Wednesday, May 30, 2018
THE REAL CONTEXT
Scholars have several avenues by
which they maintain the traditional story of how Jesus met his hand. That story
may say a Roman governor executed him, but the emphasis is always put on the
Jewish priests manipulating and pressuring him to do it. A Jesus surrounded by
Jewish enemies is the scholarly framework; they have to do a lot of rewriting
of history to make this stick. Crucial to their scheme is a misrepresentation
of ancient Jewish culture—that means they have to give a false account of the historical
behavior of Jewish leaders. Almost nothing they say comports with what Josephus
has to say about them.
Anyone who has read Josephus
carefully will know that he portrays these leaders as weak and not taking
enough, or even any, action to put down trouble. He blames the Jewish rebels
first and foremost for the debacle of going to war against Rome, but in the
second place, he blames the Jewish priests and other leaders for failing to
take action against these rebels. Scholars love to tell us that Jewish
authorities cooperated with Rome in suppressing Jewish upstarts, but that’s not
what Josephus says.
The picture that emerges from his
writings is that Jewish leaders avoided taking any action against Jewish
troublemakers. In one instance, they refuse to turn over some protesters to the
Roman procurator who demanded their arrest; they make an excuse that they are
unable to identify them. In another case, a high priest is deposed because he
did nothing. What he was probably expected to do was to beg and plead with a
mob to desist from their riots; there is no record of their taking any action
stronger than that. But doing nothing to suppress Jewish mischief is their
usual mode of operation; one could say it is their only mode.
Josephus hated the rebels for
bringing disaster on the Jewish nation. If there had been even one case of
Jewish leaders taking strong action to quell disturbances, Josephus would love
to have reported it. That is exactly what Josephus hoped they would do. He
probably would have commented that it was too bad they did not do this kind of
thing more often. But the truth is he never reported anything like this. The
golden rule of the priests was to stay out of it. Jewish priests conniving with
a Roman governor to get rid of Jesus is unlike anything Josephus ever said
about them.
I have called the story of Jewish
leaders working to do Jesus in, with a little help from Rome, the traditional
story. I did not call it the Gospel story, and that is for good reason. The
Gospels do not support this story as much as people think they do, and as much
as scholars strive to make it appear they do. The Gospels may seem to slant the
story in this direction, but they also give a lot of information to contradict
it. The traditional story grew as the years went by from a very few details,
while ignoring plenty more, but the Gospel authors cannot be held responsible
for this. They preserved many good details of what actually happened. It is not
their fault if scholars have done their best to undermine them.
Scholars maintain a story that
goes against much of the evidence in the New Testament (not only in the
Gospels, but portions of Acts and Paul’s letters have to be taken into
account). In their view, evidence is irrelevant, while the ideology of Jesus
persecuted by Jewish leaders must be maintained at all costs.
Some of the evidence I am talking
about is well-known. In Mark and Matthew, the meeting of Jewish leaders with
Jesus does not match what a Jewish trial would have been like. This could not
have been a trial or any sort of Jewish judicial procedure. Scholars treat it
as if it were a lynching, though they are careful not to call it that. They
will not consider the other logical possibility: it was an informal meeting
intended to help Jesus and save him from a Roman execution.
The later Gospel authors, Luke
and John, make it even less like a Jewish trial. They report no Jewish death
penalty against Jesus. If any Gospel author should have reported what is in
effect a lynching of Jesus, John would have been the one to present it this
way. But John’s version is the least like a lynching of any of the four
Gospels. And there is more.
In Acts, Paul says there was no
Jewish death penalty. Even Mark and Matthew do not say there was a death
penalty according to Jewish law. They don’t say according to whose law. It
could have been according to Rome. They are silent on this.
What we constantly ignore is that
we are so used to reading the traditional story into the Gospels that we forget that this story is not in the
Gospels, it is rather an interpretation
of the Gospels. We are so used to
seeing things in the Gospels, like declaring Jesus deserving of death under
Jewish law, that we have become incapable of seeing that these things are not
actually in the Gospels. We have substituted a very anti-Jewish story for the
real Gospel details. Scholars lost interest a long time ago in what the Gospels
literally say.
Also in Acts, the priests make
what appears to be a complaint that they have been wrongly accused of
complicity in the death of Jesus. If you maintain an ideological view of Jesus
being done in by his own leaders, these details (from all four Gospels and Acts)
are impossible to explain. But if you understand the real Jewish, historical
context, as reported by Josephus—namely, that Jewish leaders would never help
Rome arrest and execute a fellow Jew—then these details make a lot of sense.
There is much more (both from the
New Testament and Josephus) to substantiate that what really happened was that
Jewish leaders were holding an informal meeting in an attempt to save Jesus
from Rome’s clutches. That’s what my books are for. But the search for truth
has to begin with the truth about the Jewish history of that time, and frankly,
that search also has to include why scholars are so biased about this and
refuse to look at any evidence, or any interpretation of the evidence, that
would exonerate Jewish leaders. How can such scholarship be called a fair
hearing?
© 2018 Leon Zitzer
