Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

priest in the same year.
    With Pilate and Caiaphas gone, there was no longer any hope of stifling the revolutionary
     passions of the Jews. By midcentury the whole of Palestine was buzzing with messianic
     energy. In 44 C.E ., a wonder-working prophet named Theudas crowned himself messiah and brought hundreds
     of followers to the Jordan,promising to part the river just as Moses had done at the Sea of Reeds a thousand
     years earlier. This, he claimed, would be the first step in reclaiming the Promised
     Land from Rome. The Romans, in response, dispatched an army to lop off Theudas’s head
     and scatter his followers into the desert. In 46 C.E ., two sons of Judas the Galilean, Jacob and Simon, launched their own revolutionary
     movement in the footsteps of their father and grandfather; both were crucified for
     their actions.
    What Rome required to keep these messianic stirrings in check was a steady, sensible
     hand, someone who would respond to the grumblings of the Jews while still maintaining
     peace and order in the Judean and Galilean countryside. What Rome sent to Jerusalem
     instead was a series of bumbling governors—each more vicious and greedy than the last—whose
     corruption and ineptitude would transform the anger, resentment, and apocalyptic mania
     that had been steadily building throughout Palestine into a full-scale revolution.
    It started with Ventidius Cumanus, who was stationed in Jerusalem in 48 C.E ., two years after the uprising by Judas’s sons had been quelled. As governor, Cumanus
     was little more than a thief and a fool. Among his first acts was the posting of Roman
     soldiers on the roofs of the Temple’s porticoes, ostensibly to guard against chaos
     and disorder during the feast of Passover. In the midst of the holy celebrations,
     one of these soldiers thought it would be amusing to pull back his garment and display
     his bare ass to the congregation below, all the while shouting what Josephus, in his
     decorum, describes as “such words as you might expect upon such a posture.”
    The crowd was incensed. A riot broke out in the Temple plaza. Rather than calming
     the situation, Cumanus sent a cohort of Roman soldiers up to the Temple Mount to butcher
     the panicked crowd. The pilgrims who escaped the slaughter were trapped by the narrow
     exits leading out of the Temple courtyard. Hundreds were trampled underfoot. Tensions
     escalated further after one of Cumanus’s legionaries grabbed hold of a Torah scroll
     and tore it topieces in front of a Jewish assembly. Cumanus had the soldier hastily executed, but
     it was not enough to quell the growing anger and disaffection among the Jews.
    Things came to a head when a group of Jewish travelers from Galilee were attacked
     while passing through Samaria on their way to Jerusalem. When Cumanus dismissed the
     Jews’ appeal for justice, allegedly because the Samaritans had bribed him, a group
     of bandits, led by a man named Eleazar son of Dinaeus, took justice into their own
     hands and went on a rampage throughout Samaria, killing every Samaritan they came
     across. This was more than an act of bloody vengeance; it was an assertion of freedom
     by a people fed up with allowing law and order to rest in the hands of a crooked and
     fickle administrator from Rome. The outbreak of violence between the Jews and Samaritans
     was the last straw for the emperor. In 52 c.e., Ventidius Cumanus was sent into exile
     and Antonius Felix was shipped off to Jerusalem in his stead.
    As governor, Felix fared no better than his predecessor. Like Cumanus, he treated
     the Jews under his control with utter contempt. He used the power of the purse to
     play the different Jewish factions in Jerusalem against one another, always to his
     benefit. He seemed at first to have enjoyed a close relationship with the high priest
     Jonathan, one of the five sons of Ananus who served in the position. Felix and Jonathan
     worked together to suppress the bandit gangs in the Judean countryside; Jonathan may
     have even played a role in Felix’s capture of the bandit chief Eleazar son of Dinaeus,
     who was sent to Rome and crucified. But once the high priest had served Felix’s purpose,
     he was cast aside. Some say Felix had a hand in what happened next, for it was under
     his governorship that a new kind of bandit arose in Jerusalem: a shadowy group of
     Jewish rebels that the Romans dubbed
Sicarii
, or “Daggermen,” due to their penchant for small,