Aslan's thesis deals with this question.....if Jesus was a revolutionary, a rebel against Roman/secular rule....why would the writers of the Gospels...alter the nature of His message?
Here is his answer:
6."Then, in 70 C.E., the Romans returned. ....
.... the soldiers breached the city walls and unleashed
an orgy of violence upon its residents. They butchered everyone in their path, heaping corpses on the Temple Mount.
A river of blood flowed down the cobblestone streets. When the massacre was complete, the soldiers set fire to the Temple of God. The fires spread beyond the Temple Mount, engulfing Jerusalem’s meadows, the farms, the olive trees. Everything burned.
So
complete was the devastation wrought upon the holy city that Josephus writes there was nothing left to prove Jerusalem had ever been inhabited.
Tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. The rest were marched out of the city in chains.
7. The spiritual trauma faced by the Jews in the wake of that catastrophic event is hard to imagine. Exiled from the land promised them by God, forced to live as outcasts among the pagans of the Roman Empire
, the rabbis of the second century gradually and deliberately divorced Judaism from the radical messianic nationalism that had launched the ill-fated war with Rome. The Torah replaced the Temple in the center of Jewish life, and rabbinic Judaism emerged."
"Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,"
byReza Aslan
The devastation was so great that the elites could not allow another rebellion against Rome.
While the Jews made up a tenth of the Roman empire....they were no match for the Roman forces.
Jews pretty much destroyed themselves with a civil war, then Titus stepped in, and also the Jews wanted Jesus dead, not Rome but they did it to appease the Jews. This is also all in Josephus about the war..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicarii
Victims of the Sicarii included Jonathan the High Priest, although it is possible that his murder was orchestrated by the Roman governor
Antonius Felix. Some murders were met with severe retaliation by the Romans on the entire Jewish population of the country. On some occasions, the Sicarii could be bribed to spare their intended victims. Once,
Josephus relates, after kidnapping the secretary of Eleazar, governor of the Temple precincts, they agreed to release him in exchange for the release of ten of their captured
assassins.
At the beginning of the
First Jewish–Roman War, the Sicarii, and (possibly) Zealot helpers (Josephus differentiated between the two but did not explain the main differences in depth),
gained access to Jerusalem and committed a series of atrocities in order to force the population to war. In one account, given in the Talmud, they destroyed the city's food supply so that the people would be forced to fight against the Roman siege instead of negotiating peace. Their leaders, including
Menahem ben Yehuda and
Eleazar ben Ya'ir, were important figures in the war, and the group fought in many battles against the Romans as soldiers. Together with a small group of followers, Menahem made his way to the fortress of
Masada, took over a Roman garrison and slaughtered all 700 soldiers there. They also took over another fortress called Antonia and overpowered the troops of Agrippa II. He also trained them to conduct various guerrilla operations on Roman convoys and legions stationed around Judea.
[5]
Josephus also wrote that the Sicarii (Jews)raided nearby Jewish villages including Ein Gedi, where they massacred 700 women and children.[7][8][9][10]
The Zealots, Sicarii and other prominent revolutionaries finally joined forces to attack and successfully liberate Jerusalem in 66 AD,[11] where they took control of the Temple in Jerusalem, executing anyone who tried to usurp their power. The local populace grew tired of their control and launched a series of sieges and raids to remove the radical factions. The radicals eventually silenced the uprising and Jerusalem stayed in their hands for the duration of the war.
[12] The Romans finally came to take back the city, and they led counter-attacks and sieges to starve the rebels inside. The rebels held for a considerable amount of time, but the constant bickering and the lack of leadership led the groups to disintegrate.
[11] The leader of the Sicarii, Menahem, was murdered by rival factions during an altercation. Soon, the Romans stepped in and finally destroyed the whole city in 70 AD.
