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It is a good idea, at this point in our Course, to step back and remember how we arrived at this point, at the end of the Jewish state of Judea, in 70CE, in order that we may be consistent, and pursue the fourth part, the Christian Experience, with exactly the same methods of approach.

It would be only too easy for Christians to abandon these methods, and jump straight into 'Nativity-Play-Christianity', and away from 'nasty Jews' to 'nice Christians' without a second's thought. We did not start the Jewish Story in the Old Testament with Adam and Eve in the Garden, so likewise we shall not start the Christian Story with an angel appearing to a lilywhite young virgin, Mary by name, to announce the status of her Son-to-be.

Our method has been three-fold: first, we must stand back from everything we think we know; then secondly we must explore the historical setting of the Story, with all the rigorous academic 'tools' of the subject called History, examining evidence from internal documents, and outside sources which are more independent, together with other evidence, from coins and archaeology etc, and then, thirdly, we can explore the religious and theological ideas which have developed from people's experience of history, and produced profound ideas about 'God', and His dealings with people in creation, - ideas which have become so profound that they transcend, and even 'transform' history, and become Religion.

1.  Stand back from what we think we know
2.  Look at History
3.  Explore religious ideas prompted by people's experience of History.

Part Four still cannot 'start' with Jesus, until we understand who wrote the 'Birth Stories', and why?, because they were not written until after the great Jewish Disaster of the Temple's destruction in 70 CE, - four, five or even six decades after the beginning of the Christian Communities which produced them. It was only after the historical disaster of 70, that the two surviving branches of 2^nd-Temple-Judaism, (the Rabbinic Jews and the Jesus Jews), divided and produced two different sets of religious ideas as a result of the one historical disaster.

Rabbinic Jews emphasised Moses as their Hero-founder, because they believed that he had received God's Law at Sinai, and that this was all-important to them.

Christians, by contrast, declared Jesus to be their Hero-founder, because they believed that he had effected God's Salvation on the Cross, and this was all-important to them.

Both these religions have the same common roots, in the later years of the 2nd-Temple faith of Judaism, with all the creative theological ideas that proliferated in that culture. It must be remembered, however, that in that culture of many strands of Jewish thinking and belief, not all Jews thought and believed the same as each other, (any more than Christians do now!).

The many strands of Judaism included - the religion of the aristocratic Sadducees who guarded the wealthy Temple cult of sacrifices, (and who had no understanding for example, of beliefs in life after death), the pious beliefs of the educated lay folk, the Pharisees, (whose people had become the first religious martyrs in 167 BCE, and led to the necessity of belief in life-after-death, so the martyrs could receive their due reward from a God believed to be 'Just'), the sophisticated Wisdom of the Sages, the alternative beliefs of the Essenes who had 'opted out' of Temple-religion, and produced their own alternative out in the desert at Qumran, near the Dead Sea, the political-religious ideas of the Zealots, believing their mission to be ridding their people of the Romans by violence, the beliefs of the rural population, full of myths and legends, especially about angels and demons, and not forgetting to mention the apocalyptic visionaries, and the eschatological prophesiers of Doom and Judgment at the imminent End of the Cosmos, and possibly several more!

It is important to realise that all these many an diverse Jewish beliefs were held together , like the many arms of a spider's web, by their centre point of reference - Jerusalem, and the Temple. All Jews, even in the furthest Diaspora, paid their Temple Tax, and 'belonged'.

After Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed, - almost unintentionally in 70 CE when fire grew out of control during the Romans' attempts to deal with a colonial nuisance, - the whole system of Jewish allegiance to their 'centre' collapsed, like a spider's web when broken.

Out of the religious chaos, only the Pharisees survived, clinging to the Law instead of the Temple, but even then they divided among themselves into two main groups, the Rabbinic Jews, and the Jesus Jews, those who had known Jesus of Nazareth during his life-time, and heard him talk to, and of, God as 'Abba',(Daddy), - with such intimacy that they wanted to learn from him. These two groups soon parted company acrimoniously, when the Rabbinic Jews expelled all Jesus Jews from their synagogues because they, the Jesus people, accepted Gentile believers into their communities as full members, without demanding that they first became 'proper Jews' according to the Law, by circumcision.

Sadly this exposed the Jesus Jews to the Romans who were not sure whether they might be a new subversive movement or not, - so they 'tested' their loyalty by requiring that they make the usual public statement of loyalty, and burn incense to the Emperor as a god. Over the next two centuries this led to many Christian martyrdoms, but the new Gospel writers had already begun to have their revenge, by writing lots of anti-Pharisaic comments into their chapters, - so no one later reading Matth 23, for example, would ever realise that Jesus, - and Paul - had themselves come from the various ranks of the Pharisees! Sadly this revenge has gained for the Jews the long-standing reputation in the Christian world of being the Christ-Killers, with all the subsequent anti-Semitism that still abounds.

Historically, both Rabbinic Jews and Jesus Jews looked to Jerusalem as their reference point before 70 CE, so to trace Christian origins, historically, we must endeavour to get to it in documents written before 70, and there are seven! These are the genuine, unedited letters of Paul, who knew nothing of the loss of Jerusalem, and could never even have thought of it as a possibility. They form a valuable, and unique primary historical source for our search, to discover what we can about the embryo Christian communities, which were coming into being all round the Roman empire where Jews had first settled in the Diaspora.

AN EXERCISE TO CLEAR THE MIND

Each one of the seven letters must now be read in turn, not to follow Paul's long-winded arguments, but to glean snippets of information which are often incidental to his arguments, and list them in turn. They can be identified in answer to four questions:

1 What, if anything, does Paul say about himself?

2 What does Paul say about Jesus, before his crucifixion?

3 What does Paul say about Jesus, after his crucifixion?

4 What does Paul say about other apostles, and leaders of the Jesus communities, and about events concerning them? (meetings etc.)

Use a separate piece of paper for each of the letters, and lay them out, side by side, when you have finished. Finally, make another list of all the things you already know about Jesus, and Paul, and the Early Church, which you have NOT met in these letters, and then compare a) what we learn from contemporary Paul, before 70 CE, with b) what we learn from the four gospels and Acts, all of which were written in the next few decades, after 70 CE.