that the one didn't threaten his kingship. Oh, there's one other problem. Guess where the Parthian Empire was located? To the east, right? Guess where the wise men came from? From the east. And so he's going to be very interested in anybody coming from the east, right? Because he's paranoid.

So it's amazing what you find in the New Testament fits exactly with what we know about Herod. No exceptions. Herod was so cruel that when he died in March of 4 BC, he had an order in place that a number of Jews, I mean hundreds and hundreds of Jews, be gathered up and slaughtered upon his death to assure that there was mourning at his death.

Fortunately, what happened is that the people who took power next said, no, don't do that. Okay. So it didn't take place. Okay. Now, so he, he was tyrannical and cruelly paranoid. We find that in the Bible. We find that in the records outside the Bible. That was why they put him in the place that they did. They didn't care if he was cruel and nasty. and paranoid as long as he kept the Parthians out. They didn't want to deal with that again. And they didn't.

He also established great building programs including a major upgrade to the temple in Jerusalem. He had several different building programs. One was he built a port on the coast called Caesarea. You find it described in the New Testament. This is where Peter went in order to give the gospel to the household of Cornelius at Caesarea. This is where Paul was imprisoned when he was taken from Jerusalem to Caesarea. That was all Herod's doing, building that port.

20 BC he began reconstruction of the temple. People will ask me from time to time, how could there be rocks in the temple area How could there be rocks in the temple area? So when you see people threatening to throw rocks at Jesus, I thought that that was a temple area. Why are they finding rocks? Well, it's because the temple was still under reconstruction. And it would be pieces of rock and boulder and various construction debris all around the temple area.

So it makes good sense. Here it also built on a mountain Just east of Bethlehem, you can see from Bethlehem and between there and the top of this mountain, you can see him directly. He took the top of the mountain off and built the military place called Herodium. Why would he build a military fortress on top of a mountain there? He's paranoid. He wants a place to watch for the Parthians, right? That's his assignment.

It turns out that according to Josephus, that just a couple years ago, his burial place was found on that mountain, Herodium. And by the way, the archaeologists that found that mountain just died here in the last month. Okay. Yes? I must have missed it. Where's the hair cutter?

Was he in Israel or did they import him? Oh, he already had connections with the Romans and he was actually a descendant of Esau. Very interesting. He was actually a descendant of Esau. What he did to try to curry some favor and make political connections was he had several wives and one of them was one of them out of the family of the Hasmoneans. So he actually tried to get some political connection there by marrying one of the wives there. I don't think it gave any tender, you know, cushy feelings to anybody, but that's what he tried to do. But he had already had connections with the Romans.

They knew he was nasty. And once this opportunity came up, they said, let's assign somebody nasty who's going to just be certain to keep the Parthians out. And that's what they did. Here is a model of the Temple upgrade, which was substantial. The Temple upgrade was started in 20 BC and not completed until the early 60s AD, a few years before it was completely destroyed. Oh, one other thing.

Herod had no problem volunteering for the Jews to pay for things. And so one of the other things he did is he volunteered for the Jews to pay for the 12 BC Olympics, which they did, because he was so generous. So that was Herod, always willing to spend money. Here's this Herodium, the place where he cut the top off the mountain, built a military installation, and was buried in the side of the mountain there. just recently discovered about three years ago.

Okay. Next we have, let's see, is that page four on your handout? Next we have Emperor Augustus. He was a pivotal emperor in that his efforts turned from expanding the Roman Empire to establishing a sustainable empire. Let's have this empire continue on Further, he ruled for a long period of time, 31 BC to 14 AD, which allowed for the continued implementation of his policies without reversal. He even made rules about marriage and childbirth.

If you become either divorced or your husband dies and you are still a woman of childbearing age and you have three, less than three kids, you are required to get married inside of, I think it was like two years. So you will get remarried. Why? Because they want more kids. So very interesting. And they made a number of different rules about that. Essentially, you weren't allowed to get divorced and stay that way. You had to get remarried. unless you met certain exemptions. If you'd like to join us, you can go ahead. There's a handout here and we'll continue to operate. Okay.

By arrangement with the Roman government, the Jews were permitted to maintain a traditional self-rule in areas impacting their practice of religion. The one thing that they were not allowed to do is to carry out capital punishments. Occasionally they did carry it out in any way if they thought they could get away with it. But in their general practice of religion they did that. This is a reconstruction The usual meeting place was right over here. This is on the left-hand side of the inner temple area for the Sadducees and the Pharisees and their Sanhedrin.

Over here is where the genealogical records were kept. This is called the Court of Women. Qualified Jewish men and women could come into here. This area up front of the temple is where The widow would give her mite in the temple. That's also the area where the one guy would say, thank you, Lord, that I'm such a great Pharisee and so righteous. And the other person would come in and say, Lord, have mercy on me. It's in that area right there. So they would gather in there.

There were signs here, here, here on those three entrances. And one and a half of those signs have been found in the rubble. There were three signs that warned any non-Jew that comes through these gates. They have themselves to blame if they die. Basically, it's a threat of capital punishment for any non-Jew to come in.

Then, you see this circular set of stairways here? In that circular set of stairways, Priests would have, at various times throughout the day, a male choir of priests who would come and sing at intervals, and they would get in a kind of a semi-circle facing out and sing from there. They would play a harp called a kithara, where we get our word guitar. A kithara. They play a harp in there. The Jewish men could go through here, into here, into the area where the priests would carry on their sacrifices. And then into here, this was the doorway with the curtain that was torn in two when Jesus was crucified. So there are many very significant things that took place in here that fit in with scripture.

The Romans stayed away, but just to the north of there, they had a fortress, Fortress Antonia, which was where Jesus was brought before Pilate. The Jews hated it that the Romans from their fortress could look down upon all the Jewish activities going on there. There was also a gateway and a stairway between Fortress Antonia and this big courtyard around the temple. And so for that little gateway is where Paul was taken when the Romans pulled him out of the temple area. Later on when Paul got in trouble because it was accused that Paul had brought a Gentile into this area. past the gates where the warnings were given.

And all those features of construction were all things that Herod did put into place. Here are steps to what is believed to be Caiaphas' house, where they basically had an impromptu and fundamentally illegal trial of Jesus. And so those are what's believed to be the steps.

There was a priesthood in the Sanhedrin that consisted of a minority of Sadducees, and in order to compensate for their minority status, the chief priests were almost always Sadducees. That was their compensation for the fact that they were smaller in number. A majority of Pharisees were a total of 71 members. Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus were two. of those Pharisees that were on that High Council.

Now there was also the establishment of the Jewish two-court system. The Jews established two different court systems in the first century BC, just decades before the birth of Christ. A Jew could choose to conduct legal matters under one system or the other and switch freely between them. You could say, what's most advantageous?

For example, Rabbi Hillel said that a man could divorce a woman for any reason whatsoever, no questions asked. Whereas Rabbi Shammai said that divorce was permitted only for unfaithfulness, abandonment, lack of support, or denial of affection. Remember when Joseph, I'm talking about Joseph and Mary, right? When Joseph found out that Mary was pregnant. Before he knew that she was pregnant by the Lord, he planned to put her away quietly. Which court was he planning to use? The one of Hillel where there was no questions asked. Put her away quietly? I'll choose the court of Hillel. That way there'd be no questions asked and no big embarrassment.

See the point there? So that developed between the Testaments, and that explains why that particular circumstance would be there. By the way, it also explains something later that we won't have time to go into in any detail, but why Jesus would have a problem with people getting divorced and remarried. Why? It's because you could get divorced for no good reason at all. Christ was born during the rule of Augustus.

Roman Empire, this is not a map that you have. You can see various places that have been developed. Basically the entire Mediterranean up to the eastern part of the Mediterranean here. Here's Israel, all the way up to Britain. was included in the Roman Empire. And what we don't see, there was a period of time right after the New Testament was completed when the Roman Empire extended all the way from Britain down to the Persian Gulf, which is phenomenal, especially since you just can't call people on the cell phone and say, do this and do that, right? And that began to be administratively awkward, too.

Romans built roads all over the place throughout the Roman Empire. Ultimately, the Romans, and it was the Roman soldiers, by the way, who built all the roads by hand. They would dig down, put down layers of sand, larger and larger rocks, and then to the top was a layer of hard rock that was tightly fit. They built enough roads by hand to go around the entire globe twice. all scattered throughout the Roman Empire.

And so the roads that they built, many of which are still in place, in some cases they just put pavement over the top, the roads that they built served as connecting and communication and travel points to carry the gospel. Very interesting. And that leads us to our next, excuse me, I've got a couple points here.

Augustus was emperor of the Roman Empire. Herod was king until his death in March of 4 BC, which also, by the way, gives us a latest, latest date for Jesus' birth. Probably latest, latest date for Jesus' birth, about January 4 BC. His death was in the middle of March. It was like the 13th or the 14th, something like that. So the Jews had a major population established in Egypt, especially Alexandria, to which Joseph and Mary could go for a time. We don't know certainly that they did, but likely, outside of Herod's realm.

In Galatians 4.4 it says, in the fullness of time, at the right time, God sent his son. Why was the time right? Well, let's look at why.

The Roman Empire provided political stability and excellent roads on which to carry the gospel. That kind of road system had never existed until the Romans came into place. Greek culture brought the Greek language which was structured beautifully and precisely conveying the essential New Testament truths and in many cases becoming predominant over all the dialects. So you could spread the gospel and you could also use a language that was well structured for the kind of truths that the New Testament had to convey. For by grace are you saved, perfect tense, completed past action, ongoing results on into the future, implying permanence. The language is ideal. The road system is ideal.

The spread of Jewish culture gave the empire a background in the Old Testament so as to better convey the gospel. We talked about the Pharisees and the Sadducees. The Sadducees, eventually when the Romans wiped out Jerusalem, they died off with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. The Pharisees, however, continued on. Why? Because they were missionary.

They would go around telling everybody all the Old Testament Bible stories, and they'd tell everybody about Abraham, and they'd tell everybody about David. And so when the apostles wrote about these things, they didn't have to start from scratch explaining the Old Testament. Everybody knew it already. So it was.

In the fullness of time, at the right time that God sent his son, the roads were there, the political system was there, the language was there, and the Jews had spread Bible stories out of the Old Testament everywhere, everywhere they went. It was the right time when God sent his son. You see, When Christ died on the cross, he saved everyone for all time, before and after, right? But there was a perfect time for him to do it and for that message to get spread.

And that's what God chose. Isn't that cool? It really is cool. God is in fact sovereign. God's not guessing. God did pick the right time. Let's pray, okay? Lord, thank you that We can trust not only your sovereignty and your foreknowledge and knowledge of all things, but we can also trust your love and your grace. And we thank you for what you did indeed do at the right time to die for our sins and to be buried and to rise again. Thank you for those wonderful, precious truths. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.