Popular movements during the first century BCE

A good companion to Josephus and an eye-opening study of the Judaisms of Jesus' time. ( )

An interesting look at all the various political, religious, and terrorist groups active in lst century Judea. There some some very nasty characters active in those days in that part of the world, and Jesus associated with quite a few of them. It wasn't coincidental that the Romans put him to death as a political agitator.
What strikes one is how little it all has changed in the intervening two millenia. In the last 150 years, we've seen Jewish terrorists, Islamic terrorists, Christian crazies, and confirmed secularists all trying to inhabit that tiny crescent of land we call Palestine. Nothing's changed, only the individuals involved. The hatred, intolerance, ethnic enmity, corruption--it's all the same.
Qoheleth, the Preacher, in the Hebrew Bible, says, "There's nothing new under the sun." Especially not under the Near Eastern sun, which has been beating down on its particular variety of crazies for millenia, with no end in sight.
In that sense, I support, Horsley and Hanson's book is discouraging; it's always been like this; it'll always be like this. For a person whose faith claims are staked in Palestine, that's a daunting thought. ( )

These fellows do an admirable job of getting blood from a turnip. Namely, squeezing responsible theories and extrapolating about class struggle and peasant attitudes from the few surviving sources of the period. All of the writing, of course, comes from the literate elite, so it's by inference and careful comparison that a picture of first century peasant movements must necessarily emerge. Difficult work. The writing is definitely on the dry side, but it's not inaccessable, and seems to be a valuable contribution to the incomplete mosaic that is the first century C.E. . ( )