Why did the Romans collect taxes? To pay their army that kept their huge empire, that covered Europe, the Middle East and the northern coast of Africa, at peace. An army whose legionnaires came from all corners of Europe … And for those legionnaires, the army was their family. Those Roman legionnaires, in Jesus’s time, may have found keeping the peace in Israel a little irritating: the Jews tended to be argumentative. They were a ‘stiff necked’ people … [To read more, click on title]