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The question implies that Jesus would be a citizen of the United States. This might be the result of arrogance, of an unshakable belief that God would make his only son an American, or simply of forgetting that there is a world outside North America (which is the most likely case).

The four Gospels contain all the information that their authors considered important about the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth, known as the Christ, or Messiah. A lot more can be, and has been, extrapolated by scholars, speculators and screenwriters. Leaving out the less reasonable and more fanciful extrapolations, we are left with a concise but comprehensive picture of the man.

He lived in a time when the "holy land", the land given to Abraham's descendants through Isaac, was ruled by gentiles. This was not unusual. Jews ruled themselves independently for about 1200 years of their (then) 2000-year history, and for much of that time they were either struggling to maintain a precarious autonomy or were protected by more powerful neighbours. By the time Jesus was born, the land formed the sub-province of Judea and was part of the province of Roman Syria. Pompey's capture of Jerusalem in 63BC had ended seventy years of hard-won independence resulting from the Maccabean war, and the cultural memory of Israel ruled by Israelites was very strong.

The dominant Jewish political factions of the time were the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Sadducees were worldly, often strongly hellenised and inclined to work with the Romans to ensure a prosperous and orderly society. They did not believe in life after the death of the body. The Pharisees were pious and their leaders were inclined to be pedantic about points of law. For the most part they adjusted to worldly reality; they spoke Greek as well as Aramaic, and appreciated the benefits of Roman administration, but they never let their Jewishness fade. They regarded the Sadducees as collaborators and the Romans as occupiers and idolaters.

There were other tensions related to politics. Collection of tax was franchised to Jews, who had a Roman quota but no official limit on how much they could collect on top of that. The religious life of the people was dominated by the Temple (Often called the Synagogue, an indication of the degree of Greek influence), as it had been for centuries, but the Temple had grown fat and lazy and corrupt. It had too much temporal power, and it was controlled by a small coterie of priestly families, mostly Sadducee.

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