Christianity by the Century: Second Century BCE

Christianity by the Century: Second Century BCE (200–100 BCE)

The second century BCE was a time of upheaval, innovation, and profound searching within Judaism—the soil from which Christianity grew. Several ideas and practices that Christians later claimed as their own emerged from this turbulent time.

Hellenistic Opportunities for Judaism

The conquests of Alexander the Great were already more than a hundred years old, but their aftershocks continued to reverberate throughout the broader region. For Jewish communities, this cultural tide created both opportunities and threats. As we’ll see, many resisted it, insisting that distinctiveness was God’s call to Israel. But others embraced Greek lifestyles and philosophical attitudes, affirming that philosophy could deepen their understanding of the Torah.

They took advantage of the Greek culture as the common currency of the Mediterranean world—its language, literature, and philosophy. Alexandria of Egypt—”the city of Alexander”— was the major center of Hellenic culture and even became the birthplace of the all-important Greek translation of Hebrew scriptures, the Septuagint.

Greek philosophers also asked hard theological questions that inspired new thinking and new interpretation of ancient scriptures. These new types of questions set a precedent for Jews who began to follow Jesus a couple of centuries later.  We’ll discuss those when we look more closely at the second century CE.

The Maccabean Revolt and the Birth of Martyrdom

However, the pressure to conform finally reached a breaking point under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, ruler of the Seleucid Empire. Around 167 BCE, he outlawed Jewish practices, specifically circumcision, Sabbath observance, and Torah study. In an act of ultimate insult, he desecrated the Jerusalem Temple by sacrificing to Zeus on its altar. To many Jews, this was nothing less than an attempt to erase their covenant identity.

A gruesome Maccabean revolt broke out in 167, leading to seven years of guerrilla war led by the priestly Hasmonean family. Against all odds, they recaptured the Temple in 164 BCE, purified it, and rededicated it. This is the event still celebrated by Jews today at Hanukkah.

In the early years of the revolt, however—according to 2 Maccabees—a family of seven brothers and their mother was tortured and executed by Antiochus in 166 BE for refusing to violate Jewish dietary law. As each brother is killed, he affirms hope in resurrection. One declares, “The King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life.” Here, for the first time in Jewish history, martyrdom has been tied directly to belief in life after death.

Only a century or two later, Jesus’s faithful followers easily identified with the story of the martyred family in 2 Maccabees. The conviction that faithful suffering leads to vindication beyond death became a cornerstone of Christian identity. Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection were interpreted in precisely this light.

Apocalyptic Imagination

Out of the trauma of Antiochus’s persecution came another enduring legacy: apocalyptic hope. The book of Daniel, composed in its final form around 164 BCE, is thought to be a message of comfort and assurance to Jews living under this oppressive regime. Despite the absence of his specific name, Chapters 8 and 11 describe a powerful king who persecuted the Jews, outlawed their religious practices, and desecrated the Temple, and these events also corroborate the historical record in the books of Maccabees.

In one of Daniel’s visions, a heavenly figure—“one like a son of man”—receives everlasting dominion. He represents the apocalyptic hope that a new, just, and righteous order will ultimately prevail. Beyond the chaos of war and empire, a vision of God’s kingdom appears, overturning injustice and vindicating the righteous. This worldview shaped not only later Jewish sects but also the New Testament writers. Jesus frequently referred to himself as the “Son of Man” from Daniel’s vision, and Christians came to see his resurrection as the dawn of God’s kingdom.

Communities in Conflict

As Jews struggled to remain faithful while living in a world dominated by Greek values and worldviews, disagreement on how to respond to foreign rule or cultural pressure caused new movements to emerge that would later confront Jesus. Three competing factions emerged— Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, each representing a different answer to the question of holiness.

The Pharisees emphasized meticulous observance of Torah in daily life, even beyond the Temple. The Sadducees, closely tied to the priesthood, guarded the Temple and resisted innovations like belief in resurrection. The Essenes withdrew into desert communities, convinced that they alone preserved the true covenant. Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls were probably written during this period as well.

These divisions already start to sound familiar to New Testament readers. Jesus debated Pharisees about purity and law, while Paul clashed with Sadducean denial of resurrection. The idea of a covenant community awaiting God’s dramatic intervention—so central in the Dead Sea Scrolls—echoes throughout early Christian writings.

Wisdom for a Wider World

Not all reactions to the Greek cultural surge were militant or sectarian. Some Jewish writers found opportunity in embracing Greek culture. The book of Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), for example, highlights Wisdom rooted in the ancient writings of the Torah but framed in ways that a wider Greek audience could appreciate. The Wisdom of Solomon, written in Greek, develops God’s Wisdom (Sophia) along the lines of Greek philosophy even further as a cosmic force guiding creation and leading the righteous to immortality.

This language would later give Christians a vocabulary to describe Jesus. When the Gospel of John proclaims, “In the beginning was the Word (Logos), and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” it is drawing on a century of Jewish speculation that had already connected divine Wisdom with God’s creative and saving work.

Why the Second Century BCE Matters

Against the backdrop of encroaching Hellenistic influence and other external threats, we see Judaism begin to fragment per varying approaches to handling these pressures.  At the same time, the angels and demons that gained traction in the prior century moved in the direction of apocalyptic thinking, while also showing a clear path to valuing God over life through martyrdom. As we’ll note in the centuries to come, the Christian message drew on the innovations of the second century BCE—its categories of thought, its vocabulary of hope, and its models of faithfulness.

From this century we inherit:

• Martyrdom as faithfulness unto death, with the promise of resurrection.
• Apocalyptic expectation of God’s kingdom breaking into human experience.
• Sectarian experimentation, shaping debates Jesus and his followers would later enter.
• Wisdom theology, bridging Jewish tradition with Greek philosophy.
• A living struggle between assimilation and distinctiveness, echoing in the early church’s relationship with who lacked Jewish origins.

The second century BCE was, in short, a crucible. The Jewish heritage provided the heat-resistant containment for the melting and fusing of new materials from Greek culture. When Christ groups emerged a hundred years later, they were not alien transplants but the flowering of seeds planted in this tumultuous century.

In the next installment, we’ll move into the first century BCE, where Rome takes center stage, sectarian movements harden their lines, and the stage is set for the world into which Jesus was born.

This is the fourth in a series of Bible and Beyond blog posts, Christian History by the Century, focusing on the key developments that influenced Christianity, by century. Beginning with the fifth century BCE, we have traced historical events and ideas that influenced future generations of those who came to identify themselves as Christian, and so far we have seen the critical impact of Greek philosophers and the early stages of mystic tradition. By the second century BCE, Jewish leaders and writers are grappling with growing encounters with other civilizations, particularly the dominant Greek culture. Plato and Aristotle, then later Alexander the Great and his Hellenic followers, had prepared the way for Greek philosophy and worldviews to mingle with Jewish thought and practice.