It is certain that Peter's attachment to Jesus, at least in the beginning, was largely based on the persuasion that Jesus would indeed restore the kingdom of Israel and that Peter and the other Apostles would be leaders in the new era. Even after the resurrection of Jesus, Peter and the others asked him when and how he would restore the kingdom of Israel. Indeed, we find more than once in the Gospels that the followers of Jesus, headed by Peter, attempted to force Jesus to accept the role of king. was one of tension over the universal presence of the Roman conqueror and foreboding born of a strictly religious persuasion that the arrival of the Jewish Messiah was imminent as the only possible solution for Israel's difficulties. The general atmosphere in Palestine when Peter reached his adult life in the mid-20s of the 1st century A.D. Unrefined and undeveloped ideas about the Messiah and about the salvation of Israel easily took the form of political movements, extremist organizations, and a readiness to disassociate oneself from the authoritarian structure of southern Judaism. Furthermore, in the northern parts of Palestine, removed from proximate influence of Jerusalem, more revolutionary ideas easily took hold. Recent researches into the daily life of the ordinary people in Palestine paint a fairly clear picture of Peter's social conditions: extreme poverty, a very fideistic approach to religion, a reliance on superstition, and an extreme dependence on the vagaries of natural elements. In addition, Peter was a Galilean and therefore shared the spirit of independence and opposition to Jerusalem which was traditional in that northern province. This term was used in a derogatory fashion to describe those who were ignorant of the niceties and deeper values of Judaism and the Jewish way of life. As far as can be judged, Peter was a member of the ordinary people of Palestine, who were normally considered by educated Jewish classes to belong to Am harez, the people of the land.