Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

homes, kidnapping
     their families, and sowing fear in the hearts of the Jews. The messianic fervor in
     Jerusalem was at a boil. One by one, claimants to the mantle of the messiah had arisen
     to liberate the Jews from the yoke of Roman occupation. Theudas the wonder worker
     had already been cut down by Rome for his messianic aspirations. The rebellious sons
     of Judas the Galilean, Jacob and Simon, had been crucified. The bandit chief Eleazar
     son of Dinaeus, who had been ravaging the countryside, slaughtering Samaritans in
     the name of the God of Israel, had been captured and beheaded by the Roman prefect
     Felix. And then the Egyptian had suddenly appeared on the Mount of Olives, vowing
     to bring the walls of Jerusalem tumbling down at his command.
    For James and the apostles in Jerusalem, the turmoil could mean only one thing: the
     end was near; Jesus was about to return. The Kingdom of God they had assumed Jesus
     would build while he was alive would now finally be established—all the more reason
     to ensure that those espousing deviant teachings in Jesus’s name were brought back
     into the fold.
    In that light, Paul’s arrest in Jerusalem may have been unexpected, but considering
     the apocalyptic expectations in Jerusalem, it was neither ill timed nor unwelcomed.
     If Jesus were about to return, it would be no bad thing to have Paul waiting for him
     in a prison cell, where, at the very least, he and his perverse views could be contained
     until Jesus could judge them himself. But because thearresting soldiers assumed Paul was the Egyptian, they sent him at once to be judged
     by the Roman governor, Felix, who happened at the time to be in the coastal town of
     Caesarea dealing with a conflict that had erupted between the city’s Jews and its
     Syrian and Greek inhabitants. Although Felix ultimately cleared Paul of the Egyptian’s
     crimes, he nevertheless threw him in a Caesarean prison, where he languished until
     Festus replaced Felix as governor and promptly transferred Paul to Rome at his behest.
    Festus allowed Paul to go to Rome because Paul claimed to be a Roman citizen. Paul
     was born in Tarsus, a city whose inhabitants had been granted Roman citizenship by
     Mark Antony a century earlier. As a citizen, Paul had the right to demand a Roman
     trial, and Festus, who would serve as governor for an extremely brief and tumultuous
     period in Jerusalem, seemed happy to grant him one, if for no other reason than to
     simply be rid of him.
    There may have been a more urgent reason for Paul to want to go to Rome. After the
     embarrassing spectacle at the Temple, in which he was forced to renounce everything
     he had been preaching for years, Paul wanted to get as far as he could from Jerusalem
     and the ever-tightening noose of control placed around his neck by James and the apostles.
     Besides, Rome seemed the perfect place for Paul. This was the Imperial City, the seat
     of the Roman Empire. Surely the Hellenistic Jews who had chosen to make Caesar’s home
     their own would be receptive to Paul’s unorthodox teachings about Jesus Christ. Rome
     already had a small but growing contingent of Christians who lived alongside a fairly
     sizable Jewish population. A decade before Paul’s arrival, conflicts between the two
     communities had led the emperor Claudius to expel both groups from the city. By the
     time Paul arrived some time in the early sixties, however, both populations were once
     again flourishing. The city seemed ripe for Paul’s message.
    Although Paul was officially under house arrest in Rome, it appears he was able to
     continue his preaching without much interference from the authorities. Yet by all
     accounts, Paul had littlesuccess in converting Rome’s Jews to his side. The Jewish population was not just
     unreceptive to his unique interpretation of the messiah, they were openly hostile
     to it. Even the gentile converts did not appear overly welcoming toward Paul. That
     may be because Paul was not the only “apostle” preaching Jesus in the imperial city.
     Peter, the first of the Twelve, was also in Rome.
    Peter had come to Rome a few years before Paul and likely at James’s command to help
     establish an enduring community of Greek-speaking Jewish believers in the heart of
     the Roman Empire, a community that would be under the influence of the Jerusalem assembly
     and taught in accordance with the Jerusalem doctrine: in short, an anti-Pauline community.
     It is