Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

THE CLIMAX OF JESUS' MISSION §17.2
17.2. Why Was Jesus Executed?
One of the flaws of the most characteristic Liberal portrayal of Jesus was the unlikelihood
that anyone would have wanted to crucify such an attractive moral teacher. 106
In recent questing it has been more widely recognized that a test of any hypothesis'
viability is whether it provides a satisfactory answer to the question, Why was Jesus
crucified? To be 'historical' the historical Jesus must have been crucifiable. 107 There
is also no doubt that primary responsibility for Jesus' execution must be laid at the
door of the Roman authorities, Pilate in particular (§17.1e), and that Jesus was
executed as a threat (messianic pretender) to Rome's hold over Israel (§ 15.3a). But
the Jesus tradition also records that the move to have Jesus executed was initiated
from the Jewish side of the uneasy alliance between the Jewish authorities and
the Roman governor. And although the Jewish responsibility has been exaggerated
in the course of transmission (§17.1e), there is no good reason to doubt the basic
facts of Jesus' arrest by Jewish Temple police (§17.Id) and subsequent hearing
before a council convened by the high priest Caiaphas for the purpose (§ 15.2a). 108
So our question still stands, Why was Jesus arrested and 'handed over' to Pilate?
Typical of older attempts to answer this question was the assumption that
Jesus' challenge to the law was the crucial break-point between Jesus and the
Jewish authorities. 109 The corollary was that the authorities in question were
principally the Pharisees — a deduction which followed naturally from Mark
3.6, 110 and which could easily be bolstered by reports of other hostile encounters
with the Pharisees (particularly the diatribe of Matthew 23). That whole hypothesis
has largely crumbled away as a result of Sanders's onslaught. Although he
overstates his case, he has so undermined the two principal supports that they can
hardly bear much if any of the weight formerly placed on them: the Pharisees
were not in a position of power to determine Jesus' fate; 111 and Jesus' disputations
regarding the Torah and current halakhah were unlikely to have been as radical
or as offensive as later Christian opinion has assumed. 112
106. We may recall the famous William Temple quotation (chapter 4 above, at n. 110).
107. A point variously emphasized by Sanders, Horsley, and Wright (see, e.g., above,
chapter 8 n. 7).
108. On Caiaphas, including the discovery of an ossuary inscribed with the name 'Joseph
bar Caiapha', see Flusser, Jesus 195-206; Crossan and Reed, Excavating Jesus 240-42.
109. Theissen and Merz cite J. Roloff as typical of traditional Protestant exegesis: 'Jesus
died because of the convictions of his Jewish opponents, because in all his behaviour he had rebelled
against the will of God in the law which they had advocated . . .' (Historical Jesus 464).
Becker seems still to want to go down this path (Jesus 335).
110. Cited above, § 14.4a.
111. Pace Chilton: 'The Sanhedrin, dominated by the pesky Pharisees' (Rabbi Jesus
220); but see again Sanders, Jesus 312-17; also Judaism 458-90.
112. See above, §§9.3a(l) and 14.4.
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