There are advantages to being a stalker.

There's this one professor that I pretty much stalk. He teaches everything I like and he gives me A's. He's lucky I don't follow him home.

Anyway. I've taken probably four classes with him in which he discusses Palestine in the first century, and I've seen the series From Jesus to Christ, where I'm pretty sure he gets most of his ideas, so I could pretty much give the lecture that I'm listening to right now. This isn't a terribly bad thing- it frees me up to do very important things like contemplate the ceiling and balance my checkbook and pick at my nails. You know, academic stuff.

We're doing the four major groups of Jews in Palestine right now- Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, and zealots. (There used to be five, but we lost the scribes since last semester. Whatever, they were just hanging out in the temple, killing time.) I really like this part of the lecture. Because the Essenes are basically hippies and typing "Sadducees" or "Pharisees" just makes me want to finish, "they would not dance and they wouldn't follow me."

But my favorites are the zealots. Because they're basically the Irish of first-century Palestine. Honestly. They're all crazy and dude, the British Romans are totally jealous of our awesome potatoes Temple. They're SCARED of us. Please to have home rule independence?

Ah. I also kind of love it when Britain Rome gets fed up and puts the smackdown on the Irish Jews. I know I shouldn't. But I do.

Ooh, we're on to Holy Week now. I should probably pay attention. Pilate the Roman Thug is about to get all philosophical and what is truth? in John's gospel. Exciting.