Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (24 page)

Why would Mark have concocted such a patently fictitious scene, one that his Jewish
audience would immediately have recognized as false? The answer is simple: Mark was
not writing for a Jewish audience. Mark’s audience was in Rome, where he himself resided.
His account of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth was written mere months after
the Jewish Revolt had been crushed and Jerusalem destroyed.

Like the Jews, the early Christians struggled to make sense of the trauma of the Jewish
Revolt and its aftermath. More to the point, they had to reinterpret Jesus’s revolutionary
message and his self-identity as the kingly Son of Man in light of the fact that the
Kingdom of God they were awaiting never materialized. Scattered across the Roman Empire,
it was only natural for the gospel writers to distance themselves from the Jewish
independence movement by erasing, as much as possible, any hint of radicalism or violence,
revolution or zealotry, from the story of Jesus, and to adapt Jesus’s words and actions
to the new political situation in which they found themselves. That task was made
somewhat easier by the fact that many among Jerusalem’s Christian community seem to
have sat out the war with Rome, viewing it as a welcomed sign of the end times promised
by their messiah. According to the third-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea, a
large number of
Christians in Jerusalem fled to the other side of the Jordan River. “The people of
the church at Jerusalem,” Eusebius wrote, “in accordance with a certain oracle that
was vouchsafed by way of revelation to approved men there, had been commanded to depart
from the city before the war, and to inhabit a certain city of Peraea they called
Pella.” By most accounts, the church they left behind was demolished in 70
C.E
. and all signs of the first Christian community in Jerusalem were buried in a mound
of rubble and ash.

With the Temple in ruins and the Jewish religion made pariah, the Jews who followed
Jesus as messiah had an easy decision to make: they could either maintain their cultic
connections to their parent religion and thus share in Rome’s enmity (Rome’s enmity
toward Christians would peak much later), or they could divorce themselves from Judaism
and transform their messiah from a fierce Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic preacher
of good works whose kingdom was not of this world.

It was not only fear of Roman reprisal that drove these early Christians. With Jerusalem
despoiled, Christianity was no longer a tiny Jewish sect centered in a predominantly
Jewish land surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Jews. After 70
C.E
., the center of the Christian movement shifted from Jewish Jerusalem to the Graeco-Roman
cities of the Mediterranean: Alexandria, Corinth, Ephesus, Damascus, Antioch, Rome.
A generation after Jesus’s crucifixion, his non-Jewish followers outnumbered and overshadowed
the Jewish ones. By the end of the first century, when the bulk of the gospels were
being written, Rome—in particular the Roman intellectual elite—had become the primary
target of Christian evangelism.

Reaching out to this particular audience required a bit of creativity on the part
of the evangelists. Not only did all traces of revolutionary zeal have to be removed
from the life of Jesus, the Romans had to be completely absolved of any responsibility
for Jesus’s death.
It was the Jews who killed the messiah
. The Romans were unwitting pawns of the high priest Caiaphas, who desperately wanted
to murder Jesus but who did not have the legal means to do so. The high priest duped
the Roman governor Pontius Pilate into carrying out a tragic miscarriage of justice.
Poor Pilate tried everything he could to save Jesus. But the Jews cried out for blood,
leaving Pilate no choice but to give in to them, to hand Jesus over to be crucified.
Indeed, the farther each gospel gets from 70
C.E
. and the destruction of Jerusalem, the more detached and outlandish Pilate’s role
in Jesus’s death becomes.

The gospel of Matthew, written in Damascus some twenty years after the Jewish Revolt,
paints a picture of Pontius Pilate at great pains to set Jesus free. Having been warned
by his wife not to have anything to do with “that innocent man,” and recognizing that
the religious authorities are handing Jesus over to him solely “out of jealousy,”
Matthew’s Pilate literally washes his hands of any blame for Jesus’s death. “I am
innocent of this man’s blood,” he tells the Jews. “See to it yourselves.”

In Matthew’s retelling of Mark, the Jews respond to Pilate “as a whole”—that is, as
an entire nation (
pas ho laos
)—that they themselves will accept the blame for Jesus’s death from this day until
the end of time: “May his blood be on our heads, and on our children!” (Matthew 27:1–26).

Luke, writing in the Greek city of Antioch at around the same time as Matthew, not
only confirms Pilate’s guiltlessness for Jesus’s death; he unexpectedly extends that
amnesty to Herod Antipas as well. Luke’s copy of Mark presents Pilate excoriating
the chief priests, the religious leaders, and the people for the accusations they
have dared to level against Jesus. “You brought this person to me as one who was turning
the people away [from the Law]. I have examined him in your presence and found him
guilty of none of the charges you have brought against him. Neither has Herod, when
I sent [Jesus] to him. He has done nothing worthy of death” (Luke 23:13–15). After
trying
three separate times
to dissuade the Jews from their bloodlust, Pilate reluctantly consents to their demands
and hands Jesus over to be crucified.

Not surprisingly, it is the last of the canonized gospels that pushes the conceit
of Pilate’s innocence—and the Jews’ guilt—to the extreme. In the gospel of John, written
in Ephesus sometime after 100
C.E
., Pilate does everything he can to save the life of this poor Jewish peasant, not
because he thinks Jesus is guiltless, but because he seems to believe that Jesus may
in fact be the “Son of God.” Nevertheless, after struggling in vain against the Jewish
authorities to set Jesus free, the ruthless prefect who commands legions of troops
and who regularly sends them into the streets to slaughter the Jews whenever they
protest any of his decisions (as he did when the Jews objected to his pilfering of
the Temple treasury to pay for Jerusalem’s aqueducts) is
forced
by the demands of the unruly crowd to give Jesus up.

As Pilate hands him over to be crucified, Jesus himself removes all doubt as to who
is truly responsible for his death: “The one who handed me over to you is guilty of
a greater sin,” Jesus tells Pilate, personally absolving him of all guilt by laying
the blame squarely on the Jewish religious authorities. John then adds one final,
unforgivable insult to a Jewish nation that, at the time, was on the verge of a full-scale
insurrection, by attributing to them the most foul, the most blasphemous piece of
pure heresy that any Jew in first-century Palestine could conceivably utter. When
asked by Pilate what he should do with “their king,” the Jews reply, “We have no king
but Caesar!” (John 19:1–16).

Thus, a story concocted by Mark strictly for evangelistic purposes to shift the blame
for Jesus’s death away from Rome is stretched with the passage of time to the point
of absurdity, becoming in the process the basis for two thousand years of Christian
anti-Semitism.

It is, of course, not inconceivable that Jesus would have received a brief audience
with the Roman governor, but, again, only if the magnitude of his crime warranted
special attention. Jesus was no simple troublemaker, after all. His provocative entry
into Jerusalem trailed by a multitude of devotees declaring him king, his act of
public disturbance at the Temple, the size of the force that marched into Gethsemane
to arrest him—all of these indicate that the authorities viewed Jesus of Nazareth
as a serious threat to the stability and order of Judea. Such a “criminal” would very
likely have been deemed worthy of Pilate’s attention. But any trial Jesus received
would have been brief and perfunctory, its sole purpose to officially record the charges
for which he was being executed. Hence, the one question that Pilate asks Jesus in
all four gospel accounts: “Are you the King of the Jews?”

If the gospel story were a drama (and it is), Jesus’s answer to Pilate’s question
would serve as the climax that unfurls the story’s denouement: the crucifixion. This
is the moment when the price must be paid for all that Jesus has said and done over
the previous three years: the attacks against the priestly authorities, the condemnation
of the Roman occupation, the claims of kingly authority. It has all led to this inevitable
moment of judgment, just as Jesus said it would. From here it will be the cross and
the tomb.

And yet perhaps no other moment in Jesus’s brief life is more opaque and inaccessible
to scholars than this one. That has partly to do with the multiple traditions upon
which the story of Jesus’s trial and crucifixion rely. Recall that while Mark was
the first written gospel, it was preceded by blocks of oral and written traditions
about Jesus that were transmitted by his earliest followers. One of these “blocks”
has already been introduced: the material unique to the gospels of Matthew and Luke
that scholars term Q. But there is reason to believe that other blocks of traditions
existed before the gospel of Mark that dealt exclusively with Jesus’s death and resurrection.
These so-called passion narratives set up a basic sequence of events that the earliest
Christians believed occurred at the end of Jesus’s life: the Last Supper. The betrayal
by Judas Iscariot. The arrest at Gethsemane. The appearance before the high priest
and Pilate. The crucifixion and the burial. The resurrection three days later.

This sequence of events did not actually contain a narrative, but
was designed strictly for liturgical purposes. It was a means for the early Christians
to relive the last days of their messiah through ritual by, for instance, sharing
the same meal he shared with his disciples, praying the same prayers he offered in
Gethsemane, and so on. Mark’s contribution to the passion narratives was his transformation
of this ritualized sequence of events into a cohesive story about the death of Jesus,
which his redactors, Matthew and Luke, integrated into their gospels along with their
own unique flourishes (John may have relied on a separate set of passion narratives
for his gospel, since almost none of the details he provides about the last days of
Jesus match what is found in the Synoptics).

As with everything else in the gospels, the story of Jesus’s arrest, trial, and execution
was written for one reason and one reason only: to prove that he was the promised
messiah. Factual accuracy was irrelevant. What mattered was Christology, not history.
The gospel writers obviously recognized how integral Jesus’s death was to the nascent
community, but the story of that death needed elaborating. It needed to be slowed
down and refocused. It required certain details and embellishments on the part of
the evangelists. As a result, this final, most significant episode in the story of
Jesus of Nazareth is also the one most clouded by theological enhancements and flat-out
fabrications. The only means the modern reader has at his or her disposal to try to
retrieve some semblance of historical accuracy in the passion narratives is to slowly
strip away the theological overlay imposed by the evangelists on Jesus’s final days
and return to the most primitive version of the story that can be excavated from the
gospels. And the only way to do that is to start at the end of the story, with Jesus
nailed to a cross.

Crucifixion was a widespread and exceedingly common form of execution in antiquity,
one used by Persians, Indians, Assyrians, Scythians, Romans, and Greeks. Even the
Jews practiced crucifixion; the punishment is mentioned numerous times in rabbinic
sources. The reason crucifixion was so common is because it was so cheap. It could
be carried out almost anywhere; all one needed
was a tree. The torture could last for days without the need for an actual torturer.
The procedure of the crucifixion—how the victim was hanged—was left completely to
the executioner. Some were nailed with their heads downward. Some had their private
parts impaled. Some were hooded. Most were stripped naked.

It was Rome that conventionalized crucifixion as a form of state punishment, creating
a sense of uniformity in the process, particularly when it came to the nailing of
the hands and feet to a crossbeam. So commonplace was crucifixion in the Roman Empire
that Cicero referred to it as “that plague.” Among the citizenry, the word “cross”
(
crux
) became a popular and particularly vulgar taunt, akin to “go hang yourself.”

Yet it would be inaccurate to refer to crucifixion as a death penalty, for it was
often the case that the victim was first executed, then nailed to a cross. The purpose
of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal as it was to serve as a deterrent
to others who might defy the state. For that reason, crucifixions were always carried
out in public—at crossroads, in theaters, on hills, or on high ground—anywhere where
the population had no choice but to bear witness to the gruesome scene. The criminal
was always left hanging long after he had died; the crucified were almost never buried.
Because the entire point of the crucifixion was to humiliate the victim and frighten
the witnesses, the corpse would be left where it hung to be eaten by dogs and picked
clean by the birds of prey. The bones would then be thrown onto a heap of trash, which
is how Golgotha, the place of Jesus’s crucifixion, earned its name:
the place of skulls
. Simply put, crucifixion was more than a capital punishment for Rome; it was a public
reminder of what happens when one challenges the empire. That is why it was reserved
solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, banditry.