In the wake of the Gospels’ accounts, modern scholars do not pay much attention to the role Romans played in Jesus of Nazareth’s arrest, and are prone to give credit to manifestly biased sources. Besides, some misconceptions (e.g. that the military in pre-War Judaea was exclusively confined to its largest cities) prevent them from seriously weighing up the possibility that the role of the Romans in Jesus’ fate was more decisive than usually recognized. In this article, we reconsider a number of issues in order to shed light on this murky topic. First, the nature and functions of the Roman military in Judaea are surveyed (for instance, Palestine before the Jewish War had a robust network of fortlets and fortresses, which Benjamin Isaac has argued largely served to facilitate communication into the hinterlands). Second, we track some traces of anti-Roman resistance in the prefects’ period (6-41 CE), Third, the widely overlooked issue of the intelligence sources available to Roman governors is tackled. Fourth, the extent of the problems of the Passion accounts is seriously taken into account. The insights obtained are then applied to the Gospels’ story, thereby rendering it likely that Pilate had some degree of “intelligence” regarding Jesus and his followers before their encounter in Jerusalem that led to the collective execution at Golgotha.
There is no mention in Mark or Matthew of a Roman presence until the one (final) visit to Jerusalem attested for Jesus of Nazareth. Luke 2:1-2 mentions an alleged Roman census at the time of Jesus’ birth, and, in his version of the pericope on the payment of tribute, this author asserts that the spies sent to Jesus could catch him in something he said, “as to deliver him up to the authority and jurisdiction of the governor” (Luke 20:20). The only explicit mention of “the Romans” in the Gospels appears in John 11:48. Only at the end of these accounts, within the so-called Synoptic Passion narratives, a Roman governor, some soldiers and (fleetingly) a centurion appear; but even there, attention is focused on the Jewish authorities, to the extent that Jesus’ arrest is attributed by the Synoptic Gospels to a Jewish throng, and a cursory reading of Luke and John could even make us think that the crucifixion was carried out by Jews The high priests and their ilk are responsible for the arrest in Gethsemane, attempt to force Pilate’s hand, and rile up the Jerusalem civilians in order to end Jesus’ life. Indeed, Jewish partisans explicitly conspire to persecute and ultimately kill him from an early point in the canonical gospels (Mark 3:6; Luke 6:6; John 5:16). Romans are conspicuously absent in the bulk of the Gospels, a striking fact which is reflected in scholarly approaches to the subject: in most reconstructions of the “historical Jesus,” Romans play at most a secondary and ancillary role. Although not intrinsically impossible, this scenario is highly unlikely, since among other reasons it assumes that the Roman prefect had to rely upon the information provided by the Jerusalem religious authorities to receive notice of an apocalyptic visionary and his followers. Whatever tensions existed between Jesus and various Jewish partisans, it will be argued that the canonical Gospels greatly overstate the role of such tensions as the impetus of Jesus’ arrest.
Roman Forces in Judaea During the Prefects (6-41 CE)
The study of the military in pre-War Judaea is beset by two common misconceptions. First, in the popular (and often scholarly!) imagination, these soldiers have an emphatically Roman character: ethnically Italian, linguistically Latin, ideologically imperial, and socially isolated from the rest of the Judaean population. For examples of scholars who see the pre-War Judaean garrison as emphatically Roman, see: Cohen (2010); Cotter (2000); Hamblin (1997). For more on the problems with these assumptions, see Zeichmann (2018b:1-21). In fact there is little evidence for any aspect of this characterization. Josephus is adamant that the troops of Judaea were recruited foremost from the sister cities of Caesarea Maritima and Sebaste (see, e.g., Josephus A.J. 15.296, 20.122, 20.176, J.W. 1.403, 2.52, 2.58, 2.74, 2.236, 3.66). Herod the Great founded these cities a few decades earlier and they were largely populated with people of the Syrian ethnos. Josephus notes that Syrian Caesareans were proud that their kin comprised the bulk of the auxiliaries (A.J. 20.176). Roman military historian Jonathan Roth summarizes (Roth (2019: forthcoming); cf. Mattern (2010: 173)).
Far from being a foreign or even Roman presence, the low-ranking soldiers serving under the prefects were “local” in every sense of the word. The second misconception, thanks especially to Josephus, early Christian literature, and its perpetuation in popular culture, is a widespread assumption that the military in pre-War Judaea was exclusively confined to its largest cities, especially Caesarea Maritima and Jerusalem, and that after the War the military presence expanded to rural sites to keep a close eye on a restless population. Josephus overwhelmingly associates the Judaean garrison with Caesarea and Sebaste, but narrates a number of military incidents in Jerusalem — most of which are related to the Temple and some of which are discussed below. The Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles likewise depict almost every soldier mentioned in association with either of these two cities: the crucifixion and burial of Jesus (Mark 15 and parallels), the conversion of the centurion Cornelius (Acts 10), the arrest of Peter (Acts 12), and Paul’s trial (Acts 21-23). The matter can be pushed even farther. Even though the Healing of the Centurion’s slave (Luke 7:1-10/Matt 8:5-13) occurs in the Galilean village of Capernaum, the evangelists strangely label it a πόλις (e.g., Mark 1:33, Luke 4:31, Matt 9:1), despite being a village (κώμη; cf. Josephus Life 403) by any metric. Though the Gospel of Luke labels every inhabited site a πόλις, the Gospels of Mark and Matthew are otherwise consistent in their distinctions between villages and cities. Jonathan Reed calculates a population between 600 and 1500 around the turn of the Era, representative of the range recently articulated by other specialists. By Ze’ev Safrai’s reckoning, the six-hectare size of Capernaum would render it a medium-sized town: Reed (2000: 149-152); Safrai (1994: 40-42, 65-67).
Israel Shatzman makes a persuasive case for the systematic abandonment of military sites after the Jewish War along the southern Judaea-Nabataea border in Idumaea: most likely Beersheba, Tel ‘Ira, Tel Sharuhen, Tel ‘Arad, and Tel ‘Arorer were empty after the War, leaving only a handful of isolated sites along Judaea’s southern border. Israel Shatzman (1983; 1991: 233-246) offers a devastating critique of Mordechai Gichon’s arguments to the contrary (e.g., Applebaum and Gichon (1967); Gichon (1967; 1971; 1974; 1980; 1991; 2002)). Gichon developed the earlier thesis of Alt (1930) that after the Jewish War (Gichon: under Vespasian; Alt: under Trajan), a defensive perimeter was developed on the southern Judaea-Nabataea border — that is, a limes Palaestinae. Gichon contends that this system had its origins in a highly developed fortification system created by Herod the Great. There are significant problems with Gichon’s dating of numerous sites, inference of a road connecting Raphia to the Dead Sea, and the extent of Judaea’s southern limits. See the similar critiques of Gichon’s thesis in Gracey (1986: 311-318); Pažout (2015); Tsafrir (1982). Near the Judaean-Galilean border with Syria, almost every military site was empty after the War as well. Many other military sites appear to have been abandoned after the Jewish War, as argued forcefully by Shatzman and others. Even those post-War rural sites with a military presence both before and after the War tended to see a reduction in number of soldiers (e.g., Masada, Jericho). This policy was overhauled once more after the Bar Kokhba War, though that is another matter entirely. With the loss of rural patrolling came a much heavier concentration of single units at specific sites, often urban. While the exact size of the pre-War Jerusalem garrison is not certain, the presence of legio X Fretensis alone was sufficient to double the size of the entire pre-War Judaean army.
Similarly, most of legio VI Ferrata was located at Caparcotna/Legio and its environs. Two auxiliary units and a vexillation of legio VI Ferrata garrisoned near Beth Guvrin at Khirbet ‘Arak Hala, probably cohors I Thracum milliaria and ala Antiana Gallorum et Thracum sagittaria (Zissu and Ecker (2014). On legio VI Ferrata, see CIIP 3476). Other examples could be cited. This concentration was neither useful nor feasible in the pre-War period, given the wider distribution of military outposts throughout the region.
Benjamin Isaac suggests that this is because the pre-War distribution of soldiers in small villages to aid civilian communities could thin out forces in a potentially disastrous manner, as we will see happened in Germania under Varus’s command (Isaac (1986: 389-390; 1992: 107); he cites Cassius Dio 56.19.1-5 on Varus). Legionaries were instead concentrated in Palestinian cities in massive garrisons, the subsequent Roman policy in hostile territory; should another revolt break out, Rome would control access to financial resources and strategic sites. To be sure, soldiers remained at a number of smaller sites, but they were much fewer in number than they had been before the War. It is worth noting as a caveat that soldiers probably also billeted in less archaeologically conspicuous buildings. No specifically military structures have been found in post-War Emmaus and the existing fortifications were abandoned after the War’s conclusion. Similarly, no watchtower remains have been found in the Nile Valley, despite the abundant attestation of their presence through textual finds; see Alston (1995: 81-83). Nevertheless, inscriptional evidence renders an Emmaus garrison beyond doubt: Moshe Fischer and his co-authors contend that the epigraphic evidence indicates a sufficient stability of military presence for a stone mason to set up shop (Fischer, Isaac, and Roll 1996: 151-160). It should be noted that it is often difficult to date the occupation of specific military sites with great precision — in this case, to the decades comprising the period of the prefects. That said, coinage at a given archaeological site is generally consistent in the pre-War Roman period (i.e., 6-66 CE), indicating a continuous presence over that time. Numerous examples could be cited across Palestine: Tel Far’ah (Petrie 1930: 15-22), Masada, Khirbet ‘Urmeh (Eshel and Erlich 2002), Ya’ad, Yuvalim, among many others.
Map of Palestinian military sites during the prefecture (6-41 CE).
What Did the Roman Soldiers Do in Judaea?
From the time of the prefects until the outbreak of the Jewish War, there were no significant battles or wars in Judaea, meaning few of its soldiers ever participated in combat operations. Soldiers in peaceful provinces were instead assigned to other duties, such as policing, patrolling, provincial construction efforts (e.g., road paving), administrative labour, and intelligence gathering. There is ample evidence that soldiers in pre-War Judaea performed these duties. Consider, for instance, one anecdote related in a handful of rabbinic sources (Sifre Deuteronomy 344; cf. y. Bava Qam. 4:3-4b; b. Bava Qam. 38a). At least in this version of the narrative, a number of features might strike us: the use of soldiers for Roman spying, not to mention the apparent ability of those soldiers to both successfully infiltrate Jewish social circles and understand their teachings, despite little prior experience with Judaism itself. Even if the narrative is fantastical, similar military duties are recounted elsewhere. Josephus, for instance, says that Pilate had his soldiers act as undercover agents during the aqueduct episode (A.J. 18.30-62; J.W. 2.175-177). Patrols after the War also monitored road traffic during festivals, but given the influx of soldiers to deter unrest among the Judaean pilgrims during festivals while the Temple still stood, this was likely practiced before the War as well (see, e.g., Josephus J.W. 2.224-227, A.J. 20.105-112) (Rab. (Lam.) 1.52; Fischer, Isaac, and Roll 1996: 15-16).
Benjamin Isaac points to a story related by Simeon Hatemani, a source from the second century that states that the Romans were basically spies and they interrupt life. It’s systematic pressure. These surveillance duties served several purposes, three of which are interrelated and worth highlighting for present purposes: 1) to maintain peace in the province, 2) control of the nascent threat of the “Fourth Philosophy,” and (possibly) 3) policy changes that might have occurred after Varus’ disaster in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. The maintenance of peace in a given province was the primary duty of its garrison.
Perhaps because Acts 5:37 states that Judas perished, and that all his followers were scattered (κἀκεῖνος ἀπώλετο, καὶ πάντες ὅσοι ἐπείθοντο αὐτῷ διεσκορπίσθησαν), many scholars have inferred the complete failure of the movement, and assert that the Fourth Philosophy was an ephemeral or marginal phenomenon which suddenly disappeared (See e.g., Goodman 1987: 93-96); Rhoads (1976: 51-52). Nevertheless, we disagree with this widespread assumption, since Judas’ influence does not seem to have vanished as if by magic.Several arguments support this claim.
First, if — as Martin Hengel argued (Hengel 2011: 102-103) — the statement of faith that Josephus ascribes to Judas and his supporters was no more than an ultimate conclusion drawn from a view which was broadly shared by Jews (namely, that God was the sovereign ruler of the world, and the Lord of Israel in particular), if his revolutionary demand had grown out of the heart of Jewish faith itself, it is unlikely that it vanished so easily; in fact, Josephus refers to the wide echo found by Judas’ doctrine (A.J. 18.6).
Second, Josephus does not restrict his references to Judas to 6 CE, but establishes genealogical links between this σοφιστὴς δεινότατος (J.W. 2.433) and several other people who lived much nearer to his own times; he asserts that two men crucified by Tiberius Julius Alexander circa 46 CE were “sons of Judas” (παῖδες; A.J. 20.102), and that Menahem and Eleazar were also his descendants.
Third, several elements of ideological continuity between the Fourth Philosophy and later anti-Roman trends surfacing in the Jewish War can be detected: for instance, the motto “There is no Lord but God,” typical of Judas, surfaces in Eleazar and some sicarii (J.W. 7.323, 7.410-419); longing for freedom, a hallmark of the Fourth Philosophy according to Josephus, reemerges in the numismatic epigraphy of the Jewish War, as proved by the coins minted in Jerusalem (See Hengel (2011: 120-123); Deines (2011: 433-434); Price (1992: 68-69); Gabba 2001: 133-134).
Fourth, the fact itself that Josephus dared to describe the movement as a “philosophy” along with the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes — as a constituent of the main Jewish sects — means that it was not short-lived, but that it had some temporal durability.
The presence of anti-Roman resistance seems to be confirmed by the survey of patterns of material culture. Although the conclusions drawn from studies focused on archaeological materials are always provisional, a significant change seems to have occurred in the Galilean archaeological record around the end of the first century BCE and the beginning of the first century CE, towards the end or just after the rule of Herod the Great. This sudden and consistent rejection of formerly unobjectionable objects can hardly be explained away by economic or functional causes. Danny Syon has argued that the strict observance of coinage zones — Jewish coinage in Palestine, with only rare incursions of Syrian imperial coinage in the pre-War period — is attributable to similar motives (Syon 2015). It has been suggested that the rejection of these items was the result of individual choice, and that it implied an anti-Roman statement.
The question of how a governor might best address such unrest can be understood by reference to the pan-imperial response to the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, when Germanic tribes united under Arminius in rebellion against Rome in 9 CE:
What Did the Romans Know?
The former remarks about the presence of Roman troops in Judaea, along with the fact that they performed duties of policing, patrolling, and intelligence gathering, allow us to infer that the Roman prefects in Judaea must have been informed about any actual or potential troublemakers. After all, the matter concerned not only the Empire’s security, but also the security of the prefect’s post itself. A sound starting-point is a series of reports in which Flavius Josephus narrates how several Roman governors counteracted problems arising both in Jerusalem and other regions. These reports refer to popular prophets in first century Judaea who were not brought to trial, but were done away manu militari by a division of soldiers. Such are the cases (under Pontius Pilate) of the Samaritan prophet whom the masses followed to Mount Gerizim to find the holy artifacts ostensibly buried there by Moses, and the preemptive strikes leveled against the large multitude under the leadership of Theudas (during Fadus’ procuratorship) and the Egyptian (under Felix) (MacMullen 1966: 147). In none of these cases does Josephus describe how the Roman governors found out about the men, but all these episodes took place outside Jerusalem, and some of them at a considerable distance (Samaria, the Judaean desert), others closer (the Mount of Olives).
Though the anecdote occurs during the exceptional events of the Jewish War, there is reason to suppose it reveals something about the Caesarean and Sebastene auxiliaries of the pre-War period as well.
First, Josephus labels the soldiers “Syrian,” which is his preferred designation for the Judaean auxiliaries recruited from Caesarea and Sebaste from the time of Herod the Great until the War’s end (e.g., A.J. 15.296, 20.122, 20.176, J.W. 1.403, 2.52, 2.58, 2.74, 2.236, 3.66) — this would explain their fluency in the Aramaic tongue of the Jewish rebels.
Second, it is clear that these soldiers had experience with infiltration and spying, apparently able to survey the rebels and remain hidden. Thus, even though these events occurred during the Jewish War, we can infer that this story depicts the auxiliaries of pre-War Judaea, as it seems that the auxiliaries used during the War were drawn from all over the Empire (e.g., ala Gaetulorum from Mauretania in CIL 5.7007) and thus unlikely to be competent in Aramaic (Zeichmann 2017: 63).
Admittedly, we know very little about the intelligence sources of the Roman governors in this early Imperial period (not surprisingly, given the secret nature of such procedures). Nevertheless, it is obvious that, once installed in their provinces, these magistrates would need to become acquainted with the nature of any potential threat which faced them, particularly in those regions which had a long history of rebellion against foreign occupation. There are three different methods through which governors might acquire sensitive information.
First are the routine tours of inspection.
Second, he could also count on the information provided by the neighboring client rulers and kings; literary and epigraphic evidence attests contact between provincial governors and clients, particularly with those kings with the closest connections with Rome and those whose territory was surrounded by territory directly administered by Rome (Austin and Rankov 1995: 145).
Third, a most important source of reliable information would have been provided by his own staff or officium, which assisted each governor in both administrative/civil and military levels (Austin and Rankov (1995: 147-155); Haensch 1997: 227-237 and 710-726).
To sum up, the Roman prefects in Judaea must have known what they needed to know in order to keep the region still and quiet. In fact, despite the traces of resistance to Rome in the available sources, this period can be considered — with all the abovementioned caveats — as relatively peaceful. The occupying power had resources to get informed, to the extent that it could nip the anti-Roman activities in the bud.
Jesus of Nazareth’s Arrest and Execution as a Conundrum: Incongruities, Anachronisms, and Fictions in the Gospels’ Passion Accounts
Although hosts of scholars still treat the Gospels as reliable sources, critical historians cannot help but recognize the tendentious character of these texts. Uncritical acceptance of the story of Jesus embedded in the Gospels not only has had deeply tragic effects insofar as it has become the occasion for generating anti-Semitism, but — what is even more relevant in a scholarly context — it is epistemologically untenable. Those scholars prone to grant the historicity to these texts often commit the logical fallacy possibiliter ergo probabiliter; but “it is possible, therefore it is probable” is not a sound argumentative procedure in historical research (Baur 1847: 21).
To begin with, Jesus’ story, such as it has been told in the Gospels, has an overarching structure which neatly matches what has been called “the Tale of the Persecution and Vindication of the Innocent One,” a pattern found in Jewish literature of the Second Temple period which can be summarized as follows: the actions and claims of a just person provoke their (evil) opponents to conspire against them, to the extent that this leads to an accusation, trial, condemnation, and ordeal, usually resulting in their shameful death. But either at the brink of death or in death itself the innocent one is rescued and vindicated (Nickelsburg 1980). This story pattern, which seems to have arisen in response to the issues of persecution suffered under Antiochus Epiphanes IV and is reflected in several Bible accounts (e.g., Joseph in Gen 37-50, Esther, Susanna in Dan 13, and the episodes in Dan 3 and 6), has also been used in the Gospel Passion narratives in order to make sense of Jesus’ unexpected death (Dewey (2017: 71-73); Mack 1988: 265-270).
The fictitious character of such a tale, concocted to find meaning in the death of some people, is made plain in the fact that the prolegomena to the Passion accounts — the several passages in which Jesus predicts his death (Mark 8:31; 9:30-32; 10:32-34) — neatly reflect the concerns of the later Markan community: they provide a post factum explanation to the developing Jesus communities for the execution of the revered teacher on a cross. Although the passion predictions point to an earlier layer of material, insofar as their two-step formulations of dying and rising reflect the tradition found in 1 Cor 15:3-4, they do not go all the way back to the historical Jesus.Such “predictions” are merely vaticinia ex eventu, to which the hope of a divine vindication has been added. But this is just the starting-point for a realization of the amount and breadth of the fabricated material in the main sources for the Galilean preacher’s life and death. From the accounts of the arrest to the narratives concerning the crucifixion at Golgotha, there is no shortage of inconsistencies, anachronisms, and implausible statements, even when the texts seem to attest an episode with a basis in history. Such will form the basis for our argument that Pilate and his intelligence networks were far more likely responsible for Jesus’ arrest and execution.
Apart from the obviously legendary material contained in these accounts, many episodes defy plausibility even apart from the occurrence of the supernatural.For instance, the depiction of Jesus — found in all four canonical Gospels — as going alone into the Temple and driving out those who sold and bought contains several manifest improbabilities, not the least being its denouement. How was it possible for a single person to carry out what the evangelists attribute to Jesus? How did those people disturbed by Jesus react? Was no opposition offered to this arbitrary interruption of a brisk trade? What did the Temple guards (and eventually the Romans) do? Not a single word is said about this, thereby depriving the account of both intelligibility and credibility. These incongruities have led several reflective scholars to deny the historicity of the pericope. See e.g., Mack (1988: 291-292); Buchanan (1991); Miller (1992); Seeley (1993).
The evangelists did their best to portray Jesus as an innocuous and peaceful man, but the fact is that they do not explain either the violence involved in the Temple incident nor what Jesus was doing in the Mount of Olives at night with an entourage of armed men. All four Gospels record that armed resistance was offered in Gethsemane, and three of them identify the one who struck off the servant’s ear as a disciple of Jesus. Several converging passages (Luke 22:38, 22:49; Mark 14:47 and par.) indicate that — at least in the final phase of Jesus’ ministry — Jesus’ disciples were armed, and ready to use the weapons they carried. This is particularly clear in Luke 22:49, where the disciples ask Jesus: “Lord, shall we strike with the sword?”. Referring to the attack of one of Jesus’ disciples against a member of the arresting group, George Aichele wonders: “Would this happen if Jesus and his followers were not already a violent group?” (1998: 83). Besides, if the story of Judas’ betrayal deserves any credibility, it makes sense if a coup had been prearranged: “Da gab es etwas zu verraten, da gab es ein Geheimnis, das zu erkaufen lohnte” Kautsky (1908: 388). In fact, even the brief account of the crucial episode of Jesus’ arrest is fraught with problems.
Why was a heavily armed party sent to seize Jesus secretly, if he was indeed a harmless preacher? Why is Mark 14:47 (see also Matt 26:51) silent over the identity of the attacker taking a sword? Did the attacked person not defend himself? Did the arresting party not react to this bloodletting attack, presumably carried out with homicidal intentions? These unanswered questions indicate that the whole scene is too schematic in its construction, internally inconsistent, and thus hardly credible as a factual report.According to Matthew, Luke, and John, Jesus opposes the use of violence, being the only one in his group to adopt such a “pacifist” stance (Matt 26:52-54; Luke 22:51; John 18:11). On the one hand, however, this does not match the Lukan account wherein Jesus exhorts his disciples lacking swords to buy one (22:35); on the other hand, in the oldest evangelist, Mark, such alleged opposition to violence is conspicuous by its absence.Even more strikingly, Jesus, who is portrayed as claiming a pacific attitude, is the only member of his group who is arrested (and later crucified), whilst people using a sword or wishing to do so are left unmolested. That Jesus, portrayed as the least dangerous man, is precisely the target, and the only target for that matter, is, from a historical and a psychological standpoint, exceedingly counterintuitive. Kautsky perceptively remarked how pointless is this story (1908: 389).
Even more unreliable episodes are those portraying members of the Sanhedrin as spitting at Jesus and striking him (Mark 14:65; Matt 26:67-68), and particularly that in which Jesus is mocked at the cross by “the high priests and the scribes” (Mark 15:31-32) and challenged to “come down now from the cross, in order that we may see and believe.” The presence of Jewish passers-by mocking a crucified Jew is hard to believe, all the more so because the description of the scene strongly evokes Ps 21:8-9 LXX and 108:25 LXX, and could have been concocted out of those texts. But the portrayal of high priests and scribes showing up before the crosses to mercilessly mock a crucified countryman defies imagination. The sordidness itself of the scene betrays its lack of credibility and its slanderous character (See Collins (2007: 751); Maccoby 1973).
The untrustworthiness of the Passion accounts, however, reaches its climax in the trial before Pilate.
First, the portrayal of Pontius Pilate as a single-handed prefect unaware of Jesus’ group betrays ignorance (or conscious erasure) of the true circumstances in which a Roman prefect carried out his duties, having a consilium at his disposal.
Second, the depiction of a prefect who could be easily intimidated by the pressure of the Jewish religious authorities or a mob is blatantly contradicted by what we know about him through Josephus and Philo.
Third, and more importantly, the main notion guiding this section is in fact intrinsically meaningless: a man declared as politically innocuous by the prefect is, nevertheless, scourged and mocked by the soldiers at the service of Rome as a royal pretender and executed along with other men with the punishment reserved for people guilty of sedition, with a titulus crucis which marks him as a usurper or guilty of adfectatio regni. The implausible nature of the scene before Pilate is further adduced when the report about the so-called privilegium paschale (the alleged custom of the Passover or paschal pardon) is considered.
On the one hand, there is no evidence of the existence of such an alleged custom in the Roman Empire or in Judaea. On the other, everything related to this aspect is untenable. As Paul Winter perceptively realized, the Gospels’ depiction is self-contradictory. Winter (1974: 134):Whilst the evangelists state explicitly that the crowd was free to demand from Pilate the pardon of any prisoner, yet at the same time they imply that the choice was limited to two individuals. The offer to choose between two persons only in fact denies the free exercise of the prerogative of the people’s will. On this point the Gospels are selfcontradictory in their reports.
What is even worse, such a procedure does not make sense in the thorny political situation of Judaea, to the extent that the custom would be, from the perspective of Roman rule, blatantly self-defeating. Brandon (1967: 4):Mark presents Pilate, a Roman governor, not only as criminally weak in his failure to do justice, but as a fool beyond belief. For, if he had truly sought to save Jesus, he could surely have done nothing worse to defeat his purpose than to offer the Jewish crowd a choice between Jesus and Barabbas. To them Barabbas was a patriot who had risked his life against their hated Roman rulers, whereas Jesus, according to Mark, had advised them to pay tribute to these Romans. To have offered the people such a choice, with the intention of saving Jesus, was the act of an idiot.
Contradictory claims surface elsewhere.The Jerusalem religious authorities are said to present Jesus as a seditionist, but at the same time they incite the crowds to ask for the release of Barabbas (Mark 15:13-14; Matt 27:22-23, 25; Luke 23:23), who is, however, presented as guilty of taking part in some kind of revolt. Whilst all the Gospels keep several traces of a deep enmity between Jesus and the tetrarch Herod Antipas — to the extent that Jesus flees the tetrarch, who, according to Luke 13:31, wanted to kill Jesus — the Lukan account depicts Antipas as someone who sends Jesus back to Pilate, and when the prefect resumes the interrupted “trial,” he gathers that Antipas considered Jesus innocent (Luke 23:14).Moreover, the notion that the Jewish authorities were responsible for the arrest and death of Jesus becomes more understandable as an anachronistic projection to the prefects’ period of later conflicts and animosities between Nazorean communities and other Jewish trends. This contention has been fleshed out by Jonathan Bourgel, who has argued that several elements in Mark’s Passion account reflect circumstances which took place in the procurators’ period (44-66 CE). For instance, the mention of a “crowd armed with swords and clubs, sent from the chief priests” (Mark 14:43 and parallels) is redolent of the descriptions of some arbitrary actions carried out by the high priest’s camp followers provided by Josephus and the Tosefta (Bourgel 2012: 506-513). The existence of this and other interesting parallels between events occurring on the eve of the Great Revolt and some items of the Passion accounts (Jesus’ trial before the Sanhedrin and Barabbas’ liberation) further increases the probability that those accounts are anachronistic and hardly trustworthy from a historical standpoint.
These remarks — just a sample of the numerous problems of the Gospels as historical sources — attest to the untrustworthy nature of the overwhelming majority of the elements of the Passion accounts, thereby making Jesus’ story ultimately unintelligible. This is why Jesus’ death is usually presented as a “riddle” or a “puzzle”: “The starkest, most disturbing and most central of all the enigmas that Jesus posed and was” Meier (2001: 646); Green (2001: 88-89). There is a simpler solution to the available evidence. That solution is an underlying story, one in which a failed Galilean visionary was arrested and executed. That account was tampered with and significantly altered, because of ideological purposes and survival needs of his followers, thereby generating a confusing outcome, lacking logical consistency and historical reliability. Indeed, the problems with the Passion narrative cast significant doubt on causes of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. If this conclusion is correct, it makes a critical assessment of the evidence imperative.
Making Sense of Jesus’ Arrest and Execution in the Light of the Roman Domination of Judaea
If, as everything indicates, the Roman governors were more-or-less well informed of the potential threats posed by visionary preachers having gathered some following, the scenario of the Gospels can be further assessed. As we have remarked, these works do indeed portray Pontius Pilate as a single-handed governor who knew nothing about Jesus and who had to rely upon the information provided by the Jerusalem religious authorities to get notice of the preacher and his group; moreover, it further contends that he deemed the Galilean an innocuous person. Nevertheless, Roman interest in surveilling Jesus becomes more plausible upon considering the specifics of Jesus’ activity and arrest in the Gospels, irrespective of what one thinks about the hypothesis concerning Jesus’ involvement in anti-Roman resistance (Socas and Toribio 2017).
First, Jesus’ preaching of the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom had unmistakable political consequences, not only because that kingdom had — as expected in other movements harboring millenarian hopes — material and earthly aspects, but also because it implied an approaching national deliverance and the passing of the Empire (Weiss 1892: 123).
Second, there are enough traces of some Messianic claim by Jesus, which is also brought to the fore by the title “king of the Jews” in the Passion accounts; several indexes (contextual plausibility, recurrent patterns, embarrassment, and coherence).
Third, there are traces of evidence that Jesus’ entourage was armed with swords, most famously at Gethsemane, and that its members knew how to use them, whether or not they did (Martin 2014; 2015).
Fourth, irrespective of whether or not some disciples participated in a resistance movement (scholars have toyed with the names Ἰσκαριώτης, βαριωνᾶ and Καναναῖος/Ζηλωτής), there are some traces that at least the core members of Jesus’ group were truly bellicose men. The violent disposition of at least some of them is well attested in the tradition. The rowdy reputation and hot temper betrayed by the title Βοανηργές (Mark 3:17) are significantly displayed in Mark 9:38, and more harshly by their desire to resort to violence against a village of uncooperative Samaritans (Luke 9:51-56). See e.g., Rook (1981). In this respect, an ironical remark has been made: “If Jesus had been leading a nonviolent revolution he apparently selected a non-cooperative group” Buchanan (1984: 247). “Jesus’ colleagues appear to have been the sort of people likely to alarm the Roman authorities” Elliott (1982: 57). This point is significant because part of the image the Roman authorities may have had of Jesus “came from the people with whom he chose to surround himself” Sheldon (1998: 5).
Fifth, several episodes in the Gospels indicate that Jesus or his group caused some trouble in Jerusalem, perhaps during Passover (Mark 11:1-11, 11:15-19).
Sixth, one should note that there are clear redactional tendencies by the evangelists to distance Jesus and his followers from any activities that might imply revolutionary impulses.
In the light of all this material, and in opposition to the Gospel depiction of Pilate as a single-handed prefect, a fuller portrait of the military and administrative situation of Palestine renders it likely that Pilate had some degree of “intelligence” regarding Jesus before their encounter in Jerusalem. This conclusion is further reinforced by the fact that, as we have hinted at, Roman administration partially relied on reports from allies for intelligence on enemies and troublemakers beyond their borders. Herodian rulers are a case in point, because of their close relationships with Rome and the emperors. In the case of Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea under Augustus and Tiberius for more than four decades (4 BCE–39 CE), his collaboration must have been crucial — and taken for granted — for the prefects of Judaea. The interesting thing is that the Synoptic Gospels provide information on the relation between Herod Antipas and Jesus which point to the existence of an active enmity of the tetrarch towards his subject, as well as of a very disparaging and critical stance of Jesus towards Antipas, who warned his disciples to watch out for the yeast of Herod and called him ἀλώπηξ (Maurice Casey 1999: 188-189; 2010: 114).
Given the potentially threatening nature of Jesus and his group, it is indeed probable that the intelligence sources of Pilate had some awareness of him. “Jesus had already been the focus of enough public attention in Galilee to warrant surveillance by the authorities … in the capital” Sheldon (1998: 7). Moreover, this probability increases when the reports about Jesus’ fame and infamy are considered. Of course, a good deal of the Gospel depiction of such fame should be attributed to the evangelists’ creativity and their wish to enhance the figure of the Galilean preacher. But it is hard to deny that he must have enjoyed some popularity, both in Galilee and Judaea. As it has been argued, the popularity of Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem like his success in the Galilee is likely to represent the historical situation (Elliott 1982: 51). On the contrary, it is reasonable to suppose that the authorities were already monitoring their movements (Sheldon 1998: 23). Since such a story of Roman involvement contradicts the tendency of the Gospels to exonerate the Romans and blame the Jews (fitting all-too-neatly within the nascent Christian supersessionism), its historicity is extremely probable. For an extended argument supporting this contention, see Bermejo-Rubio (2016b).
Admittedly, the idea that the Jewish religious authorities may have been hostile to Jesus and thus played some significant role in his fate is entirely plausible and should not be hastily ruled out:
In fact, one should carefully weigh up the possibility that the other men crucified with Jesus — called λῃσταί by Mark and Matthew — were somehow associated with him. For an extended argument, see Bermejo-Rubio (2013):
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