From the U.S. News & World Report

Why Did He Die?
Jesus put the kingdom of God up against Caesar. And that act led to a political execution that launched a major world religion
By Jeffery L. Sheler

After they had gathered, Pilate said to them, "Whom do you want me to release for you, Barabbas or Jesus who is called the Christ?" . . . And they said, "Barabbas." Pilate said to them, "Then what should I do with Jesus who is called the Christ?" All of them said, "Let him be crucified!" Then he asked, "Why, what evil has he done?" But they shouted all the more, "Let him be crucified!" So when Pilate saw that he could do nothing . . . he took some water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, "I am innocent of this man's blood . . . ." Then the people as a whole answered, "His blood be on us and on our children!" So he released Barabbas for them; and after flogging Jesus, he handed him over to be crucified.

It is called the Passion–the dramatic Gospel accounts of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ in Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago. And in its faithful retelling, no story in history has evoked more passion. To the apostle Paul, the Crucifixion of Jesus was the very heart of the Gospel, "the power of God unto salvation." Early-church martyrs faced persecution and death emboldened by the familiar stories of Jesus's suffering at the hands of his enemies. And in every generation since, Christians have found spiritual sustenance in the story of Christ's sacrificial death recounted in the rich symbolism of the Eucharist and in annual observances of Holy Week. As Christians around the world celebrate the liturgy and pageantry of this Easter season, they will retrace once again the familiar Bible narrative, grieving the betrayal of an innocent Savior, mourning his lonely death on a common cross, and rejoicing in his vindication in the miracle of the Resurrection.
But while the Gospel story has inspired piety and devotion through the centuries, it also has spawned darker passions. From the rise of the Holy Roman Empire to the fall of the Third Reich and even today, purveyors of antisemitism have sought to justify their prejudices by appealing to the Gospels' depiction of Jews as jealous villains who plotted against Christianity's founder. Such hatefulness permeates Western culture. The famous Oberammergau Passion Play in Germany, which until recent years depicted the Jewish priests as demonlike villains wearing horned hats, has been a perennial sore spot in Christian-Jewish relations. Even performances of Bach's Easter oratorio, the St. John Passion, have been picketed by protesters offended by its negative references to "the Jews" drawn from the text of John.
Antisemitism in not-so-subtle forms has at times been abetted at the high- est levels of organized religion. For centuries, the Good Friday liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church included prayers "for the perfidious Jews." Only at the Second Vatican Council in the mid- 1960s did the church officially repudiate the concept of "deicide"–a term historically associated with Jews as "Christ killers." And just this year, Pope John Paul II apologized for Christianity's sins against Jews.
Some doubt whether, despite the sincerest remorse, Christianity can ever fully repent of antisemitic excesses when the New Testament is permeated with passages that seem to cast "the Jews" as enemies of Jesus and of the church. But some scholars of the historical Jesus contend that such passages contain more polemics than real history, reflecting conflicts that arose between Christians and Jews late in the first century A.D.–when the Gospels were being written and Christianity was evolving from a messianic Jewish sect into a predominantly gentile religion. "As long as Christians were the marginalized and disenfranchised ones," says New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan in his 1995 book Who Killed Jesus?, "such Passion fiction about Jewish responsibility and Roman innocence did nobody much harm. But, once the Roman Empire became Christian, that fiction turned lethal."
Storytellers. Still, other scholars maintain that while later Jewish-Christian conflicts may have colored some of the rhetoric, the New Testament stories preserve the "historical core" of the events surrounding the Passion. The Gospel writers, says Scot McKnight, a religious-studies professor at North Park University in Chicago, "were not attempting to give a careful piece of history as to why Jesus died." They were telling "the story of Jesus–a story that has within it conflicts with Jewish leaders and with Roman leaders." While the precise nature of those antagonisms may not be fully explained, he says, "the Gospel writers give us enough evidence to see that a complex set of factors" led to Jesus's death.
Indeed, from a historian's point of view, the events leading up to Jesus's death remain a tantalizing puzzle. First of all, his arrest and execution came during a week that began with public adulation as Jesus entered Jerusalem to shouts of "Hosanna!" and ended with angry crowds shouting, "Crucify him!" According to the Gospels, Jesus was arrested by order of the Jerusalem high priest, who accused him of blasphemy; he was tried before the Sanhedrin, a council of Jewish officials; was delivered to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor and chief judicial officer of Judea; and was condemned to crucifixion for claiming to be king of the Jews, an act of sedition in the view of Roman officials. But the seeming simplicity of the story line belies some bewildering complexities involving the charges and evidence against Jesus, the motives of his accusers, and the swiftness and ruthlessness of his execution.
Scholars begin their search for answers with historical reconstruction of Jesus himself. Who was he, whom did he claim to be, and how was he regarded by others of his time? What might he have said and done during his brief ministry that the authorities turned so viciously against him? Recent revisionist portraits have run the gamut from "Jesus the Cynic Sage" (a social critic who spoke in witty aphorisms) and "Jesus the Palestinian Revolutionary" (who subverted economic and social tyranny) to "Jesus the Spirit Person and Social Prophet" (a mystic who preached cultural compassion).
Whatever elements of truth these depictions may contain, a broad scholarly consensus today affirms first the indisputable Jewishness of Jesus and of the early Christian movement. The Judaism of Jesus's day, most scholars now agree, was not incidental or peripheral to his life and ministry. Raised a Jew in Galilee, he read and revered the Torah, was an ardent defender of Jewish law, and carefully observed the Jewish festivals at the Temple. To attempt to detach Jesus from that religious and cultural context is to obscure a proper understanding of the man and his message. Jesus was "fundamentally a Jewish prophet," observes Darrell Bock, a New Testament professor at Dallas Theological Seminary. "He went to the Jewish people, calling for renewal of the Jewish religion." The Jewish leaders, he says, naturally would have been "concerned by his calls for reform, which threatened the status quo and their own positions."
Political death. Yet this portrait of Jesus as a Jewish reformer does little to explain why he was put to death in the manner that he was. "The single most solid fact [known] about Jesus's life is his death," says Boston University Prof. Paula Fredriksen in her new book, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. "He was executed by the Roman prefect Pilate, on or around Passover, in the manner Rome reserved particularly for political insurrectionists, namely, crucifixion."
Moreover, depictions of Jesus as mainly a Jewish religious figure who challenged the authority of Jerusalem's priests, argues Fredriksen, don't explain his "very political, imperial death." Pilate, she contends, "would have known little and cared less about Jewish religious beliefs and intra-Jewish religious controversy." Crossan, the author of Who Killed Jesus?, contends that the Romans went after Jesus because they considered him a political subversive. "From Day 1 in Galilee, Jesus was waging a fron- tal assault on Roman commercialism," Crossan contends. "He opposed the dislocation of peasant life caused by the Roman building boom in Galilee. It's no surprise that he gets himself executed. He's putting the kingdom of God up against Caesar, and he's going to get squashed. It's just a matter of when."
On the most basic level, most scholars today agree that the official responsibility for Jesus's death rests with Pilate, who had the final say at the time in capital-punishment cases. Yet few doubt that Pilate would or could have condemned Jesus without some involvement of the leading Jewish authority in Jerusalem–Caiaphas, the chief Temple priest. "When a government formally executes a prisoner, they take responsibility for it," says Crossan. In that sense, he says, "it's right to say that Pilate and Caiaphas were responsible for the execution of Jesus. They did it because they thought he was a threat to the religious status quo and to Roman law and order."
And what might Jesus have done to make the authorities perceive him as a threat? While it may be customary in Christian tradition to think of Jesus as meek and mild, the Gospels sometimes depict him in a different light. In his 1994 standard work, The Death of the Messiah, the late New Testament scholar Raymond E. Brown says a careful reading of the Gospels reveals "a Jesus capable of generating intense dislike." He easily could have offended religious leaders, says Brown, "if he told people that God wants something different from what they know and have long striven to do, and if he challenged established sacred teaching on his own authority as self-designated spokesman for God."
Enemies list. Yet the extent to which Jewish authorities contributed to the death of Jesus is a complicated issue. The Gospels suggest that opposition to Jesus among Jewish leaders was by no means unanimous. Indeed, at least two members of the Jewish high council–Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus–are portrayed as sympathizers. But he certainly had plenty of enemies among Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. According to the Gospels, he had accused the Pharisees of hypocrisy, challenged the Sadducees' theology, and espoused unconventional interpretations of the Torah. But perhaps most important, what had been perceived by some as his threat to "destroy the Temple" was an affront that neither the priests nor the Romans could tolerate.
But what had Jesus actually said to provoke this accusation? The Gospel authors attribute to him not a threat but a prediction that the Temple would be destroyed–"Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down"–and claim that his enemies falsely accused him of threatening the Temple. And in fact some scholars argue that Jesus probably never said anything like the words ascribed to him in Mark. His prediction so closely presages what the Romans actually did in A.D. 70, they argue, that it almost certainly reflects an attempt by the authors, writing after the destruction of Jerusalem, to enhance Jesus's reputation as a prophet. (Others disagree. As E. P. Sanders argues in The Historical Figure of Jesus, the prediction was not precisely fulfilled. When the Romans destroyed the city some 40 years later, they left much of the Temple's retaining wall intact. Bogus prophecies created after the fact are almost always exact, he points out.)
Beyond Jesus's threatening words were his violent demonstration on the Temple Mount–an incident described in all four Gospels as his "cleansing of the Temple." Nearly all scholars today see the incident as the final straw and the central event that led to his arrest. As the Gospels describe it, shortly after arriving in Jerusalem for the Passover feast, Jesus and his disciples stormed into the Temple, and he began overturning the tables of money-changers and chasing animal vendors out of the court. The high priest had moved the animal stalls to the Temple from a nearby hill, making it easier for pilgrims to buy animals for sacrifice and for Temple authorities to profit from those sales. Jesus, says Bruce Chilton, religion professor at Bard College in New York, would have objected to such crass commercialism attached to the sacred Temple offerings.
The Temple takeover, as Chilton describes it, may have involved as many as 200 zealous followers–perhaps including Barabbas and the two thieves who were crucified with Jesus–and it may have succeeded at least temporarily in disrupting the Temple commerce. That, says Chilton, would have provided ample motivation for both religious and civil authorities to move against Jesus.
Yet if the Jewish authorities had wanted Jesus out of the way, and Pilate consented to do the job, asks Fredriksen, "why not a simple, private murder?" The answer, she says, is that "crucifixion was a Roman form of public-service announcement" intended to get the attention of those watching. The crowds in Jerusalem who earlier had hailed Jesus as "the son of David"–a messianic title–"are the real audience whom Pilate addresses" by sending Jesus to the cross.
Man of the people. It was the crowds assembled for Passover in Jerusalem, Fredriksen argues, not Jesus's close associates, that first proclaimed him Messiah–the prophesied king of Israel. Hearing his authoritative message that the kingdom was at hand, these pilgrims "had no other context to place Jesus in save the one in which they first met him: during the pilgrimage feast in the city of David at Passover, in all the excitement, panoply, and ritual re-enactment of the holiday that commemorated the liberation and redemption of their people," Fredriksen writes. Their enthusiasm for Jesus and his message, she contends, led directly to his death.
Whether or not Pilate thought Jesus was the Messiah–or even if Jesus thought of himself in that way–was not important, says Fredriksen. But the fact that only Jesus was killed–and none of his disciples were–suggests that Pilate did not consider Jesus a real threat. What Pilate did find threatening was a city crowded with messianic pilgrims who believed God was about to intervene on behalf of his people, defeat the Roman occupation, and restore the throne of David in Jerusalem. When the crowds began hailing Jesus as a messiah, Pilate moved swiftly and ruthlessly to squelch a potential uprising.
The disciples who had accompanied Jesus to Jerusalem at Passover, says Fredriksen, were expecting an astounding spiritual event, the arrival of God's kingdom. "What they got instead," she says, "was the Crucifixion." But then the truly unexpected happened: "God, they became convinced, had raised Jesus from the dead." Energized by that belief, they began preaching the arrival of God's kingdom, which they now believed would be fully inaugurated with the Second Coming of the resurrected Christ–an event they expected in their own lifetime.
Four years after that fateful Passover in Jerusalem, both Pilate and Caiaphas–the two men at least officially responsible for Jesus's death–were deposed by the Roman legate in Syria for failing to keep order within Jerusalem. The unpopular "reforms" that Caiaphas had imposed on the Temple–and which apparently had prompted Jesus's violent protest–were reversed. And the small core of Jesus's followers, who had scattered frightened and confused at his Crucifixion, were by then a rapidly growing sect whose astounding message of a risen Messiah was spreading through the synagogues of the region.
Within a few years, a former Pharisee named Saul of Tarsus would carry that message to the commercial towns of Asia Minor and to the imperial city of Rome, where increasing numbers of followers would be drawn into the ranks of this evolving movement. The Roman destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 would deprive Christianity of its Judaic "mother church" and hasten its transmutation from a Jewish sect to a distinctly gentile religion. Yet after 2,000 years, buffeted by the sometimes brutal tides of history, it remains as it was in the beginning–a faith rooted in the life and teachings of an enigmatic Jewish rabbi whose vision of God's kingdom and whose death on a Roman cross would change the world.



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