Christianity
The Committal of Jesus before the High Priest
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: 28 October 1998
The Committal Hearing
In Palestine, the years in which Christianity was founded were totally anarchic. Uprisings or tumults were commonplace, Messiahs were commonplace and hatred of the Romans was almost universal among ordinary Jews. Most of the New Testament was written during or just after this chaotic period and the authors plainly knew the true circumstances. Yet the books of the New Testament try to give an impression of this rustic idyll inhabited by gormless yokels led by a mendicant pacifist for whom overthrowing a table is a violent act, where the Roman administrator is a just and competent judge and where the Jews are cowardly and treacherous.
”And so they were”, you might say. ”Perhaps Pilate was cruel, and perhaps Jesus was not quite as pacifist as the later Christians made out, but it was the Jews who betrayed him and set him before Pilate because Jesus taught a new religion which the Jews thought was blasphemous.”
The trouble is it is not true. All of it is concocted! Christians have written volumes about the illegality of the Jewish trial of Jesus. Yet few of them seem to think that the very purpose of the gospels was to concoct an illegal Jewish trial because the gospels had as an objective the placing of the guilt of Jesus’s death on to the Jews. From beginning to end they try to make it seem that Jesus was innocent and set-up by the Jews.
Since Jesus was about his Father’s business, as he saw it, of relieving the Roman usurpers of their possession of God’s Chosen Land and People, it is hardly surprising that many of the Jews who supported him in this venture saw him as innocent of any crime. His first followers obviously thought he was innocent. But it did not matter what any Jews thought, even those on the benches of the local Parliament—the Sanhedrin. The Roman law of Laesae Majestatis—a broad law of treason that forbade anyone from assuming civic power unlawfully or doing anything to undermine it—was paramount. Under this law—a Roman law not a Jewish one—Jesus was multiply guilty.
Christians like to believe Jesus had two trials, one by the Jews and by the Roman governor. John’s gospel refutes the idea, yet it is the most anti-Jewish of the gospels and a Jewish trial was essential to blame the death of the Son of God on the Jews. If a Jewish trial really occurred as the synoptic gospels say, then it should have been retained or magnified by John. So, though John’s gospel is late and often the least trustworthy, in this instance, it must be relating the original tradition and Mark must be elaborating it. Whenever we find fossilised passages like this contrary to expectation, it must be a relic of the original story before the editors got at it.
Why are such contradictory passages there at all? Why didn’t John make the Committal Hearing into a Jewish trial? The answer is that the earliest version of John’s gospel told this story because it was true. In the light of the synoptics, some bishops might have preferred to have had the versions harmonised but it was already too late. The books were already regarded by the faithful as holy so gospel editing had to be piecemeal. No one could alter the gospels wholesale but small alterations could be made each time the text was copied. And, although such editing was possible when the number of copies and the number of Christians were small, both grew quickly and there came a time when there too many people ready to question changes in texts that they already had. Thereafter changing the text got harder and eventually came impossible. There was not enough time or church unity to edit the gospels rationally and the result is that we have fossil passages that give us little glimpses of the real Jesus.
Imperial policy was to leave local matters in the hands of local chiefs—in Judaea, the Jewish Council of State, the council of 70 Jewish elders, the Sanhedrin. In the Sanhedrin’s handling of civil matters though not religious ones, Sadducees, who were collaborators, dominated and knew they had to denounce a man claiming kingship or be tried as traitors themselves. The earliest gospel, Mark’s, suggests that the Sanhedrin tries Jesus first on the false charge of blasphemy. Many respectable Christian commentators think this is a fiction. As usual in Mark and emphasised even more in later gospels, the evangelists’ aim is to denigrate the Jews and to paint Jesus as a pacifist innocent.
Three of his civic crimes cannot be denied even on the facts in Mark’s gospel:
- he allowed his followers to carry swords in the streets and wound a man
- he led a messianic demonstration in which he was hailed a king
- he committed the crime of Laesae Majestatis by taking over the temple without permission.
The punishment for such crimes in Roman law was death. Whether he blasphemed or not was irrelevant and scenes of the trial before the Sanhedrin in the gospels are purely to incriminate the Jews. All the Sanhedrin could do was to turn the traitor over to the Roman authorities and to put the manifest crimes of Jesus before Pilate irrespective of any blasphemy he had committed—which they did. The supposed Jewish crime of blasphemy was quite irrelevant to the outcome. It is hard to believe that a senior holy man of a fanatically pious sect like Jesus would blaspheme, but even if he did, it had no bearing on his death. He was crucified because he was a traitor to the empire.
The Sanhedrin could have supported Jesus to a man but, unless they were happy to go to the cross with him, they had no choice but to hand him over. What the gospels show is that the Sanhedrin took a responsible position. They thought it better that Jesus should die than that angry Romans should take it out on the rest of the population. Doubtless some Jews would have liked the Sanhedrin protest Jesus’s innocence, but in the face of the evidence and ther likely consequences, it was asking too much.
What is possibly true is that the crime of blasphemy was to the Jewish authorities the same crime as Laesae Majestatis was to the Romans—treason. The Jewish state was a theocracy—notionally it was ruled by God through His agents, the priests. Thus defying God’s agents in their rule of the country was defying God Himself—was assuming God’s power—and was therefore blasphemy. This was the very basis of Jewish hatred of the Romans. They had taken God’s power as ruler of Judaea leaving the priests and the Sanhedrin as puppets.
The Jewish fighters for freedom thought they were doing God’s work in trying to free the country from the Romans and their puppets. The priests would have seen the rebels as trying to overthrough God’s rule of law, vested in them. Blasphemy therefore equated with the Roman law of Laesae Majestatis Divinae—treason against God! So, once again, it seems, the gentile Christian bishops had some truth in what they were saying but, as ever, they suitably obscured the real nature of the crime Jesus committed even under Jewish law.
In Mark 14:55, the first trial is apparently before the full Sanhedrin (”all the council”) but, the gospel maintains it was still the Passover and at night, so it could not have been—for religious reasons the Sanhedrin never met at night and most certainly would not meet during a festival or on a sabbath in any circumstances. The gospels try to make the committal hearing held at night before the High Priest into a meeting of the Sanhedrin when it could not have been—no Pharisee would have broken the Law to attend. If Jesus had seen the night of the Passover through, as seems likely from his final resigned attitude, then the hearing was in the day time which is Luke’s contention (Lk 22:66).
Furthermore the Sanhedrin met within the temple precincts yet, as Mark says (Mk 14:53-54), this hearing is held in the palace of the High Priest (according to Matthew and John, Joseph Caiaphas, who John admits was the High Priest ”that same year”—implying the position was changed annually). The insurgents of the Nazarene band were not taken back into the city. The palace of the Annas family of High Priests was outside the city walls, not far away from the scene of the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, as we know from Josephus because later rebels burnt it down. Since the High Priest was also the local policeman and magistrate, he was responsible for public order. He had promised Pilate that he could capture Jesus by stealth to avoid excessive bloodshed of innocent pilgrims, and having done so he had to hold a committal hearing. He had to be seen to be doing his duty to satisfy the Romans, and the Romans, having set up a judicial system, would not gratuitously sidestep it.
So Jesus appeared before the High Priest in the equivalent of what in the UK used to call Police Courts. That is how John’s gospel records it, for Caiaphas simply passes Jesus straight on to Pilate for civil trial, omitting all pretence of a trial for blasphemy. The High Priest could do nothing other than refer Jesus to the Governor for sentencing. He had obviously committed capital offences.
The Jewish trial of the Synoptics looks like a copy of the Roman one. Mark wrote when Jews were rising against Romans and were disliked. He wanted to show the Jews as responsible for the death of a god, not the Romans. The Jewish authorities had no alternative but to commit Jesus for trial by Pilate but the evangelist took what he knew of the trial before Pilate and reconstructed a fictitious and plaionly irrelevant trial before the Sanhedrin.
Jewish Charges
In the fictional committal hearing in Mark, charges are brought, but witnesses did not agree—an essential criterion of Jewish justice. The pious aim here however is to realize prophecies from Psalms:
False witnesses are risen up against me.Psalms 27:12
Unrighteous witnesses arise up.Psalms 35:11
The mouth of the wicked and the mouth of deceit have they opened against me.Psalms 109:2
The message was that the Christian God had done no wrong and the perfidious Jews were having difficulty setting him up.
Who were these ”Jews”? Jesus, himself a Jew, had such a following of Jews when he entered Jerusalem that the priests thought the whole world followed him. The New Testament distinguishes the ”Jews” because when it was written the Christians did not want to be associated with Jews. Gospel writers wanted to impress that their martyred god was hated by the Jews.
In some places the writers are more specific, referring to Pharisees rather than ”Jews”. The gospels portray the Pharisees as the main opponents of Jesus. He calls them hypocrites and oppressors. They try to trick him into blasphemous statements or into false teaching but Jesus always gets the better of them. The gospels imply that the Pharisees, aiming to rid themselves of his criticisms, brought various religious accusations against him. Yet an objective scrutiny shows that the Pharisees could not have brought these religious charges. They were not valid charges!
Claiming to be the Messiah, a God
In the synoptic gospels, the High Priest accused Jesus of blasphemy not the Pharisees, tying in with his roles, under the Romans, of magistrate and policeman because the title was a danger to his own position as well as his Roman masters. The gospel editors played down the political implications of Messiahship so as not to spoil their message—Romans, good—Jews, bad—Jesus, a divine innocent, yes—Jesus, a threat to Caesar, no.
The High Priest asked Jesus directly if he was the messiah, Son of God. Jesus seems to reply, “I am” apparently uttering the name of God. The Greek words actually mean, “as you say”, or, “so you say”. In view of his failure, the latter seems more likely. The High Priest takes this for blasphemy and he rents his clothes. If this was blasphemy, why was the trial not concluded and the death sentence by stoning pronounced, for stoning was the proper sentence for blasphemy. Now John’s gospel suggests that the Sanhedrin had no authority of its own to issue a capital sentence of any kind (Jn 18:31). Yet in the New Testament Jews seek to stone an adulterous woman and succeed in stoning the martyr, Stephen, to death. Later, according to Josephus, James, the brother of the Lord in Acts, is also stoned to death. Also in Acts the Sanhedrin threatened the apostles with death. It seems unlikely that the Jews under Roman justice had a right to condemn prisoners but the gospels, as always, try to have it all ends up.
The Sanhedrin might have had the power to declare a sentence of stoning for a religious offences but rarely used it because the legal requirements were so strict. Such action will have required the Governor’s approval, but the punishment would still have been stoning not crucifixion. The Romans could not have cared less what Jews did to each other as long as it did not effect themselves or their spies and collaborators, and so they are unlikely to have allowed a concession that might have given a sense of legality to the judicial murder of unpopular collaborators. The story of Jesus will therefore be accurate in showing the Jewish rulers as unable to condemn Jesus themselves.
But, if Jesus claimed to be the Messiah, was he committing a blasphemy? The answer is ”no” because only a claim to be God was blasphemous and, unlike Christians, the Jews did not regard the Messiah as an aspect or a title of God. It is no blasphemy in Judaism to claim to be a son of God who is merely a man not God. The expression “son of God” was common. Gad had made men, so all human beings were sons of God. All Jews, according to the Torah, were sons of God in a stronger sense and devout men like Nazarites and rabbis might be sons of God in a yet stronger sense. Princes, priests and kings were sons of God in an even stronger sense.
When Jesus admits to being the son of the Blessed, he is saying that he is a son of God in this strongest sense! He is saying he is a king. He is therefore admitting to treason against the Emperor. The Messiah was a king of Israel and a political threat to the Romans—the claim was a political crime not a religious one, especially in view of the Jews’ reputation as rebels constantly hankering after a warrior messiah to save them from their oppressors. Other claimants to messiahship—such as Bar Kosiba, a militant rebel, or Theudas, mentioned in the New Testament, who also expected a miracle—were not accused of blasphemy. The Messiah’s aim might have been to liberate Israel from foreign occupation or to inaugurate an era of peace for the whole world—perhaps both. But these were not blasphemous ideas.
Later, Christians thought “Christ”, supposedly Greek for “Messiah”, was a divine title and that Jesus was claiming divinity. That would have been blasphemous—but Jesus made no claim to divinity. That Jesus kept his claim to divinity secret, ”the Messianic Secret”, is a later idea. On the other hand, knowing what the Roman attitude was to royal claimants, Jesus must have preferred not to attract premature attention from the authorities by initially refusing to accept acclamation from the multitudes.
A messiah, though, is a king, so when Jesus apparently replies, “I am”, he is admitting to treason against the Emperor. That is the real crime. The messiah was a king of Israel and was, therefore, a political threat to the Romans—the claim was a political crime not a religious one, especially in view of the Jews’ reputation as rebels constantly hankering after a warrior messiah to save them from their oppressors. Other claimants to Messiahship were not accused of blasphemy whether Judas of Galilee, before Jesus, or Bar Kosiba, after Jesus, both militant rebels, or Theudas or ”the Egyptian” mentioned in the New Testament, who would save the Jews with a miracle from God.
Why then did the High Priest rend his clothes if no blasphemy had been spoken. There are only two other reasons for doing it besides blasphemy, tragedy to a close relative or friend and when the whole nation has sinned. It seems that either Jesus was a member of Caiaphas’s family or that Caiaphas considered that Jesus’s admission of treason incriminated the whole nation. The latter ties in with Caiaphas statement that it was better for one to suffer for all.
It is interesting to note how the High Priest framed his question to Jesus in Aramaic as to whether he was the “son of God”. To this day Jews follow an ancient superstition that knowing a name and uttering it at judicious moments gave power over something or someone. They must not utter the name of God, Yehouah. For this reason they were in the habit of using circumlocutions or euphemisms. They called God, Lord, most commonly, a convenience that helped Jesus to be deified also as “the Lord”. “Father” was another euphemism. In Aramaic, “Father” is abba and “son of God” would have been expressed “son of the Father” or “bar Abba”! Who then was the “Barabbas” who was offered in exchange for Jesus?
Mark has added that Jesus said,
Ye shall see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power.
God’s appointed time had passed. Jesus could not have said this. He no longer regarded himself as the messiah because God’s miracle had not occurred. Jesus was an Essene well versed in biblical interpretation. Since he was wrong he must now have been resigned to his punishment which, having failed also to sacrifice himself as the worthless shepherd, he must have seen as God’s will. His surviving followers must have been bemused, everything went wrong so quickly. God had not responded to the liberation of Jerusalem with the expected miracle, and they had been unable to bring themselves to despatch Jesus as a worthless shepherd, as he had ordered them, and now they realized he was to be crucified alongside the other rebels captured in the counter attack. Yet within a few years they were expounding in the New Testament books that it had been his intention all along to die as the suffering messiah.
The assault, in Mark 14:65, is in pure fulfilment of prophecy (Isa 50:6; 53:3-4) and since the allusions match the Greek versions of the scriptures better than the Hebrew versions it must be a gentile improvement. If the idea came for it from something in the original tradition then it must have been the temple guards after the arrest, as Luke 22:63-65 maintains. The High Priest, whatever his faults, was not a lout.
Threatening to Destroy the Temple
At the hearing a charge was brought, but not by Pharisees, that Jesus had threatened to destroy the temple, the House of God. That sounds fairly blasphemous! Mark declares that,
We heard him say, I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and within three days I will build another made without hands,Mk 14:57
was a false accusation yet Jesus seemed to say it in Mark 13:2:
And as he went out of the temple, one of his disciples saith unto him, Master, see what manner of stones and what buildings are here! And Jesus answering said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings? there shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.Mark 13:1 - 13:2
In this ambiguous passage in Mark, was Jesus threatening to throw down the stones of the temple himself or was he simply predicting the destruction of the temple, an event which actually occurred after the Jewish War in 70 AD. If it is the former, then the accusation is true. Christians prefer to think it is an accurate prophecy, but Mark wrote at about the time of Titus’s Triumph in Rome and could include this prophecy knowing it to be true. It was a heavy defeat of the Jews by Roman military might, and it stands here in Mark’s account because the same happened in the story he is narrating—but a generation earlier!
The prediction of the destruction of the temple was just what the Jews would have expected to hear from their messiah because the Sadducees who administered the temple and the building itself were hated. They had been imposed by the unpopular foreign king, Herod the Great. Jews expected nothing less than the destruction of the unclean temple and the restoration of Solomon’s temple according to Ezekiel’s blueprint at the coming of the kingdom. According to the Enoch literature—so much loved by the Essenes that multiple copies were found in the caves of Qumran—God would restore the temple on the third day after His appointed time, the great day of the Lord. So it is quite possible that Jesus did prophecy the polluted temple’s destruction because of his conviction that the great day had arrived. He was certainly accused of it later. Its apparent fulfilment in 70 AD gave the new religion a useful boost, if not to membership, to the morale of those who were still waiting for Jesus to return on a cloud.
The third day of the kingdom was also the day on which all the dead of the righteous would be resurrected. Hosea 6:2 declares:
on the third day he shall raise us up and we shall live before him.
All of Jesus’s prophecies of rising on the third day are really his statement that the dead of the elect would rise then. If he were to die in the battles for the kingdom, as he expected, then it would be on the third day of the kingdom that he would arise and rejoin his fellows.
Mark is fond of having Jesus answer questions or reply to his critics, but in reality much of what is recorded in the gospels probably came from discourses or speeches that Jesus made. Here the disciples gape at the stones of the temple as though they had never seen them and made inane observations. That suits Mark who wanted them to look like imbeciles. Luke, however, has Jesus commenting on generally admiring remarks around him. It really came in a discourse on the kingdom to come.
John confirms that Jesus said:
Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up,John 2:19
but he meant, John maintains, not the temple of mighty stones that triggers the discussion in Mark but the ”temple of his body” which he would raise up after three days—a prediction of his resurrection. The Jews deliberately misunderstood him to get him crucified, but Acts 6:14 repeats the threat to destroy the temple. It is entirely messianic so surely true. The temple made without hands was the temple of the kingdom of God. It was raised up on the third day of the everlasting kingdom, on the same day that the righteous were resurrected. Jesus could not have failed to have said this, whatever sort of messiahship he claimed. Even if he did not it was implicit in the theory of the kingdom and so would have been understood by any Jew.
John’s ingenuity in explaining that Jesus meant, not the Jerusalem temple, but the temple of his body which he would raise up after three days—a prediction of his resurrection—betrays an Essene way of thinking, for Essenes regarded the community as a living temple as John does here. But Jesus would have spoken only of God carrying out a resurrection and he would have meant on the third day of the kingdom.
If he really did say ”I will raise it up”, he must have meant he could replace the collaborationist temple organization controlled by the Boethusians and the Sadducees and not the bricks and mortar of the temple. He was simply saying that he could replace the unpopular priesthood with an acceptable alternative in a few days, because he had an alternative priesthood at the ready. The priests Jesus had in mind must surely have been members of the Qumran community, guardians of the Dead Sea Scrolls, who maintained themselves specifically as an alternative priesthood and a living temple. The implication is that Jesus had links with the Essenes. If he had, then the threat to the chief priests would be even more transparent and their attitude toward Jesus thoroughly explicable.
The temple was built by Herod the Great, the hated foreign king. Though many Jews continued to accept the ritual of the temple they did not approve of one built by an Idumaean, or its functionaries, the collaborating priestly caste. The temple of Herod would not have been tolerated by any credible messiah, nor would the Jews have expected it to continue to exist in the messianic age. To destroy it and rebuild it is what any messiah would promise. So such a threat was the sort of promise that messianic Jews would have liked to hear. Since it implied defiance of the state it represented the view of the nationalists.
Though most Pharisees would not object to Jesus’s words, the Sadducaean priesthood could not be expected to take them lying down. They feared a direct threat to their position of power—and with justification. At a later date the Sicarii murdered a High Priest and, during the Jewish War, the rebels actually did appoint one of their own.
The charge of making the threat to the temple was therefore again a political threat—this time to the ruling Jewish caste. No blasphemy was incurred. The High Priest knows what the claim about the raising of the temple means and In Mark 60 to 61, he makes a dramatic intervention, but Jesus remains silent in fulfilment of Psalms 38:13-14 and Isaiah 53:7. He is depicted as being mainly silent in front of Pilate as well, but this would have been genuine tradition. The Essenes were not allowed to condemn each other in the courts of the gentiles, and that would also have ruled out self-condemnation. Effectively Jesus was refusing to recognize the Roman court.
Abrogating the Law of Moses
Other gospels add further charges to those expressed clearly in Mark. One is that Jesus abrogated the laws of Moses.
Scholars accept that the declaration of all food as clean in Mark:
This he said making all meats clean.Mark 7:19
is a later addition, and it is contradicted by the New Testament itself in other books. In Matthew 5:17-19, Jesus is emphatic that he had not come to destroy the law but to fulfil it, and not just its general principles but each jot and tittle. It is certain that Jesus is referring to the laws of Moses because he mentions it in conjunction with the prophets showing that he meant all the teachings of the Old Testament—of the Jewish sects it was the Essenes who counted the prophets as equal to the law of Moses. If not a jot or tittle could be omitted, then the food laws too had to be obeyed. In the later gospel of Luke 16:16-17, the contradiction had been realized and the editor pretends it is sarcasm.
Jesus was seeking to save the Jews not the gentiles. He was not abrogating any of the Mosaic laws to allow gentiles easier access to the kingdom. Pious Jews were meticulous about ritual cleanliness but Mark was wrong in 7:4 asserting that the Pharisees and all the Jews washed before every meal. Only Essenes did that. Jesus would not have willingly condoned eating defiled bread. A quotation from Isaiah is given which would certainly have accurately expressed the difference in religious outlook between an Essene and a Pharisee. The Essenes were more fundamental and rejected the oral law of the Pharisees, the commandments of men referred to. The reason then for the rejection of the Pharisees would have been the exact opposite of that assumed by later Christians. It was because the oral law of the Pharisees was too lax, not that it was too strict. The last part of verse 8 is therefore Mark’s clarification for his gentile readership.
If there is any truth in the sense and circumstances of this incident, it must be placed with the discussion, ostensibly with the Pharisees, about plucking on the sabbath. There were no Pharisees. The questioners were pious Nazarenes who felt guilt toward God that they had to remain unwashed in their difficult circumstances. The quotation is more accurately:
Wherefore the Lord said, Forasmuch as this people draw near me with their mouth, and with their lips do honour me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear toward me is taught by the precept of men.
Jesus is saying that the questioners are pious in prayer but not in their hearts. They have been taught to fear God by men. In adverse circumstances in which ritual cleanliness is impossible, as long as they honour God in their hearts, they need not fear Him. God will forgive them this necessary infringement of the law—but it is not a permanent abrogation of it.
The verses on food taboos, in Mark 7:14-7:23, follow the discussion of cleanliness in Mark 7:1-7:8 quite nicely indicating that the intervening verses are inserted. Jesus is continuing to reassure his pious followers that they did no wrong in appearing to defile themselves when they had no option. The Nazarenes would not have ignored the law of Moses unnecessarily—the second part of verse 19 (“This he said making all meats clean”) is patently a Christian afterthought—but there were practical matters to address. The problem of guerrillas maintaining strictly Mosaic laws were insuperable and Jesus urged his followers that for soldiers of God in practice it did not matter—they had been ritually purified by baptism—as long as they kept themselves spiritually pure.
He continues the teaching began with the quotation from Isaiah in verse 7:6. With the kingdom due at any time, his followers had to be spiritually pure rather than bodily pure. So a man is defiled by what is in his heart not what is in his stomach—by lack of righteousness not wrong food or dirty habits. The point was not that food taboos were wrong, but that they were irrelevant in the circumstances. The Nazarenes had taken their sacramentum of baptism and had repented their sins. Those provided true purity. If it were necessary to dirty their hands to trigger the new kingdom then so be it. Assuming that the Nazarene barjonim accepted this, it is easy to see that Nazarene missionaries—who continued to believe the kingdom was due after Jesus’s death and felt they were struggling for it in adverse circumstances—could in practice have used it as an abrogation of the law. The accusation that Jesus superseded the law is based entirely on this misunderstanding, legitimized by Paul.
The gospels relate that Jesus rejected the old Hammurabi principle of an-eye-for-an-eye, which the Pharisees accepted, and replacing it with that of turning the other cheek. In fact the Pharisees did not literally approve of an-eye-for-an-eye. Pharisees did not believe in fundamentalism but interpretation—they made no virtue of tearing out eyes. They took an-eye-for-an-eye to be a law of equivalence for compensation of wrongs. It gave a measure of the recompense needed when someone had suffered an injury but whatever rights the principle gave anyone, the Pharisees favoured a merciful response. Effectively they also advocated the principle of turning the other cheek. A man who had suffered a theft by a desperate man might, in mercy, wish to waive the compensation to which he was entitled under the law. He could turn the other cheek by refusing compensation to which he was entitled. But he would defend another man’s right to insist upon such recompense before the law. To turn the other cheek as a manifestation of God’s love invited others to do the same but it did not require them to do so. Essenes positively believed in turning the other cheek.
Inasmuch as theologians considered rejection of the law of Moses a crucial issue, Jesus’s supposed teaching on it was remarkably slow to sink in. That was because the disciples were stupid, the clergy say. Peter for example was totally confused. In Acts 10:14 some time after the death of Jesus, Peter says he had never eaten anything that was unclean. It is a vision from God that tells him that formerly unclean items are now clean, not the teaching of Jesus, but according to the New Testament he changes his mind more than once. James the Just, the brother of Jesus and leader of the church after Jesus’s death never accepted the law had been rejected. He rebuked Paul for ignoring the law and made him do penance.
People from Galilee were considered lax in the strictest interpretation of the Law, but Jesus could hardly have been thought of in this regard whether he was from Galilee or not. He was a Galilaean because he supported the militant sect of Judas of Galilee. He might also have made a genuine point about the relative merits of purity of spirit and ritual purity. But he did not reject the Law of Moses. The truth is that the abrogation of the Mosaic Law was not a novelty of Jesus but of the evangelist, Paul, so that he could recruit gentiles.
Breaking the Sabbath
The New Testament maintains that the main disagreement between Jesus and the Pharisees was Jesus’s healing on the Sabbath. The Pharisees are depicted as holding so strongly to the Sabbath that even healing was forbidden. John 7:23 has Jesus defending Sabbath healing while Mark 3:6 and Matthew 12:14 have the Pharisees plotting against Jesus because they were so offended by his healing on the Sabbath.
Mark 2:23-28 relates an incident when the disciples pluck corn on the Sabbath only to invite the criticism of the Pharisees. Jesus replies,
The Sabbath is made for man not man for the Sabbath.
Now the Pharisees did forbid labour on the Sabbath, but tempered the rule with exceptions. Thus they allowed healing on the Sabbath when human life was at risk. In justification they used the same arguments as Jesus and even the same expression as Jesus. Jesus’s reply was simply a well known maxim of the Pharisees.
In the substance of his answer to the Pharisaic critics in the gospel, Jesus quotes from scripture the instance when king David and his men ate consecrated bread from the temple—something only priests were allowed to do. King David and his men, on that occasion, were fleeing from king Saul—they were tired and hungry. Now when life is at stake it is no sin to devour the temple shewbread. The implication of Jesus choosing this particular quotation from scripture was that Jesus and his men were in an equivalent situation—they also were starving. One concludes that this was no peaceful stroll in the cornfields on a balmy summer day. An exhausted group of refugees took the only sustenance at hand. The inference is they were fleeing Herod Antipas and were justified, in Pharisaic interpretation of the Law, to pluck corn as food on a Sabbath because life was at stake.
Then, as now, taking someone else’s corn without permission was theft but the gospels do not raise this as an issue because it had no implications of blasphemy. It also spoils the divine image being created—the Son of God condoning thieving! Remarkably, the Pharisaic interpretation of the Law did not unequivocally forbid theft. Indeed the Babylonian Talmud makes it a duty to steal to save life. Jesus was behaving not like a god but like a desperate man following an interpretation of the Law acceptable to the Pharisees.
The gospel account is best understood if Jesus was actually giving an explanation of why plucking corn on the Sabbath was allowed, just as any rabbi would, with a quotation from scripture and a well known saying. Jesus’s final words are
…therefore the Son of Man is sovereign even over the Sabbath.
Though this reads to a Christian as an assertion that the Divine Christ could do what he liked, to a Jew he is simply saying that mankind is sovereign over the Sabbath. In Aramaic the expression ”Son of Man” simply means ”Man” or, as the Queen would say, ”one”, or an Irishman, ”Your man”. It merely restates that the Sabbath is for men. The gospel writers omit half the story to avoid the conclusion that Jesus was a wanted man. They aimed to show that the times were tranquil not the reality which was rebellion, and to create falsely an opportunity for Pharisaic criticism.
If, as the gospels make out, Pharisees opposed Jesus on sabbath healing, why did they not bring this charge at the hearing? Indeed why were no charges brought specifically by the Pharisees? Precisely because the hearing was not before the Sanhedrin but before the court of the High Priest acting as a Roman stooge in his capacity as chief of police. Pharisees would not have been present.
Elsewhere in the New Testament, the Sanhedrin seems to concur with the High Priest’s persecution yet the Pharisees on the Sanhedrin oppose the priestly faction. The Pharisaic opposition to the High Priests, under the leadership of Gamaliel, even succeed in defeating the Sadducaic faction intent on persecuting the Nazarenes. In the trial of Peter which was before the Sanhedrin because the grounds were religious, Gamaliel, the leading Pharisee, defended Peter. The Acts of the Apostles quite often favours the Pharisees by depicting them as being liberal about religious differences and factions. If parts of Acts were written before the Jewish war, the later need to discredit the Jews would not have been so intense and many remnants of the original sympathy of the Pharisees for the Nazarenes would remain.
The Pharisees and the Jesus of the gospels had more in common than dividing them. In religious terms Jesus would not have seen the Pharisees as ultra pious as the gospels make out but as ultra-lax. They sought not to address problems posed by the requirements of the law by building a wall around it to prevent anyone transgressing it inadvertently. (There might be an implication that Essenes considered Pharisees responsible for the partition wall in the temple, which Essenes considered an offence because gentiles should not be there at all unless they came in supplication.) For Jesus this would have been avoiding the issue.
Jesus would have regarded the law itself, being God given, as sacrosanct and not needing protection. The requirements of the law had to be addressed directly and not hidden behind walls to disguise or protect them. God intended them not to be broken but, when He had provided exceptions for special circumstances, His prophets had written sound precedents in the scriptures to justify them. Essenes, like jesus, understood the scriptures deeply and would not have broken the law unless they knew of scriptural precedents which justified it. Pharisees would have seen Jesus as a fundamentalist. Jesus’s principal disagreements with the Pharisees in the gospels were political not religious.
A nationalist extremist like Jesus would certainly have regarded Pharisees as hypocrites—Jesus’s favourite word for them. Pharisees professed to be against the foreigner but were much more pragmatic about it and so they often seemed hypocritical. Some Pharisees were fed up with madmen claiming to be messianic leaders. Like any other Jew, Pharisees hoped for a Messiah but too many mountebanks had failed to do anything except stir up trouble with the Romans. They might have thought of him as another madman they should discredit before he caused trouble. They certainly seemed to enjoy trying to embarrass him but there is little evidence of a Pharisaic plot against him. The Pharisees tended to be cautious, not knowing how God might reveal himself. They dared not take peremptory action for fear of offending God (Acts 5:38-39) but would have been happy to test God’s servant by posing him legal conundrums. That appears to be just what they did to Jesus.
For all Jews the greatest commandment was ”to love God”. Jesus ranks the next one as ”to love your neighbour”, a commandment that Hillel, the noted Pharisee teacher and leader, called the great practical principle. Jesus’s Pharisaic inquisitor in Mark 12:28-34 comments that these principles are more important than burnt offerings, an expression of Pharisaic opposition to the Sadducees whose emphasis was on ritual rather than piety. Pharisees accepted sacrifice only as a token of sincere repentance. Jesus concludes by telling the scribe that he is not far from the kingdom of God. The liberal treatment of the story in Mark is because it was the first gospel, written while the church was still evolving. It was edited in later gospels to leave no credit to the Pharisee.
It seems then that the enemies of Jesus were the priests and their supporters, the collaborating Sadducees, rather than the Pharisees as the gospels try to make out, though Jesus would have willingly criticised the latter too. It was the High Priest who held the initial hearing into Jesus’s crimes. Priests were the ones who stood to lose if an uprising were successful and they did not like the idea of inviting Roman antagonism even if it were not. After the fall of Jerusalem the temple no longer existed and therefore the Sadducees had lost their raison d’etre. Judaism survived through the Pharisees. The Pharisees therefore became the targets in the Christian gospels.
The Committal Hearing of Peter
While Jesus was being interviewed by the High Priest, Caiaphas, in the courtyard below, Peter who, the gospel implies, has furtively followed the arresting party back to the court of the High Priest, denies his master thrice, fulfilling Mark’s contrived prophecy (Mk 14:30). The fairy tale formulae show it to be false, though the tradition of the denial is most likely true and has been used by Mark to let Jesus prophesy again.
The personal detail in the prophesy and its fulfilment is unusual but the moral of the story is the perennial one in Mark, that Jews are no good, even Jesus’s best mates. This could not be taken too far in case the evangelists who founded the church should lose respect so the quotation of Zechariah 13:7 was given to show that it is all God’s will:
I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep shall be scattered.
Jesus actually used the quotation from Zechariah 13:7 when he had given up hope of God’s miracle, signifying that he had become the worthless shepherd—a false prophet, but placed here it justifies for theologians the behaviour of the disciples after the arrest and crucifixion. The Essenes were aware that if they misinterpreted the signs of the times and their predictions turned out to be wrong then they were false prophets. When he was supposed to have made the prophecy of Peter’s denial, Jesus was still expecting God’s miracle, so would have been turning to Zechariah 14:4 for his text:
And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which is before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, and there shall be a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south.
The quotation of Zechariah 13:7 would have occurred in the morning when he realized he had been wrong, and turned to Judas expecting his deserts.
If the gospels are true, it is incredible that Peter was not also seized in the garden. In reality he must have been arrested, together with some of the other disciples and taken with Jesus for committal but the gospel writers wanted Jesus alone to have been picked upon by the Jews. If others had been shown as having been arrested at the same time, it would have been an unmistakeable clue that Jesus led a band of rebels. Later in the story, in Acts, both Peter and Paul are tried. Luke has probably used parts of the rumoured trial of Peter, and perhaps others, in constructing these. So, the little fairy tale published in Mark would be a cover up for Peter’s own hearing in which he denies that he is a Nazarene.
Fowl were not allowed in Jerusalem, creating an immediate difficulty for the legend, but the legionaries in the Antonia fortress had a morning bugle call at cock crow and for that reason called it the Gallicinium after the Roman word for cockerels. If true the story proves that the soldiers were back in command in Jerusalem and this might be its subtle message. It is based on a genuine reminiscence of Peter who uses it indirectly to indicate that the occupation of Jerusalem by the Nazarenes was over. Mark makes it into a prophecy and works it up in legendary fashion.
Graves and Podro argue that Luke has actually given Peter’s trial in the Acts of the Apostles 23:1-5 as part of a trial of Paul. Paul is appearing before a High Priest called Ananias, just as Jesus appeared briefly before a previous Ananias (or Annas) in John. This earlier Ananias, who was Caiaphas’s father in law, had been High Priest himself and was still a powerful man. Five of his sons became High Priests. In Acts 23:5 Paul is shown apologizing to the court for verbally abusing the High Priest, saying:
I wist not that he was the High Priest for it is written: Thou shalt not speak evil of the ruler of thy people,
yet it is incredible that Paul would not know who such a prominent official as the High Priest was. But if the incident was misplaced and Paul were really Peter then the remark would be apt. Peter did not know he was speaking to the High Priest because Ananias was not the High Priest but was acting for Caiaphas in a lower court. However, the ruler Peter spoke of was Jesus not the priest.
It seems then that, because Caiaphas thought there had already been enough bloodshed from the Romans and the priesthood feared further uprisings, that they decided to send only Jesus, the leader of the gang, for trial. In Jewish custom (not Roman!) only one man each day could be condemned and Caiaphas was happy that it should be Jesus. Peter and any other captured disciples would be released with a whipping once they had admitted that Jesus was a fraud, but Peter, loyal to Jesus as he’d promised to be, put himself in danger of his life, at first refusing to deny his king.
Invited by Annas to condemn the leader of the Nazarenes to save his own skin, he quoted the line in Exodus 22:28 forbidding the cursing of the ruler of the people—not the priest, as the passage in Acts implies, but Jesus. Then, threatened by Annas with crucifixion under Roman justice or the alternative of freedom with a whipping, he succumbed, but still would not vow before God that Jesus was not the king, chosing instead to deny his leader three times according to the formula of an old semitic abjuration. This satisfied Annas who then turned him over to the guards for scourging. At that moment the trumpets sounded the Gallicinium from the Antonia fortress. Of, course, Jesus’s earlier prophesy was added by the gospel writer.
Further Reading
- More on the trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate
- More on the crucifixion
- More on Barabbas, the robber
