java - Unable to create SparkContext (Unsupported major.minor version 52.0)

I do not have Java 1.8 installed on my machine and somehow I am receiving this error. Other stackoverflow solutions propose to use Java 1.8 to compile the code. I want to understand the reason for the following error.

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: com/typesafe/config/ConfigValue : Unsupported major.minor version 52.0

Here is my code:

pom.xml

  org.apache.spark
  spark-core_2.10
  1.5.1

Scala Code

object SparkWithHbase {
  def main(args: Array[String]) {
    System.out.println("Java Version: " + System.getProperty("java.version"))

    //Initiate spark context with spark master URL. You can modify the URL per your environment.
    val sparkConf = new SparkConf().setAppName("Spark Hbase").setMaster("spark://10.41.50.126:7077")
    val sc = new SparkContext(sparkConf) // Failing at this line
}