His thinking on New Testament themes grew out of "The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church" (1951). His most celebrated position is the controversial one, that a political Jesus was a revolutionary figure, influenced in that by the Zealots; this he argued in the 1967 book "Jesus and the Zealots: A Study of the Political Factor in Primitive Christianity". "The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth" (1968) raises again, amongst other matters, the question of how the Fall of the Temple in 70 CE shaped the emerging Christian faith, and in particular the "Gospel of Mark".