Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

with which to sow their meager plots
     of land. But even if one considers
tekton
to mean an artisan who deals in any aspect of the building trades, the hundred or
     so impoverished families of a modest and utterly forgettable village such as Nazareth,
     most of whom themselves lived barely above subsistence level, could in no way have
     sustained Jesus’s family. As with most artisans and day laborers, Jesus and his brothers
     would have had to go to bigger towns or cities to ply their trade. Fortunately, Nazareth
     was just a day’s walk from one of the largest and most affluent cities in Galilee—the
     capital city, Sepphoris.
    Sepphoris was a sophisticated urban metropolis, as rich as Nazareth was poor. Whereas
     Nazareth had not a single paved road, the roads in Sepphoris were wide avenues surfaced
     with polished slabs of stone and lined with two-story homes boasting open courtyards
     and private rock-cut cisterns. The Nazareans shared a single public bath. In Sepphoris,
     two separate aqueducts merged in the center of the city, providing ample water to
     the large lavish baths and public latrines that served nearly the entire population
     of some forty thousand inhabitants. There were Roman villas and palatial mansions
     in Sepphoris, some covered in colorful mosaics featuring sprightly nudes hunting fowl,
     garlanded women bearing baskets of fruit, young boys dancing and playing musical instruments.
     A Roman theater in the center of town seated forty-five hundred people, while an intricate
     web of roads and trade routes connected Sepphoris to Judea and the rest of the towns
     of Galilee, making the city a major hub of culture and commerce.
    Although Sepphoris was a predominantly Jewish city, as evidenced by the synagogues
     and ritual bath houses that have been unearthed there, these were a wholly different
     class of Jews than those found in much of Galilee. Rich, cosmopolitan, deeply influenced
     by Greek culture, and surrounded by a panoply of races and religions, the Jews of
     Sepphoris were the product of the Herodian social revolution—the nouveaux riches who
     rose to prominence after Herod’s massacre of the old priestly aristocracy. The city
     itself had been a major landmark for years; after Jerusalem, it is the most frequently
     mentioned city in rabbinic literature. Sepphoris served as the administrative center
     of Galilee throughout the Hasmonaean Dynasty. During the reign of Herod the Great,
     it became a vital military outpost where weapons and war provisions were stored. However,
     it was not until Herod’s son Antipas (“the Fox”) chose it as the royal seat of his
     tetrarchy, probably sometime around the turn of the first century C.E. , that the stalwart city of Sepphoris became known throughout Palestine as “the Ornament
     of Galilee.”
    Like his father, Antipas had a passion for large-scale building projects, and in Sepphoris
     he found a blank slate upon which to design a city in his own image. That is because
     when Antipas arrived at Sepphoris with a cohort of Roman soldiers in tow, the city
     was no longer the central hub of Galilee it had been under his father’s rule. It was
     a still smoldering heap of ash and stone, a victim of Roman retribution for the rebellions
     that had broken out across Palestine in the wake of Herod the Great’s death in 4 B.C.E .
    When Herod died, he left behind far more than a seething populace eager to exact revenge
     on his friends and allies. He also left a mob of jobless poor who had flooded into
     Jerusalem from the rural villages to build his palaces and theaters. Herod’s monumental
     building spree, and especially his Temple expansion project, had employed tens of
     thousands of peasants and day laborers, many of whom had been driven off their land
     by drought or famine or, often enough, the malevolent persistence of the debt collector.
     Butwith the end of the building boom in Jerusalem and the completion of the Temple shortly
     before Herod’s death, these peasants and day laborers suddenly found themselves unemployed
     and cast out of the holy city to fend for themselves. As a result of the mass rustication,
     the countryside once again became a hotbed of revolutionary activity, just as it had
     been before Herod was declared king.
    It was around this time that a new and far more fearsome group of bandits arose in
     Galilee, led by a magnetic teacher and revolutionary known as Judas the Galilean.
     The traditions say that