Jews in The Dock; Pilate in the Choir.pdf

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                    Jews in The Dock;
                    Pilate in the Choir

On a day that can be placed between the years 26 and 36 CE, the Roman
governor of Judea, a foreign Gentile named Pontius Pilate, ordered the cru-
ciﬁxion of the man known to history as Jesus Christ. The charge against
him was that he claimed to be the King of the Jews without Roman authori-
zation, which, if true, would constitute an act of treason against Rome and
lead to his horrible death. The earliest substantial accounts of what hap-
pened appear in the four New Testament Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John. Based on the evidence presented there, the evidence of Jesus’ guilt
would appear to be overwhelming, at least from a Roman viewpoint.
   Jesus preached the imminent coming of a new kingdom for the nation of
Israel, one not sanctioned or authorized by Rome. His chief disciple, Peter,
called him ‘‘the Messiah,’’ a title signifying a special king of the Jews to be
sent to Israel by God, and Jesus declared Peter’s assertion to be a revelation
from God in heaven (Matthew 16:16–17). Some of his disciples argued over
what role they would play in Jesus’ kingdom (Mark 10:37). Jesus arranged
his entry into Jerusalem in a fashion designed to invoke messianic allusions
from Jewish scripture (Matthew 21:4). When he entered Jerusalem, large
crowds hailed him as the Son of David, a messianic title (Matthew 21:9).
After entering Jerusalem, he publicly declared, ‘‘now the ruler of this world
will be driven out’’ (John 12:31). He accused the Roman-appointed high
priest of the Jews of turning the Temple into a den of thieves and a corrupt
marketplace (Mark 11:17; John 2:16). When the high priest asked him if he
was the Messiah, he said that he was (Mark 14:61–62). When the Roman
governor questioned him about the charges against him, he refused to
answer (Mark 15:4–5). Roman soldiers ridiculed and abused him by pre-
tending that he was the King of the Jews (Mark 15:16–20). At the end of
the trial, Pilate ordered him to be cruciﬁed and ordered the cross to be

2                                                           The Judas Brief

inscribed with the words ‘‘King of the Jews’’ to indicate the charge for
which Jesus had been convicted (Mark 15:26). The Roman soldiers took
Jesus out and cruciﬁed him (Mark 15:20). By any reasonable standard of
Roman judgment, Pilate acted according to the evidence before him, bar-
baric as this decision may have been.
   So, who killed Jesus? No, this isn’t a trick question, not if you read the
gospel accounts and other Christian literature. The easy answer ought to be
Pontius Pilate. But the gospel authors and their Christian contemporaries
didn’t seem to like this response. So they changed the question slightly and
asked who was ‘‘responsible’’ for the death of Jesus. They blamed the Jews.
And, as I hope to prove in this study of the gospel accounts of Jesus’ death,
they gave a deliberately false answer by distorting the evidence, misrepre-
senting the facts, and frequently lying about what happened.
   In the course of this work, I will argue that the gospel authors concocted
historically implausible conspiracies among Jewish leaders to kill Jesus;
invented corrupt Jewish courts trying to frame Jesus through perjured testi-
mony; and fantasized about howling mobs of blood-thirsty Jews screaming
‘‘Crucify him!’’ and ‘‘His blood be on us and on our children!’’ They even
falsely accused Judas Iscariot, a loyal and trusted disciple of Jesus, of betray-
ing his mentor. All of this came wrapped in plotlines that frequently lack
narrative coherence and simple logic.
   At the same time that they cobbled together these bizarre fables about
Jewish involvement in the death of Jesus, they presented a stunningly inac-
curate, almost laughable portrait of Pontius Pilate as a sincere, kindly dedi-
cated jurist completely convinced of Jesus’ innocence and determined to
set him free, only to be rebuffed time and again by those demonic Jewish
   Perhaps they were afraid of Roman persecution. Perhaps they were frus-
trated at their inability to convince Jews that tendentious Christian interpre-
tations of Hebrew scriptures, coupled with frequent misquotes of the text
and misunderstandings of the content, somehow proved that the dead Jesus
was the living Messiah. But the damage was done.
   Having falsely ﬁxed the responsibility for the death of Jesus, it was not
long before the gospel audiences identiﬁed the Jews instead of Pilate as the
killers of Jesus. By the turn of the ﬁrst century, Christian leaders such as
Ignatius of Antioch, one of the early church fathers, would routinely
denounce those ‘‘Christ-killing Jews.’’1 So, who killed Jesus? For Christians,
it was the sour Jews, not sweet Pilate.
   To add milk to the meat, Pilate not only escaped Christian condemnation
for his heinous act but eventually became a sort of Christian folk hero. You
have to look far and wide in early Christian literature to ﬁnd even a hint

    1. Ignatius, To the Magnesians XI; ECF
Jews in the Dock; Pilate in the Choir                                        3

that Pilate had any direct responsibility for the death of Jesus. Early Chris-
tian writers often mention that Christ suffered ‘‘under’’ Pilate but almost
never ‘‘because’’ of Pilate. This standard Christian formulation ﬁxes the
time of death but doesn’t identify the Roman governor as the executioner.
Over the centuries, only the Jews were identiﬁed with that act.

                         The Gospel Overview
As indicated above, our earliest full accounts of what happened with Pilate,
Jesus, and the Jews come from the four canonical Gospels. Although the
four reports contain several troublesome contradictions and numerous
inconsistencies, a clear consensus emerges as to the essential accusations
against the Jews.
   According to all four sources, the chief priests of the Jews and other
important Jewish ofﬁcials, for one reason or another (jealousy, heresy, fear,
hypocrisy, ignorance), wanted Jesus put to death. For reasons that are not
particularly clear or convincingly set forth, these Jewish leaders had to turn
him over to the Roman governor in order to have the fellow executed.
   First, however, they needed to arrest him, but this was a problem. Even
though he came to the Temple day after day to teach, they couldn’t take him
into custody in public because he was too popular and they feared that riots
would break out. Fortunately for the chief priests, a member of Jesus’ inner
circle, Judas Iscariot, agreed to lead them to Jesus’ secret nighttime location
so they could place him under arrest.
   After taking Jesus into custody and conducting some sort of inquiry into
his teachings, the Jewish authorities brought him before Pilate and accused
him of many crimes, mostly unspeciﬁed. But the one charge that appears to
have resonated with the governor was the charge that Jesus claimed to be
King of the Jews. Pilate conducted a hearing into the matter.
   Although there seems little doubt, based on Pilate’s inquiry, that Jesus
was clearly guilty of the charge, the governor told the Jewish authorities that
he wanted to release the prisoner. But an angry Jewish mob led by the chief
priests rejected Pilate’s offer. They demanded that the governor not only
crucify Jesus but that he also release a homicidal Jewish revolutionary
named Barabbas, who had just led an insurrection against Rome that led to
a number of deaths. Pilate, in order to avoid the possibility of massive riots
that would threaten public safety, gave in to the crowd’s demands. He
released Barabbas and had Jesus delivered for cruciﬁxion.
   Poor Pilate. Fair-minded judge that he was, the Jewish threat to public
safety forced him against his will to give in to the crowd’s wishes. Whatever
happened, though, to those large crowds that hailed Jesus as king and whom
the priests feared would riot if Jesus was taken into custody? Did they just
slink away? The Gospels don’t say. Had this large outpouring of support
4                                                             The Judas Brief

shown up for Pilate’s tribunal, they could have given him enthusiastic public
support when he offered to release their Messiah. They could have changed
the course of history. It doesn’t seem to have served the gospel authors’ pur-
pose to explain this puzzling absence.

                               Pilate in History
Clear and convincing extra-biblical historical evidence tells us much about
how Pilate functioned as governor, and we will examine that evidence in
detail in chapters 4–6, along with a look at standard critiques of this evi-
dence. For purposes of our present perspective, however, let me brieﬂy sum-
marize what his contemporaries thought of him.
    They considered him ‘‘cruel,’’ ‘‘merciless,’’ ‘‘obstinate,’’ ‘‘corrupt,’’ ‘‘in-
solent,’’ and ‘‘inﬂexible’’ once he had reached a decision. He was insensitive
to Jewish concerns and did not permit crowds to protest his rulings or chal-
lenge his authority. He readily employed armed Roman soldiers for crowd
control and threatened mass executions of peaceful protestors if they didn’t
disperse. Of particular importance for our purposes was his reputation for
‘‘his continual murders of people untried and uncondemned, and his never
ending, and gratuitous, and most grievous inhumanity.’’2 Jesus was appar-
ently lucky even to appear before him to offer a defense.
    Pilate did not tolerate popular religious outsiders and his overreactions in
this regard eventually led to his removal from ofﬁce. He massacred a Jewish
prophet from Samaria (between Judea and Galilee) and his followers. This
was too much even for the Romans, and the governor of Syria, who had
legal authority over Pilate, removed him from ofﬁce. In an act of apprecia-
tion, the inhabitants of Jerusalem gave the Syrian governor a hero’s welcome
when he came to their city shortly after Pilate’s removal.
    How might this Pilate view Jesus, then, a preacher who taught the immi-
nent coming of a new non-Roman kingdom that would rule the world for
all time, a prophet hailed by large Jewish crowds as their non-Roman king,
a protestor who aggressively denounced the Roman-sanctioned Jewish gov-
ernment as ‘‘a den of thieves,’’ and a political activist who disrupted Temple
trafﬁc and religious rituals? Let’s just say that turning Jesus loose wouldn’t
appear at the top of the governor’s list of things to do before dinner.

         The Evolving Images in Early Christian Literature
As you proceed through Christian literature in chronological order, you can
notice a clear pattern. The viliﬁcation of the Jews increases and the perﬁdy
of Pilate decreases. In the Gospel of Mark, for example, almost universally

    2. Philo, On the Embassy to Gaius 302.
Jews in the Dock; Pilate in the Choir                                            5

considered by New Testament scholars as the earliest of the gospels, Pilate
hands Jesus over to the Roman soldiers and they carry out the cruciﬁxion.
In the later Gospels of Luke and John, Pilate hands Jesus over to the Jews
and they carry out the cruciﬁxion. In Mark, Pilate makes no speciﬁc ﬁnding
that Jesus was innocent of the charges. In Luke and John, the governor
makes three such declarations. In Mark, Roman soldiers abuse Jesus and
mock him as King of the Jews. In Luke, the mockery is transferred from
Pilate’s Roman soldiers to Herod’s Jewish soldiers. In Mark, no motive is
ascribed to Judas’s interaction with the chief priests. In Matthew, greed is
the motive. In Luke, Satan inﬂuences Judas. And in John, probably the last
of the gospels to be written, Judas acts out of both greed and because of

The Gospel of Peter
This trend toward enhancing Jewish blame and exonerating Pilate reached
its apex in the noncanonical text known as the Gospel of Peter, a Christian
text attributed to the Apostle Peter, although very few New Testament histo-
rians would accept such a claim. Most scholars date it to the late ﬁrst or
early second century.3 Evidence suggests that during the second century,
Christians already debated whether this gospel actually came from Peter’s
hand.4 It appears to have been read as scripture in some Syrian and Egyptian
Christian churches.5 Around 200, Bishop Serapion of Antioch barred its use
as scripture because it was either heretical or subject to heretical interpreta-
tions.6 Its deﬁciency is that it seems to hint that Jesus may not have been
fully human.7 We have only fragments of the manuscript, and one fragment
begins with a portion of the trial proceedings against Jesus.

  And since they did not desire to wash, Pilate stood up. And then Herod the
  King orders the Lord to be taken [sent?] away, having said to them, ‘‘What I
  ordered you to do to him, do.’’8

   Next, Joseph of Arimathea, described in this gospel as ‘‘the friend of
Pilate and the Lord,’’9 came to Pilate for help in retrieving the body of Jesus,
and Pilate sent a request for the corpse to Herod.

  3.   Brown 1994a, 1332, 1342.
  4.   Ehrman 2003a, 15.
  5.   Brown 1994a, 1341.
  6.   Ehrman 2003a, 16.
  7.   Ibid.
  8.   Brown 1994, 1318.
  9.   Ibid., emphasis added.
6                                                               The Judas Brief

    Contextually, there seems little doubt that in this version of the Passion,
the active judge is Herod, not Pilate, and that Herod ordered the cruciﬁxion
and the Jews carried it out. Pilate complained about the proceedings, cere-
moniously washed his hands of the event, and waited for Herod and other
Jews to do the same. But none did.
    Where Luke earlier transformed some of the anti-Pilate attributions into
anti-Herod assertions, the author of this document altered the remaining
anti-Pilate material so that Herod became the wrongful actor. Pilate didn’t
even order the cruciﬁxion, according to this text. This development is inter-
esting in that the Gospel of Luke has Pilate send Jesus to Herod for investi-
gation and Herod, ﬁnding Jesus innocent, returned him to Pilate for
continued proceedings (Luke 23:6–12).
    We should note that this Herod, a son of Herod the Great, was the
Roman-appointed ruler of Galilee, where Jesus conducted his ministry, but
he was also a Jew. Pilate, however, was a Gentile. So the shifting of responsi-
bility from Pilate to Herod not only minimizes Pilate’s involvement but
also reinforces the Jewish responsibility for Jesus’ death and exonerates the
    The depiction of Joseph of Arimathea, who in the canonical gospels is
responsible for the burial of Jesus, as a friend of both Pilate and Jesus, fur-
ther softens the image of Pilate. That Pilate had to send to Herod for the
corpse reinforces the idea that Pilate had no direct connection to the cruci-
ﬁxion. With the Gospel of Peter, the transformation of Pilate and the Jews
is complete. Pilate was thoroughly innocent, having no role in or responsi-
bility for the death of Jesus, while the Jews were solely responsible for the
trial, verdict, and execution of the Jews. Christians never looked back.

Other Christian Accounts of Pilate
I brieﬂy observed above that the late ﬁrst-century–early second-century
Christian father, Ignatius of Antioch, referred to Jews as Christ-killers. In
his letter to the Magnesians, he writes about the suffering of Jesus ‘‘at the
hands of the Christ-killing Jews, under Pontius Pilate the governor and
Herod the king.’’10 Ignatius clearly afﬁxes blame for the death of Jesus on
the ‘‘Christ-killing Jews’’ and lets both Pilate and Herod off the hook. The
inclusion of Herod in this exoneration suggests that he was inﬂuenced by
the Gospel of Luke. He mentions Pilate and Herod only for the purpose of
ﬁxing the time of the event, while they were both in ofﬁce, but he gives no
indication that he holds either of them responsible. Only the Jews are guilty.
   The second-century Christian writer Irenaeus, noted as one of Christiani-
ty’s premier heresy hunters, says that Jesus ‘‘was arrested by the priests, con-

    10. Ignatius, To the Magnesians XI; ECF, emphasis added.
Jews in the Dock; Pilate in the Choir                                                  7

ducted before Herod, and condemned in the presence of Pilate.’’11 Here,
Pilate is only present while Herod conducts the trial. This version of events
seems clearly inﬂuenced by the Gospel of Peter.
    The third-century Christian writer Origen, considered one of the most
brilliant of the early Christian scholars, contributes further to the process of
exonerating Pilate. In his Against Celsius, he responds to a Jewish argument
against the divinity of Christ, the argument being that nothing ever hap-
pened to Pilate because of his execution of Jesus. If Jesus were truly a God,
the Jew argued, then Pilate would have received some divine punishment.
Origen replied, ‘‘he does not know that it was not so much Pilate that con-
demned him (who knew that ‘for envy the Jews had delivered Him’), as the
Jewish nation, which had been condemned by God and rent in pieces and
dispersed over the whole earth.’’12 By this time, we can see that inﬂuential
Christian thinkers condemned the entire Jewish nation for the death of Jesus
while granting Pilate amnesty.
    Bishop Hippolytus, a contemporary of Origen, says that Jesus was
‘‘scourged by Pilate and derided by the soldiers and nailed to a tree by the
Jews.’’13 While Hippolytus acknowledges that Pilate had Jesus whipped, he
exempts the governor from blame for Jesus’ death, stating that it was the
Jews who nailed Jesus to the tree.14 Both Luke and John blame the Jews for
crucifying Jesus but only John depicts Pilate actually whipping Jesus. This
suggests that the bishop’s account may have been inﬂuenced by the Gospel
of John.
    Lactantius, another third-century Christian writer, had this to say about
what occurred.

   And when Pontius Pilate, who then as legate had authority in Syria,15 per-
   ceived that the cause did not belong to the ofﬁce of the Roman judge, he sent
   him to Herod the Tetrarch, and permitted the Jews themselves to be the judges
   of their own law: who having received the power of punishing His guilt, sen-
   tenced Him to the cross, but ﬁrst scourged and struck him with their hands,
   put on Him a crown of thorns, spat on his face, gave Him gall and vinegar to

   11. Irenaeus, ‘‘Fragments from the Lost Writings of Irenaeus, LIV,’’ in Roberts et al.
1997, I:577; ECF
   12. Origen, Against Celsus 2.34; ECF
   13. Hippolytus, ‘‘On Psalm II. From the Exposition of the Second Psalm, by the Holy
Bishop Hippolytus,’’ in Roberts et al. 1997, V:170; ECF
   14. A number of Christian writers sometimes refer to Jesus’ cross as a tree. This is
due to the inﬂuence of Deuteronomy 21:23, which instructs Jews that when a man is
sentenced to hanging, his body should be removed and buried before nightfall. This pas-
sage was thought to come into play when Joseph of Arimathea went to claim the body of
Jesus for burial.
   15. This is obviously an expansive and inaccurate description of Pilate’s legal
8                                                               The Judas Brief

    eat and drink . . . then the executioners . . . suspended him on the cross, and
    afﬁxed Him to it.16

Elsewhere, he adds,

    Then Pilate was overpowered by their outcries, and by the instigation of
    He did not, however, pass judgment himself, but delivered him up to the Jews,
    that they themselves might judge Him according to their law.17

   In Lactantius’s version of events, Pilate conducts no inquiry and passes
no judgment of execution. The decision is made by Herod and the Jews exe-
cute judgment. He also adds that the Jews judged Jesus themselves under
Jewish law. This implies that there was no crime against Roman law, such
as claiming to be King of the Jews, and that Jesus was only put to death for
violating Jewish law (or under false charges that he violated Jewish law). He
even shifts the ﬂogging of Jesus from Pilate to Herod and the mocking by
the Roman soldiers to the Jewish executioners. Lactantius has completely
exonerated Pilate and the Romans of any involvement whatsoever and
transferred all wrongdoing to Herod and the Jews. He appears to have been
heavily inﬂuenced by the Gospel of Peter.

                         Pilate: Christian Folk Hero
The process of exonerating Pilate led to the emergence of a number of folk
traditions that cast the governor as some sort of Christian hero. The early
third-century Latin writer Tertullian hailed him as a convert to Christianity
who tried to persuade the Roman emperor to join the ﬂock.18 Eusebius, the
fourth-century church historian, added that Pilate convinced the emperor
that Jesus was a deity and the emperor referred the matter to the Roman
Senate for consideration.19
   In the Gospel of Nicodemus, another fourth-century work, we ﬁnd Pilate
before the Roman emperor, who condemns Pilate to death for his role in the
death of Jesus. Just before Pilate’s execution, however, the governor prays
to Jesus for forgiveness. As he ﬁnishes his petition, the voice of Jesus from
heaven declares him blessed among Gentiles and announces that Pilate shall
appear as a witness to the second coming of Jesus. When the executioner
decapitates Pilate, an angel carries off the head.20

   16. Lactantius, Epitome of the Divine Institutes XLV; ECF
   17. Ibid., XVIII; ECF, emphasis added.
   18. Tertullian, Apology XXI; ECF
   19. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 2.2.1–2.
   20. Acts of Pilate, New Testament Apocrypha, in Roberts et al. 1997, VIII:465; ECF
Jews in the Dock; Pilate in the Choir                                          9

   This account is especially interesting in that it acknowledges that Pilate
ordered the cruciﬁxion of Jesus, despite what many other Christian writers
were saying, and that the Roman emperor executed Pilate for his actions.
This at least acknowledges that Pilate was responsible for what happened
to Jesus. But Pilate’s conversion to Christianity leads him to become a favor-
ite of Jesus. So Pilate is ultimately exonerated, as is the Roman emperor at
the time of Jesus’ execution. However, we know that Pilate wasn’t executed
for his role in the death of Jesus, although he was subsequently removed
from ofﬁce for killing a different Jewish prophet.
   Augustine, the extremely inﬂuential ﬁfth-century Christian scholar.
praised Pilate as a prophet21 and as the ﬁrst Gentile at the death of Jesus to
recognize his divinity.22 By the sixth century, Pilate had such star quality that
the Coptic Church declared him a saint.
   Not only did early Christian writers attest to Pilate’s Christian bona
ﬁdes, by the mid-fourth century, he began to appear in Christian art. In
some portrayals, the artist aligned him opposite Abraham, Daniel, or other
biblical celebrities.23 The Abraham scene depicted the sacriﬁce of his son
Isaac, an act of supreme religious devotion. The Christian artist clearly
implied a parallel with Pilate’s delivery of Jesus for execution. The Daniel
connection derives from the story of Susannah and the Elders, in which
Daniel defended Susannah against false charges by the Jewish elders. Again,
the parallel enhances Pilate’s reputation.

                     Judas and the Jewish Nation
Judas didn’t fare as well as Pilate did. No nominations for sainthood, no
tomb depictions, not even a heavenly voice of forgiveness. Over the last two
thousand years, hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people have
despised the man, making him the most hated man in all of history. His
name is a synonym for traitor, and the Judas kiss, the act by which he con-
summated his deed, has become the metaphor for betrayal.
   But Christians weren’t satisﬁed with just pounding on Judas’s reputation.
They began to see him as symbolizing all Jews who didn’t accept Jesus.
Augustine, the sainted Christian scholar, wrote of him:

  Church, whom he is acknowledged to have ﬁguratively represented . . . so

  21. Brown 1994a, 697n50, citing Augustine, Sermones 201.
  22. Jensen 2003, citing Augustine, Sermon 201.
  23. Ibid.
10                                                              The Judas Brief

     continuing, hate Him.24

   In other words, when the Gospels tell us that Judas did something evil,
we should understand that Judas represents the entire Jewish nation and his
action is the action of the Jewish nation. His betrayal of Jesus means that
the entire Jewish nation betrayed Jesus. When Jesus allegedly says of Judas,
‘‘woe to that one by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been
better for that one not to have been born’’ (Mark 14:21), Augustine’s teach-
ing implies that this curse applies to all Jews who reject Jesus. This August-
inian analysis has imposed itself on Christian thought throughout the ages,
and all Jews who rejected Christ were deemed evil and wicked, better that
they not be born.
   Augustine wrote in the late fourth–early ﬁfth century, but the condemna-
tion of the Jewish nation as a whole took root much earlier. We already saw
that by the end of the ﬁrst century, Ignatius referred to Jews as the Christ-
killers. And we noted Origen’s teaching in the third century that the Jewish
nation ‘‘had been condemned by God and rent in pieces and dispersed over
the whole earth.’’ Augustine, however, elevated the degree of wickedness by
equating Judas with the Jewish nation. If Satan entered into Judas, then he
entered into all Jews who rejected Jesus.
   While Augustine probably didn’t need any special props to convince fel-
low Christians that Judas’s wickedness applied to all Jews, he probably got
an extra push from some scriptural connections to the disciple’s name.
   The name ‘‘Judas’’ is a Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name Judah.
In the Jewish scriptures, Judah was the fourth son of Jacob and a rival to
Joseph for leadership of the twelve tribes of Israel. Jacob had designated
Joseph as his heir to lead the twelve tribes and Judah hated Joseph, so he
arranged to deliver Joseph into the hands of a foreign enemy by selling him
into slavery. So this ﬁrst Judah/Judas betrayed the designated leader of the
nation of Israel by handing him over to foreigners and received money for
his actions, just like the disciple Judas. This would have impressed many
early Christian scholars who recognized the parallel.
   Eventually, the nation of Israel split into two kingdoms, Judah in the
south and Israel in the north. In 722 BCE, the last remnants of the northern
kingdom were destroyed by the Assyrians, giving rise to the legends of the
ten lost tribes of Israel. The kingdom of Judah survived the onslaught and
survived as a political entity in one form or another down to the time of the
Bar Kokhba rebellion against Rome at about 133 CE. In the time of Jesus,
the political entity of Judah, usually rendered as Judea, encompassed mostly
Jerusalem and its surrounding environs. Larger portions of the original

     24. Augustine, Enarrations on the Psalms 109.1; ECF
Jews in the Dock; Pilate in the Choir                                         11

kingdoms of Israel and Judah were divided among other Roman administra-
tive units, such as Galilee or Samaria or Idumea.
   The term ‘‘Jew’’ (yahud in Hebrew) derives from the association of the
remaining Hebrew people with the territory of Judah (yahudah in Hebrew).
A Jew was someone from Judah.
   For Christians, therefore, the name Judas/Judah had a double negative
association. First, it suggested that Judas’s evil act was foretold by scripture
in the actions of Judah the son of Jacob. Second, the name corresponded to
the political entity of Judea that rejected Jesus and turned him over to the
Romans. It didn’t take much imagination for Augustine to see in Judas a
symbolic representation of the Jewish nation. No doubt, several Christian
scholars had already put these two parallels together and shared their
polemical joy by pointing it out to others.
   But did Judas betray Jesus, or was he falsely accused of such a heinous
act by the authors of the Gospels? In fact, there is very good evidence that
in the years immediately following the death of Jesus, this disciple enjoyed
a reputation as a loyal and trusted follower of Jesus. The charge of betrayal
was a late invention that arose in the context of increasing hostilities
between Jews and Christians. We will look at that evidence in more detail
in later chapters and see how gospel authors twisted the facts around to cre-
ate a different picture.
   Given Augustine’s pronouncement that Judas symbolized the Jewish
nation, it is only ﬁtting, therefore, that the title of this book, The Judas
Brief, signiﬁes both a defense of the Jewish nation and of the disciple Judas.

                             The Current View
Despite numerous inconsistencies, several narrative incoherencies, many
historical errors, and frequent implausible allegations against the Jewish
people (examples of which will be examined in later chapters), when read
together, the four New Testament Gospels have provided Christianity with
a generic plotline that has served to fuel intense hatred of the Jews for
almost two thousand years. The trajectory of this virulent animosity encom-
passes centuries of constant anti-Jewish harassment, persecution, violence,
torture, murder, and massacres, all leading to a climate of anti-Jewish revul-
sion that culminated in the Nazi execution of over six million Jews. At its
base stands the accusation that Jews were criminally responsible for the
death of Jesus, that the Jews were ‘‘Christ-killers,’’ that the Jews, out of mal-
ice and spite, forced the Roman governor to crucify the innocent Jesus.
   In recent years, primarily in reaction to the Holocaust, many New Testa-
ment scholars have wrestled with the problem of the relationship between
the Gospels and the prevalence of Christian anti-Semitism and have written
sensitively about the issue. Modern critical scholarship also recognizes an
12                                                         The Judas Brief

enormous number of difﬁculties in using the Gospels as historically reliable
sources. They have made long strides in showing us the many layers of
development that led to the ﬁnal shape of the gospel manuscripts, including
some alterations and changes made to the received text after the Gospels
were written. They point out many historical errors and challenge many
claims as implausible or unproven. And they show clearly how the gospel
authors frequently misrepresent, distort, or alter the content of earlier
sources, whether quoting from Jewish scripture or from another gospel or
from some earlier source. The scholars politely describe this latter practice
as rearranging the material to accommodate the author’s theological per-
spective. The more accurate charge would be that the gospel authors delib-
erately misrepresented the evidence to make a polemical or theological
    Nevertheless, no matter how ﬁnely the scholars slice and dice the gospel
texts, how thinly they peel off the various layers of development, how care-
fully they simmer theological claims in the historical broth, how delicately
they reassemble the textual ingredients to recreate the original recipe, when
it comes to the question of who killed Jesus, they still serve up the same cold
gruel. Jews were responsible. The chief source of dispute is over which Jews
were responsible and why. Even the most philo-Semitic exegetes adhere to
some variation of the core gospel allegation that at least some Jewish leaders
cooperated with the Roman governor in seeking the death of Jesus.
    Raymond Brown, for example, one of the most respected modern New
Testament historians, writes in his The Death of the Messiah that ‘‘an
underlying hostile attitude toward Jews is religiously unjustiﬁed and mor-
ally reprehensible.’’25 Yet he also concludes, ‘‘Because they disliked Jesus
and what he did and said, Sanhedrin authorities [i.e., the Jewish court] were
involved in seizing him and giving him over to the Romans to be put to
    John Dominic Crossan, another prominent New Testament scholar and
author of several volumes on Jesus and early Christianity, argues that
Brown does not go far enough in exposing the fallacious roots of anti-
Semitism in the Gospels and critiques Brown’s historical analysis of several
elements in the Passion Narrative that cast aspersions on the Jews.27 Yet, he
concludes that Jesus died because he committed a crime against the Jewish
Temple rather than for treason against Rome.28 In his view, when Jesus over-
turned the tables of the money-changers, he reenacted a symbolic destruc-

     25.   Brown 1994a, 385.
     26.   Ibid., 386–87.
     27.   Crossan 1996, ix–xi.
     28.   Ibid., 117.
Jews in the Dock; Pilate in the Choir                                        13

tion of the Temple, and it was ‘‘that act of symbolic destruction, in deed and
word, against the Temple’’ that led to his arrest and execution.29
   In connection with the problems of anti-Semitism among Christians, the
Second Vatican Council had this to say about blaming Jews for the death
of Jesus: ‘‘What happened in Christ’s passion can not be blamed without
distinction on all Jews then living, nor upon the Jews of today.’’30 The Coun-
cil obviously concluded that some Jews can be blamed, and this would
appear to be the most that current church and modern New Testament
scholarship will concede regarding the involvement of Jews in the death of
   Today, New Testament scholars who are willing to subject the Gospels to
the sort of historical criticism that questions the idea of scriptural inerrancy
tend to see the gospel accounts as presenting a generally reliable overall pic-
ture of what happened but not necessarily a literally accurate one with
respect to all the signiﬁcant details. These scholars can be divided into two
opposing camps with regard to how they understand the gospel portrayal of
the interaction between Pilate and the Jews. The division concerns how they
evaluate the extra-biblical evidence concerning the way Pilate governed.
   On one side, you have those who accept the broad gospel picture that
shows Jews bullying Pilate until he yields to mob pressure. They evaluate
Pilate as a weak, perhaps spineless governor, unable to assert his authority
when challenged and giving in to the crowd’s demands for cruciﬁxion,
although they would be among the ﬁrst to admit that not all Jews are
responsible for what happened and that later generations of Jews shouldn’t
be held responsible for the acts of the irresponsible few.
   For this group, the historical evidence concerning Pilate is unreliable, a
distorted picture based on bias and polemic. In opposition to this negative
portrayal, they cite other historical evidence and provide alternative inter-
pretations of the existing evidence. They conclude that Pilate’s administra-
tion was far less malevolent than depicted in these other sources and that
the gospel picture could be historically accurate. I dispute this analysis in
chapter 6.
   On the other side, you have those who accept the validity of the extra-
biblical evidence that shows Pilate as a strong-willed governor not easily
cowed by protesting throngs. For this group, Pilate was also a wily politi-
cian who saw a good opportunity to do a favor for the Jewish authorities
and win their support. His execution of Jesus was simply clever politics
designed to appease his critics. I challenge this argument also, in chapter 13.
This group, too, argues that most Jews had nothing to do with the death of

  29. Ibid., 65.
  30. Brown 1994a, 38, emphasis added.
14                                                         The Judas Brief

Jesus, and that subsequent generations of Jews shouldn’t be held responsible
for the acts of a few misguided Jewish leaders.
   What we don’t see argued among New Testament scholars is the idea that
Jews had nothing to do with the death of Jesus; that Pilate determined, with-
out any Jewish input, that Jesus should be put to death, and that he ordered
the Jewish authorities to turn Jesus over or suffer the consequences of a vio-
lent confrontation between the Roman military and Jewish defenders of
Jesus, a confrontation that could lead to the deaths of thousands of innocent
Jews in this dangerously over-crowded city during the holiday festival. Or,
as the Gospel of John lets slip, ‘‘But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high
priest that year, said to them, ‘You know nothing at all! You do not under-
stand that it is better for you to have one man die for the people than to
have the whole nation destroyed’ ’’ (11:49–50).

                         The Argument Ahead
In the following chapters, we will take a close and critical look at the gospel
accounts of what happened and at the relevant historical evidence. As the
facts unfold and the gospel contradictions and inconsistencies mount, we
will see that the charges against the Jews unravel and that a more likely his-
torical scenario emerges.
   The evidence will show that there was no plot by Jewish authorities to
kill Jesus; Judas did not betray his mentor; Pilate never seriously offered to
release Jesus; the followers of Jesus did not disappear from the scene; the
Jews did not call for the release of Barabbas or demand that Jesus be cruci-
ﬁed; and Pilate, from the very beginning, planned to execute Jesus.
   At the end of the investigation, it will be argued that during the Passover
holiday, matters had become volatile. An insurrection led by Barabbas had
led to riots and deaths, with Roman soldiers among the casualties. Pilate
put the Roman military on high alert, ready to suppress any elements of
protest and immediately quell any outbreaks of violence.
   Onto this scene came Jesus, who had developed a large following in Gali-
lee with his message of the imminent coming of the kingdom of God. As he
approached Jerusalem, large crowds of Galilean supporters who had come
to Jerusalem for the holidays hailed him as some sort of envoy from God
who would usher in the new kingdom. To many of his followers and to the
Romans, this would be heard as a challenge to the exercise of Roman
authority. From Pilate’s perspective, this was not the sort of gathering one
wanted to have in the aftermath of a deadly riot.
   Pilate would have wanted to suppress this movement, but any action on
his part during the holiday season could easily have triggered massive riots
by Jesus’ followers and resulted in the deaths of an enormous number
Jews in the Dock; Pilate in the Choir                                          15

of innocent Jews in the wake of the deadly insurrection that had just
    The Jewish authorities were deeply concerned about the danger and
wanted to avoid bloodshed. They went to Pilate and begged him to hold off
on a military solution. They promised to ﬁnd a way to keep the peace. The
Jewish authorities then opened up negotiations with Jesus to ﬁgure out how
to avoid violence. Judas acted as Jesus’ representative.
    A deal was struck. Jesus agreed that he would keep his followers calm by
agreeing to remain a hostage during the holiday festival, staying at the house
of Annas, a former high priest, father-in-law of the current high priest, Caia-
phas, and one of the most inﬂuential political ﬁgures in the Jewish govern-
ment. The agreement called for Jesus’ release after the holiday season ended,
the crowds had left Jerusalem, and his followers went home to Galilee.
    Pilate initially agreed to the plan, but under pressure from his politically
powerful rival, Herod Antipas, the Galilean ruler who saw Jesus as a threat
to his own rule, Pilate reneged on his promise. After Jesus surrendered to
Annas, Pilate demanded that Jesus be brought to the governor’s headquar-
ters to ascertain whether Jesus claimed to be King of the Jews. The Jewish
authorities had no way to ignore Pilate’s order without creating a military
confrontation, but they hoped that Pilate would keep his promise.
    Crowds assembled outside Pilate’s headquarters and Jesus’ supporters
called upon Pilate to release their teacher, but Pilate taunted them by asking
if he should release ‘‘your King.’’ The large number of Roman soldiers sur-
rounding the crowds, angry over the deaths of their comrades in the recent
insurrection, wanted this revolutionary leader put to death and called for
his cruciﬁxion. The Jewish authorities, fearful of violent outbreaks in this
hair-trigger situation, did what they could to keep the crowd from rioting.
    Pilate, having abandoned his commitment to allow Jesus to remain with
Annas for the holidays and then be released, ordered him to be cruciﬁed.
Jesus, concerned that riots would lead to a great many innocent deaths,
asked his followers to remain calm, told them that the kingdom was immi-
nent, and said that when the kingdom arrived, he and his followers would
be reunited. His followers heeded his words and dispersed.
    In the early years after the death of Jesus, the apostolic circle did not hold
the Jews or Judas responsible for what happened. As religious conﬂicts
between Jews and Christians increased and as the Christian base became
more Gentile, later Christians began to see what happened to Jesus as a
betrayal and blamed Judas and the Jewish authorities for what happened.

                Some Methodological Considerations
The so-called Jesus Quest, a scholarly effort to extract the historical facts
about Jesus from the existing evidence, relies on a number of critical criteria
16                                                            The Judas Brief

to evaluate gospel claims about what really happened. For example, if a
story has multiple attestations in independent sources, we can be more cer-
tain that the story has some credibility than if a story appears in only one
source. The goal is to ﬁnd out what events in the gospel stories can legiti-
mately be traced back to the time of Jesus and which stories may be later
inventions. We will, of course, make use of such techniques from time to
time. As with any such tools, however, they must be used judiciously and
with caution and they can only take us so far. Enormous patches of the
scriptural material don’t yield to such analytical processes.
    With that in mind, I want to propose that a few additional criteria be
added to the standard arsenal, ideas that may linger subconsciously in the
scholarly analysis but ideas that I never see explicitly stated.
    1. Where inconsistencies in the Gospels reﬂect differing degrees of hos-
tility towards the Jews or Jewish ﬁgures, the least hostile text is more likely
to be closer to the historical truth than the more hostile text. The argument
in support of this criterion follows:
    All early Christian writers (that we know of) exhibit some degree of hos-
tility toward the Jews and Jewish opponents of Jesus. As we move forward
chronologically, we ﬁnd the degree of hostility increasing. We also know
from text-critical studies (and we will look at some examples later) that
some gospel writers have altered information in their sources so that Jews
sometimes appear in a more negative light than depicted in the source mate-
rial. It would seem, therefore, that a writer hostile to the Jews, when evalu-
ating a source (oral or written), is more likely to change the source content
to make the Jews look worse than to change it so that Jews look better.
There would seem little incentive for a hostile author to soften the Jewish
    For example, Mark says that Pilate handed Jesus over to the Roman sol-
diers for cruciﬁxion and the Roman soldiers carried out the execution. John
indicates that Pilate handed Jesus over to the Jews and they were the ones
who put Jesus to death. Logically, if the Jews were the ones who cruciﬁed
Jesus, the fact should be well known and widely circulated from early on. If
Mark had two sources, one that said Jews cruciﬁed Jesus and one that said
Romans cruciﬁed Jesus, what would induce Mark to reject the charge
against the Jews and accept the anti-Roman source? The most likely expla-
nation is that Mark probably knew of no credible source that said Jews car-
ried out the cruciﬁxion and that the anti-Jewish allegation is probably a later
    Implicit in this principle is that if a later text has a version of a story that
is more favorable toward the Jews than a version in an earlier source, then
the author of the earlier source has probably altered the underlying story so
that the Jews appear in a more negative light and the later source is more
likely to be closer to the original underlying story.
Jews in the Dock; Pilate in the Choir                                        17

   2. Where inconsistencies in the Gospels reﬂect differing degrees of
approval for Pilate, the one containing the less ﬂattering version is more
likely to be closer to the historical truth than the more favorable version.
The argument here is similar to the one made above for the criterion involv-
ing less hostile versus more hostile views of Jews.
   All of the gospels present Pilate in a better light than they do the Jews.
As time went by, the image of Pilate continued to improve. It seems unlikely,
therefore, that an author hostile to the Jews and favorable to Pilate would
take a description of Pilate and make it more harsh than it appears in a
source, especially since such an act would also have the effect of improving
the image of the Jews, at least by comparison.
   For example, in Mark, Pilate makes no explicit statement that he ﬁnds
Jesus innocent of the charges, but in John, Pilate makes three such declara-
tions. Now, if Pilate speciﬁcally declared Jesus to be innocent, it would be
well known and widely circulated among the earliest Christians. So if Mark
had two sources, one in which Pilate makes no declaration of innocence and
one in which Pilate makes three declarations of innocence, why would he
choose the one that presents Pilate in the worse light when he wants to pres-
ent Pilate in the best possible light vis-a-vis the Jews? The likelihood is that
Mark never knew of a reliable source that said Pilate declared Jesus innocent
on three occasions, which suggests that the claim is a late invention.
   Again, the test is not the chronological order in which the texts appear
but the degree of favorability in the sources. So if a later gospel has an inci-
dent that shows Pilate in a harsher manner than does an earlier gospel
account of the same incident, then the later gospel account is more likely to
be closer to the historical truth than the earlier version.
   3. The attitude of Jews toward Jesus prior to the cruciﬁxion should be
judged based on what Jesus actually said while he was alive and not on
teachings revealed after his death. The basic principle here is that whatever
Jews may or may not have reacted to while Jesus was alive can only be
judged on the basis of what Jesus said and did while he was alive. Nobody
can be held responsible for knowing something about Jesus that hadn’t been
   This criterion is particularly difﬁcult to apply, because it essentially
involves the whole range of tools used to determine what portions of the
gospel texts reﬂect activities from the time of Jesus and what events appear
to be later inventions. Nevertheless, there are some instances where such
information can be elicited.
   For example, there are a number of teachings in the Gospels that suggest
that Jesus saw his mission as solely to the Jews and not to the Gentiles.
Other evidence indicates that shortly after his death, Gentiles weren’t admit-
ted into the movement. Over time, however, there were revelations to Peter
and Paul regarding the Gentiles and the Christian mission expanded to the
18                                                        The Judas Brief

Gentiles. While there may be good theological explanations for why the
nature of the mission changed, the more important concern for our pur-
poses is to determine what the nature of the mission may have been before
Jesus was cruciﬁed. If Jesus prior to his cruciﬁxion addressed his mission
only to the Jews and not to the Gentiles, then that is a factor that has to be
considered in evaluating how Jewish authorities may have judged Jesus and
what things Jesus may have said to the Jewish people.
   In the next chapter, I take a closer look at a number of problems that we
face when trying to use the Gospels as a historical source of evidence.

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