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10. ACCUSED OF MANY THINGS

        Unlike his disciples, Jesus did not simply teach in the Temple or, as Matthew tells us (Mt 21.14), heal there.  Jesus also directly attacked the Temple's economic infrastructure.  The account of Jesus overturning the tables of the money-changers "and the seats of them that sold doves," appears in all four gospels; in John (Jn 2.15), Jesus also goes after the vendors of sacrificial sheep and oxen.  These were all extremely lucrative concessions and were probably virtual state monopolies, controlled directly by the Temple priests.  The money-changers converted the coins of foreign Jews into shekels, the only coins acceptable for Temple offerings; unblemished animals were required for sacrifice at the Temple altar.  Multiplied by a hundred thousand transactions at any given festival, these were major industries.  And the tables and animal pens, set up just inside the entrance to Temple in the large outer court, would have been the most visible symbols of the still more powerful and pernicious economic institution embodied in the unseen Temple treasury.  Jesus was only repeating what must have common public sentiment when he said that the Temple had been made into a "den of thieves."  Of course an attack on the vendors might as easily have been spontaneous or even unintended; any significant crowd of protesters in the Temple court -- even a crowd with peaceful intent -- could hardly avoid coming into conflict with vendors defending their concessions.  But planned or not, the overturning of the money-changer's tables was almost certainly an historical event.  

        After which, the picture becomes clouded.  Having given us this nugget of truth, the author of Mark lapses into the tortured internal logic that often plagues his attempts to rewrite history.  Mark's Jesus goes back to teaching in the Temple, and when he is finally seized by the High Priest's thugs on the Mount of Olives, he seems to have forgotten his own violent protest, telling them "Are you come out, as against a bandit, with swords and staves to take me?  I was daily with you in the temple teaching, and you took me not..." (Mk 14:48-49).

        John's Jesus presupposes a better memory on behalf of both Jesus and Caiaphas' supporters.  Although Jesus returned to the Temple for at least one separate festival and another event after the table-toppling incident, each time he was threatened by a faction of the divided crowd and was forced to flee.  But when at last he was apprehended, it was on the Mount of Olives, and he was arrested by a speira, which is the Greek term for a Roman cohort -- the entire regular military contingent at Jerusalem -- under the command of a chiliarchos, the Greek term for a Roman tribune (Jn 18.3-12).

        This picture becomes even more blurred once Jesus is in custody.  Mark introduces the concept of an extraordinary night trial, before the entire Sanhedrin, at Caiaphas' house -- not the usual meeting place in the Chamber of Hewn Stone.  "And the chief priests and all the council sought for witness against Jesus to put him to death; and found none" (Mk 14.55).  Nevertheless after Jesus admitted that he was "the Christ," he was convicted of blasphemy and condemned to die.  In the morning, however, Jesus was bound and brought to Pilate, where he was accused of "many things" (Mk 15.3).  Jesus refused to answer these manifold yet vague accusations, a silence at which Pilate "marvelled."  Then, Pilate, observing the alleged custom of releasing one prisoner in honor of the festival -- a custom known in no independent source -- produced Barabbas, who "lay bound with them that had made insurrection with him, who had committed murder in the insurrection" (Mk 15.7).  At this "the chief priests moved the people, that he should rather release Barabbas unto them. And Pilate answered and said again unto them, What will ye then that I shall do unto him whom ye call the King of the Jews? And they cried out again, Crucify him.  Then Pilate said unto them, Why, what evil has he done? And they cried out the more exceedingly, Crucify him. And so Pilate, willing to content the people, released Barabbas unto them, and delivered Jesus, when he had scourged him, to be crucified" (Mk 15.11-15).

        Matthew elaborates a bit on Mark's scenario, adding that Pilate's wife warned him to have "nothing to do with this just man,"  and that Pilate washed his hands before the crowd, "saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see you to it.  Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children" (Mt 27:24-25).  

        Luke's account is considerably more convoluted.  Jesus was arrested by a mob led by the captain of the Temple guard and virtually the entire Sanhedrin (Lk 22.47-52).  As in Mark and Matthew, Jesus was taken to Caiaphas' house, found guilty of blasphemy, and dragged before Pilate.  But there he was accused of "perverting the nation" and forbidding the Jews to pay taxes (Lk 23.2).  Pilate found no cause for these charges, but learning that Jesus was from Galilee, sent him to Herod Antipas (who had come to Jerusalem for the festival), whose soldiers mocked Jesus and gave him an elegant robe, but who otherwise did not punish him.  Then Jesus was sent back to Pilate, who again found Jesus guiltless, deciding only to scourge him and release him.  The crowd clamored for Jesus' crucifixion and the release of Barabbas.  Pilate refused three times, but at last the "voices" of the crowd and the chief priests "prevailed."  Pilate "released unto them him that for sedition and murder was cast into prison, whom they had desired; but he delivered Jesus to their will" (Lk 23.26).

        John, of course, provides yet another version.  After his arrest by an entire Roman cohort, Jesus was taken to Ananus (Annas), who questioned Jesus and then sent him bound to Caiaphas' house.  No mention is made of a trial conducted there; Jesus was taken to Pilate early in the morning.  When Pilate asked for the charges, the priests answered with peculiar circularity, "If he were not a malefactor, we would not have delivered him to you" (Jn 18.30).  After hearing Jesus declare that his "kingdom is not of this world," Pilate told the Jews he could find no fault in Jesus, and offered to release him.  "Then cried they all again, saying, Not this man, but Barabbas" (Jn 18.40).

        The vagueness and contradictory nature of the charges against Jesus are only our first clues that something is wrong with these New Testament accounts.  In their entirety, the legal proceedings against Jesus we find in the gospels have little historical basis.  The Sanhedrin was forbidden by Jewish law to try capital cases at night, and forbidden to reach a guilty verdict in a capital case on the same day as the trial -- although they could acquit on the same day as the trial.  (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4.1).  However, the halakah, the body of law which comprises the Mishnah, was transmitted orally until it was finally written down shortly after 200 A.D., and it is sometimes argued that these particular statutes were not observed by the Sanhedrin in Jesus' day.  But the best evidence that such laws were in force is found in the New Testament itself.  As we have seen above in the accounts from chapters 4 and 5 of Acts, when the apostles were arrested, they were imprisoned overnight and tried before the Sanhedrin the next day, as directed by the halakah.  They were acquitted of capital charges the same day, as that law prescribes.  And when Stephan was convicted, the punishment was stoning, not crucifixion -- the same punishment prescribed by Jewish law (Mishnah Sanhedrin 6.1-4) and the same punishment that Josephus tells us that James the brother of Jesus received from the Sanhedrin.

        Of course, in the New Testament Jesus is brought to Pilate for punishment.  But we have seen nothing in Pontius Pilate's character and conduct of his office that would suggest that a Jewish crowd -- the same crowd that on so many other occasions protected Jesus and was bullied by Pilate  -- could challenge his legal finding of innocence and force him to execute for their pleasure a man he had publicly declared innocent.

        In short, the trial of Jesus as presented in the gospels is poorly researched fiction.  The origen of that fiction was possibly the so-called Cross Gospel.  This proto-gospel was first hypothesized by the biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan, who proposes that it was a text written in Galilee, probably in the mid-fifties A.D., and is now found embedded in the Gospel of Peter, a mid-second century A.D. text.  All that remains of the trial account from the Cross Gospel is brief passage in which Pilate washes his hands and Herod Antipas condemns Jesus (the Galilean author assuming that his king, Herod Antipas, would have presided over a Roman court in Jerusalem -- a faulty assumption probably derived from the role of the puppet king Agrippa in the 50's A.D., which we have seen (See A Man with Connections).  Crossan theorizes that this pro-Roman account was written in the city of Sepphoris, where the political climate was so intensely pro-Roman that the inhabitants appealed to the Roman governor of Syria for protection at the outbreak of the 66 A.D. revolt.  It was a prudent request, as Josephus tells us, because "The Galileans took this opportunity... for showing their hatred to them, since they bore ill will to that city.... So they ran upon them, and set their houses on fire" (Life 373-376).  When the Roman legions approached Sepphoris, the people went out and welcomed them as liberators (Life 411).

        Whatever the origins of the trial accounts used by the four authors of the New Testament gospels, those authors certainly had their own reasons to cast Roman authority in a favorable light.  The Mark gospel was written in Rome just after the Jewish rebellion had begun in Judea in 66 A.D. and -- more importantly -- not long after the Christian community in Rome had suffered a gory, very public persecution under Nero, who had made the Christians scapegoats for the fire that destroyed Rome in 64 A.D.  Mark had the difficult task of presenting to the predominantly Gentile subjects of Rome a Messiah who had been executed in a fashion usually reserved for the same kind of revolutionaries who had provoked Roman wrath in Judea, and whose followers had recently gotten themselves into so much trouble in Rome itself.  The persecutions of the Christians went on throughout the period in which the later gospels were written, as did Roman troubles with Jewish nationalists, who finally rebelled again in the Bar Kokhba uprising of 135 A.D.  Thus it remained desperately important for all four authors of the New Testament gospels to distance the early church from Jesus' legal difficulties with a high Roman official.   And since Pontius Pilate had undeniably executed Jesus, that distance was obtained through the elaborate fiction that somehow Pilate had actually been convinced of the innocence of the man he executed.  He didn't really do it.  The Jews did it.

        But of course Pilate did it.  The question we now address is, How did he do it?

Next: THE SUPREME PUNISHMENT

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Copyright (C) 2004 Michael Ennis
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Claudia Procula, or Claudia Procle, the name given Pilate's wife in such popular fictions as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, is based solely on preposterous legends and forgeries long discredited by biblical scholars.