"Factors in the Death of Jesus"

From Raymond E. Brown, A Crucified Christ in Holy Week: Essays on the Four Gospel Passion Narratives (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1986): 13-16.

The exact public involvement of Jewish authorities in the death of Jesus is a complicated issue. Early Jewish tradition freely admits responsibility for "hanging" Jesus on the eve of Passover because "he seduced Israel, leading her astray" (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 43a). Yet modern Jewish writers have rejected in whole or in part Jewish involvement in the crucifixion. A frequent argument is that the Sanhedrin legal procedures described in the Gospels do not agree with Jewish Law expounded in the Mishnah and so cannot be factual. The Mishnah, completed about A.D. 200, is the written codification of the Pharisee oral law; but in Jesus' time Sadducee priests, not Pharisees, dominated the Sanhedrin, and they rejected oral law, claiming to rely only on the written law of the OT. The trial of Jesus as narrated in the Gospels does not violate the letter of the written law; therefore, the accounts of Jewish involvement cannot be so easily dismissed on technical grounds.² We are reminded by this point, however, that, although during his ministry Jesus may have argued with the Pharisees, those Jews who had the most direct involvement in his death were the priests, perhaps angered by his prophetic castigation of Temple practice.

Let us probe further, asking in what way and to what extent the priests and the Sanhedrin were involved. A distinguished Jewish commentator on the trial of Jesus, Paul Winter, would give priority to Luke's account of the procedure against Jesus, for, unlike Mark and Matthew, Luke reports no calling of witnesses and no Jewish death sentence on Jesus. Yet the failure to mention a death sentence probably does not mean that in Luke's mind the Jewish leaders were free from responsibility for the death of Jesus, since elsewhere he stresses an active Jewish role (Acts 2:36; 4:10; 5:30; 7:52; 10:39; 13:27-29). Nevertheless, unlike the formal Sanhedrin trial at night recounted in Mark and Matthew (with the latter specifying the high priest to have been Caiaphas), in Luke there is a less formal Sanhedrin questioning of Jesus in the morning. John recounts no Sanhedrin session after the arrest of Jesus but only a police interrogation conducted by the high priest Annas (18:19-24). Further confusion: John 18:3, 12 indicates that the party which arrested Jesus involved not only Jewish police supplied by the high priest but also Roman soldiers with their tribune. Roman soldiers would not have taken part without the prefect's permission or orders; and so, if the Johannine information is historical, Pilate had to have known beforehand about the arrest of Jesus and perhaps had even commanded it.

It is not impossible that, having heard rumors of Jesus as the Messiah (the anointed king of the house of David whom many Jews were awaiting), Pilate wanted the Jewish authorities of the Sanhedrin to investigate him and so assisted in his arrest. Some of those authorities would have had their own religious worries about Jesus and antipathies toward him (for example, as a false prophet). Yet they could have told themselves that they were only carrying out orders in handing Jesus over to the Romans for further action, on the grounds that under interrogation he had not denied that he was the Messiah. (Notice, I say "not denied," for the response of Jesus to the question of being the Messiah differs in the various Gospel accounts of the trial: "I am" in Mark; "That is what you say, but .... " in Matthew; "If I tell you, you will not believe" in Luke; see John 10:24-25.) Religious people of all times have accomplished what they wanted through the secular authority acting for its own purposes.

Attention must be paid to such complications lest the liturgical reading of the passion narratives lead to simplistic accusations about guilt for the death of Jesus. As I shall point out when I discuss the individual passion accounts, both Matthew ("all the people" in 27:25) and John ("the Jews" throughout) generalize hostilely, so that participation in the execution of Jesus is extended beyond even the Jewish leadership. Reflective of this, some famous Christian theologians (Augustine, John Chrysostom, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther) have made statements about the Christian duty to hate or punish the Jews because they killed the Lord. Thus, modern apprehensions about the anti-Jewish impact of the passion narratives are not groundless. One solution that has been proposed is to remove the "anti-Semitic" passages from the liturgical readings of the passion during Holy Week, a type of "Speak no evil; see no evil; hear no evil" response. But removing offensive passages is a dangerous procedure which enables hearers of bowdlerized versions to accept unthinkingly everything in the Bible. Accounts "improved" by excision perpetuate the fallacy that what one hears in the Bible is always to be imitated because it is "revealed" by God, and the fallacy that every position taken by an author of Scripture is inerrant.³ In my opinion, a truer response is to continue to read unabridged passion accounts in Holy Week, not subjecting them to excisions that seem wise to us--but once having read them, to preach forcefully that such hostility between Christian and Jew cannot be continued today and is against our fundamental understanding of Christianity. Sooner or later Christian believers must wrestle with the limitations imposed on the Scriptures by the circumstances in which they were written. They must be brought to see that some attitudes found in the Scriptures, however explicable in the times in which they originated, may be wrong attitudes if repeated today. They must reckon with the implications inherent in the fact that God has revealed in words of men. Congregations who listen to the passion proclamations in Holy Week will not recognize this, however, unless it is clearly pointed out. To include the passages that have an anti-Jewish import and not to comment on them is irresponsible proclamation that will detract from a mature understanding of our Lord's death.

2.  Other explanations exonerating Jewish religious leadership posit two Sanhedrins, e.g., one political which worked with the Romans (and which found Jesus guilty at their bidding) and the other religious (which did not deal with Jesus or was not opposed to him). The evidence for the existence of such diverse bodies is slim; and those who shaped early Christian tradition (among whom some were certainly familiar with the Palestinian scene) make no such distinction. The oldest preserved Christian writing (ca. A.D. 50), I Thessalonians, speaks baldly about "the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus" (2:14-15--a text that is probably authentically Pauline despite attempts to classify it as a later scribal edition). Such a sentiment may be overgeneralized, but it is scarcely without some foundation in fact.

3.  How much more cautious is Vatican II (Dogmatic Constitution Dei verbum on Divine Revelation, #11) in confining inerrancy: "The books of Scripture must be acknowledged as teaching firmly, faithfully, and without error that truth which God wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation."