Scientists find what is true though unpopular. Christians say what is popular though untrue.

The Trial of Jesus 2 The Charges

Claiming to be a King
Perverting the Nation
Refusing Tribute

Abstract

Having been turned over to the Romans by the priests, Jesus Barabbas was quickly brought for trial. The Romans had built and administered the greatest empire the world had seen by being systematic, organised and thorough. Admittedly, they were a severe and cruel people but they had a sense of justice, and Roman law is still the model for civil law everywhere. Is it credible that they felt threatened by a man who told moral tales and thought he had a kingdom in heaven? Christians insist it is, but the Roman governors of Judaea had a lot more to concern them than mendicant preachers. Judaea had been in turmoil since even before the Romans annexed it in 6 AD, and only a quarter of a century after the crucifixion of the Christian god from Galilee, the Jews rose as a nation against their foreign rulers in a bloody war. When Jesus was crucified as a king, the problem for Roman governors was constant rebellion in Judaea.

Claiming to be a King

Are you the king of the Jews?

Pilate picked on the charge that Jesus claimed he was a king as the most serious, and asked him how he wished to plead. He had no choice but to try such a charge. As the Prefect, he stood in the place of the emperor and had to uphold his dignity. If the verdict was guilty there was no way out of declaring crucifixion as punishment. Pilate put the charges to Jesus who refuses to answer, according to the synoptic gospels, just as an Essene would. The Greek of Pilate’s opening question implies emphasis on the you suggesting disbelief or contempt.

Jesus replies: “Thou sayest”, an ambiguous reply. It might be agreement, meaning “As you say”. On the other hand it could be a defiant and surly, “So you say”, or even “That’s what you say” but Pilate takes it to mean “No”.

Pilate might have hoped for an admission of the crime to secure himself against the accusation that he executed paople illegally. But Jesus was acclaimed a king as the gospels themselves loudly declare. It was a crime under Roman law to be acclaimed a king. Jesus was unarguably guilty!

Jesus is not being helpful in the court. By refusing to answer or giving unhelpful answers he is effectively refusing to recognise the court. Interestingly Essenes were forbidden to swear a brother to death under the law of the gentiles as we can read at the start of column 9 of the Cairo Damascus Document following Geza Vermes:

Every man who vows another to death by the laws of the gentiles will himself be put to death.

This also is delightfully ambiguous, in typically Essene fashion. It can be read as upholding gentile authority or as denying it. It would be easier for the Damascus Rule to get into Roman hands than others since it was the rule for the village Essenes rather than the more secretive monastic ones. Essenes would have known precisely what it meant but anyone intent on betrayal could not show from the text what was intended. If the trial of Jesus is anything to go by, he was following a rule like this in refusing to assist the court. The death which Essenes feared was eternal death—exclusion from the kingdom of God. Jesus would have considered it wrong even to vow himself to death under the laws of the Romans, in case he would thereby lose his ticket into the kingdom.

In any case, though Jesus might have been convinced he was God’s king until the night of the Passover, he was now the worthless shepherd, and as an Essene unable to recognize Roman justice he would neither affirm nor deny the charge.

John’s much later gospel, the last gospel written, blatantly seeks to dissociate the events in the temple from Jesus’s arrest. It puts them at the start of a four year ministry instead of at the end of a shorter one as do the other gospels. John also fails to make it clear that Jesus’s band had resisted arrest and that the Sanhedrin, as the civic authority, had issued a formal warrant for Jesus’s arrest, as they must if they were to remain within the laws laid down by Rome and not leave themselves open to accusations of incompetence in Pilate’s eyes.

John or an editor of the fourth gospel had altered the book to make Jesus’s crime bringing a man, Lazarus, back from the dead, not capturing Jerusalem as he must have done to control the temple precinct with its police, and even soldiery nearby in the Antonia tower. John was rewriting history because he thought it too obvious in the synoptics. He underestimated the stupidity of human kind.

John has Jesus defending himself, proving that it was a romance. He pleads (Jn 18:36) “confusion and avoidance” or what we would call “guilty but with mitigation”. He had spoken of a kingdom, but confusion had arisen because it was “not of this world,” a later addition because the idea of another-worldly kingdom of God was developed by Christianity, the Jews believing firmly that the kingdom of God would be here on earth. In John’s romance, the explanation is sufficient for Pilate to find the uncouth mendicant philosopher, Jesus, innocent.

But Jesus’s ignoble Jewish supporters have now turned against him, and Pilate gets cold feet at the Jewish antagonism. Pilate had nothing but disgust for the Jews and their opinions, so will hardly have bothered about the crowd. In Luke, he sends the Galilaean to Herod—more romance, but as a Roman bureaucrat, he would not have abandoned his responsibilities and he would not have sent Jesus for another trial having just tried him. Roman law might have seemed hard to us but Romans as a race were correct people.

Herod sends Jesus back to Pilate dressed as a king, perhaps a half-hearted attempt to absolve the Romans of the mockery of a god by suggesting that Herod was the source of it. Finally, Pilate can hardly have been expected to use a Jewish ritual to dramatically “wash his hands” of the matter. Such a concession would have been beneath him. Instead, he should have asked the sun to witness the justice of his act, but no gospel has him doing this—proof that his verdict was unjust!

Yet even if John’s defence of Jesus were true history and even if Pilate had been a humane person, and he was not, he would himself have invited a charge of treason to have ignored a challenge to the authority of the Emperor. Pilate undoubtedly knew this but John 19:12 has the Jews reminding him of his duty:

If you release this man you are not Caesar’s friend: everyone that maketh himself a king speaketh against Caesar.

Here the gospel writer puts the indefensible case against Jesus in a nutshell. It is absurd to imagine that the Roman Prefect of Judaea needed reminding of Roman law, or of his own duty. That this line should be included proves that the gospel writer knew that Pilate had no option but to crucify the defendant. All that had gone before was pure fiction composed to absolve Romans of the guilt of murdering a god.

Nor could Pilate have found Jesus innocent because his acts had shown him to be guilty. If we take the gospels at face value, Jesus had deliberately arranged a foal so that he could ride it into Jerusalem in fulfilment of prophecy. The student should read the whole of the prophecies of Zechariah to understand what Jesus the Nazarene was up to. In Zechariah 9:9 we read:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass.

This passage is purely messianic. It states unequivocally that the king will ride into Jerusalem on a foal. For what purpose? It is worth quoting succeeding passages in Zechariah.

When I have bent Judah for me, filled the bow with Ephraim, and raised up thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece, and made thee as the sword of a mighty man.
Zechariah 9:13

And they shall be as mighty men, which tread down their enemies in the mire of the streets in the battle: and they shall fight, because the Lord is with them, and the riders on horses shall be confounded.
Zechariah 10:5

These passages prove that Jesus’s intentions were not peaceful when he ordered a foal of an ass to enter Jerusalem. He intended to destroy the enemies of Israel and institute a Jewish kingdom to bring peace to the world. By deliberately entering Jerusalem on a foal, Jesus was declaring himself King of the Jews, and declaring his intention to follow the prophecy of Zechariah. No Jew could have mistaken the symbolism and they shouted, “Free us, Son of David” as he entered the city.

John 18:36 is a very telling little verse because Jesus also says to Pilate:

If my kingdom were of this world then my men would fight to prevent me from being captured.

The author hoped to show that rumours of Jesus being an armed rebel were nonsense by making Jesus himself say:

We could have fought if we had wanted to—but we didn’t.

The band of pilgrims, including women, Christians love to imagine were Jesus’s companions could hardly have been considered a fighting force. Unwittingly, John gives the game away, admitting that Jesus led a force of men capable of fighting. If the Nazarenes were the rag-bag of stupid disciples depicted by the clergy, this passage could only have been a joke. Obviously it was not. The Nazarenes were sufficient in numbers, armed and willing to fight at Jesus’s command!

We know they were armed because in Luke 22:36-38 Jesus tells his disciples to buy swords. Two turn out to be enough! Luke is trying to explain the rumours that Jesus and his men were armed. The fact that two is sufficient is obviously a Christian dilution. Some say that Jesus wanted a sword to die as a false prophet, having realised his prophecies had failed. But for that, only one was needed.

The gospel picture of Pilate as a kindly man is also nonsense. The Emperor Tiberius wanted to keep peace and order in a sensitive but politically important area of the empire. To get the confidence of some at least of the population he allowed the Jews religious privileges: they were free to pursue their own religion; they were exempt from military service; Roman soldiers were not allowed to insult the Jewish religion on pain of death and were subject to the Jewish penalty of death if they stepped beyond the court of the gentiles in the temple.

But Pontius Pilate was singularly crass in his treatment of the Jews, offending them repeatedly. He was spiteful, unjust, greedy and indiscreet.

As soon as he was appointed, he carried Roman standards bearing the image of Caesar into Jerusalem, and possibly into the temple, knowing the Jews would have been incensed.
He took the temple treasure to build an aqueduct into the city, an action that one might have thought would be welcomed—but the Jews put God before any beneficent actions of the foreigner.
He strongly favoured the Priestly Party of the Sadducees—disliked by the masses—and its leaders, the Annas family.

Such obduracy led to a series of uprisings. One of these was the uprising of Simon Magus, an Egyptian Jew who was hailed as messiah in Samaria. After savagely putting down the uprising the complaints of the Samaritans to the Roman Legate in Syria, Vitellius, led to Pilate’s recall to Rome where he disappears from history.

Jesus was acclaimed a king—there is no denying that crime. Pilate had enough evidence. Jesus was guilty! The verdict was read from a tablet. Once written, it could not be changed, whence Pilate’s, “What I have written, I have written”. The subscription on the cross proves that Jesus was condemned for “Majestas” —he had sought to be a king. Such a “titulus” was commonly paraded before the prisoner proceeding to execution.

It only remained for Pilate to write a precis of the report to be sent to Rome as his duty required and his role was complete. Christians pretend that the whole matter was so trivial in the vastness of the Roman empire that Pilate would not have bothered to file a report, but these reports could not be bypassed. Pious lies! Without reports like these most of the genuine stories of the saints and martyrs would have been unknown—most of them are fictitious anyway.

Moreover, Justin, Tertullian and Eusebius, giants of the early church, assure us there was such a report. Christian apologists again say that even their own Church fathers did not know this but were only assuming it. Christians always want it all ends up. Even at an early date, the Fathers of the Church considered it inconceivable that Pilate would not have filed such a report. We can be certain that he did, and the fact that it has not even survived as a copy proves that it did not favour the Christian version of the story.

Speaking of saints, Pilate himself is a saint of the Abyssinian Church—25 June being his holy day. Pilate is said to have been beheaded by Tiberius. As his head fell off, it was caught up by angels and a voice declared:

All generations will call thee blessed… for under thee all these things were fulfilled.

Tertullian called Pilate “a Christian in his convictions”. Eusebius claims that forged Acta Pilati were produced by heathens as a weapon against Christianity in the reign of Maximinus. We take it from Eusebius that these unfavourable documents were forged, but he had every reason for saying they were forged even though they were genuine—plainly they did not support the Christian myth. Maximinus is supposed to have deliberately aimed to undermine the superstition of Christianity by having the Acta Pilati taught to all schoolchildren. Acts of Pilate are even mentioned in records of contemporary Christian martyrs like Andronicus but these are a set of Christian forgeries now known as the Gospel of Nicodemus.

Perverting the Nation

When Luke speaks of “perverting the nation” he is referring to the Roman law of Laesae Majestatis whereby the assumption of the power of the government without authority was punishable by death. The gospels state clearly that Jesus defied the civic authorities. He overthrows the tables in the temple court and controls access into it because he refuses, in Mark, to allow anyone to carry anything through it. Under his regime Jesus taught daily in the temple implying a continuous period of occupation of at least several days. The parable of the vineyard and the husbandmen told the enthusiastic audience that Israel would soon be under new management.

Some fragments of an unknown gospel and of Josephus even say that Jesus officiated as a priest, entering the Holy Place, implying both that Jesus had the role of an alternative priest and that he was in a position to play it because the temple had been captured. The only people who maintained a priestly tradition outside the temple Priesthood were the community at Qumran, guardians of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The High Priests had absolute power in the temple precinct and would have set the temple police on to anyone disrupting temple activities in such a manner. Instead they merely asked Jesus on whose authority he carried out these acts. Of course they might well have asked this question to get Jesus to incriminate himself, but whatever his reply he would have been swiftly arrested. Why did they not do it?

The gospels admit the High Priests feared the people, confirming the immense support Jesus had. But ordinary Jews, though they hated the collaborators, would have respected their rights within the temple because they would have felt they had them by God’s will.

The only explanation is that Jesus and his followers had forcibly occupied the temple and almost certainly the city as well. These are crimes of Laesae Majestatis. Guilty!

Refusing Tribute

What of Jesus’s attitude to the money required as tribute to Caesar (Mt 22:15-22). The gospel story seems to refute the idea that Jesus was a nationalist because his answer seems to acknowledge Caesar’s political power and imply that Jesus would have paid the tribute. Yet in Luke 23:2 he was accused of refusing to pay it! Even for Alfred Loisy, the biblical scholar, who was excommunicated by the Pope for his intellectual honesty, this declaration meant the kingdom of God was not to be established by violence. Loisy’s prejudice for the Christian image of gentle Jesus had distorted his judgement. Jesus’s answer does not acknowledge Caesar’s political power, it denies it. Jesus is asserting clearly that Caesar had no authority over God’s country and people. It means he would not have paid the tribute. That explains Luke’s charge.

The question was a trick like “Have you stopped beating your wife?”. A reply of either “Yes” or “No” would have discredited him. To have denied the tribute money would have suited Jewish nationalists but would have been treasonable to the Romans; to have recognised Caesar’s right to tribute would have pleased the Romans but lost support from most Jews. The answer in the gospels:

Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s,

is considered to be very clever by Christians, implying that the tribute money is merely this-worldly whereas God was interested only in other-worldly matters.

This interpretation is nonsense. If the reported words were those of Jesus, he was openly defying Caesar and the Romans. He was telling Romans they had no right to be there and he had no intention of paying them tribute. When Jesus spoke of “the things that are God’s” no Jew could mistake his meaning—it was Eretz Israel itself and the Jewish people, God’s Chosen people! There could be no mistake in the context in which it is spoken—what is God’s is contrasted with what is Caesar’s. He is saying:

Judaea is God’s land; the Jews are God’s Chosen People. Caesar is welcome to what is his, the rest of the Roman Empire, but he can have no claim to what is God’s.

That this is the correct interpretation explains Luke’s charge of refusing to pay the tribute money. Jesus refused to pay tribute. Guilty!

Commentators on the gospels try to find in Jesus’s audience both collaborators and nationalists so that one or the other would be offended by Jesus’s answer. Taking the Pharisees to be collaborators, they identify Mark’s Herodians with Jewish nationalists—people of the philosophy of the real Jesus. Yet the Herods were Roman puppets! It is true that Josephus tells us that the Essenes were favoured by Herod the Great but the discoveries at Qumran suggest quite the opposite. Nobody is certain who the Herodians were, but their name must imply associations with the detested puppet kings. They were allies of the Romans and allies of the Sadducees and might have been the Sadducees by another name. There is no need to look for explicit mention of nationalists and collaborators—they were there. The band accompanying Jesus were nationalists—the inquisitors were collaborators.

Depicted as part of Jesus’s confrontation with the Jewish authorities—Mark places this episode in the temple. But Pharisees would not defile the temple with unclean coin—it was against the Law of Moses. In the same episode related in Luke 20:19-26 it was the Chief Priests who posed the question. This seems more likely. The Sadducees were out and out collaborators, kept wealthy out of the temple tax, paid by all Jews, and the sale of sacrificial animals. As agents of the occupying power they were the real enemies of Jesus.

Really the incident must have happened elsewhere. Jesus would not have discussed money in the temple after cleansing it and, having disposed of the Jerusalem garrison, he would not have been bothered about tribute anyway. Its real setting was on entering Judaea at the customs post of Jericho. Its absence there explains the curious double reference to Jericho in Mark 10:46. Then Herodians and Sadducees is the original tradition—they were the border officials and customs men. Mark replaced Sadducees with Pharisees and an editor moved the incident into the temple. Luke then changed Mark’s text because he realized that in the temple the inquisitors should have been the priests, but seemed to hedge his bets in that he implies that the question was put at another time at the instigation of the Sadducees.

The people marvelled or were amazed. Why! These are words used of daring deeds or remarkable events like miracles. Interpreted the Christian way, the answer was clever but not amazing. Interpreted properly it was amazing because it was so bold. Jesus was openly defying Caesar.

Note that the priests address Jesus as one who teaches “the way of God in truth”. They state categorically that he is an Essene.

17:24 And when they were come to Capernaum, they that received tribute money came to Peter, and said, Doth not your master pay tribute? 17:25 He saith, Yes. And when he was come into the house, Jesus prevented him, saying, What thinkest thou, Simon? of whom do the kings of the earth take custom or tribute? of their own children, or of strangers? 17:26 Peter saith unto him, Of strangers. Jesus saith unto him, Then are the children free. 17:27 Notwithstanding, lest we should offend them, go thou to the sea, and cast an hook, and take up the fish that first cometh up; and when thou hast opened his mouth, thou shalt find a piece of money: that take, and give unto them for me and thee.

Besides the story of Caesar’s tribute money in Matthew, we also get what seems to be an entirely different tribute—the annual temple tax of half a shekel. There is no Christian who will not read this episode as a miracle—the precise coin to pay the tax for Jesus and Peter is found in the mouth of a fish—but you will note that no miracle is recounted. We are not told that such a marvellous fish is caught!

Jesus’s direct speech has become nonsense through pious editing, and yet the original meaning shines through—for anyone not blinkered! Jesus is not telling Peter to pay the tax, he is telling him not to pay it. And the tax he meant must have been the tribute money to Caesar not the temple tax. The miracle is not recorded because Jesus was being heavily sarcastic in saying:

go to the sea, cast a hook, open the mouth of the first fish that you catch, and if you find the money for the tax, take it to them and pay it.

He was really saying, “It will take a miracle for me pay this tax”.

Now Jesus would not have paid either the temple tax or the tribute to Caesar, and Jesus shows that neither himself, nor any of his followers owed the Temple tax. Jesus is not contradicting the law, though. The law requires a temple tax to be payed by every male aged twenty and over (Ex 30:11-16) but does not say how often. Pharisees and Sadducees seem to have paid annually, but Essenes had no respect for the polluted temple and, as the scrolls indicate, would have fulfilled only the strictest requirements of the law by paying the tax once in their lifetime:

The money of the valuation which a man gives as ransom for his life shall be half a shekel in accordance with the shekel of the sanctuary. He shall give it only once in his life.
4Q159

Jesus would already have paid it at his age. The tone of the tax collector in Mt 24 is menacing, and the implication is that Peter agreed with him to avoid trouble. Temple Levites would have bullied many people into paying the tax, though they could not afford it, but they would not have wasted their efforts on any as committed as Essenes, who had a vow of poverty, besides their disdain for the temple. Peter, who was a rock, would not have been intimidated by a temple bully. He would, however, have been scared of anyone collecting the Roman tribute levied by Caesar.

Though the text, by using in the Greek the word didrachmon, implies that the tax is the temple tax, it also uses words which mean custom and poll tax. The temple tax is a Jewish matter but the poll tax is the tribute owed to the Romans. Though the evangelist has tried to confuse the issue, there is no doubt in Matthew that Jesus is talking about the Roman tax. Jesus asks Peter:

Of whom do the kings of the earth take tribute?

The kings of the earth cannot be priests in the temple of Jerusalem but must be gentile kings—the emperors of Rome, the rulers of almost the whole known world. He is referring to Tiberius Caesar.

Jesus’s question has been slightly altered by an editor. The question was originally:

Of whom do the kings of the earth take tribute, of God’s children or of strangers?

Peter gives the correct answer—of strangers. God’s children paid tribute only to God. The kings of the earth take tribute from those they have conquered—as long as they are not God’s children! Jesus then says:

Then are the children free.

When Jesus says the children he does not mean immature adults he means the children of Israel, establishing the original question. Jesus reaffirms the principle that God’s children do not pay tribute to foreigners—he is refusing tribute just as he did in Luke—and just as Judas of Galilee a few years earlier had refused to pay tribute. He concludes with his heavily ironical: By all means pay the tribute—if you can catch a fish with the money in its mouth.

Interestingly there must have been a census in 20-21 AD because there was one in 6-7 AD and they were every fourteen years. This numbering of the people was the sad calamity of Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews that led to Jesus’s uprising, but has been suppressed. Luke’s reference to the census at the time of the birth of Jesus was perhaps a transference of the fact that a census led to his death! Jesus plainly saw the census as yet another sign of the times.

We are told the incident in Matthew occurs in Capernaum in Galilee but Matthew probably knows less about Jesus’s itinerary than Mark. He has set it in Capernaum because it refers to catching fish, and Matthew has to make that possible. If it corresponds with Mark it occurred in Judaea, where it would have been collected when Jesus entered the country on his way to Jerusalem. The oasis of Jericho is only five miles from the river Jordan.

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Last uploaded: 11 May, 2008.