Word: nazareth
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Like Bethlehem and Jerusalem, Nazareth is one of the holiest places in Christendom, but it has never enjoyed quite the same awe that the other two names evoke. For Christians, it is the town where Gabriel announced to Mary that she would be the mother of God, the town where Jesus grew up. But even in Biblical times it suffered from a bad press. When the apostle Philip told Nathanael that the Messiah had come from Nazareth, the Gospel of John reports, the incredulous answer was, "Can anything good come out of that place?" In modern times, tourist buses have...
...Roman sources, the trial of Jesus could have taken place essentially as portrayed in the New Testament. A very important but little-known gauge of the reliability of the New Testament accounts are the purely Jewish sources and traditions, which require the death penalty for Yeshu Hannosri (Jesus of Nazareth), such as Sanhedrin 43a of The Babylonian Talmud. The stoning of Jesus' brother James during the absence of the Roman governor in 62 A.D. is another shred of important evidence. The Gospels, then, are not necessarily anti-Semitic for their portrayal of a Jewish prosecution at the trial...
Rather, it was a tragic error of the later Christian church to derive an anti-Semitic attitude from Jewish involvement in the case of Jesus of Nazareth. The church forgot that the prosecution was acting in absolute good faith, that even so it represented only a small fraction of the Jewish populace, and that responsibility for its role is not transferable. Indeed, to be anti-Semitic because of Good Friday is as ridiculous as hating Italians because a few of their forebears once threw Christians to the lions...
...Gospels - the only detailed written records on the life of Christ - record that Jesus of Nazareth was condemned by the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem on a charge of blasphemy and some what reluctantly executed by the city's Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate. Historians have long been dissatisfied with this explanation, principally because of the discrepancies among the Evangelists' accounts, and their portrayal of Pilate...
...ordained Anglican priest and a professor of comparative religion at the University of Manchester, Brandon is not the first to make this case, but he has marshaled the best arguments for it. In Jesus and the Zealots (Scnbners; $7.95) and The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth (Stein & Day; $6.95), Brandon pictures Jesus as a politically aware activist vigorously working against the Palestinian "Establishment"-the Roman occupying forces and Jerusalem's collaborationist Jewish aristocracy. As a champion of the poor, says Brandon, Jesus went so far as to lead an abortive raid on the Temple treasury to dispossess its money...