The Gospel Before Jesus

Mark, our earliest gospel, opens with, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ…” — yet the story does not begin with Jesus.

After tracing the final forty years before the destruction of both the First and Second Temples, we now turn to the opening of the gospel narrative itself—a time every bit as prophetically charged. In this class, we’ll see that the gospel’s beginning is not Bethlehem or Nazareth, but the Temple, and with a priest.

Luke introduces the story “in the days of Herod, king of Judea,” when a certain priest named Zechariah, of the course of Abijah, serves in the Temple while the people pray outside at the hour of incense. The sacred historian assumes his readers understand these things. Most do not. Together, we’ll unlock this background—drawing from the Hebrew Bible, Josephus, the Mishnah, and the Talmud—to reconstruct what actually happened inside the Holy Place when Zechariah stood before the golden altar and the angel appeared.

We’ll explore the priestly courses, the incense ritual, and why being “righteous before God” meant something very different in its original Hebraic context. Finally, we’ll follow the narrative to Elisabeth’s miraculous conception and reflect on how her story continues the long biblical line of barren women blessed with promised sons.

This class bridges the world of the prophets and the Gospels, opening “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus” where it truly begins: before Jesus, with John.

Watch the video [⁠HERE⁠]