Good Friday, 2022
As a non-militant atheist, Easter has no special religious significance to me, but it always makes me think about the trial and punishment of Jesus of Nazareth.
We have no contemporaneous court records for that trial and punishment, just as we do not really have such records for anyone else who was tried and executed at that time – that is not a surprise.
What we do have are very early traditions that there was such a trial and punishment.
Here is, for example, Tacitus writing in the early 100s about the Roman fire of about fifty years before:
“Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus…”.
We also have records of what Roman and Jewish procedural and substantive law was at the time, though nothing about how it was applied (or not applied) in this particular case.
And we have the gospel accounts and the letters in the New Testament.
The fascinating and striking thing about the gospel accounts of the trial of Jesus of Nazareth is how secular the story is: little or nothing rests on any miracles or divine interventions from arrest to punishment.
It is just one thing after another in almost entirely human terms.
It could be a normal procedural legal drama.
The gospel accounts seek to explain the relationship between the reasons for his arrest, the manner of his trial, and the imposition of a sanction.
One day, as with other historical trials, I would like to write about this case.
(I was once asked to write an article about the trial, and I never completed it as I could not make up my mind on various aspects of the applicable law and procedure.)
And what would be nice about writing something substantial is that as nothing really rests on any miracles or divine interventions in the story of the trial and execution of Jesus of Nazareth, nothing in such an examination will ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ the truth of what Christians believe.
It should be possible to write a detailed examination of the trial which would satisfy Christians and non-Christians.
Had the gospel writers intended for their accounts of the the trial and execution of Jesus of Nazareth to require a belief in the possibility of miracles or divine interventions then they would have not have written such secular narratives.
Instead, by setting out this dramatic story in secular terms, the gospel writers ensured that those of us who are not Christians are able to fully engage with the story.
Some will doubt or deny that the figure of Jesus of Nazareth ever existed or whether he was even tried or executed.
But given in the gospel accounts no miracles or divine interventions are claimed about the trial and imposition of the punishment, we are not trying to explain (away) anything extraordinary.
Extraordinary claims, of course, need extraordinary evidence: but there is little extraordinary in the gospel accounts of the trial or the imposition of the punishment.
The sources may be inaccurate or incomplete (or conflicting) – but they are not fantastic.
And given there are early traditions of a trial and execution – even if not of other events in the life of Jesus – then it would seem perverse to insist that it cannot have happened and was a later invention.
There is also, of course, the complicated issue of how the writers of the books of the New Testament sought to allocate responsibility for the arrest, the trial(s) and the execution as between Romans and non-Romans.
So: what do you think?
What is your view, regardless of your ultimate religious position, of the trial of Jesus of Nazareth?
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[Warning: I am a Christian, though I do hope that does not mean I have checked out any capacity for (moderately) rigorous thought]
My understanding of the trial accounts in the Gospels is that (within the limits of oral tradition) they were reasonably honest attempts to write down what the writers understood to have happened. However, it was first pointed out to me a very long time ago (in school religious education classes) that the accounts are very slanted to minimise, as far as possible, the role of the Romans and maximise the role of the Jewish establishment. This, it was assumed by my (pretty rationalist) teachers, was to avoid offending the new, and influential, followers who identified with Roman, rather than Jewish, identities.
There are no doubt much more expert readers of your blog who can confirm, or correct, this perspective, but I can say with some confidence that the orthodox (in the sense of conventional) Christian view would be that it was essential that the trial and punishment happened entirely in accordance with human procedures and expectations as otherwise the purpose of the whole exercise would not be achieved.
Happy Easter!
“Instead, by setting out this dramatic story in secular terms, the gospel writers ensured that those of us who are not Christians are able to fully engage with the story…”
A few points:
1. The Gospel writers make for a successful, influential read
2. Ultimately, people tend to believe what they want to believe – this happens in all walks of life, about all sorts of things.
This blog is heavily evidenced based as befits the author. I’m minded to think that whether one is a christian or non-christian, the Bible ( gospel) gives us humans a hope ( or some other such characteristic) that life is a bit more than just ‘evidence’ or what’s before our eyes.
Getting a glimpse of ‘beyond the evidence’ is ,to me, what it’s all about.
Happy good Friday.
In terms of the historicity of the trial and crucifixion. Wikipedia reminds us that in an edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time entitled Eclipses, Frank Close, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford, stated that certain historical sources say that on the night of the Crucifixion “the moon had risen blood red,” which indicates a lunar eclipse. He went on to confirm that as Passover takes place on the full moon calculating back shows that a lunar eclipse did in fact take place on the night of Passover on Friday 3 April 33AD which would have been visible in the area of modern Israel, ancient Judea, just after sunset.
Thank you Geoffrey G. I very much like your contribution. 33AD & was he 33 when he was crucified. I think so. Funny that. I like that.
What I think is that you would probably find that “Christian Beginnings “ by Gera Vermes answers some of the questions you raised here.
It is a good book, as are his other volumes.
Interesting that you should be drawn to this. I think you’ll need to be very careful in distinguishing between the Roman secular jurisdiction represented by Pontius Pilate and the Jewish [religious] jurisdiction represented by the High Priest and the Sanhedrin. I do not know how much is known about how they interrelated in C1 Judaea. The Gospels make clear that Pilate, having examined Jesus and “found no fault” in him, sensed the potential for popular disorder and handed him over to the Jews, who according to John, had no power to crucify him. So the responsibility for carrying out the crucifixion appears to have been a Roman one, although a penalty imposed arguably by a nervous Roman governor to appease a fractious crowd. John’s Gospel makes Jesus’s offence a religious one in the eyes of the Jews – claiming to be the son of God – whilst Pilate, adopting a more secular yardstick, found no fault. My advice would be to start with Geza Vermes’s work and work outwards from there. Welcome to the minefield!
“I think you’ll need to be very careful…”
Very wise words, and well-taken!
Would it be reasonable to regard the Tacitus snip as appearing to corroborate the Gospel story in terms but in a secular context?
Speaking as a theologian: no. There’s no indication Tacitus is drawing on any other sources than the Gospel narrative.
NT studies have focused on Empire as a theme in the last generation or so, and as a result we know a bit more about politics of that era in Palestine. (Richard Horsley’s stuff might interest you). Christians are generally also much more savvy about distinguishing between the politics of local client elites (‘the authorities’) and Jewish faith. The church generally is more careful of crude stereotyping, so many would now avoid the pejorative sense of ‘Pharisee’, for instance. Jesus and Paul were both Pharisees. A better translation of the greek ‘grammateis’ (usually trans. ‘scribes’) would actually be ‘theologians’: which is a bit too close for home for most theologians.
Violence as a central concern of both Jewish Bible and NT is also much more widely recognised. So, Paul’s conversion, it would maybe now be more clearly understood, wasn’t from Judaism to ‘Christianity’ .. but it was clearly from pro-violence to anti-violence (most traditional translations of the NT, by using the word ‘persecute’, fail to convey the violence of Paul’s pre-conversion life).
Together with the impact of Girard’s framing of the atonement around mimesis and scapegoating, all of that has pushed the ‘human’ story of Jesus trial and execution into the foreground. (the Resurrection is another matter).
I guess it’s all part of the slow, slow shift of the Western church away from the indiscriminate legitimation of states’ use of force, and its centuries-long support of imperialism and racism. For ‘slow shift’ read ‘dragged kicking and screaming’.
Hey ho. When I’m being a believer, I spend a lot of time trying to persuade people that reading the bible as a collection of stories about power makes more sense of the text than reading it religiously. And that they’d do better by trying to convert people from violence (or at least silent complicity in it) to non-violence than to any particular sectarian notion of Christianity.
btw. have you looked at Tom Holland’s ‘Dominion’? He’s very good on the historical impact of the human story of Jesus’ trial and death.
One way in which the Romans kept their empire going was tolerance of the eccentric religious views held by the subject peoples. If the Jewish religious leaders came to Pilate asking for the execution of Jesus on religious grounds his natural inclination would be to acquiesce, even if reluctantly.
The way that the gospel accounts minimise culpability on the part of the Romans and place it all on the Jewish establishment is controversial. Some would argue that this lies at the heart of Chritian, and hence European, anti-semitism, and all that that has led to. But, on the other hand, if the gospel accounts as a whole are in any way accurate, then Pontius Pilate’s refusal to find Jesus guilty is a predictable consequence of the simple fact that he hadn’t, actually, broken any Roman-imposed or enforced laws. The fact that Pilate was persuaded to order cruxifixion anyway, despite that “not guilty” verdict, is all about politics – and the realpolitik of governing a potentially hostile territory – rather than law. Although, of course, the Romans could, when it served them, be capricious in their administration of justice and it’s not necessarily any great surprise that they should have been willing to connive in the elimination of a potential troublemaker. Especially if doing so helped keep the local populace on side.
From a Christian perspective, though, the entirely secular nature of the trial and punishment follows on from the earlier scenes in the Garden of Gethsemene, where Jesus is recorded as praying “Father, if it be possible, let this cup be taken from me. Yet not my will, but yours, be done.” There’s no record of any answer to this request, but the context makes it clear that, from that point, Jesus was on his own. From there on, it was all about due process. Jesus had to go on trial, he had to be acquitted, but he had to be sentenced to death nonetheless. And that all had to happen in the absence of any divine intervention. The miracles came later.
“One day, as with other historical trials, I would like to write about this case.” Today’s the day.
I’m a Christian but, as you say, it is not necessary to be one for this story to have resonance. It is a universal story of a miscarriage of justice, possibly the greatest in history. The execution of an innocent man, who had been found to have done nothing wrong by a court but was put to death anyway, continues to have a hold on us two thousand years later. And if you are a Christian and believe that this man was half-human and half-divine and was allowed by God to be put to death in order to save all other souls, then the enormity of it is hard to grasp.
Thank you for raising the case and I hope you’ll continue the analysis.
Happy Easter!
I can’t see that one follows from the other?
I believe that John F Kennedy wrote about the trial in his book on moral courage. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy. As I recall, Kennedy considered that Pontius Pilate lacked moral courage in the face of public pressure. Maybe there is a lesson there for our times.
No divine intervention is noted until we get to “One the third day” when, it is stated, Jesus arose from the dead and ascended into Heaven.
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful: – Seneca.
As for the trial and execution – probably pretty normal for the times for someone seen as a threat to the establishment and law and order. Probably some jiggery pokery among the power groups of the time. We do the same sort of thing these days – but skip the crucifixion bit.
My view is that religion is a branch of politics. A useful branching of the roles of kings and of priests as the old notion of the divinity of kings started to lose credibility. What seems really interesting is how the early Christians did a fantastic missionary job convincing kings and leaders and peoples of the religious and secular advantages of Christianity. A tremendous selling job at the right place at the right time.
Very interesting article and comments. The second chapter of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita has a fictionalised account of Christ stood before Pilate that I think brilliantly explores Pilates doubts.
I highly recommend the book to those who’ve not read it.
I warmly recommend the Arte series Corpus Christi, in which a number of scholars discuss the trial and in particular the differences between the gospels. Being the version written most latterly, St John’s gospel points the finger at the Jews as responsible for Christ’s crucifixion.
I agree with “Jim” that religion – as it has developed in the west – is a branch of politics … or is it vice-versa? As a Christian, I make a distinction between religion and faith, with the latter being accessible to anyone. To that end, all of the gospels are written in a clear, matter-of-fact way: whereas other books get translated differently, it is noticeable that there is little variation in the wording of the gospels, from one translation to another. So as you say, “it is just one thing after another in almost entirely human terms.” Even the miracles are described plainly. So it’s no surprise that the trial is written up simply. As for who’s to blame for this miscarriage of justice, it comes down to “everyone” – i.e.human nature. So the story continues to resonate down the ages, and is relevant to you and me. We all have faith; what differs is in what we place our faith, even if we claim that we place our faith in nothing.
Drawing on both the commonalities and the inconsistencies of the Gospel accounts of the trial of Jesus there are two particular points that I find interesting.
Firstly, the weight that all four put on the lack of response from Jesus to the charges laid against him, “So again Pilate asked him, ‘Aren’t you going to answer? See how many things they are accusing you of.’ But Jesus still made no reply and Pilate was amazed.” (Mark 15: 1-5 and similarly Matthew 27: 11-14, Luke 23: 2-5, John 18: 33-36) So what’s going on here? The right to remain silent is hardly likely to have been part of the legal code either of Rome or the Sanhedrin, but in this case silence on the part of the accused was essential if due process – and the will of God – were to result in what would become the ultimate sacrifice.
Secondly, regarding “the relative responsibility of Romans and non-Romans” it’s noteworthy that Luke’s account is unique (varying even from the other synoptic Gospels of Mark and Matthew) in suggesting that Pilate actually sent Jesus to King Herod for questioning, since as a Galilean he fell under Herod’s jurisdiction. (Luke 23: 6-12) It also seems to suggest that the political consequences which followed from that were to the benefit of both parties.
In anticipation of a Happy Easter for all!
As regards Jesus being sent to Herod, the one Gospel that mentions this is unlikely to relate the truth since Herod Antipas was king of Galilee while Pilate was governor of Judea. Unless Herod was in Judea how could Jesus have been taken to see him and brought back within the same morning? Perhaps Herod was in Jerusalem for Easter but why don’t the other gospels mention it?
The Robin Lane Fox book “the unauthorized version: truth and fiction in the bible” has a nice section on the trial. In the quote that you gave Tacitus described Pontius as a procurator- but (according to Bart Ehrman) P was a Prefect, not a procurator. This suggests that T. had heard an oral version of the Jesus story, rather than any sort of written records, though he could have heard it from anyone rather than a Christian. Mind you, I doubt there would be any sort of record of a summary execution ordered before lunch.
That book had a huge influence on me at university in the early 1990s – indeed books by Lane Fox and Vermes were the start of my life-long interest in first century history.
Luke appears to go out of his way to anticipate your point, recording that “he sent him unto Herod, who himself also was at Jerusalem in these days.” (Presumably a reference to Passover?) Not at all definitive, but detailed enough as a point of difference in the accounts to be interesting.
“I light my candle of faith, and a theologian comes along and blows it out.” That is all I remember of a sermon (curiously dubbed “conference”) at the Catholic chaplaincy in Oxford in February, 1963. (I’m not clever: I was there for my brother’s 21st. birthday.)
Apologists for the ahistorical style, inconsistencies and questionable details of the gospels like to suggest that they were never meant to be read as plain history, but rather as a guide to the mind of God and to the route to salvation. I would bet my bottom sesterce that the congregations who listened to the (not yet canonical and ossified) narrative in the catacombs and other secret places took it at face value.
A couple of dodgy bits:-
Who was awake and noting Jesus’ words in the garden when allegedly his companions were all asleep?
What’s the first thing you do as a Roman squaddie when some bastard chops off your mate’s ear? Wait for the bastard’s mate to stick it back on again? I don’t think so.
Pilate goes to the outside of the building to address the crowd, then comes back into the court-room to consult Jesus about what they have said. Great screen-writing. William Goldman would give it a B-. Was the stenographer-equivalent trotting back and forth behind Pilate to ensure that no word went unrecorded? Rather undignified for a trial held in accordance with the established customs of the world’s greatest empire, I would have thought.
Come to think of it, who apart from a braggart like Cicero, would try to keep a verbatim record of a trial anyway?
Thought-provoking as ever.
The trial could be an elaborate hoax to ensure that future generations couldn’t doubt Jesus’ existence…..but I *am* being perverse here.
I’m also non-religious but, for me, the existence of this historical figure is beyond doubt.
History is written by the winners. We have the winners’ version. That’s what I conclude.
The early church was riven into numerous factions. They indulged in an intense scriptural edit war over their preferred doctrines and interpretations. Eventually one church – the church advanced by Constantine – came out as winner, the orthodox (“right belief”) church, as it was then. The outcome has been a New Testament with a high population of pseudepigrapha (or less politely, forgeries), contradictions, and hagiographical fantasy that was never intended as accurate history. Ehrman documents this in his excellent books.
None of the surviving gospels are contemporary or eye-witness accounts. We infer the existence of a lost earlier source they had access too. Was it deliberately suppressed for some “inconvenient” statements? Or maybe it was just lost. Much else has been lost. But so much has survived, especially when people were careful to keep it. So why weren’t they careful with this seemingly very important source?
So, we have the winners’ version. No one can ever know a different version. That’s what I conclude.
Some people were even better at it. Leontius aka Lewond, an 8th century Armenian, claimed that Pope Leo told him that Al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, a governor of the Umayyad caliphate from the late 7th to early 8th centuries, was rigorous in collecting up and destroying all regional source documents and records from the lifetime of Mohamed to his own time. To avoid any “misunderstandings” that might arise should people read them. The “official histories” of the prophet and early Islam were written subsequent to this, a much longer time-lag than occurred with the gospels. (For the Koran contains no history.) What is undeniable is that there are almost no regional sources surviving from that period, in contrast to periods before and after. Nothing we can check the official versions against.
Maundy Thursday is when Jesus ate the last supper with the disciples, before they came and arrested him.
Good Friday is when they crucified Jesus and when he died.
& Easter Sunday is supposed to be when Jesus rose from his death to life. Rolled back the stone to his tomb and appeared to the soldiers on guard outside who fainted thinking he was a ghost. Jesus was alive for 40 days, there after. Appearing to many people. Especially Mary his mother, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome. To Martha and to others.
I think this is correct.