Helen Bond

Romans were actually pretty generous to the Jews, despite, you know, occupying their land.

They did allow them to continue to have these big pilgrimage feasts.

And Passover was the biggest of the pilgrimage feasts.

You've got about hundreds of thousands of people making their way to Jerusalem from all over the Eastern Empire.

So

you've really got loads and loads of people all squashed together doing no work, which is very unusual for people at the time.

They're all drinking, they're meeting up with families.

And so this is a potentially volatile situation.

So I think as soon as you get this holy man coming from Galilee into this already slightly precarious situation, it's just a matter of time really.

Yeah, I think he did become something big in his day.

I mean, one of the difficulties is it's hard to know how long his ministry lasted.

It might just have been a few months.

It might have been a couple of years.

We don't actually know.

Certainly he had a body of very close followers.

So he's got the 12 men, the 12 male disciples that kind of everyone knows about.

But there's also lots of women.

The Gospels say that as he's making his way around Galilee, he's got a lot of women who follow him too.

So our mental picture shouldn't just be Jesus and these 12 strapping men, but women with them as well.

It's a mixed group.