well we are now going to be looking at the roman empire during the epoxy mana in a completely different way and that we're going to be looking at how it was during the pax romano when we see the the origin and the spread of a new religious tradition known as christianity christianity began as a sec we will see within the jewish world but it did become its own distinctive religious tradition by the first century already we will see here in this video christianity would be illegal over the first several hundred years of its existence in the roman state for reasons we will be getting to later on but eventually christianity would be successful and in fact it would be come the major religion of western civilization later on so it's a very very important topic western civilization is still very much if you look over western history and look at the culture you can see it's very much been focused on the christian religion in so many different ways so here you can see some early christian art this is a depiction of jesus as a young shepherd a symbol an image from the early christian religion that we'll be coming to in more detail actually in the next video in in this particular video we're going to be looking at the jewish origins of the faith and as i said in the next video we'll be looking at its spread despite the fact that it was illegal and potentially very dangerous therefore to be um uh to adhere to um for for many many years so as i've already pointed out we're talking about the pax romana still which means uh well at least the rise of christianity um began theoretically you would say it begins with the teachings of jesus of nazareth etcetera that there's there was later an attempt by christian churchmen to to devise a dating system that went back to the time of jesus's birth as it turns out year one however according to that dating system it now appears might have been a little bit off by maybe as many as six years but theoretically uh one a.d or one common era would denote the year of jesus's birth it seems he was possibly born maybe actually by 6 bc or something the dating system that we now use in fact was not really did not really become more popular until some 700 years after the period that we're talking about today in any case christianity did emerge in the first century as you would expect given that's what the dating system is all oriented on is cr is christianity but it began in the first century and as we will see it would become an illegal religion and it would remain illegal in the roman world until 313 the legalization of christianity however something we're going to be coming to with our next topic of late antiquity so we won't worry about that too much right now christianity as i've already pointed out a few times here had an origin in the eastern area of the roman world in fact in what the romans called the province of judea which is named after the jews who lived there and since this video is in particular going to be focused on the jewish origins of this ultimately what becomes anyway a new religious tradition it it makes sense to spend just a few minutes looking at what the situation was like in judea in these years when we see this teacher right becoming popular and important in jesus of nazareth an area or at least somewhat popular okay um just in case you don't remember this jews of course had centuries before the period we're looking at now originally had their own independent kingdom but you'll recall that the kingdom of judah had been conquered you may remember by a few different larger empires jews had even been forced to many of them anyway forced to move to babylon by their conquerors many centuries before the time we're looking at right now um jews were eventually conquered by alexander the great and they were became part of the hellenistic kingdoms that followed alexander's death eventually it's the romans who show up and take over so there's already been centuries of jewish people therefore being forced to live under foreign rule either directly or indirectly and that would prove to be something as we will see of a problem for roman governance of this province of judea we can see incidentally that christianity has a jewish origin just by looking at some of its core beliefs um and most importantly the idea that the the christian god is quite clearly the the ethical and soul god worshiped by the hebrews at least that's how christians conceive of him but uh in looking here at the context for the rise of christianity that is to say to look at the situation in judea in the first century it was a period in which there was clearly a lot of tension between jewish people more generally and the roman authorities the romans actually had been content to rule judea indirectly for many years and in fact this map displays the different client rulers that the romans ruled through in this area of the east of roman control but beginning in the year six by the western calendar beginning in the year six the romans decided to directly appoint what for now just called governors to rule over judea and it seems that that did clearly heighten a great deal of tension between the ruling authorities and people living in judea in fact what the situation leads to is a great deal of resistance and as we will see that resistance ultimately led to the outbreak of rebellion on several different occasions the romans were actually pretty tolerant as ancient conquerors go you know relative to the time but if people would rise up in rebellion against them once they had been conquered the romans could be every much as brutal as any ancient conqueror could be like we'll come back to that in just a little bit you can see the famous or infamous maybe i should say in western history uh roman governor in judea um in the critical years of jesus's teachings and ultimately his execution pontius pilate we'll come back to him too soon before we talk though more about jesus and his story um i want to point out that not only was there a lot of tension in judea at the time of jesus's life because of the again the the roman ruling authorities and some degree of resistance clearly on the part of many jewish people to that ruling authority but under the pressure of roman rule there had been sort of a revival of this idea that there might be a sort of messiah or savior figure that would return uh to the world to save the jews this idea of a messiah or a savior type figure it actually uh was a very very old idea because it had been a concept believed in back centuries before when jews had been conquered by babylon and if you'll remember this story which we talked about a while back now eventually the babylonian state was itself conquered by the persians and the persian king had let jews in babylon if they wanted to return to the land of judah and so some had even at the time considered that possibly the persian king was in fact that messiah figure well obviously that is uh not relevant to our period now with the roman occupying authority now there is clearly growing expectation and belief in the idea of a messiah that would save jews in some way from rule by this foreign power and there were clearly a variety of different beliefs about what that would mean and that combined with the seriousness of the situation in terms of roman rule led to the splintering of of many jewish people into different sects different sects that that well they differed on a variety of things but including what it meant this idea of a messiah figure what it would look what that messiah would look like um but there were also differences of opinion about jewish law um and some other matters that we'll come to here very quickly we're going to see here that therefore when jesus of nazareth begins his teaching in the late 20s and possibly early 30s that he is sort of it almost makes sense that there would be a new sort of let's say sect that emerges in this jewish world that was clearly far from unified either politically or religiously about the future one of the sexed uh sects that was around um in this period that we're looking at were the jewish aristocracy who served as the temple priests called the sadducees they were um complicit in many ways with the roman occupying authority they were very much for not just the temple rituals and sacrifices being carried out and according to traditional ways but they also had really stressed the need for rigid adherence to the torah which is the essentially the first five books of the hebrew bible and of the christian bible and they as it turns out did not regard these sadducees other oral traditions or even more written texts to be legitimately uh inspired by god so this leads to a mention mention of a second sec within the jewish world at the time that we're looking at that is to say this time when christianity will emerge there's a group called the pharisees who um believe of course in the validity of the torah just as the sadducees would have done but they also valued as you can see your oral traditions and sort of other interpretations that had gone alongside the torah over time something that the sadducees rejected they also believed that the pharisees and this is a really interesting idea that there would one day be the resurrection of the dead the bodily resurrection of the of the dead who were righteous and that means that the pharisees believed in the idea not just of a collective salvation that god would offer his promised people but an individual salvation for righteous people and in fact the pharisees believed that this messiah figure would in fact return once in such time when jews finally got their act together you see and started to live in this righteous manner basically a 14th century depiction of the pharisees one other interesting thing about the pharisees is that they believed in and and conveying their views by means of parables right in other words stories that weren't literally true but they had a moral to it that was very instructive the sadducees rejected these oral and more recent traditions especially the one including the idea of a bodily resurrection of righteous individuals and so that's a very significant difference between the two groups another group that existed in this time in judea at the time of early christianity or the rise of jesus of nathan i should say and his uh the group or his followers around him was a very ascetic group called the essenes who uh who also believed in the need for righteous living they they seem the essenes to have regarded the sadducees and the pharisees both as being corrupt and evil and they sort of essentially created monastic communities in rural locations and tried to live aesthetically they also seemed to believed in one day a messiah figure returning and then the last group i'll mention here are the zealots another group and this was a group that rose in response to the direct rule by rome beginning in the year six the zealots unlike the pharisees and the essenes i just mentioned the zealots believed that uh when this messiah figure returned that it would be a conquering messiah which is to say uh i'm a messiah that actually kicked the romans physically out of judea itself altogether so um it's at one point that's worth making about the zealots here is that they do lead a few different rebellions i mean the most famous of them is a little after jesus himself his own time because in 66 as you can see is this major rebellion and boy did the romans brutally crack down in fact they ended up destroying the temple of jerusalem which the babylonians had managed to do for the first time back in the 6th century bc and now the romans themselves do but there will be even more rebellions beyond the year 66 which would lead to other brutal reprisals and ultimately in response to this military action led by the zealots the romans began to well do kind of the same sort of thing that the babylonians had done so many centuries before which is to kick them out of judah excuse me of judea as i should call it now and force them to live in other parts of the empire and so here you can just see a simple map indicating areas where jews were dispersed in our period so jews actually already have become somewhat dispersed because of previous uh forced deportations in their history and so they're already jewish communities in some of the eastern cities particularly of the roman state that that process of the creation of a jewish diaspora around the mediterranean was greatly um hastened along let's say by the brutality of the romans and the crackdown on the zealots as a militant rebellious group so therefore when we look at the story of jesus and his career if i can call it that um it sort of makes sense in a way that he would be essentially creating a new sect within the jewish religion he was clearly also uh quite influenced in different ways by the different sects that i've mentioned so far particularly by the pharisees um this is what especially stands out there i suppose is is the idea of righteousness excuse me is resurrection and the hope of something eternal for the individuals who are righteous there's something apocalyptic about that which is uh a part of particularly of the essenes but also the pharisees to some extent even at the zealots more i think about it given their idea of a military conquering messiah figure of course jesus didn't offer or agree with the zealots on that particular point but this the apocalyptic meaning this idea that in the future the near future is going to be this sort of uh return of god through a messiah and this big change that sort of characteristic of other sex at the time but the idea of individual resurrection reward for the individually righteous is also a very interesting point jesus however did not agree right with any really it seems certainly not anyway the pharisees sadducees are the zealots uh when it came down to it he seems to have regarded them as uh being hypocritical in many ways in terms of the way that they lived versus how they taught in fact jesus in these stories written down about his life is shown as having comfort uh confronted the sadducees and the pharisees i'll say more about that in a minute along the way here before i do say more about that story i will point out our source for it of course our major sources for it are stories about jesus's life and death that were written down decades after jesus would have lived the the first non-uh or the first reference to jesus and his followers that we have who were not themselves uh christian or writing down text as believers doesn't come until the early second century so um [Music] therefore we don't have any text written down at the time fact jesus we have nothing written down from him himself when jesus died it appears what happened was that there were different uh stories about jesus teachings about his life about a lot of different things that got told and spread by word of mouth and that eventually it seemed some of these different snippets i guess you would say this teachings and life were written down and then somebody eventually started to compile all those snippets into a larger whole a whole story about jesus these stories about jesus teaching about his life about his death became known in english translation anyway as gospels which is the word for which is an old germanic word actually because it's translated from the original greek but the original word for gospel in greek means good news because the idea was that by reading this story about jesus is teaching his life that you're reading about this good news about the future about what it will mean for the righteous when this apocalyptic future with the messiah's return actually occurs but these stories were written down decades later after jesus's own death the earliest of them was probably written at least 30 years or so after jesus's death some of the uh the latest gospel that is considered canonical the gospel john probably written around in the 90s so uh about 60 years after jesus's death there are four versions of of jesus's story i guess you would call it that eventually become accepted by christian leaders as being divinely inspired by god and therefore legitimate and authoritative these four gospels which you've probably heard of call the gospels of matthew mark luke and john were actually not the only gospels there are other versions other stories of the gospels that were written that were not for a variety of reasons considered to be authoritative unless as it said excluded from the canon so what i'm going to tell you or try to summarize here is a general outline not only of what is presented in these gospel stories about jesus's life but also what of course early christians believed about jesus when they write these things down later on jesus was um as i've already pointed out an apocalyptic sort of teacher but if you look at the basic ethics of morality that jesus taught a lot of it does seem to be in line with jewish ethics there there is a moment where jesus is asked what the most important thing he is teaching is and he responds by saying the most important thing is to love god and also to love your neighbor loving your neighbor becomes particularly an interesting feature of course of this teaching because he jesus generalizes the idea of loving of neighbor not just to include those who are your friends or your family but even to love your enemies jesus uh states essentially the golden rule the idea that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto yourself is the old i guess fashion english way of translating that famously in the sermon on the mount jesus explains a lot of these ethics he clearly was a jewish teacher jesus was a jew not just in terms of his actual heritage but he thought of himself as a jew and he explicitly states in in the gospels that he did not see himself as as overturning any of the laws of the jews but instead fulfilling them as they put it he was also apocalyptic something i mentioned a few times here already in that he talks about this epic sort of event that's going to occur in the near future he explained that god's kingdom was at hand and that that made it all the more important for people to repent and live in a righteous way as soon as possible jesus is also presented in the gospels as a holy man holy men were according to uh the sources of the time there were there was a belief in holy men who did in fact have the ability to not just heal the sick or cure various maladies but even to cast out demons and um jesus is of course presented as doing exactly those sorts of things in the gospel stories so a lot of what i've said so far therefore doesn't actually seem to be unexpected in a way when you look at some of what the other jewish sects at the time were teaching and some of the ideas that were already in circulation in judea about ethics and about the future and about the idea of a messiah figure which as we will see eventually jesus is seen clearly by his followers as being this messiah figure the savior figure one really interesting thing about jesus story is that if you read it if you look at the gospels which by the way were of course written not only decades later but were written not with the purpose of what a modern historian would be about of course but instead would be written from the point of view of uh trying to to enlighten the reader right as to true belief that sort of idea but even with that devotional uh motivation an historian can read these texts and still glean a lot of really interesting historical information including the idea that that jesus was clearly something of a rabble rouser as i already mentioned he came clearly into direct confrontation with the pharisees and the sadducees which ticked off both of those groups particularly the sadducees here they were the again the jewish aristocracy who played an important role in maintaining uh peace and order i guess you would say under roman rule if jesus was to be seen as a rabble rouser especially considering the context of the zealots who would actually of course call for military revolt well that could really get jesus and his followers as well into some serious trouble romans particularly do not like rebels and it is interesting to to notice based on these gospel stories about jesus's actions that if assuming that these have some truth to them in terms of challenging authorities uh it definitely would have gotten not only the attention of jewish authorities ruling in the name of rome but it probably would have gotten the attention of roman authorities too there's this famous scene for example in the gospels where jesus entered the temple in jerusalem and he was really angry because there are always money changers there who were basically selling animals for sacrifice ritual sacrifice but he was really angry about merchants taking over the temple and he kicked them out but that would have been a very dramatic scene very dramatic scene eventually jesus got himself into quite a bit of trouble he would be denounced to roman leaders to the roman governor by local jewish authorities um before however his arrest the gospels tell us that he had this final meal or last supper as it eventually becomes known with his 12 apostles or disciples meaning his main followers and at that last meal he's presented as holding out the bread and saying eat this bread this is my body broken for you and then he holds out the wine and says drink this wine this is my blood spilled for you we'll come back to that a little later actually we'll come back to that in the next video because it's a pretty key part of christian ritual later on of course jesus also lets it be known that one of the disciples or the apostles will betray him which in fact turns out to be the case jesus was denounced as i just explained to roman authorities by local jewish authorities and as such he was eventually arrested the charge against him it seemed was essentially that treason because his apostles became convinced that jesus was this messiah figure and additionally to that since jesus talked about bringing about the kingdom of god the return of god's kingdom to to the earth it led him to be charged of claiming to be the king of the jews implying that of course the roman emperors didn't have the right to rule so he essentially got himself uh accused of treason and he was convicted of this and he was sentenced to die in a very brutal fashion crucifixion which was a means of execution that was typically reserved for slaves or it was meant to be utterly not only miserable as a way to die but also to be completely degrading and so jesus was of course according to the gospels crucified the a lot of these images obviously i'm showing you here are later images i include them in part to make the story a little easier to track with visually but also to along the way display the clear influence that this christian story has later on on western civilization in so many ways but i'll also be showing you a few examples of ancient art here connected to this not just in this video but in the next one as well so jesus was executed by crucifixion absolutely brutal form of execution according to the gospels though three days after jesus had been executed he miraculously rose from the dead here's a renaissance depiction of this scene jesus rising from the dead and you see these roman soldiers down here we're supposed to guard his tomb and they're like what the heck is going on here anyway jesus is described as having risen from the dead is it's in this miraculous way he then makes a series of different appearances to different people including the apostles of course his main followers sometimes called the twelve apostles sometimes called the twelve disciples he before he leaves the scene to put it i guess one way uh he he told his apostles to then teach all nations about his well about his teaching and he promised that he was going to return soon in order to usher in god's kingdom and then he is described as physically ascending into heaven which of course you can see happening here he's rising up into the sky there's some angels down here and the people like this is amazing so jesus then ascended into heaven and now the apostles believed it was on them to teach quote all the nations the apostles as i've already suggested a few times here came to understand from all this that this jesus they had been following was in fact this messiah figure that had been such an important part of jewish tradition for centuries actually they also came to believe jesus was the son of god although it's not entirely clear what exactly this would have meant to jesus's early followers who were like jesus himself jews well one thing seems to be clear which is that these apostles at least almost all of them anyway would have if not all of them seen themselves not as somehow bringing about the creation of a new religious tradition but instead would have seen themselves as jews but this sect again if i could call it that within the jewish world would become more than just a sect it would become its own distinctive religious tradition here you see some ancient art this as you can see our jesus and his twelve apostles this is from the catacombs underground in rome something we'll look at a little bit more in our next video but they carry the story forward a little bit more there was one man named paul also a jewish person although paul was a romanized or should say hellenized uh jew which means that he was jewish but he become very influenced by greek culture through the romans in fact he had become a roman citizen himself even though paul is called an apostle he wasn't one of the 12 apostles he didn't actually personally know jesus but the story goes that paul was himself actually an authority persecuting the followers of jesus but that on his way traveling one day to us to the city of damascus in order to continue with this job of persecution the story goes that he was struck down by the light of god and momentarily or blinded and that he was suddenly converted over through this experience uh to become a follower of jesus instead of a persecutor this is uh michelangelo's renaissance depiction of this scene of the saul which was his original name he changed it to paw to his conversion but you can see here he is having been struck by the light of god he's been knocked off of his horse this becomes a sort of archetypal christian conversion story that in western civilization later on many saints are associated with a similar type of conversion but here's the point here about paul though paul despite his early opposition to the followers of jesus he became a convert as i just explained but he did something quite different than the other apostles which is to say he showed a real interest in spreading the teachings of jesus outside of the jewish community altogether outside of judea altogether and he it sort of makes sense that it would be a figure like paul to do this because not only of course had he become this follower of jesus but paul also as i explained a moment ago was himself hellenized meaning influenced by greco-roman culture and he therefore traveled to other areas of the eastern part of the roman empire areas where the greek language would have been dominant and in these various journeys he began to preach the ideas of jesus and he began to help found christian communities in these places eventually unfortunately for paul he was uh arrested and he was taken to rome and after some time in rome he was eventually uh martyred had his head cut off there so eventually got himself in trouble and martyred which is a very common ending for these early christian leaders but in any case the message of paul to these greeks was something it's not in contradiction really to what i've already described about jesus story as presented in the gospels but um it's something that is enough of a departure it's enough of an addition maybe you could say that it's what transforms this from being simply a sector judaism into a new religious tradition that has its own distinctive features because paul really emphasized not as much jesus's life as much of as much as he emphasized his death and his resurrection according to paul jesus was this messiah figure the savior who had come to earth in order to be sacrificed to atone for to pay for the evil or the sin of human beings by the way the word messiah right which really means anointed like a king would be anointed is translated into the greek as christos and it's from that word for messiah or anointed christos that not only jesus gets his i was going to call nickname or epithet right jesus christ but also that's the name of course ultimately for the believers in jesus with this pauline understanding they become known as christians in any case paul says it's really the jesus the meaning of his death he said was that he came here to sacrifice himself to pay for humanity's sins we see a depiction of paul preaching in in greek right in one of these areas in the eastern part of the roman state but according to paul here's the big the big part of this paul argued that because jesus or christ as i couldn't now say he referred to him right because jesus or the savior called christ had been successfully sacrificed to pay for humanity's sins that had established a new covenant between humanity and god a new covenant that made the old covenant associated with like abraham and moses irrelevant superseded no longer do believers need to follow all the jewish laws and customs that were part of the old covenant the new covenant that now exists with god according to paul at its core requires believing and accepting jesus as being the savior figure and understanding that his sacrifice for humanity was in fact a sacrifice and was in fact efficacious that it worked so paul therefore is sort of advocating giving up many jewish laws and customs as being part of an old covenant that no longer matters between god and humanity and the reality is that there would have been a lot of these early followers of jesus who would have thought that paul was going way too far right there are clearly plenty of jews who followed jesus back in judea who thought of jesus as a jew and who would have believed it was necessary to continue to maintain all jewish laws and customs unfortunately for that group through uh not only because of the hostility of the romans increasing in that area because of military rebellion led by zealots but also because of the fact that jewish authorities in judea who themselves reject rejected jesus's teachings they were really hostile to jesus followers in judea and so that meant that as this new christian religion spread among greek speaking people in the first eastern half of the empire they would increasingly look as jews as being ignorant because they don't agree with paul you see that their laws and their customs have now been made irrelevant by this new covenant and at the same time those followers of jesus in judea those jews in other words who believed in jesus would have been persecuted by roman and jewish authorities in judea so what this means is that the what had been a jewish sect around jesus begins to collapse in the first century and what eventually is left behind are those who have come to believe in the teachings of jesus who are greek speakers and who come to understand the meaning of jesus as paul explained it to be paul became known by the way as an apostle despite the fact that he wasn't one of the original 12 because it was believed by early christians that he had been directly inspired by jesus himself and that that had made him an apostle paul a lot of what i just explained about his views would be of course written down not only um in in the acts but more importantly in a series of letters that he wrote to different christian communities that he helped found in the eastern mediterranean region and paul's letters to these christian communities combined with the gospel stories of jesus's life together became the core of what would become the christian bible of course that that bible forms over years it doesn't like emerge fully formed as a big book or something like this in either the first or the second century by around 200 we do start to see some christian leaders naming different books or letters that they think are all authoritative and should be regarded as sacred scripture but these lists don't always all match up until more years go by until there's paul writing these letters that again became part of or the foundation really of a new religion we would call christianity paul's understanding of jesus made this in a new religion as i just explained because he's claiming that the old covenant that of course was still core to jewish belief was now going to be replaced he claimed by this new covenant which required people to accept and believe in jesus as this messiah figure or this christ-like figure but you know one thing that's really interesting here i sort of touched on this a little earlier it wasn't it's not really that easy to be certain what the first followers of jesus thought about jesus in detail i mean they regarded him as a messiah as i already said a savior-like figure they regarded him as a son of god but believe it or not despite the label son of god that doesn't necessarily mean that early followers of jesus saw jesus himself as being divine in fact it's possible that that view of jesus being regarded as divine was something that was more to be associated with what happened to the teachings of jesus as it was hellenized that is to say influenced by greek culture under not only the teachings of paul but others eventually too there was after all in greco-roman myth all kinds of stories of gods who became uh gods who assumed human form that occurs quite a bit in greco-roman myth there was also the more recent uh reality that the roman emperors began to claim to be god's son like octavian actually i didn't mention it before but octavian had his adoptive father julius caesar deified after caesar's assassination and that meant that caesar became a god and then octavian claimed to be therefore the son of god and of course when octavian died he became known as augustus he was then deified as well so this idea of being god's son and what it could mean for someone else becoming divine as well i don't know it's possible that in that context it was more likely that hellenized converts to the teachings of jesus would have been more likely to see jesus himself as being divine but it's not entirely clear as i said well actually i will point out one other thing about this which is to say if you look at the earliest believers the followers of jesus in judea itself since those were jewish people and since they were strictly monotheistic it seems unlikely that perhaps many of them would have regarded jesus perhaps being divine again from a historical point of view i'm talking about this there's probably something i should really emphasize here even though i know it's near the end of this video which is that um as you can probably see from the fact being 43 minutes in here um we're looking of course of the christian religion like all religious traditions in this class from an historical point of view from the secular point of view that doesn't mean there isn't a way to look at any of these things from a more religious or devotional point of view that's just not what we do in history here we're just looking at the faith in order to get a better understanding of what people seem to have believed at the time whether or not you we whatever think that it's true some part of it true not true that's kind of irrelevant to what we're doing here okay but anyway having clarified that i will make one last point here before we conclude this video and that is that despite the jewish origins the clear jewish origins of this new religious tradition as you can see it became influenced by greek culture that the i meant didn't mention it before but the gospels those letters wrote pipe written by paul all that is written in greek not the semitic language of aramaic which jesus himself would have spoken and used but in greek so this is clearly a jewish set that is hellenized or greekified and in the process it becomes its own distinctive religious tradition but that does mean that despite the jewish origins the proponents of this new religious tradition can often become quite hostile toward jews the sad uh sad part of the story which unfortunately is a characteristic feature or would become a characteristic feature christianity for the rest of its history this is not to suggest that all christians were so hostile toward jews but there's clearly uh quite a bit of hostility there expressed by many christian leaders toward jews these christians would come to see jews as being stubborn as being blind as not seeing that jesus was quite clear the messiah one of the uh more absurd but frequent accusations to see early christian or not just early christians but later christians make of jews would be the idea that somehow the jews murdered jesus that they were god killers deicides which i mean is ridiculous on several levels but including the fact that jesus was a jew himself um in any case i've included here uh reference to this early church theologian is actually a little bit dated for our period here but he's he's an excellent example of this unfortunate hostility toward jews that becomes an all-too-common feature of christian history as time goes by uh ironic right because of the jewish origins of the faith but this man john chrysostom we have a selection a reading by him and in that reading you'll see he is clearly angry with how there are some christians who are friendly toward jews which is interesting by the way to see that not all christians because he were so hostile toward jews but he refers to jews in the most brutal of ways he calls them murderers of god's son he calls them robbers he calls them demons he complains about uh synagogues since the by the way temple of jerusalem was destroyed after a jewish rebellion in 66 after that point jews become more associated less with the temple and especially when they go into the diaspora they can associate with these synagogues where they meet and so he chris chrysostom ridicules these synagogues as basically thieves dens and places where demons live it's pretty horrific stuff and it's also as i said a minute ago kind of an ironic uh point right that despite the clear foundation of hebrew ethical monotheism that not all but some christian leaders even many christian leaders over time historically would become hostile to that faith for not for that jewish tradition for not accepting paul's understanding of jesus's teachings or i suppose for that matter accepting jesus is a messiah figure at all all right what we're going to do in the next video is we're going to look at how this new emerging christian religion fared in the roman world