It is difficult to separate pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion.

Carl Sagan

The Jewish Committal Hearing 2

Threatening to Destroy the Temple
Abrogating the Law of Moses
Breaking the Sabbath
The Commital Hearing of Peter

Abstract

The Jewish “trial” of Jesus was really a committal hearing because Jesus’s crimes were not religious but political, and the punishment for such crimes in Roman law was death. Whether he blasphemed or not was irrelevant. Christians have written volumes about the illegality of the Jewish trial of Jesus. Yet few of them appreciate a gospel purpose was to concoct a Jewish trial to place the guilt of Jesus’s death on to the Jews not the Romans. Scenes of the trial before the Sanhedrin are to incriminate the Jews, though it had to turn the prisoner over to the Roman authorities, and put the manifest crimes of Jesus before Pilate irrespective of any blasphemy he had committed—which they did. How likely was a senior holy man of a fanatically pious sect, like Jesus, to blaspheme? He was crucified because in Roman law he was a traitor to the empire.

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.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.