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The world into which Christ came

The Jewish World of Jesus' Time

By the time of Jesus, the silent years had shaped a complex Jewish world. The land was ruled by Rome, which had taken Jerusalem in 63 BC and set up client kings like Herod the Great. The people were divided into parties: the Pharisees, devoted to the law and its traditions; the Sadducees, the wealthy temple aristocracy; the Essenes, a separatist community; and the Zealots, who longed to throw off Rome. The synagogue and the scribes shaped daily faith, and over everything hung a fervent hope for the promised Messiah.

And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him.Luke 2:25 (KJV)

The coming of Rome

The independence the Maccabees had won did not last. The Hasmonean dynasty they founded ruled Judea for about a century, but it declined into bitter family feuds. In 63 BC the Roman general Pompey intervened in one such quarrel, marched on Jerusalem, and took the city, even entering the Holy of Holies in the temple, to the horror of the Jews. From that day Judea lay under the power of Rome, and it would still be under Rome when Jesus was born, lived, died, and rose again.

Rome preferred to rule through local strongmen. Chief among them was Herod, called the Great, whom Rome made king of the Jews, and who reigned from about 37 to 4 BC. Herod was a capable and monstrous ruler, an Idumean by descent and a Roman client by loyalty, who rebuilt the temple in Jerusalem on a magnificent scale and also murdered members of his own family out of paranoia. It was in the last days of this Herod, the Gospel of Matthew tells us, that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, and it was this Herod who ordered the killing of the infants there.

Beneath Rome and its kings, the Jews kept a measure of self-government in religious matters. The high priest presided over the temple and its worship, and a council of leading priests, elders, and scribes, known as the Sanhedrin, ruled on questions of law and order in Jerusalem. It was this council that would later put Jesus on trial before handing him to the Roman governor, for Rome reserved the power of execution to itself. The temple that Herod rebuilt was one of the wonders of the ancient world, its courts crowded at the great feasts with pilgrims from every land, and it was in those courts that the boy Jesus once astonished the teachers, and the grown Jesus taught, cleansed the money-changers, and foretold that not one stone would be left upon another.

The Pharisees and the scribes

The most influential religious party was the Pharisees. They arose in the wake of the Maccabean age as men devoted to the careful keeping of the law of Moses, and they surrounded it with a body of oral traditions meant to guard it. The Pharisees believed in the resurrection of the dead, in angels and spirits, and in a coming judgment, and they were respected by ordinary people for their seriousness. In the Gospels Jesus often clashes with them, not because they cared about obeying God, but because their traditions could harden into hypocrisy and crowd out mercy. Yet some, like Nicodemus, came to him, and the apostle Paul had been a Pharisee.

Closely linked were the scribes, the professional students and copyists of the law, also called lawyers or teachers of the law. They preserved the Scriptures, taught in the synagogues, and settled questions of how the law applied. Because they knew the Scriptures so well, it was the scribes whom Herod could ask where the Christ should be born, and they answered at once, in Bethlehem of Judea, exactly as the prophet Micah had foretold.

Sadducees, Essenes, and Zealots

The Sadducees were a smaller but powerful party, drawn from the wealthy priestly and aristocratic families who controlled the temple. They accepted only the written law of Moses and rejected the oral traditions of the Pharisees, and, unlike the Pharisees, they did not believe in the resurrection of the dead, which is why they once tried to trap Jesus with a riddle about it. They were pragmatic men who cooperated with Rome to keep their position, and they largely vanish from history after the temple was destroyed in AD 70.

Apart from these were the Essenes, a devout separatist movement who thought the temple hopelessly corrupt and withdrew into strict communities of shared property, ritual washing, and intense study. Many scholars connect them with the community at Qumran near the Dead Sea, whose library, the Dead Sea Scrolls, was discovered in the twentieth century and gives a vivid window into the period. Different again were the Zealots, fierce nationalists who believed that God alone was king and that faithfulness meant armed resistance to Rome. One of the twelve apostles, Simon, is called the Zealot. These groups shared little but a homeland, a Scripture, and, in their different ways, a hope.

The synagogue and the life of faith

One of the quiet gifts of the silent years was the synagogue. During and after the exile, when the temple lay far away or in ruins, Jews had gathered in local assemblies to pray and to hear the Scriptures read and explained. By the time of Jesus, every town of any size had its synagogue, a house of prayer and teaching where the people met each Sabbath. This meant that ordinary faith no longer depended only on pilgrimage to a distant temple. It lived in every village.

The Gospels show Jesus at home in this world. It was his custom, Luke tells us, to go into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and there he read the Scriptures and taught. The synagogue also gave the apostles their first pulpit in every city they entered, for Paul would go first to the synagogue and reason from the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ. The humble institution that grew up in the silent years became a doorway for the gospel across the whole Roman world.

A people waiting for the consolation of Israel

Above all, the Jewish world of Jesus' time was a world of expectation. Centuries of foreign rule, Persian, Greek, and Roman, had sharpened the longing for the promised deliverer, the Messiah, the anointed king of David's line who would set his people free. That hope took many forms. Some looked for a warrior to break the yoke of Rome. Others, taught by the prophets, looked for a deeper redemption from sin and death.

Luke gives us two of these waiting hearts at the very hinge of the ages. There was an old man in Jerusalem named Simeon, just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel, to whom it had been promised that he would not die before he saw the Lord's Christ. And there was the aged prophetess Anna, who spoke of the child Jesus to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem. Into a world strained tight with hope, at last the One so long awaited was born, and the silence broke into song.

A note on the sources: the history above rests on well-attested ancient records, above all the books of First and Second Maccabees and the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus. First and Second Maccabees are received as Scripture by Catholic and Orthodox Christians and read as valuable history by Protestants. Where a detail is a later tradition rather than early history, such as the account of the oil at Hanukkah, it is flagged as such. Dates in this period are approximate and are given as historians commonly reckon them.

Related: The Maccabean revolt and Hanukkah · How God prepared the way · Who is Jesus? · The 400 Silent Years hub