The Trial of Jesus: History and Ideology

Outside the New Testament, there exists no account at all of a trial of Jesus, though Roman sources know of his execution by one of their own colonial officials. Our main Jewish source for the period, Josephus, however, tells us that Jesus was denounced to the Romans "by leading men among us" and put to death by Pontius Pilate. [1] Paul, the earliest New Testament source, shows no knowledge of any such trial or hearing. In the Gospels, we have four differing accounts. [2] Two of them (those of Mark and Matthew) are closely related, Mark being the earlier. Each tells a story of a formal trial before the Sanhedrin, ending in a condemnation for blasphemy and a death sentence. (The story familiar to the Christian mind is based primarily on Matthew's version, traditionally believed to be the earliest and most authoritative.) The version in Luke may be based on these; it differs from them, however, in describing the court vaguely as "the council"; the role played by the High Priest in Mark and Matthew is here assigned to the whole assembly; there is no formal charge and no verdict, and Pilate in effect acts as Jesus's defense counsel before the people, whose will finally prevails. It would be possible, even natural if we took it by itself, to read this version as asserting that the Jews killed Jesus themselves, without a proper trial at all. I will set this version aside for the purposes of the present paper, though the critical observations to be made apply even more to Luke's heightened version. John's account, on the other hand, does not mention any formal trial. Instead, it describes a private hearing by the High Priest, leading to a political decision to denounce jesus to the Roman governor--an account very close to that of Josephus, and agreeing with what little other Jewish tradition we have in its dating of the events one day earlier than the other Gospels do.

One scholar comments that it is a clear finding of recent scholarship that there was no agreement in early Christian circles about the circumstances of Jesus's trial, or even that there had been a trial at all. [3] A number of critics are of the opinion that the familiar story was created by Mark, the earliest gospel writer, or his immediate source. Matthew and Luke amplify and modify it according to their purposes, Luke substantially. I am increasingly inclined to regard the texts dealing with the trial and execution of Jesus as pivotal for a critical understanding of the nature of the New Testament as an historical source and likewise the key to understanding the origins of Christian antisemitism.

The best-attested historical fact about Jesus of Nazareth is that he was crucified as a subversive by a decision of a Roman official, the Prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate. This we learn from Tacitus and Josephus, [4] as well as from the New Testament. Even if we were to accept the New Testament story of the Jewish trial at face value, it would remain apparent to the historian that the Romans carried the final responsibility for the death of Jesus. From their point of view, he was clearly a subversive, to be dealt with summarily. The New Testament, on the other hand, while recording the fact, wishes us to believe that the Prefect was convinced of Jesus's innocence of the charge of subversion and crucified him only as a result of great political pressure from the Jews, who wished his death for religious reasons. To understand the intentions of the New Testament writers, therefore, we must set the Jewish trial scene in its full context, including the accounts of popular agitation for Jesus's death, as well as Pilate's examination of Jesus. The previous accounts in the Gospels of clashes between Jesus and Jewish religious figures are also an important part of this broader context. The Gospels wish us to think that the condemnation of Jesus by the Sanhedrin was the ultimate result of a longstanding dispute between Jesus and the Jewish religious leadership, touching the very basis of religion.

On critical examination, the gospel story turns out to involve massive historical improbabilities at crucial points. I will start with the central issue, the accusation of which Jesus was supposedly found guilty, and the verdict. Jesus is brought before the Sanhedrin on somewhat confused charges of an offense against the Holy Temple. However, as the hearing proceeds, no clear evidence of guilt emerges, and these charges fade into the background. The High Priest, presiding over the court, now introduces an apparently new issue. He asks Jesus to tell the court whether he is the Messiah, the Son of God. When Jesus affirms it (Mark), or fails to deny it outright (Matthew), the High Priest rends his clothes, declaring that the court has heard the blasphemy and that Jesus has been convicted out of his own mouth. The court concurs, judging that the offense carries the death penalty. Since the Jewish judges, operating under Roman occupation, are not able to carry out the death penalty, they denounce Jesus to the Romans as a political offender, an issue (we are to think) of no concern to them, just as the religious issue is of no interest to Pilate.

In all four Gospels, there follow detailed accounts of Pilate's examination of Jesus, depicting Pilate as impressed by Jesus, convinced of his innocence, and only yielding reluctantly to great political pressure from the Jewish leadership and the crowds. Finally, in Matthew - the most historically influential of the Gospels - Pilate washes his hands before them, declaring his innocence of Jesus's blood (in a Jewish gesture apparently not employed by Romans) while the crowd cries out that Jesus's blood s on their own heads and those of their children. The guilt for the crucifixion is thus firmly fastened on the Jewish people as a whole, while Rome is exculpated. Pontius Pilate, the brutal and insensitive administrator we know from other sources, who did not shrink from massacres, [5] is thoroughly whitewashed.

From the point of view of Jewish law, nothing at all has been alleged against Jesus in the story of the trial that would constitute blasphemy. Jesus does not misuse the divine name, and indeed his speech is reverent and pious. It is not an offense in Jewish law to claim to be the Messiah. Where then is the blasphemy? The Christian reader has no difficulty in understanding what is meant, which is perhaps why the majority, of Christian scholars have not until recently found this part of the story very surprising or laid the kind of emphasis on the point that seems to be warranted. Since for Christians the Messiah is by definition the divine Son of God, a false claim to be the Messiah would ipso facto be blasphemous. The High Priest, believing Jesus's messianic claim to be false, is supposed to see blasphemy in his acknowledgement that he is the Son of God. There is nothing else in the account of the proceedings on which a verdict of blasphemy could be based.

The story does not depict Jesus himself as spontaneously claiming divinity. Astonishingly, the Jewish High Priest is the one who introduces the concept of the divinity of the Messiah, which apparently did not develop within the Christian movement itself for another generation after these events. Anachronistically and indeed absurdly, it makes the High Priest himself the Christian blasphemer. No mainstream Jewish source of the period has (so far at least) been found to refer to the Messiah as the son of God, though there is a possible reference in the Dead Sea Scrolls. [6] Any such reference would undoubtedly have been a citation of Psalm 2, which refers to God's adoption of the anointed Davidic king as his son. In any case, there is no hint in Jewish sources of the divinity of the Messiah, a notion that would indeed be blasphemous to Jews. The story of the Jewish trial thus depends for its coherence and intelligibility on Christian assumptions belonging to a substantially later date than the events depicted.

Given this central impossibility, we might well conclude without further enquiry that no such trial took place. (Luke's story of a virtual lynching of Jesus by the Jews is even less plausible.) But this is only the greatest of a number of difficulties in the way of accepting what the Synoptic Gospels wish to tell us. For the purposes of this paper, it is sufficient to mention a few of the legal improbabilities. In Jewish law, as we know from later sources, an accused person cannot be convicted of a capital charge on his own testimony, as here. In this version, the court is sad to meet on the first night of Pesach. Even if we supposed that later-attested laws forbidding a meeting of a court to hear a capital charge by night or on a festival did not yet exist, we could reasonably assume that no Jewish court would meet and hear charges of this gravity on the first night of Pesach. A baraita has been preserved in the Talmud, however, stating that Jesus of Nazareth was hanged [= crucified] on the Eve of Passover. [7] It may be significant that the baraita and the Fourth Gospel are in agreement in setting their own accounts 24 hours earlier than that of the Synoptic Gospels. We should conclude that the Synoptic chronology is theologically motivated. The writers wish to make the Last Supper a Seder and Jesus's crucifixion an echo of the Passover sacrifice. By itself, that would only be a matter of symbolic chronology, but in the context of so many other improbabilities, it assumes additional weight.

There are so many breaches of correct legal procedure in the account that Geza Vermes, following the Jewish scholar, Paul Winter, concluded that if such a trial had actually taken place, the Sanhedrin would have managed to break just about every rule in the book on a single occasion. [8] The Gospel writers were probably not aware of, or chose for their own reasons to disregard, the careful legal safeguards of Jewish trials. We are dealing with theology, not history.

Any scholarly speculation about what might really have happened, if we reject details of the version in the Gospels, but still believe there must have been a trial of some kind, must break down on the evident fact that Jesus's followers were not present at any hearing or examination of Jesus that may have taken place and can hardly have had access to a court transcript. If there had been any sort of hearing, they would perhaps have known of the fact of it, and of the outcome, his delation to Pilate and subsequent execution. But that is all. Any account of a Sanhedrin trial, or for that matter of Pilate's examination of Jesus, must of necessity be fiction, though perhaps thought plausible by its authors, given their ideology, at the time they were writing.

Such speculation about what happened behind closed doors is not needed, however, for even in the New Testament there is available to us a more probable version of events. The Gospel of John records a couple of private meetings held by the high-priestly leaders, without the Sanhedrin, in which there is no formal charge or verdict, but a political decision is taken to hand Jesus over to the Roman authorities. In that case, the priestly leaders would have been acting in accordance with their normal role. The Romans chose to administer Judaea indirectly, through the Sadducean aristocracy. It was part of their function to maintain order. From Pilate's point of view, it would certainly be their duty to inform him of any subversive whose activities were dangerous to public order. The High Priest Caiaphas is represented (fictionally in all probability) as defending the decision as a means of saving many Jewish lives by the sacrifice of one life. The present-day reader may think of hard decisions taken in the conditions of the Holocaust. Even so, it is proper to remind ourselves that the Pharisees would have objected to this reasoning.

This account, in essential agreement with the version of Josephus, has been found generally probable by a number of both Jewish and Christian scholars. However, having presented us with a plausible story, perhaps based on some good information, this Gospel now changes direction. It proceeds with a detailed account of Pilate's examination of the accused, in which Jesus denies any this-worldly aims ("my kingdom is not of this world"), impressing Pilate greatly with the nobility and courage of his bearing. This writer too wishes us to believe that the Romans were morally innocent of Jesus's death and Jesus himself innocent of any political aims. In the light of this subsequent account of Pilate's examination of Jesus, the private examination by the high-priestly circle, plausible enough in itself, now begins to look somewhat different, no less an inculpation of the Jewish authorities than the dramatic scenes invented by the Synoptics.

We may conclude that there never was a trial of Jesus: the stories in the four Gospels of the events leading up to Jesus's death are in general without historical foundation, though they may contain some authentic details, as in the case of John's version of the activities of the High Priests, which corresponds well with Josephus's presumably independent account. What is clear is that they have a purpose; they are not only unreliable, they are tendentious. The writers who tell us of a trial before the Sanhedrin and of a subsequent hearing by Pilate have a powerful wish to convince their readers of two interrelated things: the Romans should not be blamed for Jesus's execution, even though they undeniably carried it out, while the Jews may be blamed, since the real cause of Jesus's death was a religious dispute between Jews. The reader is invited to conclude that Jesus was not a political figure but (from the Roman point of view) a harmless religious personage. The stores are intended for Roman readers, as well as for the Christian community.

The New Testament thus appears to have effected a double reversal of history: it is almost certain that in reality the Romans, not the Jews, were responsible for Jesus's death, and that he issues were political, not religious. Jesus was executed because the Roman governor believed him to be a messianic claimant with political aims ("the King of the Jews," as the titulus over the cross puts it) and therefore subversive. He would have thought it correct to crucify Jesus regardless of any religious issues between Jesus and the rest of the Jewish community. It was sufficient for Pilate that a fair number of people believed Jesus to be the Messiah and that he was accordingly the head of a movement with aims subversive of Roman rule and authority. On the other hand, it appears that the movement was not thought to be a major danger: it was sufficient to remove its leader, and Pilate did not proceed against any of his followers, even the more prominent ones. For the moment, it is not necessary to decide whether Jesus actually was a political "messiah," as some Jewish scholars in particular believe, and as the high-priestly leadership evidently believed at the time, or thought of his mission in more "spiritual" terms, as the Gospel writers wish us to think. In determining why he was put to death, the most important question is what Pilate himself thought he had reason to suppose.

However, today we would call the Gospel version a cover-up, historically very successful, though now relatively transparent to scholarship. How much had to be covered up? If what the writers wish us to believe is the opposite of the truth at points where we can check the story, perhaps this is also the case where the real story is less certain. In all probability the priestly authorities were alarmed at the possibility of losing their own comfortable relationship with the occupying power, if a messianic movement were to stir up trouble without corrective action on their part. Perhaps Jesus really was a messianic claimant with political hopes, possibly associated with contemporary resistance movements against Roman rule. The priestly authorities nipped the incipient movement in the bud by denouncing Jesus to the Romans. I am now inclined to follow those scholars who believe that this was the case, even though there is little evidence that Jesus ever explicitly claimed to be the Messiah. [9]

Why did the Gospel writers not tell the real story of how Jesus came to be crucified? One possible answer might be that they did not know it. This, however, is unlikely, since a more correct version of the events must have been known from the first in the Christian movement, transmitted by Jesus's immediate followers. (This group must in any case be the ultimate source of all the information about Jesus available to any of the sections of the Christian movement.) The group became the nucleus of the so-called Jerusalem church, actually a messianic movement within Judaism. They did believe that Jesus had been the Messiah, son of David, and therefore a claimant to the vacant throne, a claim with strong political resonance in relation to Roman rule. The titulus on the cross, "the king of the Jews," echoes this claim. They saw nothing in his teaching to cause them to forsake Judaism, and their standard of observance seems to have been acceptable to the Pharisees. Instead of Peter and other prominent followers of Jesus, they appointed as their leaders successive members of Jesus's family, though (if the Gospels are to be believed) the family had not supported him in his lifetime. As Hyam Maccoby argues, this means that they thought of their leaders as regents, temporarily replacing the once and future king, the Son of David, who would soon return to earth to complete the normal functions of the Messiah. [10] This group would have understood clearly that the issues for the high priestly leadership were political, and by no means only religious.

However, their version is emphatically rejected in the Gospels, whose writers, influenced by Paul's views, believe that Jesus was a very novel kind of Messiah indeed, destined to redeem the world spiritually by his death and resurrection. In the Synoptic Gospels, the disciples are regarded as spiritually blind for failing to see that this would be his role and for expecting him to fulfill the normal expectations of the Messiah, which were to a substantial degree political. In effect, in these Gospels, the disciples are castigated for not holding a Pauline theology - by Jesus himself!

We may reasonably conclude that one powerful motive for the rewriting of history was that the real story did not fit the theology of the Gospel writers themselves, which was derived from the teaching of Paul (in the case of the Synoptics) and not from the tradition of the Jerusalem group, the family and former associates of Jesus, who might well be thought to be in the best position to have known what he stood for. The story we have examined fits the theology of the Gentile churches perfectly. It shows Jesus suffering death and rising again from the dead according to the predetermined will of God. The Jews, and in particular Judas Iscariot, are instruments in the hand of God, but since their actions constitute a cosmic crime, they are nonetheless accursed. Because the Jews have rejected their Messiah, they in turn have been rejected by God in favor of the Gentile church that accepted him.

There was apparently a second motive, perhaps not separable from the first. The Gospels were being written at a time of new dangers for the church. In its early days, Christians seem to have passed as Jews in the Roman Empire, even if, properly speaking, most of them were not and had benefited from the relative popularity of Jews in the Roman Empire at that time. A succession of clashes with the Romans in the sixties of the first century of the common era, culminating in the great Jewish revolt and the destruction of the Temple, had changed all that. Jews were now very unpopular, and it was much safer for Christians to be regarded as a separate group, even if the Jewish origins of their movement could not be altogether concealed. It was now better strategy to blame the Jews than the Romans for the death of the supposed founder.

Thus, Christians in the Roman world, in the dangerous time after the Jewish revolt, when the Gospels were being written, must not be embarrassed by their association with someone who had been executed as a political subversive. Accordingly, Jesus should not be thought of as a Jewish rebel at all, since the Jews themselves had repudiated him and wished for his death, but rather as the peaceful forerunner of a harmless religious movement. The Christian movement is not to be seen as a movement within Judaism but as an independent religion, at odds with its Jewish parent. In the early centuries, the Romans sometimes persecuted the church, but for over two millennia the church has enjoyed, shall we say, a much easier relationship with the state power than has the Jewish people.

Should we therefore call the story of Jesus's trial an antisemitic document? It is common to make distinctions between anti-Judaism, theological dissent from Jewish religion, and antisemitism, hostility to Jews as such. Taken as a whole, the Gospel stories of the events leading up to the death of Jesus seem to me antisemitic in this sense. It is hard to call Paul antisemitic, though there is justification for calling him anti-Judaic. By the time we reach the earliest Gospel, perhaps a decade after the death of Paul, something has changed. Christian writings now begin to exhibit a first-century version of antisemitism. Somewhere in that decade, Christian antisemitism had been born. The most likely trigger seems to have been the Jewish revolt against Rome, and its consequences for the Christian movement.

The Gospel writers succeeded in their aim of deflecting the blame for Jesus's death from the Romans to the Jews. We are looking at the charter story of Christian antisemitism.

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(1.) Cf. Josephus, Antiquities 18, 63-64. This passage, once regarded by Christians as Jewish testimony to Jesus's messiahship, has often been rejected in toto by scholars as a Christian interpolation. However, more careful scrutiny by recent scholarship has shown that while there are some interpolations and some shortenings in the present text, authentic portions can be distinguished with reasonable probability. Cf. Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian's Reading of the Gospels, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1974, pp. 51, 237, fn. 51, and the references cited there.

(2.) Mark 14:32-15:39; Matthew 26:26-27:54; Luke 22:39-23:54; John 18:1-19:42.

(3.) Charles P. Anderson, "The Trial of Jesus as Jewish-Christian Polarization," in ed. Peter Richardson, Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity, vol. 1 Paul and the Gospels, Waterloo ON, 1986, pp. 114ff.

(4.) Tacitus, Annals 15.44.208; Josephus loc. cit.

(5.) Cf. Luke 13:1; Philo, Embassy to Carius 302; Josephus, Antiquities 18, 88f.

(6.) 1Q Sera 2:11-12. Cf. Vermes, op. cit., pp. 198f.

(7.) The baraita is cited in Sanhedrin 43a. The general tone of the reference is polemically anti-Christian, incorporating the standard Jewish charges against Jesus. But there is no reason to suppose any polemical interest in the chronological reference, which may reflect a Jewish historical memory. Cited and discussed in J. Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching, New York, 1989 edition, p. 27.

(8.) Vermes, op. cit., p. 36.

(9.) In Christian Antisemitism (1993), I attempted to make as strong a case as I think can be made that Jesus did not at any point claim to be the Messiah and may even have denied it. This is indeed a possible conclusion from the Gospels, once we disregard the passages that clearly derive from the later faith of the Christian movement that Jesus was the Christ of Christianity However, I now think that the anxiety of the Gospels to cover up any suspicion that Jesus claimed to be the Messiah in a Jewish political sense, the charge on which he was actually put to death, argues rather for the probability that he did indeed have aims of a messianic and therefore political character, whether or not he actually spoke of himself as the Messiah, a term in which he may not have been especially interested. This view is supported among others by Sanders on the Christian side and Maccoby on the Jewish side of New Testament scholarship.

(10.) Cf. Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986, etc.