Next came the Court of Women, followed by the Court of Israelites, the Court of the Priests and, above all, the massive sacrificial altar. The Temple's innermost shrine, featuring the holy room that the Bible said had been occupied by the Ark of the Covenant in Solomon's Temple, loomed 80 ft. high, a glistening tower.

The scene must have been spectacular. Whether that spectacle is understood as deeply felt or empty depends on later interpretation. "The place was as vast as a small city. There were literally thousands of priests, attendants, temple soldiers and minions," writes historian Paul Johnson. "Dignity was quite lost amid the smoke of the pyres, the bellows of terrified beasts, the sluices of blood, the abattoir stench, the unconcealed and unconcealable machinery of tribal religion inflated by modern wealth to an industrial scale."

Bruce Chilton, a religion professor at Bard College whose book "Rabbi Jesus" was published in October, says recent scholarship finds a great deal more meaning and joy in the proceedings. Pilgrimages were festive occasions, with families or friends traveling together and camping overnight in the hills around the city and singing cheerful sacred songs outside the Temple. Although parts of the sacrifice would be immolated for the Lord or consumed by the priests, others would be cooked and shared by the pilgrims, who ate little meat the rest of the year. "Not only would they offer this very scarce protein to the deity," says Chilton, "but actually share a meal of meat with the Lord of Israel. The sense was one of wealth and celebration."

Hollow or hallowed, the Temple was a formidable economic engine. Although only 2 million of the ancient world's 5 million Jews lived in the region, all were expected to pay a yearly half-shekel Temple tax. Historians have not definitively established a shekel's worth, but certainly the total earnings were great. At the three pilgrimage holidays, the economy shifted into overdrive. Jewish law required that sacrificial animals and grain offerings be "unblemished." Rather than risk spoilage along the way, most pilgrims raised the sacrificial goods at home, sold them and used the proceeds to buy fresh items in the holy city, supporting farmers for miles around.

An excavation under what is now the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City reveals the way the town's élite lived. Two-story houses, built around stone-paved inner courts, had separate baths for regular and ritual cleansing. Floors boasted fine mosaics; on the walls were frescoes or trompe l'oeil stucco that mimicked masonry. Archaeologists have uncovered finely crafted glass goblets and delicate perfume flasks. Experts are divided as to whether such prosperity was shared. Says Reich: "There weren't any real poor people in Jerusalem then. There were the rich and the less rich." Argues Fabian Udoh, professor of liberal studies at Notre Dame University: "The high priests, the aristocrats and the administrators would have been very, very rich, but there were also people who were very, very poor." The obvious economic tension in Jesus' preaching may reflect his experience either in Jerusalem or in Galilee.

Those in the middle, the craftsmen (like Jesus) and small businessmen and jewelers and tax collectors, would have got their education at home and at their local synagogue. (The wealthy would have hired tutors for their children, in the Greek style.) Women married in their early teens and would generally undergo seven or eight pregnancies in hopes of having three or four surviving children. They often managed the household and exerted considerable influence in the synagogue. The family would have observed religious laws regarding food and ritual purity, although many aspects of Jewish law were not formalized until later.

Jerusalem was a monoculture, comparable to Washington or Redmond, Wash. (It remains so today, although it is now tourism rather than religion that is the city's dominant business.) Unlike many company towns, however, the city in Jesus' time had a cosmopolitan feel. Its material needs drew caravans from Samaria, Syria, Egypt, Nabatea, Arabia and Persia. Two-thirds of its population were Jews (roughly the same percentage as today), practicing a religion that counted millions of adherents in the Roman Empire and a large group of "God fearers," Gentiles who observed some key precepts without full conversion. At the same time, the city was in its 15th generation of Greco-Roman influence (since the conquests of Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.). Parents gave their children Greek names; intellectuals were conversant in classical philosophy. Greek had become along with Hebrew and Aramaic one of the area's main languages, and one of the most commonly used versions of the Torah was in Greek. (Jesus presumably spoke all three languages.) The interaction of Jewish and classical thought would lend the Christian Bible much of its strength.

This Greco-Roman "modernism" was conflicted, however. A building full of soldiers loomed over the Temple courtyards like a watchtower over a prison. As Jesus and the other pilgrims performed the most sacred rites of their faith, they would never be beyond surveillance. After Herod's initial rise, the Roman yoke was relatively light, consisting mostly of tribute. But the Jews had been independent for a century before the imperial conquest, and many hoped to return to that state. In recognition of this, above the Temple's northwestern corner stood the city's great Roman garrison, the Antonia, named after Herod's patron Mark Antony and housing between 2,000 and 3,000 soldiers.

Their presence in the city's very soul posed a painful conundrum. Beneath its prosperous surface, says Neil Asher Silberman, director of the Ename Center for Public Archaeology in Brussels, Jerusalem was actually "extremely turbulent." To some, "the beautiful Temple of Herod was a horrible betrayal of Israelite tradition. Herod obliterated the original Temple and replaced it with a Roman one." Even the most prosperous citizens must have had some major identity issues.

This led, Silberman suggests, to "movements of desperation where people harked back to a purity of faith and looked for signs of messianic redemption." The city's dominant religious authorities, skewered in the Gospels, were the Sadducees, who made up most of the Temple élite, and the Pharisees, respected for their ongoing explorations of the correct interpretation of religious law. But the city also played host to groups like the Zealots, a militant nationalist group, and the Essenes. The Essenes detested the Temple priests, lived in monastic communities and may have been authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the treasure trove of texts uncovered in the Judean desert in 1947. Josephus assigns the Essenes a membership of 4,000, only 2,000 fewer than his count of Pharisees.

And then there were radical free-lancers like Jesus. Up until 20 years ago, it was left to Jewish analysts to present Jesus' various messages-of inner purity over legal adherence; of baptism; of messianism; of the expectation of God's kingdom on earth-as growing out of various 1st century Jewish beliefs. But lately, says Chilton, more Christian scholars have scuttled the idea that Jesus' Judaism was mere "ethnic happenstance." He argues, "If you were to take the elements of Jesus' position in isolation, each would [recall] the practice of a certain type of Judaism. He is distinctive in the way in which he brings the elements together and is able to mediate the spirit of God to his followers so that they can be part of the revelation."