2000 years ago the Romans crucified a young Jew from Galilee named Jesus,
but who exactly was Jesus?
Remarkable discoveries in science and history...
are today shedding new light on his birth, his life, his death.
And the world of 2000 years ago into which he was born.
New evidence is filling in the missing years in Jesus' life,
and telling us about the turbulent times in which he grew up.
A historian called Josephus is just 1 of 80...
first and second century sources confirming that Jesus existed.
Josephus described Jesus as a wise man who worked surprising deeds,
he also mentioned that Jesus was sentenced to death by crucifixion.
It was Pontius Pilate who sentenced Jesus to the cross and...
archeology has miraculously revealed where he governed from.
Just 60 miles northwest of...
Jerusalem lay one of the most powerful roman enclaves in the world.
In the Time of Jesus they called it Caeseria and...
it was the headquarters of the roman occupation of Judea.
Proof of their awesome presence remains.
2000 years ago this aquaduct brought fresh water from the north,
evidence of the street plan and the remains of buildings has allowed...
archeologists to recreate what Caeseria looked like.
The city was originally built by King Herod and completed in 10 BC,
it then became the headquarters of the Roman Governors, including Pilate.
In the heart of the city was the temple to the Emperor Augustus.
The only other major structure to have survived is the theater,
now restored and used for performances.
But from the air it is still possible to see the foundations of...
a lost harbor that is now covered by the sea.
From his strategic point Pilate ruled first century Judea,
now part of Israel, with an iron rod.
Pilate executed dozens of Jewish rebels,
he wouldn't have thought twice about...
getting rid of a young troublemaker from Galilee.
The crucifixion of Jesus is well-documented by...
several historical sources - crucifixion was very common.
At this biblical museum in Jerusalem,
they have erected a series of what historians think where...
typical roman crosses.
The Romans were inventive people,
they adapted olive trees to crucify their victims and...
they killed hundreds of thousands of people.
According to Joe Zias, an archeologist at the Hebrew University,
the idea that crosses were built from scratch is a myth.
Now this thing would have been in the place of crucifixion permanently,
the individual would have carried the cross bar.
Now this device here, which is called a setekual...
this could or could not be there depending upon how longyou wanted...
that person on the cross, by putting this up on the cross the individual...
can sit on the cross, okay, he is tied to the cross or nailed to the cross,
but what happens is he is sitting up here and...
what this does is simply it prolongs the agony.
The Jewish Historian Josephus confirms that...
Jesus was a real man who lived and died, but he tells us little else.
The full story of Jesus' life comes from the gospels, his mysterious birth,
his remarkable mission, and the events that lead to his death;
but the gospels were written by early Christians at least 40 years after...
Jesus died.
So it is often argued that they are the work of...
converts based only on oral records and...
therefore can't be trusted as reliable historical documents.
But today, breakthroughs in science and archeology are...
making it easier to establish what actually happened.
The biggest break came in 1947 with the discovery of...
ancient Jewish scrolls in caves overlooking the Dead Sea.
Written in the years leading up to the time of Jesus,
the Dead Sea scrolls reveal the tense world that Jesus lived in.
James Charlesworth from Princeton Theological Seminary has...
spent a lifetime deciphering them.
It is a vibrant world in which so many arguments are going on,
we are finding evidence of purity laws, stone vessels,
we are finding arrowheads, spears there are some people living here...
that believe that they were really in a war and that is where Jesus fits in,
it is a life that makes sense because we are understanding the context.
The daily market in Bethlehem, a town 5 miles south of Jerusalem.
Today it has a population of 30,000 Palestinians.
The story that Jesus was born here is mentioned in the Gospels of...
both Matthew and Luke, but they don't always agree on some of the details.
Luke gives us the famous story that when Mary and Joseph arrived in Bethlehem,
exhausted by their long journey from Nazareth, there was no room at the inn.
But in Matthew's gospel the journey isn't even mentioned - maybe there...
was no journey and they were already living in Bethlehem.
Whatever the facts surrounding the journey,
by the 2nd century it was widely believed that...
Jesus was indeed born here in Bethlehem.
This church, the Church of the Nativity,
was built over the spot to mark it forever,
so what evidence is there that this really was Jesus' birthplace?
Extensive excavations have revealed a 1 st century network of caves or grottoes,
directly under the Church of the Nativity.
Right under the main altar there is a grotto that is lavishly decorated and...
is specially revered.
This is the grotto under the church, the tradition is that Jesus was born here,
at the place marked by the star,
and if you reach inside you can feel the rock underneath.
But the most commonly held believe is the Jesus was born in a stable,
however this Christmas card image may be inaccurate...
as near by ancient ruins suggest.
This is Yata a small Palestinian town just 30 miles from Bethlehem,
in the center is an old abandoned village.
Archeologist Joe Zias has established that the houses here...
have much in common with their ancient ancestors.
They maintain the styles of houses going back to 1 st century AD,
and what is remarkable is that many of these houses...
have stones going back to the first century and what we see down here...
is a typical courtyard, typical of the 1 st century, with rooms radiating out,
courtyard shared by one family or sometimes by several families,
again these things functionally make a lot of sense and...
that's the reason that these styles haven't changed for...
hundreds if not thousands of years
The slow pace of change in the Middle East also...
sheds light on the look of ancient Bethlehem itself.
This is Bethlehem as it looked 200 years ago,
because it was painted before the town was modernized.
Archeologists believe it is a useful pointer to the towns size and...
layout in the 1 st century.
Together with the archeological data from Yata it is possible to...
recreate what Bethlehem would have looked like at the time of Jesus.
Villages were built on hilltops to give a sense of security.
Rooftops were used as living spaces during the mild weather.
Most villages only had a few hundred people,
but a town like Bethlehem would have been home to about a thousand.
The houses in Yata also reveal that caves and...
mangers were very much a part of 1 st century domestic life.
We have a room here, which was used during the winter for the animals,
this first of all did 2 things, it kept the house very,
very warm and again in terms of safety it was very good for the animals
Although under 1 roof, people lived apart from the animals,
this manger is located on the 1 st level of the house
Upstairs is this facility here, which was used for people,
during the winter it would have been very comfortable here,
the animals giving heat below.
So, would babies born 2000 years ago have shared house space with the animals?
Remarkably, the evidence can still be found in Palestine,
only 15 miles from Bethlehem.
In a secluded valley is this settlement;
here a small and isolated community of Palestinians and...
their animals eke out a living.
The hills around are dotted with caves,
but the caves aren't just used as stables,
their goats and sheep feed from the manger at one end of the cave,
at the other end are the living quarters, the kitchen and the sleeping area.
It is quite normal for animals and people to share the same living space.
The mystery is why Mary had to lay Jesus in a stone manger down with the animals.
There is a clue in Luke's gospel when he writes that there was no room at the inn,
the original Greek word for 'inn', 'Catalooma' can also mean upper room,
so Jesus may simply have been placed in a manger because...
there was no space in the upper room.
And would Mary and Joseph really have been surrounded by strangers?
Claire Pfann thinks not.
Hello How is it going? Very good, very nice.
Good, ya, that is very beautiful.
She helps run a workshop reviving ancient craft skills,
she is also an expert on the way of life of 1 st century women.
Bringing a baby into the world in the 1 st century was the...
single most dangerous thing that a woman ever faced in her whole life.
Although we often picture them riding on the donkey in the pouring rain on...
December 24th in the darkest night of winter;
and Mary is in labour huddled over and they arrive in Bethlehem and...
Joseph goes from motel to hotel to hospice knocking on every door and...
being turned away.
In fact if we really read the text of Luke chapter 2 we would see that...
that isn't what the story tells us; instead it says that they went to Bethlehem,
which was his ancestral home and that means that...
they probably had relatives there - aunts,
cousins and perhaps mothers and mothers in law - to bring this baby...
into the world.
It is said that the birth of Jesus was heralded by...
a bright star that shone over Bethlehem,
it would guide 3 wise men traveling from the east to the spot...
where the baby they believed was their savior had been born.
The story has often been dismissed as a fairytale,
but now that view is being challenged.
Scientists today can take us back to the skies of 2000 years ago,
and they have discovered something very unusual.
It has not been seen before because people where...
Iooking for astronomical events like comets or exploding stars.
Amazingly a new theory indicates that the star of...
Bethlehem may have been an astrological phenomenon instead.
Now, many people for decades and hundreds of years indeed have said...
that this is not possible - no Jew was interested in astrology...
until the middle ages; low and behold among the Dead Sea Scrolls...
we find 2 horoscopes with astrological signs, with astrological ideas,
so astrology is certainly there in the time of Jesus.
Astrologers would have been hired to foretell the birth and death of kings,
to do this they tracked the movement of the largest planet,
Jupiter, known as the king of planets.
Michael Molnar an astronomer argues that the key place to look,
not just for Jupiter,
but for other signs of special stellar activity was in the sign of Aries.
During the reign of King Herod astrologers believed that...
Aries the Ram symbolized his kingdom,
that is Judea, Sumeria, the lands that he controlled.
The stargazers also knew that there was a prophecy that the Messiah was...
about to come and conquer the world and rid the world of tyranny.
So they were watching very carefully Aries the ram for the advent of the Messiah
In certain rare alignments Jupiter could actually appear as...
an extraordinary star instead of a planet.
Charts for Aries in 1 AD the traditional year that...
Jesus was born reveal nothing unusual,
but Jesus wasn't born in 1 AD.
Our modern calendar was worked out in the 6th century by...
a scholastic monk called Dennis the Little
who simply added the reigns of the kings together,
but historians have since discovered that he miss calculated by half a dozen years,
so Jesus was actually born 6 years earlier than the history books tell us.
And guess what,
when Michael Molnar looked at his charts for the year 6 BC he discovered that...
on April 17 th Jupiter was in Aries.
It would have been a sign that a big royal event was looming.
But there were even more regal portents on that day.
Saturn came into Aries, so did the sun,
then the moon eclipsed and revealed Jupiter,
yet another favorable sign.
The ancients also found meaning in the Dawn,
which they saw as a symbol of birth.
On that day Jupiter emerged as a morning star,
this was the most powerful time to bring about the birth of a king,
these collectively indicated the birth of a super king if you will, the Messiah.
This set of alignments may have escaped modern astronomers,
but it would have most certainly impressed 1 st century astrologers.
Especially if those astrologers were wise men traveling from the east.
East of Judea lay Babylon, the birthplace of astrology and Persia,
where it also flourished.
The wise men who, according to Matthew's gospel carried gifts of gold,
frankincense and myrrh from the east may well...
have been astrologers keen to greet the new king,
with the help of local guides.
Perhaps some of them did set off across the desert to Judea.
There are even clues to the route they may have taken...
if you examine the origin of there gifts.
Today gold, frankincense and Myrrh can all be found in a Jerusalem bazaar.
This is Myrrh, a type of scented oil used in antiquity for anointing kings.
And this is frankincense a bitter tasting gum collected from Arabian trees,
when burnt it gives off an exotic smell.
It was used to purify temples, it is still used in most churches.
But frankincense and Myrrh weren't freely available in the 1 st century,
they would have been extremely hard to find.
Frankincense and Myrrh were not actually grown in the east but...
in the very south of Arabia,
so it would have been a detour for anyone traveling from the east to Judea,
but historical research shows that they could have been bought on route.
Hidden in the southern canyons of modern Jordan are the remains of...
the capital of the old kingdom of the Navatians...
the ancient trading city of Petra,
the Navatian civilization was flourishing 2000 years ago and...
it the one place we know frankincense and Myrrh were traded,
by the time Jesus was born Petra had become...
the major caravan city in the ancient world,
all trade from Arabia had to pass through Petra,
this gave the Navatians a pretty total monopoly on frankincense and Myrrh.
It makes Petra not only the most likely route from...
the east but also a great place for the wise men to do their shopping.
If the birth of Jesus was heralded, even if only by 3 astrologers,
there is no evidence in the gospels that Jesus grew up knowing he was special.
Today babies born in Bethlehem usually...
start live in these modern maternity hospitals,
but the circumstances of Jesus' birth were humble and contentious.
His mother Mary was said to be unmarried at the time of his conception a fact that...
would have attracted as much scorn 2000 years ago as...
it still does in 21 st century Palestine.
Even today traditional Palestinians believe that all babies like this one must be...
conceived in wedlock if their mothers want to avoid severe reprisals.
Nadera Shalhous-Kevorkian is an expert of the status of women in Palestine
A young woman that is pregnant and she is not married;
that means that the family failed to protect her -that means that the man
the male honor has been, actually somebody has hurt his honor and...
it is very shameful for, it brings lots of shame
A woman pregnant before marriage could find herself thrown down a well
The last case of a 17-year-old;
the father knowing that she lost her virginity...
and they took her to 2 doctors and...
both gynecologists told him that she lost her virginity so...
he ended up taking her at night cutting her head,
throwing her head, totally separating the head from the body
In Mary's day honor killings were backed by the law,
which prescribed death by stoning.
She would have been killed, she would have been,
it might have caused a scandal,
the social reaction would have been extremely problematic and...
she would have been accused of bringing shame and dishonor to the family
Perhaps the fact that Mary lived to tell the tale was thanks to Joseph.
The gospels say he kept the news of Mary's pregnancy secret and...
he married her before she gave birth.
And yet when the gospels of Matthew and Luke were written 40 years after...
Jesus' death they claimed that Jesus was born of a virgin and conceived by god.
We do know that there is no scientific evidence to support a virgin birth and...
skeptics claim that the story was made up simply to promote the divinity of...
Jesus with hindsight but even to suggest at the time that...
Mary's conception occurred out of wedlock would have been madness for...
it would have left the fledgling new religion of...
Christianity wide open to ridicule.
Doctor Mark Goodacre,
a biblical scholar from Birmingham University in England has...
found evidence in John's gospel and in Jewish and roman authors from...
the 1 st and 2nd centuries of wide spread anti-Christian slander
Jesus' opponents in John's gospel were basically saying you are born...
not of ordinary human parents but of fornication.
Celsius says that it is all to do with Mary having had...
an illicit union with a roman soldier,
Tatalion says this is your son of a harlot.
In other words virginal conception is not the kind of thing you make up lightly,
it is not the kind of thing that you want to sort of trumpet from the rooftops.
That friend and foe actually agree is strong evidence that...
the gospel writers didn't make up Jesus' conception out of wedlock but...
how that conception happened the historian cannot say.
We didn't have, you know, cameras there,
we didn't have the tape recordings,
we didn't have interviews with the parents,
so the historian can only go so far but I suppose it is the moment...
if you like where faith begins to play a role in history.
One thing is certain though,
it wasn't long before Joseph and Mary took their new baby 100 miles...
away to a new town and a new life and archeology can tell us much about...
the place where he grew up.
To the north of Bethlehem lies Nazareth in Galilee.
All of the gospels agree that Nazareth was the place where Jesus grew up.
Modern Nazareth is now a thriving town of 60,000 people.
It is hard to get a sense of what it was like during the time of Jesus - it has...
few ancient remains so unlike Bethlehem it has never quite managed...
to attract as many pilgrims or tourists.
In the first project of its kind in Israel,
a group of archeologists and local people have got together...
to do something about it
they found a piece of abandoned land in the town and...
began to meticulously recreate a Galilean village as it would have been when...
Jesus was alive.
The village is being reconstructed by studying the remains of...
1 st century villages found across Galilee.
The smallest details have been identified,
the plastered walls, the size of the windows.
The team has also begun working with local people to...
turn the village into a living museum.
Ancient implements and customs described in religious texts provide clues to...
the farming life at the time of Jesus.
By all accounts it was an ordinary rural family life,
it is a little known fact but according to the gospels Jesus had 2 sisters...
whos names are not recorded and 4 brothers named James, Jude, Joseph and Simeon.
Whether the siblings were Mary's children or Joseph's from a previous marriage...
we will never know.
But historians now believe it is possible to tell what kinds of games Jesus and...
his friends or siblings would have played.
Looking through ancient Jewish and Roman sources,
Joshua Schwartz has found that they played with...
wooden toys, with dolls, with pets and with balls.
When I grew up you would throw the ball...
and I would throw the ball back to you and...
you are supposed to catch it and throw the ball back to me,
however in the old days the idea was to keep the ball in motion,
in other words you don't hold it but simply back and forth, back and forth,
back and forth until I drop it and then I lose, right?
And that is one type of game and children would play this,
sometimes even with 2 balls together back...
and forth back and forth back and forth and I drop it at some point and I lose.
In time, this ordinary boy from a rural backwater...
would become a public figure who...
drew huge crowds,
so something must have stirred his determination to right the wrongs...
he saw in his society.
Luke's gospel tells us of an experience that...
might just have started the boy on his fateful journey.
When Jesus was only 12 his parents took him to Jerusalem...
to the annual festival of Passover,
inside the walls of the old city the atmosphere of...
ancient Judea survives but the beating heart of 1 st century Jerusalem,
the Jewish temple, was destroyed long ago.
It was built on a mount where the Dome of The Rock now stands,
all that is left of that Temple Mount are the walls where Jews still gather to pray.
We don't know what Jesus thought of Jerusalem,
little is left of what was said to be...
one of the most beautiful cities in the ancient world.
Hanan Eshel is one of a long line of archeologists...
who have been excavating old Jerusalem since early in the 19th century.
Archeologists have found remains of...
arches, columns, pillars, stairs, cisterns and more.
The works of Josephus and old 1 st century Jewish texts have...
left detailed accounts of the architecture and appearance of the temple,
so archeologists are now confident they can accurately recreate...
what the young Jesus would have seen.
We can see that in the wall just behind me that...
there are some stones that are sticking out.
This is the beginning of an arch that a staircase was built on top of...
this arch in order to lead to the southern part of the Temple Mount.
This is Robinson's Arch, named after the archeologist that...
first identified it in 1839
he matched the Archeological remains with Josephus's descriptions...
to produce the blueprints of a monumental staircase.
Subsequent generations of archeologists have since produced...
blueprints of the whole Temple Mount.
Begun in 20 BC, this was the brainchild of Herod the Great,
a tyrant who ruled Judea on behalf of the Romans.
The brand new temple was the headquarters of the Jewish faith,
it must have been awesome to a young boy.
Little did Jesus know then that one day he would return here...
to challenge everything that both the temple and the Jewish Priests stood for.
Hanan Eshel suspects that Jesus' interest in religion and...
politics may well have been sparked off during this visit.
Somebody like Jesus who grew up in a peasant society...
will come for the first time to the temple and he will see how rich the temple is,
how much work was used here, he will be shocked,
that is something that he assumed would exist...
only in Rome know he sees it in Jerusalem.
But his fascination gave Mary and Joseph a shock too,
according to Luke's gospel.
An incident occurred that may well have been...
his first political experience - Luke's gospel says that when...
they began their journey back to Nazareth Mary and...
Joseph realized that they'd lost Jesus.
Apparently they found him in the temple discussing religion...
with the learned priests.
It is an engaging story but could it really have happened.
These are some of the original steps that lead up to the temple,
evidence from Jewish writing suggests the Rabbis used to gather on these steps...
to help pilgrims enter the temple.
Hanan Eshel believes that Jesus may well have sat down here...
to listen to one of the Rabbis preaching.
There was always conflict between pilgrims who wanted to enter...
and priests and the pabbis would have been here...
in order to make sure that as much people as possible are allowed to...
enter the Temple Mount,
so the story in Luke about Jesus talking with some religious leader...
might have happened here
It is one of the few clues that the gospels give about the education of Jesus
To know as much as he knows you have only 2 options,
god zapped him and told him everything he needed to know...
or he spent a lot of time reading and studying and debating,
the new testament supports only the second one,
where did this man get such knowledge?
He is not spending the whole day out there farming or fishing,
he is studying and thinking and he is discussing with the great minds.
Safely back in Galilee the education of Jesus...
would have continued to include lessons in carpentry so...
he could follow in the footsteps of his father.
Nazareth is never mentioned in ancient histories of the Jews giving...
the impression that Jesus grew up in a small and...
isolated place far removed from the political turmoil...
that was ravaging the country.
But just 4 miles away on a hill was another center of Jewish opulence,
Sepphoris the capital of Galilee.
It is here that Jesus would have come face to face with the ruling class,
it was the northern home of Herod Antipas,
ruler of Galilee and son of Herod the Great.
The historian Josephus described it as the ornament of Galilee.
Today it is a ruin but for the last 20 years teams of...
archeologists have been excavating the site.
With the help of Josephus's descriptions,
archeological information and wonders of modern technology...
we can paint a remarkable picture of Sepphoris at the time of Jesus.
Rising some 400 feet about the plane Sepphoris was...
a large city of about 10,000 people.
There was a culminated main street with shops...
where farmers from neighboring villages came to trade.
When Herod Antipas inherited the kingdom of Galilee from his father...
it is thought that he converted the old arsenal into a fortified palace.
Sepphoris is only about an hour's walk from Nazareth but...
more significantly it was built during the time that Jesus was growing up,
it is almost impossible to believe that Jesus didn't come here with his father,
either to look, to trade or work.
As carpenters they would have been well placed to find work in Sepphoris.
Eric Meyers leads one of the teams digging in Sepphoris,
it has been his passion for over a decade,
he believes that the spectacle of the town would have effected Jesus deeply
Coming and meeting the royal family processing down one of...
these streets must have had an enormous impact on a young man such as...
Jesus would have been when he visited and...
you can imagine what this might mean in England or...
in any other country where royalty exists.
Eric Meyers has also found these baths used by priests for habitual purification,
the priests controlled the access to the temple in Jerusalem and...
one day Jesus would take issue with them
Some of the priestly families who settled here had excessive wealth and...
I think seeing such well to do established families unlike the people...
who were living in the hamlets around and eking out a living...
such as his family would have done and...
this might have left a bad feeling in Jesus' mind
In fact Josephus writes that when Jesus was a child...
there was an uprising against the palace,
the Romans retaliated by burning the city to the ground.
The whole of Galilee was at different times a hotbed of...
religious and political discontent.
The cliffs around the Sea of Galilee are dotted with hundreds of caves...
they were the hideaways of Jewish rebels against the Romans.
They were suitably inaccessible and were often only reacted...
by means of a rope being lowered down from a cliff top.
Rebellion was not new but had not been successful the Jews
had been fighting invading armies for centuries,
all their hopes were pinned on a savior.
They had a special name for the one they longed for,
they called him the anointed one,
in Hebrew - the Messiah
in Greek - the Christ
The Jews are looking more and more for the coming of the great redeemer,
maybe it is God, maybe it will be one of his messengers,
maybe it will be an angel, maybe it will be the Messiah.
Rebellion, power is in the air, Jesus fits into a time that is really a powder keg.
Frustratingly, the gospels tell us little else about Jesus' life until...
he reaches the age of around 30,
and when they do, it is to tell use about the baptism of Jesus...
that could have formed the real turning point in his life;
the gospels say that a man called John...
started baptizing crowds in the river Jordan.
John was offering to cleanse people's sins in readiness...
for the arrival of the long-awaited Messiah.
The gospels say that one day Jesus too was plunged underwater by John.
Proving the existence of the baptismal site has been difficult,
one of the most promising sites was the holy place...
where according to ancient tradition the Hebrews crossed into the Promised Land,
it is between Mt. Nebo where Moses died and Jericho.
6th century church books mention pilgrimages to the baptismal site,
and archeologists hope to find the remains of churches and monasteries,
but excavation on either side of the Jordan has been a problem,
for 50 years the Jordan was a front line on the Arab-lsraeli conflict and...
so it was a no-go area for archeologists,
but after peace was declared in 1994 the Jordanians cleared the landmines...
on their side and started to dig.
After 7 years they found what they where looking for,
the tell tale remains of a pilgrimage site dated to between the...
3rd and 6th centuries AD.
At the last count these included 7 churches,
a monastery and facilities of pilgrims.
And there was one more surprise.
Rami Khouri is a Jordanian historian and...
he has been monitoring the excavations since they began,
he believes that the evidence that clinched it was the discovery of this pool,
for pilgrims to reenact the baptism of Jesus
There are other pools in the monastery that where used clearly...
for storage of water or as wells or as cisterns so you have big pools like this...
that were clearly used for baptism,
mainly the evidence is the long internal staircases...
for people to walk into it for a full immersion baptism.
I would say it was probably the biggest turning point in his life,
Jesus must have had a moving experience when...
he realized 'okay, I've got a task to do' and obviously he thought...
it was a task God wanted him to do
Mysteriously, instead of going public the gospels say that...
Jesus withdraws into the desert where he fasted for 40 days and 40 nights,
in the wilderness it is said that Jesus was tempted by...
the devil with abundant food, immortality and all the riches and glory in the world.
Biblical scholars believe that the temptations symbolize Jesus' dilemma,
he was wrestling with a big decision,
the biggest decision of his life, what kind of Messiah to be,
the temptations, food, wealth, glory, hint that...
Jesus was tempted by the trappings of power
I think that there was a temptation there...
to lead a military or a very powerful political move,
but then he realized what he had seen as a young boy,
the burning of Sepphoris,
he realized that those who live by the sword are going to die by the sword.
Luke says that he would often spend all night in prayer,
Mark says he would get up very early, long, long before dawn...
and go out and meditate in prayer and think,
so we have a human, lets not forget the humanness of Jesus,
I think he is trying to find out 'what am I to do? '
His decision would have fateful consequences,
his words and actions galvanized large crowds...
who saw him as their long awaited savior,
but they would also put Jesus on a collision course with death.