Matthew Bible Study for Beginners – Intro to Matthew's Gospel – Mike Mazzalongo | BibleTalk.tv (Full Transcript) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObRSgJW0Oig
shared by Sarah Brown
OK, so this is Matthew for Beginners. Matthew for Beginners, lesson 1.
This is the introductory lesson to the Gospel of Matthew. I want to explain the
"for beginners" here. The "for beginners" part of the title does not mean that
these lessons will be oversimplified. It means that I'm going to teach about
Matthew's Gospel with the notion that you haven't studied the Gospel of
Matthew at all or in a while. I know I've taught some things about Matthew, about the parables in Matthew and other type of materials, the
kingdom, idea of the kingdom in Matthew, but this is going to be a real
study of the Gospel of Matthew itself as Matthew has has written it. So rather
than being oversimplified, think complete. This will be a complete study and in our study we're going to take time to examine the social, the historical settings that existed when the gospel was produced, because Matthew,
obviously a man of his time, influenced by his times, even though he was inspired, God uses the individual as that individual is to write what he wants to
write. We're also going to take a look at the author himself and how the book came to be included in the official New Testament canon and that'll give us an
opportunity to study how did books make their way into the New Testament Canon?
Why were some chosen and others rejected? Be a good opportunity to do that and I'll also show you how the book is divided and review some of
the reasons why it was written and how it was used in the early church. This book was used in a particular way in the early church. Now we're not going to have time to read everything in class, but I'm going to give you reading assignments each week. I mean they're not going to be very long, but you'll be able to read ahead as Cary mentioned to read ahead couple of chapters so that we won't have to read all of the chapters in class. Alright, let's take a look at the historical background of Matthew's writing. There are four main political, historical periods which shape the thinking of the
people when Jesus arrived on the scene of human history and the scene which
Matthew will record in his gospel so very, very briefly. (Yeah I got to go one
more time here. There we go, there we go) The first the historical period the
Persian period 536 to 336 BC. By then the southern kingdom of Judea had been exiled to Babylon in 586 BC. God finally grew weary of their idolatry, their
disobedience. The northern kingdom had been exiled and dispersed centuries
before, now it was the turn of the southern kingdom 586 BC and while
they're in Babylon in exile, Babylon itself fell, their kingdom fell to the
Persians in 539 BC. So very interesting, the Jews were captive under two world powers here; first the Babylonians and then the Persians that took over from the Babylonians who kept them in captivity. Another interesting thing that
took place while they were in captivity is that synagogue worship began not in
Judea, but actually began while they were in captivity before the Jews went to the temple to offer sacrifice, to pray, and so on and so forth, no need, but when they were in exile in Babylon of the temple had been destroyed, the city was
in ruins, they couldn't worship in the temple. There was no temple and they themselves were captives in a foreign land so they began
"house churches." They began house churches, they began synagogues, places for prayer; and the synagogue idea and the synagogue movement began while they were in Babylonian captivity and it was kept up when they finally returned were returned back from exile. So historically, eventually, a small remnant returned to rebuild the city and the temple in and around 520 BC and others follow to resettle the land over the
next century. So it wasn't they were in exile and then all of a sudden they all came back. It was they were in exile and a few came back and then another group came back and then another group came back, they came back sporadically over the next century and not all of them came back many of them stayed in Babylon, because they were there for generations and they had businesses, they had farms, they had you know, it was home and so they didn't all come back to Jerusalem. So when we read the books of Ezra and Nehemiah and
Malachi, those writers write about that period of restoration from Babylonian
captivity. The final book of the Old Testament is the book of Malachi and it
was written at about this particular time. After Malachi we have
what's called the inter-testamentary period that lasts for about 400 years
where there is no inspired books that are produced, but a lot of historical and
diverse religious styles are produced. So it's not that nothing was written, it was that there were no prophets, there were no inspired books written from the
period of Malachi to John the Baptist, which is about 400 years, however, there
was a lot of material that was produced and it's important to kind of look at these, because they influenced the thinking of the Jews in the first
century or in the time when Jesus arrived. So let's take a look at those. So
diverse, non-inspired writings, there are first of all the historical books which
record the social and political movements of the Jewish people at that time. For example, there's Josephus who was a contemporary of Jesus, he was a
Pharisee and a historian by training and he records the history of the Jewish people during that time and he writes about
Jesus, this Nazarene who was executed as an insurrectionist, totally
rejecting the idea that Jesus is the Son of God or anything like that, he's just writing objectively what's going on politically and socially
during that time and his writings are available to us today, I have a copy of Josephus or of Josephus' writings. He's the one that writes about James, for
example, that's how we know that James, the brother of Jesus, the one who wrote the Epistle, was killed, he was thrown from the top of the wall around
Jerusalem, he was thrown down into the rocks and apparently according to his record, James didn't die right away so the Jews went down and they stoned him to make sure that he had died, a very terrible death, but that's not recorded in the Bible. You only know that if you read Josephus, for example.
Also the writing of the Maccabees, the First and Second Maccabees, the history of the Jewish uprising during that period of time and I'll talk about that
a little later. So there were the historical books that were written during that inter-testamentary, some people say inter-testamental, either way's
OK. Other material are commentaries. Commentaries, the Talmud, for example, which was a collection of rabbinic teachings concerning the Jewish law. So get it straight, the Torah is the Jewish word for the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch are the first five books of the Bible right? Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy; those are the first five books, sometimes we refer to those five
books as the Pentateuch, a Greek term "Penta", five, five books right? The Pentateuch. Well, the Torah, the word Torah is the Jewish word for these first five books. So when they're talking about the Torah, they're talking about the law, they're talking, the Jews are talking, about the first five books of the Bible.
Alright. The Talmud, that's where it's confusing, the Talmud is a
commentary written by rabbis about the Torah.
OK? Commentary written by Jewish rabbis concerning the books of the law, the first five books of the Bible and then the word Mishnah is another commentary that's within the Talmud. Alright, so we don't have to memorize all
these things, I'm just trying to explain to you that during that time there began to be commentaries, not inspired writings, commentaries written by scribes, by
students of the word, about what they believed [about] how the law should be
applied in various situations, again we'll talk about that a little more as
we go on. Then there were diverse non-inspired writings called the Apocrypha, the word Apocrypha means hidden and these were
stories and accounts of events and people in Jewish history that are not recorded in the inspired books. For example, the history of Susannah, a
character of that time, not mentioned in any Old Testament record, not mentioned in any New Testament record, but written about by writers during this period of time. Or the wisdom of Solomon, we don't have a book in the Old Testament
canon entitled "The Wisdom of Solomon," but a book like that was written
referring back to Solomon. A first and second Esdras or other additions to the
book of Esther, for example. Sometimes people say, "My friend has a
Catholic Bible, is that Bible any good?" They say, "a Catholic Bible," and the reason they say "a Catholic Bible" is that many versions authorised by the
Catholic [church], many versions of the Bible authorized by the Catholic Church include these books. So you've got the Old Testament, Genesis all the
way to Malachi and then before you get to the New Testament there are a whole bunch of other books and you wonder, "What are these books?" well these are the
Apocrypha, they include many of these books between the Old and New Testament in their version of the Bible, in their collection of Bible books, but we have to understand. So people say, "Is that book any good?" Well, of course, it is, it's the same Old Testament and it's the same New
Testament that we use, the New American Standard or New Revised or New International Version or whatever, it's the same book, except they've just added these other additions in between the Old and New Testament. The thing to remember is that these books are non-inspired. Alright. And then we have another type of book entitled a pseudipigrapha. Pseudipigrapha meaning "false."
False. These were works that were written using the name of Old
Testament writers long after their deaths. For example, there's a book entitled "The Revelation of Moses." Well, "The Revelation of Moses" was not written
by Moses, but people would take the name of a Bible character and attach it to
their book to give it more circulation value, more authenticity, if you
wish and usually these books here in the pseudipigrapha were written in the apocalyptic style; if you were in other classes like Daniel, Revelation, you know
that the apocalyptic style, OK, is a style of writing, is a literary style
that uses a lot of metaphor, a lot of fantastic language, the blood was...
the moon was filled with blood, the stars fell, so on and so forth, that we see in Daniel, for example, and the book of Revelation, that's a, apocalyptic type
literature. Well, these books here in the pseudipigrapha, many of them are written in this particular style. So these
writings between 400 BC and the arrival of Christ, the thing I'm trying to get
across here, is that they influence the thinking of the people and much of Jesus's teaching was done to counteract the false ideas that people had drawn
from this type of literature here, that's the point I'm trying to get across. OK?
The Talmud, for example, that commentary on the Torah,
the commentary on the first five books of the Bible that had been written by Jewish scribes, the Talmud with the many restrictions about the Sabbath
that were not found in the actual Bible itself, but were imposed on the people. So a lot of the things that the people had to do according to "the law" wasn't according to the law at all, it was according to the commentary
on the law. Alright? People also were learning and basing much of their
religious thought on commentaries and their hopes on the end time scenarios
rather than the prophets, in other words a lot of these books were talking about
when the end time was coming, when the Messiah was coming, it was almost like science fiction. And so a lot of their thoughts were...
their thoughts about the coming Messiah were based on these type of writings instead of carefully studying what the prophets were saying and so that's why
they had such a mistaken idea of, or a confused idea on, who the Messiah was
supposed to be, because they had so many contradicting ideas that they were
consuming through this type of
literature. OK, so that gives you that inter-testamentary period there and some
of the things going on there. Another era, if you wish, you had the Persian era 536 to 336 BC and then the inter-testamentary period, then you had the
Greek period 333 to 167 BC, the time of Alexander the Great and his legacy. After Alexander's death we know that his kingdom was divided among his four
generals and as far as we're concerned in the study of Mathew, we need to
understand that Palestine was under different control for two centuries of
the Greek world domination. In other words, the Greeks dominated the world but that little strip of land we called Israel was fought over by regional
powers at the time, OK? North and South and so from (let's
get another slide up here) from 320 to 198 Egypt controlled Palestine or
Israel, OK? They were in control. Egypt was under domination by Greece, but
Palestine was under regional control, local control by Egypt. I should go down
here, Egypt was south, OK? And then from 198 to 167 BC, Syria, the country to the north of Palestine, gained control over that region and the reason that these, the north and the south, were always fighting is because they wanted to control that piece of land as a buffer zone between them and their enemies. They wanted to be... It's always easier to fight a war on somebody else's turf right? You destroy their homes, you burn their crops, and so on and so forth. So they always wanted that middle piece of land we call Israel, they wanted that to stage their wars and so on and so forth, so they fought back and
forth. So from 198 to 167 BC, Syria was in control of that, of Palestine, and one king in particular, his name was
Antiochus Epiphanes, he was really trying to destroy and demoralize the Jewish people and what he did is he closed the temple. He closed the temple and then he went in and he sacrificed a pig on the altar, knowing about Jewish religious custom and so on and so forth, knew that that would desecrate the
temple and the area and so on and so forth and then he forbade circumcision.
You weren't allowed to circumcise children, in other words, he was trying to completely destroy, not just the people economically, but he was trying to
destroy them psychologically by destroying their religion. So it was a
time of great, great depression and great trouble for the people of Judah at
that time. Another thing that was interesting is in a larger sense the
Greeks controlled... it was their time of domination and it wasn't just a military domination, but it was also a cultural domination.
I mean Greek ideas and Greek philosophy and Greek language and Greek art and Greek religion and Greek literature was just being
diffused throughout their empire, throughout the world and it had an effect on the Jews. What happened for the Jews was they began to forget how to
speak Hebrew, because they were influenced and I mean that's really easy to understand. I'm looking around, but everybody here was kind of born here,
but for people, well like us. like our family, our oldest
ones still speak French, because we originally come from Quebec, right? So we speak French and they speak French, but I doubt if our grandchildren are going to speak French and I really doubt that our great-grandchildren will speak French. Why? Well they're assimilated into the United States which is an English-speaking country. They'll probably speak Spanish before they'll
speak French, right? So the same thing was happening in Israel, in Judah, people were being assimilated by the Greek culture, they were forgetting to speak the old language what but was a problem. Their whole life revolved around their religion and their whole religion revolves around the scriptures and if they couldn't read the scriptures, they would cease to be as a people. And so what they did is they created a Greek version of the Old Testament. A
Greek version of the Old Testament that we call the Septuagint and we call it
the Septuagint because 70 scholars were brought together to undertake the task of translating the Hebrew Old Testament into the Greek language, and so when you see the Roman numerals L X X, which represents 70, many times in a text or something usually what they're saying is this text is from the Septuagint, which is the Greek version of the Old Testament, OK?
Another period after this is the Maccabean period, very interesting, from
167 to 63 BC. Notice we're working our way towards the arrival of Jesus, but all these things that happened in the world had an effect on the Jewish people and what Matthew is going to be writing about. This is the Maccabean period. The Maccabean period is known for the revolt against the Syrian control. Against Syrian control, in other words, they had had enough of Syrian control
and trying to destroy the religion, the people rose up and the Maccabees, that
family, led that insurrection, led that revolt. Also there was a revolt against
the Greek language and Greek influence. So the Jews enjoyed a brief period of independence from 167 to 135 BC. The revolt succeeded in pushing back the Syrian King and the Syrian influence during their time. And
during this period here, very interesting, new powers arose within Israel. had
If you ever wondered where do the Pharisees come from; who are those guys? Where do they come from? Who are they? Well what they were,
they were scribes. I mean that's what they did and they belonged to a party
called the Pharisees and the Pharisees, the word Pharisee simply means the called out people, OK, the separated ones. The Pharisees
that party begins during the Maccabean period. They were scribes who led the
revolt and were considered saviours of the law and the protectors of the law
against pagan Greek influences. So they were the ones in their day who said, "Let's go back to the Bible." They're the original ones who said, "Enough of
Greek influence in our life and in our religion and in our our culture and so on and so forth, enough the Syrians taking over, we need to go back to the
scriptures and go just with the scriptures. And so they were heroes at
the beginning, they were seen as heroes. They saved, if you wish, the way
of life that the Jews had that was dictated by the Scriptures. So that's where they come from. Now if you understand that idea of how they
started it gives you great insight into how they became 100 years later how they became, what they became during Jesus's time,
because they were Jesus' greatest enemies and yet at the beginning they were the hero of the people. And then of course the Sadducees. The
Sadducees were the aristocratic upper class of priests who began to
wield political power. They didn't always have political power, because in Israel
there was theking, there was a king and then
there were the priests, but then in Israel there was no king, there were no kings, they were dominated by outside influences and so what
happened is that the priests took over.
There was a vacuum, no leadership. So the priests took over the secular
leadership, because they were wealthy, because they were well-educated and they were well positioned and respected, so it was like a natural transference, but something very interesting happened when they did that. Traditionally the priests were the ones charged by God to teach the people God's Word, when they abandoned that role, they abandoned that role in order to take over political leadership and the ones who stepped into their role was the Pharisees, they became the teachers of the people and began to have that kind of spiritual influence over over the people. It's a change that you don't
recognize if you read very quickly, but that was a very significant thing that took place at that time during the Maccabean period. We also have a group
called the Essenians or the Essenes. The Essenes were monks, if you wish, they were desert dwellers and they saw Jerusalem as a place of corruption; the priests were corrupt, the Pharisees were corrupt, the Greek influence, they wanted to just escape all of it, if you wish, and so they lived
in a commune, they lived in a community like monks and what they did
was they recorded copies of the Old Testament Hebrew, not Greek, but the Old Testament Hebrew and Aramaic writings and they sealed them in protective earthen jars and they hid those jars in caves near the Dead Sea and the reason
they did that is that they were afraid that there would be some sort of cataclysmic military thing that would happen where either the north of the
south of the Greeks or somebody would come in and destroy Jerusalem again and destroy the temple and destroy the scriptures and so they wanted to protect the scriptures. So they were very careful in copying them, they were
scribes and so they copied the scriptures, hid them in caves,
hoping to guarantee that the scriptures would live on for another generation. Well, we know what happens right? In 1947 a shepherd boy taking care of his sheep; you have to understand if you go to that area and near the Dead Sea, you look at the mountains, there are thousands of caves, we're not talking about a huge
cave we're talking about enough where a person could crawl in with three or four sheep or something, there are thousands of those things all over
dotting the countryside. So a boy in 1947 goes into one of those caves
and stumbles across a jar that's broken, he opens it up, there's a scroll inside. He gets it, he brings it to Jerusalem, or this the city, I forget if
it was Egypt, Cairo, Egypt, Jerusalem. Anyway, so he brings it to a
merchant and lo and behold the Dead Sea Scrolls. And so they go back and they
begin to examine all these caves and they begin to find all these scrolls
hermetically sealed for almost 2,000 years;
protected against moisture and wind and so on and so forth in the dark in the
cave and if you see them, I've seen them when I was in Israel, I was at the Museum, they have the Dead Sea scrolls, and you see them like they're in
behind climate control glass cases and you see the entire
scroll (yeah, I can't read it) in Hebrew obviously, but you see this is the original thing. What's amazing is one of the scrolls,
Isaiah, right? You take out your New American Standard or whatever
and you flip over to Isaiah and if you could read the same language, it's exactly the same thing. One of the strongest arguments for the
continuity of Scripture and so that was the Essenians, that was their
contribution to that time. The reason I say that is that there was a lot of political stuff going on, end time scenarios, the end is coming,
a lot of stuff happening, these guys out in the desert thinking that the end was going to come, they were writing the scriptures, trying
to protect them, all the political turmoil going on in the city and then of course you had the zealots they were political activists and anarchists who
wanted to continue the revolution. The Maccabean Revolution,
we have to stay in a perpetual state of revolution. Barabbas,
the one that they released instead of Jesus, he was part of this group and Simon, one of the Apostles, was part of this group. And then you have the
Herodians. The Herodians were a political party who were sympathetic to Herod and
some thought that he was the Messiah. Among the Herodians, they thought he was the savior and you know what in those days I could see them believing a thing
like that, because Herod was responsible for rebuilding the temple, bringing back its splendor. He was a king, he was
bringing back the temple, so on and so forth, I could see some saying. "Yeah, this is the guy who... he's gonna bring us back to greatness." So
Israel was a hotbed of political activity, it was nurtured on writings
during the inter-testamentary period that speculated about the fantastic arrival of the Messiah, it was almost like science fiction.
There was great expectancy, they were like a bomb, ready to blow up and into this, Jesus enters. OK, so now we get to the period of the time
when Jesus comes. The Roman period 63 to the New Testament period.Now the Romans
they simply destroyed Syria completely and they dominated Palestine. They
established governors over Palestine, they sold the rights to collect taxes to
individuals in the country, this is what they did in all countries, wasn't anything new in Palestine, that's what they did, was a lot easier. And of course
the men who collected the taxes, who purchased the license to collect the tax, they were
called publicans, right? And guess who was one of those guys, well, Matthew. Matthew was a publican. Herod, of course, was called the King of the Jews. He was a Roman appointed governor actually. He was a political ruler called a king. Then you had Pontius Pilate, he was the military governor who supplied a Roman guarantee, or excuse me a guarantee of force, in other words, to collect the taxes and to put down rebellion. So there will be peace if you pay your taxes and if you do not rebel; if you don't pay your taxes and you give us trouble, then we wipe you out. This was the deal, OK?
There was no negotiating this deal and they kept the garrison of soldiers there just to make sure that the people understood what the deal was.
Alright, now we need to talk about the calendar. The calendar, BC, AD,
before Christ, the year of our Lord. OK? During the time of Jesus, the time
at that time was calculated according to the Roman calendar. So
the time was calculated according to the Roman calendar, the feasts were celebrated according to the Jewish calendar, but the years were according to
the Roman calendar, okay? The Roman calendar calculated the year
by referring to the founding of the city of Rome as year number one and so when Jesus arrived, if you wish, it was year 753. It was 753 years after the founding of Rome, that was when Jesus was born according to the Roman calendar. if you lived then and Jesus is the in the manger,and so on and so
forth and you turn to your buddy and said, "Well what year is this?" He'd say, "Well, it's 753 according to Roman calendar." Alright, after
Christianity became the religion of the Roman world, the Emperor Justinian
requested that a new dating system be established using the birth of Jesus as
year number one thinking well wait a minute we are the Holy Roman Empire, we are a Christian Empire, why should the calendar reflect the beginning
of Rome, pagan Rome? Our calendar should actually reflect our religion, the birth
of our Lord, so let's make the year of our Lord year number one and then we'll
count forward okay. And so the new dating system was established
using Christ as year number one. OK, now, so that meant with this adjustment, when
this adjustment was made, the Roman year, they were in year twelve seventy-nine
according to the Roman calendar, OK? Since Jesus had been born in 753 which
is Roman time, they reestablished the Year in Christian terms to be 526 in
other words 526 years after the birth of Christ, this is when the new calendar, this is going to be the date of the new
calendar when it's inaugurated, if you wish. Everybody following me so far? We good? But then the problem was there was a mistake. To complicate things even further it was discovered that their calculations as to the year of Jesus's birth was an error. He was actually born in the year 749 Roman calendar, not 753 Roman calendar, see what I'm saying? But since the change had already been made to the new calendar, they just left everything as it was. So this means that
according to the new calendar Jesus was born in 4 BC, OK? Is that confusing enough for you? Alright, so that's why you read secular books sometimes and they say, "Jesus Christ of Nazareth, born 4 BC," and you're going, "How can
Jesus be born four years before Christ?" This is the reason why this was done. So the Romans, of course getting back to Rome, the Romans of
course, were cruel, they were ruthless rulers, but during their dominance they provided important elements which actually supported the spreading of the
gospel. For example, the Pax Romana between years
fourteen BC and 93 AD there was a hundred years of world peace. Now you say to yourself, Yeah, no big deal." Well how many wars have we had in the last hundred years? World War One, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq,
Afghanistan, Korea, I even left out Korea, that's just
wars that the United States has been involved in, not to mention wars between India and Pakistan.
There's wars everywhere, all the time, never ends right? But from 14 BC to
93 AD there were no wars, it was a period of relative peace guaranteed by the
might of the Roman army and the Roman Empire. Well what did that mean?
One of the things it meant was that there was freedom of movement. It means that the Apostles given the gospel to go preach to all the world
had freedom of movement throughout the Roman Empire which they would not have had had there been wars and civil strife and so on and so forth. So that's one of
the things. Another thing that the Romans did, they had an excellent road system designed to move troop from one... that's why it was originally designed, to move troops from one place to another if there's some
problems in the southern kingdom, in the East, West, or whatever, they could move troops very, very quickly to put down anything. You know what's interesting is after World War II when Mr. Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, started this tremendous road building process here in the United
States, if you read the history, everyone says, "Yeah and those roads
started motels, hotels, gas stations, it was great for the economy, but that was only the secondary reason for building roads across the
United States. The primary reason that they were built were for defense purposes. This was a big country, the country had just gone through a war, they wanted to make sure that they could move armies around in our country easily in order to defend it. And so during the time of the Romans of
course it provided excellent traveling. Also a third thing is that they,
during the Roman Empire, they maintained communication and a literary system on a universal plane, in other words, the Greek language was universal as the language of good literature and communication between cultures alright? Literature and culture still use the Greek language even though it was the Romans. The Romans, however, used Latin as the language of the law, of Roman law. So we know that the New Testament was written in Greek and it was easily
spread on a well-maintained road system by a Roman citizen and a Christian
missionary called Saul and Paul. So a little background about the eras.
Alright, a little bit more here, we're almost done. Show you a little map, you've
probably got this map in your Bible. Key locations in Jesus's ministry. For
example, Jerusalem is here and you've got the Sea of
Galilee where Jesus lived, Capernaum up here in the North, this was the travel
route back and forth along the Jordan River. The Dead Sea over here, this is
where the caves were. And so they traveled back and forth, not a very big
strip of land, maybe a hundred and ten miles from south to north, not a lot. Forty miles, maybe forty, fifty miles across; very, very small, but they
did it on foot. They walked everywhere they went. Some social situations taking place at that time, people were poor. Judea was poorer than Galilee actually. The religion was the center of life, it provided the anticipation of freedom mixed with politics. Agricultural, it was an
agricultural society at that time. Jerusalem had perhaps 250,000 people
which was extremely large for a city at that time, not just in the city, but
around Jerusalem. There was a high literacy rate at that time, because
Jewish children were taught to read, because they had to read the law and where did they learn to read? In the synagogues, every city had a synagogue.
Capernaum where Jesus was born, excuse me, where Jesus lived as an adult,
every city had one synagogue, well they've discovered where the synagogue is in Capernaum, the archaeologists have, and they have a
dig there and I've been there, I've walked in. Now they said the walls are gone but the entranceways are still there, like the
base wall is still there and the floor's still there and it's amazing. You can walk through, this is the door that they went through, this is the door that Jesus
went through, because He as was His custom, at the synagogue, so it's really,
really amazing experience. And there were class divisions in that
society; the aristocracy as I say were the priests and the priests only
believed in the Pentateuch, in other words, they only accepted the first five books of the Bible as inspired, they didn't believe in angels, they did not
accept the prophets, nothing like that. They were conservative religiously, but
they were liberal socially. They accepted a lot of Greek ideas and so on and so forth. Then there were the Pharisees, they were
the teachers, they were rabbis; they on the other hand believed in the prophets
and believed in a resurrection from the dead. The common people came next, the publicans and those who were sympathetic
to Rome, sinners and then slaves at the very bottom. This is why crucifixion was so humiliating, it was a punishment only for slaves. It was against
the law to crucify someone who was a common person, for example, or even
somebody part of a Pharisee or a publican, you couldn't do that, only slaves could be executed in that way. They did have a lot
of social problems at the time. Slavery of course, open and practiced. Some
estimates, thirty to forty percent of the population of the Roman Empire was in slavery. There was no middle class,
except perhaps the military, military had some influence. Divorce was rampant.
Prostitution, cult prostitution among Gentiles, the idea of cult prostitution
is that the sexual activity was required as part of your religious practice; so if
you went to the temple, the temple prostitutes were there to service the males who went to worship. In small towns,
the women of the villages would take turns serving as temple prostitutes. So we're not thinking of prostitutes trolling down Main
Street now, they were prostitutes, but in the service of their of their religion
at the time. Infanticide was a big problem especially among Gentiles; boys
were prized, girls less so, and so many female children were simply left to die
out in the fields, as a matter of fact one of the marks of Christianity that
set Christians apart at that time was that they would rescue these children that no one wanted. Child abuse, terrible. Orphans
were raised to be thieves or prostitutes. As far as the religious life is
concerned, Jews, temple worship was the center of their life. A cycle of
feasts on a yearly basis. Regular synagogue worship was the lifeblood of the community and most of the world practiced emperor worship at
that time. So into this turbulent world comes Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem to
a poor couple, raised as a young Jewish boy attending synagogue and temple worship, learning how to read, entering public ministry at age 30, confronting
the Pharisees and the priests; believe me this little background that I've given you now will speak largely when we begin looking at the dialogues that
Jesus has with these people. He gives them the news that He's the Messiah.
I mean they're all expecting all these fantastic ideas about
the Messiah and "What? This guy from Nazareth, are you serious? From Galilee? He's the Messiah? Wow, what a downer that is, what a
disappointment." He's hailed as king, He's killed as a criminal, He's resurrected to demonstrate His deity and Lordship. So Matthew, one of His disciples, writes about Him and next week we're going to start Matthew's eyewitness account of Jesus. So here's the assignment, this is a class, I want you to learn something okay? So read chapters 1-3, that's not a huge task, but I want you to get a notebook and I want you to write down two things: one, main section titles, in other words, in Matthew chapter 1 if you begin reading in chapter 1 verses two all the way down to verse 17 is just the genealogy. So as you read that in your notebook just put Matthew 1 and then just put a bullet and put genealogy verses 2 to 17 that's all, and then I also want you while you're reading verses 1, 2, and 3 or chapters 1, 2, and 3, I want you to record any nuggets that you find. You know what I mean by nuggets? You're reading and you go, "Oh wait a minute, I never noticed that before, hmm, that's interesting." Write that down, so hopefully by the time we're finished Matthew you yourself will have a notebook with a lot of good material for you to reflect on, pray over, and if you have an opportunity to teach or to do a devotional or to share with someone else, you'll have something that you yourself discovered and I'll help you put it into context with the classes that we do. So that's why I say this is
not simplistic Matthew for Beginners, but it will be complete. You'll really know
Matthew when we finished this and I hope that you'll have something valuable to kind of take away from it. Alright? Alright that's it. Thank you very
much for your kind and deliberate attention.
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