Historical Context of 1st Century Israel

I am reading "The New Testament and The People of God" by N.T. Wright. It's been very helpful to read the NT in light of the context in which it was lived out and written. I happened across this summary which seems to accurately describe what I've read so far:

"The Jews had, of course, returned to the land of Israel after the exile. But nowhere in all second-temple Jewish literature do we have the slightest suggestion that the great promises and prophecies of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the rest – including those of Deuteronomy 30, which were important for Paul – had been fulfilled. Israel had not been restored to her proper position; she was not ruler in her own land; the Temple was not properly rebuilt; YHWH had not returned to dwell in the midst of his people; justice and peace were not yet established in Israel, let alone in the rest of the world. The ‘post-exilic’ prophets such as Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi indicate pretty forcibly that things are still in poor shape; Israel is not yet all she should be, and a further great act of YHWH will be necessary. Qumran proves the point exactly: the self-understanding evident in (e.g.) CD is precisely that of people who see themselves as the advance guard of the real return from exile, which means that everybody else is still in exile, and that they are the first, secret ‘returnees’, who will be vindicated as such when YHWH finally acts. "

"Few will doubt, in fact, that the great majority of Jews in Jesus’ day were looking for a major action of their god within history to liberate his people. Even those who want to minimize this have to allow for a huge groundswell of this belief bursting out in the mid-60s of the first century. The point here is that, in thinking about and longing for this event, they did not merely draw upon patterns and types, such as the Exodus, culled at random, allegorically or typologically, from a past conceived as a scattered bunch of unconnected events. Rather, they saw themselves in sequence with, and continuing, Israel’s whole past story, waiting for that story to reach its promised goal. They were not living in an ahistorical mode, in which the only question of weight were timeless salvation or ethics, with such issues being ‘illustrated’ by ideas taken in a fairly random fashion from her distant past. Rather, they read that past not least as a story; as a story which was continuing, and in which they themselves were characters; as a story with an ending, which can variously be characterized as ‘return from exile’; ‘return of YHWH to Zion’; ‘salvation’; ‘forgiveness of sins’; ‘new covenant’; ‘new exodus’; and perhaps even, for some at least, ‘new creation’ and ‘resurrection’. "

Sadly, that last bolded statement is how many of us have been taught to read the New Testament....

I'll post some more later...for you light readers...