Jesus was a radical Jewish prophet. And like many Jewish prophets, he was against the Jewish ruling structures of his time. Not all prophets, admittedly, opposed the reigning authority—there were some “court prophets” and “Temple prophets” who supported the Jewish monarchy and (later) ritual administrators like the priests.1 But “the classical prophets,” as they are called, were normally harsh critics of ritual that was only ritual. That is what prophecy meant, then—not predicting the future, as the word has come to be understood subsequently. Prophets were originally God’s messengers, called to rebuke those who were forgetting or defying his commands, deserting his Pact (Covenant) with his people. Sometimes this involved warnings about the consequences of deserting the Lord—which is why they came, simplistically, to be considered as predictors of doom.
In the treaty terms we call the Ten Commandments, the Jewish people recognized Yahweh’s sovereignty, and he in return promised his protection if the people kept their side of the Pact. When they did not do that, he let them know that the treaty was broken and his protection could be withdrawn. His instrument for informing the people of this was a long line of prophets carrying his message. The remedy for what Abraham Heschel called the “absolutizing of the Law and its cult” was a prophet’s call back to the intent and spirit of the Law: “The prophets disparaged the [Temple] cult when it became a substitute for righteousness.”2 Ritual can become mechanical, a matter of rote repetition, until life is breathed back into it with the fresh urgencies of the prophet. That is why the revelation of God’s will was twofold, given in “the Law and the prophets.” The Law was beneficial but static. The prophets gave it new life in a dynamic series of pointed, provocative messages. Bruce Vawter writes of the prophetic role:
When the prophets condemned the priesthood, as they often did, it was not for what the priests were teaching but rather for what they were not; they had rejected knowledge and had ignored the law of God…Certain of the prophets would have had at best a minimal interest in the Israelite liturgy,3 which does not necessarily mean that they made a fetish of opposing rites the observance of which had become a fetish for others…The prophetic attitude to the cult was like the prophetic attitude to everything—one in which forms were always secondary to the realities they signified. It was only when forms no longer signified anything that he [the prophet] demanded condemnation.4
The office of prophet was, paradoxically, both institutionalized and spontaneous. The credentials of the prophet had to be established from moment to moment. They rested on the authenticity of concern for God and for his people, for justice and for the poor. They could also depend on literary power and on dramatic enactment. This extraordinary kind of authority was bound to run into difficulties with the established powers. It fit Max Weber’s thesis on charismatic power vs. institutional power: “We shall understand prophet to mean a purely individual bearer of charisma, who by virtue of his mission proclaims a religious doctrine or divine commandment.”5 Joseph Blenkinsopp develops this Weberian notion:
Weber located prophecy in the context of charismatic authority and defined the prophet as “a purely individual bearer of charisma.” This was taken to imply that the prophetic-charismatic figure is legitimated not by virtue of a socially acknowledged office like the priesthood, but solely through extraordinary personal qualities. The prophet is therefore neither designated by a predecessor nor ordained, nor installed in office, but called. The claims staked by the prophet, or on the prophet’s behalf by others, would tend inevitably to set him (less commonly her) in opposition to dominant elites dedicated to preserving the status quo. This kind of prophecy would therefore, according to Weber, play a destabilizing rather than a corroborative role in society.6
Weber and Blenkinsopp compare Israelite prophets to seers and “ecstatics” in other cultures. But Abraham Heschel argues that this underestimates the unique quality of prophecy in Israel.
Prophetic incidents, revelatory moments, are believed to have happened to many people in many lands. But a line of prophets, stretching over many centuries, from Abraham to Moses, from Samuel to Nathan, from Elijah to Amos, from Hosea to Isaiah, from Jeremiah to Malachi, is a phenomenon for which there is no analogy…Where else was there a nation which was able to emulate the prophetic history of Israel?…Neither Lao-Tzu nor Buddha, neither Socrates nor Plotinus, neither Confucius nor [the Egyptian] Ipuwer spoke in the name of God or felt themselves as sent by Him; and the priests and prophets of pagan religions spoke in the name of a particular spirit, not in the name of the Creator of heaven and earth.7
John Bright agrees with Heschel: “Regardless of its antecedents, the phenomenon of prophecy as it developed in Israel was unique, without a real parallel.”8
The prophets put their message in visible metaphors, as when Jeremiah broke the clay vessel (Jer 19.7) or wore a yoke (Jer 27.2). Or when Habakkuk wrote his message on placards visible far off (Hab 2.1).9 They engaged in what sixties radicals would call “street theater.” Isaiah went “naked as a sign” of Egypt’s fate (20.2–4). They could also put the humiliation of a rebellious people in vivid sexual terms, as when Jeremiah said that God was raping his own wife (13.26–27).10 The image of the people’s infidelity to their Pact with God was given its most vivid expression when Hosea was called to marry a whore, “for like a wanton this land is unfaithful to the Lord” (1.2). Jesus, too, acted out his radical message—by healing or feeding on the Sabbath, by writing on the ground to ignore the crowd calling for a prostitute’s death, by cursing the fig tree, or by weaving a lash and driving money changers from the Temple. This last action, which prevented the carrying of money to pay for the animals to be sacrificed, suspended for a time the very possibility of performing the sacrifices at the center of Temple worship.
The prophets had a tradition of saying that sacrifice without moral reform is an empty gesture. This often put them at odds with the Temple and its ministers. When Jeremiah was banished from the Temple for predicting its demise, he had to have his disciple Baruch read his message in the sacred precinct.11 Here, for instance, is Amos:
I will not delight in your sacred ceremonies.
When you present your sacrifice and offerings
I will not accept them,
nor look on the buffaloes of your shared-offerings.
Spare me the sound of your songs;
I cannot endure the music of your lutes.
Let justice roll on like a river
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (5.21–24)
Or Hosea:
Therefore have I lashed you through the prophets
and torn you to shreds with my words;
loyalty is my desire, not sacrifice,
not whole-offerings but the knowledge of God. (6.5–6)
Or Isaiah:
Your countless sacrifices, what are they to me?
says the Lord.
I am sated with whole-offerings of rams
and the fat of buffaloes;
I have no desire for the blood of bulls,
of sheep and of he-goats.
Whenever you come to enter my presence—
who asked you for this?
No more shall you trample my courts.
The offer of your gifts is useless,
the reek of sacrifice is abhorrent to me.
New moons and sabbaths and assemblies,
sacred seasons and ceremonies, I cannot endure.
I cannot tolerate your new moons and your festivals;
they have become a burden to me,
and I can put up with them no longer.
When you lift your hands outspread in prayer,
I will hide my eyes from you.
Though you offer countless prayers,
I will not listen.
There is blood on your hands;
wash yourselves and be clean.
Put away the evil of your deeds,
away out of my sight.
Cease to do evil and learn to do right,
pursue justice and champion the oppressed;
give the orphan his rights, plead the widow’s cause. (1.11–17)
Or Micah:
Am I to approach him with whole-offerings of yearling calves?
Will the Lord accept thousands of rams,
or ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my eldest son for my own wrongdoing,
my children for my own sin?
God has told you what is good;
and what is it that the Lord asks of you?
Only to act justly, to love loyalty,
to walk wisely before your God. (6.6–8)
If I were hungry, I would not tell you,
for the world and all that is in it are mine.
Shall I eat the flesh of your bulls
or drink the blood of he-goats?
Offer to God the sacrifice of thanksgiving
and pay your vows to the Most High.
Or Jeremiah:
What good is it to me if frankincense is brought from Sheba and fragrant spices from distant lands? I will not accept your whole-offerings, your sacrifices do not please me. (6.20)
No one could be more scathing against the religious establishment of the Jews than another Jew, the prophet Malachi:
If I am a master, where is the fear due to me? So says the Lord of Hosts to you, you priests, who despise my name…I will accept no offering from you…And now, you priests, this decree is for you: if you will not listen to me and pay heed to the honoring of my name, says the Lord of Hosts, then I will lay a curse upon you. I will turn your blessings into a curse; yes, into a curse, because you pay no heed. I will cut off your arm, fling offal in your faces, the offal of your pilgrim-feasts, and I will banish you from my presence. (1.6, 10, 2.1–3)
Jesus was acting in the prophetic tradition when he cleansed the Temple, driving out the money changers. The weaving of a lash recalls God’s “lashing” of priests through the prophets at Hosea 6.5. And his words, “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a robbers’ cave” (Mt 21.13) recall Jeremiah (7.11), “Do you think that this house, this house which bears my name, is a robbers’ cave?”
The prophets attacked those who used power against the poor. As Isaiah said (10.1–2):
Shame on you! you who make unjust laws
and publish burdensome decrees,
depriving the poor of justice…
The prophets, as a menace to those in power, were regularly treated as troublemakers. They were threatened, called crazy, driven away, isolated, or murdered. Amos was banished (7.11). Priests called for the death of Jeremiah (Jer 26.11). Elijah says: “The people of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, torn down thy altars and put thy prophets to death with the sword. I alone am left, and they seek to take my life” (1 Kings 19.10). Jeremiah spoke the same way: “‘Come, let us decide what to do with Jeremiah,’ men say. ‘…Let us invent some charges against him; let us pay no attention to his message’…Well thou knowest, O Lord, all their murderous plots against me” (18.18, 23).
Jesus suffered the fate of other prophets. His own family thought him crazy (Mk 3.21). Men called him a bastard (Jn 8.4–1), unclean (Lk 11.38), a glutton (Lk 7.34), a devil (Jn 7.20). They tried to throw him off a cliff (Lk 4.29) or stone him (Jn 8.59). Men schemed to get him into trouble with the Roman authorities by criticizing the taxes paid to them. They tried to get him into trouble with religious authorities by criticizing the death penalty or divorce as prescribed by the Law. King Herod plotted to kill Jesus, just as he had killed the Baptist (Mk 3.6).
As Jesus traveled through Galilee and Palestine, he was constantly harried. His foes used the Law to oppose his acts of healing and helping the poor. Jesus could say with the prophet, “You have turned into venom the process of law and justice itself into poison” (Amos 6.12). In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus says such leaders are descended from the men who killed prophets:
“Alas for you, Scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites, who raise tomb monuments for the prophets and adorn their memorials, protesting that ‘If we were living in the prophets’ times we would have had no part in shedding their blood’—which is a confession that you are the descendants of the prophet-killers. Complete their record…Take note that I send more prophets and sages and Scribes. Some of them you will kill, some crucify, some scourge in your gatherings, and others chase from city to city, so that the guilt of all the just men’s blood shed on earth belongs to you, from the blood of the just Abel to that of the just Zachary the son of Barach, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar…O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who murder the prophets and stone the emissaries sent you, how often I yearned to gather your children to me, as a hen gathers its brood within her wings, but you would have none of it.” (23.29–37)
Luke, in the Acts of the Apostles, gives us the fulfillment of what Jesus was saying about those who murdered prophets. He describes the first Christian martyr, Stephen, accusing his executioners: “Which of the prophets did not your fathers persecute?” (Ac 7.52).
In the Gospels, opposition to Jesus the prophet came from four sources—all of them conceiving themselves as upholders of the Law of Yahweh: Sadducees, Pharisees, Scribes, and Priests.
1. The Sadducees, who claimed descent from the priest Zadok, were aristocrats, according to Josephus.12 By the time of Jesus, the Sadducees had become comparatively secular and were in “sympathy with the foreign occupying power.”13 The Synoptic Gospels claim that Sadducees denied that there is life after death (Mt 22.23, Mk 12.18, Lk 20.27). Despite disagreements in their past, the secular Sadducees joined the religious Pharisees in testing Jesus (Mt 16.1), who warned his Followers against “the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees” (Mt 16.6). The Acts of the Apostles treats the Sadducees as allies of the chief priests (4.1, 5.17). They were a conservative force worried about troublemakers like Jesus.
2. The Pharisees, or “the Separated,” were adherents of the strictest readings of the Law, as that was defined in continual oral refinements.14 Raymond Brown writes of them:
The Pharisees began as a liberalizing movement which, through appeal to oral tradition, sought to make contemporary the real thrust of the written Law of Moses. The problem in [the Gospel of] Matthew’s eyes (and here he may reflect Jesus) was that this oral interpretation had now become as rigid as the written tradition, and was at times counterproductive. The Jesus who says, over and over, “You have heard it said, but I say to you” (Mt. 5.21, 27, 31, 33, 38, 43) is, then, preserving the purpose of the Law by making certain that past contemporization of God’s will is not treated as if it were exhaustive of that will.15
Since pride in their lore made the Pharisees even more demanding than the Law, they kept up a running criticism of Jesus for boundary-crossing relations with the “unclean,” whether lepers, the insane, the possessed, a menstruating woman, prostitutes, tax gatherers, or Samaritans. They also thought he was not sufficiently observant of the Sabbath or of fasts. They collaborated with Herod’s scheme to kill Jesus (Mk 3.6).
The Pharisees are threatened by Jesus’ teachings and reject him because none of the authorities (archontes) or Pharisees have believed in him, and the people who have do not know the Law (Jn 7.48–49). Only once do the Pharisees directly debate with Jesus (Jn 8.13–20); usually they maintain a superior position based on social recognition of their learning, their influence with the people, and their political power in conjunction with the chief priests—and so they refuse to treat Jesus as an equal.16
3. The Scribes were scholars, lawyers, secretaries, or assistants to the priests. Scribes were praised in the Wisdom Literature (Sirach 39.1–11) for use of all their time in studying the Law and the prophets.17 Raymond Brown and other scholars think that the author of Matthew may have been a Scribe, as one sees by his meticulous compiling of cognate bits of information and his careful citation of Scripture.18 But the Scribes who mainly dealt with Jesus seem to have become middle-level officials “mainly in or from Jerusalem” who were useful to others in power, and are linked with them as assistants, as in the formula “scribes and Pharisees.”19
4. The Priests were the men most dangerous to Jesus. They had the greatest stake in what he was saying about God’s justice for the poor. They had the religious establishment to protect from the Roman imperial overlords. They had to contain any challenge to the status quo, to preserve their own standing with Roman officials, as the spokesmen for allowed religion. Jesus, by questioning their authority, could upset the delicate balancing act they performed from moment to moment. They had to convince the Roman rulers that Jesus had no overwhelming popular support or political meaning or religious authority, but was nonetheless a threat to the stability of imperial relations. For years the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Scribes stalked Jesus, discredited him, threatened and harassed him from Galilee to Jerusalem. But when it came time to close in for the kill, they turned the dirty work over to the priests. The priests are the ones who bribe Judas (Mk 14.10–11), who lend Temple police to the arrest of Jesus (Jn 18.3), who make sure that the “high priests, elders, and scholars of the Law” condemn him (Mk 14.53), and who manipulate Pontius Pilate into doing what they had no more authority to do—to execute a criminal (Jn 18.31). “Christ, who inherited the religion and ethic of the prophets, was betrayed by the institutional church in much the same way as the prophets had been betrayed by the ritualistic-legalistic system of early Judaism.”20
To say that the priests killed Jesus is not to say, with anti-Semites down through the ages, that “the Jews” killed him. The priests are the culpable ones, and if there is any curse upon them, it is the one Malachi called down on priests who betrayed their Covenant with the Lord. How can saying that Jesus suffered the fate of Jeremiah and other prophets be anti-Semitic? This is part of a story that was old and familiar in Jesus’ time—once again, Jewish authorities were killing a Jewish prophet. The “Jewish people” as a whole had no part in the transaction, nor had they ever been guilty when prophets met their fate. The priests killed Jesus. That is what they do. They kill the prophets.
1. John Bright, Jeremiah (Doubleday, 1965), pp. xx–xxi; Bruce Vawter, “Introduction to the Prophetic Literature,” NJ, p. 189; Joseph Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel, revised and enlarged (Westminster John Knox Press, 1983), pp. 3, 15, 17.
2. Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (Harper & Row, 1962), p. 250.
3. Cf. Carroll Stuhlmueller, “Deutero-Isaiah and Trito-Isaiah,” NJ, p. 345: “Deutero-Isaiah was indifferent to Temple and cult.”
4. Vawter, op. cit., pp. 192–93.
5. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, translated by Ephraim Fischoff (Beacon Press, 1963), p. 46.
6. Blenkinsopp, op. cit., p. 35.
7. Heschel, op. cit., pp. 604–5.
8. Bright, op. cit., p. xix.
9. Blenkinsopp, op. cit., p. 127.
10. Kathleen M. O’Connor, “Reclaiming Jeremiah’s Violence,” in The Aesthetics of Violence in the Prophets, edited by Julia M. O’Brien and Chris Franke (T & T Clark, 2010), pp. 37–49.
11. Blenkinsopp, op. cit., p. 133.
12. Josephus, Antiquities 18.16; Gary G. Parton, “Sadducees,” ABD, vol. 5, pp. 892–95. Zadok was the high priest under David and Solomon, and those claiming descent from him were sometimes rivals with, sometimes members of, the priestly Levitical line. Cf. William H. C. Propp, Exodus 19–40 (Doubleday, 2006), pp. 567–74; Jean J. Castelot and Aelred Cody, “Religious Institutions of Israel,” NJ, pp. 1256–58; and Stanley E. Porter, “Zadok,” ABD, vol. 6, pp. 1034–36.
13. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, “Jewish Movements in Palestine,” NJ, pp. 1243–44.
14. Ibid., p. 1243.
15. Raymond E. Brown, The Churches the Apostles Left Behind (Paulist Press, 1984), p. 127.
16. Anthony J. Saldarini, “Pharisees,” ABD, vol. 5, p. 298.
17. Alexander A. Di Lella, “Sirach,” NJ, p. 507.
18. Brown, op. cit., p. 126.
19. Anthony J. Saldarini, “Scribes,” ABD, vol. 5, pp. 1012–16.
20. Blenkinsopp, op. cit., p. 17, paraphrasing Julius Wellhausen.