A Shepherd’s Tale

Moving on to the second story in my book “Meeting Jesus: Three Christmas Stories,” “A Shepherd’s Tale.” Now this one does not have anything big to talk about (like inns that aren’t inns). But there are some things I want to bring up.

Firstly the statues of shepherds. For some, this may seem obvious, but I think because we hear about shepherds in the Bible so often, (these shepherds, David as a shepherd boy, Jesus’ parables of shepherds, and shepherd-related things) I think we forget what the shepherd’s statues was. Quite simple they were at the bottom of the totem pole. In professions, you couldn’t get much lower than a shepherd. In a court of law a women’s testimony was not considered reliable and so was not accepted. Yes, women were considered and treated like second class citizens. I forget if it was because they were considered too emotional to be a reliable witness or what, but so it was. Who else was not considered a reliable witness? Shepherds. Shepherd’s testimony was not accepted in a court of law either. It’s a beautiful picture then that God chose to have some of his first witnesses to Jesus’ birth be those the world would not except as witnesses. It shows God’s Lord and accepts of all. That God values people and not the same things the world does.

This is why I had my main character came from the upper crust of society and have him become a shepherd. It shows the position shepherds were in and how they would have been thought of and treated, and how they may even have thought of themselves. As for how many shepherds there were, the setup, and the way things worked, what I have is just what I came up with. I did try to do some research on this area, but there are many ways things could have looked. Again my words are not scripture. This is what I decided to do in my story.

Now there is something I focus on in my story that is not in the Christmas story at all. It is in the Bible though. It’s the topic of Pharisees and Sadducees. They don’t really come into the Christmas story, but they come into the story of Jesus. I chose to bring them up in my story because I wanted to import what I had learned more than anything really. Growing up in the church I heard the names Pharisees and Sadducees a lot, and I understood they were religious leaders. I even know they did not exactly like each other, but that was about all. They were the “bad guys” so to speak. And all of this is true, but there’s more to it. So I tried to bring that up in my book, and I want to go over it more here.

First I’m going to go back and cover some history I learned first in Bible College. When the Old Testament ends, the Babylonian captivity had ended and the Persians are in power. Then three to four hundred years pass, and the New Testament starts. Now the Romans are in control and things might seem the same, yet there are a lot of changes too. We now have Synagogues, something that came about from the Babylonian captivity. Also, the whole Greek occupation has been skipped over. Yeah, Alexander the Great happened in those silent years, along with a lot of other stuff. The transfer of power from the Persians to the Greeks was peaceful for the Jews if I remember correctly. At first for the Persians, and later the Greeks, the Jews lived a pretty peaceful existence.

Now the Greeks did have a way of pushing their culture and customs onto the people and lands they controlled. Their dress, language, and what they did. This is called Hellenistic. Like I said at first, I don’t think the Greeks were too pushy and some Jews accepted the Greek customs more than others. Now there would come a Greek leader, who was in control of Israel and the surrounding area, who oppressed them. There was slavery, the selling of the position of priests, and other things. If I remember correctly, the last straw was that an idol of Zeus was set up in the temple court and a pig (an unclean animal) was sacrificed to it. A Jewish priest walked up and stabbed the Greek doing sacrificing. This started the Maccabean Revolt. If I have my facts straight, Jerusalem became an independent state within the Greek empire for a time. The revolt, lead by the Maccabean family (which was a priestly family, I think) achieved this through guerrilla warfare. (I think it was a Maccabean who did the stabbing.) This is where Hanukkah comes from too. It’s good to know that before the Babylonian captivity Israel struggled with idol worship. But the Babylonian captivity seems to have cured them of that. So setting up an idol in the temple was a big deal to people who had go into captivity for 70 years for that sin.

Anyway, I think a nephew of the Maccabeans betrayed them and brought the end to the revolt. I think of the leaders that were not dead yet, were captured and killed. (This is what I remember being told anyway.) Well, the Greeks, I think, kind of learned their lesson that they could not push the Jews too far. Also it showed the Jews they could win for a time against other big powers. They did not forget it, and later others would try revolts, but the Romans always crushed them.

Later power transferred from the Greeks to the Romans. I think the Romans tried to keep a tighter leash on the Jews, and the Jews were really tired of being under foreign powers by this point.

So what’s the point of me telling you, this other then I wanted to? Well I think the Sadducees and the Pharisees came to be around the Greek time. Now the Sadducees seem to have been more excepting of the Greek Hellenistic influence. Also Sadducees seemed to have come from a lot of priestly families and families of power. The Sadducees did not believe in life after death or resurrection, so it makes sense to live it up here on earth if there no heaven or hell to build for or worry about. They also did not believe in angels or heavenly beings. And lastly they only counted the first five books of the Bible as scripture. Now they were religious leaders, don’t get me wrong. Some may have been more so then others. They do seem to have been more liberal.

Now the Pharisees were the conservative. They believed in all the scripture and followed the law, and this to the extreme. If the law said not to do something, they made buffer laws to make sure they did not break the original law. For example, there is the commend to not take the name of the LORD in vain. They would not even say God’s name, in Hebrew Yahweh. They had other names they would say instead. So if you don’t say God’s name, you can’t take it in vain. Well the pit fall to this might be obvious. The Pharisees tended to be very legalistic. It became all about following the letter of the law and not God being the focus of your life.

Now I would not have needed to include any of this in my book, but it served to show a contrast between the top of society and the bottom. Mostly I just wanted to share what I had learned, and it may help others understand things in the Bible better. As I said last week if I get you to open up your Bible and read it again in a new light, I have done my job.

What else to say? I can’t think of anything. Because the shepherds were not considered reliable witnesses, people may to have believed there story. But it is a beautiful picture of Jesus/God taking the humble and foolish things of this world to shame or skip the wise and great.

I hope this was fun and informative for you. I should be back next week for my last book. Until then...God Bless