Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

in a big city.
    Six days a week, from sunup to sundown, Jesus would have toiled in the royal city,
     building palatial houses for the Jewish aristocracy during the day, returning to his
     crumbling mud-brick home at night. He would have witnessed for himself the rapidly
     expanding divide between the absurdly rich and the indebted poor. He would have mingled
     with the city’s Hellenized and Romanized population: those wealthy, wayward Jews who
     spent as much time praising the emperor of Rome as they did the Lord of the Universe.
     He certainly would have been familiar with the exploits of Judas the Galilean. For
     while the population of Sepphoris seems to have been tamed and transformed after Judas’s
     rebellion into the model of Roman cooperation—so much so that in 66 C.E. , as most of Galilee was joining the revolt against Rome, Sepphoris immediately declared
     its loyalty to the emperor and became a Roman garrison during the battle to reclaim
     Jerusalem—the memory of Judas the Galilean and what he accomplished did not fade in
     Sepphoris: not for the drudge and the dispossessed; not for those, like Jesus, who
     spent their days slogging bricks to build yet another mansion for yet another Jewish
     nobleman. And no doubt Jesus would have been aware of the escapades of Herod Antipas—“thatFox,” as Jesus calls him (Luke 13:31)—who lived in Sepphoris until around 20 C.E ., when he moved to Tiberias, on the coast of the Sea of Galilee. Indeed, Jesus may
     have regularly set eyes upon the man who would one day cut off the head of his friend
     and mentor, John the Baptist, and seek to do the same to him.

Chapter Five
Where Is Your Fleet to Sweep the Roman Seas?
    Prefect Pontius Pilate arrived in Jerusalem in the year 26 C.E . He was the fifth prefect, or governor, Rome had sent to oversee the occupation of
     Judea. After the death of Herod the Great and the dismissal of his son Archelaus as
     ethnarch in Jerusalem, Rome decided it would be best to govern the province directly,
     rather than through yet another Jewish client-king.
    The Pontii were Samnites, descended from the mountainous domain of Samnium in southern
     Rome, a hard country of stone and blood and brutal men that had been broken and forcibly
     absorbed into the Roman Empire in the third century B.C.E . The surname Pilatus meant “skilled with a javelin,” a tribute perhaps to Pilate’s
     father, whose glory as a Roman soldier under Julius Caesar had allowed the Pontii
     to advance from their humble origins into the Roman knightly class. Pilate, like all
     Roman knights, performed his expected military service to the empire. But he was not
     a soldier like his father; he was an administrator, more comfortable with accounts
     and tallies than with swords and spears. Yet Pilate was no less hard a man. The sources
     describe him as cruel, coldhearted,and rigid: a proudly imperious Roman with little regard for the sensitivities of subject
     peoples.
    Pilate’s disdain for the Jews was obvious from the very first day he arrived in Jerusalem,
     bedecked in a white tunic and golden breastplate, a red cape draped over his shoulders.
     The new governor announced his presence in the holy city by marching through Jerusalem’s
     gates trailed by a legion of Roman soldiers carrying standards bearing the emperor’s
     image—an ostentatious display of contempt for Jewish sensibilities. Later, he introduced
     a set of gilded Roman shields dedicated to Tiberius, “son of the divine Augustus,”
     into the Temple of Jerusalem. The shields were an offering on behalf of the Roman
     gods, their presence in the Jewish Temple a deliberate act of blasphemy. Informed
     by his engineers that Jerusalem needed to rebuild its aging aqueducts, Pilate simply
     took the money to pay for the project from the Temple’s treasury. When the Jews protested,
     Pilate sent his troops to slaughter them in the streets.
    The gospels present Pilate as a righteous yet weak-willed man so overcome with doubt
     about putting Jesus of Nazareth to death that he does everything in his power to save
     his life, finally washing his hands of the entire episode when the Jews demand his
     blood. That is pure fiction. What Pilate was best known for was his extreme depravity,
     his total disregard for Jewish law and tradition, and his barely concealed aversion
     to the Jewish nation as a whole. During his tenure in Jerusalem he so eagerly, and
     without trial, sent thousands upon