In the youth Sunday School class that I teach we have been traveling slowly through the life of Jesus and we find ourselves with him as he is entering his hometown of Nazareth for the first time since his baptism and initial entrance into itinerant ministry. Rabbi Yeshua has been making noise in other towns, performing miracles and stirring up the crowds down south in Jerusalem, preaching in synagogues in and around Galilee. Now he comes home to the town where he grew up.
What must it have been like to go to 'church' and have Jesus show up? What would he say? How would they react? In order for us to grasp what is going on in Luke 4 there is a lot of information we need. Edersheim supplies a lot of that information in his Sketches and also in his classic work The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah. I have gleaned from these sources and put together what I think is a pretty accurate picture of what first century Galilean synagogue worship was like and what it would have been like to 'go to church' with Jesus.
So here are, more or less those posts from four years ago, this being the first with three or four more to follow. I hope they will open the Scripture to you so that you will see Jesus more clearly than ever before. God bless.
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I wanted to wrap up my reading of Alfred Edersheim's Sketches of Jewish Social Life before delving into Isaiah very deeply. So last night I was attempting to scramble up those last three chapters and get to the top. That's when I realized it was just not going to be that easy--there's just too much enlightening information in those last chapters to pass over them so . . . lightly. I find myself compelled to go back and look at them more closely. These chapters, which deal with the first century Jewish synagogue, simply open up too many gospel passages to not stop and marvel for a bit. I don't know how many blog posts I will make out of it, but it's just too interesting to pass up.
No one knows for sure when the first synagogues came to be, but most scholars believe it must have been at or about the time of the Babylonian exile and dispersion. The English word "synagogue" is of Greek derivation and means "gathering together" for religious purposes. These synagogues probably started out in homes as rooms set aside for prayer. As public, corporate prayer was something to be encouraged, the people would have met in these places for that purpose--hence the name. By the time of Christ, these worship places had evolved into organized prayer and teaching centers for the Jewish faith.
The worship of the Old Testament was typical and centered around, first, the tabernacle and, later, the temple in Jerusalem. Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC. Most of the people were then, or already had been carried away captive to Babylon. Of those remaining, a large portion fled to Egypt. Solomon's temple was razed and the vessels of the temple stolen and taken to Babylon as spoils of war.
Around what, now, would the Levitical priests attempt to organize their religion in a foreign land? The answer, through natural social evolution, was the synagogue.
When the people began returning to their homeland it would take a while for a new temple to be built. In the meantime, the people needed places to meet and pray and propagate their faith. By the time a new temple was built, and desecrated, and re-built, the synagogue had established itself as a quintessential part of Jewish life. Each had its rulers, its rules, and its daily litany. By the time of Christ, nearly every town had several of them--cities had hundreds--and thousands dotted the countryside.
Witness the words of the Jerusalem council in Acts 15:
Acts 15: [21] For from ancient generations Moses has had in every city those who proclaim him, for he is read every Sabbath in the synagogues.”According to the rabbinical sources, there were as many as 480 synagogues in Jerusalem at the time of its destruction in 70 AD.
In the next few days I will give some information about synagogue design and worship and tie it in to the gospel narrative, shedding light on some of the events of Jesus's ministry.
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