If Jesus caused a disturbance in the Temple together with his followers and he was arrested for that, why weren’t any of his disciples arrested too?
If Simon Peter cut off a servant’s ear during Jesus’ arrest, how contradicting it seems that nobody else apart from Jesus was arrested?
John said
If Jesus caused a disturbance in the Temple together with his followers and he was arrested for that, why weren’t any of his disciples arrested too?If Simon Peter cut off a servant’s ear during Jesus’ arrest, how contradicting it seems that nobody else apart from Jesus was arrested?
I think Paula Fredriksen’s argument about this issue is remarkable .
She argues Jesus didn’ t arrested because of revolting he simply proclaimed in the temple that God’s kingdom is coming at that Passover .
And crowd believed him then Romans and Jewish authorities wanted to silenced this messianic fervor therefore only the leader was arrested . If this was really politic revolt surely all of disciples would have been arrested .
We may be thinking of this from too modern a context. It was likely a pretty chaotic moment. The goal seems to have been to arrest Jesus, the leader of the group. Even he had to be identified to them, so other members of the group would likely also not have been so obvious to them. And the mission, as defined, was apparently to arrest Jesus, which they did. There may not have been much leeway to adjust those orders, although I would admit that one would think cutting off the ear of a Roman warranted arrest. Still, the story as recorded makes no such suggestions, and we should perhaps be careful not to fill in gaps with fabrications.
My pet hypothesis is that Jesus was arrested on the Temple Mount because of the Temple disturbance and was handed over to the Romans by the Temple guards. The two trials seem historically improbable although made good theater for the authors of the NT (maybe just Mark). In the melee on the Temple Mount the guards wouldn’t have known who was who or even whether Jesus was alone or not so the easiest thing would have been to grab the obvious perpetrator.
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