But at the turn of the first millennium C.E., in the turbulent landscape of first-century Palestine,* one group of religious nationalists pushed the biblical doctrine of cosmic war to its ghastly extreme. They were known as the Zealots. The Zealots were not a formal religious group or political party. They were a loosely affiliated, heterogeneous movement of Jewish revolutionaries, centered in the Galilee—long a hotbed of radicals and rabble-rousers—who shared contempt for the Roman occupation of Jerusalem and a fierce opposition to the Temple authorities. Some Zealots were members of the
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