The Dawn of Christianity: How God Used Simple Fishermen, Soldiers, and Prostitutes to Transform the World
342
The Dawn of Christianity: How God Used Simple Fishermen, Soldiers, and Prostitutes to Transform the World
342eBook
Related collections and offers
Overview
Drawing upon the most recent discoveries and scholarship in archaeology and the first-century Near East, The Dawn of Christianity reveals how a beleaguered group of followers of a crucified rabbi became the founders of a world-changing faith.
How did Christianity truly come to be? Where did this worldwide faith come from? The Dawn of Christianity tells the story of how the first followers of Jesus survived the terror and despair of witnessing the one they knew to be the messiah—God’s agent for the salvation of the world—suddenly arrested, tried, and executed. Soon after Jesus’ death, his relatives and closest followers began hearing reports that Jesus was alive again—reports that even his most loyal disciples at first refused to believe.
Using the most recent studies by top Christian and secular scholars, Robert Hutchinson, known for his popular books on Christianity and Biblical Studies, reconstructs all of the known accounts of these early resurrection appearances and follows the witnesses to the resurrection as they experience brutal persecution at the hands of zealots such as Saul of Tarsus and then become committed evangelists to the major population centers in Antioch, Damascus, Rome, and Athens—and ultimately across the world. A riveting thriller of the most improbable history-changing movement imaginable, The Dawn of Christianity brings to life the compelling story of the birth of Christianity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780718079444 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins Christian Publishing |
| Publication date: | 12/19/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 342 |
| Sales rank: | 559,628 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Robert J. Hutchinson is an award-winning writer and author who studied philosophy as an undergraduate, moved to Israel to learn Hebrew, and earned a graduate degree in New Testament. Hutchinson’s most recent book is Searching for Jesus: New Discoveries in the Quest for Jesus of Nazareth, an overview of recent archaeological finds and new developments in biblical scholarship that are calling into question much of what skeptical scholars have assumed and asserted about Jesus over the past two centuries.
Read an Excerpt
The Dawn of Christianity
How God Used Simple Fishermen, Soldiers, and Prostitutes to Transform the World
By Robert J. Hutchinson
Thomas Nelson
Copyright © 2017 Robert J. HutchinsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7180-7944-4
CHAPTER 1
Fishers of Men
"The kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind."
— Matthew 13:47
Jesus of Nazareth showed up that morning by the lakeshore dressed in a simple tunic and wearing a woolen tallit, a traditional Jewish toga-like garment that covered him down to his mid-calves. He was in his early thirties — a strong and confident man with burning eyes, his hair likely uncombed and longer than most, his skin dark and cracked from the dry desert air. He looked older than his years but strong, a man accustomed to hard work in the hot sun. It is difficult to describe the effect Jesus had on people, particularly on the destitute and starving masses who lived on the fringes of society. Full of zeal and energy and life, he was steeped in the complexities of Torah yet embraced the world with a full heart. Jesus drew crowds — men, women, and children — to him like moths to a flame (Mark 10:1, Matt. 27:55).
On this particular autumn day, Jesus sat on the hillside above the large crescent bay at Tabgha, about four miles south of the fishing village of Capernaum. Just to the south lay the town the locals called Magdala, but that others referred to as Taricheae, or "Town of the Salt-Fish." There, wealthy landowners from Jerusalem had set up a factory used for exporting salsamentum, a popular condiment made from chopped fish, throughout the Mediterranean. It was a rich town with a large synagogue where the rabbi Jesus was frequently invited to speak. It was also home to one of his most famous followers, a woman named Miriam who had been possessed by demons and who may have been a prostitute (Luke 8:2).
Large groups of people were making their way to the area from many different villages in the region. Jesus would speak here often, on the hillside covered with dazzling red poppies and bright yellow daisies. About a year later, an enormous gathering would be organized on this very spot, planned months in advance, in which tens of thousands of people showed up from all across the region, even as far south as Jerusalem and east to the Ten Cities. But on this day, the crowds were only a few hundred, perhaps a thousand. The crowd was laughing because Jesus had said something funny, which he did often.
"Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on," Jesus shouted above the crowd, a large smile on his face. "Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?"
He then pointed to the thousands of wildflowers that covered the hillside.
"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?"
Jesus paused as he let his words sink in for a moment.
"Therefore do not be anxious, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?'" he added. "For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you" (Matt. 6:25, 28–33).
The crowd had grown larger. Jesus stepped slowly down to the lakeshore where the well-known fisherman named Simon bar Jonah had been repairing his nets. Simon, a barrel-chested man with a big mouth but also a big heart, was famous in the area. He had a thriving business with his brother, Andrew, who had introduced Simon to Jesus. Simon lived with his wife, his brother, and his mother-in-law in an attached stone townhouse near the lakeshore there in Capernaum. Tourists today can still see the ruins of what is possibly his house. It stands just one hundred steps from the lake.
Simon had been listening attentively to everything the rabbi had said and, like most people, was transfixed by his words. When Jesus asked Simon if he could borrow his boat for a time, Simon agreed and helped him ease the boat off the pebble beach out into the lake. The boat was heavy and well built, about thirty feet long, the frames made of oak and the planking of fine Lebanese cedar. One just like it was found in 1986, stuck in the lake mud for two thousand years and only revealed after a severe drought had lowered the water levels in the lake.
Jesus stood in the bow, speaking to the crowds who had formed a large semicircle on the rocky beach. He spoke for quite some time and, by the end, had the crowds laughing and joking with one another. Jesus had been speaking about something he called the kingdom of God. He had invited his listeners to join him in a kind of crusade. He explained that the Almighty, the Creator of the universe, was taking over — in fact, had already taken over — and that the starving and the naked, the sick and the destitute, were his chosen people as much as the priests in the temple. More so, in fact.
This young teacher was giving these hungry people on the lakeshore something they had not had for a very long time: hope, and a new sense of purpose. The old world as everyone knew it, of might making right, was coming to an end. A new era was dawning — the time long talked about by Israel's holy prophets. The Spirit of God would now dwell not in the temple in Jerusalem but in the hearts of all who worshipped the one God in truth. The rabbi asked everyone to join him, to bring the good news of this dawning kingdom to every village in Israel.
When the rabbi was finished speaking, Simon and his men pushed the boat back onto the beach. Simon was speechless. He had likely never heard anyone speak like this before. He stared at Jesus in wonder. What the rabbi was asking sounded dangerous but also thrilling — the adventure of a lifetime.
Still in the boat, Jesus told Simon he should push off and take the boat out into deeper water to catch some fish.
At that, Simon must have smiled. Clearly the rabbi knew more about the Torah than he did about fishing.
"Master, we toiled all night and took nothing," Simon said gently. "But at your word, I'll let down the nets."
Simon and his partners moved the boat out into deep water and did as the rabbi bid. When they had lowered the nets, suddenly a great shoal of tilapia, the most common fish in the lake, moved into them and filled their nets to the breaking point. Simon and his partners yelled at men in a nearby boat to come help them. Together the men hoisted the nets and filled both boats to the point that they almost began to sink. As quickly as they could, the men brought the boats back to the shore. Simon leapt out of his boat and fell at the feet of the rabbi.
"Depart from me, for I am a sinful man," he said, bowing his head.
Jesus walked away, up the hillside toward the road back to Capernaum. But then he stopped and turned back to Simon. "Come with me, Simon," he said simply. "And I will make you a fisher of men."
CHAPTER 2The Kingdom of God
"I must preach the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns as well; for I was sent for this purpose."
— Luke 4:43
It started small, with three pairs of brothers and their friends: Simon bar Jonah, whom Jesus later nicknamed, perhaps somewhat ironically, Kepha, or the Rock; his brother Andrew; and their mutual friend Philip. There were also the brothers Ya'akov (James) and Yochanan (John), sons of a wealthy local man named Zebedee and his wife, Salome; and someone they called the "younger James" and his brother Jude (short for Thaddeus). Alongside these siblings were Shimon, nicknamed "the Zealot" for his passion for the Torah; Tau'ma (Thomas), whose name in Aramaic means "twin"; and Bar-Talmai (Bartholomew), who came from the town where Jesus turned water into wine. Then there was a Jewish tax collector named Mattityahu (Matthew), or Levi; and Yehuda (Judas), whom history remembers as the one who betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver.
Yet this close-knit inner circle only represented a small fraction of Jesus' students, or talmidim. The kingdom movement brought together people from all walks of life — fishermen and day laborers, peasant farmers, ruffians, prostitutes, soldiers, Jewish intellectuals like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, and wealthy female patrons. Jesus also had at least one supporter among the Jewish ruling council, the Sanhedrin, and perhaps even among the Roman upper classes (Matt. 27:19). We know some of these people's names, as they are preserved in the Gospels — and remarkably for that time, even the names of the women. There were Miriam, Marta, and their brother, Eleazar (Lazarus) from the Judean village of Beit Anya; and a very wealthy woman named Susanna who contributed money to help Jesus and his students move about the country. A woman named Joanna also was one of Jesus' most important followers — a remarkable fact given that she was married to Chuza, house steward for the Jewish king Herod Antipas. These were the diverse and surprising laborers for the kingdom — and they were all part of Jesus' plan.
People often think of Jesus as a kind of early hippie who wandered aimlessly around Galilee, giving sermons and healing people at random until it was time for him to sacrifice himself on the cross. But the Gospels portray Jesus as having a very specific plan and a real urgency about his mission. "The harvest is plentiful," Jesus is quoted in one of the oldest parts of the New Testament, "but the laborers are few" (Luke 10:2). He traveled from village to village throughout Israel, announcing the good news of God's kingdom and demonstrating its power by healing the sick, feeding the hungry, giving alms to the poor, visiting the imprisoned, forgiving injuries, counseling the doubtful, comforting the sorrowful, admonishing sinners, and more.
Through his followers, he created self-perpetuating "cells" of his kingdom movement throughout Israel, each with the mission of establishing new communities. In this way, Jesus ensured that the kingdom movement grew rapidly. He had a keen understanding of human nature: when he gave his followers instructions for visiting towns and villages in his name, he told them, "If any place will not receive you and they will not listen to you, when you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them" (Mark 6:11). In other words, his followers were not to waste their valuable time in places not receptive to his message. As a result of Jesus' wise planning, demographers estimate the kingdom movement grew at a rate of about 40 percent per decade. Within two years, the few dozen men and women had grown to more than five hundred, then to three thousand. Within a decade, the community could have numbered many tens of thousands. Within three hundred years, it was thirty-five million. Today, it's about two billion.
A PEOPLE IN BONDAGE
This exponential growth was nurtured in the soil of turmoil and oppression. For six centuries before Jesus was born, the Jews had been living under brutal foreign domination — first under the Babylonians, then the Persians, then the "Greeks" (both Greco-Egyptian and Greco-Syrian), and finally the Romans. The Jews were ruled by their own people for only a brief period, between 164 and 63 BC. An independent Jewish state arose under the leadership of the priestly family known as the Maccabees, but eventually it deteriorated into internecine feuds until the Roman general Pompey was practically invited to invade the country in 63 BC.
As was their custom, the Romans appointed local despots to rule in their name. The most famous and successful was Herod the Great, a half-Jewish aristocrat who lived from around 73 to 4 BC. Herod had been an active participant in the myriad intrigues of the Roman Empire, forging an alliance with the Roman general Mark Antony and even tangling with Mark Antony's famous mistress, Queen Cleopatra of Egypt. Ostensibly Jewish, Herod held no scruples about adopting those aspects of Greco-Roman culture he liked, including pagan temples, nude baths and gymnasia, theaters, brothels, and other foreign innovations. During his reign, Israel became bitterly divided both religiously and socially. On the one hand, there was a vast peasant underclass loyal to the Torah and Jewish traditions, but ruling over them was a much smaller, more cosmopolitan urban elite that tried to assimilate into the dominant Greco-Roman culture, even going so far as to exercise naked in the Greek-style gymnasia. Conditions were ripe for unrest.
While many historians dismiss as mere legends the stories the Gospels tell about Jesus' birth, the accounts of the massacre of the innocents in Bethlehem and the flight into Egypt fit perfectly the political milieu of that time. Right after Jesus was born and Herod the Great died, a bloody civil war broke out. It would last for a dozen years. The rebellion was centered in Sepphoris, the affluent Greek-Jewish city located just four miles from the tiny village where Jesus was raised. Eventually, the Roman general Publius Quinctilius Varus arrived with three legions from Syria — about fifteen thousand trained soldiers — to put down the insurrection. Varus recaptured the city of Sepphoris, executed all the men, and sold the women and children into slavery. He then hunted down the Jewish nationalists who led the rebellion — two thousand men — and crucified them all.
The violence continued throughout Jesus' childhood. When Jesus was around ten years old, a Jewish revolutionary named Judah of Galilee declared the country's independence from Rome. Other Jewish rebel leaders followed suit, putting the entire country in an uproar. As a child, Jesus likely hid with his friends and family as rival armies and bandit militias marched by on the main roads just a few hundred yards from Nazareth. An archaeological discovery in 2009 supports this scenario. Among the foundations of first-century stone houses uncovered in Nazareth, archaeologists found a hidden underground chamber that looked like a kind of "safe room," an ideal place to hide when rampaging troops searched door-to-door. In 2006, Israeli archaeologists uncovered similar safe rooms and underground tunnels in Kfar Cana, the biblical Cana, dating back to the years immediately before the Jewish War against the Romans (AD 66–70). This indicated that the Jews at this time prepared for the upcoming war by fashioning underground places to hide. This is the political and military background to the Gospels that is lost on most people today.
After Herod's death and the civil war that devastated the countryside, the land of Israel had been divided up into a series of despotic fiefdoms ruled by two of Herod's surviving sons or directly by the Romans. Under Herodian and Roman rule, Israel became a gigantic protection racket — organized crime on a national scale. Archaeological excavations following the 1967 Six-Day War revealed that some of the homes of Jerusalem's priestly families were nothing short of palatial. One villa in Jerusalem's Upper City measured over ten thousand square feet and featured such luxuries as marble walls, mosaic floors, steam baths with built-in under-floor heating, fountains and bathing pools, and more. To finance these wonders, the temple elite had created a system of taxation, fees, and surcharges unrivaled anywhere in the ancient world. A handful of wealthy families were given vast tracts of land in the fertile Galilee region and charged outrageous rents and fees to peasant farmers. Fishing rights on the Sea of Galilee were tightly controlled. According to ancient records, Herod the Great and his offspring claimed 25 to 33 percent of all grain grown within his realm and 50 percent of all fruit.
And that was just the beginning. There were numerous other taxes and fees from the Herodians, the Romans, and local landowners — such as soil tax, head tax, market taxes, transit tolls on roads, and port taxes. The question posed to Jesus about whether it was lawful to pay taxes to Caesar wasn't an academic question (Mark 12:14). It was a question about survival. The temple administration in Jerusalem, too, charged taxes, such as the half-shekel tax, the tithe for priests, fees for sacrifices and vows, and more. Literally millions of silver Tyrian shekels flowed each year into the temple coffers. Following King Herod the Great's death in 4 BC, the Romans looted the Jerusalem temple's treasury and removed some four hundred talents of gold — roughly $545 million in today's currency. By comparison, the total annual budget for all of Israel under Herod's successor Herod Agrippa (who ruled AD 41–44) was only two thousand talents. The Jewish historian Josephus sums up what this national looting had done by saying that Herod and his successors "had indeed reduced the entire country to helpless poverty."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Dawn of Christianity by Robert J. Hutchinson. Copyright © 2017 Robert J. Hutchinson. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Map of Eastern Mediterranean, xiii,Map of Jerusalem, xiv,
Introduction, xv,
PART I: THE ROAD TO JERUSALEM,
1. Fishers of Men, 3,
2. The Kingdom of God, 9,
3. Bringing the Dead to Life, 20,
4. King of the Jews, 27,
5. A Demonstration on the Temple Mount, 37,
6. Proclaiming Liberty to the Captives, 47,
7. An Anointing in Bethany, 57,
8. "Do This in Memory of Me", 63,
9. Betrayal, 75,
10. On Trial, 87,
11. The Crucifixion, 96,
12. A Hasty Burial, 108,
PART II: ALIVE,
13. A Glimmer of Hope, 119,
14. The First Reports, 128,
15. "I Am with You Always", 134,
16. The Return of the Spirit, 141,
PART III: THE BEGINNING OF PERSECUTION,
17. "Neither Gold nor Silver", 151,
18. The Trial Before the Sanhedrin, 158,
19. The Martyrdom of Stephen, 165,
20. Protecting the Gospel, 174,
21. The Road to Damascus, 181,
22. The Healing Ministry of Peter, 190,
23. The Baptism of Cornelius, 196,
24. Persecution Resumes, 206,
PART IV: THE EXPANSION OF THE JESUS MOVEMENT,
25. Spreading the Word, 216,
26. Welcoming Pagans, 226,
27. The Council of Jerusalem, 232,
Appendix I: Time Line, 243,
Appendix II: Who's Who in the Early Jesus Movement, 249,
Acknowledgments, 257,
Notes, 258,
Further Reading, 293,
Index, 297,
About the Author, 316,