The dispersion of the Jews

God's Chosen People

The only people to whom the one, true God had made himself known, were, you remember, the Jews.  Whereas the other nations were pagan and knew practically nothing about him, God had been teaching and training the Jews for 2,000 years in preparation for his coming into the world.  The Jews had a written record of all this teaching and preparation in the Books of the Old Testament which also looked forward to the birth of a great King and Deliverer whom they called the Anointed One (the Messiah or Christ).  It was the Jews whom God had chosen, when the time was ripe, to be his missionaries among the pagan nations, so that they too might learn to know him and love him and obey him.

Jews of the Dispersion

The total number of Jews was between four and five million.  Their home country was Palestine but more than half of them had been dispersed or scattered to various parts of the Empire, and groups of them of them were living in the cities of Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece and Rome itself.  These were known as the Jews of the Dispersion, and in each place they had built synagogues for themselves where they held services every Sabbath Day.  At these services, which were also attended by many people who were not Jews, the Books of the Old Testament were read in a Greek translation known as the Septuagint.  This meant, of course, that everyone could understand them.  It was called the Septuagint, which means Seventy, because of a legend which said that the translation to Greek had been made by 70, or rather 72, learned Jews from Jerusalem.  It was started about the year 250 BC in Alexandria in Egypt, and was finished a little more than 100 years later.

Waiting for a Saviour

The result was that, at the time Jesus was born, people all over the world were waiting for the Birth of a Saviour.  For example, only about 35 years before Our Lord’s Birth in Bethlehem, the Roman poet Virgil had written a remarkable poem in which he looked forward to the birth of a child under whose peaceful reign cruelty and evil would be ended.  As he put it, “Under the infant boy the iron age shall cease and the golden age shall rise over all the world”.  And he finished the poem with a prayer to the coming Saviour: “Dear child of the gods…see how all rejoice at the approaching age.  Oh that I may live long enough to see it and sing to thy deeds.  Begin, sweet babe, to recognise thy mother with a smile” (Eclogue IV).  Actually, Virgil never knew of Our Lord’s birth nor heard of his deeds, because he died about 15 years before Jesus was born, when he was only 51.