Week8

Christianity is actually a branch of Judaism! WHAT?!? Christians use to refer to themselves as the "the way" following the "path", basically followers of Jesus. Jesus was actually Jewish, but the people that followed him believing specifically that he was the son of God separated from others of Jewish practice making themselves a whole new religion. (which I think is crazy because I meet mostly Christians so I find it interesting how much it has spread and how popular it is today) Jesus himself even made Jerusalem less important in Christian eyes. He predicted the destruction of the Temple and Jerusalem changing it to a portable faith until his marker of his burial and resurrection happened.
I believe a huge change forming of now day Christianity is the rule of Constantine (he would kill and use the name of Jesus as his purpose). He conquered Jerusalem and saw the growing popularity of Christianity and used it. He legalized it and gathered leaders to create the Council of Nicaea that created the main laws of Christina concept, the doctrine of the Trinity. At this point there was less diversity and exclusion of all those who didn't follow these EXACT beliefs.....good or bad?

Week7

King Herod, good or bad. The king did a lot of good for the people that benefited them in they end, but the people still didn't like him. He was appointed to your Jerusalem from the Romans. He was from a area of forced Judaism, so he knew of Jewish traditions but was not a real Jewish follower. It was his knowledge of the Jewish traditions that allowed him to last as long as he did with out a rebellion.
"Herod the Great" ruled 37-4 BCE, he was impulsive and paranoid. He murdered anyone that threatened him, even his own children of wives. He did good for the people, his obsession with building made it so every person had a job, he allowed the Jewish people to pick their own High Priest, married one of their people (even though he ended up killing her, but at the time it helped), was generous during time of famine, his coins avoided pagans signs and human faces. He did everything not to directly offend the Jewish people. However they still hated him, he didn't do good for the people, he was a puppet to the Roman empire. He was a dictator but it worked for him as a ruler.

Week6

So moving on to the period of the 2nd Temple. Do we build it, do we not build it, do we even need at temple? Well during this period the second temple built to replace the first temple gets destroyed anyways (but we haven't really talked about that yet). Persian had liberated the people from Jerusalem from the Babylonians. I think it was more, "yeah we took over Babylonian!" then "wow how did all of these people get here?". So adopted this cool way of ruling people in a friendly kind of way. Sent all the people that had been exiled from Jerusalem back to the city with money to build a new temple (o ya, leave, be ruled by me, but I'll let you be free). Pretty smart I say, a happy employee is a good one, definitely better than a dead one.
  HOWEVER!!! this transitions of the exiled people of Jerusalem back to Jerusalem were their are already people living there (old people of Jerusalem meshed with people shoved in there from the Babylonians). Some people don't want to change how they are living and others do. The city expanded but there was conflict among the people. It was a fight to build the temple.

Week5

One lecture this week, and basically it was kind of depressing. Good new was that Jerusalem had a increased amount of literature in the common people. There were writings called the "Lanchish letters" where the righting of a common solider talk about the negative stigma with illiteracy. Also there was a braclet found with a prayer written on it from the Bible (and it brings to question how this pray came about in the Bible), but this is all a positive!
Now the bad news. Jerusalem is taken over by Babylonians in 586 BCE. First all the intelligent and skilled people of Jerusalem were exiled from the city. Then after King Jehoichin tried to rebel against the Babylonians, so they got mad and then banished all the people from Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple of Solomon. This happening made many people question the everything they had know. Everything that people had been taught from Gods promise to David was contradicted by reality.