The way of imagination

  “Where & when are we?”      As Episode 1 of Season 1 begins, we find ourselves in the village of Capernaum, on the western shores of the Lake of Galilee, located in northern Palestine.   The historical moment is the early decades of the first century A.D.   By this time, Palestine had been the homeland of the Jews for over a millennium and had been occupied by the Romans for about a century.   The Roman Empire dominated the political and economic systems of the entire Mediterranean world.   The region around the eastern Mediterranean had been “Hellenized” by Alexander the Great in the 4 th century B.C., and the Romans took advantage of the unifying effect of Greek culture throughout this area.   The Jews were engaged in a constant struggle to resist the pressure to assimilate to Hellenistic culture and to maintain their distinct cultural and religious identity.      The context of 1 st -century Galilee is of course vastly different in many ways from that of 21 st -century Mo