More Case Studies of the 'Hermeneutic of Suspicion': The Trial and Condemnation of Jesus (Part 18)
It may come as something of a shock to the devout Christian student of New Testament history, but the accounts of the trial, passion and death of Christ are actually among the most contentious parts of the whole gospel story. In numerous ways, historians have asked sharp questions about the plausibility of the narrative of the events surrounding his crucifixion. There is nothing irreverent or unfair about asking tough questions, of course; but the “hermeneutic of suspicion” kicks-in when the multiple attestation of the gospel accounts is not given any “benefit of the doubt,” or when plausible harmonisations of discrepancies between them are rejected out of hand.
For example, Reza Aslan summarizes for us the frequent charge that the late-night trial of Jesus by the Jewish Sanhedrin is historically implausible:
The problems with this scene are too numerous to count. The trial before the Sanhedrin violates nearly every requirement laid down by the Jewish law for a legal proceeding. The Mishnah is adamant on this subject. The Sanhedrin is not permitted to meet at night. It is not permitted to meet during Passover. … It is certainly not permitted to meet so casually in the courtyard (aule) of the high priest, as Matthew and Mark claim. And it must begin with a detailed list of why the accused is innocent before any witnesses are allowed to come forth. The argument that the trial rules laid down in the Mishnah [rabbinic teachings composed ca. 70-200 AD] did not apply in the thirties, when Jesus was tried, falls flat when one remembers that the gospels were also not written in the thirties. The social, religious, and political context for the narrative of Jesus’s trial before the Sanhedrin was post 70 c.e. rabbinic Judaism: the era of the Mishnah. At the very least what these flagrant inaccuracies demonstrate is the evangelists’ extremely poor grasp of Jewish law and Sanhedrin practice. That alone should cast doubt on the historicity of the trial before Caiaphas. (Zealot, p. 157)
Aslan presupposes, of course, that the gospels were written post-70 AD, in the era of the recording of the Mishnah. I have argued at length in article ten of this web series that the Synoptic Gospels, at least, were written earlier than that, before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the take-over of the leadership of Judaism by the rabbis and the synagogues. In fact, rather than attributing such gross ignorance of pre-70 Jewish law and Sanhedrin procedures to all three evangelists, would it not be historically more plausible to hold that the rabbis who wrote the Mishnah many years later — and who were doubtless not in ignorance of the rising Christian movement in their midst, and its gospel stories of the trial and death of Jesus — would have been keen to proscribe the kind of legal mess that led to the over-hasty condemnation of Jesus, which ultimately made a “martyr” out of him? Many scholars believe that the rules and regulations for Israel laid out in the Mishnah are actually idealized portraits of the way the Pharisaic rabbis believed things ought to be, not a chronicle of the way things actually were before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.
Besides, even if the Mishnah’s procedural rules for the Sanhedrin were fully in place back in the days of Jesus, why would we assume that the Jewish leaders at that time were so devoted to procedural justice that they would insist on sticking to its precepts in this case? Everything about the accounts of their attitudes makes it clear that this was a desperate group of men (see Jn 11:45-53; 12:19), eager to get rid of Jesus before the mob of Galileans in the city noticed that he had been taken, and eager to avoid the kind of riots that might result in a Roman crack-down on the Jews, one that might strip them of their social power and bring the wrath of the Romans down on the whole city (Jn 11:48). Thus, they gathered hastily at night in order to discover what charges could be made to “stick” against, him under Jewish law (Mk 14:55-59), and then brought him to Pilate “early in the morning” (Jn 18:28), to see if they could quickly manipulate the Roman Governor into condemning him to death under Roman law — thereby avoiding direct blame for his execution themselves. In a dangerous and time-sensitive situation like this, it is doubtful that the members of the Sanhedrin would have worried about sticking to the letter of the law.
Aslan continues:
Even if one excuses all of the above violations, the most troublesome aspect of the Sanhedrin trial is its verdict. If the high priest did in fact question Jesus about his Messianic ambitions, and if Jesus’s answer did signify blasphemy, then the Torah could not be clearer about the punishment: “The one who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death: the congregation shall stone him to death (Leviticus 24:16). That is the punishment inflicted upon Stephen for his blasphemy when he calls Jesus the Son of Man (Acts 7:1-60). Stephen is not transferred to Roman authorities to answer for his crime; he is stoned to death on the spot. (Zealot, p. 158).
The stoning of Stephen, however, is not solid evidence that the Jews under Roman rule possessed the legal right to condemn blasphemers to death — it was a spontaneous act of mob violence (Acts 7:54-60), which probably took a only a few minutes to carry to its grim conclusion. Still, is it true that the Jewish authorities under Roman rule had no legal power to put anyone to death? The only explicit evidence that they did not come from the gospels (Jn 18:31). However, according to John Milbank:
When it comes to the executive powers of the Sanhedrin, then the scholarly consensus now is that they did not enjoy undisputed and autonomous powers to put to death; instances where they did fell during vacancies in the [Roman] procuratorship and otherwise (as Simon Legasse notes) Josephus [the ancient Jewish historian] records two cases where, indeed, the Sanhedrin tried to get self-appointed prophets executed by Rome for essentially Jewish offences — one of them another man named Jesus. (Being Reconciled, p. 86)
In any case, even if the Jewish authorities did have the legal power to put Jesus to death, many critics forget that the prisoner named Jesus was a “hot-potato”: no one wanted to risk the ire of the Galilean mob gathered in the city for the Passover (Lk 19:37-40) by being held directly responsible for his death — not the Temple authorities, who feared for their own safety, and worried about the possible Roman reaction if the Jews rioted against each other; and not Pontius Pilate either, who had been a supporter of Sejanus, the (recently executed) attempted usurper of the imperial throne back in Rome. Politically, Pilate needed to stay “under the radar” of the Emperor Tiberius, or at least show that he could govern Palestine effectively by keeping law and order. Thus, Jesus the hot-potato is passed back and forth: from the Sanhedrin to Pilate, from Pilate to Herod (Lk 23:6-12), then back to Pilate, who proceeds to pass-the-buck to the Passover crowds (Jn 18:38-19:16). Ultimately, it is the threat to bring complaints against Pilate to Rome that forces his hand to agree to crucify Jesus under Roman law (Jn 19:12). The gospel accounts, therefore, perfectly match the known political realities of the day.
Milbank opens up another contentious issue when he reports that skeptical historians doubt that there ever was a custom to release a prisoner each year at Passover. Milbank writes:
Most striking is the fact that nowhere else do we read of the purported Passover custom whereby the governor of Judea offered to release a prisoner every year. There is no mention of this in Rabbinic sources, nor in Josephus, who was favorable to the Romans, and likely to have mentioned any instances of their mercy. (Being Reconciled, p. 82-83)
New Testament historian Dale Allison echoes these same misgivings when he notes that “Mark 15:6 is our sole witness to an annual custom of releasing, in response to popular request, a prisoner during the festival” (The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, p. 26). But we are not justified in claiming with any confidence that St. Mark is the “sole” witness to the annual custom of releasing a prisoner at Passover, unless we accord to the famous “Two-Source” theory (i.e., that Mark and “Q” are the main sources for Matthew and Luke) a degree of certainty that the theory should not possess (on this, see article 9 in this web series). We actually have three explicit gospel witnesses to this Passover custom: Matthew 27:15, Mark 15:6, and John 18:39. Given that these documents were written at three different times and places in the ancient world by three different authors, who were either eyewitnesses themselves to what transpired or had direct access to eyewitnesses, a case still can be made (on the grounds of multiple-attestation) for the historical accuracy of their common perspective on this matter.
Marcus Borg brings up two more items on the skeptical check-list about the trial and condemnation of Jesus by the Sanhedrin:
1. “[I]f it really did happen, how did the followers of Jesus know what happened at it?”(Jesus, p. 263). This question is easy enough to answer: it appears that Jesus had at least two supporters on the Council, Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who almost certainly would have been present for the proceedings (Jn 3:1, 7:45-52; Lk 23:50-51). We also know that according to the 4th century Christian historian Eusebius, the apostle John was born the son of a priestly family, and seems to have been known to the high priest (see Jn 18:15) and knew the high priest’s slaves and their families (18:10, 26), enabling him to get inside the court of the high priest and have access to at least some of the proceedings (Jn 18:15-17).
2. Borg writes: [T]he high priest’s question [at the trial] and Jesus’s response sound remarkably like a post-Easter Christian confession of faith: ‘Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?’ ‘Are you the Christ, the Son of God?’ These are classic post-Easter affirmations about Jesus. Jesus’s response sounds like a reference to his resurrection and second-coming: ‘You will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power’ echoes Psalm 101, one of the texts used by the early Christians to express their conviction that God had raised Jesus to God’s right hand. ‘Coming with the clouds of heaven’ echoes Daniel 7:13-14, a text that also uses ‘Son of Man’ language and that is associated in the New Testament with the expectation of Jesus’s second coming (as in Mark 13:24-27). The symmetry is almost too good to be factual — Jesus was condemned for what amounts to an early Christian confession of faith. Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, who will come again on the clouds of heaven. (p. 263-264)
Notice the presupposition at work in Borg’s argument here: It is not likely that Jesus ever said anything to justify the faith of the early, post-Easter Church that he was the true Messiah and Son of God who would come again to the earth in glory one day; so, if the Gospels report that he did say such things, then these sayings probably should be attributed to the literary and theological creativity of the Gospel writers themselves; it is not likely that it is something that Jesus himself actually said. In other words, Borg simply assumes from the outset that the understanding of the person and work of Jesus by the early Christians is not grounded in what Jesus actually said and did. This kind of flaw in historical reasoning, has a popular name: it’s called “begging the question”: holding as a presupposition of your historical argument one of the very things you are setting out to prove! It is a version of the “hermeneutic of suspicion” at work again, which we have found reason to question many times throughout this web series.
Some claim that Jesus did not actually commit blasphemy before the Council and the high priest, because the Jewish crime of blasphemy was limited to the utterance of the secret name of God — Yahweh— and simply to claim to be the Messiah and the agent of the coming of the Kingdom of God, while it certainly would have been a bold and outrageous claim, was not technically blasphemous. We will return to this issue later in this series. Suffice it to say for now that we know from the first century Jewish author Philo that the charge of blasphemy could be extended to any invocation of God that was considered impious — and Stephen was stoned to death by the Jewish Council and the mob for using much the same language about Jesus that Jesus did about himself at his trial (Acts 7:54-60). Protestant New Testament scholar C.H. Dodd summed up the matter well in his essay “The Historical Problem of the Death of Jesus”:
The Evangelists, I conclude … take the view that Jesus was charged with blasphemy because he spoke and acted in ways which implied that he stood in a special relation with God, so that his words carried divine authority and his actions were instilled with divine power. Unless this claim could be believed, the implied claim was an affront to the deepest religious sentiments of his people, a profanation of sanctities; and this, I suggest, is what the charge of ‘blasphemy’ really stands for …. [T]he implied claim was messianic at least, perhaps rather messianic plus. (p. 99)
Next Time: More Case Studies of the “Hermeneutic of Suspicion”: the Crucifixion of Jesus
Robert Stackpole, STD
©The Mere Christian Fellowship, 2017
