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Pilate, the Politics of Rome, and Evangelical Politics

While Jesus pursued his dispute about arrangements the Temple, events in Rome had altered
the political landscape around him in ways he himself could not begin to fathom.

Brown himself summarizes his scheme in the following way: [9]

• a Sanhedrin session was called to deal with Jesus

• an issue in that session was the threat Jesus posed to the Temple
• the one who urged the others to decide Jesus’ death was the High Priest
• there was a judgment equivalent to a death sentence
• there was a high-priestly investigation of Jesus on the night that he was
arrested.

In short, Brown abstracts from the Gospels’ account material he believes to be historical,
recognizing that the bulk of the passage is pulled together for dramatic purposes.

Brown’s concluding sentence may help to assess his analysis overall:

The clarity and force of the unified trial presentation has moved and been remembered
by hundreds of millions; the awkwardnesses have bothered a handful of scholars
subjecting the narrative to microscopic examination. [10]

In the very act of writing his book, Brown proved that he is one of the bothered few, but he also
writes with a sense of responsibility for the outline of faith as presented in the Gospels. That
dual loyalty involved him in some inconsistency.

Brown’s analysis wisely accords much more weight to the issue of the Temple itself than had
been conventional in writing until his time. He devotes an extensive section of his commentary
to that general issue, [11] but his overall concern is whether Jesus would have said
anything
against the Temple (as in Mark 14:58). He concludes that he would have, but the form of
Brown’s concern leads to a lack of focus in regard to what Jesus did
. Prophecies against the
Temple had been traditional from the time of Jeremiah, and even under disturbed conditions
much later (four years before the war against Rome), Jesus son of Ananias was scourged for his
prophecy, not executed (see Josephus, Jewish War6.5.3 § 300-309). Jesus of Nazareth
evidently constituted a more pointed threat, both to the cultic authorities and to Pilate, whose
chief interest was public order.

Brown oddly does not cite the work of Victor Eppstein, [12] or of Benjamin Mazar, [13] or of the
present writer, [14] or of Craig Evans. [15] All those contributions address the arrangements in
the Temple which Caiaphas innovated, and which resulted in Jesus’ occupation. Brown refers to
some of the relevant Talmudic passages (Bavli Sanhedrin.
41a; Shabbat Abodah Zarah
15a; 8b),
but not in relation to the issue of Caiaphas’ growing power. He does not refer to the evidence of
Pharisaic actions akin to Jesus’ (see Bavli Besa20a-b and Mishnah Keritot1:7), nor to the strong
Yoma
tradition of a failure in the efficacy of the Temple forty years prior to its destruction (Bavli
39b):

Forty years before the destruction of the house, the lot did not come up in the right
hand, the crimson strap failed to turn white, and the western light would not burn, and
the gates of the Temple opened on their own…

In a commentary that is nearly comprehensive in its reach, these omissions are striking.

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Because Brown does not develop an adequate understanding of the issue that divided Caiaphas
and Jesus, he falls back on the argument that Jesus "blasphemy" was that he spoke with
authority and out of turn. [16] Here Brown joins a tendency of pious scholarship which has been
evident since the ’fifties. [17] While Brown concedes that Jesus made no directly messianic claim,
[18] the matter of Jesus’ identity eclipses the issue of the Temple, although Brown had already
shown that the Temple was the historical pivot of events. That is an example of the triumph of
Christian apologetics over sound historical sense. No one can read the Talmudic episodes of
rabbinic actions in the Temple, including driving animals into the place and changing sacrificial
requirements in order to control the prices of offerings, and conclude that cultic arrangements
were anything but contentious, or that claiming authority for oneself presented the biggest
offense imaginable within that setting. Instead of exploring why Jesus appeared more
threatening to the cultic authorities than his contemporaries did, Brown reverts to the picture of
Jesus’ "authority" causing the Sanhedrin to turn against him, with Caiaphas signing on at the
last moment out of annoyance about something Jesus said in the Temple. The implicit
assumption that inappropriate speech would automatically result in execution is implausible.

The same sort of implausibility afflicts the claim that Jesus was put to death for claiming to be
the messiah or having people make that claim on his behalf. Brown’s distortion is extended,
when scholars argue that Jesus’ messianic claim provoked his death at Pilate’s hands. [19] Brown
would probably not have agreed with those who extend his work in that way. [20] The portrayal
of the messianic issue reflects the perspective of those who told the story, rather than the
perspective of Jesus, Caiaphas, or Pilate.

But that early Christian perspective is as important to appreciate as the perspective of Jesus, if
we want to understand the Gospels (all of which were composed after 70 CE). Christians, as
partisans of Christ, claimed that Jesus was son of God, and they therefore denied that Caesar
was Divi filius.
That is what lead to persecution and pogrom at Roman hands from the time of
the fire in Rome in 64 CE until Constantine’s edict of Milan. During that long period, the best
that Christians could hope for was a Roman policy of "don’t ask, don’t tell." In the
correspondence between Pliny the Younger and Trajan during the second century, that is just
what they got, and Tertullian rejoiced in that precedent. [21]

The Gospels are in part designed to encourage that policy. You can see that in the unique
additions each Gospel offers to get Pilate off the hook of the political responsibility he alone
bore. In John, Jesus tells Pilate, "My kingdom is not of this world" (18:36). Although this
exchange regarding political theory is not plausible, at least it is presented in Greek, rather than
in Latin (as in Mel Gibson’s "The Passion of the Christ"). Luke alone among the Gospels has an
acquittal pronounced at the moment of Jesus’ death (Luke 23:47-48):

The centurion standing by opposite him saw what happened and glorified God,
saying, In fact this person was righteous. And all the crowds that came upon this
sight, observing what had happened, returned beating their breasts.

Mark is unique in having a befuddled Pilate "utterly astounded that he had already died"
(15:44), as if he had not known Jesus had been flogged prior to crucifixion. Matthew’s Gospel is
the most inventive, in passing on the legend of Pilate’s wife (27:19), although prefects of Pilate’s
rank were not authorized to bring their wives on posting. In any case, Pilate and his entourage
resided in Caesarea, not Jerusalem. Matthew is sensitive to the latter fact (as Mel Gibson is not),
and has the wife "send" a message to Pilate.

By means of such embellishments and legends, early Christians supported the Roman policy of
"don’t ask—don’t tell," and deflected blame for Jesus’ crucifixion as best they could from the
Romans. In doing so, they wound up repeating a version of what Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy

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said in 1 Thessalonians. Those writers fiercely asserted that the Pharisaic teachers from Judea
who had tried to prevent contact with Gentiles formed an obstacle to their preaching (2:14):
"For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God that are in Judea in Jesus Christ,
because you also suffered the same things from your kinspeople as they did from the Jews."

This refers back to the deep contention in Jerusalem among Jewish followers of Jesus. Paul,
Silas, and Timothy are using the word "Jews" ( Ioudaioi
in Greek) to mean the people back in
Judea that wished to "forbid us to speak to the Gentiles" (2:16). They had some disciples of
Jesus in mind, teachers such as those Pharisees who believed in Jesus’ message but insisted
that circumcision was a requirement of salvation (Acts 15:5). [22] But the same term could also
be used during the first century (and later, of course) to mean any practitioners of Judaism
anywhere, and that is the sense of the term "Jew" in common usage. The lineal descendant of 1
Thessalonians 2:16 is the Wagnerian crowd in Matthew 27:25 that declares, "His blood is on us
and on our children."

So the three companions, writing to Thessalonica and dealing with local issues and recent
history, [23] spoke in a way that has encouraged anti-Semitism. Had Paul, Silas, and Timothy
known they were writing for something called the New Testament, and how their words would
be used to justify the persecution of Jews, they obviously would have spoken differently. So
would the writers of the Gospels. And so should we.

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Jennie Ebeling -- Department of Archaeology and Art History, University of Evansville
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