You're listening to Catholic Sprouts, the daily podcast for Catholic kids that strives to plant seeds of faith.

Hey there, Sprouts. Today is Tuesday, September 22nd, 2020. This week on the Catholic Sprouts podcast, we are talking about the world that Jesus lived in. We've already talked about the fact

that Jesus was a real person. He actually lived.

So let's dig into this world that Jesus lived in. Well, the thing that dominated Jesus' life,

his growing up, his decisions was a fact not only that he was Jewish, but that he lived during a time when Rome

controlled the Jewish population, the lands where the Jews lived. For about 60 years before Jesus was

born, Judea, or the place where the Jews lived, had been under Roman control. They had been

conquered. Now, to understand Rome, we need to understand a couple of things. First of all, the Romans,

well, they thought that they were better than most people. They had more of an organized government than most people that lived at the time.

They also valued things like strength and beauty. They had a highly trained military and they were also very vicious.

They would attack and take control of an area, and they demanded, once they were in

control of an area, that that area remain peaceful. They demanded that there be no uprising,

no outbursts, no protests, and they maintained order through the sword. Now, if you know about Jesus' life,

we can see what the Romans did just by looking at his life. Jesus, the Jewish leaders, told the Roman

leaders that Jesus was causing problems, that he'd probably cause an uprising or

revolt. And the Romans were very happy to get rid of him. We know that the Romans used all sorts of

terrible means to punish or to get rid of people that were against them. One of them was

crucifixion.

They also used scourging, which we saw happen to Jesus

and all sorts of other terrible punishments.

So there's many things that we can talk about

to learn about the Romans,

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