“Daddy, why was Jesus killed?” my four year-old son asked me as we drove through the rain to pick up a visitor at the London airport some 20 years ago.
His question was very different from “Why did Jesus die?” to which the most familiar answer is “He died for the sins of the world.” But I knew that answer wouldn’t work. It makes no historical sense to say, “Jesus was killed for the sins of the world.”
The question has seemed significant to me ever since. It is very important for Jewish-Christian relations. It also enables us to see something that popular images of “gentle Jesus the nice guy” obscure. The fact that Jesus was executed means that he struck some people as dangerous and threatening.
The use of crucifixion establishes Roman involvement. It was a Roman (not Jewish) form of execution, used for slaves, violent criminals and political rebels.1 So why was he crucified? The most common answer throughout the centuries is that “the Jews rejected Jesus.” It is grounded in the Gospels themselves, which report that, despite the Roman execution, the primary responsibility for his death was Jewish.
In Mark, the earliest Gospel, Jesus is tried and condemned to death by a Jewish court (“all the chief priests and the elders and the scribes”) on the religious charge of “blasphemy” (Mark 14:53–64) and is delivered to the Roman governor Pilate, who would have preferred to let him go (Mark 15:6–15). Matthew intensifies Jewish responsibility by adding to Mark’s account the cry of the Jewish crowd, those terrible words that have been the source of so much Jewish suffering through the centuries, “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matthew 27:24–25). These words are the product of Matthew’s redaction, reflecting heightened tensions between Jews and Jewish Christians at the time Matthew’s Gospel was written, around 90 C.E. They are not historical.
Indeed, scholars have long suspected that the Jewish trial as a whole, including the charge of blasphemy, is not historical. Among the reasons are the virtual impossibility of a night-time trial before the Sanhedrin, the lack of evidence as to what constituted “blasphemy,” and the difficulty of imagining how the followers of Jesus could have known what happened at the trial (if there actually was a trial).2 Rather, the Jewish trial and the charge of blasphemy are seen by scholars as the product of early Christian apologetic, which sought (understandably) to present Jesus and his followers as not politically threatening to the Roman empire, despite the fact of his execution as a political rebel against Rome.
What then really happened? Almost certainly there was not a formal trial before an official Jewish body known as “the Sanhedrin,” but a private hearing before the Jewish high priest and his “privy council.”3 Together, they were the Jewish religious, political and economic elite in whose hands rested the domestic affairs of Roman-controlled Judea.
They did not represent the Jewish people. They were a small but powerful elite whose power derived from the Romans. Rather than representing the Jews, they are more accurately seen as collaborators in the oppression of the Jewish people. The “Jews” did not reject Jesus.
Why would this elite have found Jesus threatening? Not because of “blasphemy,” whatever that may have meant. Rather, their continuation in power depended upon their maintaining order. Jesus (like John the Baptizer, who was also executed) was a charismatic figure with a following. That alarmed them.
Moreover, Jesus was not politically innocuous. Shortly before his hearing, he had performed a provocative action in the Temple, the economic and political center—as well as religious center—of the first-century Jewish social world. (Mark 11:15–18 reports that this disruptive action in the Temple was the immediate cause of the arrest of Jesus.)4 In short, they perceived him as a subversive figure who threatened the stability of the order over which they presided.5 In this they were correct—not because Jesus was an advocate of armed revolt, but because his social and religious vision imagined a world and a kingdom in which there would be no elites and no domination.6
“Daddy, why was Jesus killed?” my four year-old son asked me as we drove through the rain to pick up a visitor at the London airport some 20 years ago. His question was very different from “Why did Jesus die?” to which the most familiar answer is “He died for the sins of the world.” But I knew that answer wouldn’t work. It makes no historical sense to say, “Jesus was killed for the sins of the world.” The question has seemed significant to me ever since. It is very important for Jewish-Christian relations. It also enables us to […]
You have already read your free article for this month. Please join the BAS Library or become an All Access member of BAS to gain full access to this article and so much more.
See Gerald G. O’Collins, “Crucifixion” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 1207–1210.
2.
For a compact summary, see E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), pp. 294–318.
3.
I owe the useful phrase “privy council” and this understanding of what happened in part to the very helpful popular book by the Jewish scholar Ellis Rivkin, What Crucified Jesus? (Nashville: Abingdon, 1984).
4.
In the judgment of many scholars, this is probably right. See, for example, Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, pp. 301–304.
5.
See John 11:47–53, where the high priest Caiaphas argues that it is better to put Jesus to death than to take a chance on a popular uprising. In this case, John’s Gospel (in general highly symbolic and not very historical) may be closer to what happened than are the accounts of a Jewish trial in the Synoptic Gospels.
6.
See especially Walter Wink’s treatment of Jesus’ attack upon the domination system in his Engaging the Powers (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1992), pp. 109–137.
