Word: romane
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This Greco-Roman "modernism" was conflicted, however. A building full of soldiers loomed over the Temple courtyards like a watchtower over a prison. As Jesus and the other pilgrims performed the most sacred rites of their faith, they would never be beyond surveillance. After Herod's initial rise, the Roman yoke was relatively light, consisting mostly of tribute. But the Jews had been independent for a century before the imperial conquest, and many hoped to return to that state. In recognition of this, above the Temple's northwestern corner stood the city's great Roman garrison, the Antonia, named after...
...painful conundrum. Beneath its prosperous surface, says Neil Asher Silberman, director of the Ename Center for Public Archaeology in Brussels, Jerusalem was actually "extremely turbulent." To some, "the beautiful Temple of Herod was a horrible betrayal of Israelite tradition. Herod obliterated the original Temple and replaced it with a Roman one." Even the most prosperous citizens must have had some major identity issues...
...case, Jesus' radical new synthesis--and his dramatic preaching of it--was dangerous, especially in an atmosphere that Schwartz says had turned into "a tinderbox." Herod had managed to keep a lid on anti-Roman sentiment for most of his reign. But starting with his fatal illness in 4 B.C. and continuing over the careers of several less effective successors, a series of bloodily suppressed revolts erupted...
...angry Jews, protesting the execution of students who had tried to remove a Roman eagle from the Temple decorations, threw stones down on their occupiers from the mount's porches and set off a citywide riot; eventually 2,000 rebels were crucified. In A.D. 26, the Roman governor provocatively ordered his troops to raise flags with Caesar's face within a few hundred feet of the central shrine. A mob marched to his house in Caesarea. His soldiers drew their swords. The Jews, in an extraordinary act of passive resistance, laid bare their necks and said they would rather...
...situations now and then are not analogous. Israel's current Jewish government, unlike the Roman Empire, is not alien to Jerusalem. The Palestinians are not as defenseless as the ancient Jews. And Israeli opposition leader (now Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon's unwelcome stroll last September around the two Islamic shrines that now occupy the Temple platform--a provocation that may have sparked the Holy Land's current strife when Muslims responded by throwing rocks down on Jews at prayer below--has no precise 1st century cognate. Still, the intertwined dynamic of military occupation and religious clash is shockingly familiar...