Jesus has just gotten two new disciples and those new disciples then go to recruit others to the Jesus-movement.

One of the prospective disciples asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nazareth sat in the heart of Galilee, a region populated by Jews and Gentiles from several ethnicities. Positively, it could be said that it was a diverse region. The Jewish communities, at most, constituted about 60 percent of the Galilean populace. Jewish persons in Judea looked down on their kinsmen in Galilee. Judea was over 90 percent Jewish. Those in Judea paid the temple tax, kept the rituals more rigorously, and were less likely to intermarry. On the other hand, Galilean Jews were less likely to pay the temple tax, more lax in regard to ritualistic traditions, and more likely to intermarry. Their Judean cousins saw Galilean Jews as less pure, if not impure.

The problem was that social factors were immensely important in Roman society. For example, Roman citizens, wherever they might reside in the Empire, had status that non-Roman citizens did not have. One’s ethnicity, nationality, ...