The gospel accounts of Jesus’ trials before the Jewish Sanhedrin and Pontius Pilate swarm with difficulties, though to read the “History” by O’Reilly and Dugard, one would never suspect this. They have simply used the time-dishonored method of scissors-and-paste historians, that is, precritical pseudo-historians. They have merely chosen the bits from all the conflicting gospels that strike them as good raw material for their edifying novel.
COURT REPORTERS?
O’Reilly and Dugard follow the lead of the gospel writers in assuming the position of omniscient narrators. They know what they know because they are creating the story (with the help of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) as they go along. It does not seem to occur to them that, if they were really writing, as they claim, a genuine history of Jesus’ trial, they would not be entitled to include anything for which they could not supply testimony. But they do. How on earth do they, like the evangelists, pretend to know what was said by Jesus, Caiaphas, and others, in closed-door sessions? “He will be questioned extensively, and what he says will be written for the ages” (pp. 224–25). Uh, by whom, pray tell? Peter and the Beloved Disciple only got as far as the high priest's courtyard. They could not have heard anything of what transpired inside. Could Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea, members of the Sanhedrin, have told the disciples what had happened, once things had died down?
This will not work, because there is no hint of any dissenting voices being raised at the trial, unlike in the earlier scene where Nicodemus sticks up for Jesus and receives a sharp rebuke (John 7:50–52). Mark 14:64 says quite clearly that “they all condemned him as deserving death.” Nicodemus, too? Not if he was a fictional character, a “narrative-man,” created by John to symbolize chicken-hearted would-be followers of Jesus in Yavneh-era Judaism (ca. 80–90 CE). What about Joseph of Arimathea? Mark never implies Joseph was a disciple. If he had been, then we could imagine him reporting to the disciples after the trial. But this is how Mark introduces him after the crucifixion: “Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God [to dawn], took courage and went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.” This does not make him a follower of Jesus. Many or most Jews are said to be hoping for the swift arrival of the kingdom (Mark 12:28, 34; Luke 2:25, 38, 17:20, 19:11).
Nor does Joseph's desire to give the crucified Jesus a decent burial imply discipleship, since seeing to the burial of those dead who had no one to take care of it was a very important act of charitable piety in Judaism, as witness Tobit 1:16–19, 2:3–4, 7–8; Matt. 8:21. Matthew does not even hesitate to depict the villainous priests as being concerned for the burial of indigents (27:7). “Josephus the historian actually tells us that pious people undertook the task of burying crucified victims who otherwise would have been buried in a common grave for malefactors.”1 So Mark may well have pictured Joseph as having voted against Jesus and yet being concerned that the pathetic heretic receive a decent burial.
But Luke thought it better to “clarify” things and to enhance Joseph's reputation: “He was a member of the council, a good and righteous man, who had not consented to their purpose and deed, and he was looking for the kingdom of God” (Luke 23:50b–51). Still, Luke has forgotten to exempt Joseph from the Sanhedrin's villainy: “Then the whole company arose, and brought him before Pilate” (Luke 23:1).
Matthew goes even farther in sanitizing and sanctifying Joseph: he “was also a disciple of Jesus” (27:57b). And, as far as Matthew is concerned, Joseph was not even a member of the council. John 19:38 does not make Joseph a Sanhedrinist either, and now Joseph has become a clone of John's character Nicodemus: “Joseph of Arimathea…was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly, for fear of the Jews” (John 19:38). Nobody in here but us chickens.
Thus even if Joseph of Arimathea had been a member of the Sanhedrin and present for the trial, as in Mark and Luke, he would have had no connection to Jesus’ disciples. If he was a disciple but not a member of the council, as in Matthew and John, he would not have been privy to their proceedings. There is absolutely no reason to nominate him as the source of information about Jesus’ trial. And Nicodemus—did he even exist?
WHO'S THE LAW-BREAKER HERE?
Jewish and Christian critics have long raised red flags at various points in the Trial narrative. If one supposes, as Matthew, Mark, and Luke do, that Jesus’ Last Supper was a Passover meal, then Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin was also on Passover Eve, and that is patently absurd. These pious guardians of Torah orthodoxy left home, where the Torah required them to stay put, on Passover? “Why is this night different from all other nights?” “Sorry, son. Mommy's going to have to field that one. I gotta be somewhere. Later!” Of course, O’Reilly and Dugard figure Caiaphas—er, and every single Jew on the council—was an unscrupulous bastard who regarded “God's covenant with Abraham as just so much chin music.”2 Unless, of course, he could make a buck from it. But even if that were so, there are some things even a stinking hypocrite dare not do—like publicly flouting the holiest customs of one's people, the very traditions one's job is to uphold. “Pass me another slice of that lamb, will you, honey…Good God! Look out the window! Isn't that Lord Caiaphas? What the…?”
O’Reilly and Dugard consider this a minor speed bump: “But the religious laws state that no trials can be held during Passover, and none can be held at night” (p. 207).
“Everything about Jesus's interrogation is illegal: it takes place at night, Jesus is asked to incriminate himself without a lawyer, and Annas has no authority to pass sentence” (p. 229). Well, so what? Let's get on with the story…
In the Killing Jesus gospel, as in traditional Christian storytelling (which is what Killing Jesus really is, despite O’Reilly's Jay Carney–like protestations), Jesus gets condemned for blasphemy. But even if somehow the New Testament writers had any information about what Jesus said at the trial, it does not come close to blasphemy.
“‘I charge you under oath,’ fumes Caiaphas, ‘by the living God: tell us if you are the Christ, the Son of God’” (p. 232). This much of the “Is It Legal?” segment comes right out of Matthew 26:63, almost verbatim. But Jesus’ reply is taken from Luke 22:67–69: “If I tell you, you will not believe me. And if I asked you,3 you would not answer. But from now on, the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the mighty God” (p. 232). O’Reilly and Dugard clumsily paraphrase Luke's “right hand of the Power of God” to “right hand of the mighty God.”
They go on to Luke 22:70, with an important modification: “Are you the Son of God?” the priests demand. “‘Yes,’ he tells them. ‘It is as you say.’” Luke actually has him reply, “You say that I am.” Matthew has the same equivocal, even evasive, reply. O’Reilly and Dugard have been listening to those Evangelical apologists again. They prefer Mark's reply: “I am” (Mark 14:62). So they try to get us to believe that the Matthew/Luke version is just an idiom that means the same thing. That is why O’Reilly and Dugard paraphrase Jesus’ reply as “Yes. It is as you say.” If you want to paraphrase it, surely it ought to be “If you say so.”
I don't know why, if O’Reilly and Dugard preferred an unequivocal affirmation of Jesus’ messianic identity, they didn't just go with Mark's “I am.” But I'm glad they didn't since I don't think that is what Mark wrote. A few manuscripts read, “You say.” This has to be the original text. It is certainly what Matthew and Luke were reading in their copies of Mark. There is no way either one of them would have found a ringing “I am” in Mark and changed it to the vague “You say that I am.” It is much more natural to picture Matthew and Luke copying Mark's original “You say” and a subsequent scribe not liking what he read in Mark and changing it to “I am,” making Jesus sound more decisive.4
Killing Jesus then switches over to Mark 14:62 but sneaks in an embellishment: “Then Jesus looks straight at Caiaphas: ‘You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven’” (p. 233). Caiaphas is furious, “for Jesus is implying nothing less than that Caiaphas is an enemy of God. ‘He has spoken blasphemy,’ the high priest tells the Sanhedrin’” (p. 233). Oh no; this is no good. First, the Greek for “You will see” is in the plural, not the singular, so Jesus cannot be speaking to Caiaphas in particular. But even if he had been, it is hard to see how this would make Caiaphas “an enemy of God.” O’Reilly and Dugard are just having fun writing their novel again: more conflict, more mind reading, more nonsense.
Second, nothing Jesus says in this scene would have been considered blasphemy, much less worth the death penalty. It was not blasphemy (defaming God) for a man to claim he was the Messiah and to be wrong. About a century after the ostensible time of Jesus, Simon bar Kokhba believed himself to be the destined Messianic king and actually managed to achieve a brief window of independence from Rome. There is some reason to believe he managed to rebuild some version of the Jerusalem Temple.5 The great Rabbi Akiba endorsed him. But before long, bar Kokhba was defeated. Akiba's colleagues rebuked him for backing the wrong horse, but this did not destroy his reputation as a holy scholar of Torah. Nor was bar Kokhba written off as a blasphemer. Instead, he was viewed as a fallen hero. His noble death may even have been the origin of the doctrine (attested as of the third century) of a preliminary “Messiah ben-Joseph,” whose mission was to die in battle to atone for the sins of Israel that had blocked divine redemption. He would have prepared the way for the subsequent Messiah ben-David to vanquish the pagans.6
There is nothing in the words of Jesus to his interrogators to suggest he believed himself to be a divine incarnation. Even as a mortal man, the Messiah might be expected to sit at God's right hand, to be exalted to heaven, even as many believed Enoch, Moses, Elijah, and others had been. Remember, as O’Reilly and Dugard themselves point out, “Son of God” need have denoted no more than “Davidic king,” and nothing Jesus says here goes beyond that.
Seeing the problem here, some scholars, like Ethelbert Stauffer,7 have sought to vindicate the trial narrative by suggesting that Jesus’ declaration (at least according to most manuscripts of Mark) “I am” was supposed to refer back to the “theophany formula” in Exodus 3:14, “I am that I am.” But that is farfetched desperation. Caiaphas asks Jesus, “Are you the Christ?” Jesus answers, “I am.” Doesn't that simply mean “Yes, I am the Christ”? It recalls the scene in Monty Python's Life of Brian when Brian finds there is no way to get his point across to his overenthusiastic fans.
“I am not the Messiah, will you please listen! I am not the Messiah. D’you understand. Honestly!” [Someone in the crowd shouts out,] “Only the true Messiah denies his divinity.” Brian: “What? Oh! (in exasperation) What sort of a chance does that give me?…All right! I am the Messiah!” The crowd: “He is! He is the Messiah!”8
On this theory we must imagine Jesus getting frustrated every time he answers a mundane question (“Who's in the mood for some ice cream?”) with “I am,” and then having to explain, time after time, that, no, he's not claiming to be Jehovah. It's almost inviting an Abbott and Costello “Who's on first?” routine.
THE BEAT GOES ON
While leading up to their favorite chapter, the one about the execution of Jesus by John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald, O’Reilly and Dugard continue to crucify not Jesus but the gospels. We find both the addition of details with no basis at all in any gospel text (“The beating [of Jesus by the guards] goes on for hours,” p. 230), and the telepathic conjuring of the inner deliberations of characters, who have become just that, literary figments rather than historical personages. They also, as we should expect by now, include various dubious gospel anecdotes if they sound good. I am reminded of a scene in Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel Satan in Goray, in which a popular rabbi is supposed to be inspecting animals but doesn't really give them a second look.
They said that since becoming the slaughterer of Goray he had never once found any beast to be unclean and unfit to be eaten—this in order to win the favor of the butchers. Whenever the question arose, he ruled the beast clean, and he had abandoned all the laws of purity…. “Hurry! It's clean! It's clean!”9
We read that, in accord with John 18:31, the Jewish authorities have no power to execute convicted criminals, which is why the priests approach Pontius Pilate to do their dirty work. Is this true? The evidence is not clear, but Alfred Loisy seems on the right track when he suggests that this restriction of their authority is another Johannine anachronism.10 John's Gospel has the Sanhedrin excommunicating believers in Jesus already in his lifetime (John 9:22), even though John also has Jesus predict that such a synagogue expulsion program will occur in the future: “I have said all this to you to keep you from falling away. They will put you out of the synagogues…. But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you of them” (John 16:1–2a, 4). The same would seem to be true of the powerlessness of the Sanhedrin. After the disastrous defeat by the Romans in 73 CE, the Sanhedrin was reconstituted as a strictly religious body with no jurisdiction, as before, over civil and criminal matters. This does imply that the Gospel of John is telling the story of Jesus as if it had happened in the postwar period. These anachronisms are a tool for bringing to bear the perspective of Jesus upon issues current in the evangelist's own day. This is another one of them.
Among the gospels, only Luke has Jesus appear on trial before both Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas (Luke 23.6–12). Pilate, upon hearing that Jesus is a Galilean, attempts to fob Jesus’ case off onto Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Galilee. But this is nonsense. Pilate would not have been required, or even entitled, to extradite a Galilean who had committed a crime in Jerusalem, for example, threatening to demolish the Jerusalem Temple. Why did Luke double the trial? It must have been a creative, yet clumsy, attempt to harmonize two different but parallel Passion accounts, one that had Pilate hand Jesus over to execution, the other placing the blame on Herod. Luke could not bring himself to choose between them. This is the inevitable implication of the bizarre notion that Herod, to whom Pilate had delegated the case, declared Jesus not guilty—yet sent Jesus back to Pilate for his judgment. Antipas did not, please note, decline to hear the case. He heard it and exonerated Jesus (Luke 23:14–15)! So why did he send him back? And if he did, as per Luke, why didn't Pilate release him? It just doesn't work.
But O’Reilly and Dugard are fine with it. It is fine for them to speculate on what both Herod and Pilate must have been thinking, what political and public relations factors they weighed, and why they came to the decisions they did. But they present their speculations as fact, as if Pilate and Herod had left behind memoirs recording these thoughts. This is all sheer fiction, but it is presented as history. Killing Jesus is more like Lew Wallace's 1880 novel Ben-Hur than, say, D. F. Strauss's The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835). Why do they indulge in such imaginary mind reading? It is a desperate exercise in fundamentalist harmonization, in this case, trying to make it look even remotely plausible that a contemptuous Jew baiter like Pilate, as Philo and Josephus describe him, would lift a finger to get one more deluded Messiah off the hook. Even the evangelist Matthew knew something was amiss in Mark's portrayal of Pilate trying to free Jesus, so he added some narrative motivation by including the apocryphal touch of Mrs. Pilate having ominous nightmares about Jesus and sending a note to her hubby to steer clear of this case (Matt. 27:19). “You're a regular Pontius Pilate the minute you start!” (Miracle on 34th Street).11 O’Reilly and Dugard are engaged in the same futile exercise, trying to save face for the story as history, which it isn't.
I have already mentioned the enormity of having Pilate cave under “pressure” from a crowd of nobodies in his courtyard who threaten to rat him out to Rome if he sets Jesus free. “Pilate's soft on sedition!” Afraid of their “clout,” Pilate accedes to the mob's request that he release Barabbas instead, a known killer of Romans in an insurrection! Rome's not going to take a dim view of that? Come on, Bill. Get real, Martin.
Our authors unquestioningly repeat from the gospels the business about a Passover clemency custom. Each year, as a show of Roman magnanimity, the governor would supposedly release one prisoner of the crowd's choice (Mark 15:6). Not only is this inherently incredible;12 there is no mention of any such practice in any ancient extra-biblical source. And thus, the entirety of the Barabbas story (and with it, the story of Pilate's advocating for Jesus’ release) goes down the drain.
FOR AZAZEL
For a long time now, both Jewish-Christian ecumenists and historical critics have suspected that Jesus was simply arrested and executed by the Roman occupiers and put to death as a rebel, which he was. Jesus’ revolution having failed, his sect reacted by becoming a quietistic community, praying for an apocalyptic deliverance from Rome but leaving it to God to do the job his own way and in his own time. Accordingly, the gospel writers, increasingly alienated from Judaism, were eager to reassure Rome that Christians presented no threat and thus deserved no persecution. So they wrote up a version of the story of Jesus that, while acknowledging that Jesus was executed as an anti-Roman seditionist, tried to explain it away. They shifted the blame to the Jews in order to exonerate the Romans. According to this new version, the Sanhedrin, furious at Jesus for outwitting and publicly embarrassing them, framed an innocent Jesus for sedition and tricked Pilate into taking the blame for Jesus’ death. Poor Pilate! Bullied and manipulated into doing the Jews’ dirty work!
We are in a position analogous to that with King Herod and the Slaughter of the Innocents: it was the kind of thing Herod would do, but there was no independent corroboration outside the Bible, and the story, besides being beset with inherent implausibilities, conformed a bit too closely to Josephus’ Moses nativity. Same here: the Jewish Talmud (Pes. 57a) describes the priestly aristocrats as villains: “Woe to the house of Annas! Woe to their serpent's hiss! They are High Priests; their sons are keepers of the treasury; their sons-in-law are guardians of the Temple; and their servants beat the people with staves.” So they do make believable villains in the story, but when we examine the gospel accounts of the trial, they have important strikes against them: the anachronism of the blasphemy charge, the lack of any way Christians could have known what was said at the trial, and the blooper of having the trial on Passover Eve. Add to that the potholes in the Pilate episodes, and it does begin to look like we are reading propaganda fiction, something distressingly close to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. (This nineteenth-century fiction, concocted by the Czarist secret police, purported to “leak” the minutes of a secret cabal of Jewish leaders plotting to take over the world. It was intended to provoke persecution of Jews and worked pretty well.)
We can cite another historical analogy. In the eighteenth century, Jacob Frank was a libertine, nihilistic would-be Messiah who taught that everything the Torah had forbidden was now permitted, even commanded!13 His followers conducted secret orgies behind a pretense of conventional piety. Frank eventually led his cult to a pretended mass conversion to Catholicism. To demonstrate his new loyalty, he began to slander the Orthodox Jewish population and to incite pogroms against them! Of course, Mark never thought of going that far, and I don't mean to say he did. But I think you can see the similarities: switching sides and vilifying one's parent faith in order to secure one's position with the authorities.
ANOTHER JESUS
Killing Jesus briefly contrasts with Jesus the Nazarene another man named Jesus, Jesus ben-Ananias, of whom we read in Josephus. First, here is O’Reilly and Dugard's summary:
Thirty-two years from now, a peasant named Jesus ben-Ananias will also predict the Temple's destruction. He will be declared a madman at first, but his life will be spared by order of the Roman governor—but only after he is flogged until his bones show…. When Jesus ben-Ananias continued for seven more years to proclaim loudly and publicly that the Temple would be destroyed, a Roman soldier permanently silenced him by catapulting a rock at his head. Four months later, the Romans destroyed the Temple as punishment for a Jewish revolt. (pp. 194–95)
“But the time of Jesus is different” (p. 195). But maybe not so different. Here is the Josephus text. I'm sure you will spot the striking parallels before I point them out.
An incident more alarming still had occurred four years before the war at a time of exceptional peace and prosperity for the City. One Jeshua, son of Ananias, a very ordinary yokel, came to the feast at which every Jew is supposed to set up a tabernacle for God. As he stood in the temple he suddenly began to shout: “A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the Sanctuary, a voice against bridegrooms and brides, a voice against the whole people.” Day and night he uttered this cry as he went through all the streets. Some of the more prominent citizens, very annoyed at these ominous words, laid hold of the fellow and beat him savagely. Without saying a word in his own defence or for the private information of his persecutors, he persisted in shouting the same warning as before. The Jewish authorities, rightly concluding that some supernatural force was responsible for the man's behaviour, took him before the Roman procurator. There, though scourged till his flesh hung in ribbons, he neither begged for mercy nor shed a tear, but lowering his voice to the most mournful of tones, answered every blow with “Woe to Jerusalem!” When Albinus—for that was the procurator's name—demanded to know who he was, where he came from and why he uttered such cries, he made no reply whatever to the questions but endlessly repeated his lament over the City, till Albinus decided he was a madman and released him. (The Jewish War VI, 302)14
Jesus ben-Ananias comes into Jerusalem for one of the great feasts, just as Jesus does periodically throughout the Gospel of John. Once there, he takes advantage of the huge, milling crowds to take his stand publicly and begin shouting prophecies, again, as the Johannine Jesus does: “On the last day of the feast [of Tabernacles, John 7:2], the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed, ‘If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink,’” and so on. Jesus ben-Ananias warns of doom “against bridegrooms and brides,” just as Jesus does in Luke 17:26–27: “As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of man. They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all.” Both Jesuses were beaten up for prophesying the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple: “And some began to spit on him, and to cover his face, and to strike him, saying to him, ‘Prophesy!’ And the guards received him with blows” (Mark 14:65). “Aha! You who would destroy the temple and build it in three days!” (Mark 15:29). Both endured their ordeals in stolid silence (Mark 14:61). Each was hauled before the Roman procurator, Pilate in one case, Albinus in the other, and flogged (Matt. 27:26). Each procurator asks his Jesus, “Where are you from?” (John 19:9) “But Jesus gave no answer,” neither Jesus. Both men are, sooner or later, killed by Roman soldiers, and each expires with a mournful cry. And eventually, both Jesuses’ doom-prophecies on Jerusalem and the Temple are amply fulfilled.
It is this sequence of close parallels that convinces Theodore J. Weeden that the New Testament evangelists used Josephus’ account of the Passion of Jesus ben-Ananias as the basis for their stories of Jesus.15 This has perhaps never occurred to scholars because of their insistence on the earliest feasible dates for the writing of the gospels,16 and these are the apologists upon whom O’Reilly and Dugard are dependent. Burton L. Mack dismisses the conventional dating of Mark, the earliest gospel.
Howard Clark Kee…does not include Mark's knowledge of the Jewish War as a consideration in determining [the gospel's] provenance. He leaves the impression that the power of the apocalyptic imagination could have created the Gospel of Mark even before the end of the Jewish War and the destruction of the temple. One detects a growing trend in recent scholarship to agree with this position. The pre-70 C.E. date is convenient, for it (1) supports traditional sensibilities…, (2) does not threaten the sense that some modicum of insight or truth may reside in the predictions [of Mark 13] after all, whether made by Jesus or Mark, and (3) keeps the earliest gospel pressed back as far toward the beginning as possible in the hope of closing the gap between Jesus and the stories about him.17
Accordingly, it is simply unthinkable for most scholars, much less axe-grinding apologists, to recognize it when they see the influence of the late first-century historian Josephus on the gospels, much less their actual use of Josephus. But it is there.18 And it is here, in the Passion narratives.
Once again, the back-dating of the events surrounding Jesus ben-Ananias into the career of Jesus Christ is another example of the general gospel tendency to retroject the events of the Jewish War some forty years earlier. More Mack:
Evidence in support of the seriousness of the times was given with the destruction of the temple. If that could be understood as an act of judgment by God upon an intransigent Israel, the seriousness of the Jewish rejection of Jesus and the kingdom could be imagined. Mark made the connection at the level of social history and its rationalizations. He projected them back upon the time of Jesus by creating a narrative setting of conflict and rejection for the teachings and activities of Jesus. Before Mark, the memories of Jesus had not been given, had not needed, such a setting.19
Have Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard provided a history of the trials, interrogations, and beatings suffered by Jesus at the hands of Annas and Caiaphas, Herod Antipas, and Pontius Pilate? These names belong to people who did live in the first century. Even Jesus was a historical figure, though it is not clear whether he lived contemporary with these gents or later in the time of Albinus. At any rate, fictional novels of the period abound with the names of famous figures of the day, but that does not anchor the adventures recorded there in the immovable ground of real history. And we must render the same verdict on the novel called Killing Jesus.