Understanding the historical context of Jesus's time reveals that 90% of the population were peasant farmers living under Roman occupation, facing heavy taxation, debt, and constant hardship; religious life was integrated with daily existence through the Torah, and the 'kingdom of God' represented a political expectation of God's intervention rather than a vague spiritual concept, making Jesus's teachings about daily bread, debt forgiveness, and social boundaries deeply relevant to his audience's lived experiences.
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What Life Was REALLY Like When Jesus Was AliveAdded:
Okay, so when most of us picture the world of the New Testament and the time of Jesus, we probably picture something like a Renaissance painting. You know, you have gentle rolling hills, flowing robes on everyone. Everyone's looking slightly thoughtful and perhaps even luminous. Maybe there are even some olive trees and sandals everywhere. Now, I'm partially to blame because I use a lot of Renaissance themed art on my channel. And look, some of that is somewhat correct. There were olive trees and there were indeed sandals, but the actual story of first century Galilee and Judea was a rough place. Life was hard and just flat out different. And honestly, the real story is way more interesting than the version most of us are picturing. And I think when you actually understand the context, when you understand what people's daily lives actually looked like, what they were afraid of, what they were hoping for and what, even more importantly, they were expecting from God, the things that Jesus says and does make so much more sense.
You start to see Jesus' teachings for what they are and you start to see just how different life was back then. And that's important for us to know today.
So that when we know what the context was, we can be better informed on how figuring out or figuring out how the Bible makes sense. So that's what this video is going to be about. We're going to be spending a lot of time actually being there, walking through what a typical person's life looks like in the world that Jesus was born into. Who you'd be, what would you be eating, what would you be worrying about and what would you be hoping for. So hello everyone, today we are exploring what life was actually like in the world of Jesus. And I'll be honest, some of what I found while researching this genuinely surprised me. So if you enjoy this kind of deep biblical historical deep dive, please consider hitting the subscribe button as it really does help out my channel more than what you'd think. And I'm excited for this one, but with all that being said and without any further ado, let's get into it.
The first thing to establish is, well, the most obvious one, who are you?
Because when we read the New Testament, there's a tendency to picture ourselves somewhere near the top of the social pyramid. Maybe as a Pharisee or a scribe, someone with enough leisure time to engage in theological debates online.
But the overwhelming majority of people in the first century Judea and Galilee, something like 90% of the population, were peasant farmers. That's almost certainly who you are. But Nels, I wouldn't be a peasant farmer. Stop it.
Yes, you would. Stop coping. Me on the other hand, I would probably be a Roman legionary or a captain or perhaps even or even the governor himself.
No, I'd also likely just be a peasant just like the rest of us. But jokes aside, the social structure of this world looks roughly like this. At the top, you have this Roman Imperial uh I don't know what word to use, apparatus. The emperor and his officials and the legion stationed in Syria. Then you have the local elite.
The uh Herodian family, the client kings ruling on Rome's behalf, like the vassals and stuff like that. And then you have the priestly aristocracy in Jerusalem. You have the high priest and the families around him. And then relatively small middle layer where the scribes and the Pharisees, the merchants, the skilled craftsmen.
And then making up the vast majority of the population, peasant farmers, day laborers, fishermen, and then the people who've fallen off the bottom entirely, the destitute, the disabled, and the beggars. You are most likely somewhere in that large bottom tier. You know, you probably farm a small plot of land you or you work on someone else's land or you fish.
Your family has done this for generations. You live You live in a village, maybe you know, 200, maybe 400 people. Everyone just kind of knows everyone. You were born there. You will probably die there. Your world, geographically speaking, is pretty small.
So, then that begs the question. What does your actual day look like? Well, usually you'll wake up before dawn, not because you want to, but because the work that you do requires it. If you're farming, you need to be in the fields before the heat of the day makes it absolutely miserable. If you're fishing on the Sea of Galilee, well, the best fishing is at night, which means that you're likely have already been out since dark, and you're only now coming back in. Your house is small. You have one main room, maybe two. You know, stone walls, packed earth floor, and a low ceiling. In the winter, your animals might even share the lower level of the house for warmth, theirs and yours. And then there's maybe a courtyard that several families likely share, where a lot of the actual cooking and social life happens.
Unfortunately, at this rate, there's there's no running water. Someone, usually a woman, usually early in the morning, goes to the village well or the cistern to bring back water for the day.
And what do you eat? Well, bread, mostly. Barley, if you're poor, and and you are. Uh wheat, only if you can afford it. Olive oil is a staple. You You dip the bread in it. You cook with it. You use it for even your lamps.
You'll have dried or salted fish if you're near the Sea of Galilee, or lentils, or other legumes, which is pretty much the protein source for these people. You know, you had vegetables.
You had onions, leeks, cucumbers, figs, and dates, and pomegranates when they're in season. Fresh fruit, for you, unfortunately, is a luxury of the harvest season, and not something that you can have all year round.
Meat, oh, glorious meat, is a festival food. You don't eat meat on a regular Tuesday or Friday.
Meat usually appears at the Passover festival, at different weddings and major celebrations. The rest of the time, you're just eating a diet that is nutritionally functional, but not exactly um there's not a lot of variety to any degree.
If you had a bad harvest, you feel it immediately. There is no safety net for you here.
And when Jesus teaches the disciples to pray, "Give us today our daily bread."
It's seemingly almost literal. Cuz bread in this climate keeps for a day, maybe two, before it hardens or starts to mold in the heat. So, you grind the grain, you bake it, you eat it, and then tomorrow you just do it again, if if you have the grain. But if a store is run low from either a bad harvest or from a debt that came due from a tax collector who took more than you expected, you'll feel it by the next morning with your grumbling stomach. "Give us today our daily bread." is the prayer of someone who generally does not know if tomorrow's bread is covered. The idea being, if we recall to the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus tells the people that, "Well, if he feeds the sparrows of the air and the birds, will he not also, more so, take care of you?"
Your week, also, is structured around the Sabbath, Saturday, from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.
This is when life becomes a genuine pause in your life. You're not working, you're not buying or selling. The village starts to quiet down, and the family starts to gather. This is not primarily a burden the way that sometimes we imagine it. It's actually the built-in rest in a life that otherwise, unfortunately, does not stop.
These lives were brutal.
The Sabbath was genuinely valued. And on top of that, your religious life is also not a separate compartment from the rest of your life, kind of like how it is today. That's not how um That's not how it works in this world. The Torah actually governed pretty much everything. What you eat, how you grow your crops, how you treat your neighbors, your debt, um even your marriage, and your interactions with foreigners and strangers, and what you do on Saturday.
Religion and daily life back in this time were not two different things.
They're the same thing. The synagogue is usually the center of your village's communal life. But it's also worth pausing on what the synagogue actually was in the first century because it's different from what the word might suggest to us. So, it's not actually a grand institution with that has professional clergy. It's more like a village hall that doubles as a school and a prayer space. So, the Torah is read there, it's interpreted there, it's discussed, and the service there is kind of like for anyone. Anyone can participate. Any qualified man can stand up and teach, which is This is why Jesus walks into the synagogues in Galilee and starts teaching. That's just like kind of how it worked. He wasn't doing anything unusual by standing up and teaching. However, what was unusual is what he said.
And also, three times a year, Passover in the spring, Pentecost 50 days after that, and then this one in autumn, Sukkot, I think. If you're in Galilee, you make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
This is the four or five-day walk. You maybe go with your village, you maybe go with your extended family, with your neighbors. And then the roads leading up to Jerusalem during the festival are always packed.
Jerusalem's normal population around this time was maybe about 80,000, and then that swells to well, really several times that number. The whole city and, well, really the whole region is operating on a different level of life during the festival weeks. And the reason for that intensity of life is the temple.
Herod the Great began rebuilding this massive temple around 20 BC.
And this is genuinely astonishing fact that that I just keep thinking about. It was still under construction during Jesus's entire ministry. They started it maybe 20 years before Jesus was born, and it wasn't really finished until 63 AD. So, the when the disciples comment in Mark 13 saying, "Look, teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings are here." is probably not hyperbole. These are people who've watched this construction project for pretty much their whole lives. And it is one of the largest and most spectacular building projects anywhere in the Roman world.
The gleaming white marble um it had gold fittings. The enormous platform which whom Josephus, a historian who actually saw says you couldn't look at it in direct sunlight without squinting. So for you as a Galilean farmer, Jerusalem and the temple are practically the center of the universe literally. They are where God dwells, where heaven and earth are the closest, where the sacrifices maintain the order of the world essentially. You would pay your temple tax. You would bring your tithes. When you make the pilgrimage, it is one of the most significant things that you will do all year.
But there's another layer to this religious world that I want to dwell on for a moment because it actually explains so much of what Jesus actually does in the Gospels. And that's the purity system.
So the Torah doesn't regulate behavior.
It regulates who is clean and unclean.
And the crucial thing about ritual impurity as it was known is that it transfers. If you were to touch a leper, um if you were to touch a corpse, you would become impure. If you were to um a woman with discharge of blood is impure and everyone that she comes into contact with also becomes impure as well. And they have real practical consequences. For example, you can't enter the temple. You can't participate in community religious life.
>> [music] >> And the ritually impure person is cut off from the center of the world.
Sometimes for days, sometimes for years, sometimes effectively on different occasions permanently.
So for example, the woman with the issue of the blood in Mark chapter 5, 12 years of ritual impurity, 12 years of being a contamination risk to everyone around her, reaches out in the crowd and touches the hem of Jesus' cloak.
She isn't supposed to be there.
And by the logic of the purity system, what should happen now is that the defilement that she had, or the corruption that she had, or the uncleanness that she had, transfers to Jesus. That's just how it works. That's how it's always worked. Except that's not what happens. The impurity doesn't go to him. The healing that Jesus provides actually goes to her.
So, the crowd here watching knew exactly what that meant. And I find that I can't stop thinking about what that would have looked like to be standing in the crowd at that point. Um, but now, here's where it gets a little harder, cuz we're going to transition into the political reality of the world, because it is one of constant grinding pressure.
The Romans have been in the picture since 63 BC, when Pompey marched into Jerusalem, and then he strutted himself into the Holy of Holies, just to pretty much prove that he could do it. The most sacred, um, place in all the world for the Jews.
He didn't take anything, he just looked.
But the point was made, your sacred space is accessible to whoever has the bigger army. That's essentially what he was saying. By the time of Jesus' ministry, Galilee is under the control of Herod. Technically a Jewish client king, but he's Rome's man, ruling on Rome's behalf. Judea and Jerusalem is under a direct Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, appointed in 26 AD, known in the historical sources as an abrasive and occasionally brutal administrator, but the taxation is too heavy for you. You pay the the Roman land tax, you pay the Roman head tax, the tributum capitis, which is the coin in question behind is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar that Mark 12:14 talks about. You pay customs and tolls on goods moving through the region. And on top of the Roman taxes, you pay the temple tithes, about 10% of your agricultural produce. And so when you add it all up, the various estimates suggest that something like a third to even as upward to a half of what you produce goes out the door in taxes and in tithes before you and your family eat. So it's kind of like when you go to a store today and then you pay sales tax.
And then the person who you paid has to pay income tax on that.
And then they take that same money and then they go buy another item just to pay more sales tax just to have that person pay more income tax to then have that person go buy another item and then pay even more sales tax.
You get it. Fast forward that a few times and that $100 that you spent on a backpack, you you know, that you bought has now made all of its way to Uncle Sam's coin purse.
Oh, and that's let's not even let's let's just talk about debt really quick, which me as an American I can't really talk about, but this is probably the most thing that we under appreciate when reading the New Testament.
Debt in this world is existential.
If you had a bad harvest and take out a loan to survive, and then the next harvest is also bad, that sucks, you lose your land.
And once you lose your land, well, then you become a day laborer. These were essentially people who were hired at the marketplace at dawn, and so if anyone needs you, they'll pay you a denarius a day, which is like kind of like a day's wage back then.
And below that is debt bondage and that in below that is practically begging.
So this is why so many of Jesus' parables are about money, debt, and masters, and tenants, and talents, and laborers.
Many tend to think of why Jesus would speak in such weird parables with such strange examples using these, you know, to our day. Well, they are the circumstances of their lives, the people around Jesus' time. So when Jesus tells a story about a man who owes 10,000 talents and he can't pay and then he begs for more time, everyone listening has felt that weight personally or knows someone who has. And after that, even the Lord's Prayer, at least in Matthew's version, uses the words debts, "Forgive us of our debts."
So, when you know what debt actually means to this audience, what losing your land meant, what debt bondage meant, well, that mattered to people. The people praying it weren't holding the economic and spiritual as really separate categories. In their lives, those categories were barely distinguishable.
Even furthermore, the tax collectors, the publicans, as they were called, are absolutely despised in this world for a very specific and understandable reason.
They are Jewish men who've contracted with Rome to collect taxes, which means that they are now collaborators and they're almost universally assumed to be extortionists, skimming extra money off the top.
But what I didn't initially appreciate is that the corruption was structural. And when I say appreciate, I mean like find pretty interesting.
The Roman tax collection system worked through a system of tax farming. So, you bid for the rights to collect taxes in a given district. So, you paid Rome a fixed sum upfront to secure the contract pretty much. And then you went off to work and whatever you collected above what you paid Rome, you essentially get to keep personally. So, the profit motive was built directly into the system. The more you could extract beyond the official rate that you paid Rome, the better you did financially.
So, the extortion wasn't happening around the edges of an otherwise fair agreement.
It was the incentive structure. It was literally built into it. The tax collector, that's how they got paid. And the worst part about it is you did it to your own people. A Jewish man backed by Roman authority collecting from Jewish neighbors in a village where, you know, practically everyone knows your name.
And then that leads to Jesus calling Matthew at the tax collector booth, and then he goes to eat at his house.
And by the way, eating together in this world is not a casual thing. It is a public statement about who you consider worthy to be at your table. So, the statement he's making about is pretty much as loud as it gets. But, there's one more piece of the Roman presence that I want to mention because it makes something that Jesus says that tends to get read as vague spiritual advice actually makes sense. So, Roman soldiers had a legal right called the angaria, impressment. A soldier could conscript any local civilian to carry his military equipment for up to one Roman mile. You had no legal rights for this here to stop it. You could be walking to your fields or even working on your fields, and then a soldier a Roman soldier just points at you, and then now you have to carry his gear.
Simon of Cyrene, the man actually drafted to carry Jesus' cross in Mark 15, that's like the same system. If someone forces you to go 1 mile, go with him two, as Jesus says. Every person in the crowd knows exactly what he's describing. They've done it or they've watched someone they love do it. It's one of the quiet, regular humiliations of the of living under Roman occupation. The moment where the power imbalance of this whole thing becomes completely real and you feel it in your back. And what Jesus is pointing to is this, the second mile is yours. Nobody can take that from you.
You chose it. In a world where an extraordinary amount of power and influence and structure has already been taken from you, your produce, sometimes your land, your dignity on a road, he keeps pointing to the thing that cannot be taken from you.
And I think that's really cool. But, I want to talk to you about something that I think is even more important or one of the most important things to understand about the world that Jesus walked into.
And it's the thing that's hardest to get a feel from modern translations.
The air in first-century Judea and Galilee is electric, let's just say, with expectation.
This is not a world that has made peace with the Romans occupying. This is a world that is waiting, dare I say, anxiously, sometimes desperately, for God to do something about it.
The prophets of the Old Testament had promised that God would return to Zion, that he would restore Israel, and that he would judge the nations and set things right.
>> [music] >> And it has been, depending on how you count it, 400 years since the last recognized prophet spoke.
The Second Temple period has seen the Babylonian exile, when the Jews are taken into exile. They've seen the Persian restoration when Cyrus brings them back in. They've seen the Hellenistic crisis under Antiochus Epiphanes, who was this terrible guy leading to the Maccabean revolt. And now you have the Romans on your doorstep.
And God, seemingly, has not yet done the thing that the prophets had promised.
So, the atmosphere is charged. Multiple figures in the first century also claim to be some kind of prophet or messianic role. Josephus actually mentions this guy named Theudas, um who actually led a crowd to the Jordan River promising to part it like Moses. And there were various others who gathered followings around the end of the age expectations. Rome, obviously, dealt with all of them, usually pretty violently.
And then the phrase in the New Testament, kingdom of God, is the phrase that Jesus uses more than almost any other phrase in the Gospels. [music] For us, reading it 2,000 years later, it can kind of sound like sort of like a vague kingdom, I guess.
Maybe it's just something internal, like the kingdom of God is the kingdom God is you. Maybe something personal or about something about a personal transformation in you means that the kingdom of God is here.
But a um a 1st-century Jewish audience, N.T. Wright argues, is that that phrase was actually loaded to the brim. It essentially meant that God is taking back his world. God is coming to reign.
And the enemies of Israel and God are going to be dealt with. And so, this is happening right now in our generation.
Your kingdom come.
So, when Jesus starts preaching the kingdom of God in Galilee, the people who hear him are not receiving a for lack of a better term, sermon about an inner spiritual development, seemingly.
They're hearing Jesus make a claim that he's what they've been waiting for.
What their parents and their grandparents and their great-grandparents waited for. And it's finally beginning to arrive.
That is the context that everything else happens inside of. And there's also the idea of the future kingdom as well. But, if you're this person, a peasant farmer in Galilee or a fisherman or a day laborer, you are currently living under Roman occupation. You're probably carrying a debt.
You're paying multiple layers of taxes, by the way. And you're part of a people who have been waiting for God to show up and do something for so long that it's just like all you like you don't even remember it anymore.
And then, you hear about this teacher from Nazareth.
Now, Nazareth is probably a village of maybe three or 400 people. It doesn't appear in the Old Testament.
It doesn't appear in Josephus. And when Nathaniel in John's gospel says, "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" He's not just being snobby. That's this place was so unremarkable that people barely know where it is.
The Messiah, you you know, you'd probably assume would come from somewhere, right? Jerusalem, maybe maybe Bethlehem, per Micah's prophecy. Not a village that nobody's heard of in rural Galilee. It'd be like [music] if this figure showed up today and he came from, I don't know, Sandwich, Illinois, which by the way, I figured out is a very real place, instead of somewhere like New York or LA or Toad Suck, Arkansas. Another interesting note is Jesus' occupation, usually translated as carpenter. It's actually more precisely craftsman. Someone who works with their hands, probably in wood or stone, maybe building things in the villages around Galilee, including the nearby city of Sepphoris, which was being rebuilt exactly during Jesus' childhood years.
I've also seen translations or connections that it could just be like more like a broad, like construction worker type guy, but nonetheless, it was an artisan class, a small notch above the peasant farmer on the social scale, but also not elite, not educated in the formal rabbinic system, not the kind of person whom you'd expect a teacher of any significance to emerge.
And yet, Jesus starts teaching in the synagogues and the crowds come. Because here's what's strange about Jesus, and the thing that makes the crowds follow follow him rather than ignore him.
Jesus teaches as someone who knows.
Most teachers of his time taught by citation. You know, Rabbi so-and-so said this, and beforehand so-and-so said that.
Jesus teaches by direct assertion.
You have heard it said, but I say to you.
He speaks as someone for whom the Torah is not a transmitted tradition to be carefully handled, but rather a living thing he is personally authorized to interpret.
And that's rather astonishing.
That's also, depending on your perspective, either the most exciting thing or the most alarming thing that a person can do in this world.
He also heals people.
And I think this, you know, hits a little differently in a world with no hospitals. There was no effective medicine. There was no infrastructure of care for the disabled or the chronically ill. I think the the lady who had the blood problem is a perfect example of that and all the people that Jesus helped healed.
These people are at the bottom of the social structure, excluded from the temple by either ritual impurity or just invisible to most of the community. And Jesus talks to them. He restores not just their physical condition, but their place ultimately in the community.
He's eating with the tax collectors. He speaks to um Samaritan women, which the Jews absolutely hated.
He lets people who are ritually impure touch him.
Every one of these interactions is crossing a social boundary that everyone in his world can see clearly.
Take the Samaritan woman at the well in uh in John 4 for example.
There are actually three separate layers of transgression that supposedly Jesus did stacked all on top of one another in that conversation.
Jesus is a Jewish man speaking to a Samaritan.
The hostility between the two groups went so far back, all the way back centuries, rooted in the Assyrian conquest and in the question of who actually um constitutes real Israel. Secondly, she's a woman and unaccompanied women aren't who you have theological conversations with in public. And he's also doing it during midday when the well is largely empty, which is when she comes precisely because she wants to avoid everyone else.
Any one of those things would usually raise eyebrows. All three of them at once is a pretty big statement.
And running through all of these these confrontations and these conversations that Jesus is having is something that I mentioned a little bit earlier.
The honor system.
So, when religious authorities challenge Jesus publicly, you know, they'll say things like, "By what authority do you have to do these things?" They're not asking as most people would probably think they would do an honest question. It's a public challenge. If he can't answer it, it's a public defeat for him. So, Jesus had a habit of turning the questions back on them. Well, I'll answer yours if you answer mine first. In the culture that that was, that was not evasive because the honor mechanics that everyone understood or, you know, in the crowds is that you can neutralize a challenge without answering it. And when Jesus' challengers consistently find themselves unable to respond, the message becomes clear.
And the crowd is tracking every single one of those exchanges. It's also worth noting what the term blessed are the meek sounds like to a crowd of day laborers and debt-ridden farmers living under occupation.
Meekness in this world ultimately leads you to defeat, to you being subjugated and humiliated. Jesus inverted the entire social logic that these people are living inside. And what he's saying is that underneath all of this, when you put it together with the kingdom of God proclamation, is something more like the world that you've been waiting for is not going to arrive looking how you expected it to. It's arriving right here, right now, in this village, through this meal that we're sharing with these [music] people that you wrote off.
This is going to delight some people and infuriate others. And the Gospels actually tell you which is which.
One of the things, you know, one of the things that I find the most striking about all of this, the more time I spend in the historical context and just like engulfing myself in the in the time that these people lived.
Is how precise the incarnation of Jesus is.
Jesus' birth into this particular time.
Most non-Christians who aren't really familiar with Christianity at all besides hearsay usually sum it up to say that God sends a general message of love and goodwill to humanity.
But God through Jesus enters a specific world at a specific moment into a specific social position.
Not in the priestly elite in Jerusalem not in the Roman aristocracy not even in the merchant class.
He's a craftsman from a nobody village in Galilee in a generation seething with expectation and resentment and ultimately hope.
They were all not all but the world was heavily indebted to Rome. Roman so indebted in like the bad sense not like that the Romans did it anything good for them maybe besides building roads but the soldiers on the roads the temple gleaming in the distance and everyone waiting what or everyone was waiting for God to do something and he finally did. He stepped into that world specifically and what he did and said makes the most sense when you can feel the ground that it was standing on.
And that's ultimately what life was like for for a first century person in the time of Jesus. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video.
Um as always please consider hitting the subscribe button if you actually enjoyed it. It helps out my channel a lot and yeah hopefully that was helpful I guess.
But as always I'll see you in the next one.
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