Stephen said

Timfromnewyork said

What crimes did Jesus actually commit against Rome that was enough to get him crucified? Crucifixion was usually for treason. But there’s no real historical evidence that Jesus commited treason our lead any kind of rebellion against Rome. 

  

I suspect Jesus was arrested and condemned because of the incident at the Temple.  Any disturbance or protest at the Temple would have been considered a tacit attack on the collaborative Temple system itself and would have been quite enough for the Romans any time but especially at Passover.  The Temple Guard arrested Jesus and turned him over to the Romans. That’s what I think likely happened historically.  

  

I’m going to go ahead and reanimate this thread, just because I’ve been thinking about this lately.

1) I think a lot of what is shared among the gospels’ passion narratives can lead us to an historically plausible series of events with a deep internal coherence. Here’s the main outline I have in mind:

First, Jesus was at least somewhat popular–there were people in Jerusalem at that passover who really thought he might be the messiah. At least some of his followers were prepared to take matters into their own hands (one of his own disciples was called the Cananean/Zealot). 

Second, there was one or more public events (a triumphal entry, cleansing of the temple) in which Jesus was supported by a crowd and in which he posed a serious threat to Roman rule and order. If I had to pick one of the two, I’d say the triumphal entry is more likely to have been historical, just because the temple was an confined space (it was walled in, with limited entrances) and was so closely guarded, especially during passover week; the authorities were fully prepared to control disturbances in the temple, they couldn’t have had nearly the same level of control over every city street. 

Third, the dynamic that played out was that, when there was a large (sympathetic) crowd assembled, he would show up and do something provocative, challenging the powers that be. The authorities stood down in these cases because the crowd was large and apparently sympathetic enough that a riot was a real possibility, and there was a real danger that a riot could become a revolt that could not be suppressed by the Roman forces present in the city. If Josephus’ numbers for how many came to Jerusalem during passover was anywhere near accurate, Jewish men would have overwhelmingly outnumbered Roman soldiers. Also, we know that the authorities in first century palestine were quite scared of a full revolt, and fully aware of how tenuous their situation would be if a full revolt developed. Keep in mind we are talking about a situation that would amount to urban warfare, which is messy: Roman auxiliaries could do quite well against an unorganized mob on an open plain and they could do well holding a fortified position against a mob, but a sudden break out of street to street fighting, when you haven’t gotten a chance form a tight perimeter and choose the position you will defend could be catastrophic; also remember, the Roman command may not have known how many of them were ready to take up arms and fight. With all this considered it seems entirely possible that when faced with outright defiance, the Romans decided it was better to play things safe and bide their time rather than arrest Jesus on the spot. Thus Jesus’ power was in the crowd (and his ability to pick the time and location of his appearances), and so when there was no crowd present he would stay in hiding. Taken in this light, his comment to the guards about their coming out to arrest him like a robber (lesten) though he preached publicly among them (Mk 14:48-49) makes perfect sense: he is taunting them, they had to catch him by surprise through betrayal, because when he was with the people they wouldn’t have dared to lay hands on him and they all knew it–“you won this round, but only by playing dirty. We all know you don’t have the support I have.”

The temple authorities, who generally had a good working relationship with Rome (which is how they maintained their own authority), recognized the real danger of this situation developing into a full revolt. They knew a revolt might succeed for a time–a mob might drag Pilate’s body through the street and take control of Jerusalem for a month or two, but they knew what would happen when the legions from Syria arrived (see the Jewish wars and the Bar Kochba rebellion.) And of course, their own authority and quite possibility even their own necks were on the line. Thus they resolved to find Jesus and take care of him but only when there was no crowd present. 

Judas had a similar line of thought. He had at some point realized the Jesus wasn’t the messiah. He saw that the situation was madness and things were getting out of control. And he realized that he was now in deep, a recognized part of a dangerous movement, and as one of the twelve at the heart of this movement, he was almost certainly going to end up on a cross. The only safe way out was to turn and collaborate. (Think about this: he was one of Jesus’ closest intimates–fallings out are one thing, even really acrimonious fallings out, but it takes something really extraordinary to set a former friend up to be literally crucified.) 

The rest pretty much writes itself: Judas collaborates with the authorities to save his own skin (or perhaps more altruistically, to save the nation), he leads them to Jesus when he is not protected by a boustrous crowd at his back. By the time the crowd finds out the next morning, Jesus is securely held in the praetorium, and the Roman forces are prepared to keep him there and control and crowd that tries to storm the place. However sympathetic they may have been to Jesus, none of them is ready to be the first one over the top, rushing into the Roman gladii that are standing ready to disembowel them. 

And thus Jesus’ messianic delusions come to a gruesome end, and he dies a miserable, humiliating, agonizing death, alone, betrayed by a friend, abandoned not only by the crowd he had promised to lead to freedom, but even by his staunchest supporters, who had promised to fight for him to the death. By itself it is a pretty gripping story, even if you dismiss any belief in his being God or just a human messiah. 

Also, I think Jesus was buried by a member of the sanhedrin–They took the obligation to bury those hung from a tree before sunset seriously and we have exrabiblical testimony that they maintained tombs for precisely that purpose, though this burial was not honorable but ignoble: the person had to be buried without customary honors because even in death he was a curse on the land. But the duty to bury him fell on those who had him killed. 

As we move to easter morning, things get a lot less clear, but I don’t think it is impossible that a woman with a history of mental disturbance (the only person all four gospels put at the tomb was Mary Magdalene, from whom Jesus was reputed to have cast out several demons) later claimed she found an empty tomb where she was met by a mysterious messenger. 

Finally, as a bonus, I think this basic story helps explain why Jesus’ followers clung to the idea that he was the messiah even after his crucifixion. They were tormented not just by disappointment, but crippling guilt. They watched him get killed as a direct result of doing things that they had urged him (in one way or another) to do. When the plan went terribly wrong, the possibility that they had urged him to put his neck on the line, that they had encouraged his delusions of being the chosen one, and that they had then abandoned him to an unspeakable fate was too much guilt to bear. What better way to cope with that crushing guilt than to say, “we weren’t wrong at all, he *was* the messiah as we thought, we were just confused about what that meant and we didn’t understand that God had always planned for the messiah to die. He *was* the messiah as we rightly said, and though we didn’t understand that it was part of the plan til later, God had always ordained him to suffer.” 

2)  While I think a reconstruction like that makes a ton of sense, the big question for me is how much the gospels can be trusted at all. Is there even reason to search for a kernel of historical truth in the canonical gospels, or has the story been so freely and thoroughly reworked that it is pointless even to try to recover a primitive historical narrative out of them? Stil, I’m tempted to say it makes too much sense not to be basically accurate. 

The thing I find so compelling in all this is that it seems to explain the events of the passion narrative so nicely–you don’t need to add much or remove much from the narratives as they are recorded in the canonical gospels to have all the pieces fall into place, and some of the things it explains seem to pass dissimilarity. The gospels don’t want to portray Jesus as a pretender to earthly office. For them, the charge, king of the Jews, is ironic–Jesus was the true king of the Jews, but not in a sense that would pose any danger to Caesar or constitute any sort of crime; he was innocent of the charges. And yet, they record multiple episodes that would very naturally have led to his being taken as an insurrectionist and that predictably would have led to his being punished as such. Again, it explains why people turned on Jesus, whether the crowds that proclaimed him the son of David, or the disciples who left him to die alone, or Judas who set a close friend up for an unspeakable death–each of these is at least a little bit awkward for Christianity, though each is recorded in the gospels. 

In other words it seems like a tightly coherent, historically plausible series of events that have been lightly reworked by the evangelists to suit their agenda. But even in its reworked form there are embarrassing holes if anyone looks too closely. Everyone’s perfidity becomes part of the story, even though making it a theme of the story makes the characters almost laughably evil (e.g., Judas or the Jews calling for Jesus’ blood). 

Anyway, getting back to the titular question: The gospels say Jesus was welcomed by a crowd into Jerusalem as the Son of David and that he was crucified under the charge, “King of the Jews”–I don’t see any reason to question those assertions and I see lots of reason to take them as basically accurate.

“the support of the inhabitants of Jerusalem for the prophet from Galilee seems unlikely. Jerusalem in the time of Pilate and Caiaphas is a well-run city that makes money from Hellenistic pilgrims. Pilate and Caiaphas are a durable duo that provides security in a difficult time of economic collapse. Rebellions break out in the provinces as a result of the impoverishment of the peasant society, the completion of large construction projects and additional tax burdens.”

Well, I don’t think it was necessarily the inhabitants of Jerusalem who would have been the principal supporters of Jesus. Even if the inhabitants of Jerusalem were reasonably happy with the present order of things, a majority of the people in Jerusalem at passover wouldn’t have been residents of the city.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the noisy crown that followed Jesus around would likely have had people with very different attitudes towards him and equally different propensities for violence: On the one extreme you might have zealots itching for a fight who also happened to be true believers in Jesus as the divinely protected messiah who would lead them to victory, and at the other extreme you might have people who were just gawkers and didn’t want to miss a spectacle, and you would have all sorts in between. What would have mattered, as far as the authorities deciding how to respond to–say–a triumphal entry, wouldn’t have been the actual composition of the crowd, but their perception of its attitude. In other words, you could have a situation where Jesus’ support wasn’t all that deep, but the officers, in calculating how to handle the situation, couldn’t have known that and wouldn’t have wanted to take a risk. You don’t need most of the people in Jerusalem to have believed that Jesus walked on water for the dynamic I sketched to play out.