=Roman taxes and the Publicans.=—­Naturally, the thought of paying taxes to such masters was almost unbearable.  Yet each adult Jewish man and woman was required to pay a personal or poll tax besides taxes on his property or income.  To make matters worse, the Romans were accustomed to hire Jews to collect these taxes, giving these men the right to extort whatever they could, provided the required tribute was paid to Rome.  Of course all true Jews hated and despised these Jewish tax-gatherers or publicans even more than they hated and despised the Romans themselves.

VARIOUS PARTIES AMONG THE JEWS

There were some respectable Jews, indeed, as well as these tax-collectors, who favored the Romans.  There were for example the Sadducees, a group of wealthy and aristocratic men, mostly priests, who formed a sort of political party called by this name.  Many of them were members of the Sanhedrin.  They were prosperous, and so long as their power was not taken away they sided with the Romans.  It was nothing to them that the great mass of their poor fellow countrymen were being brutally and wickedly robbed and ill-treated.

=The Pharisees.=—­We have already spoken of the Pharisees as being “Separatists,” that is, the people who were most opposed to any contact with heathen foreigners.  Strange to say, most of the Pharisees were opposed to any violent rebellion against the Romans.  They believed that God himself would come to the aid of his people.  Many books of the class called apocalypses were written during this period of the history in which the writers tried to comfort their readers by prophesying that the Lord would soon descend from heaven with armies of angels or would send his Messiah to drive out the Romans and set up his own kingdom.  The word “Messiah” (in Greek, “Christ”) means anointed one.

The book of Daniel in the Old Testament is one of the books of this period.  Many similar books were written which were not included in the canon of the Scriptures.  All of them were written in rather mysterious language—­with references to trumpets, vials, seals, beasts with many heads and many horns, and so on.  This was to keep their heathen rulers from understanding the real meaning.  It would not have been safe openly to predict that in a few years God was going to send all Romans to eternal punishment.

=The Zealots.=—­There were still others among the Jews at this time who were not willing to wait for Jehovah to come down from heaven.  They wanted to start a revolution right away.  One such man, Judas of Gamala, led a revolt when Jesus was about ten years old in which many Galilaeans joined.  It was put down by the Romans with their usual cruelty.  Very likely the fathers of some of Jesus’ boyhood friends in Nazareth of Galilee were crucified as the punishment for taking part in this revolt.  Those who sympathized with Judas continued to plot in secret against the hated Roman oppressors.  They were called Zealots.  One of them became a member of Jesus’ band of twelve apostles.