It is of course strange, from our much later perspective, that the two stories, the biblical and Jewish one on the one hand and the Roman one on the other, developed in unintended parallel. The Jewish texts go back long before the rise of Rome; and the Roman texts were certainly not borrowing ideas from Isaiah or the Psalms. However, many Jews of Paul’s day, calculating the future on the basis of ‘seventy weeks of years’ in Daniel 9.24, concluded that the new age was about to dawn in what we call the first century.1 And that, for quite different reasons, was the very moment when the Roman
...more
