Appendices

c. 6–4 BCE — Jesus of Nazareth born, probably in Nazareth or its vicinity, during the reign of Herod the Great.

c. 4 BCE — Death of Herod the Great. Revolt and Roman reprisals, including the burning of Sepphoris, four miles from Nazareth.

c. 1 CE — Jesus' early childhood. The family lives in Nazareth, a village of around four hundred, without land ownership, dependent on daily work. Joseph, if still alive, works as a tektōn, a builder.

c. 10–20 CE — Jesus grows up in Nazareth, learning the trade. The building boom in Sepphoris and Tiberias offers work for a builder. Jesus is part of a large family — brothers and sisters whose names are given in Mark 6.

c. 20–27 CE — The hidden years. Near-total silence in the sources. Jesus lives as an ordinary Jewish man in Galilee. The birth stories in Matthew and Luke are later compositions, not transparent history.

c. 28–29 CE — John the Baptist preaching and baptising at the Jordan. Jesus comes to the river and is baptised by John. This is the most secure fact about the beginning of Jesus' public life, because it was an embarrassment no one in the early movement would have invented.

c. 28–29 CE — Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness after his baptism, in a landscape where Jewish men understood themselves to be in confrontation with what the mission would cost.

c. 28–29 CE — Jesus leaves Nazareth and makes his home in Capernaum, a fishing village on the lake. He gathers followers — twelve men and the women who fund the ministry, among them Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Susanna.

c. 28–29 CE — Jesus proclaims the kingdom of God — the rule of God breaking into the present — and teaches in parables, in the Beatitudes, in the Lord's Prayer, in healings and exorcisms, and in the table with the marginal.

c. 28–29 CE — Jesus' conflicts with other Jews — Pharisees, the traditions of purity, the way Torah is kept — are internal debates between people who care about the same things. The bad habit of reading them as hero versus villain is the most damaging reading habit two millennia of retelling have left us.

c. 29–30 CE — Jesus' public ministry continues for somewhere between one and three years. He walks through the villages of Galilee and beyond.

c. 30 CE — Jesus decides to go to Jerusalem at Passover, knowing what the city is. Whatever he thought he was — Messiah, prophet, son of man — he had some sense of what he was walking into.

c. 30 CE — Jesus enters Jerusalem and acts in the Temple. This is the thing that gets him killed, because it is the thing the authorities cannot leave alone.

c. 30 CE — The last meal. The synoptics and John disagree on the timing; the meal's meaning was interpreted differently by different early communities. What was said in that room is not recoverable in detail.

c. 30 CE — Jesus is arrested at night in Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives. Judas Iscariot is part of the story, but his motivation is not recoverable.

c. 30 CE — Jesus is carried before the high priest Caiaphas and then before the prefect Pontius Pilate. Pilate is ordered to handle a political nuisance in Jerusalem at Passover, exactly the kind of problem he handled by crucifixion.

c. 30 CE — Jesus is crucified outside the walls of Jerusalem by the Roman state. Crucifixion is a public torture designed to humiliate, deter, and destroy. It can take days. The method is an instrument of policy, not an accident of a particular trial.

c. 30 CE — Jesus dies. The movement is crushed and scattered. The Saturday after the crucifixion is a silence. The men who had followed him have fled. Peter has denied him. The family who knew him best thought he had lost his mind.

c. 30 CE — On the first day of the week, the women who had been at the tomb go back and tell the disciples. The sources report appearances of the risen Jesus. Paul's list in 1 Corinthians 15 — to Cephas, to the twelve, to more than five hundred, to James, to all the apostles, and last of all to Paul — is our earliest testimony.

c. 30–33 CE — The belief in the resurrection takes hold. The scattered followers come back together. The movement begins to move again.

c. 35 CE — Paul, a persecutor of the early movement, is converted by a vision of the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. Paul's letters are the earliest Christian documents we have.

c. 40s–50s CE — Paul's missions to the Gentiles spread the movement beyond Judaism. Paul's letters to the Galatians, Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Thessalonians are the earliest Christian documents.

c. 50s CE — The Jerusalem community holds the centre of the movement. James the brother of Jesus chairs the Jerusalem council, which decides that Gentile believers do not need to keep the Torah.

c. 60s CE — James the brother of Jesus is condemned to death in Jerusalem by the high priest Ananus, during the gap between the death of Festus and the arrival of Albinus, and stoned for breaking the Jewish law. Josephus attests the event.

c. 60s CE — Peter dies, probably in Rome during the persecution under Nero, probably crucified. This is a tradition we cannot verify but is early and widely held.

c. 60s CE — Paul dies, probably in Rome during the persecution under Nero. This is a tradition we cannot verify but is early and widely held.

66–70 CE — The Jewish war against Rome. The Roman army under Titus destroys Jerusalem and the Temple in 70.

70 CE — The destruction of the Temple. The single most consequential event in the history of Judaism in the first century, and the event that makes the parting of ways between the Jerusalem community and the Gentile mission irreversible.

After 70 CE — The Jerusalem community survives the war but does not survive it intact. Simeon, the brother of Jesus named in later tradition, becomes the leader of the Jerusalem church and holds the position until his death in the 100s.

After 70 CE — The parting of ways between the Jerusalem community and the Gentile mission becomes a separation that produces what we now call Christianity and Judaism as distinct religions. The earliest believers did not think of themselves as founding a new religion. They thought of themselves as a movement within Judaism.

c. 70–100 CE — The Gospels are written: Mark around 70, Matthew and Luke in the 80s, John later. They are interested sources, written decades after the events, by people making a case.

100s CE — The movement outlasts the Roman empire. The question of who Jesus was becomes the question around which the largest human community in history shapes itself.

A brief dramatis personae. The book moves through thirty chapters and a cast that grows across them; this is the anchor the reader can return to when names recur.

The central figure

Jesus of Nazareth — A tektōn, a builder from Nazareth in Galilee. About thirty when his public ministry begins, about thirty-three when he is crucified in Jerusalem. His mother is Mary, his father Joseph. He walks into the Judean countryside, spends one to three years talking to farmers and fishermen about God, goes to Jerusalem at Passover, and is executed by the Roman state. Within a generation, people across the empire are reorganising their lives around him.

The family

Mary — The mother of Jesus. Her name is given in the Gospels. After the infancy stories she is not prominent in the narrative; what is known of her later life is thin. The book opens and closes in the village where she raised her son.

Joseph — Jesus' father, a tektōn like his son. He is largely absent from the story after the childhood narratives, and the Gospels are silent on when he dies. A large family without land, dependent on daily work, is what the household economics look like.

The brothers and sisters of Jesus — Named in Mark 6: James, Joseph (or Joses), Judas, and Simon, and at least two sisters whose names are not given. They do not follow him during the public ministry. James the brother of Jesus becomes a leader of the Jerusalem community after the crucifixion. The family who knew him best thought he had lost his mind (Mark 3:21) — the book leaves that on the table.

The forerunner

John the Baptist — The best-attested figure in the region at the moment across multiple sources: the Gospels, Josephus, and the wider Jewish context. Preaches repentance at the Jordan, baptises crowds, and calls for moral and political reckoning. Herod Antipas has him killed. The baptism of Jesus by John is the most secure fact about the beginning of Jesus' public life, because it was an embarrassment the early movement would not have invented.

The twelve and the wider circle

Simon Peter (Cephas) — A fisherman from the house church in Capernaum, the most prominent of the twelve. Denies Jesus at the arrest. Present at the tomb in the resurrection traditions. Paul calls him Cephas; the Gospels call him Peter.

Andrew — Peter's brother, also a fisherman. One of the first called.

James, son of Zebedee — One of the twelve, a fisherman, brother of John. Part of the inner circle with Peter and John in the scene at the Transfiguration and the Gethsemane narrative.

John, son of Zebedee — Brother of James, one of the twelve. Traditionally identified as the author of the fourth Gospel, though the historian is cautious about that attribution. Part of the inner circle.

Philip — One of the twelve.

Bartholomew — One of the twelve. Sometimes identified with Nathanael in John.

Thomas — One of the twelve. The "doubting Thomas" of tradition comes from a resurrection appearance story.

Matthew — One of the twelve, a tax collector. The name is associated with the first Gospel, though the Gospel's author is not necessarily the same Matthew.

James, son of Alphaeus — One of the twelve. Distinguished from James the brother of Jesus and from James son of Zebedee.

Thaddaeus — One of the twelve. Also called Jude in some traditions.

Simon the Zealot — One of the twelve. The name is suggestive but the historian does not assume he was a Zealot in the political sense.

Judas Iscariot — One of the twelve, who betrays Jesus to the authorities. The piece that does not fit a simple story. His motivation is not recoverable. The name Iscariot is of uncertain meaning.

Matthias — The disciple chosen to replace Judas Iscariot after the arrest, according to Acts.

Mary Magdalene — Mary of Magdala, a woman from whom seven demons had gone out, a follower of Jesus, a provider for the ministry, a witness at the cross, a witness at the tomb, and in John the first person to whom the risen Jesus appears. Not a prostitute. The association with prostitution is a later conflation with an unnamed sinful woman in Luke.

Joanna — A woman who provided for the ministry, according to Luke 8:3. The wife of Chuza, Herod Antipas' steward — which means she had access to the Herodian court and resources that crossed social boundaries. Luke 8:3 is a bombshell the book treats as one.

Susanna — Another woman who provided for the ministry, named in Luke 8:3.

The Jerusalem leadership

James the brother of Jesus — Not a follower during the public ministry, then a leader of the Jerusalem community, the chairman of the Jerusalem council, and the person Paul defers to as the brother of the Lord. Condemned to death and stoned in Jerusalem by the high priest Ananus, during a gap between Roman governors, an event Josephus attests.

Simeon (Son of Clopas) — In later tradition, a son of Joseph and a brother of Jesus, who becomes the leader of the Jerusalem church after the Jewish war of 70 and holds the position until his death in the 100s.

The hostile powers

Herod the Great — Client king of Judea under Rome from 37 to 4 BCE. Builder of the Temple platform, the palace at Jericho, the theatre in Sepphoris. The king whose building programme dominated the landscape of Jesus' entire life and whose taxes and labour drafts a peasant family felt in their bones.

Herod Antipas — Son of Herod the Great, tetrarch of Galilee and Perea from 4 BCE to 39 CE. Rebuilt Sepphoris and built Tiberias. Killed John the Baptist. The ruler to whom Jesus is sent for examination in Luke.

Pontius Pilate — Roman prefect of Judea from 26 to 36 CE. The man who ordered Jesus' crucifixion. Not the figure the Gospels later painted — a reluctant official pressured by the crowd — but a prefect capable of violence, corruption, and contempt for Jewish sensibilities, as Philo and Josephus describe.

Caiaphas — Joseph Caiaphas, high priest from 18 to 36 CE. The man in whose house the hearing before the Sanhedrin appears to have taken place. A long-serving high priest in a period when the office changed frequently, and a collaborator with Roman authority.

Ananus — A high priest who condemned James the brother of Jesus to death, during a gap between the death of the Roman governor Festus and the arrival of Albinus, an event Josephus attests.

Paul (Saul of Tarsus) — A Jew from Tarsus, a Pharisee according to his own account, a Roman citizen, and a persecutor of the early movement before his conversion by a vision of the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. The author of the earliest Christian letters, the earliest Christian documents we have. His missions to the Gentiles opened the movement to the wider Roman world and made the parting of ways between the Jerusalem community and the Gentile mission irreversible after 70.

Titus — Son of the Roman emperor Vespasian, commander of the army that destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE.

Josephus — Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century, author of The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews. Our best outside source for the period. Not a character in the story of Jesus, but the figure without whom the historian cannot reconstruct it.

This list is a guide, not a verdict on who matters most. The book's measure of importance is not prominence in this list but presence in the evidence.

Antipas — Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great, ruler of Galilee and Perea from 4 BCE to 39 CE. The tetrarch who killed John the Baptist and to whom Jesus was sent for examination in Luke.

basileia — The Greek word translated "kingdom." It means rule, reign, the domain of a king. The kingdom of God is the rule of God, not a territory on a map.

Caiaphas — Joseph Caiaphas, high priest from 18 to 36 CE, the man in whose house the hearing before the Sanhedrin appears to have taken place.

cephas — Aramaic for "rock." The name given to Simon Peter. Paul calls him Cephas; the Gospels call him Peter, which is the Greek equivalent.

crucifixion — A Roman method of execution designed to humiliate, deter, and destroy. Not a quick execution but a public torture that could take days. An instrument of policy, not an accident of a particular trial.

denarius — The standard silver coin of the Roman economy, roughly a day's wage for a labourer. The coin in the Gospels' economic references.

disciples — The followers of Jesus, especially the twelve. The word means "learners" or "pupils." The term is not identical with the twelve; it is sometimes broader.

Essenes — A Jewish movement of the second and first centuries BCE and CE, known from Josephus, Philo, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. A separatist, highly disciplined, apocalyptic group.

exorcism — The casting out of demons or unclean spirits. In the ancient world, illness and possession were not sharply distinguished, and exorcism belonged in the world of healers and wonder-workers the reader already knows from Josephus and other sources.

Galilee — The northern region of Judea, around the Sea of Galilee. Jesus' home region. A place of mixed population, agriculture, fishing, and the building boom Herod and his successors created.

gentile — A non-Jew. A term the early movement used for the wider Roman world. The Gentile mission was the spread of the movement beyond Judaism.

gospel — Originally "good news," then the genre of the four narrative accounts of Jesus' life (Mark, Matthew, Luke, John), written decades after the crucifixion.

herod the great — Herod I, client king of Judea under Rome from 37 to 4 BCE. The builder of the Temple platform, the palace at Jericho, the theatre in Sepphoris. The king who dominated the landscape of Jesus' entire life.

james — James the brother of Jesus. Not a follower during the public ministry, then a leader of the Jerusalem community, the chairman of the Jerusalem council, and the person Paul defers to as the brother of the Lord.

jerusalem — The holy city, the site of the Temple, the centre of Jewish pilgrimage. Jesus went there at Passover, and it was where the movement's crisis happened.

john the baptist — The wild man at the river, the prophet of repentance who baptised Jesus at the Jordan. The best-attested figure in the region at the moment, across multiple sources.

josephus — Flavius Josephus, the Jewish historian of the first century, author of The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews. Our best outside source for the period. Read in a good annotated edition.

judas iscariot — One of the twelve, who betrayed Jesus to the authorities. The piece that does not fit a simple story. His motivation is not recoverable.

mark — The earliest Gospel, written around 70 CE. The source on which Matthew and Luke draw, along with a shared sayings source. The spare, urgent narrative that sets the shape for the later Gospels.

mary — Mary, the mother of Jesus. Her name is given in the Gospels; her later life is not well documented. In the Gospels after the early stories, she is not prominent.

mary magdalene — Mary of Magdala, a woman from whom seven demons had gone out, a follower of Jesus who provided for the ministry, a witness at the cross, a witness at the tomb, and the first person to whom the risen Jesus appears in John. Not a prostitute.

messiah — The Hebrew mashiach, "anointed one." A term available in Jesus' world for a figure expected by some to restore Israel. The reader should not assume a single fixed meaning.

nazareth — The village in Galilee where Jesus grew up. Around four hundred people, no synagogue we can find, no pavement, no coins minted in its name. The place the book opens and closes in.

pilate — Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect of Judea from 26 to 36 CE. The man who ordered Jesus' crucifixion. Not the figure the Gospels later painted — a reluctant official pressured by the crowd — but a prefect capable of violence, corruption, and contempt for Jewish sensibilities, as Philo and Josephus describe.

pharisee — A Jewish movement of the late second and first centuries BCE and CE, concerned with Torah, purity, and the relationship between Israel and God. Not the villains of a morality play. A Jewish movement in internal debate with Jesus, who cared about the same things.

passover — The pilgrimage festival commemorating the Exodus. The time when Jesus went to Jerusalem and when he was crucified. A time when Jerusalem's population multiplied and the Roman troops were on the porticoes.

paul — Saul of Tarsus, a Jew from Tarsus, a Pharisee according to his own account, a Roman citizen, and a persecutor of the early movement before his conversion by a vision of the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. The author of the earliest Christian letters, and the one whose missions to the Gentiles opened the movement to the wider Roman world.

philo — Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher who wrote a letter about Pilate that describes him as corrupt, violent, and contemptuous of Jewish sensibilities. Not the Pilate of the Gospels' softening.

sadducee — A Jewish group associated with the Temple priesthood and the Temple aristocracy, concerned with Temple and Torah, sceptical of the resurrection and the apocalyptic traditions. A power-holding group in Jerusalem.

sanhedrin — The Jewish council in Jerusalem, a body of leading Jews, with which the hearing before the high priest is associated. The historian is cautious about the Sanhedrin as a formal institution at this point.

sepphoris — A city in Galilee, four miles from Nazareth, rebuilt by Herod Antipas after 4 BCE. A site of building work that would have offered employment to a tektōn from Nazareth.

son of man — A term Jesus used of himself. The reader should not assume a single fixed meaning. The term has Danielic, apocalyptic, and self-designation uses, and the evidence does not close which of these was in Jesus' mind.

tektōn — A Greek word meaning builder, not romantic carpenter. A person who works with their hands on material that has to hold weight and take weather. A tektōn could work stone or wood or both.

torah — The Jewish law, the instruction of God. The term Jesus and the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the Essenes all used. Not "legalism" but the instruction that structured Jewish life.

tetrarch — A ruler of a fourth part of a kingdom. The title Antipas held as ruler of Galilee and Perea.

judea — The southern province of the region, the seat of Roman administration, the place of Jerusalem and the Temple. The province Jesus walked into at the end.

wilderness — The desert landscape of the Jordan valley and the hills around it. The place where Jesus spent forty days after his baptism, and where Jewish men in that landscape and at that moment would have understood themselves to be in confrontation with what the mission would cost.

zealot — A member of a Jewish resistance movement against Roman rule. The reader should not assume that one of the twelve — Simon the Zealot — was a Zealot in the political sense, though the name is suggestive.

A guide to the sources and the scholarship for readers who want to go further. Primary sources are the raw material; secondary works are the historians who have spent their lives recovering the world Jesus walked through.

Primary sources

The documents that carry the story. Read them in a good annotated edition. None of them is a neutral transcript; all of them are shaped by the purposes of the communities that produced them. That is the condition of the evidence, and the reader who understands that goes further.

The Gospels

Mark — The earliest Gospel, written around 70 CE. Spare, urgent, shaped by the experience of the Jewish war. The source on which Matthew and Luke draw, along with a shared sayings source (often called Q). Mark's Jesus is a man of action who repeatedly tells people not to speak of what he has done. The spare style is not a limitation; it's a decision.

Matthew — Written in the 80s, using Mark and a shared sayings source. More concerned with Jesus as teacher and with the relationship between the new movement and the Jewish tradition. The birth story is here, and the Sermon on the Mount.

Luke — Written in the 80s, using Mark and the same sayings source as Matthew, plus material peculiar to Luke. More concerned with social margins — women, the poor, the outsider. The birth story here is different from Matthew's. The book of Acts is the same author's sequel.

John — The latest Gospel, most theological, sometimes preserving good geography and sometimes the least reliable on the sequence of events. A different kind of document from the synoptics. Not a commentary on them; a distinct witness with its own concerns.

Paul's letters

Galatians, 1 Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians — The earliest Christian documents we have, written in the 50s, decades before the Gospels. Almost uninterested in Jesus' life. Paul is interested in the meaning of the crucified and risen Jesus for communities living under pressure. What Paul does not say is as informative as what he does: he has almost nothing to say about Jesus' teaching, his miracles, or the events of his ministry. For the historian, Paul is not a source for Jesus' biography but a source for the earliest layers of the movement's memory and the belief that something had happened.

Other early Christian writing

Gospel of Thomas — A collection of sayings, some parallel to the canonical Gospels, some not. The date is contested; some scholars place it early, some late. Worth reading for the sayings tradition it preserves, worth treating cautiously for the dating it implies.

Outside sources

Josephus, The Jewish War and *Antiquities of the Jews* — The best outside source for the period. Josephus writes as a Jewish aristocrat who ended up working for Rome, and his account of the late first century is indispensable and complicated. The passages on John the Baptist, James the brother of Jesus, and the situation in Judea are the ones the historian returns to. Read in a good annotated edition; don't take him second-hand.

Tacitus, Annals 15.44 — A single passage, in a work about the emperors Nero and Tiberius. Tacitus mentions that Christus was executed by Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius, and that the movement spread from Judea to Rome. Sparse but significant: Roman testimony, hostile, and independent of the Christian tradition.

Philo, *Legatio ad Gaium* — A letter about Pilate that describes him as corrupt, violent, and contemptuous of Jewish sensibilities. Not the Pilate of the Gospels' softening. Philo is writing about the same Pilate the historian needs to know.

Pliny the Younger, letter to Trajan (c. 112 CE) — A letter from a Roman governor in Bithynia asking how to treat Christians. Evidence for the spread of the movement and the shape of early Christian practice, not for Jesus' life. Useful for understanding what the movement had become within a generation of the crucifixion.

Secondary works

The historians below are not in order of importance — that order does not exist — but in rough order of what they do for the reader of this book. Sanders is the best starting point; Meier is the reference work to have on hand; Allison is the book that teaches the reader how to think about uncertainty honestly.

The starting points

E. P. Sanders, *The Historical Figure of Jesus* — The best single starting point. Sanders lays out what can be said with confidence, what can be said with less confidence, and what cannot be said, and he does it in a way that is accessible without being loose. The book that most directly shaped the stance of this one.

Geza Vermes, *Jesus the Jew* — The Jewish Galilean holy man frame. Vermes insisted on reading Jesus inside Jewish categories and against the Jewish landscape, long before that became a broadly shared assumption. The book that taught a generation to stop reading Jesus as if Judaism were not the air he breathed.

The serious reconstructions

John P. Meier, *A Marginal Jew* — Exhaustive. A multi-volume work that reads like reference rather than like a continuous argument, but the detail is unmatched. Use it to check a question, not to read cover to cover. The most careful historian working in the tradition.

Dale Allison, *Constructing Jesus* — The most intellectually honest book on what memory can and cannot deliver. Allison takes the problem of reconstruction seriously — not as a methodological inconvenience to be overcome, but as a limit to be lived within. Essential for the book's voice of uncertainty.

Paula Fredriksen, *Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews* — The best account of the Passover politics and why Pilate acted. Fredriksen reads the crucifixion as a political act in a city at festival, and she reads Pilate as the prefect Josephus and Philo describe, not as the reluctant official of the Gospels. Essential for Part Five.

Amy-Jill Levine, *The Misunderstood Jew* — The corrective on anti-Jewish reading habits. Levine shows, passage by passage, where two millennia of retelling have baked in assumptions that the historian cannot live with. Read early; it will change your sentences. The book treats the Pharisees as a Jewish movement in internal debate, not as the villains of a morality play.

The counterweights

N. T. Wright, *Jesus and the Victory of God* — The confessional-but-serious counterweight. Wright reads the Judaism of the period and the apocalyptic expectation of Jesus with real seriousness, and he argues for a reconstruction that is more confident about what Jesus thought he was doing than the prevailing scholarship. Read him as a challenge to the uncertainty, and decide whether the challenge holds.

John Dominic Crossan, *The Historical Jesus* — The peasant-Cynic reading. Crossan reads Jesus as a peasant wisdom teacher in the tradition of Mediterranean Cynicism, and the book is as much about method as about Jesus. The reader won't buy all of it; include it anyway, because the peasant context is right and the argument about social location matters.

The clear voices

Bart Ehrman, *Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium* — Clear on the end-times frame. Ehrman reads Jesus as an apocalyptist who expected God to act soon, and he does not flinch from the implications. The book that most directly handles the finding in chapter 19.

Helen Bond, The Historical Jesus: A Guide for the Perplexed and *Pontius Pilate* — Bond's guide is a good second read after Sanders; her work on Pilate is the historian's Pilate, stripped of the Gospel softening and read against Philo and Josephus.

Richard Bauckham, *Jesus and the Eyewitnesses* — The case for early testimony. Bauckham argues that the Gospels are closer to the events and to living memory than the conventional dating allows. The argument is contested, but it is serious and it deserves engagement, not dismissal.

James Dunn, *Jesus Remembered* — Oral tradition done properly. Dunn works through the mechanisms by which the Jesus tradition could have been preserved in oral form across the decades before the Gospels, and the result is a serious account of the interval between Jesus' life and the written sources.

The indispensable specialist

Martin Hengel, *Crucifixion* — Short, brutal, indispensable for Part Five. Hengel's book is a detailed study of the method, what it was for, what it did to a body, how long it took, who watched. It does not let the reader look away. The chapter on the cross stands on this book's ground.

Archaeology and context

Jodi Magness, *The Archaeology of the Holy Land* — The readable archaeological survey of the period. Magness writes archaeology for the reader who wants ground under their feet, and the book is useful for the chapters on Jerusalem, the Temple, and the material world of the region.

Mark Chancey on Galilee — Chancey's work on Galilee in the late Second Temple period is the specialist's specialist, and it returns repeatedly to the mixed population, the Hellenistic and Roman presence, and the building boom that made a tektōn's life possible.

Sean Freyne, *Jesus, a Jewish Galilean* — The specialist study of Galilee and the Jesus movement in its Galilean setting. Freyne's work on the geography, the economy, and the social structure of the region is the ground the book stands on for chapters 1 through 10.

The editions

Josephus in a good annotated edition — The Loeb Classical Library editions are the standard. Read him yourself; don't take him second-hand. The annotations matter — Josephus is a writer who needs them.

The New Testament in a good annotated translation — The translator's notes are part of the text for the reader of this book. Pick an edition that tells you what the Greek says and what it might mean, and treat the translation as a decision, not a fact.

This is a starting list, not a closing argument. The historian who reads these will find more in their footnotes than in their conclusions, and that is where the real work lives.

Nine image plates were planned for this book, tracing the geography of Jesus's life from the villages of Galilee to the Temple courts of Jerusalem. Eight of the nine are reproduced below, each sourced from a public-domain or Creative-Commons-licensed original identified on Wikimedia Commons, with full credit and licence. Figures 7 and 9 share a single source plan, noted where it happens.

Figure 1: Lower Galilee in the Roman period, with Nazareth on its ridge and Sepphoris — Herod Antipas's rebuilt capital — four miles to the north, and the Sea of Galilee visible to the east. A tektōn from Nazareth could walk to work in Sepphoris and back in a day. From "Galilee & Surrounding District (50–70 A.D.)," Edward Stanford Ltd., London, in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Josephus, The Jewish War, vol. II (1927). (Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Figure 2: Nazareth, Sepphoris (labelled by its later name Diocaesarea), and Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, showing the short distances between the village and the two building-boom cities that employed Galilean tektōnes like Joseph and Jesus. From William R. Shepherd, The Historical Atlas (1923). (Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Figure 3: The Sea of Galilee, surveyed by Lieutenants C. W. Anderson and Horatio Kitchener for the Palestine Exploration Fund's Survey of Western Palestine. The map shows the lakeside villages of the western shore — Magdala ("El Mejdel"), Tiberias — and, across the water, the Decapolis cities of Gadara and Gamala: the lake as the highway around which Jesus's Galilean ministry moved. (Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — National Library of Israel, Eran Laor Cartographic Collection.)

Figure 4: The synagogue ruins at Capernaum. The visible white limestone building is a later, Byzantine-period reconstruction; excavation has found a basalt synagogue of the right first-century date beneath it, along with a nearby house of the same period that later tradition identified as the house of Peter. Neither identification is archaeologically provable — the site is consistent with the Gospel tradition, not proof of it. Photograph by David Shankbone. (Image: David Shankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Figure 5: Palestine in the time of Christ, showing the geography of the journey south — from Galilee down through the Jordan Valley to Jericho, then up into the hill country to Jerusalem. Inset: Jerusalem and its immediate vicinity. From Barton W. Johnson, The People's New Testament (1891). (Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Figure 6: A plan of Jerusalem and its environs at the time of Jesus, by the French cartographer Auguste Henri Dufour (1798–1865), showing the city's quarters (Bezetha, Acra, Sion, Ophel), the Temple platform, the walls, and the Kidron valley and Mount of Olives to the east — with Gethsemane, Bethphage, and Bethany marked along the pilgrim approach. (Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — National Library of Israel, Eran Laor Cartographic Collection.)

Figure 7: A plan of Herod's Temple and its courts, showing the sanctuary and inner courts at the centre and the Court of the Gentiles — the outer court, the only part of the Temple precinct open to non-Jews — surrounding it, with the Royal Porch (Solomon's Porch) along the southern end. This is a scholarly reconstruction, not a surviving ancient plan — no first-century architectural drawing of the Temple survives. From the Dictionary of the Bible (1909), reprinted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1911). (Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Figure 8: A reconstruction of Jerusalem in the time of Herod, viewed from the east — the vantage of a pilgrim descending the Mount of Olives, crossing the Kidron valley, and climbing into the city. The Temple platform dominates the skyline. This is an artist's reconstruction rather than an excavation plan, useful for the sense of approach and scale it conveys rather than as an architectural record. Published by MacCalla & Co., Philadelphia. (Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — National Library of Israel, Eran Laor Cartographic Collection.)

Figure 9: The Court of the Gentiles, the great outer court of Herod's Temple, where pilgrims changed money into Temple currency and bought sacrificial animals — and where Jesus, according to the Gospels, overturned the tables. This is the same plan as Figure 7 (a second, distinct plan of the Temple courts illustrating specifically the money-changers' area could not be located in the public domain); it is repeated here because it is the clearest surviving reconstruction of the court where the action described in this chapter took place. (Image: Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons — from the Dictionary of the Bible, 1909, reprinted in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911.)