>> (choir singing)l >> "the angel gabrs sent from god to a city of galilee named..." >> nrator: every sunday, in every corner of the world... >> "...the virgin, betrothed toa whose name..." >> narrator: ...people gather to hear a story. >> "...and the virgin's name was mary." >>arrator: for more than 2,000 years, that story has been told and told. >> "...and to bear a son." >> narrator: ang the way, each generation has found in its telling its own meaning and interpretation. >> "'...u shall call his name

jesus.'" >> narrator: that story, of a man called jesus of nazareth, a man who became jesus christ, was originally told by his first follows... >> "'...and called the son of the most high.'" >> narrator: ...and thenetold in accounts by later believers in the gospels. >> "the gospel accorng to st. luke." >> narrator: so began the building of a religion. now it is our turn, with thers help of schond historians, theologians and archaeologists, to return to that ti and use our best efforts to understand that story... of a man born in obscurity in whose name a faith was made.

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with major support from jon and jo ann hagler.di additional f for this program was provided by the arthur vining davis foundations. we know so little about him-- that he was born more than 2,000 years ago, and that heal lived intine. we know he was baptized and became a preacher. and we know that he was publly executed. >> (dramatized): what mannerof an is this that even the winds and the seas obey him? >> narrator: with so little evidence to go by,

archaeologists must ft the clues, and scholars decode t stories told by the first followers of jesus. >> the problem for any historiay ing to reconstruct the life of jesus is simply that we don't have sources that come from the actual time of jesus himself. >> the historian's task in understanding jesus and the jesus movement and ear christianity is a lot like the archaeologist's task in excavating a tell. you peel back layer after layer after layer of interpretation, and what you always find is a plurality of jesuses. >> history isn't made to record the deeds of a person like jesus.

jesus is very much like most people, statistically speaking, who have ever existed in the world: poor, obscure, no pretensions to royalty or diinction of any kind. they live under less than desirable conditions, and they die th way. h there is nothitorically remarkable about that. billionsf people pass through this veil of tears in exactly that way. >> we can tell the story by looking at the way the earliest christians themselves thought about jesus, by the wthey kept his memory alive, by the way that they told the story. >> arrator: central to the story is the fact that jesus was born a subject of the roman empire.

>> (dramatized): and in those days, a decree went out from heesar augustus that all t world should be taxed. >> jesus was born duringhe reign of the emperor augustus in the sort of a booming economy of the pax romanthe roman peace. and on every coin that augustus had were the worddivi filius, "son of the divine one"-- julius caesar-- son of god. >> this is on every billboard in the mediterranean world. he is the savior of the wod, and he brings the peace. now,ou may have scruples abo how he brings the peace, but he brings peace to rome. and as the saying goes in latin, "peace to the rome and quiet to the provinces."

>> (dramatized): this is he, augustus caesar, son of a god,o all restore the golden age and spread his empire. >> narrator: rome's empire spad across the mediterranean, sweeping through north africa and reaching as far west as spain. to the east, it encompassed egypt, turkey, greece, and palestine, where jesus was born in the jewish land of judea, then ruled by king herod. >> in judea, the king, herod, was inffect a client king. he ruled almost in place of rome. he was the... he was the voice of rome, the instrument of rome, probably "instrument of rome" is best in that, because he... he had his own independent notions rtainly. >> herod the great was probably one of the greatest kings of the

post-biblical period in israel,t but you woulant your daughter to date him. he was ambitious, brutal, extremely successful. >> and it is one of the real his man, who... who's thehistort guy you love to hate in jewishy, history, reaeaves the most indelible mark on the face of the la of israel. >> it appears that herod thought of jerusalem as his showpiece. he really waed to make it a st as people would have gonee, to athens, or rome, or the grea citiese mediterranean world. >> narrator: a meticulously accurate model of ancient jerulem shows the extraordinary scale of herod's building program.he

>> and so, whed but the city, or helped to rebuild the city, he did so on a monumental scale.se and this can be in the rebuilding of the temple. ♪ >> narrator: we know exactly how herod rebuilt the temple because detailed descriptions of therv architecture have sued. (dramatized) along the coast, herod constructed an aqueduct 40 miles long. it brought wat to a new seaport he had built. in honor of the roman emperor tycaesar, herod nad the caesarea.

>> we really need to get a... a feel for a city like caesareati maritima at the of jesus precisely because it shows the crucial intersection of roman rule in jesus' own homeland. >> narrator: in this thriving seaport, the power of rome, its delture and commerce, comm every aspect of daily life. >> in the middle of the city was a roman city, complete with the capital, temples to the deified roma-- that is the personification of rome itself. the political reality of the day was of a dominant power overseeing the lifon a day-to- day basis. nt

>> narrator:this political climate jesus was born. the gospels present the familiar count of his birth. ( amatized): and she gave birth to her firstborn son, and wrapped him in bands of cloth, and laid him in a manger because there was no place for them in the inn. >> our best guess for the birth da. of jesus would be 4 b.c in other words, he was born befo the death of herod the great, who died in 4 b.c.e. but emphasize "best" and "guess." >> narrator: the gospels claim jesus was born in bethlehem. historians think it is more likely that he was born and grew up near the sea of galilee inll the e called nazareth.

>> the region was known for activity, and some of itcal violent. in the last few generationof new testament scholarship, the galilee has achieved this reputation for being the hotbed of radicalism, you know, the... i don't know, the '60s berkeley of... of palestine. >> the galilee, by most of the traditional accounts, is always portrayed as a kind of bucolic backwater-- peasants on the hillsides. archaeological discoveave shown this not to be the case.

nazareth stands less than four miles from a major urban center, sepphoris. sepphoris was founded as the capital of the galilee. and so it was really invested, much like caesareaaritima, with all the trappings of greek oroman city life. >> nrator: recen archaeological discoveries at sepphoris challenge the conventional picture of jesus' life. >> one of the mo exciting discoveries that we made at man villa with a gorgeous,t gorgeo mosaic its floor, in a banquet hall. the lady was dubbed "mona lisa" by the press when we found her because she is really ann extraordinary depict a

beautiful woman of roman antiquity. and the picture we get is a community very much in the mainstream, but on the hh end of the scale. s sepphoris wat just a city with houses and with waterworksu and things like thatit had satellite settlements around. nazareth, to all intents and purpose, was a satellite village attached to the region or municipality of sepphoris. >> the findings really arey requiring us complet rethink jesus' social, economic setting, because wreally had thought of jesus as being really out in the... in the hinterland, utterly removed from urban life, espeally roman-influencedba

urlife. what t excavations at sepphoris suggest is that jesus was quite proximate to a thriving and sophisticated urbam envit that would have brought with it all of the diversity of... the roman empire, and would have required just to get on, ow, as the price of doing business, a level of sophistication thatne would of jesus, the humble cer.ristic >> narrar: scholars today question the image of jesus the humble carpenter, and disagree about his social class. >> (dramatized): they were a astounded, said, "where did this man get ts wisdom? is not this the carpenter's son?"

>> the difficulty for us in hearing a term like "carpenter" is that we immediately think of a highlykilled worker, and, at least in north america, in the middle class, making a very high income. as soon as we take that into the ancient world, we are totally lost, because, first of all, there was no middle class in the ancient world. tthere were the "haves" a "have nots," to put it very simply. and in the anthropoly of peasant societies, to say that somebody is an artisan or a carpenter is not to compliment them.to it is ay that they are lower in the pecking order than a peasant farmer.r: >> narratoery few scholars now believe that jesus was of such lowly birth >> i'm not entirely convinced that we could characterize jesus as... as a peasant. i think that that probably miscasts jesus, especially inen view of the more r discoveries at sepphoris and elsewhere. >> he must be someone in the

the building industry.working in and in all probability, that would mean where he might grow up and live in nazareth, he likely went to sepphoris to earn his living. and this puts him in the interesting mix of cultures that would have been the daily life of a city like sepphis-- through the marketplace, in the building. and sepphoris itself, as a city, at jesus was growing up andtime living just next door. >> you couldn't deal ael either in the workplace or in the market without knowing a good deal of greek. anybody worth their sagine wouldn't know some greek. jesus was trilingual.ic jesus paated in both the aramaic and hebrew culture and its literatures, as well as the

kind of hellenistic greek that he needed to dhis business and his ministry. >> narrator: despite its greek and roman influences, sepphorish was a oughly jewish city. and jesus remained faiful to his religious heritage when he n leftazareth to become a preacher. >> (dramatized): then he began to speak, and taught them, saying, "dnot think i have come to abolish the law or the prophets. i have come not to abolish but to fulfill." >> what we learned from the gousel stories is not that j was not jewish. quite the opposi. he's completely embedded in the judaism of his time. >> was jesus a jew? of course jesus was a jew.

he was born of a jewish mother in galilee, a jewish part of the world. all of his friendsassociates, colleagues, disciples-- all of them were jews. he regularly worshipped in jewish communal worship-- what we call synagogues. he preached from jewish text,fr the bible. he celebrated jewish festivals.d he was born, ldied, taught as a jew. nowadays, there are temples and synagogues everywhu go. there is not a jewish community in the world that doesn't have y gogue, and many of them are called temples. in this period, however, we should always remember that there is only one mple, and that's the one temple in jerusalem. (people conversing in background) >> narrator: for jews living in the time of jesu the temple in jerusalem was the center of their religious life.

has a very memorableian josephus line. he says, "one temple for the one god."th jews saw themselves as a unique peoe with one god, one god alone, and this one god of this one special people had one temple.an that's a very powerful idea, reflecting-- accurately, i think-- e historical truth that the temple was a very powerful unifying soce within the jewish community. this was the onemost sacred place on earth, the one place on and the heavens somehow descend just enough that they just touch. this was the only one placon the entire earth where this was so. >> the tple in jerusalem was the symbolic heart of the jews everywhere, if thse

to, if they were pious, wod put aside part of their income-- it's sort of like, oh, the way christmas clubs operate now-- you'd put aside money explicitly to be spent having a party in jerusalem. >> narrator: although the temple was the centerpiece of jewish life and worship, judaism was not a state religion. >> there's no such thing as a state church. ou not a monolithic reli or cultural entity at this time. indeed, what we're seeing more and more through theesearch and the archaeological discoveries, is how diverse judaism was in this period. >> sometimes reading ancient sources is like overhearing a family quarrels istant room. (whispering) and some of the most endearing aspects-- i can say this because i don't. i don't live in t first century-- but the most endearing aspects of reading this evidence that we still have

is overhearing the lively quarrels. i mean, people who weren't priests at all would have absolutely firm opinions on how the priestshould be doing their business.ta (d conversations) >> there will have been a whole wi variety of groups in jerusalem, and perhaps in the countryside as a whole. these are the revolutionarygr ps who took their religious understanding of what judaism was and turned that into political program, political agenda. "we must destroy the roman empire or we must destroy jewse who cooperth the roman empire." >> narrator: we now know tha other groups had even more extreme views, and their ideas shed new light on jesus' own message. >> one of the best examples the vibrantly different thought that's at work in judaism in

nthis period is, of cours what we know from the discovery of the dead sea scrolls. as you leave jerusalem and go to the south and tohe et, toward the dead sea, the terrain changes rapidly and starkly. you move off gradually from rolling hillside through the ravines, and it becomes stark and desolate. it's dry, it's arid, it's rocky, and it's rough. and then, all of a sudden, within a span of only about 13 miles, the entire terrain drops out in front of you at the surface ofhe dead sea. s it i that rugged cliff face

on the banks of the dead sea that the dead sea scrollwere discovered at the site known as khirbet qumran. the dead sea scrolls are usually thought to have been produced by and the essenes are a group that literally abandoned jerusalem, it seems, in protest against the way the temple was being run. and they go to the desert to gee away from whatsee to be the worldliness of jerusalem and the worliness of the temple. ua in hebrew, sera-hayachad, envisages a community living in almost total isolatith communit is self-

contained, that is governed very strictly there is an oath of entry. it is very much a monastic community. >> (dramatized): everyone who t wishjoin the congregation of the elect must pledge himself to live according to the rule of the community, to love all the children of light, and to hate all the children of darkness. >> the essenes are what we might best call an apocalyptic sect of judaism. an apocalyptic sect is one that thinks of itself as, first of all, the true form of the religion. >> by apocalyptic expectation, i mean that some group has a... an apocalupsiin greek-- a

revelation that god is going to finally lve the problem of injustice, unrighteousness, evil in the world, by totally eradicating the evil. that's the terrible price of apocalypse-- there's going to be a lot of very dead peoe-- totally eradicating evil-- and we, the good, whoever we are, are going to live with god, be it heaven on earth, or earth in heaven, forever, in justice and holiness and righteousness. >> ang the dead sea scrolls, we hear not of just one messiah, but at least two messiahs. some of their writings talk about a messiah of aaron, a priestly figure who will come to store the temple at jerusalem to its proper purity and worship of god. but there's also a messiah off david that is a kindngly figure who will come to lead the war.

>> the qumran scrolls reve a variety of scenarios for... for the end of days. the best known one, perhaps, isc thll called "the war of the sons of light against the sons of darkne." and, at some point, there will be a major battle, a cataclysmic struggle, not just between people, but also between cosmic forces-- the cosmic forces of evil and the cosmic forces of good. and, needless to say, is will end with a victory for the sons of light-- in other words, for the group itself. >> now, we typically think of this as reflecting a belief in the end of the world, but, in fact, that's not exactly what

they thought. they use language like "the end" or "the last things" or "thebu last days,what they mean is the present evil age is coming to an end. this is really more in the vein of a transformation of the present social order, and ao returnkind of golden age of statehood and independence. so it's really kind of apo tical expectation. it's not otherworldly. in fact, when it comes, it wil be right here and right now. >> narrator: history offers no evidence that jesus was influenced by the esnes, but their apocalyptic chalnge struck chords that reverberated throughout the homeland and echoed through the mesge of a baptist.known as john the i >> (dramatizedthose days, john the baptist appeared

in the wilderness of judea, proclaimg, "repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near." >> john the baptiswas a renowned kind ofccentric, it appears, from the way that josephus describes him. but seems to have had this quality of a kind of prophetic figure, one who was caing for change. so he is usually thought of as unusual clothes-- a kind ofring ascetic almost. to the desert, crossing thet jordan. he is recapitulating the exodus, and he is planting little ticking time bombs of apocalyptic expectation all over god to strike, as it were. w for

(faispering) >> narrator: it was as john's disciple, the gospels say, that jesus submitted to the ancient jewish rite of baptism. >> the evidence that jesus was follower of john is as strong as anything historians can find about jesus. embarrassment in the texts, trying to explain why on earth would jesus be apparently inferior to john.pt if he goes and is baized by john, then somehow we ha to explain how that can happen. os >> thepels then go on to say that jesus was the one predicted by john. most contemporary scholars would see that to be a... a construct developed by the early church te explain the relationship

between the two. >> the difference i see between john the baptist and jesus is, to use some fancy academic language, john is an apocalyptic eschatologist. an eschatologist is somebody who sees that the problem of theth world is so radica it's going to take some kind of divine radicality. god is going to descend in some sort of a catastrophic event to solve the wod. there is another type of eschatology, and that's what i think jesus is talking. i'm going to call it ethical eschatology. that is the demand thagod is ch as god on us-- to don god so something about the evil in the world. >> narrator: we don't know to what extent jesus remained

faithful to john's apocalyptic message, but at some poi after j his baptm by john,esus seemsem to havrked on his career as a preacher. alice: thiis frontline here on your pbs station, and through the years, we've come to expect the most thorough and this production, from jesus to christ: the first christians is just one more in a long line of stellar films. bill: yes, it is, alice. we are 'glad that you're here with us. hi, i'm bill young here with alice ferris. right now you're experiencing a fascinating prestation of a timeless story, helping us to understand a man born of obscurity of whontire faith was made. alice: and i hope that you value the service ths local pbs station provides you by bringing you programs like frontline. if you wanna make sure that this continues to be a service that's available to everyone throughout yr community, it's t that you invest in it right now, because this type of programming, this type of indnt media is only available

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>> jesus' career apparently was centered mostly in the towns and villages and a few small cities in the area of the galilee, his home region. es >> j' ministry in the galilee is rather complicated, o but i think we can begint the real better understanding of it through archaeology and through higher literary studies of the gospels today. those villages there were absolutely essential this ministry. he's avoiding the big towns, or cities, probably because the elements who run those cities are of such a high class that they're probably not interested in jesus' messag >> narrator: whether he was himself a simple man of ther pele or someone famore sophisticated, jesus does seem

to have pitched s message at ordinary people and to have impressed them with his healing powers. >> healings, which seems to have be somhing of a specialty of his, for which he had a great reputation, people would bring-- ffrom miles around, judgim the gospels-- they would bring their sick, the frail, to jesus. to be heal >> i love the story abou.. about jesus reaching down and picking up the dust and mixing a kind of healing balm that heng applies to someone. and it's also interesting that rt of misses the mark a bitjesus and has to... has to refine the cure that he's applyin so one finds the intrusions of popular culture in these jesus traditions that are being elaborated through natural.. processes of storytelling. >> now, we need to be aware that there are other miracle workers around at the time, so just the

idea of performing miracles is not in itself unique. >> in the first centur in one sense, everyon- including, later in the century, vespasian, when he was becoming the emperor-- were miracle workers if they were important enough. what really was unusual about jesus is, why would d work through a jewish peasant? that sort of struck the roman imagination as unbelievable. not that there would be miracles, but that miracles might be performed by a jewish peasant. h >> jesus limited circulation d his teaching waspulace. characterized by metaphors that would beeadily understood by agrarian populations. s >> (dramatized): jesd to his apostles, "give them something to eat." they replied, "we have nothing here but five loaves and two fish."

and he said, "bring them here to me." >> the feeding of the multitudes is one of the few stories that'l told ifour gospels. that's a story near and dear to many people's hearts. jesus goes into the galilean hillside he takes about 5,000 people with him. and it's there that they have picnic, even though there are no provisions made for that he ultiplies five loaves and two fishes to feed this multitude of people. well, i... i don't think it takes rocket science to figure out why that kind of story is so endearing to poor people. i meanthat's... that's... that's dinner and a show. >> nrator: behind the simple rustic imagery was the message of the coming kingdom of god, an enigma jesus did not aempt to simplify.

>> jesus tells a parable aboutme dy who takes a mustard and it grows up to be a great, tree, or a bush at least-- a weed, though, in plain language. now, imagine an audice reacting to that. presumably the kingdom is like this, and they have to fure out, "what's it like? you mean, the kingdom is big? but you just said it's a big. we so why don't you say a big cedar of lebanon? why a g weed? and besides, this mustard... we're not certain we like this mustard. it's very dangerous in our fields. we try to... we try to control it. we try to contain it. why do you mean the kingdom is something that the people try to control and contain?" e every.ry reaction in the audience... the audience fighting with themselves, as it wereanswering back to jesus, is doing exactly what he wants. it's making them think, not about mustard, of course, but about the kingdom. but the trap is at this is a very provocative, even a weird, image for the kingdom. to say the kingdom is like a cedar of lebanon, everyone would yawn, say, "of course."

"it's like a musrd seed." "what's going on here?" >> either people will tend to focus on jesus as some sort of social reformer, or as an apocalyptic firebrand preaching a coming kingdom of god on earth. and yet, it must be recognized that those are very differentag , very different kinds of individuals, and yet both are 'flected within the gospe tradition. >> narrator: he may have preached social change. he may havpreached a new kingdom on earth. either way, jesus was bound tose find h in conflict with the roman authorities. >> the core of jesus' preach is the kingdom of god.

and the difficulty for us is to hear that term as 100% political and 100% religious. not one, not the other. in the first century, those were inextricably intertwined. the kingdom, if you used that exy,ession in the first cent would... meant the roman kingdom, meant the roman empireb when you talket the kingdom of god and were somehow setting it up in some tension with the roman empire, you were making a very caustic criticism of the roman empire, and you were saying that its system was not the system of god. >> the jewish historian josephus tells us a number of stories about aracters whose career could be crudely summarized as followg: some guy wakes up in the morning and he thinks he's the messiah or something, he's a prophet. and he says... he gets a group of people toollow him. he says, "we're going to go out in the desert and we're going to wait for god to do something for us."

so a whole bunch of people may go with him-- maybe thousands-- go with him out to this deserted, unsecured place, and they wait for at josephus calls "the tokens of their deliverance." and the romans send a vicious kilice action out there an everybody. when that kind of police action is perpetrated against what we mit consider harmless fanatics, e romans are really giving us a very good historica. lesson in how domination works. >> all the time that jesus is talking, i cannot not imagine the fact that he's going to be put to death. everything that he is doing isll politidangerous. if you are following jesus' life from day to day, you should be saying to yourself, "somebody is

going to kill this man." >> (dramatized): after he hadid his, he went on ahead, going up to jerusalem. , >> moving to jerusalsus was moving from the territory rud by herod antipas, to t territory ruled directly by rome through a prefect, pontius pilate. >> pontius pilate was the governor from 26 to 36, and so that places us very clearly within the early perioof roman rule. these are some of our most imrtant and clearest dates for the activities of jesus' life.

when jesus actually died we're t absolutely sure. some people would say as ely as maybe 27, maybe some others as late as 33, but we do know it's underilate. >> pontius pilatus, praefectus judea. pontius pilate, governor of judea. >> and we know of him as effective and a fairly ruthlesss administrator oferritory, the area of judea. recorded by josephus whereph eschatological ps emerge, and pite has no hesitation in suppressing episodes of potential colict or revolt within that territory. (murmur of crowd) e>> people from all over

empire went to jerusalem on passover. it's one of the most populated times in the whole city. it's a madhouse. there are extra animals being brought up-- sheep-- because of the passover holiday. there are pilgrims coming in e frrywhere. and jesus comes up to town, too. he could havstayed home and had passover in the galilee, but he didn't. he's up usalem because this is important. pilate would get nervous when there were crowds of jews,nd, of course, he was legally responsible to be up in jerusalem when it was the most crowded of all. he would leave this very nice, plush, seaside town in caesarea, gan city, plenty of a nice rs, all the stuff he wanted-- and have to go up to jerusalem where...here all these jews were congregating,ay and here for crowd control until the holiday was over. n

he wasbad mood already by the time he got to town, and passover would fray anybody's rves. (murmur of crowd) >> if you were a pilgrim coming to jerusalem in these days, you would walk through the streets of this magnificent city. as you approach the temple mound, you come up to this massiv monumental complex that we call the temple, and there are grand staircases up which top.can go and get up to the and you come out up on top of the platform in the outer precincts of the temple complex. (singing) the soldiers that were garrisoned in jerusalem would have been stationed in the nearby fortress called the antonia, which literally stands adjacent to the temple complex and kind of looks over it.

they could keep an eye othings there, and, of course, everyone in the temple knew they were there,oo. >> particulay at passover, which is a holiday that vibrates with this incredible historical memory of national creation and freedom, and the roman soldiers standing along the colonnade of celebrating this.g down at jews so it's... it's a politically and religiously electric holiday. >> (dramatized): then, jesus entered the temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the temple, ande overturned the tables of the money chanrs. >> the difficulty with the story of jesus and the mhangers in the temple is that the story is told in slightly different ways in different gospels. for example, in mark's gospel,

and, in fact, in matthew, mark, ent occurs in the last week of jesus' life and is clearly the event which brings him to the attention both of the tele leadership and the roman authorities. it is, in effect, whatets him killed. john's gospel, interestingly enough, though, puts the story of the cleansing of the mple as the very first episodin jesus' public career, more than two years earlier, and no mention is made of it near his death. so, there are a few problems with the... with the story itself, although it is one of the stories at appears in all the gospels, so something is going on there. >> it's unclear how he actually gets into trouble. he wouldn't ve wandered into the crosshairs of the priests because, compared to how the pharisees are criticizing the priests, what jesus doing... is doing is fairy minimal.

if he had en complaining about the priests, or criticizing them, or criticizing the way thh temple was being run would just..it's business as usual. this is... this is one of the aspects of being a jew. >> another possibility, though, is that jesus sounds more like the essenes, who werreally criticizing the whole way the cotemple is run as having too worldly, too caught up inay the money of the dor maybe just too roman. and if that's the case, then his action looksuch more like an act of political subversion. >> try and imagine the temple for what it was.ot it was bthe house of god andf the seat ollaboration. it was the high priest caiaphas whd to collaborate with the

roman occupati. now, how would jesus, as ae galilean peasant, see temple? i think with ferocious ambiguity. i on the one hand,was the seat of god, and you would die tofr defend i, say, a roman emperor like caligula putting a statue in there. but what would you do when it was also the place whe caiaphas collaborated with the romans? was the temp really the house of god anymore? what jesus does is not cleanse the temple; he symbolically destroys it. >> if you really think the end of the world is at hand, thatli has a kind orating and frantic energy that goes along with it. it'sot good for quiet crowds and social stability. and given the... the emotional

sand religious tenor of t holiday anyway, to have somebody preaching that the kingdom of god was real on its way-- perhaps it was going to be coming within, you know, within that very holiday-- preaching that the... the... in the days before passover, it's the equivalent of shouting "fire!" a rowded theater. >> narrator: the gospels agree that this polically charged climate was the occasion for his arrest, but what happed next, and the role played by the priests, remains unclear. >> i think there's some kindf cooperation between the chief priests and pilate.th chief priests always had to cooperate with rome beuse it's their jobs. they're mediating between the imperial government and the people.re then tas a perceived verge of some kind of muscular crowd control. people would get hurt or killed when pilate felt so moved. and perhaps for this reason,

jesus was turned over to rome. >> the most diicult ing for0 us, after 2,ars, is to bring our imagination down when wefe looking at the passion jesus, becau we want to think the whole world was watching, or all of the roman eire were watching, or all of jerusalem was watching. i i tafor granted there we standing orders between pilate and leiaphas about how to hand lower-class especially, dissidents who cause problems at passover.us >> jould have represented, you know, a kind of activist and resistor in... in pontius pilate's experience that he hada beenng with for years, and with varyingegrees of... of success and effectiveness, obviously. but jesus would have been a blip on the screen pontius pilate because the unrest and the uprisings were so common-- a part of daily life for the roman administration of judea-- that

jesus would have been seen, ik, thins very, very little out of the ordinary. >> now, i don't for a moment think that pilate would have been worried that jesus could ofhave challenged the powehe emperor. that's not the point. the point is, any chalnge to roman authority, any challenge w to the peace of rold have been met with a swift and violent response. >> in dealing with a person who was guilty of sediti, pilate had considerable leeway. he was probably driven byen coon, and that is the process of executing state criminals thugh crucifixion. >> there is no doubt in my mind but that the persons responsible for the actual execution of jesus were the romans. the romans practiced crucifixion. it was... while it was not unknown to theewish people, it

was not a form of jewish execution. >> (dramatized): then they brought jesus to the place called golgotha, which meansl. "the place of a skul >> a crucifixion site was usually near, say, a main ad into the city. the uprights for the crosses were usually left there permanently. and you have to think of that site as not a place where peopll would go regly. it's supposed to be a ing,te. even when nobody is hanging there. so the idea that there would be crowds around the crucifixion-- leave... leave out passover or anything like that-- just watching, i think most people t would probably aveir eyes and walk away because they don't want to be on the side of the romans who are killing and ewcrucifying one more good among the thousands who have been crucified in the first quarter ofhat century.

>> death by crucifixion was certainly an awful, awful experience for the percuted individual. it waslow, it was painful, and it was public terror. >> it's not from bleedin it's not from the wounds themselves that the death occurs. it's rather a suffocation because oncan't hold oneself up enough to breathe properly. and so, over time, really, it's the exposure to the elements and the gradual loss of breath that produces death.e >>n't have that much detail about the actual crucifixion of jesus. a what we ha the stories in the gospels.e. and they uh, interestingly and appropriately, the gospel writs are drawing on psalms, psalms that, in... in the jewish

canon, are... are often cries to god. and that's... they're grabbing onto that literature to shape their naative presentation of the crucifixion. those are cries of terror and loneliness.ls they're really appo god for meaning. the words that are put ijesus mouth mark, "why have you forsaken me?" it's... it's the religious power of the psalms that is really one of those wonderful moments ofnu concrete cony between what this... this very passionately religious first-century jew might have been inking as he was dying this horrible death on the cross as the finalto this... this week of passionate religious excitement and commitment, and... and asking god what happened. (singing)

>> the plaque that was nailed to the cross is one of the few clear pieces of historicalt evidence t have. >> iesus nazereno, rex iudoru. as jesus, the king of ws,s him suggests that the charge onhe whicas executed was one of political insurrection, a threat to the pax romana. but he's also now a victim of the pax romana. bill: it was interesting to hear the different theories he last days of jesus in jerusalem

and ultimately the events leading up to his crucifixion by the romans. this is a comprehensive look thatfrontline caprovide and is the direct impact that your donation makes for you, your family, and our entire community. delighted to be here with alice ferris, friend and colleague. alice: bill, that first hour we just enjoyed really lays the groundwork for thisncredible story, and we'll get back to the program in just a moment. coming up, we start to learn of the apostles and their impact on the creation of the new testament. bill: now, those are important events, and you know what else is important? you action and supporting this station with a financial gift right now. when you call or go online, you can request the dvd when you make an ongoing monthly donation of $8 or aal one-time gift of $96. alice: there's so mh going on in this program that even watchinglyt one time ctas not enough. and the things you thght you knew, hearing these experts give us more context

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♪ you're watching pbs. ♪ >> (choir nging) >> "the angel gabriel was sent from god to a city of galilee named..." >> narrator: every sunday, in every corner of the world...n, >> "...the viretrothed to a man whose me..." >> narrator: ...people gather to hear a story. >> "...and the virgin's na was mary." >> narrator: for more than 2,000 years, that story has been td and retold. >> "...and to bear a son." >> narrator: along tay