“It is?” Jess and Phil responded in stereo.

I gathered the plates and took them to the sink. “We need to think of these verses in the context of the time when they were written. We need to think in the mind-set of the ancients.”

“They were wimps,” Jess said.

Okay, this requires an explanation. As most schoolkids and all marathoners know, in 490 bc, the fate of ancient Greece hung on the outcome of the Battle of Marathon because Marathon was the final obstacle between the invading Persians and the city of Athens. Naturally, the Athenian rulers were on pins and needles, waiting to hear how the battle would turn out. And because this news was so crucial, a Greek warrior named Pheidippides was dispatched from the battlefield to bring the news of the Greek victory to Athens. He ran the roughly twenty-five miles from Marathon, gave his report, and then promptly died of exhaustion.

When Jess had run her first marathon, Phil and I were waiting for her as she crossed the finish line. She had been tired, but was by no means totally exhausted. After she’d caught her breath from the finishing sprint, she looked happily at Phil and me and declared, “Pheidippides was a wimp!”

When Jess made her remark about the ancients being wimps, I laughed and said, “Okay, agreed. All wimps. Every one of them. But wimps with their own cultural roots, which were very different from ours.”

Setting the dishes in the sink, I walked back into my study, retrieved a book from my shelf, and came out reading the text:

The providence which has ordered the whole of our life, showing zeal and concern, has ordained the most perfect consummation for human life by giving it to [him] . . . by filling him with virtue for doing the work of a benefactor among men, and by sending in him, as it were, a savior for us and those who come after us, to make war to cease, to create peace everywhere. . .. The birthday of the god was the beginning for the world of the gospel that has come to men through him.¹

I looked up. “That’s a pretty good translation of a birth announcement that was written in koine Greek, the same form of basic, universal Greek used in the New Testament. Whose birth do you think it announces?”

Jess gave me a look like, What kind of softball question is that? “The birth of Jesus, of course,” she said.

“Wrong,” I said with a smile. “It’s the official birth announcement of Octavian — otherwise known as Caesar Augustus — written almost six decades before the birth of Christ.”

I showed them the page and they scoured it, looking for an error, a footnote, anything that might lessen the confusion. Finally, Phil looked up. “But it says savior.”

“Which, in ancient times, meant about the same thing as victor,” I said. “You probably know that when a king or a general in those days captured a city or defeated an enemy at war, it was his right to burn the city to the ground and kill everyone in it. A quick survey of the Old Testament shows that such things happened with absolutely numbing regularity. But as victor, he could also decide to spare the city and its inhabitants, which made him their savior. In other words, he kept them from a death they deserved.”

“Exactly,” said Jess. “Which was why people had to know about Jesus. They knew they needed to be saved from the consequences of their sins.”

“Did they?” I sat down at the table again. “Let’s think about this. Jesus conducted a roving ministry, walking around Palestine — a Jewish state occupied by a foreign power. The final destruction of the Temple had not yet taken place. In fact, Herod the Great — the same Herod who tried to hunt down Jesus when he was an infant, and the father of the Herod who was ruling when Jesus was crucified — had rebuilt the Temple as a means of pacifying the Jews to make them more accepting of their Roman rulers. So, if you had been in an argument with your neighbor, or you hadn’t met with your minyan, your synagogue leaders, for a few days, you could set things right by going into the Temple and making a donation or offering a sacrifice.”

I turned to Phil. “What would you say if I told you I had a great device to keep the elephants off your lawn. Would you be interested in one?”

“I’d say I don’t have a problem with elephants on my lawn.”

“That’s right. And a Jew in the first century would have given a similar reply to someone who said, ‘I’ve got the remedy for your sins.’ Jews of this period didn’t see themselves as sinful. They were doing a pretty good job of living by the rules; and when they broke one, they could offer a sacrifice at the Temple. That’s why Jesus and the disciples didn’t lead with the salvation story, as in ‘This is how you get to heaven.’ They knew they wouldn’t find any takers.”