The first book to cover the myriad factors of the Jews revolt against the Romans — from its origin to its lasting consequences — and re-evaluate historical accounts.

A definitive account of the great revolt of Jews against Rome and the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple “A lucid yet terrifying account of the 'Jewish War'—the uprising of the Jews in 66 CE, and the Roman empire’s savage response, in a story that stretches from Rome to Jerusalem.”—John Ma, Columbia University This deeply researched and insightful book examines the causes, course, and historical significance of the Jews’ failed revolt against Rome from 66 to 74 CE, including the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Based on a comprehensive study of all the evidence and new statistical data, Guy Rogers argues that the Jewish rebels fought for their religious and political freedom and lost due to military mistakes. Rogers contends that while the Romans won the war, they lost the peace. When the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem Temple, they thought that they had defeated the God of Israel and eliminated Jews as a strategic threat to their rule. Instead, they ensured the Jews’ ultimate victory. After their defeat Jews turned to the written words of their God, and following those words led the Jews to recover their freedom in the promised land. The war's tragic outcome still shapes the worldview of billions of people today.

During the first and second centuries A.D., the supremacy of the Roman Empire was aggressively challenged by three Jewish rebellions. The facts surrounding the initial uprising of A.D. 66-74 have been filtered through the biased accounts of Judeao Roman historian Flavius Josephus. Primary information regarding the subsequent Diaspora Revolt (A.D. 115-117) and the Bar Kochba Rebellion (A.D. 132-135) is limited to fragmentary anecdotes emphasizing the religious implications of the two insurrections. In contrast, this analytical history focuses objectively on the military aspects of all three Judean uprisings. The events leading up to each rebellion are detailed, while the nine appendices cover such topics as the nature and number of the Jewish rebels and the factual reliability of the controversial Josephus. One appendix hypothesizes an alternative history of the war between Jerusalem and Rome.

In AD 70, after a war that had flared sporadically for four years, three Roman legions under the future Emperors Vespasian and his son Titus surrounded, laid siege to, and eventually devastated the city of Jerusalem, destroying completely the magnificent Temple which had been built by Herod only eighty years earlier. What brought about this extraordinary conflict, with its extraordinary consequences? This superb book, by one of the world’s leading scholars of the ancient Roman and Jewish worlds, narrates and explains this titanic struggle, showing why Rome’s interests were served by this policy of brutal hostility, and how the first generation of Christians first distanced themselves from its Jewish origins and then became increasingly hostile to Jews as their influence spread within the empire. The book thus also provides an exceptional and original account of the origins of anti-Semitism, whose history has had often cataclysmic reverberations down to our own time.

If you want a gripping, well-written, detailed story of insurrection against Rome, supported by splendid illustrations, start here.?The Sunday Telegraph

This book interprets Mark's gospel in light of the Roman-Jewish War of 66-70 CE. Locating the authorship of Mark's gospel in rural Galilee or southern Syria after the fall of Jerusalem and the temple, and after Vespasian's enthronement as the new emperor, Kimondo argues that Mark's first hearers--people who lived through and had knowledge of the important events of the war--may have evaluated Mark's story of Jesus as a contrast to Roman imperial values. He makes an intriguing case that Jesus' proclamation as the Messiah in the villages of Caesarea Philippi set up a deliberate contrast between Jesus's teaching and Vespasian's proclamation of himself as the world's divine ruler. He suggests that Mark's hearers may have interpreted Jesus' liberative campaign in Galilee as a deliberate contrast to Vespasian's destructive military campaigns in the area. Jesus's teachings about wealth, power, and status while on the way to Jerusalem may have been heard as contrasts to Roman imperial values; hence, the entire story of Jesus may have been interpreted an anti-imperial narrative.

While conquering the world, Rome encountered a great number of peoples around the Mediterranean. We know very little about how these populations viewed their conquerors. The Jews were the only people to offer a comprehensive view of Rome over a great span of time. They expressed it in a rich corpus of Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic sources, reflecting the evolution of the relations between Jews and Romans: from alliance and friendship to tensions and revolt, culminating for the Jews in temporary compliance to foreign domination together with hopeful expectations for redemption. The image of Rome which emerges from apocryphal, Talmudic and Midrashic literature durably shaped the Jewish political, moral and eschatological vision of the world and history.