The Roman horizon

By 63 BCE the armies of Pompey had entered Jerusalem, bringing Judea under Roman control. The brief Hasmonean independence that had followed the Maccabean revolt was over; the Temple remained, but sovereignty had passed to foreign power. Rome ruled through client kings such as Herod the Great and, after his death, through governors answerable to imperial authority.1 Taxes, land seizures, and the presence of pagan symbols in a city devoted to one God sharpened a long-felt tension between divine promise and political humiliation.

This political reality turned theology into resistance. The ancient belief that Yahweh alone ruled the nations now demanded vindication in history. Monotheism became expectation; covenant became prophecy.

The diversity of late Second-Temple Judaism

The Judaism of the first century BCE–CE was not a single sect but a mosaic of movements responding to the same question: how should Israel live under empire?

• The Sadducees, drawn from the priestly aristocracy, controlled the Temple and emphasized ritual purity and cooperation with Rome.

• The Pharisees stressed oral law, synagogue teaching, and the sanctification of daily life; they democratized holiness beyond the Temple.

• The Essenes, perhaps the community of Qumran whose scrolls were discovered near the Dead Sea, withdrew from what they saw as a corrupt priesthood and awaited divine intervention.

• Apocalyptic groups and popular prophets proclaimed imminent deliverance and the coming of a Messiah.2

Each represented a different adaptation of the same monotheistic ideal: faithfulness to one God in a world that denied His rule.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and sectarian expectation

The Dead Sea Scrolls, copied between the second century BCE and the first century CE, reveal a Judaism alive with eschatological hope. The Qumran community saw itself as a “new covenant” awaiting the Teacher of Righteousness and the final battle between the “sons of light” and the “sons of darkness.”3 Their hymns and commentaries reinterpret Scripture as prophecy of their own age.

In these texts, monotheism becomes militant: the one God will soon expose the false powers of this world. The scrolls illuminate the theological atmosphere in which ideas of Messiah, Spirit, and new covenant circulated, concepts that would shape early Christianity.

Apocalyptic hope and social unrest

Roman exploitation and the widening gap between rich and poor deepened apocalyptic fervor. Prophets, healers, and charismatic teachers moved through Galilee and Judea, proclaiming repentance and the kingdom of God. To call God “king” was, implicitly, to deny the sovereignty of Caesar.

Texts such as 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra, and the Sibylline Oracles portray history as a drama nearing its climax. The expectation of a Messiah, an anointed deliverer, took several forms: some awaited a priestly reformer, others a warrior king descended from David, still others a heavenly figure who would judge the nations.4 These hopes reveal the flexibility of Israel’s messianism: political, spiritual, and cosmic at once.

The moral revolution of the prophets renewed

Within this ferment, the ethical monotheism of the prophets re-emerged as radical critique. Teachers such as Hillel and Shammai debated the heart of the law; apocalyptic writers insisted that justice for the poor and repentance were the true sacrifices God desired. The idea of a “new covenant written on the heart,” first voiced by Jeremiah, became a metaphor for inner transformation, a theology of conscience anticipating later Christian spirituality.

Jesus and the message of the kingdom

Into this world came Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean teacher who proclaimed that “the kingdom of God is at hand.” His movement belongs squarely within late Second-Temple Judaism: he taught in synagogues, quoted Torah, and spoke of covenant and repentance. Yet his interpretation of God’s reign, universal, compassionate, inwardly realized, reshaped inherited ideas.

The parables expressed the prophetic conviction that divine rule was breaking into the present; the healings and table fellowship enacted the restoration of wholeness promised by Isaiah. The crucifixion, a Roman punishment for sedition, testified to the political implications of declaring any sovereignty but Caesar’s. The conviction among his followers that God had vindicated him through resurrection transformed messianic hope into a universal gospel: the kingdom had already begun.

From sect to faith

The earliest believers, many of them Jews of the diaspora, continued to worship in synagogues and to read the Scriptures in the Greek Septuagint. Figures such as Paul of Tarsus interpreted the Christ event through the lens of Hellenistic Judaism, presenting it as the fulfillment of Israel’s covenant for the nations. In doing so, they extended Jewish monotheism into a missionary universalism: one God for all peoples, revealed through the one Messiah.5

This synthesis, rooted in Israel’s scriptures yet expressed in the idiom of Greek thought, created the theological continuity between Judaism and Christianity. The one God of Abraham had become the moral and metaphysical ground of all being; the covenant had become world history.

• 1. Martin Goodman, Rome and Jerusalem: The Clash of Ancient Civilizations (New York: Knopf, 2007), 49–60.
• 2. E. P. Sanders, Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE–66 CE (London: SCM, 1992), 34–57.
• 3. Géza Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English (London: Penguin, 1997), 15–27.
• 4. John J. Collins, The Scepter and the Star: The Messiahs of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Other Ancient Literature (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010), 82–95.
• 5. Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagans’ Apostle (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 43–55.