All 18 nights · Session 14 of 18 · May 4
Term 3 — Exile to Pentecost
Client kings, taxation, and the temple economy — and the four parties whose arguments fill the Gospels.
How Rome actually governed a place like Judea: client kings, tribute, and a temple that functioned as a bank and an economy as well as a sanctuary.
Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots — what each actually wanted. Knowing that makes the Gospels' arguments legible. Most of the disputes Jesus walks into are live political and religious fights with real parties attached.
Purity as a social system rather than a hygiene code. This one quietly rearranges a lot of scenes.
Village life in Galilee. Nazareth in the shadow of Sepphoris, a Roman city being built a short walk away. And what a tekton actually did all day.
Read: Mark 5:35–43
Mark keeps the Aramaic. Ask why he bothered to preserve the actual sound of it.
Entirely optional. Come either way.
Sit with this week’s passage and see what the Spirit shows you in it — a connection, a question, something that will not leave you alone, something you think the rest of us need to hear. That is not an interruption of the night. That is the night.
The subject above is the field we are working, and it is a real boundary. The Spirit who inspired these texts is the one who lights them up, and he does not compete with himself. What he gives will open this material further, not change the channel.
Send it ahead if you can, by replying to the message that brought you here. We open by hearing what the week turned up, before anybody explains anything.