Word: jesus
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...animal, visitors changed their Roman denarii (the dollar of the day) for shekels, or Temple coins, that had no portraits on them and so did not violate the Jewish prohibition of graven images. Herod appears to have allowed the money changers onto the Temple platform, which may have spurred Jesus' scourging of them in "my father's house." Joshua Schwartz, a professor of historical geography at Israel's Bar Ilan University, styles the stairway as a Judean version of London's Hyde Park Corner. There would be "beggars and upper-class Jews and Gentiles from all over," he says. "Scholars...
Bruce Chilton, a religion professor at Bard College whose book Rabbi Jesus was published in October, says recent scholarship finds a great deal more meaning and joy in the proceedings. Pilgrimages were festive occasions, with families or friends traveling together and camping overnight in the hills around the city and singing cheerful sacred songs outside the Temple. Although parts of the sacrifice would be immolated for the Lord or consumed by the priests, others would be cooked and shared by the pilgrims, who ate little meat the rest of the year. "Not only would they offer this very scarce protein...
...then. There were the rich and the less rich." Argues Fabian Udoh, professor of liberal studies at Notre Dame University: "The high priests, the aristocrats and the administrators would have been very, very rich, but there were also people who were very, very poor." The obvious economic tension in Jesus' preaching may reflect his experience either in Jerusalem or in Galilee...
Those in the middle, the craftsmen (like Jesus) and small businessmen and jewelers and tax collectors, would have got their education at home and at their local synagogue. (The wealthy would have hired tutors for their children, in the Greek style.) Women married in their early teens and would generally undergo seven or eight pregnancies in hopes of having three or four surviving children. They often managed the household and exerted considerable influence in the synagogue. The family would have observed religious laws regarding food and ritual purity, although many aspects of Jewish law were not formalized until later...
Jerusalem was a monoculture, comparable to Washington or Redmond, Wash. (It remains so today, although it is now tourism rather than religion that is the city's dominant business.) Unlike many company towns, however, the city in Jesus' time had a cosmopolitan feel. Its material needs drew caravans from Samaria, Syria, Egypt, Nabatea, Arabia and Persia. Two-thirds of its population were Jews (roughly the same percentage as today), practicing a religion that counted millions of adherents in the Roman Empire and a large group of "God fearers," Gentiles who observed some key precepts without full conversion. At the same...