Every teaching spoken by Yeshua in A.D. 30 is taken directly from the record of his teachings, referenced in the appendix below. How his teachings were understood by various characters in the story is a matter of their interpretation.
In addition, though I have fictionalized Maviah’s journey, none of what otherwise occurs in A.D. 30 contradicts well-supported historical records of what happened within the scope of this novel. Among many others, these events include the suppression of the rebellion in Sepphoris by Varus and Aretas’s army of Bedu (though his dagger is my addition); Herod’s divorce of Aretas’s daughter, Phasa; the imprisonment of John the Baptist following Herod’s marriage to Herodias; and the events surrounding Yeshua’s ministry, including his referenced meeting with Nicodemus, the calming of the storm, the healing of the woman with the issue of blood, and his teachings in the hills of Capernaum and Bethsaida.
Scholars agree that Yeshua would have repeated his teachings many times throughout his ministry from beginning to end, yet I have focused primarily on those teachings recorded early in the gospels, because his emphasis shifted toward the end of his life, as we shall see in A.D. 33.
Please note that there is little agreement in the scholarly community regarding specific dates for certain events—whole books have been written to argue various points of view. But in the end, the lack of consensus about the specific timing of some events has little bearing on the significance of those events. I contend that when an event occurred is not nearly as important as the fact that it did. I have thus chosen a scholarly calendar that best facilitates Maviah’s story.
And this is only the beginning…