Jesus was born into a world where His people were dominated and treated unjustly by the ruling authority of Rome. As such, the Jews held to the prophecies that God would send them a Deliverer. Such is why King Herod ordered the murder of all male children born around that time, causing Joseph and Mary to hide in Egypt with Jesus when He was a babe (Matthew Chapter 2).
To get a better understanding of this time period and the lives of Jewish people, look at the following excerpts from Jews and the Roman Empire and The Jewish World of Jesus:
Jews and the Roman Empire
The way the Roman Empire developed, was gradually to take over more and more territories in the eastern Mediterranean. Some of these were governed as provinces. You can imagine the Roman Empire gradually taking over more and more areas as they conquered and progressively moved to the east. North Africa, Egypt, Asia Minor, modern day Turkey, Syria. And gradually, they also conquered Judea. In the process, they set up some as provinces, and some as client kingdoms. Judea happened to be one of these client kingdoms run by its own independent, or semi-independent, King. This is the person we know as Herod the Great.
For the ordinary people of the Jewish homeland, Rome was a kind of dominant political factor. Although they might not have seen Romans on a day-to-day basis, the imposition of Roman power was certainly there. In the case of the client kingdom, Judea, Herod's rule and Herod's forces would have been the political entity. But everyone knew that Rome was the power behind the throne. Everyone knew that Rome was the source of both the wealth and also the source of some of the problems that occurred in the Jewish state. So the political reality of the day was of a dominant power overseeing the life on a day-to-day basis.
The Jewish World of Jesus
Life for the Jews under the procurators was exceedingly difficult. For example, Pontius Pilate was described by Agrippa I as unbending and severe with the stubborn, and was accused of bribery, cruelty, and countless murders. This protrait is confirmed by the Jewish historian Josephus who chronicled a number of events that provoked the Jews under Pilate and other procurators, leading to riots, beatings, and executions. The Legate of Syria eventually removed Pilate on the complaints of the Samaritans, whom he had mistreated. After the interim reign of Herod Agrippa I ended in 44 C.E., the situation under the procurators deteriorated even further. In one case, Josephus (who likes to inflate figures) says 20,000 Jews were killed in a riot prompted when a Roman soldier ridiculed some Passover pilgrims with an indecent gesture. There thus emerged within Judaism groups of revolutionaries who looked back to the militaristic Maccabees and their zeal for the Law as great heroes. These “Zealots” were already active in spirit, if not in name, in the period prior to the birth of Jesus. In 6 or 7 C.E., Judas the Galilean and a Pharisee named Zaddok attempted to arouse the people to revolt against the first Roman census. Self-styled prophets and messiahs appeared from time to time and eventually an even more radical group, the Sicarii (Latin sicarius, “dagger”), emerged to foment revolution by assassination. Clearly, the policy of the tyrannical and brutal procurators, like that of the Seleucid Hellenizer Antiochus IV over 150 years earlier, met with increasing opposition led by more revolutionary Jews; ultimately, the forces of moderation could not contain them.
