From complete obscurity Jesus suddenly came to public attention in the late 20s of the first century, when he was around thirty years old. Virtually everything we know about him as a figure of history is crammed into a short space of time; it’s not easy to tell if it lasted one, two, or three years, but pretty certainly it wasn’t any longer. He was then picked up by the authorities in Jerusalem and, after some kind of trial or trials, executed on the charge of being a would-be rebel leader, a “king of the Jews.” Like many thousands of young Jews in that period, he died by crucifixion, a
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