Who Killed Jesus?

John Dominic Crossan

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061978364
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

The death of Jesus is one of the most hotly debated questions in Christianity today. In his massive and highly publicized The Death of the Messiah, Raymond Brown -- while clearly rejecting anti-Semitism -- never questions the essential historicity of the passion stories. Yet it is these stories, in which the Jews decide Jesus' execution, that have fueled centuries of Christian anti-Semitism.

Now, in his most controversial book, John Dominic Crossan shows that this traditional understanding of the Gospels as historical fact is not only wrong but dangerous. Drawing on the best of biblical, anthropological, sociological and historical research, he demonstrates definitively that it was the Roman government that tried and executed Jesus as a social agitator. Crossan also candidly addresses such key theological questions as "Did Jesus die for our sins?" and "Is our faith in vain if there was no bodily resurrection?"

Ultimately, however, Crossan's radical reexamination shows that the belief that the Jews killed Jesus is an early Christian myth (directed against rival Jewish groups) that must be eradicated from authentic Christian faith.

CHAPTER ONE

Crime

In the Territory of Antipas

Herod the Great ruled the entire Jewish homeland for over thirty years with the title King of the Jews. After his death, the Roman emperor Augustus divided his territories, placing Galilee and Perea, areas northwest and east of the Jordan, under his son Herod Antipas with the title of tetrarch, and placing Samaria, Judea, and Idumea, areas west and southwest of the Jordan, under a Roman governor with the title of prefect.

Why did two peasant movements, that of John and that of Jesus, arise in Perea and Galilee rather than in Samaria, Judea, or Idumea? Why did they arise under the Herodian kingling Antipas rather than under his father, Herod the Great, who ruled the entire country from 37 to 4 B.C.E., or under his half-nephew Agrippa I, who ruled the entire country from 41 to 44 C.E.? And, because Antipas ruled between 4 B.C.E. and 39 C.E., why did they arise in the late 20s rather than in any other period of that long reign? Why did two movements, the Baptism movement of John and the Kingdom movement of Jesus, arise in the late 20s of that first common-era century in the two separated regions of Antipas’s territory, John in Perea east of the Jordan and Jesus in Galilee to its northwest? Why precisely there, why exactly then?

This Land Belongs to God

The Roman world was an aristocratic society, a preindustrial empire in which the peasantry produced a very large agricultural surplus. But, as in any agrarian empire, a tiny minority of political and religious elites, along with their supporters and retainers, held the peasantry at subsistence level and thereby obtained levels of luxury those exploited and oppressed peasants could hardly even imagine. The Roman Empire, however, was no longer a traditional but rather a commercialized agrarian empire, and the Jewish peasantry was being pushed into debt and displaced from its holdings at higher than normal rates as land became, under the commercializing Roman economy, less an ancestral inheritance never to be abandoned and more an entrepreneurial commodity rapidly to be exploited. In a traditional or uncommercialized agrarian empire, business or investment intrudes minimally if at all between aristocrats and peasants. There exists almost a steady state situation in which peasants produce and aristocrats take, and it almost looks like an inevitable if not natural process. Peasants resist exploitation, of course, but in the same fatalistic way that they resist other unfortunate but implacable phenomena such as storm, flood, or disease. But with commercialization even the guarantee of owning one’s own familial plot of well-taxed land is gone, and the peasantry, having learned that things can change for the worse, begin to ponder how they might also change for the better, even for the ideal or utopian better. As ancient commercialization, let alone modern industrialization, intrudes into an agrarian and aristocratic empire, the barometer of possible political rebellion and/or social revolution rises accordingly among the peasantry. That was precisely the situation in the Mediterranean world of the first century. The Roman civil wars, from Julius Caesar against Pompey to Octavius against Antony, had ended with Octavius emerging as the victorious Augustus, and this Augustan Peace opened the Roman Empire to an economic boom. But booms do not boom alike for everyone.

The Jewish peasantry was prone, over and above the resistance expected from any colonial peasantry, to refuse quiet compliance with heavy taxation, subsistence farming, debt impoverishment, and land expropriation. Their traditional ideology of land was enshrined in the ancient scriptural laws. Just as God’s people were to rest on the seventh or Sabbath Day, so God’s land was to rest on the seventh or Sabbath Year:

For six years you shall sow your land and gather in its yield; but the seventh year you shall let it rest and lie fallow, so that the poor of your people may eat; and what they leave the wild animals may eat. You shall do the same with your vineyard, and with your olive orchard. (Exodus 23:10–11)

When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a sabbath for the Lord. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard, and gather in their yield; but in the seventh year there shall be a sabbath of complete rest for the land, a sabbath for the Lord: you shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. (Leviticus 25:2–4)

On that seventh or Sabbath Year, moreover, Jewish debts were to be remitted and Jewish slaves were to be released.

Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts. And this is the manner of the remission: every creditor shall remit the claim that is held against a neighbor, not exacting it of a neighbor who is a member of the community, because the Lord’s remission has been proclaimed. Of a foreigner you may exact it, but you must remit your claim on whatever any member of your community owes you….

If a member of your community, whether a Hebrew man or a Hebrew woman, is sold to you and works for you six years, in the seventh year you shall set that person free. And when you send a male slave out from you a free person, you shall not send him out empty-handed. Provide liberally out of your flock, your threshing floor, and your wine press, thus giving to him some of the bounty with which the Lord your God has blessed you. (Deuteronomy 15:1–3, 12–14)

Finally, there was even a Jubilee Year, the year after seven sets of Sabbath Years. In that fiftieth year all expropriated lands and even village houses, but not city ones, were to revert to their original or traditional owners:

You shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family….

But if there is not sufficient means to recover it [a piece of property], what was sold shall remain with the purchaser until the year of jubilee; in the jubilee it shall be released, and the property shall be returned. (Leviticus 25:10, 28)

It is hard to know now what is ideal and what is real, what is ideological and what is actual in those decrees. Most likely the Jubilee Year was not implemented at all by the first century, but the Sabbath Year was probably still more or less enforced. My point, however, is that those ancient laws precisely as ideal vision or ideological promise refuse to see debt, slavery, or land expropriation simply as standard business transactions and normal economic activities. The land is a divine possession, not a negotiable commodity, or, as Leviticus 25:23 put it, “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants.” The Jewish peasantry, therefore, had a long tradition in flat contradiction with a first-century boom economy that saw land accumulation as sensible business practice and debt foreclosure as the best and swiftest way to accomplish it.

Lower Galilee’s 470 square miles are divided by four alternating hills and valleys running in a generally west-east direction. It is rich in cereals on the valley floors and in vines and olives on the hillside slopes. But the Galilean peasantry had their own very particular pressures at the time of John and of Jesus, and this gives an answer to that opening question: Why did those two movements arise under Antipas in the late 20s? Sepphoris, about four miles northwest of Nazareth, and Tiberias, about twenty miles northeast of Nazareth, alternated as capitals of Galilee in the first century. Sepphoris was burned and its population enslaved as the Romans reestablished control over those several sections of the Jewish homeland that had broken into open rebellion at the death of Herod the Great in 4 B.C.E. Herod Antipas rebuilt the city almost immediately. But then, around 19 C.E., he finished another city on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, named it after the Roman emperor Tiberius, and transferred his capital there from Sepphoris. But two new cities of about twenty-four thousand population apiece, in close proximity and also in administrative competition, must have increased demands and exactions on their local peasantry for both food production and investment opportunity. New cities, as mentioned earlier, are not good news for the local peasantry, at least not as a whole—especially where, in ancient law, the land belongs to God.

Crossing over Jordan

What do we know about John’s vision and program? For what crime was he executed by Herod Antipas? Our sources are the New Testament gospels and Josephus, but both must be read critically and combined carefully. Josephus does not admit that John was an apocalyptic visionary announcing the imminent and avenging advent of God. And the New Testament gospels do not admit that it was God rather than Jesus whose advent John was announcing.

Antipas abandoned his first wife, a daughter of King Aretas of the desert Nabateans east of the Jordan, to marry Herodias, his half-brother’s wife. And John was executed, according to one account, for reprimanding that action:

For Herod himself had sent men who arrested John, bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, because Herod had married her. For John had been telling Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” (Mark 6:17–18)

But another account puts that story in a wider context, which shows that there was much more than a moral reprimand involved in John’s crime. Here is Josephus’s description of John the Baptist:

Herod had put him [John, surnamed the Baptist] to death, though he was a good man and had exhorted the Jews to lead righteous lives, to practice justice towards their fellows and piety towards God, and so doing to join in baptism. In his view this was a necessary preliminary if baptism was to be acceptable to God. They must not employ it to gain pardon for whatever sins they committed, but as a consecration of the body implying that the soul was already thoroughly cleansed by right behaviour.

When others too joined the crowds about him, because they were aroused to the highest degree by his sermons, Herod became alarmed. Eloquence that had so great an effect on mankind might lead to some form of sedition, for it looked as if they would be guided by John in everything that they did. Herod decided therefore that it would be much better to strike first and be rid of him before his work led to an uprising, than to await for an upheaval, get involved in a difficult situation and see his mistake…. John, because of Herod’s suspicions, was brought in chains to Machaerus…and there put to death. (Jewish Antiquities 18:116–119)

I divided that unit into two separate paragraphs to emphasize how strangely they go together and how difficult it is to see what exactly was John’s crime. The reason is that Josephus does not want us, or maybe even himself, to see it too accurately. But, no matter how much Josephus obscures it, John was offering a radical alternative to the Temple cult as an apocalyptic visionary announcing the cataclysmic advent of God to restore an evil world to justice and holiness.

In that first paragraph John seems to preside over a convocation of otherworldly saints who, having already achieved spiritual perfection by themselves, come to John just for physical purification. But Josephus’s apologetic insistence on what John was not doing lets us see exactly what he was doing: he was offering a free and populist alternative to the Temple’s purification process for sin. That is the first point that Josephus, himself a Temple priest before its destruction, wishes to obscure about John’s program.

In that second paragraph, the tone changes completely. We now hear about crowds aroused to the highest degree by John’s sermons and about eloquence potentially leading to some form of sedition, uprising, or upheaval. How did we get from select saints to dangerous crowds? What is Josephus hiding now? Before proceeding, recall that the Roman Empire had God’s approval as far as Josephus was concerned. Furthermore, he had no sympathy with Jewish messianic or apocalyptic hopes and expectations. Those prophecies were fulfilled in Vespasian and his Flavian dynasty:

What more than all else incited them [the Jews] to the [First Roman] war was an ambiguous oracle…found in their sacred scriptures, to the effect that at that time one from their country would become ruler of the world. This they understood to mean someone of their own race, and many of their wise men went astray in their interpretation of it. The oracle, however, in reality signified the sovereignty of Vespasian who was proclaimed Emperor on Jewish soil. (Jewish War 6.312–13)

The second feature Josephus deliberately obscures about John’s program is that those sermons were dangerous apocalyptic promises announcing the imminent arrival of an avenging God. That, of course, is why they aroused his audience, and that, of course, is why Antipas struck.

This apocalyptic scenario is very clear in the New Testament accounts of John’s message, although those texts now presume that he prepares for Jesus rather than God:

You offspring of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming fury? Change your ways if you have changed your mind. Don’t say, “We have Abraham as our father.” I am telling you, God can raise up children for Abraham from these stones. Even now the ax is aimed at the root of the trees. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire…. I am plunging you in water; but one who is stronger than I is coming, one whose sandals I am not worthy to touch. He will overwhelm you with holy spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into his granary. The chaff he will burn with a fire that no one can put out. (Q Gospel in Matthew 3:7–12="Luke" 3:7–9, 16b–17)

There are, finally, two features that Josephus does not mention but the New Testament accounts affirm. He has nothing about John baptizing in the Jordan and nothing about his location in the desert on its east bank. You might guess that last point because he is taken to the Machaerus fortress in southern Perea, east of the Jordan, but both those points are quite expli...