One theory on the formation of the Essenes suggested the movement was founded by a Jewish high priest, dubbed by the Essenes the Teacher of Righteousness, whose office had been usurped by Jonathan ( of priestly but not Zadokite lineage ), labeled the " man of lies " or " false priest ".

In fact, “ Luke perceives himself to be a Jew .” Finally, Rebecca Denova concludes her book with these words: “ Luke-Acts, we may conclude on the basis of a narrative-critical reading, was written by a Jew to persuade other Jews that Jesus of Nazareth was the messiah of Scripture and that the words of the prophets concerning ‘ restoration ’ have been ‘ fulfilled .’” Finally it should be noted that Strelan in 2008 not only concluded that Theophilus was Jewish but also that Luke was a priest.

In Christian use, pontifex appears in the Vulgate translation of the New Testament to indicate the Jewish high priest ( in the original, ἀρχιερεύς ).

The word " priest " is ultimately from Greek, via Latin presbyter, the term for " elder ", especially elders of Jewish or Christian communities in Late Antiquity.

In a Jewish tradition, still continuing today, on the first birth-day of a first-born son, the parents pay the price of five pure-silver coins to a Kohen ( priest ).

** Mattathias, father of Judas Maccabaeus, Jewish priest from Modi ' in, near Jerusalem, who has started and briefly led a rebellion by the Jews in Judea against the Seleucid kingdom of Syria

** Judas Maccabeus, third son of the Jewish priest Mattathias, who has led the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid Empire until his death

Eusebius is also said to have referred to Hefa as Caiaphas civitas, and Benjamin of Tudela, the 12th century Jewish traveller and chronicler, is said to have attributed the city's founding to Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest at the time of Jesus.

* With the Seleucid victory in Judea over the Maccabees, Alcimus is re-established as the Jewish high priest and a strong force is left in Jerusalem to support him.

* In response to the Jewish high priest, Alcimus ', request for assistance, the Seleucid general Bacchides leads an army into Judea with the intent of reconquering this now independent kingdom.

* Judas Maccabeus, third son of the Jewish priest Mattathias, who has led the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid Empire until his death

* Mattathias, father of Judas Maccabaeus, Jewish priest from Modi ' in, near Jerusalem, who has started and briefly led a rebellion by the Jews in Judea against the Seleucid kingdom of Syria

* Since the reign of the Seleucid king, Antiochus III, the Jewish inhabitants of Judea enjoy extensive autonomy under their high priest.

Artaxerxes (, ) commissioned Ezra, a Jewish priest ( kohen ) and scribe, by means of a letter of decree ( see Cyrus's edict ), to take charge of the ecclesiastical and civil affairs of the Jewish nation.

The Hebrew noun kohen is most often translated as " priest ", whether Jewish or pagan, such as the priests of Baal or Dagon, though Christian priests are referred to in Hebrew by the term komer ( Hebrew כומר ).

The status of priest kohen was conferred on Aaron, the brother of Moses, and his sons as an everlasting covenant During the 40 years of wandering in the wilderness and until the Holy Temple was built in Jerusalem, the priests performed their priestly service in the portable Tabernacle (,,,) Their duties involved offering the daily and Jewish holiday sacrifices, and blessing the people in a Priestly Blessing, later also known as Nesiat Kapayim (" Raising of the hands ").

Jeremiah was a kohen ( Jewish priest ) from a landowning family.

* The Jewish priest Ezra assembles and leads a band of approximately 5, 000 Jews from Babylon to Jerusalem.

It is not clear if the word Pontifex, the word used in Latin for the Jewish high priest, as in and, was commonly used by early 3rd-century Christianity, as it was later, to denote a bishop.

Examples include the social climber in George Stevens's A Place in the Sun, the anguished Catholic priest in Hitchcock's I Confess, the doomed regular soldier Robert E. Lee Prewitt in Fred Zinnemann's From Here to Eternity, and the Jewish GI bullied by antisemites in Edward Dmytryk's The Young Lions.

The unexpected appearance of the Samaritan led Joseph Halévy to suggest that the parable originally involved " a priest, a Levite, and an Israelite ," in line with contemporary Jewish stories, and that Luke changed the parable to be more familiar to a gentile audience.

* The leader of the Jewish revolt against Syria rule, Mattathias, dies and his third son, Judas, assumes leadership of the revolt in accordance with the deathbed disposition of his father.

In the narrative of I Maccabees, after Antiochus issued his decrees forbidding Jewish religious practice, a rural Jewish priest from Modiin, Mattathias the Hasmonean, sparked the revolt against the Seleucid Empire by refusing to worship the Greek gods.

After Mattathias ' death about one year later in 166 BCE, his son Judas Maccabee led an army of Jewish dissidents to victory over the Seleucid dynasty in guerrilla warfare, which at first was directed against Hellenizing Jews, of whom there were many.

The books are written from the point of view that the salvation of the Jewish people in a crisis which came from God through the family of Mattathias, particularly his sons Judas Maccabeus, Jonathan Apphus, and Simon Thassi, and his grandson John Hyrcanus.

Mattathias ' sons Judah ( Yehuda ), Jonathan ( Yonoson / Yonatan ), and Simon ( Shimon ) began a military campaign, initially with disastrous results: one thousand Jewish men, women, and children were killed by Seleucid troops because they refused to fight, even in self-defense, on the Sabbath.

The book covers the whole of the revolt, from 175 to 134 BC, highlighting how the salvation of the Jewish people in this crisis came through Mattathias ' family, particularly his sons, Judas Maccabeus, Jonathan Maccabaeus, and Simon Maccabaeus, and Simon's son, John Hyrcanus.

Mattathias calls upon people loyal to the traditions of Israel to oppose the invaders and the Jewish Hellenizers, and his three sons begin a military campaign against them.

Judah Maccabee ( or Judas Maccabeus, also spelled Machabeus, or Maccabaeus, Hebrew: יהודה המכבי, Y ' hudhah HamMakabi, Judah the Hammer ) was a Kohen and a son of the Jewish priest Mattathias.

Judah was the third son ( Josephus ) of Mattathias the Hasmonean, a Jewish priest from the village of Modiin.

In 167 BCE Mattathias, together with his sons Judah, Eleazar, Simon, John, and Jonathan, started a revolt against the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who since 175 BCE had issued decrees that forbade Jewish religious practices.

* Degree of Loyalty-In the Degree of Loyalty, the dramatic work revolved around the following characters: Apelles, Mattathias, Matthathias's four sons, Judas, Soldiers, while the candidate, Sentinel, and a Knight took the parts of Jewish peasants.

In keeping with the Maccabee legend of the revolt at Modin the patriarch Mattathias remained steadfast to the Jewish religion when ordered to make sacrifice to Roman gods and at great personal risk stops an apostate Jew from offering sacrifice to false gods.

Based on Singer's short story " Yentl the Yeshiva Boy ," it centers on a young girl who defies tradition by discussing and debating Jewish law and theology with her rabbi father.

* Professor defies Jewish holiday closing, Toronto Star, October 2, 2008.

Ezra is written to fit a schematic pattern in which the God of Israel inspires a king of Persia to commission a leader from the Jewish community to carry out a mission ; three successive leaders carry out three such missions, the first rebuilding the Temple, the second purifying the Jewish community, and the third sealing of the holy city itself behind a wall.

The visions describe the national crisis that occurred under Antiochus IV Epiphanes, a Seleucid king who attempted to introduce Hellenistic religious practices, including the worship of idols, into the temple and the Jewish religion more generally, sparking outrage from Biblical authors.

The fragments describe a Babylonian king ( spelled N-b-n-y ) who is afflicted by God with an " evil disease " for a period of seven years ; he is cured and his sins forgiven after the intervention of a Jewish exile who is described as a " diviner "; he issues a written proclamation in praise of the Most High God, and speaks in the first person.

Around 523, the Jewish king Dhu Nuwas came to power in Yemen and, announcing that he would kill all the Christians, attacked an Aksumite garrison at Zafar, burning the city's churches.

According to the Bible, she was a Jewish queen of the Persian king Ahasuerus.

That night, during the banquet, Esther told the king of Haman's plan to massacre all Jews in the Persian Empire, and acknowledged her own Jewish ethnicity.

Cyrus the Great, the Persian king, refounded the city one mile southeast of its historic site at the mound of Tell es-Sultan and returned the Jewish exiles after conquering Babylon in 539 BCE.

* 1 Nisan: " new year " for counting months and major festivals and for calculating the years of the reign of a Jewish king

In the Talmudic era the title mashiach or מלך המשיח, ( in the Tiberian vocalization pronounced ), literally meaning " the anointed King ", is referred to the human Jewish leader and king who will redeem Israel in the end of days and who will usher in a messianic era of peace and prosperity for both the living and the deceased.

The Jews, who held a vulnerable position in medieval England, protected only by the king, were subject to huge taxes ; £ 44, 000 was extracted from the community by the tallage of 1210 ; much of it was passed on to the Christian debtors of Jewish moneylenders.

It concludes that the closest parallels with Isaiah's description of the king of Babylon as a fallen morning star cast down from heaven are to be found not in any lost Canaanite and other myths but in traditional ideas of the Jewish people themselves, echoed in the Biblical account of the fall of Adam and Eve, cast out of God's presence for wishing to be as God, and the picture in of the " gods " and " sons of the Most High " destined to die and fall.

Jewish exegesis of Isaiah 14: 12 – 15 took a more humanistic approach by identifying the king of Babylon as Nebuchadnezzar II.

The king, who drew Jewish settlers from across Europe to his country, built several castles along western border of Lesser Poland, with the most notable ones in Skawina, Pieskowa Skała, Będzin, Lanckorona, Olkusz, Lelów, Bobolice, Krzepice, Ogrodzieniec, Ojców, Olsztyn, Bobolice, Mirów ( see also Eagle Nests Trail ).

However, messiahs were not exclusively Jewish kings, and the Hebrew Bible refers to Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, as a messiah.

Following the death of Simon bar Kokhba, a messiah came to be a Jewish king who would rule at the end of history.

It is used throughout the Hebrew Bible in reference to a wide variety of individuals and objects ; for example, a Jewish king, Jewish priests, and prophets, the Jewish Temple and its utensils, unleavened bread, and a non-Jewish king ( Cyrus king of Persia ).