respect and love, not by a physical building where they sacrifi ce
animals. In other words, the rituals seem to have become empty
now. They also studied the Bible intensely, and the Dead Sea
Scrolls are from one of these desert communes—the Qumran sect. Jewish practice was changing, and there was a great deal of
intellectual and religious ferment that was really making the
Romans edgy. It is into this milieu that Joshua ben Joseph (Jesus)
appears and basically has yet another plan for revitalizing the
Jewish religion by scrapping the legalistic practice of the Pharisees
and replacing it with simple rules that people can follow and
that will actually make them better people, and he told neat little
parables that they could understand.
Jesus’s parables were often about food or about agricultural tasks
so that the people he was preaching to—simple shepherds, farmers,
and fi shermen—are familiar with the situations. There’s the story of
the landowner hiring workers for his vineyard, and everyone gets
paid the same amount, even the people who show up late. This is
a parable that preaches that people should not begrudge what other
people get.
There was another Jewish tradition that Jesus eventually came to
be associated with: that one day a moshiach, or messiah, would
come to initiate a new era in human history. In the Jewish tradition,
he would be a person sent to teach and change ritual practice once
again—like another Moses, a messenger from God.
The other side of Jesus’s career is a little harder to explain. Apart
from the stories, Jesus was also a faith healer and miracle worker,
and most of his miracles either involve healing the sick or feeding
people, which makes him a great candidate for the downtrodden
and oppressed Jews.
Everything that Jesus is saying is very socially subversive; it’s not
the sort of thing the authorities want to hear (neither the Jewish
priests nor the Romans). However, at no point did Jesus ever