Actually, the web is a pretty neutral place to get information from all over the world, on almost any subject matter. Perhaps it threatens people who aren't curious for all the different kinds of ideas that are available on the web, however.
Sam, when you were writing about Jesus' crucifixion I thought of the discussion by theologians on the PSB Frontline series. There is a little about the differences in the Gospels, as well:
L. Michael White:
Professor of Classics and Director of the Religious Studies Program University of
Texas at Austin
Now why did he leave Galilee and head for Jerusalem?
Jesus apparently at some point makes the decision to leave his home
territory and move to Jerusalem. Precisely why he did that is not clear. It
would appear that he had some sense of mission and that's clearly what the
gospels suggest. That he felt compelled to go to Jerusalem. More than that is
not entirely clear from the historical perspective but it seems that Jerusalem,
where the temple was located, perhaps on one of the Holy Days, one of the
festivals was the attraction for him to go and participate....
The traditional story has Jesus going to
Jerusalem at the time of the festival of
Passover. Passover is one of the two most
important Jewish Holy Days or festivals in
the entire year. On the one hand, coming in
the spring it celebrates harvest. On the
other hand, it commemorates one of the
most important historical events in the
Jewish tradition. Namely the deliverance from slavery in Egypt, the story of
Moses and the Exodus. So it is a celebration of Jewish identity centered in
the Temple itself.
Now to go to Jerusalem at one of these pilgrim feasts, as they're sometimes
called, where everyone is expected to show up at some point during their
life, means to join a big crowd. This is one of the really important holidays of
all Jewish life. Especially in the ancient times when the Temple was standing
and the Temple was the centerpiece of the whole event. If you were a
pilgrim coming to Jerusalem in these days you would walk through the
streets of this magnificent city, many of which are crowded. Very much like
a Roman city in certain places. Very much like an older city, a Greek or
even Near Eastern city in other places. But as you approach the Temple
mound you come up to this massive, monumental complex that we call the
Temple and there are grand staircases up which one can go and get up to
the top. From the southern end they're also tunnels much like the way one
goes into a football stadium today, where you proceed with all the others up
through the tunnel and you come out up on top of the platform in the outer
precincts of the temple complex. Now here we could imagine all kinds of
people milling about. It's Passover after all. It's a holy time and so they
would have come for various reasons. Some just to see, some curiosity
seekers, and some there for their own religious devotion, but the temple is
going to be where almost everyone would go at some point in time.
Now how did the Roman
Governor respond to the
atmosphere here?
It may be the case that the Roman
authorities became particularly antsy
at times of these festivals when there
was the potential for increased
political insurrection and agitation. It
may be just a function of the number
of people there. The size of the crowds that made them nervous, but the
authorities, going even back into Herod's day and certainly under the Roman
governors, tended to keep a close eye on things like that. It is alleged by
Josephus in fact that Herod and then the governors after him actually locked
up the garments of the high priest and only gave them out on these holy days
so that there was not the occasion for religious activities prompt popular
unrest. And yet at Passover they clearly are going to be in all their regalia,
and this is going to be a lot of pomp and circumstance. So it's probably the
case that [on] any of these holy day celebrations, that the authorities are at
least going to be on careful watch and the civic magistrates of Jerusalem
themselves are certainly going to be concerned with this....
So what do the Romans do?
If the Romans were convinced that the mob scene might break out into open
rebellion they might shut the whole thing down. They had done so in the
past, and closing the Temple or keeping the people away certainly would not
have been out of the question for them.
It's probably the case that the soldiers that were garrisoned in Jerusalem
were kept close to the Temple. If not in the Temple proper. Now there is an
outer court in the Temple called the Court of gentiles where anyone could go
including Roman soldiers and it's very possible that there were the local
police officials or the odd Roman soldier standing around. But in all
probability most of the Roman soldiers would have been stationed in the
nearby fortress called the Antonia which literally stands adjacent to the
Temple complex and kind of looks over it. They could keep an eye on things
there and of course everyone in the Temple knew they were there too.
What's the traditional account of what Jesus did?
According to the traditional story, Jesus came to the Temple during the
Passover season, and going up into this mob scene that you can imagine up
there, proceeded to do something quite odd. He started to take the tables of
the money changers in the Temple. People who would have been selling
animals for sacrifice, or doing money changing, as it were, in order for
people to buy their proper contributions for the Temple... Jesus is portrayed
as taking these money tables, turning them over, kicking the people about,
driving them out, even in one case with a whip, and claiming that to buy and
sell in the house of the Lord is a transgression against God.
What are the problems with [this traditional account]?
The difficulty with the story of Jesus and the money changers in the Temple
is that the story is told in slightly different ways in different gospels. For
example in Mark's gospel and in fact in Matthew, Mark and Luke, all three,
this event occurs in the last week of Jesus' life and is clearly the event which
brings him to the attention both of the Temple leadership and the Roman
authorities. It is in effect what gets him killed. John's gospel, interestingly
enough, though, puts the story of the cleansing of the Temple as the very first
episode in Jesus' public career. More than two years earlier, and no mention
is made of it near his death. So there are a few problems with the story itself,
although it is one of the stories that appears in all the gospels, so something is
going on there in terms of interest in what Jesus did at the Temple.
But let's think for a moment what Jesus might have been doing if we take the
story seriously as told in the gospels. To cleanse the Temple of these money
changers is an act of protest against something apparently, but what? Now
there's no reason to say from a perspective of the way the Temple was run
that there's anything wrong with the money changers in the Temple, of buying
and selling things that are part of the religious activities of the Temple. In fact
it was an absolutely necessary activity within the way the Temple was run.
So whatever the protest represents it must be a protest against some sort of
idea of what the Temple should be, that they represent as having gone awry.
It may be the case that Jesus represents the same kind of criticism that the
Phariseesthemselves would have brought against the Temple, that in fact the
kind of piety that happens only once a year at Passover is something that
ought to happen every day and every week in your private lives. In that
sense, Jesus' criticism of the Temple sounds very much like the Pharisees
wanting to bring piety home. Wanting to make it much more personal.
Another possibility though is that Jesus sounds more like the Essenes who
were really criticizing the whole way the Temple is run as having become too
worldly. Too caught up in the money of the day, or maybe just too Roman,
and if that's the case then his actions look much more like an act of political
subversion.
These are like three completely different ways of reading the same
event.
Jesus comes across differently depending on which way you look at the
story....
Now what kind of evidence do we have for what really did happen?
What happened to Jesus after the Temple incident is a bit unclear. It appears
he's actually arrested, perhaps by the Temple guard or perhaps by Roman
soldiers themselves. He probably had a trial but whether it was an extensive
courtroom hearing or just a quick and dirty justice before the tribunal of the
governor is not clear as well. But I think we have to realize that the evidence
that we have by the mode of execution, by virtue of the trial stories as told in
the gospels and by virtue of what appears in the story of his actual death,
suggest that it ultimately fell to Pilate and Pilate alone to make the decision
on what would happen to this figure Jesus.
Is it likely or plausible that the Jewish authorities did hand him over
to the Romans?
What the role of the Jewish authority is in the actual arrest and execution of
Jesus is difficult to say. Clearly from the traditional stories in the gospels they
have a heavy role, and it might very well be that the Temple leadership were
concerned with the kind of unrest that Jesus might cause. My own feeling is
that there's very little role by the Jewish authorities. Maybe the Temple
leadership at most but there's probably no direct historical evidence for an
actual trial before the Sanhedrin and the Jewish leadership and clearly the
decision to execute on a capital crime was a Roman decision. Certainly it is
the case that the idea of the masses of the Jewish people gathered around
the Temple had some voice in the death of Jesus is not part of history but a
legacy of some later tradition.
What do we know historically about crucifixion as a method of
execution? How is it carried out? It's not just another myth?
No, crucifixion was something very, very real. There are too many ancient
sources that talk about it. Josephus himself describes a number of
crucifixions that took place in Judea at about this time. So we can be fairly
confident [of the crucifixion] as a historical event because it was a very
commonplace affair in those days and very gruesome. Now different medical
historians and other archaeological kinds of research have given us several
different ways of understanding the actual practice of crucifixion. In all
probability the feet were nailed either directly through the ankles or through
the heel bone to the lower post of the cross. The hands or the arms might be
tied rather than nailed. It depends but it suggests really that crucifixion was a
very slow and agonizing form of death. It's not from bleeding. It's not from
the wounds themselves that the death occurs. It's rather a suffocation
because one can't hold oneself up enough to breathe properly, and so over
time really it's really the exposure to the elements and the gradual loss of
breath that produces death. It's an agonizing death at that.
... [E]vidence of crucifixion in archaeological
form has been rare until the discovery that was
made in recent times of an actual bone from a
coffin which was found to have a nail still stuck
in it. This is apparently someone who actually
did experience crucifixion. .... Now what
apparently happened was the nail that had been
used to put him on the cross by being placed through his heel bone had
stuck against a knot or bent in some way and so they couldn't pull it out
without really causing massive tearing of the tissue and so they left it in, and
as a result we have one of those few pieces of evidence that show us what
the practice was really like.
What's the significance of a sign that they hung up on the cross?
When we look at the stories of Jesus'
crucifixion in the gospels the different
phases, the different episodes that
occur between the arrest and the
garden of Gethsemane, the trial before
the Sanhedrin, the trial before Pilate, the
final kind of public scene where the
decision is made to send Jesus to the cross. Of all of those episodes, most of
them seem to be the product, really, of literary imagination, where people
later on, at the time that the gospels are being written, are trying to fill in the
gaps in the story, but the one thing that most scholars do agree on is a
historical artifact that tells us something about what really happened to Jesus.
...[T]he plaque that was nailed to the cross which identified him as Jesus,
King of the Jews. This piece of evidence suggests that he was executed by
the Roman authorities on some charge of political insurrection. Now I don't
for a moment think that Pilate would have been worried that Jesus could
have challenged the power of the empire. That's not the point. The point is
any challenge to Roman authority, any challenge to the peace of Rome
would have been met with a swift and violent response.
And that's what happened?
And that seems to be what happened with Jesus... It's probably the case that
the plaque that was nailed to the cross is one of the few clear pieces of
historical evidence that we have. Precisely because it reflects a legitimate
charge upon which the Romans would have called for execution and it
stands out so starkly, and in fact it stands in some tension with some of the
rest of the story, that it could only be supposed to have been left there
because it reflects one of the central events that really happened. The plaque
which names him as Jesus, the king of the Jews, suggests that the charge on
which he was executed was one of political insurrection. A threat to the Pax
Romana but he's also now a victim of the Pax Romana.
Allen D. Callahan:
Associate Professor of New Testament, Harvard Divinity School
[Why was Jesus killed?] The Roman answer is good enough for me. He was
causing trouble. He constituted a security risk and he was dealt with the way
the Romans always deal with security risks in the provinces. This was a
matter of not even so much politics, as policy. This is how the Romans
handled trouble-makers, even if they didn't intend to make trouble.
One of the questions that runs like a leitmotif in modern New Testament
studies is whether Jesus was fomenting revolution, ...[whether] Jesus'
self-concept had to do with being a revolutionary or being someone who
was overturning the Roman establishment. For the moment anyway, I'm
probably willing to leave that question unanswered. I think the Roman
answer is the one that's important, and that is, whatever he was doing, it was
considered dangerous enough that he'd be crucified for it. And, that's exactly
what they did.
The Romans had a genius for brutality. They were good at building bridges
and they were good at killing people, and they were better at it than
anybody in the Mediterranean basin had ever seen before....
Crucifixion was considered such a humiliating form of punishment that if you
were a Roman citizen, of course, you couldn't be crucified, no matter what
the offense. It was usually the execution of choice... for slaves and people
considered beneath the dignity of Roman citizenship. It was a form of public
terrorism.... You would be punished by being hung out publicly, naked until
you died. And this sent a very powerful message to everybody else in those
quarters that if you do or even think about doing what this guy's accused of
having done, you, too, can wind up this way and it was very effective;
excruciating, perhaps the most excruciating form of capital punishment that
we know.
Does the manner of Jesus' death effectively tell us who actually
condemned him? I mean, sometimes people say the Jews killed
Jesus. Is a crucifixion incompatible with that?
Absolutely.... It was a Roman job, there's no mistake about that. There has
been some examination of the question of whether Jews... actually crucified
people in any circumstances. There's some evidence that crucifixion did take
place; members of the Pharisee party at one point were crucified, maybe a
century and a half before Jesus. But that's disputed. It's a Roman form of
execution and it was a public execution on a political charge.
Shaye I.D. Cohen:
Samuel Ungerleider Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies
Brown University
What is the story about Jesus' final days?
The gospel stories about Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, the dramatic
confrontation in the Temple, the celebration of Passover with his disciples
and the rest, and crucifixion, of course, are very dramatic; we all know the
ending when the story begins, and that sort of increases its melodramatic
value or its drama or pathos. And no doubt for pious Christians the meaning
or the significance ofthe story. For the historians this is one set of problems
after another as we try to figure out exactly what happened or what might
have happened and try to understand what happened.
And there are certainly no end to puzzles ... just to begin with a famous
incident of Jesus confronting the money changers in the Temple, what does
this mean? There have been two classic interpretations. One is that this is
Jesus' symbolic overturning of the Temple itself, the rejection of the Temple,
that is to say the rejection of Judaism... in favor of a new religion that he's
about to introduce. Well, that's a wonderful Christian interpretation, of
course, but it's entirely anachronistic and entirely inappropriate in the setting
if we think about Jesus himself, as a Jew, as a Jewish teacher and a preacher
and a man who lived and died in the social community of Judaism. It's much
more likely, then, that he's not overturning in the sense of destroying the
Temple, he is trying to purify the Temple. He is preparing the Temple for its
new, improved, purified state that will come about shortly, in the end of
days.... Passover, of course, is a festival of redemption. The time when God
set the Israelites free from Egypt a millennia before, and a time when
presumably God would yet set them free again. So this is all in anticipation of
the great, great redemption of the end time. What we have then is Jesus
making the Temple ready for its new role in the end time. He's purifying the
Temple. It is then an act which is very much within the confines of Judaism,
very much within the confines of the Jewish belief.
So it was not an act of political protest?
Was overturning the tables of the money changers a political act? Well, of
course it's a political act. Everything is a political act. That is to say that
somebody who is taking on the status quo, rejecting authority or rejecting
the social norms, rejecting social values to some degree. Yes, of course,
that's a political act. But by the same token it is a political act which needs to
be understood in religious terms. Just to state the obvious, in antiquity,
politics and religion cannot be distinguished. We think that these are separate
categories because we are the products of the 18th century deistic
philosophers who wrote our Constitution and who constructed our political
society for us. But in antiquity nobody for a moment thought politics and
religion were distinct. And of course, every political act is religious and every
religious act is political.
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