A Jewish Perspective of Jesus.

Abstract

On an essential level, the writer's Jewish perspective of Jesus is a personal reading of the relevant ancient texts. It focuses heavily on the trial because the question of Jewish involvement in Jesus' trial is key to this perspective. The article also examines the view of modern scholars who reckon the disputes recorded in the Gospels between Jesus and other teachers as the major cause for his arrest and death. It is the writer's contention that those disputes between the Jerusalem leadership and Jesus ring true enough; but neither individually nor yet cumulatively do they explain the enormity of the crucifixion. In order to elucidate this point the author examines some of the purportedly contentious teachings, such as those to do with the Temple, ritual purity, filial piety, Messiahship, and vicarious atonement.

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Let us begin with a disclaimer: When one tries to reconstruct ancient history it is difficult to know when one has hit upon the correct theory, because there are no surviving eye witnesses and the documentary and archeological evidence is so often ambiguous if not contradictory. That is why the discipline rarely gets beyond the realm of probability--a very humbling thought. There has to be an even greater degree of diffidence in approaching this particular undertaking. The human spirit cannot be held in the hand. If it is a tall order to reduce to words a single spiritual experience of one human being, how much more so a complex of ideas and convictions subscribed to by large hosts of people. And yet many of us, including those who chose the title A Jewish Perspective of Jesus for the original lecture that became the precursor of this paper (see the author's note, at the end of the article), evidently deem words not totally inadequate vehicles for communicating and sharing ideas and meaningful dialogue about them.

Forums like this are quite momentous. We do well to remember how fortunate we are to be living in a time and place that allow scholarship to breathe. Once upon a time, encounters between faiths, and even between sects and denominations, were fraught with tension. If they occurred at all, they were occasions for subterfuge and one-upmanship and usually resulted in misunderstanding and resentment. Today, thanks in part to psychological insights, we recognize that there can be more than one valid expression for the human spirit, and that even unity and accord among peoples should not and need not be contingent upon conformity. It may also be that the excesses to which the old intolerances led have tardily alerted us to the destructiveness of narrow partisanship. Above all, those brave pioneers of intellectually honest scholarship have shown how enriching an endeavor it can be. They have paved the way for us, the more cautious, to bring up the rear in this forward march towards a deeper appreciation of all spirituality. And so, in the promise of this openness, I shall try to submit: A Jewish Perspective of Jesus.

The title does not demand a Jewish perspective of Christianity. Definitionally any Jewish perspective of Christianity is an outsider's. By living his/her life in the faith of Israel, the Jew makes clear his stance vis-a-vis other faiths. A perspective of Jesus is quite another matter. And, of course, there is more than one perspective. To some extent, everyone forms his or her own individual impression even of their contemporaries whom they can question directly. This holds at least as true for those that are no longer around to give interviews and can be glimpsed only second hand and through the mists of time. So when I the man, the Jew, the American was asked to present "a perspective," I knew that on an essential level it would be my personal reading of the relevant texts. For that is all we have: texts--and our best shot.

Most of what we know about Jesus comes from the four Gospels, which are also the oldest extant texts. There are also a number of apocryphal gospels, and the Roman historian Tacitus has a brief notice. Then there are the Jewish sources, namely the Talmud and Josephus, and some would add the Hebrew and Aramaic versions of the so-called Toldot Yeshu. These are a natural first stop. However, for anyone curious as to how Jews close to his time remembered Jesus, the Talmud's usefulness is minimal. That is because we do not find the rabbis to have preserved any independent memories of Jesus. Instead, what they provide are responses to the Christian reality. No doubt these responses--patently combative and propagandist--were intended to counter questions from both within and without. Or to quote John P. Meier (98) " ... when we do finally find such references [to Jesus] in later rabbinic literature, they are most probably reactions to Christian claims, oral or written."

What applies to the rabbinic sources goes a fortiori for Toldot Yeshu. That is because the latter is extracted from that very same rabbinic material--albeit reworked, and amply and scatologically embellished by the skillful redactor. If the Talmud takes liberties with the niceties of chronology and halakhu in the polemical cause, Toldot plays fast and loose; e.g. Yehoshua ben Perahyah, Queen Helen (of Adiabene? Constantine's mother?) and Jesus are made coeval! Embedded in the farrago, lodge no doubt vestiges of early anti-Christian propaganda useful for studying the agonistic age of the evangelists. But nothing reliable can be gleaned from this material regarding what his Jewish contemporaries--whether friend or foe, admirer or detractor--thought of Jesus.

For that one would need a source that is earlier and, preferably, less creative. Of course, the letters of Paul and at least some of the Gospels were authored by men Jewish by birth and upbringing. When they wrote, however, they had already joined the Christian movement. That means not only that their perspective must count as Christian and not Jewish but even when they describe Jewish reactions with very few exceptions it is hostility they describe. Yet all four Gospels make it clear that most if not all Jesus' friends and supporters were Jews, which proves that Jewish opinion about Jesus was by no means monolithically hostile. But it must be borne in mind that these documents attained their present form at a time when Church and Synagogue were caught up in bitter rivalry, when only people who are against the writer's church are called Jews. "Jew"--especially in John's Gospel--has become almost a synonym for adversary. So because these documents display at times a slant no less partisan than the Toldot, disentangling fact from legend from apologetics becomes rather tricky. However, unlike the much later Toldot genre, genuine traditions are recoverable from beneath the polemical overlay of Gospel and Epistle. And when those traditions relate to Jesus' Jewish acquaintances and their stance towards him, they are indispensable to our quest, as we shall see by and by. Then there is Josephus Flavius, the Jewish historian, who lived from 37 CE until the year 100 CE.

The standard text (also called the vulgate) of the 18th book of Josephus' ANTIQUITIES contains the following reference to Jesus:

   About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one
   ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising
   feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth
   gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the
   Messiah. When Pilate, upon an accusation brought by the principal
   men (or men of the highest standing) among us, had condemned
   him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come
   to love [him] did not cease. On the third day he appeared to
   them restored to life. For the prophets of G-d had prophesied
   these and myriads of other marvelous [things] about him. And
   the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still up
   to now, not disappeared [ANTIQUITIES XVIII, 63-64].

The question is: how much, if any, of this passage known as the Testimonium Flavianum (i.e. The Testimony of Josephus Fluvius, TF) flowed from the pen of Josephus, and how much was a later Christian concoction? Ever since the Renaissance, critical readers have contended that only a Christian--which Josephus was not--could have written the above passage replete as it is with Church dogma. In the wake of this realization, many scholars dismissed the entire TF as a forgery. Others argued for its authenticity, reasoning that had Josephus' work not contained a testimonium, the Church would not have embraced the Jewish historian the way it did. A third group attempted to reconstruct a hypothetical TF that was more compatible with Judaism.

Then in 1971, the meticulous Jewish scholar Shlomo Pines, shed new light on the whole issue. In an article he published that year, he brought to bear evidence from a previously ignored quotation of the TF in an Arabic text. That text, KITAB AL-UNWAN, a tenth century historical work by Agapius (also called Mahboub) bishop of Hierapolis, had been twice published earlier in the century, but its import had somehow been overlooked. Here is Agapius' variant TIT:

   At this time there was a wise man who was called Jesus.
   His conduct was good, and [he] was known to be virtuous. And
   many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his
   disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. But
   those who had become his disciples did not abandon his
   discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three
   days after his crucifixion, and that be was alive; accordingly
   he was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have
   recounted wonders [Pines: 16].

Pines recognized immediately that Agapius' version tallied in at least one important detail with Origen's version of the TF. For Origen, a Church father born in (or around) the year 185, writes ruefully in two separate places that Josephus did not accept the Messiahship of Jesus. Origen could have known Josephus' position on any given subject only from his writings. It can therefore be inferred that Origen must have found a reference to Jesus in those writings and that the reference demonstrated Josephus' rejection of Jesus' Messiahship. That means that Agapius' TF has a good chance of being an Arabic rendering of a Syriac document (for Agapius translated from Syriac, not from Greek in which language Josephus published his works) that had in turn used the undoctored TF as it circulated some 120 years after Josephus and before Christian scribes had an opportunity to rework it. In other words, though Agapius's version must be assumed to suffer from the kind of inaccuracies that inevitably attend any translation of a translation, at least such mutations are accidental rather than tendentious. Thus, Pines was inclined to think that Agapius had a fair amount going for him.

If Pines is right, odds are that we have in Agapius a perspective of Jesus limned by a well-informed--and presumably impartial--first century Jew. What is that perspective? Obviously, the adjectives wise, good, and virtuous are all highly approbative, and most important they express Josephus's own evaluation. At the other extreme there is Pilate, who condemns Jesus to death, thereby signifying that he does not share Josephus' appraisal. As for the reactions of other protagonists, TF tells us about followers--both Jewish and gentile who after Jesus' death cannot forget him or come to terms with his death and apparently open themselves to the happier option of his resurrection and Messiahship. These devotees are obviously reacting positively to Jesus. In the vulgate TF another group appears on the scene--a group Josephus designates "the principal men among us." Now it will have been noticed that besides the patently Christological affirmations present in the vulgate TF but not in Agapius, the latter also lacks two non-Christological, or if you like neutral, details found in the vulgate TF. One is the report about the survival of the so-called tribe of Christians with which the vulgate TF ends, and the other is the clause: "when Pilate, upon an accusation brought by the principal men among us, condemned him to the cross." Agapius's parallel reads simply: "Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die."

Taken at face value it would seem that Agapius's Pilate does not act upon accusations brought by leading Jews. From the Jewish perspective, whether Josephus believed Pilate to have acted off his own bat or only subsequent to prompting from within the Jewish hierarchy is no trifling matter. Let us therefore give due consideration to this discrepancy between the two versions of TF. Pines himself keeps an open mind as to why Jewish "accusers" are absent from Agapius:

   Contrary to ... most or all others, Agapius' recension does not
   refer in its fourth sentence (or anywhere else) to the part
   played by the principal men among the Jews in Pilate's
   condemnation of Jesus. This is perhaps an omission due to
   scribal negligence, but it might also be a trait that
   characterizes this recension from the beginning [35].

Dr. Ernst Bammel of the Cambridge Divinity School is far readier to deprive the omission of material significance. He writes: "The omission of Jewish participation may be attributed to Agapius's customary abbreviation of his sources. He does not need to include this detail here since he has supplied this information in the two neighboring sections of his account" (1974a: 146). So according to Bammel, Agapius might well have decided to skip the reference to the accusation brought by Jewish leaders even if he had found it in his Syriac Vorlage of TF. And this because "he has supplied this information in the two neighboring sections of his account." Now, the two sections between which Agapius sandwiches his TF do indeed contain references to the crucifixion. What they impute to the Jews is, however, not the bringing of an accusation before Pilate but the crucifixion itself--which is surely a very different story. More germane, those references do not occur in Agapius's own words but rather in texts which, like Josephus, he presents as "quotations"--the first from a putative dossier drawn up by Pilate for Tiberius Caesar and the second in a letter of Abgar, king of Edessa. One cannot but wonder why Agapius would have arbitrarily dropped the reference to Jewish complicity just from his Josephus citation while retaining it even in the Abgar source that he quotes after Josephus--unless he felt the lesser guilt ascribed to the Jews in Josephus diluted the effect of his two more robustly anti-Jewish sources.

To sum up, though one would welcome the idea of a TF that said nothing of Jewish involvement in the arrest of Jesus, the argument that a Christian hand added the relatively mild clause about the Jewish accusation is weaker than the opposite case: viz., that Agapius--consciously or subconsciously--omitted that clause because it gave the Jews too small a role. So we have to reckon with the distinct possibility that Josephus did write the words "upon an accusation brought by the principal men among us." But what was he thinking of? How do Jewish leaders come to denounce a son of their people to the hated Roman prefect?

In the Gospels--and most explicitly in John--Jewish and Roman authorities cooperate in the arrest of Jesus. But Josephus' configuration would be more shocking, insofar as it makes Jewish worthies the instigators, all but implying that without their initiative Jesus might not have come to Pilate's baleful attention.

For the rabbis the most dastardly thing an Israelite could do was to hand over a fellow Israelite to the iniquitous Roman government. Such a person is called a moser or masor (see Rosh Hashanah 17a et al.). There are stern prohibitions against so much as taking a civil case to a Roman court of law (Gittin 88b; Midrash Tanhuma, Mishpatim 3)--let alone surrendering to its jurisdiction the life of a fellow Jew. Thus, one would have expected the Jewish community to protect its members from the intrusive and brutal arm of Roman tyranny. At this juncture it may be worthwhile to look more closely at the moser laws as formulated in the Tosephta. It is not easy to date the Tosephta's material. Committed to writing in the third century, it embodies much older orally transmitted tradition. Towards the end of the seventh chapter of Tractate Terumoth we read:

   A band (si'a) of people to whom gentiles say "give (tenu) us one
   of you so that we may kill him, otherwise we shall kill you
   all"--better that all die and not to hand over (lo yimseru) one
   Israelite life. However, if they specify a single person--as
   Sheba the son of Bikhri was specified--they shall give him to
   them (yittenuhu lahem), and let not all of them be killed
   [Tosephta Terumoth 7:23; cf. Genesis Rabbah 94:9].

Assuming this halakha to have been in place at the time of Jesus--and to have been accepted by all Sects--its ramifications would ostensibly have meant the following. If Jesus was 'specified' by the Romans as one suspected of sedition, then a Jewish body that acceded to a Roman warrant for his arrest would not be in breach of Halakha; if Jesus was not 'specified' by the Romans then to deliver him to them would have transgressed this same Halakha. Note the Tosephta's formulation "as Sheba ben Bikhri was specified"; why give this illustration? Some say that it is an example of someone who is requested by name. Others insist 'like Sheba' implies not merely that the wanted person must be named, but unless there was a prima facie case cited against him as there was against biblical Sheba (2 Sam 20:21), then it would still be prohibited to turn him in. Hence the only way to reconcile the handing over of Jesus with this established halakha is to say that the Romans had already targeted him as an enemy or, at the very least, had set their sights upon him. Otherwise, the enormity of handing him over to their jurisdiction, rather than shielding him from their clutches, would be highly problematic.

Now some writers question the antiquity of the rabbinic moser laws. They wonder whether Jewish solidarity in earlier times was not essentially tribal and instinctive and if so whether it was strong enough or pervasive enough to ensure that every Jew, however tiresome, would continue to enjoy the community's protection. These are the writers who also wonder whether the moser laws of the Talmud might not have been called for precisely because Jew had been found informing on Jew to the Roman authorities instead of closing ranks against Rome. They cannot imagine how people bound by moser laws would reach decisions such as the one to bring the wistful visionary Yeshua ben Hanan (or Hananiah--who began to speak his forewarnings around the year 62 CE) before the Roman governor Albinus--which is what they did according to Josephus.

   Thereupon, the magistrates ... brought him [Yeshua ben Hanan]
   before the Roman governor; there, although flayed to the bone
   with scourges, he neither sued for mercy nor shed a tear....
   When Albinus, the governor, asked him who and whence he
   was and why he uttered such cries, he answered him never a
   word, but unceasingly reiterated his dirge over the city, until
   Albinus pronounced him a maniac and let him go [WARS 6:5, 3].

Josephus implies that Albinus might readily have passed a death sentence on Yeshua had the latter's insanity not saved him. The contention is, had the moser halakha been in place, it is inconceivable that it could have been so trampled underfoot.

In response, we submit that even if the Tosephta's formulation is late, the basic prohibition to hand over a Jew to the Gentiles was no post-Temple rabbinic scruple. It is unambiguously codified in the Temple Scroll (col. 64, lines 6-9)--a text at least three centuries older than the Tosephta. But nor should we hastily write off the antiquity of the Tosephta's distinctive moser law. As noted, it is a third century compilation that nevertheless preserves material of earlier vintage. To date any particular component of this type of corpus, one looks for independent corroboration.

As it happens, for the antiquity of the Tosephta's moser law such corroboration might be provided by John's evangelion. John 1 1:50 narrates that at a meeting of the Jewish council, the High Priest Joseph Caiaphas (Caiaphas is the Latinized form of [ben ha-]Qayyaf, which name is attested by the Mishnah (Parah 3:5) and Josephus and by the ossuary excavated in the early 1990's and exhibited in Washington DC in 1995), stood up and said, "it is better that one man should die for the people than that the whole nation should be destroyed." These words of Caiaphas are of course nothing but the inverse of the Tosephta's law. If it was not Caiaphas who spoke these words, the evangelist who put them into his mouth must have been some awesome rabbi. For he was familiar not just with the moser halakha and its precise formulation but was also possessed of acute halakhic irony. The Tosephta's formulation runs, as we have seen: "better that all die and not to hand over one Israelite life." Is it fortuitous that Caiaphas' formula is the Tosephta's in reverse, or far more likely the result of Caiaphas (or else the author of John 11:50) having the halakha in mind and deciding to override it?

John makes much of Caiaphas' utterance, interpreting it as prophecy; he was prophesying in spite of himself. This notion of making predictions without being aware of it, is familiar from rabbinic literature: "nithnaba welo noda' ma nithnaba" (Aboth of Rabbi Nathan recension B, beginning of chapter 43; cf. Baba Bathra 119b). The preservation of Caiaphas' words is thanks to the tradition that credited them with foretelling the atonement that the crucifixion was to bring. A man unworthy of predictions spoke the future unbeknownst to him.

Of course, Caiaphas himself intended his words in a thoroughly mundane sense. His colleagues had expressed alarm about Jesus' success: "This man is performing many signs. If we leave him alone like this the whole populace will believe in him. Then the Romans will come and sweep away our temple and our nation." At that point Caiaphas proposes the drastic step of denouncing Jesus to the Romans as if to demonstrate the Jewish leadership's loyalty to Rome. It is obvious from John's report that the colleagues were in a predicament; and though he does not elaborate, he provides clues. Before Caiaphas utters his "oracle," he addresses some rather sharp words to the room: "You know nothing; you do not use your judgment." By faulting their judgment he implies that his own disagrees with theirs. Since his politico-halakhik decision is for denouncing, theirs must have opposed it or at least expressed reservations. These inferences lead us to the following tentative conclusions regarding the colleagues' dilemma. While they were cognizant of their vassal duties to the Roman overlord, their loyalty to Torah continued to pull at their heartstrings and stopped them from throwing Torah overboard for political expediency. Pragmatic and cynical, Caiaphas scorns their conscientious halakha. He then proceeds to deliver an alternative ruling--political in substance, halakhic in form--to the effect that when temple and nation are at stake corners must be cut, which, under the circumstances, means handing Jesus over to placate Rome.

But to pick up the Josephus thread and our original question: what did he have in mind if or when he wrote "upon an accusation brought by the principal men among us"? We have just seen John's report of Jewish leaders reaching a decision to denounce Jesus. Does that allow us to understand Josephus' "accusation" in the light of John? Perhaps. But Josephus is cryptic and does not identify wherein consisted the charge brought against Jesus of Nazareth--any more than he does the charge against the other Jesus, son of Hanan (Yeshua ben Hanan is somebody we keep running into because of the parallels between his fate as told by Josephus (WARS 6:5, 3) and some particulars in the Passion stories)--or even whether it was political or otherwise. Scholars are divided as to this apparent reticence. A few scholars suggest that for Jesus of Nazareth Josephus does supply the information when he reports that Jesus attracted large crowds. That would have been cause enough to spur Jewish leaders such as Caiaphas into action according to this minority of scholars; it would also tally with John's intimation that to Roman eyes any mass movement was suspect (John 11:48). Bammel also thinks Josephus identified the charge but it became obscured through scribal errors befalling two key Greek words (1974b: 11-12). Others, while agreeing as to the likelihood of the accusation having been spelled out in the original TF, speculate that being of a political nature, it might well have been deleted by "politically correct" Christians who wanted to minimize their movement's (alleged) "liberationist" beginnings. Still others suppose Josephus himself to have exercised self-censorship when it came to Messiahship. We happen to concur with this last group of scholars, for they point out that Josephus is always coy when chronicling the careers of other known Messianic figures. Maybe Yeshua ben Hanan was also a Messianic visionary; that would explain the glaring chasm between the recorded behavior of hapless Yeshua and the draconian measures taken against him. It would not be out of character for Josephus simply to gloss over the unmentionable Messianic dimension of Yeshua ben Hanan.

So far we have considered only the political grounds for Jesus' prosecution. And rightly so, because it is as good as axiomatic that for the Roman prefect to get embroiled with a case the charge would have to be political or impinge on Roman interests--which amounts to the same thing. Some scholars, however, do not reckon the political charge the primary cause. The Gospel resonates with spontaneous antagonism to Jesus on the part of the Jewish establishment. In their opinion, (a) that antagonism is not a projection of later synagogue/church friction (as understood by others) but is to be taken as essentially historical, and (b) the descriptions of that antagonism seem too visceral to be explained as resulting from fear of the Romans. Josef Blinzler (1959) is a leading representative of this school. In a word, what Blinzler and company (e.g., Bammel 1970: 11-40) seem to be saying is that once the gospel portrayal of the chief priests' and/or scribes' antipathy as well as their role in the arrest and trial is accepted as historical, it might just as well be concluded that the arrest and trial were the end products of that antipathy.

The chief obstacle to the foregoing reconstruction is Pontius Pilate. The role of this Roman governor (more accurately: prefect) in the sentencing of Jesus of Nazareth is one of the few constants in all early sources. Its historicity may therefore be accepted along with the historicity of the parties--Jesus and Pilate--themselves. Nihilists and compulsive skeptics who doubt the reports of Pilate's involvement may also doubt his existence. Now, Philo, Josephus and other sources that tell us about Pilate make it clear that he was nobody's stooge. If a Jew was irritating his coreligionists, either through his popularity or through the other kinds of provocations of Jesus that got under his contemporaries' skin, is it likely that Pilate would have that man brought before him for trial simply to oblige? Moreover, it is far from proven that under Rome the Sanhedrin was deprived of the right to pass and carry out death sentences. On the contrary, the trial and stoning of Stephen (Acts 6:12-7,1; 7:57-58) and of James (Jacob, the brother of Jesus--Josephus, ANTIQUITIES 20: 9, 1; Hegessipus, cited by Eusebius in his ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY, Book II, 23), and the burning at the stake of the adulterous daughter of a priest (Mish. San. 7:2; Toseph. San. 9:3) etc. strongly suggest that the Sanhedrin continued to impose capital punishments. An aside of Josephus may also have some bearing. It occurs in his report of the Pharisees' falling foul of the Hasmonean king John Hyrkanos over their leniency towards one Eleazar who had reproached the King: "they [the Pharisees] replied that Eleazar deserved stripes and chains; for they did not think it right to sentence a man to death for calumny." At this point Josephus inserts a gloss whose verb is in the present tense and whose evident purpose is to confirm the Pharisees' reputation for clemency based on his first hand knowledge: "and anyway the Pharisees are naturally lenient in the matter of punishments" (ANT. 13: 10, 6). If under Rome the final decision lay with the governor, there would be little or no leeway for the exercise of Pharisaic magnanimity. Lastly, in his report of James' execution Josephus notes that the high priest had acted illegally by convening the Sanhedrin without the procurator's permission, implying that as long as it was cleared with the procurator, the Sanhedrin's convocation would have been legal--and by extension any verdict it then rendered.

To be fair, Blinzler realizes Pilate's inconvenience to his theory (that not Roman but Jewish will and effort were decisive in Jesus's execution) and tries to do something about it. Reluctantly (the reluctance is palpable) he grants that Pilate passed the formal death-sentence. However, in doing so--Blinzler opines--Pilate acted against his own convictions and against his earlier innocent verdict, condemning Jesus only because he was afraid that if he acquitted him those who wanted Jesus dead would complain to Caesar (1959: 236).

But were there grounds to fear that Tiberius Caesar would fault his representative for acquitting a defendant whom he had openly and unequivocally pronounced innocent under Roman law of any capital offense, just because that defendant had filed Jewish priests? For Pilate to let clerics walk all over him to the point that he reverses his findings--indeed makes a public fool of himself and his Roman justice--they would have needed to convince him that they had Caesar in their pocket.

Blinzler cites instances of Tiberius, in response to Jewish gripes, rapping Pilate over the knuckles, such as when the latter put up plaques or shields honoring Caesar in his Jerusalem residence. Philo tells us that the Jews sent a petition to Caesar advising him that by installing the plaques Pilate had disregarded the practice of earlier Roman emperors who had insisted their officials respect the religion of the indigenous population. These petitioners understood full well that Caesar would ignore them unless they invoked Roman precedent. Witness how precedent is the operative word in his letter: "[Tiberius] wrote to Pilate with a host of reproaches and rebukes for his audacious violation of precedent and bade him at once take down the shields .... " (EMBASSY TO GAIUS, 299-305). Similarly when Pilate accedes to the Jews' impassioned plea to remove the standards he had brought into Jerusalem by night, his position is weak, not because the petitioners have a hot-line to Caesar, but because Pilate knows that his action was a departure from Roman precedent. And Rome does not look kindly on change.

It is evident that Blinzler has set himself the laudable goal to vindicate wherever possible the Gospel accounts, especially John's, and John can be read as saying that Pilate switched his judgment from innocent to guilty only out of abject trepidation of Jesus's enemies-the specter of whose clout at the imperial court jellyfished him. On this occasion, however, we feel Blinzler tries so hard that he forgets to explore an equally credible (or incredible) scenario. Enemies never lack enemies of their own. What if the enemies of Jesus' enemies had reported to Caesar that a Jewish mob had bullied Pilate into killing a man after publicly declaring him innocent of all wrongdoing? We submit that Caesar would be livid to learn that his deputy cowered under pressure, disgracing the reputation of Roman justice and opening the floodgates for pressure groups to lead the Imperium Romanum a merry dance. Remember also Pilate was ultimately removed for coming down too hard on the native population-not for showing leniency. Thus we must question Blinzler's ingenious casuistry to the effect that Pilate, though finding Jesus innocent under Roman law, sentences him all the same, trembling in his boots lest Jesus' foes get their other little stooge, Tiberius Caesar, to come after him. Moreover, the procurator Albinus let neither Yeshua ben Hanan's accusers, nor the high priest who convicted James the Just, have it all their own way.

Although conjecture is the common lot of every reconstruction, some score better and some worse on the verisimilitude scale. The documentary and epigraphical evidence about Pilate is not of a pliant robot waiting to do the Sanhedrin's dirty work (pace Blinzler [183], whose Pilate is indeed made "to serve as their tool"). The Inquisitors of the 15th to 18th centuries, who tried tens of thousands, killed nobody; those they found worthy to die they relegated for execution to the "secular arm." Pilate was no "secular arm"; nor will he go away. Thus, we are left with the obvious alternative that Pilate sentenced Jesus because he found him guilty by his own terms of reference. According to the Gospels, Jesus' friends did not rally round or present any defense of their teacher before Pilate, but on the contrary kept a low profile. What a pity Blinzler was not there to apprise them of Pilate's sympathy and let them know that all he craved was a counter-protest by fellow sympathizers to support his lonely stand against Jesus' accusers! We suspect that the disciples--like the rest of Jewry--knew the real Pilate and the danger he posed to their own lives. For it was Pilate's well attested policy to show zero tolerance for apocalyptic stirrings in any shape or form; and there is no good reason to doubt the Gospels' intimations that the Jesus Movement was indeed apocalyptic, looking for the imminent dawn of a new age. And that new age--they further intimate--was to be called the Kingdom of Heaven. To what extent the members of the Movement thought in political categories is not the issue. The language they used was familiar as Messianic, and to Roman ears--irrespective of whether or not the rumor that Jesus discouraged payment of Roman taxes (Mark 12:14-17; Luke 23:2) was baseless--its proclamation of Divine Rule was tantamount to saying their allegiance was not to Herod nor to Caiaphas and certainly not to Caesar.

Paul Winter (born in 1904, his world-acclaimed scholarship developed late in life) offers a more credible explanation for Pilate's uncharacteristic behavior in the Gospel passion scenes:

   Any investigation as to how it happened that such a different
   picture of the same man is given on the one hand by Philo,
   Josephus, and the authors of the source in Lc 13, 1, and on the
   other hand by the evangelists in their descriptions of Pilate's
   actions at the trial of Jesus, we have to trace the thread of
   Pilate's changing pattern as it runs through early Christian
   traditions [76].

   There is a definite connection between two facts: the more
   Christians are persecuted by the Roman state, the more generous
   becomes the description of Pontius Pilate as a witness to Jesus'
   innocence.... The stratagem of depicting Pilate as being
   unwilling to sentence Jesus to death is in line with the general
   pattern of ... apologetics addressed to the Roman authorities....
   Suffering for their belief under Roman emperors and officials,
   they employed the technique of portraying Pilate as Jesus' friend,
   so as to reproach their present persecutors [85; cf. Sanders,
   1993: 274].

Thus, Pilate, Tiberius and the Jerusalem leadership situated in the context of their power play seem to us to militate against Dr. Blinzler's reconstruction.

So far we have been focusing rather heavily on the trial because the question of Jewish involvement in Jesus' trial is key to a Jewish perspective of Jesus. For it is one thing to debate religion or ideology fiercely. Sadducees and Pharisees indulged in it and no milder was the acrimony between the Dead Sea Scroll sect and the "Glib of Tongue" party. Neither did Hillel and Shammai mince words. But wishing the opponent dead--not to mention taking concrete steps to that end--has no place in a Torah society where the only people who can lawfully be sentenced to death are felons found guilty of very specific capital crimes and then only by a court of Torah law. Therefore anybody persuaded by the reports either of a trial, sentence and execution of Jesus by the Sanhedrin (Talmud; see further) or of that body's collusion with Roman authorities (Gospels; standard TF), must also be persuaded that Jesus was guilty of a crime considered capital by Torah or else that he had been named as a wanted felon by the powers that be.

The Gospels all describe the High Priest and other Jerusalem dignitaries engaging in proceedings, of one sort or another, against Jesus prior to arraigning him before Pilate. However, what each of the Gospels describes--though disagreeing quite radically on details--is nothing that deserves the name legal proceedings but rather a travesty thereof. First of all, the authorities are presented as hell-bent on liquidating the defendant so that the trial is merely a show trial. After none of the allegations comes to anything, the presiding High Priest decides to convict on what he, on the spur of the moment, declares to constitute blasphemy uttered obligingly by the defendant just as the prosecution case collapses for want of testimony. Incidentally, rabbinic halakha disqualifies a judge who witnessed a crime from trying the case because "witness and judge cannot be the same person in a capital case" (see Rosh Hashanah 26a; Baba Qama 90b et al.). Bringing Pilate into the case is equally devoid of Torah coherence. Nothing is said of Pilate naming the defendant or spelling out his alleged crime (on the moser halakha see above). For these reasons the reader of the Gospels has only two options. One is to take the low road--and the Gospel reports at face value; concluding withal that Caiaphas and his minions were time-serving rascals and worse. That, of course, is the road traditionally trodden by sworn anti-Semites. If that is what the evangelists wished to convey then those who decry the germs of latter-day Jew-hate in the Christian canon would be sadly right. We happen to side with those scholars who recognize in the trenchancy of the Passion stories poetic--or better, polemic--license, a device met in the Toldot and comparable "molten writing."

As we have seen, it is possible also that Josephus assigns the leaders of his nation a prosecutorial role. Even the Aggadah and Jewish parodies such as the Toldot do not deny it. Quite the reverse; often ascribing the lion's share of the prosecution to the Jewish authorities or, in the case of the Talmud, taking it out of Roman hands entirely and placing the trial and execution (by means of lapidation, not crucifixion) squarely under the Sanhedrin's jurisdiction. But as already observed, these relatively late Jewish sources--all written in Aramaic or Hebrew and intended for home-consumption--make no pretense to history. Indeed their polemical strategies are not even opaque. Take the extreme example. The Talmud, as just noted, makes the Sanhedrin solely responsible for the trial and execution of Jesus as it does, incidentally, for the trial and execution of Bar Kokhba (Sanhedrin 93b). Why? Of all the conjectured motives, try the following for size: (1) The fatally wounded King Saul asks his arms-bearer to put an end to his life "lest these uncircumcised ones come and torture me" (1 Sam 31:4; 1 Chr 10:4). It is less painful to contemplate a Jesus, a Bar Kokhba or any other Jew punished under humane Israelite law than his abandonment to the cruel caprice of uncircumcised Rome. (2) In its anti-Christian polemic, the Jewish side will have boastfully exaggerated its faction's past "triumphs" (especially over its opponents' heroes but also over the Bar Kokhbas and sundry others) in order to compensate for its present defeats. But whatever their motives and whatever their historical value, the perception of these sources is one of active Jewish participation in the execution of Jesus.

We may have devoted disproportionate space to this element. Notwithstanding, this emphasis seems justified due to the execution's persistence in the records, and because of the very different ways Judaism and Christianity relate to Jesus' crucifixion. Christianity predominantly--though not universally--has associated Jesus' crucifixion with an idea incomprehensible, and a word for that idea dismaying, to all known Judaisms: deicide. The Jewish student has to bear in mind that there are Christians for whom the crucifixion of Jesus entails this dimension which is quite outside his own Jewish conceptual horizons. I say has to bear in mind because to overlook it is never to understand its corollary adopted by some Church spokesmen who lived in the pre-Second Vatican Council age; namely, that contrary to all norms of justice from the crucifixion onwards (i.e., not retroactively) all Jews in perpetuity are responsible for it. On the other hand, even when stripped of metaphysical connotation, the crucifixion of Jesus as an historical event still leaves the Jewish student plenty of legal as well as religious questions to ponder.

Specific Religious Questions

The legal we have tried to fathom; it is now the turn of the religious. Earlier we saw the view of Blinzler et al., that the disagreements over points of religion recorded in the Gospels between Jesus and other teachers in Israel so vexed the latter that it drove them to seek his death. Let us also recapitulate our reasons for doubting that scenario. First, the Gospels yield such an understanding only to the uncritical or selective reader. Second, the evidence from outside the Gospels does not corroborate the picture of a Sanhedrin that sent people to the scaffold for disputing halakha. Elazar ben Hanokh rejected the ritual of hand washing and was anathematized--not passed along to the occupying government to be murdered. Nor was Aqabia ben Mahalel for his stubborn insubordination to prevailing halakhic opinion (Eduyoth 5:6). For a Sanhedrin--Sadducee or Pharisee--to use its position to get rid of vexatious individuals would be repugnant to its high calling and a betrayal of its trust with the Almighty. The Sanhedrin that we meet in the Talmud and Josephus are not all saints; but neither did scoundrels or moserim form their majority. So if Josephus really wrote the words and meant them literally, that his compatriots ratted on Jesus or even helped the Romans get their hands on him as the Gospels tell it, either way the gravity of the act, like the denunciation of Yeshua ben Hanan thirty years later, is beyond comprehension by every yardstick of the Judaism that we know and receive.

But to get back to Blinzler, skepticism about his theory of cause and effect between religious disputation and crucifixion, in no way extends to the disputes themselves. In fact there is wide scholarly consensus as to the verisimilitude, and therefore credibility, of the Gospels' recollections of vehement dissent. Put another way, the disputes recorded in the Gospels ring true enough; but neither individually nor yet cumulatively do they explain the enormity of the crucifixion. According to E. P. Sanders, "The situation seems to be this: those who presumably know the most about Judaism, and about the Law in particular--Jewish scholars--do not find any substantial points of disagreement between Jesus and his contemporaries, and certainly not any which would lead to death" (1985: 55). Just so; Jesus' recorded teachings regarding specific misvot are inadequate, as far as we know, to account for hostility greater than that which divided the various Jewish sects. In fact some of the issues are demonstrably sectarian, such as voluntary fasts (observed exclusively by the Pharisees and John the Baptist's circle), washing of hands before meals (as distinct from scriptural purity), and doing things on the Sabbath that debatably constitute "work," but are non-scriptural Sabbath prohibitions (e.g. miracle healing, exorcisms, and carrying within the walls of Jerusalem (John 5:2, 10-12; cf. Erubin 6b, 22a, 101a). The dominance of these and similar recognizably sectarian themes has been explained rather persuasively by Alan Watson (22-23). He maintains that when at the beginning of Jesus' ministry, Jerusalem Pharisees arrive in Galilee to check him out, it is with the prospect of co-opting him. This might explain why they come forward chiefly when Jesus' teaching diverges from theirs. Of course that leaves a sizeable residue of religious pronouncements attributed to Jesus in the Gospels that touch upon non-sectarian subject matter. But even when contentious, they do not appear to us to carry a lethal threat.

To elucidate this last point let us examine some of the purportedly contentious teachings that are not Pharisee-oriented, such as those to do with the Temple, ritual purity, filial piety, divorce, Messiahship, prophecy, vicarious atonement.

The Temple

Some sayings of Jesus can be read to question the indispensability of the Temple. Among the prophets of Israel, Ezekiel and Haggai clearly envision temples as essential, but they are the minority. Moses provides blueprints only for a mobile tent-sanctuary--thus implicitly ruling out a permanent temple. Elijah, the Talmud notes, though the Temple was standing in his day, went up Mount Carmel to worship (Sanhedrin 89b and Rashi, ad loc.). The other pre-exilic prophets are ambivalent when not outright repudiatory. Jeremiah foretells the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and draws upon himself the ire of the priests (Jer. 26:11). At his trial Jeremiah's friends remind the prosecution that equally harsh prophecies had been spoken against the temple by prophets past (ibid. vv 16-19). All in all, then, for Israelite prophecy the temple had not always been fundamental. Priestly worship, on the other hand, is constitutionally temple-centered. Was Jesus taking sides in this age-old debate? Those who think he was, go on to explain the high priests' subsequent attitude as the fallout. Others reject this theory, citing gospel portrayals of Jesus as anything but anti temple. The so-called cleansing of the temple they rightly connect to the promise of Zechariah that "there shall be no more traders in the house of the L-rd of Hosts on that day" (Zech 14:21). In moving to fulfill that prophecy Jesus affirms the temple, protesting the presence of traders on a spot he cherishes enough to be zealous for its integrity. He attends the Temple, prays and teaches under its porticoes. Even the "I will destroy this temple" saying, ascribed to Jesus by the false witnesses, ends with the words "and I will rebuild it in three days." Again, it is not temples that are intrinsically bad but rather this imperfect temple of Herod; this edifice will pass to be replaced by one pure and befitting the "latter day." Assuredly, by foretelling the destruction of a Temple a preacher could invite backlash for the implied criticism of its hierocracy. There are those--among them E. P. Sanders--who would locate the source of the resentment of Jesus in the feelings of hurt and inadequacy that his preaching must have generated. Because the temple is the priests' domain, it is understandable that the Temple sayings could ruffle priestly feathers without upsetting the public at large. That public--especially the poor folk, the downtrodden, the pious in Israel--were deeply attached to the temple and would hardly team up with someone who was anti-temple. But even they could not have been blind to the shortcomings of some Temple personnel. The Qumran critics were far more scathing, and virtually boycotted the Temple. In sum, censure of the Temple establishment--from Qumran or Jesus or any other quarter--will have touched a raw nerve; but is that the same thing as provoking mortal hatred?

Ritual Purity

As indicated, this survey is intended to examine non-sectarian disputes between Jesus and his opponents. Hence the controversy about hand-washing before meals (Mark 7:1-13) falls outside that purview, the washing at issue being a Pharisaic affair.

Mark 7:14-15 demands to be read, however, not as a further comment on Pharisaic ablutions, but as moving far beyond--to encompass ritual purity in the round. It makes its demand in two ways. First, Mark 7:14 begins, "On another occasion." What follows these words carries on the theme of ritual purity, and could therefore easily be read as a sequel to Mark 7:1-2. The disjunctive "on another occasion" obviously means to break the ensuing from the preceding. Second, after presenting Jesus' teaching on defilement, the text continues: "Thus he declared all foods clean" (v 20). To elicit the abrogation of Scripture's dietary laws from a comment about levitical purity, the ritual purity under discussion would have to be scriptural too--not the Pharisaic innovations of verses 1-13.

As it stands, then, Mark 7:14-15--whatever its historical value--conveys an impression of Jesus taking on Torah; specifically Leviticus 11:40: "Whoever eats of its carcass shall wash his clothes and be unclean until the evening," and Leviticus 17:15: "Every person, native or alien, who eats that which has died a natural death or has been mauled by wild beasts shall wash his clothes and bathe in water, and shall be unclean until the evening; then he shall be clean." Mark 7:14 quotes Jesus as saying: "Nothing that goes into a man from the outside can defile him; no, it is the things that come out of him that defile a man." When juxtaposed to the Leviticus verses, Mark 7:14 can be taken--or more likely mistaken--fur a declaration of war on Leviticus 11:40 and 17:15 (and by implication on G-d, whose bestowal of the Scriptures is avowed by Jesus throughout the Gospels--e.g., Mark 7:9-13; 10:7-9).

"It is not the corpse that causes defilement nor the water that cleanses," Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai taught his disciples. "It is a divine decree," he continued, "which we must not question" (Pesiqta of R. Kahana, p. 40). So Rabbi Yohanan denies the hypostasis of corpse defilement, while at the same time pledging obedience to G-d's will. Other rabbis reached an analogous accommodation with animal sacrifices. Having outgrown the cruder notions about the efficacy of sacrifices, they settled for gazarti ve-naasah resoni (=I have decreed [says G-d] and my wish is carried out; Sifre Numbers 107, 118, 143, etc.). These rationalizations of the rabbis reflect a distancing from key cultic concepts. But what is true of the rabbis need not hold for their predecessors the Pharisees. Indeed, to the extent that anything reliable can be ascertained regarding the Pharisees, it is their concern with ritual purity. It was they who, in defiance of the scoffing Sadducees, immersed the temple candelabrum in a ritual bath after the festival on the off chance that amine ha-ares pilgrims had touched it (Yerushalmi Hagigah 3:8; Tosephta, end of Hagigah).

Then there are plenty of non-scriptural purity laws attested in the rabbinic literature that can safely be dated to the time the Temple stood, and may therefore be considered Pharisaic. Indeed, all the signs are that ritual purity mattered inordinately to the Pharisees; though what made them uptight was no longer demons but the Torah's dire warnings. Still, enough of the old "demonic" lingers just beneath the surface, waiting to be tackled: that is to say, waiting for somebody directly and explicitly to deny the taboo element. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, for one, delivered the timely challenge.

Is it conceivable that with the saying "nothing that goes into a man from outside can defile him" (which saying is widely accepted as authentic) Jesus meant to debunk, not the prescriptions of Leviticus, but rather the sinister potency believed to "rub off" from defilement? Now it could be argued, if you trash the superstition that keeps tum'ah/taharah viable, you kill the system itself--which seems to be a common enough assumption. For instance, David Catchpole writes:

   The attitude to Torah expressed in Mark 7:15 is very clearly
   crucial for the evaluation of Jesus.... Kaesemann [1964: 39]
   was entirely right in his interpretation of this devastating
   saying: "The man who denies that impurity from external sources
   can penetrate into man's essential being is striking at the
   presuppositions and the plain verbal sense of the Torah and at
   the authority of Moses himself [108--the source for Kaesemann's
   citation has been supplied by Steven Golden].

We submit that in light of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai's teaching it is an open question. That the Priestly Torah seems to take defilement to be "hypostatic" cannot be ruled out. Also, as already noted, the disproportionate attention of the Pharisees to ritual purity/defilement (as compared with other misvot), suggests a driving force that exceeded the desire to obey the bare letter of the law. Thus, one might argue that Rabbi Yohanan was less faithful to the spirit of the levitical system than were the Pharisees who did nothing to dispel defilement's mythos. But when the chips are down, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai is not placed on death row for his demythologizing.

This theory of ours has been criticized on the grounds that demons and exorcisms were very much alive in the Jesus Movement with no hint of unease about the associated beliefs. But compared with sickness that is always real and palpable, defilement not resulting from disease (e.g., ritually impure food), is fictional. Hence, downplaying the potency of ritual defilement is not necessarily inconsistent with an existential recognition of human suffering.

Filial Piety

"To another he said, 'Follow me,' but the man replied, 'Let me go and bury my father first.' Jesus said 'Leave the dead to bury their dead; you must go and announce the kingdom of G-d'" (Luke 9:59-60; cf. Matt 8:21-22). Some scholars find this saying to challenge the fifth commandment and therefore bound to offend. Let us review Jesus' deterring the man from burying his father within its Jewish context. If a rabbi had said to his disciple, "Become a Nazarite," and the disciple listened, then as a Nazarite, he would be forbidden by the Torah of Moses to bury his next of kin, as it says in Numbers 6:6-7:

   During the whole term of his vow he shall not go near a corpse,
   not even when his father or mother, brother or sister, dies; he
   shall not make himself ritually unclean for them, because the
   Nazarite vow to his G-d is on his head.

Likewise, according to Rabbi Yehudah, a haber (i.e. a person enrolled in a Pharisaic commensality) would be forbidden to bury the dead (Mishnah Demai 2:3). Thus, we have two halakhically sanctioned voluntary pledges that prevent the votaries from burying their closest relatives and necessitate delegating their duty to others. Where there is absolutely no one else to attend to the corpse, then according to halakha it becomes a meth misvah ("a misvah corpse" = an abandoned corpse), and whoever comes upon a meth misvah--even the High Priest or a Nazarite--is obligated to attend to its burial. Jesus was careful to say that there were others to bury the dead; he did not say "let the father bury himself." Because there are others to bury the father, a novice in committing himself to join a religious fellowship such as Jesus' would be emulating the haber who, in turn, presumably sees himself as a quasi Nazarite. So, there is no undermining of the misvah of interring the dead, nor of the fifth commandment, to a degree unparalleled in biblical and post-biblical halakha.

Divorce

Deuteronomy 21: 10-14 legislates for the case of a captive woman whom an Israelite soldier has taken in battle. Later generations squirmed at legislation that evidently grated on their evolved sensibilities. Needless to say they did not repeal it but explained it away with the famous line dibra tora keneged yezer hara (=the law was given in response to the evil inclination; cf. Kiddushin 21b)--i.e., it was never intended as the ideal but as a concession to human frailty. Scholars have long suspected that, if Jesus' reputed comment about divorce (Mark 10:4-6) could be translated back into Hebrew or Aramaic it would sound very much like dibra tora keneged yezer hara (Kampen 1994).

Messiahship

It was not exceptional for a group of Jews to identify a particular person as a Messiah. Mosaic monotheism is based on the belief in one G-d; but Mashiahs could be any number. In the Torah, it is the High Priest who is kohen ha-mashiah (Lev 4:3, 5). David refers to Saul as meshiah of the L-rd (1Sam 26:11,16), and to himself as meshiah of the G-d of Jacob (2 Sam 22:51; 23:1). Admittedly, during the second commonwealth the Messianic idea undergoes transformation, and with the ascendancy of apocalypse, comes to be associated with the End of Days. Hence Messianic redemption was to be final and all-out. Still, one individual was not necessarily expected to fulfill or accomplish all the Messianic prophecies single-handed. The Dead Sea Scrolls anticipate at least two Messiahs, a priestly and a Davidic (Rule of the Congregation (1QSa) 2, lines 11-21; Damascus Covenant 12, lines 13-24; et al). Similarly, the Talmud speaks of the Messiah son of Joseph and the Messiah son of David. Besides, history records many instances of Messianic claimants who won adherents in their day but did not arouse Jewish antagonism. Thus, the claim that Jesus was a Messiah is unlikely to have excited extreme Jewish unease.

Perhaps at this juncture we should digress for a moment to clear up a common misconception. The later Christian doctrine about a divine Messiah was no part of the prevalent vision of Jewish Messianic expectations. A handful of biblical and post-biblical sources raise the Messianic personage to a very exalted rank, bordering the superhuman. Even so, there was nothing to prepare Jews for the idea of a divine Messiah. Jews then will have felt, as they continue to feel today, that G-d stands alone and there is no sharing of His indivisible oneness and wholeness with any of His creatures; and by definition all that is other than He is the work of His hands.

In tandem with the Church's drift away from the mother faith, the apotheosis of the Christ figure gains ground in the Christian collective psyche. Indeed, there is evidence of serious aggravation of the synagogue-church conflict resulting from the latter's adoption of this un-Jewish soteriology--so un-Jewish that even those Jewish communities that acknowledged the Messiahship of Jesus could not stomach it. The Church father Eusebius describes the nature of this later doctrinal rift and its effect on the relationship between Jewish followers of Jesus and what was becoming mainstream or orthodox Christianity. In his ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY (Book III, 27) Eusebius discusses the Ebionites who were Jewish Christians. This is what he writes:

   The first Christians gave these the suitable name of Ebionites
   because they had poor and mean opinions concerning Christ.
   They held him to be a plain and ordinary man who had achieved
   righteousness merely by the progress of his character and had
   been born naturally from Mary and her husband. They insisted
   on the complete observance of the Law, and did not think that
   they would be saved by faith in Christ alone and by a life in
   accordance with it. But there were others besides these who have
   the same name. These escaped the absurd folly of the first
   mentioned, and did not deny that the lord was born of a virgin and
   the holy spirit, but nevertheless agreed with them in not
   confessing his pre-existence as G-d, being the Logos and Wisdom.
   Thus they shared the impiety of the former class, especially in
   that they were equally zealous to insist on the literal observance
   of the Law.... Wherefore from these practices they have obtained
   their name, for the name of Ebionites indicates the poverty of
   their intelligence, for this name means "poor" in Hebrew.

The quaint yarn Eusebius spins around the name ebyon (=poor) is, of course, pure "midrash." As explained by Hans-Joachim Schoeps (11), Ebionites (in Hebrew ebionim) is a rehebraized ancient title of honor that was adopted by those Jewish Christians on the basis of Jesus' beatitudes concerning the poor. "The hatred and satire of opponents reduced 'Ebionite' to a nickname and term of abuse (the 'poor in spirit,' the 'poor in faith in Christ') so that the Jewish Christians themselves avoided it." Thus, in reality the appellation "Ebionites" was one its bearers carried with pride because it referred to their eschewal of luxury and worldliness.

Two important points transpire, at any rate, from Eusebius. (1) As self-defining Jews the Ebionites were unable to accept the dogma of the Messiah's divinity; and conversely, their denial of the dogma enabled them to continue in their Jewish self-perception. (2) This resistance of the Ebionites strongly suggests that the divinity of the Messiah had not been an integral dogma of the Jesus Movement when Jewish Christianity was taking shape.

Ongoing Prophecy

E. E. Urbach has shown that in the late second temple period, the age of divine communication had not been declared a thing of the past (1978: 514-17; also 1946). In fact the Talmud states quite categorically that even when prophecy ceased divine communication continued through the agency of ruah ha-qodesh (=the holy spirit) (cf. Erubin 64b; Sanhedrin 11 a; Tosephta Pesahim 2:9) and when the holy spirit was withheld but qol (=an echo of the [divine] voice; i.e., a "muffled" communication) still continued to be heard. Josephus also attests to contemporary prophets and prognosticators such as Yeshua ben Hanan, whom Josephus explicitly accredits with supernal foreknowledge (Gray).

In Deuteronomy we read:

   the prophet who presumes to utter in My Name what I have not
   commanded him ... that same prophet shall die. If you ask
   yourselves how shall we recognize a word that the L-rd has
   not spoken--this is the answer: When the word spoken by the
   prophet in the name of the L-rd is not fulfilled and does not
   come true, it is not a word spoken by the L-rd. The prophet has
   spoken presumptuously [18:20-22].

Some commentators hazily connect this Deuteronomic text to the fate of Jesus. They are quite right that this law would have been enough to convict any claimant to divine prophecy whose prognostication failed the test laid down in the text. In the Gospels there is one saying attributed to Jesus by witnesses that might have been amenable to such a test: viz., the prediction in Mark: "I will pull down this temple made with human hands and in three days I will build another not made with hands" (Mark 14:58). But to apply the test the temple would have had to come down and three full days to elapse. Mark also says that the report was false. So if Jesus never made the prediction, that adds a further impediment to the test's application. Moreover, in Matthew's parallel there is no "I will pull down" but instead the witnesses allege to have heard Jesus say: "I can pull down" (26:61). This suggests that the point of the testimony was something other than to impugn Jesus' prophetic status by drawing attention to an unfulfilled prediction. Neither are the controversies recorded in the Gospels explained by these Deuteronomic verses, nor are these verses invoked or so much as alluded to (Morrow).

Jewish polemic frequently calls Jesus Meseet U-Maddeakh. Meseet is defined by Scripture (Deut 13 7-12) and Mishnah (San. 7:10) as a person who seduces another to worship or/and to sacrifice to an idol which he both names and whose efficacy he extols. Maddeakh (Deut 13:14; also 13:2-6 Mishnah loc. cit. and 10[11]:4) is also a touter for idols--just more ambitious. The puzzling thing is the vagueness of these late polemical sources. Which idol or idols were touted? Were they Greek, Roman, Phoenecian or some new-fangled cult? Were Jews persuaded to worship the idols and/or to sacrifice to them? If any were persuaded, why were they not charged with the lesser charge of idolatry? How come the idols disappeared from Christian memory without a trace? The answer to all these questions is that the Meseet U-Maddeakh allegation dates from an age when Christianity had adopted dogmas that Jews considered idolatrous. At that time there was no need to designate the idols or the form of worship etc., because Gentile Christianity itself was the problematic religion that the Church was preaching with a view to convert--or if you like, to "lead astray."

Nevertheless we cannot ignore those scholars who reckon the Meseet U-Maddeakh charge historical. They reason that in addition to the Talmud, the Gospels also allude to a popular perception of Jesus as one who leads astray (pianos in Greek). We would grant that as a jibe pianos is feasible (just as the serpent is dubbed meseet in the aggadah San.29a); and it is no doubt out of this and similar insinuations (e.g. Hebrew mekhashef = goes in Greek) that the Talmud's stories grew. But all this is irrelevant to our quest, which is the trial. In the Gospels meseet never comes up as a charge before the Sanhedrim Meseet U-Maddeakh is nothing but a red herring.

Vicarious Atonement

King David laments his fallen son: "O that I might have died in your stead, Absalom my son (2 Sam 19:1). The sentiment speaks for itself. Skipping a millennium or more, vicarious atonement is entirely at home in the Talmud. For instance, when mentioning a parent who has died within the previous twelve months, the Talmud requires a child to refer to them thus: "My father/mother for whose resting place may I be an expiation" (cf. Kiddushin 31b).

So we see that Jews are allowed--if not encouraged--to say to G-d, "Let me suffer instead of so and so." In a world where this was believed, it would have a very powerful effect. On the other hand, Psalm 49 seems skeptical of vicarious atonement: "the ransom of the soul is too great a cost and must be left forever" (v 9). Likewise today, many Jews are uncomfortable with the idea, because it implies that no matter what, sin must exact a toll.

In Exodus 34:7 Moses revealed to his people and to the world that G-d Himself bears (or carries away; Heb. nsa) the sin, guilt and iniquity of human beings. Now the primary meaning of nsa is to bear, to carry, to take away. When used of sin, some translations render it "to forgive" because eventually "remissive" nsa sheds its concrete sense and becomes coterminous with slh. While the outcome may be the same, the process envisaged by nsa was clearly "removal" and "transference." The mere fact that later usage endowed nsa with an independent secondary meaning of "to forgive," should not influence our reading of its early occurrences, such as here in Exodus 34 where it undoubtedly retains its original sense (Brown, Driver & Briggs: 671,3c).

As a rabbi, I know that there are people whose consciousness of sin and guilt can be overwhelming. Some people need an abstract idea to be reified for them to grasp it. Witness the solemn atonement rite of the priestly torah:

   When Aaron has finished making expiation for the sanctuary, for
   the Tent of Meeting, and for the altar, he shall bring forward the
   live goat. He shall lay both his hands on its head and confess
   over it all the iniquities of the children of Israel and all their
   acts of rebellion, and all their sins; he shall lay them on the
   head of the goat and send it away into the wilderness in charge of
   a man who is waiting ready. The goat shall bear upon itself (nsa
   alav) all their iniquities into some barren waste and he shall let
   the goat go, there in the wilderness [Lev 16:20-22].

The ritual of a scapegoat was given, no doubt, to satisfy the need of people to see the carrying away (nsa) of their iniquity acted out before their eyes. Interestingly, the Torah says nothing about killing the scapegoat; rather it prescribes that it be released in the wilderness. If in later times it was indeed toppled from a precipice as described in the Mishnah (Yoma 6:6) it may bespeak a belief that only through death would atonement be secured (Sassoon:169-74). Nonetheless, the Christian doctrine of sin and atonement brought through Jesus' death goes way beyond the symbolism of the scapegoat. Still, even if expressed by a metaphor some might find ostentatious, vicarious atonement as a concept was nothing outlandish in first-century Jerusalem.

This brings to an end our examination of specific religious points of view credibly attributed to Jesus but sometimes incredibly (and erroneously in our judgment) held responsible for sealing his fate. In a separate category stands Christology, whose attribution to the historical Jesus is far from being settled. The debate as to whether Jesus taught Christology is not entirely divorced from the questions surrounding Jesus' appearance before the Sanhedrim Some scholars explain that appearance as a formality, preparatory to a Roman trial. According to those scholars the only capital charge Jesus had to answer was vis-a-vis the colonial authorities. Thus any questions the Sanhedrin put to Jesus would have been dictated by Roman protocol, the Sanhedrin acting in a quisling capacity. That theory finds qualified support in Luke (who has no Sanhedrin trial, just a hearing). On the other hand, Mark and Matthew describe an autonomously prosecutorial Sanhedrin that tries and indicts Jesus on a charge designated "blasphemy." Now blasphemy, being a "Jewish" crime (presumably the biblical crime: Lev 24:15-16, 1Kings 21:9-14), is not likely to have interested the Romans. In short, if the Sanhedrin trial and indictment (Matthew; Mark) are historical, then blasphemy is plausible--not blasphemy as defined in the Talmud, but an utterance perceived to assail G-d's honor, such as the arrogation of divine attributes--i.e., Christology.

In his book, A RABBI TALKS WITH JESUS, Jacob Neusner poses the question: when did a prophet ever say, "Follow me"? Prophets always say, "Follow G-d" (Deut 13:5). To be sure, the paramount question for the Jewish community bound to obey G-d according to the terms of the covenant He made with them was and is: Insofar as a teacher makes new demands, how far can they go along with him and his message without breaking faith with the G-d of their fathers? To help one imagine the dilemma facing the G-d-fearing Jew of the first century, one might cast one's mind forward some six centuries to the time when Muhammad appeared. The Koran records approvingly that some Jews and Christians joined the new faith (3:113-16; 5:83-46). The vast majority that held back must have felt unable to join without reneging on their own prior allegiances. This illustrates the perennial quandary that individuals and communities face when contrary demands are placed before them, each claiming divine authority. The Torah commands: "The L-rd your G-d you shall follow" (Deut 13:5). How can anyone then come and say, "Follow me" ("me" instead of G-d) and not offend? I assume that is what Neusner has in mind. On the other hand, the biblical prophets used "I" and meant the One in whose name they spoke. Perhaps those Jews who saw Jesus as a prophet did not hear egotism but the prophetic voice. In the main, however, the Jewish community reacted otherwise. Not convinced of his prophetic claims, they had really no choice but to say "no" if they were to remain faithful to what they understood to be G-d's will.

The foregoing is, of course, merely a theory that stands or falls according to how one reads the relevant Gospel passages. Certainly in the Gospel of John, when Jesus brings up his own centrality, the audience is most confounded. In chapter 6 it causes such consternation that the bulk of his audience walks away. In chapter 10 when his opponents take up stones to throw at him, they actually articulate the grounds for their antagonism: "We are not going to stone you for any good deed, but for your blasphemy. You a mere man claim to be G-d" (John 10:33). Of course allowance must be made for the likelihood that John is addressing primarily the situation of his own community so that the prominence given in his Gospel to distinctive Johannine Christology is not necessarily indicative of the place--or even the existence--of that Christology in other communities of his day, let alone in the pristine Jesus Movement.

That is by no means to deny peremptorily the historicity of all theological tension recorded or implied in the sources. Surely each source deserves to be examined on its own merits. Then--and after allowance has been made for Johannine emphases--it may turn out that Jesus said things about himself, his mission, or his relationship to G-d that Caiaphas construed as blasphemy and the Church as what came to be called Christology. Whether or not those are the only two options, this much is certain. Since all parties were loyal Jews (no, not necessarily loyal Pharisees), they would have hoped for the Kingdom of G-d and subscribed to what Jesus concurred to be the number one commandment: shema Yisrael (cf. Mark 12:28-30).

Epilogue

During many dismal centuries of fear and superstition there was a complete breakdown of communication. This tragedy has a complex history that a vast library of books has tried to document and understand, and we cannot cover that story here. To reduce it to its barest outline, once the break between Judaism and Hellenistic Christianity was complete (,Jewish Christians such as Ebionites, did not break with Judaism although the ties were sorely tested during the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-135 CE) then the two groups began to adopt the "You and Us" terminology. The Christian--which had been at first the smaller and more vulnerable party and had been subject to harassment at the hands of Jewish busybodies--employed all available defense tactics. And of course the best defense is a strong offense: So "If you Jews invalidate us, then we can countercharge you with killing Jesus." Those who take literally the words found in the Gospel and in [standard] Josephus to the effect that Jewish leaders were instrumental in having Jesus tried by Pilate, must find a way to contend with a situation we have already seen to be at odds with halakha and Jewish Tradition. Jews were not to be tried by a legal system that is contrary to Torah law. Even if some of Jewry's leaders--who should know better than to put politics and expediency above Torah--went badly astray, still the blame should not and cannot devolve on their children, let alone on the entire Jewish people. For the Torah says: "Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children for their fathers; a person shall be put to death [only] for his own sin" (Deut 24:16).

But for this Mosaic law the Church seems to have had limited use. It visited the sin of the fathers not only upon their biological children but also upon every single Jew, homeborn or proselyte.

The distinctions between collective and perpetual guilt were ignored; both extraordinary, yet in other respects distinct. Even if it was collective in the sense that the Jerusalem adult citizenry at the time of the crucifixion could stand by and let it happen, how could unborn generations be held responsible forever? We know from the Gospels that large numbers of his countrymen respected Jesus--as did Josephus half a century later--and would have had no part in the conspiracy against him. But the Gospels also inform us that the disciples fled in fear when Jesus was arrested, and influential friends such as Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathaea are not reported as appearing before Pilate at the critical moment. Unless the Gospels wished to erase the memory of any resistance to Roman authority on the part of the original Jesus fraternity, the way they tell the story leaves the impression that there was no concerted protest against the arrest. To repeat: if by Torah standards an injustice was perpetrated (as seems possible) and fear struck everybody dumb, then that silence cannot be condoned. The rabbis taught that the sin of silence in the face of injustice is as heinous as actively promoting it (Sotah 11a; Sanhedrin 106a). But heinous as it is, even the sin of silent witnessing to wrong is not hereditary. Notwithstanding, the ideas of collective and perpetual guilt conjoined to preclude all constructive dialogue or mutual understanding throughout a long dark night of persecution, Inquisition and pogrom inflicted on Jews almost from the moment Christianity attained political power.

Vatican II was a trailblazer for those who were ready to embark upon a new path in human relations. More recently, the Lutheran Church has distanced itself from the virulent anti-Jewish rhetoric of Martin Luther. Perhaps, after the Shoah, we have begun to feel answerable for words emitted in the heat of crisis but which out of context solidify into hard cold weapons. Today, there is a growing resolve to go further and re-evaluate texts that use immoderate language--language that in the wrong setting can still stir the baser passions. Such an examination of our respective literatures is imperative for both Synagogue and Church as a first step towards self-understanding and putting one's own house in order.

Then the kinder and more wholesome dialogue that is now sprouting can develop, based not on denial of the jarring, the angry, and the recriminatory in our respective traditions, but rather on acknowledgement of their existence and finding the guts to do what it takes. That should make for a calmer atmosphere in which the two sides can perhaps listen to one another, speak to--not at--one another across the barrier. For the barrier is real, and rapprochement is not achieved through the blurring of differences or glossing over of one's convictions. We must also beware of the secularist's devaluation and the cynic's: "a plague upon both your houses."

The rapprochement is precarious. There are those who see much that is shared, and others who emphasize the dissimilar. Some would like to deny the common Judeo-Christian heritage. But as long as we hold fast to the two pivotal lifelines:

   One--belief in the word of G-d
   Two--coming before G-d in prayer

then we can unite in prayer for G-d's spirit to guide us and ultimately to prevail.

Works Cited

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1974b. Zum Testimonium Flavianum. Pp. 9-22 in JOSEPHUS STUDIEN, edited by Betz, Haacker, & Hengel. Gottingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

1970. ex illa itaque die consilium fecerunt ... Pp. 11-40 in THE TRIAL OF JESUS: CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN HONOUR OF C.F. D. MOULE, edited by Ernst Bammel. London: SCM Press.

Blinzler, Josef. 1959. THE TRIAL OF JESUS. Translated by Isabel & Florence McHugh. 2nd revised and enlarged edition. Westminster, MD: The Newman Press.

Brown F., S. R. Driver, & C. Briggs. 1959. A HEBREW AND ENGLISH LEXICON OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. London, UK: Oxford University Press.

Catchpole, David R. 1971. THE TRIAL OF JESUS: A STUDY IN THE GOSPELS AND JEWISH HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM 1770 TO THE PRESENT DAY. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill.

Eusebius. ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY, Book II. Retrieved October 7, 2003, from http://www.ccel.org/fathers2/NPNF2-01/Npnf2-01-07.htm#P938_461218

Feldman, Prof. Louis H. Nov. 15, 2000 Fax Correspondence.

Gray, Rebecca 1993. PROPHETIC FIGURES IN LATE SECOND TEMPLE JEWISH PALESTINE: THE EVIDENCE FROM JOSEPHUS. Oxford University Press.

Greenblatt, Zvi. 1992. Burial Cave of the Caiaphas Family. BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY REVIEW 18/5, 28-36, 76.

Josephus, Flavius. 1968. THE JEWISH WAR, Books IV-VII, translated by H. St. J. Thackeray. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. 462-67.

1965. JEWISH ANTIQUITIES, Books XVIII-XX, translated by Louis H. Feldman. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. 48-51.

Kaesemann, Ernst. 1964. ESSAYS ON NEW TESTAMENT THEMES. London, UK: SCM Press.

Kampen, John 1994. The Matthean Divorce Texts Reexamined. Pp. 149-67 in NEW QUMRAN TEXTS AND STUDIES, edited by George J. Brooke & F. G. Martinez. Leiden, The Netherlands: E.J. Brill.

Meier, John P 1991. A MARGINAL JEW. New York, NY: Doubleday.

Morrow, William. 1995. Phone conversation. Queens' Theological College, Kingston, ON.

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Author's Note

In 1995 I was invited by Rev. Dr. Hallett E. Llewellyn, then Dean of Queens' Theological College (QTC) in Kingston, Ontario, to talk to his senior theological students about Jesus from a Jewish perspective. The following year Dr. Llewellyn asked me to give my paper again to his 1996 graduates. Recently, it has been delivered--with additions and revisions--to a number of Jewish audiences. I here record my thanks: to Dr. Llewellyn and Rev. Dr. William Morrow of QTC for their friendship and assistance; to Professor Louis H. Feldman for his gracious help with our Josephus research; to my brother, Dr. Jonathan M. Golden of Drew University for his unstinting support. From my mentor, Hakam Isaac Sassoon, I received encouragement and help at all stages of this project.

Rabbi Steven H. Golden, M.A. (The Jewish Theological Seminary of America), was among the first graduates to receive semikhah (rabbinical ordination) from The Institute of Traditional Judaism (Teaneck, NJ). Twice chosen to serve as a Student Chevra Intern at CLAL, the National Center for Learning and Leadership, he is the author of Jewish Service and the Jewish Tradition, published in CONTACT The Journal of Jewish Life Network (summer 1999). Golden is an adjunct faculty member at the Skirball Center for Adult Jewish Learning at Temple Emanu-El in New York City and currently serves as Rabbi of the Jewish Community Center of Spring Valley, NY. He can be reached at Greenbriar at Whittingham, One Birmingham Lane, Monroe Township NJ 08831-2638, and his e-mail