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ARTICLE
NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 2.4  Sorting fact from mythology in the trials and death of Jesus The mystery of the naked man — a metaphor for the fleeing from Jesus? We are told that with the cooperation of Judas Iscariot (the only known non-Galilean among the apostles) the Jewish civil guard was sent in force to seize Jesus at night with the minimum of publicity. When Jesus' enemies took hold of him there was apparently a brief skirmish during which Peter rashly wielded a sword. It is telling that the panic was so great, "A young man who followed him had nothing on but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the cloth in their hands and ran away naked." All Semitic people were prudish and most still are very modest and were always careful to avoid exposing themselves, even keeping their loincloths on when they washed at the wells solely in male company. That the youth was so scantily clad creates another mystery. It indicates a warm night, not likely at the time of Passover.
The naked young man may just be a Midrashic creation. Raymond E. Brown hypothesized through ten pages of his book The Death of the Messiah, about the identity of the young man and the meaning of the text. He concluded that the young man was a would-be disciple whose "attempt to follow Jesus ... is a miserable failure... The moment of Jesus' passion is an eschatological battle with evil. Amos (2:16) warns what can happen under the pressures of such a time: 'The bravest warriors will run away naked that day.' If such can happen to the stout of heart, why be surprised when it happens to this would-be follower who was not prepared for the trial? During the ministry an enthusiastic would-be disciple (the rich man] left when he heard how demanding discipleship was (Mark 10:17-22); the failure of the would-be disciple at the end of Jesus' life is even greater." And Brown notes a further contrast: Earlier Peter and his friends left everything to follow Jesus; now a young man leaves everything to flee from Jesus. It may just be a metaphor. Jesus was taken away and shortly thereafter Peter was cravenly denying any connection with him. However, if this legend has any veracity at all, a desire on Peter's part to protect his wife, daughter and extended family, may have been a strong motivation. Keeping chickens was forbidden in Jerusalem, thus the cockcrow reference is to the beginning of the fourth watch when the signal known as gallicinium (cock-crowing) was given by a bugle call. No eyewitnesses of the trials and execution… Paul tells us that all the apostles and disciples abandoned Jesus. Thus there were no eyewitnesses of the trials and the execution recounted much later with such detail in the Gospels. Immediately after his arrest, we are told, Jesus was interviewed by the influential ex-high priest Annas, father-in-law of Caiaphas. But experts are divided about the nature of the extremely improbable inquiry claimed to have been convened before the full Sanhedrin, which would never have met at night, especially at the time of the Passover. Some believe that the Sanhedrin was anxious to save Jesus from execution but that he spoiled any chance of it being able to do so by refusing to deny that he was the expected Messiah, an offense for which Pilate could execute him. The High Priest is said to have torn his clothes as a sign of mourning at Jesus' obstinate attitude and impending death. But had Jesus committed grave blasphemy, punishable by death under Jewish law, the whole assembly and not just the High Priest would have torn their clothes, something the Gospel authors, so far removed from Jewish custom, were unaware of. Christian scholars in the past, struggling for explanations, came up with a far-fetched theory that the Jewish authorities were willing, at times, to placate the Romans by handing over a religious criminal, a scapegoat, considered of little importance, a policy which pleased the Romans without harming Judaism. But Jewish historians disclaim any knowledge of a procedure like the Barabbas incident reported in the three synoptics, and no evidence for such a practice has ever been discovered in Jewish or Roman sources. As Bishop Spong noted in his book Liberating the Gospels, "This custom seems to be a gospel invention, a literary device created to help exonerate the Roman governor. The irony of this story is so often missed by readers who do not understand that the name of the murderer who was offered for release, Barabbas, literally meant son of God (bar, son, and Abba, father or God)." Later mythologising, including by Ann Catherine Emmerich, Clemens Bretano and Mel Gibson…
The episode has been soundly discredited, as have all the incidents reported of Jesus' trials and passion, despite Mel Gibson's celebrated movie based on the dubious Gospel descriptions, and the visions of a nineteenth-century mostly illiterate German nun, Ann Catherine Emmerich, beatified by Pope John Paul II, October 3rd, 2004. At age thirty-eight Emmerich began to manifest stigmata, starting with a circle of wounds around her head, followed by wounds on her hands and feet and the imprint of a cross on her chest. The Romantic poet Clemens Brentano visited her bedside over a five-year period, taking notes while she claimed to mentally travel back in time, becoming a spectator at Jesus' crucifixion, describing the scene with a cinematic eye for detail that the Gospel writers cannot match. In 1833, nine years after Emmerich's death, Brentano published the nun's visions as The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The book was famous throughout Europe for much of the nineteenth century. When Emmerich was first put forward for beatification, in the nineteentwenties, Church examiners concluded that Brentano, not Emmerich, was the author of most of her visions, and that they were literary inventions, not divine revelations. Sadducee animosity… According to the most influential theory about Jesus' appearance before the Sanhedrin, the Sadducee members were determined to put an end to the mission of Jesus that had attacked their own authority and attitudes, and condemned him for his, to them, blasphemous claim that he could forgive sins. Since Jews regarded the forgiveness of sins as the prerogative of God alone, Jesus' claim implied that he regarded himself as divine and thus a blasphemer against Jewish monotheism. Under Jewish law the penalty for blasphemy was death. But since this power had been removed from the Sanhedrin by Pilate, they had to press the Roman capital offense, namely that he claimed to be the Messiah, the King of the Jews. Jesus' reported cures and miracles smacked of magic and necromancy, condemned alike by Roman and Jewish law. But the most likely reason for Sadducee animosity seems to have been his condemnation of their monopoly of the sale of sacrificial animals in the Temple, and even more dangerously, his declaration of intent to replace the flesh and blood sacrifices with ritual meals similar to the Passover service. But this latter belief flies in the face of Jesus' immediate follower's continued faithful attendance at the Temple, unless they went there solely to pray and shunned the sacrifices. But the whole episode is extremely suspect and most likely never happened. Herod Antipas, king of Galilee, was in Jerusalem for the Passover Festival, so Pilate tried to pass the case on to him, as Jesus was a Galilean; although the charges as formulated were more relevant to Pilate's Judaea. Antipas, after questioning Jesus, sent him straight back to the Roman governor. He had succeeded in ridding his province of Jesus and certainly didn't want to be concerned with him again. Pilate's job-description Procurator meant financial officer. and his tax gatherers, following standard practice, collected from the people twice the amount remitted to Rome. Disgruntled at having to travel from his comfortable seaside palace to oversee crowd control during the Passover festival, he was faced with a prisoner who either remained silent, or answered his questions with extreme ambiguity. It is not surprising that Pilate concluded that Jesus' refusal to deny his Kingship of the Jews was a sufficient demonstration of his treasonable intentions for him to condemn the prisoner, as he had done with many other Jews charged with sedition, by the normal Roman method of crucifixion. Roman politics… It was not a time for Pilate to be weak. His patron in Rome, the devious Sejanus had fallen. Sejanus might have become Emperor had not Tiberius been even more devious. Pilate's position had become tenuous and he needed scapegoats to establish his loyalty to the Emperor. In every little rebel, every street-corner orator, the frightened Tiberius saw another Sejanus plotting to cast him down from his throne. Anyone who made himself a king stood opposed to the emperor, and Pilate is not likely to have equivocated, seeing in Jesus a real danger to the status quo. Any Messianic claim was a powerful stimulant to Roman oppression.
Pilate's knowledge of Messianic hopes was that of a sardonic observer of the many varieties of oriental religion and superstition. He was familiar with the idea of a sacred king, sacrificed in the spring to turn away the wrath of the powers of heaven, of the old year slain to bring in the new in peace and prosperity. He was also familiar with the idea of the New Year emerging out of the tomb in victory at the conclusion of a festival in the spring. The crowning with thorns was an appropriate jest in the eyes of the Romans showing contempt alike for the victim and his accusers. According to Matthew, the whole cohort, some six hundred soldiers, gave Jesus a brutal mock coronation. When calm prevailed, the idle cohort had nothing to do and frequently seized petty criminals and rebels to vent their rage by humiliating, mocking and torturing them, as latter-day soldiers did at Abu Ghraib. To put a guard over the tomb of a sacrificed king was also apt to such an occasion and, like the coronation, performed in mockery. It is not altogether improbable that the guards slept the sleep of the drunken. Our picture of the Crucifixion: how faithful to reality? The representation of Jesus nailed to the cross by his hands and feet does not come from the Gospels but from later Christian interpretation of such texts as "They will look on one whom they have pierced," in the prophecy of Zechariah. More often a victim was tied to the crossbar, not nailed. If the hands were nailed, it was through the wrists, not through the palms. Death came by suffocation, not from loss of blood and some victims lasted two or three days on the cross. There was no need always to fix the feet to the upright post but it seems that a peg was sometimes driven between the victim's legs to give some support and thus prolong the agony. In 1968 the remains of a man crucified in his mid-thirties were discovered north of Jerusalem with a seven-inch nail still embedded in the heel. The state of the bones indicated that the condemned man's arms were outstretched and that his feet had been placed sideways, with the nail driven through a small block of wood and then through both heels into the cross. The wood block would have prevented the feet from coming free as the wound ripped and enlarged. Contrary to most representations, the knees were bent. Crucifixion was the most contemptuous form of execution reserved for slaves and people of low class. Eventually Christianity was to find symbolic value in it, but at the time it was a humiliating disgrace and early Christians were laughed at because their founder had been crucified. To the first Christians it was a shameful embarrassment that had to be explained away. The Book of Deuteronomy states, "One who has been hanged (on a tree) is accursed of God". For any Jew this was a decisive argument against Jesus' being the Messiah. In Hans Kung's words, "His death on the cross was a fulfillment of the curse of the law". Crucifixion was no less disgusting to the Romans themselves. "The very name of the cross should never come near the body of a Roman citizen, nor even enter into his thoughts, his sight, his hearing." That is what Cicero (106-43 BCE) declared in a speech at the Roman Forum, defending a centurion accused of crucifying Roman citizens. The dating of the Crucifixion…
Oxbridge Professor Dr Colin Humphreys believes that a lunar eclipse accompanied the crucifixion of Jesus. The Prophet Joel's observation (Joel 2:31) about the moon turning to blood is quoted by St. Peter (Acts 2:20) apropos the crucifixion, and the moon does turn red in eclipses, because that is the color of the refracted sunlight that reaches it. The only lunar eclipse at Passover-time visible from Judaea during Pontius Pilate's tenure as governor was on Friday, April 3, 33 CE. The moon was first visible from Jerusalem that day at 6.20 pm, with about a fifth of its disc eclipsed (and turned "into blood"), and the eclipse ended half an hour later. That Friday was also Passover. Scholars who favor other dates, such as 30 and 36, argue that the Christians were a little lax about prophecy: they tended to suppose that if a prophet had said something was going to happen, and if the moment for fulfillment was in the past, then it must have happened, whether there was written confirmation or not. The saying attributed to Jesus predicting the destruction (and rebuilding) of the Temple may have played a part in his followers Messianic beliefs, if the prophecy was not an after-the-event invention by the evangelists. Josephus tells us of another prophet, Jesus, son of Ananias, who announced the imminent fall of the Temple. He was handed over by the Jews to the Romans, whipped by them and then set free. The Cross as Christian symbol came in the Seventh Century… It was not until the seventh century that the cross became the normal Christian symbol. To most of the followers of Jesus it seemed that they had been duped and all was lost. Many of them fled the Holy City and denied that they had ever known Jesus. Such disillusionment could only have resulted from an intense early illusionment. Apart from John, the only other followers recorded as accompanying him to crucifixion were his mother and some of his female companions. This is in the later gospels. The Gospel of Mark only records three women followers, not his mother. or any of his relatives who are portrayed throughout the Gospel as hostile to his mission. The various accounts contradict the earlier information that there were no witnesses to either trial or crucifixion. Each passion account is almost certainly a completely imaginary reconstruction at a later date of what was thought may have happened.  ARTICLE
NAVIGATION: You are presently looking at Part 2.4 PHOTO CREDITS: Unfortunately I have now lost track of where the main image of Jesus used in the headline came from. A Google search of "Who is Jesus?" shows it at a number of places on the web today. Clicking on any of the other images will take you to the original source.
What are your thoughts on this commentary? You can contribute to the discussion in our forum. ©2008 Tom Lee (Star Concepts LLC) 15633 N. 17* Drive, Phoenix, AZ 85023-3409 |
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