Unbelievers in the Bible

I am back today and would like to discuss outsiders. Now, before I get any backlash about that term, it is not meant as derogatory whatsoever. It is simply a term denoting the position of a group or groups of people. When I talk about outsiders, I am simply talking about those people who were not followers of Jesus. Everyone of Jesus' followers was an outsider before becoming an insider (a follower of Jesus). So who were the outsiders in the bible. They fall into three separate groups.

First, there were Gentile outsiders. These were people who were not of the Jewish faith. Jesus did not encounter many Gentiles during his ministry, mainly because there were not nearly as many Gentiles in Palestine during Jesus' lifetime as there were Jews. Jesus came into contact with the Gentiles in one of two ways. They either came to him while he was in Jew territory, such as when the Centurion came to Jesus to ask him to heal his servant (Matt. 8:5-13; Luke 7:1-10), or he went to a pocket of Gentile territory and encountered them there; such as when he went with some of his disciples to Gerasa/Gadara and ran into the man with a legion of demons (Matt 8:28-34; Mark 5:1-20; Luke 8:26-40).

Secondly, Jesus ran into Samaritan outsiders. We see this in John 4:5-38 where Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman at the well. What is so remarkable about Jesus' encounters with the Samaritans is that the Jews and the Samaritans were essentially at war with each other. There was no military fighting going on, but each claimed to be the right religious heirs to the kingdom of God. The Samaritans claimed to be the lost northern kingdom that had been captured by the Assyrians in the 7th century B.C. and had never been seen again. The Jews claimed that was a lie. So the two groups hated each other. Jesus only runs into this group when going through the land of Samaria which is between Jerusalem and Galilee.

The third kind of outsider would be the obvious Jewish outsider. Being in the land of the Jews, Jesus encountered many Jews who were not yet (some did not become) followers of his. If the person Jesus encounters is not specifically called a Samaritan, or somehow identified (by region or occupation) as a Gentile, then it is safe to assume that they are a Jew.

Jesus' encounters with all of these outsiders is remarkable, and as I will discuss in the next series of blogs, the traditional Christian way of communicating to and with outsiders completely counters the way Jesus communicated with them in Scripture. We will see that where Jesus welcomes and accepts, we often exclude and reject. In the next post I will be discussing Luke 7:1-10; 7:11-17; and 17:11-19 if you want to read ahead.