Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

preaching his master’s words and baptizing others alongside him, until Antipas,
     frightened by John’s power and popularity, had him seized and thrown into a dungeon.
     Only then did Jesus leave Judea and return home to his family.
    It would be back in Galilee, among his own people, that Jesus would fully take up
     John’s mantle and begin preaching about the Kingdom of God and the judgment that was
     to come. Yet Jesus would not simply mimic John. Jesus’s message would be far more
     revolutionary, his conception of the Kingdom of God far more radical, and his sense
     of his own identity and mission far more dangerous than anything John the Baptist
     could have conceived. John may have baptized by water. But Jesus would baptize by
     the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit and
fire
.

Chapter Eight
Follow Me
    The Galilee to which Jesus returned after his stint with John the Baptist was not
     the Galilee into which he had been born. The Galilee of Jesus’s childhood had undergone
     a profound psychic trauma, having felt the full force of Rome’s retribution for the
     revolts that erupted throughout the land after the death of Herod the Great in 4 B.C.E .
    The Roman response to rebellion, no matter where it arose in the realm, was scripted
     and predictable: burn the villages, raze the cities, enslave the population. That
     was likely the command given to the legions of troops dispatched by Emperor Augustus
     after Herod’s death to teach the rebellious Jews a lesson. The Romans easily snuffed
     out the uprisings in Judea and Peraea. But special attention was given to Galilee,
     the center of the revolt. Thousands were killed as the countryside was set ablaze.
     The devastation spread to every town and village; few were spared. The villages of
     Emmaus and Sampho were laid waste. Sepphoris, which had allowed Judas the Galilean
     to breach the city’s armory, was flattened. The whole of Galilee was consumed in fire
     and blood. Even tiny Nazareth would not have escaped the wrath of Rome.
    Rome may have been right to focus so brutally on Galilee. Theregion had been a hotbed of revolutionary activity for centuries. Long before the
     Roman invasion, the term “Galilean” had become synonymous with “rebel.” Josephus speaks
     of the people of Galilee as “inured to war from their infancy,” and Galilee itself,
     which benefited from a rugged topography and mountainous terrain, he describes as
     “always resistant to hostile invasion.”
    It did not matter whether the invaders were gentiles or Jews, the Galileans would
     not submit to foreign rule. Not even King Solomon could tame Galilee; the region and
     its people fiercely resisted the heavy taxes and forced labor he imposed on them to
     complete construction of the first Temple in Jerusalem. Nor could the Hasmonaeans—the
     priest-kings who ruled the land from 140 B.C.E . until the Roman invasion in 63 B.C.E .—ever quite manage to induce the Galileans to submit to the Temple-state they created
     in Judea. And Galilee was a constant thorn in the side of King Herod, who was not
     named King of the Jews until after he proved he could rid the troublesome region of
     the bandit menace.
    The Galileans seem to have considered themselves a wholly different people from the
     rest of the Jews in Palestine. Josephus explicitly refers to the people of Galilee
     as a separate
ethnoi
, or nation; the Mishnah claims the Galileans had different rules and customs than
     the Judeans when it came to matters such as marriage or weights and measures. These
     were pastoral people—country folk—easily recognizable by their provincial customs
     and their distinctly rustic accent (it was his Galilean accent that gave Simon Peter
     away as a follower of Jesus after his arrest: “Certainly you are also one of [Jesus’s
     disciples], for your accent betrays you”; Matthew 26:73). The urban elite in Judea
     referred to the Galileans derisively as “the people of the land,” a term meant to
     convey their dependence on subsistence farming. But the term had a more sinister connotation,
     meaning those who are uneducated and impious, those who do not properly abide by the
     law, particularly when it came to making the obligatory tithes and offerings to the
     Temple. The literature of the era is full of Judean complaints about thelaxity of the Galileans in paying their Temple dues in a timely manner, while a bevy
     of apocryphal scriptures, such as
The Testament of Levi
and