Throughout the centuries different countries have pictured Jesus through the lens of their own culture.
An artist in Peru would paint Him with dark braided hair and a poncho with a Peruvian face, while artists in Europe have painted Him with blond hair and blue eyes and the Ethiopians portray Him as a tall black man, none of them ever stopping to ask what a Jew from 2000 years ago looked like.
We mentioned Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper in our last couple of programs, and much of Christendom was heavily influenced by it with regard to their understanding of that event, but most people are unaware of the fact that it’s culturally and Biblically wrong in almost every detail:
- The ‘Last Supper’ was actually a Passover Feast but the painting shows the meal taking place during the daytime but Passover meals always take place at night
- The people in the painting are white Caucasians instead of Semitic people with a darker skin with dark hair
- There are none of the necessary elements of the Passover meal on the table
- There is ordinary leavened bread like bread rolls instead of unleavened Matza and the meal of what appears to be grilled eels and oranges is completely non-kosher so wouldn’t have been eaten any time, and certainly not during a Passover meal.
- They were sitting on chairs at a table when during the actual event, they would have been reclining on soft cushions around a low table on the floor.
It’s important for us to look at Jesus and what He said and did, through the Hebrew cultural eyes of those living in Israel 2000 years ago.
Jesus’s teachings were life-changing, and to His first followers, what He taught was astounding.
The disciples left all their earthly belongings and risked their relationships in order to follow Him but as earth-shattering as Jesus’ teaching was 2000 years ago in a Jewish cultural context, we modern readers react to His words and actions with a ho-hum attitude sometimes because we don’t understand the context and setting—we simply read words on a page, quickly passing over their significance.
But what if we were to scrub away the past 20 centuries of western influence and thinking and look at the original context of what Jesus said and did?
While His words won’t change, they’ll carry greater insight and significance.
Jesus environment and cultural setting was of Rabbis, synagogues, nomads, farmers, despotic kings, brutal oppressive regimes and shepherds, traditions, rituals and ceremonies.
The very first church birthed in Jerusalem had the best advantage because they were eye witnesses to all Jesus did and they knew the people involved in all that happened around Him. And, when you read the first chapters in the book of Acts you can almost feel their excitement and passion, their honesty and faith is very evident in their prayers. They were joyful when they met together and they were incredibly generous toward each other.
Most people don’t realise that the very first church in the book of Acts was made up entirely of Jews and they continued to study Torah (remember the New Testament hadn’t been written at that time).
They worshipped in the Jewish Temple, they maintained the celebration of the feasts and they recognised Jesus as the fulfillment of every aspect of them; and they kept the Sabbath. In fact, the church didn’t have any contact with Gentiles until Peter had his vision of the unclean animals in the sheet when he was staying in Jaffa, and then he promptly went to the house of the Gentile, Cornelius at Caesarea. That was almost a decade after the events listed in Acts chapter 2!
When you compare the conduct of the Jewish congregations with Gentile congregations it’s obvious that the Jewish church was in a far healthier condition because they already had an amazing understanding of the Bible—they’d been raised in it their whole lives.
The Gentile church at Corinth for example was a mess. They were selfish, greedy, immoral, self-indulgent and they were proud of it, but the Jerusalem church—all Jews—were for the most part, thoughtful, generous, selfless, moral and righteous in their behaviour. The Jewish church wasn’t given to the same level of worldliness that the Gentile church was because they already understood the precepts of God as laid out in Torah—the Jewish Scriptures.
We’ll stop here and continue on in the next program about what it means to walk in the dust of our Rabbi.
Shalom
Mandy
(These studies are based on the book ‘Walking In The Dust Of Rabbi Jesus: How The Jewish Words of Jesus Can Change Your Life’ by Lois Tverberg)
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