When Jesus was in his early 30s he was baptized by John.
This simple act seems to have convinced him that he was the long-awaited Messiah,
he was now a man with a mission;
a mission that proved to be hugely popular with ordinary people.
Though they said he consorted with thieves,
prostitutes and tax collectors he also claimed to heal the sick and the infirm.
Now archeology and history are giving us a truer than ever picture of how and...
where he lived and why he was seen as a threat to the establishment.
Jerusalem, today home to Jews and Palestinians,
the religious and political tensions are never far from the surface.
This is the Wailing Wall,
it is where Jews come to pray, many come to pray for freedom,
the freedom to live in a land they can call their own.
Historians now realize that 2000 years ago that...
the Jews here also dreamt of freedom
In the time of Jesus they are losing the land,
they are losing it not only to the might of Rome but...
they are losing it by taxation from the Caesars who are demanding more and more,
so you have an oppressed people you have a people who are losing hope,
you have people who are turning more and more...
to believing that god must soon do something.
The Dead Sea scrolls,
written in the second century BC reveal exactly what the Jews believed,
that sooner or later God would send a messiah, a savior.
By the time of Jesus,
Jewish hopes had reached fever pitch
Religion is in the air like at a big football game,
you know like in London or in Manchester,
the frenzy that is going on, that is Jerusalem,
but frenzy is not about football, it is about God,
and God maybe coming soon,
maybe this Messiah is here in our midst, how would we know?
Jesus wasn't the first would-be messiah,
over the centuries the Jews had seen several come and go,
but earlier messiahs had led armed uprisings,
Jesus wasn't a military leader and he didn't have any troops,
the facts show that after spending 40 days and...
nights alone in the wilderness Jesus returned to Galilee with...
a very different plan, which in it's own way was much more revolutionary.
Just 20 miles east of Nazareth in the great lake known as...
the sea of Galilee Jesus picked his team, the disciples.
Instead of recruiting the obvious candidates,
such as hardened revolutionaries Jesus picked an unlikely bunch of characters.
His first recruit and right hand man was a fisherman,
his name was Simon Peter.
Thanks to a startling discovery here on the shores of the lake...
we can now tell what kind of people fishermen like Peter were.
In 1985 a severe drought caused the lake to drop to unprecedented levels,
revealing an ancient and extraordinary find.
Buried next to some 2000 year old pottery,
archeologists made one of the great discoveries of modern times,
an ancient fishing boat.
It was a delicate salvage operation,
each piece of timber was identified with red tape,
then a special foam kept the boat intact and...
allowed archeologists to prise it away from the mud.
Orna Cohen, the leader of the excavation,
was astonished that it was so well preserved
Well that is one of the miracles we've got with this boat,
this boat was only preserved because very soon at the time...
it sank it filled up with silt clay like from a river...
near by this locked it in very limited oxygen condition and...
slowed down all the bacterial activity,
that's why it has been preserved so well.
While the boat was slowly drying out in a chemical solution radio carbon tests...
were carried out to determine to age of the wood,
it was dated between 40 BC and 40 AD.
These dates covered the years when Jesus lived.
The boat was made of assorted second hand timber and iron nails,
nicknamed 'the Jesus boat',
the relic is now proudly displayed in a museum in Galilee,
but could it really have belonged to one of the disciples?
lts size certainly seems to match the kind of boat Peter is thought to have used,
John's gospel mentions that Peter's boat could carry at least 7 disciples,
this boat is 26 feet long, big enough to carry that number.
This is a replica of that 1 st century boat.
It looks like the kind of boat a humble fisherman could afford but...
in ancient Galilee wood was rare and a boat like this was a luxury.
Orna Cohen believes Peter wasn't a man of humble means.
I can only assume knowing the conditions of that period was considered quite...
an investment whoever owned such a boat was very relatively a well-to-do person,
considered rich.
Jesus also enlisted Peter's brother Andrew
and 2 more fishermen, James and John.
But Jesus' bizarre recruitment drive didn't stop there,
he also approached Matthew,
a Jewish man employed to collect taxes from the Jews.
And then there was Judas, the group's treasurer and...
the disciple who was to play a key role in the final week of Jesus' life.
Jesus underlined his unusual approach by breaking with the tactics...
used by previous would-be messiahs.
Earlier revolutionaries hid in caves or lived on the run...
instead the gospels say Jesus and...
the disciples lived openly in a fishing town called Capernaum.
Just 5 miles from where the 1 st century boat was found on the northern shores...
of the Sea of Galilee,
archeologists have identified the remains of ancient Capernaum,
it has become a shire for Pilgrims,
a chance for them to recall many of the gospel stories set in Capernaum.
Archeologists also believe they may have identified...
the house of one of the disciples.
The tradition in the Middle East has always been to preserve holy sites...
linked to Jesus by building churches on top of them.
When they started digging here 100 years ago...
they unearthed a series of old churches build around a first century house,
in keeping with this tradition a modern church has recently been build...
over the ruins of the house,
but the new church has proved highly controversial - it obscures the ruins and...
critics have likened its design to a flying saucer.
But its supporters argue that at least this time the ruins have been kept intact,
they can just be glimpsed through a glass floor,
the church has also been suspended on pillars allowing visitors...
another partial sight of the ruins.
Mordechai Aviam is one of the leading archeologists in Galilee;
he and many of his colleagues are convinced they know...
which disciple that house belonged to,
on one of the plastered walls of the house they found graffiti,
some as early as the 3rd century AD
Some of the graffiti, although they are not complete ones,
carry the name of Simon or the Hebrew name 'Shimon' and...
this is Saint Peter's Hebrew name and so we can assume...
that people who came here knew that this is the house of Saint Peter,
in a rural area,
in a village like this one families are living for hundreds of years...
in the same house so when pilgrims came here probably...
in the end of the 2nd or beginning of the 3rd century and...
asked natives 'do you know where guy named...
Shimon, Simon, Saint Peter lived? ' they say 'oh yes of course this building,
you see this building?
His grand, grand, grand children are living there'
It is hard for us now to visualize Peter's house,
or indeed Capernaum,
but archeologists believe they now have enough information to...
recreate what the town was like.
The size of the excavated area suggests that Capernaum was a town...
of 15,000 people.
No evidence has yet come to light of where Jesus lived,
but what archeologists can tell from the foundations is that Peter's house would...
have been one of several overlooking a common courtyard,
so perhaps Jesus and Peter were neighbors.
Around the courtyard people would have continued with...
their daily tasks such as baking bread, or carpentry.
Houses were simple,
they were large because those are families that lived together,
the elders and their sons and daughters and their wives and husbands and...
their children all lived in one large building as it is nowadays in villages,
in Arab villages or in other villages in other places in the world.
Women were thought inferior to men at the time,
yet the gospels say that Jesus included Mary Magdalene and...
at least 5 other women among his close followers
He is the only teacher we know of from antiquity who...
includes women into his group.
John talks about him talking with a Samaritan woman and...
good gracious alive are the disciples depressed by this,
what is the matter with this man?
So he is even different than his followers
Jesus never married nor had any children, his disciples were his immediate family,
they weren't exactly going to bring the Roman army to its knees,
but the number of disciples he picked is a clue that...
Jesus wasn't targeting the Romans.
The number 12 was no accident it harked back...
to the 12 tribes who originally founded Israel.
People at the time would have understood the symbolism,
scholars believe Jesus was calling for a fresh start,
he wanted Israel to go back to the ideals of its founding fathers
In that world,
the Jews of the first century - who are just as hungry for justice...
as people today are - believed passionately that the god of...
the all world was the god of justice,
therefore if this god finally did what he promised they would get justice...
and peace and mercy, that was what Jesus was basically offering them
That put Jesus on a collision course, not with the Romans,
but with the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem.
The power base of Jewish society and...
headquarters of the Jewish faith was the temple,
Jesus had first seen the fabulous gold and marble building...
when he came to Jerusalem at the age of 12.
The temple was run by a caste of Jewish priests,
these are the people with whom Jesus takes issue with.
Several ancient texts vividly describe their duties,
every day at dawn and at dusk they drew lots to make their sacrifice of...
pure white lambs to god.
The sacrificial blood was then taken into the sanctuary and...
sprinkled in front of a large curtain,
the Jews believed the invisible presence of god lived behind it.
Every rite from the sacrifice to the burning of incenses was designed to...
keep the sanctuary pure,
but according to the gospels Jesus believed the temple no longer...
was a holy place, but a den of iniquity and corruption.
The temple is not only the place of worship,
it is the Jewish treasury, the Jewish bank,
it is the Jewish base for authority and of course when...
you have authority you have the problem of abuse of authority
Jesus was to become a fierce critic of the temple system but he wasn't alone.
Hanan Eshel a Hebrew archeologist has found...
in the Dead Sea scrolls evidence of wide spread discontent,
the scrolls were the work of a Jewish sect called the Ascenes,
they had walked out of Jerusalem in protest of the power...
of the temple priests and set up a rival community in...
Qumran 20 miles away on the shores of the Dead Sea.
If you needed incense for the altar,
they wouldn't tell it to anyone else that would be bought from their family and...
the people from Qumran would criticize the priests for keeps those secrets and...
taking as much money from the temple budget as possible
It wasn't until archeologists dug up the streets of Jerusalem that...
they found out how the priests spent their money.
In 1967 archeologist excavated incriminating evidence it...
what is now the Jewish quarter of the city.
It revealed the lavish lifestyle enjoyed by the high priests.
The area has now been redeveloped with blocks of apartments,
but archeologists had 14 years in which to excavate the area what...
they found has been preserved under these buildings.
The remains of a large first century house it had been decorated and...
furnished in the finest styles of the period,
without doubt one of the wealthiest households in Jerusalem.
It was close by to the temple so it could have belonged to one of the high priests...
but there was no direct proof.
Then archeologists found this, a ritual bath,
it was used for daily purification.
The Jews believed that contact with a corpse,
a dead animal or with bodily fluids such as blood made them ritually unclean.
Jesus himself would have had regular ritual bathes,
like most Jews he would have used public facilities,
every town had one.
A few could afford their own private ritual bathroom,
but this palatial house had several,
that could only mean that it must have belonged to one of the top priests,
to make sure that they never mingled with common people...
the priests even had a private bridge linking their mansions to the temple,
the rest of the people, including Jesus, walked beneath them,
but that was only half of the story,
there is also evidence that the priests were manipulating Jewish purity laws...
in order to keep undesirables down.
Before Jews could enter the temple they had to purify themselves.
Ronny Reich is one of the leading archeologists excavating around...
the Temple Mount, he had come to the conclusion that in the time...
of Jesus the concern with purity had become an obsession.
He found that the walls of the original baths would have been carefully plastered,
today only the bare rock and stone walls remain,
this ritual bath is just one of more than 100 Ronny Reich...
has found around the Temple Mount perimeter,
and it wasn't just body and soul that needed purifying.
If Jesus or a pilgrim was down in Jerusalem they may well have had to...
use this large bath for their household vessels and utensils and...
even for their beds and mattresses.
It was considered in those days like almost mania,
lets imagine that the people who gathered here...
during the festivals came on a pilgrimage,
lived here in tents, what would have happened if one bed became impure?
Lets say a menstrual woman touched it, it is impure.
Somebody coming back from the cemetery and touched it,
then they had to purify that particular mattress,
this could have been done here.
But no matter how many ritual baths they took Jewish law...
stopped some people from going into the temple, the Mishnah,
a book listing rules and regulations at the time says...
that among others the lame, the blind, the sick,
the deformed were all excluded.
Above all they were the people whom Jesus wanted to reach,
that made him popular and dangerous.
The mystery was how Jesus was going to break down those barriers,
the gospels claim that Jesus went traveling around Galilee and...
Judea curing the incurable.
Not the call to arms many expected from a messiah,
but it was just as radical,
for Jesus was going to reach out to the very people...
who were shunned by the temple priests and...
the first on his list were the sick and the infirmed.
The Gospel of John tells the story of a pool of...
spring water in a place called Bethesda in Jerusalem.
The sick would gather here in the hope of a cure occasional the waters...
would stir the sick believed that it was a sign that...
the pool had miraculous powers and they all rushed to bathe in it,
but a paralyzed man could never get to the water in time,
when Jesus saw him he said get up, pick up your mat and walk.
When the paralyzed man was asked who had healed him he replied he had no idea.
Amazing though the stories of Jesus' healings are...
they have mystified those trying to make sense Jesus' mission.
Did Jesus really have a gift for healing?
And how could this possibly help his cause?
There is a clue here in Hamat Gadeer, an ancient spa in Galilee.
Archeologist Joe Zias says that baths are prove...
for the huge demand for healing in antiquity
You have to realize that health and sickness is something...
which everyone was concerned about.
I think even more so back then life was difficult,
50% of the people died before the age of 18,
most people died by the time they were in their 30s,
people would come here to bathe in the springs for many different reasons,
everything from leprosy to arthritis.
The sick and the infirm were a sizable group of outcasts...
that's why Jesus was targeting them
and it is now known that the setting for the story...
of the paralyzed man really existed.
Although there are no pools in Jerusalem called Bethesda today,
archeologists knew where to look thanks to John's gospel which says that...
Bethesda was right outside that Sheep gate.
The Sheep gate was to the north of the city and north of the old city...
today is a major archeological site with ruins dating back to the time of Jesus,
In the 1960s archeologists discovered a 1 st century temple, Asclepius,
the Roman god of healing, they also found a series of small rock pools.
Jerry Murphy O'Connor took part in those early excavations and...
he is in no doubt that this is the setting for the story of...
the paralyzed man.
Well the location that Saint John gives in chapter 5 of the gospel is that...
it was outside the Sheep gate and the sheep gate in the north wall...
of the temple was just about 50 meters south of here.
In front of the sheep gate the Romans had built 2 large pools,
these were typical Roman baths where ordinary citizens could come and bathe,
that was in the daytime, the sick would come out at night,
but they headed for a place behind the twin pools to where the Romans...
had also built a small temple to the healing god Asclepius.
And beneath it would have been a whole series of little baths like this,
that is essential to the Asclepius cult.
And that is exactly where you'd expect sick people to congregate.
That is the context of the miracle story.
While archeology can authenticate the setting of...
the healings it can't prove whether Jesus could actually heal.
But it is certain that many people believed that he could.
Wandering healers were a common site in ancient Israel.
12 miles north of Nazareth in the Palestinian town of...
Aruba is the tomb of another Galilean healer.
Hanina Ben Dosa was a near contemporary of Jesus,
his tomb is still revered for like Jesus
people believed that he could heal the sick.
Rabbis wrote that families with sick children sought his help...
Hanina's story shows that there where exceptional men around...
who were believed to have to gift of healing,
but in one key respect Jesus was different.
Jesus was executed.
The only explanation is that he was seen as a threat,
historians now believe that unlike Hanina Ben Dosa,
Jesus used his gift of healing to defy the temple system.
On one occasion, after curing a leper,
Jesus says to him to 'go to the temple priests and...
make the offerings set by the law'.
Jesus brought these people back into society,
and not only did he bring them back into society but...
he challenged the religious notions at that time,
people who had the disease who were cured of...
leprosy Jesus told them to go up to the Temple Mount,
something which these people were totally excluded from,
it is this unfortunate attitude in antiquity toward people...
that had any type of illnesses, was that you deserved it,
the wages of sin is death, if you got sick you deserved it
Anybody who can heal in a world without modern medicine is...
bound to draw large crowds and this many account for Jesus' popularity in Galilee.
But however subversive the healings were hardily grounds to have him killed,
something more must have upset the Jewish establishment.
These are the ruins of Jerash in Jordan a roman city built in the 1 st century AD...
it was built with taxes collected in occupied provinces such as Judea,
the tax burden under Roman administration was in fact crippling,
the money was brought in by Jewish tax collectors,
according to historians in the time of Jesus the tax man was especially despised.
In any society and it is so today,
people who go around collecting taxes get a bad press,
and we all know that we've got to pay tax and we don't like the people...
who come and do it,
just pick we don't like parking attendants and that sort of thing...
because we feel that they are an intrusion on our liberty,
however that was compounded by the fact that the taxes...
were being collected for Rome and the ordinary Jewish people resented that...
because they were rich and powerful and they thought...
why should we pay more money to them, they've already got a lot.
But tax collectors not only did the Roman's dirty work,
they made matters worse by keeping a cut for themselves,
in the eyes of many people,
not least the religious authorities this made them sinners and outcasts.
But Jesus welcomed these sinners, Matthew for example,
one of his disciples was a tax collector,
in fact the gospels say that Jesus shared meals and...
feasts with all manners of sinners some times these included prostitutes,
they too were despised as sinners by the priests...
because like tax collectors they many have been...
in contact with an impure race, the Romans.
The Romans were gentiles they hadn't been circumcised like Jews
A good Jew is not to be seen with a harlot, he is accompanying her,
she is with him and of course you can imagine the rumors,
he goes to the people that are marginalized,
not only the tax collectors but also the people who aren't considered important.
Only the temple priests acting on behalf of god could forgive sinners but...
Jesus shocked everyone by taking matters into his own hands.
On one occasion when Jesus is...
invited to dinner a distraught prostitute comes into the house.
As the woman wept her tears fell on Jesus' feet,
she then wiped the tears away with her hair,
covered his feet with kisses and rubbed them with ointment,
when she was finished Jesus said to her your sins are forgiven
Jesus is upstaging the temple,
we can get a handle on what this means if you imagine the sort official things...
that go on in our society, if you want to get a new passport...
or a driving license you have to go to the issuing authority to get that,
what we find Jesus doing is out there on the street offering to...
issue somebody a new passport and this is offensive because...
he is bypassing the system and thereby presuming to speak for god.
The gospels say that the priests were outraged,
by Jesus replied that he was simply following the Jewish law,
which said that you should love your neighbor as you love yourself.
Jesus' actions must have rattled the temple priesthood
Anyone in that world, which is so volatile and politically unstable,
anyone who calls together large crowds is bound to be regarded as a threat,
when they then on top of that see what he is doing and...
how this is somehow functioning as an overturning of...
the social world and the normal structures that they are used to and...
Jesus must have been regarded as a dangerous character.
But Jesus didn't stop there he also told stories...
with a deeply unsettling message and not just for the priests.
One of the best-known stories told by Jesus is the parable of the Good Samaritan,
there was once a Jewish man, he began,
a traveler who was attacked by a thief and left for dead on the road,
one priest saw him and passed him by,
then a Levite came his way and also left him,
but a passing Samaritan had compassion,
he bound up his wounds and took him to an inn,
he even left some money with the innkeeper to look after the injured man,
most people think the parable was all about helping strangers in need,
but in the 1 st century it would have carried a deeply unsettling message...
for the Samaritans weren't strangers but neighbors, they still are.
The descendants of the Samaritans live in Samaria between Jerusalem and Galilee.
This is their annual Passover festival where they sacrifice lambs,
which are then cooked in special pits.
The Samaritans and the Jews worship the same god and celebrate the same rituals,
but long before the time of Jesus there was a major split...
and Jews and Samaritans became enemies,
this was the real meaning of the parable,
loving your neighbor also meant loving your enemy
Jesus was trying to break down barriers that separated people,
all these tremendous barriers, Jesus is a barrier breaker now...
when you attack a barrier you run it to the problem...
of being destroyed by it's collapse
It was one thing to tell subversive stories from Galilee,
but sooner or later Jesus would have to decide whether to...
confront the priests in person.
This is the mount of the Beatitudes over looking the Sea of Galilee,
it is the spot where the church says Jesus delivered the sermon on the mount,
his most detailed vision on how he would usher in the new age.
Although it is right next to Capernaum archeologists can't be sure that...
this was the right mount
Well if there was a sermon on the mount it might well...
have been somewhere in this area but actually we don't know either of...
those things, because for a start Jesus could have come up not just this hill...
which is quite a small one,
but any of the hills behind where we are or over the other side of the lake...
and the chances are he said the same sorts of things again and again and again,
they didn't have mass media, radio, TV,
didn't have any of that so what Jesus had to do was to say...
the same things repeatedly so that different people would get the message,
now it is quite likely that was we have in Matthew's gospel...
which we call the sermon on the mount is an undoubtedly edited...
and shaped version of some of the sayings that...
Jesus would have said on that sort of occasion
One of the most memorable things that Jesus said was the Lord's Prayer,
some of it's lines, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,
summed up the themes that Jesus was pursuing.
The Lord's Prayer is still recited by...
millions all over the world in dozens of languages,
remarkably it can still be heard in the language which Jesus spoke.
This little church is in the old city of Jerusalem,
when Jesus spoke to his friends or to his disciples he would have used Aramaic,
they don't speak it in Galilee anymore,
in fact like so many ancient languages it has disappeared, well almost.
Aramaic is still spoken in remote parts of...
Syria and this is a Syrian orthodox church.
This is the closed we are ever likely to get to hearing the sound of Jesus,
the sound of the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic.
It may have been a memorable prayer but...
prayer alone wasn't going to get Jesus very far,
so he tackled the question that was on everyone's mind,
the use of violence.
Jesus was uncompromising,
if anyone hits you on the right cheek he said offer him the other as well.
Often in the Sermon on the Mount we come upon saying that...
puzzle us initially because it sounds as if Jesus is saying just be a doormat and...
let people walk all over you, turning the other cheek is one example,
but that is not what is it all about
According to Tom Wright Jesus was using the expression...
as a metaphor for pacifist or non-violent resistance
If I give someone a blow on the right cheek it will be with the back...
of my right hand and may scholars have suggested that that is a demeaning,
dismissive sort of thing to do which is what you'd do to a slave or child or,
alas in that culture, a woman.
So that to say okay now hit the other cheek is a way of saying hit me again...
if you want but this time do it so that we are equals...
it is a way of reaffirming ones own dignity often...
with a kind of rye humor at the expense of the bully who is putting you down
His disciples and close followers would have been in no doubt what that meant,
Jesus was ruling out the path of violence taken by previous messiahs
Jesus is saying if you fight evil with evil it is always evil that wins,
and somehow a different way of conquering evil has to be found
No leader, no prophet in Jewish history had spoken in such terms.
For a year,
maybe 3 Jesus traveled around the country preaching his radical message.
He caused further outrage by taking his message to gentiles.
On one occasion in his adopted town of...
Capernaum a centurion asked him to heal his servant who was severely ill,
this was a big test, the messiah was only supposed to come and save the Jews,
but once again Jesus overturned the expectations and healed the servant
For Jesus to go to the house of a gentile or to do something in relation to...
a gentile would have been like Jesus going to eat with a sinner or whoever,
it would be a sign that he was breaking through normal barriers.
But if that was all it took to right the wrongs he saw in Jewish society then...
Jesus could have stayed here in Galilee healing the sick and telling parables.
Instead the gospels say that Jesus decides to make a stand once for all,
he told his disciples that there was no time to lose,
they had to leave there possessions, their boats,
even their families and follow him.
They made their way from Galilee to Jerusalem to confront the temple priests,
as they journeyed down the disciples may...
well have wondered how on earth Jesus was going to do it.
So far Jesus had used the symbolic power of healings and...
parables to undermine their authority,
but that was in the relative safety of Galilee.
The evidence shows that Jesus was going to press on...
with his symbolic protests only this time under...
the very noses of the temple priests.
Much like religious Jews today 1 st century Jews were steeped in the...
sayings and prophesies of their ancient scriptures...
and every one knew that some of them foretold
the coming of god and the messiah
They even spelt out how the arrival of god could be recognized.
His arrival would be heralded by a messiah riding into the city on a donkey.
Riding on a donkey comes from the Prophet Zacharia,
which speaks of a king who will come as a man of peace rather than...
as a man of war and there are other prophecies...
which speak about him coming through this east gate.
The evidence from the gospels is that Jesus decided to throw down the gauntlet...
and challenge the priests by entering the holy city...
in the way spoken of by the prophecies,
if Jesus had walked into Jerusalem no one would have batted an eyelid,
but Jesus makes a point of riding in through the fabled east gate.
There are several prophecies that Jesus seems to be deliberately picking up and...
echoing and it appears that Jesus was consciously acting out God's judgment...
on the city and the temple system that was refusing his message
The priests would have been outraged who did Jesus think he was?
The messiah? God himself?
They would soon find out
Jesus couldn't have picked a more dangerous week to enter Jerusalem.
The gospels say that he arrived in time for Passover the festival...
when Jews to this day remember the flight of the Hebrews from Egypt.
Helen Bond,
as expert on the politics of the period believes Jesus' timing was deliberate.
Thousands of people were converging on Jerusalem and...
flocking into this tiny, tiny city,
all of them heaving together inside the walls, it was a very, very tense time.
And the whole city I think would have been like an immense tinderbox,
that it just needed one spark and that was it
The Roman Governor in charge of Judea,
at the time was based 60 miles away in Caesarea his name was Pontius Pilate,
he would also have had to make the trip to Jerusalem all be it reluctantly.
He would have had to leave his nice pleasant cool villa at...
Caesarea full of all the pagan gentile things that he was used to and...
he would have to make the journey with a fairly sizable amount of...
troops down to Jerusalem,
the feast attracted so many different people from all over the empire...
that there was a worry from the Roman point of view that...
there could be riots and insurrections.
It wasn't a good time to have rebels and would be saviors kicking up a fuss,
yet that is precisely what Jesus sets about doing.
In the afternoon of his first day in Jerusalem the gospels say that...
Jesus went around looking at everything in the temple area,
he would have gone up these steps and in through a double door,
just here on the southern wall,
a long tunnel lead from the southern gate towards the money changers courtyard.
That day Jesus would have seen the evils that...
he had denounced time and time again going on in the heart of the temple.
Pilgrims had to change their impure currency for pure temple coins,
the coins were used to buy blemish free white doves to sacrifice to god,
the permanently impure such as the sick were kept out by guards,
the next day Jesus went back
And think a lot of people when they read the story about...
Jesus and the moneychangers think that it is just like having a shop...
in a cathedral or something like that and they think...
oh this is terrible having commerce on this sacred turf,
but actually this is a calculated act,
it is like someone deliberately going into the main square of the capital city...
in Washington or London or wherever and burning the flag,
it is a way of saying this system is under god's judgment and...
people I'm sure would have heard it like that.
Everyone including Jesus knew that...
the temple priests wouldn't tolerate any more insults,
Paunches Pilot too would have been alerted to the disturbance,
had Jesus lost his mind?
It couldn't be ignored for pilgrims...
how come for the first time in their lifetime to Jerusalem and...
they come with some kind of leader from Galilee and that's what the leader does,
they will talk about this and that is exactly what...
the priests didn't want to happen.
Everything Jesus had done so far, the healings, the parables,
the provocative entry into Jerusalem would have won him more support,
but equally it would have got him deeper into trouble,
a confrontation with the temple priests was looming,
the out come of that encounter would decide the fate of his mission.