Traditional Christian depictions and interpretations of the death of Jesus have long been intertwined with Christian anti-Semitism. Given the Gospels’ depiction of a Roman governor who finds Jesus innocent and a mob of angry Jews demanding Jesus’ death, Christians have long understood Jews to be responsible, at least legally and politically, for Jesus’ crucifixion. Thus, throughout the last two thousand years, Christians have destroyed Torah scrolls, burned synagogues, confiscated Jewish property, taken Jewish lives, and even engaged in genocide, regularly justifying such actions by using the epithets “Christ killers” and “God killers.”
Tragically, such evil actions persisted even in the face of official teachings from the Christian church that denounced both the actions themselves and this particular justification for them. Even today, many Christians are either ignorant of or simply insensitive to the implications that the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ death have for Jewish-Christian relationships. In light of such a history, it would be highly irresponsible to write a book on the death of Jesus without addressing anti-Semitism.
One of the purposes of this book is to demonstrate that the historical realities surrounding Jesus’ death are more complicated than what appears in the Gospel narratives. While the Gospels reveal a public narrative that was witnessed by the masses, I propose that a private narrative also existed that the Gospel authors were not privy to and thus did not include. While my imaginative re-creation of this private narrative does not completely remove Jewish involvement from the death of Jesus, I hope that it qualifies Christian perceptions of Jewish culpability in significant ways. First and foremost, my reconstruction rejects the perception that Pilate truly believed that Jesus was innocent, and instead argues that he was the primary instigator and orchestrator of Jesus’ arrest and execution from the beginning. Such a move is important, because Jewish guilt for Jesus’ death is often magnified when compared to the Gospels’ portrayal of Pilate finding Jesus innocent. While throughout Christian history Pilate has often been rehabilitated and sometimes even presented as one who later came to Christian faith, the Jews have been vilified for demanding the death of an innocent man. By strongly implicating Pilate in Jesus’ death, I hope readers’ perceptions of Jewish guilt will be mitigated.
Second, my reconstruction undermines the belief that the majority of Jews in Jerusalem rejected Jesus and demanded his execution. This belief has been propagated by the misguided yet often-preached message that goes something like, “The Jews welcomed Jesus as a savior on Palm Sunday, but by Good Friday they rejected him and demanded his execution.” As my narrative (and any responsible historical treatment of Jesus’ death) demonstrates, this belief is grossly misguided. Jesus was apparently highly popular among the people, which in the eyes of the power brokers of Judea made him a threat to the stability of the region that needed to be removed. The crowd that demanded Jesus’ death was not the throngs of supporters that Jesus had throughout the city, but likely a small group of leading Jewish priests that were orchestrated by the high priest and Pilate himself. Thus, the Jews involved in Jesus’ death were an extreme minority of the population (maybe a couple hundred people in a city of three hundred thousand!) and far from representative of Jewish attitudes toward Jesus.
Finally, I reject the theory that the Jewish leaders involved in Jesus’ death knowingly killed an innocent man out of jealousy or hatred. Through my narrative reconstruction of Jesus’ death, I sought to present the complexity of political realities facing the Jewish high priest, Caiaphas. The weight of keeping the peace in Jerusalem as well as maintaining the safety of his Jewish brothers and sisters in the city would have no doubt lain heavily on his shoulders. A figure like Jesus would have greatly threatened that safety. His actions would have been perceived as illegal and seditious by Roman legal standards, which Caiaphas was tasked to uphold as high priest under Roman authority. Jesus’ entrance into Jerusalem and his temple actions would have, from a Roman perspective, made him guilty of capital crimes. If Caiaphas had refused to play a part in Jesus’ execution, he could have been perceived as taking the side of a traitor and rebel, thus aligning himself against Rome. Ultimately, Caiaphas acted in accordance with the legal responsibilities of his office at that time in Jewish history and likely did so out of a motivation to keep the city of Jerusalem at peace and its inhabitants safe. By better explaining the position of Caiaphas and the complicated realities he was negotiating, I hope my readers’ perception of Jewish guilt in the death of Jesus (and the historic charge of deicide) is yet further mitigated.
The historical reconstruction I have offered does include the involvement of the high priest and his administration in the death of Jesus. However, it undermines the teaching that “all Jews” were and are responsible for Jesus’ death. This claim is central to Christian anti-Semitism, the consequences of which, including the Holocaust, are well known. I hope that the reconstruction provided in this book will have an impact on Christian assessments of the role Jews played in the death of Jesus and that it will provide Christians with a more responsible way to both understand and present that role moving forward. My prayer is that such efforts to more responsibly handle the scriptural traditions of Jesus’ death in Christian preaching, teaching, and dramatic depictions will lead to healing and increased trust between Jews and Christians.