INTRODUCTION The man remembered as Vespasian has long been presented as a hard-driven outsider of modest background – a provincial who clawed his way upward through military competence and talent for survival, eventually restoring order to an empire torn apart by revolts in Judea and civil war. Yet the surviving evidence points in a very different direction. As Guy Edward Farquhar Chilver, Professor of Classical Studies, long ago observed, Vespasian’s revolt and rise to power

OVERVIEW This article asks a simple but controversial question: do the Synoptic Gospels follow the same sequence of events  as the account of The Jewish War ? The focus here is not on vague similarities, shared themes, or biblical imagery that everyone agrees the Gospel writers used. Instead, it looks at whether the order  in which events unfold in the Gospels repeatedly mirrors the order in which events unfold in The Jewish War , from Galilee through Jerusalem and its destru

ABSTRACT  Nazareth is famous because later Christian tradition made it famous. From a Roman historical perspective, that fame is not evidence. The question here is simply what the archaeology of the Roman period can support — and what it cannot. Some recent studies argue that first-century houses have been identified at several sites within modern Nazareth. This article takes a closer look at those claims by returning to the excavation reports and the material record itself: