Jesus the Insurgent

A man is arrested at night, away from crowds, by a detachment acting for the collaborating priesthood of an occupied province. He is handed to the imperial prefect. He is flogged and executed by crucifixion (the penalty Rome reserved for sedition and for slave revolt) between two men the earliest Gospel calls lēstai, the word Josephus uses for insurgents. Above his head the execution party posts the charge: king of the Jews. Two other men associated with him are crucified at the same time, and a third, a man held for an uprising in which people had died, is released instead.

If you knew nothing else, you would say: the state killed a political prisoner. That is not a modern reinterpretation. It is what the documents say, before the theology is applied. This chapter is about what happens when you read them that way.

What we actually have

Honesty about the sources first, because the argument is only as good as they are.

• Paul's letters (c. 50–60 CE) are the earliest Christian writings. They are letters to congregations, they show almost no interest in Jesus's biography, and they were written before any Gospel.
• Mark (c. 70 CE), then Matthew and Luke (c. 80–90), which use Mark and a shared body of sayings material, then John (c. 90–100), which is theologically the most developed. None is a disinterested report; all are written for communities, in Greek, outside Judaea, after the war.
• Josephus mentions Jesus twice. The longer passage has been tampered with by a later Christian hand (no first-century Jewish historian wrote "he was the Christ"), but the scholarly majority holds that a shorter, neutral notice underlies it, and the second, briefer mention of "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, James by name" is widely accepted as authentic.¹
• Tacitus, writing c. 116, records that the founder of the sect was executed under Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilate, a hostile Roman source confirming the manner and authority of the death.²

From this the professional consensus extracts very few certainties. Two of the firmest are that Jesus was baptised by John, and that he was crucified by Roman authority.³ Both are certain for the same unglamorous reason: they embarrassed the later church, which had to explain away a founder who submitted to another preacher and then died as a condemned criminal. Nobody invents that.

The country he came from

Galilee in the 20s CE was a client territory under Herod Antipas, and it was being squeezed. Antipas was building (refounding Sepphoris and constructing an entire new capital at Tiberias), and building was paid for out of the countryside. On top of Antipas's taxation sat tithes and Temple dues, and beneath it all sat the ordinary arithmetic of smallholder agriculture: a bad year means a loan, a loan means collateral, and collateral means the land. The consolidation of small plots into large estates worked by tenants and day-labourers is the economic weather of the period.⁴

Now read the parables again. Debt cancelled and debt enforced. Day-labourers waiting in the square for someone to hire them. An absentee owner and his tenants. A steward falsifying the accounts. A rich man and a beggar at the gate. These are not timeless spiritual metaphors that happen to use agricultural furniture. They are the recognisable subject matter of a rural audience in an over-taxed client kingdom, and the striking thing is which side of each transaction the storyteller is standing on.

"Kingdom" was not a metaphor

The central term of Jesus's preaching in the earliest layer of the tradition is basileia tou theou: the kingdom, reign, or empire of God. Modern readers hear an interior or otherworldly state. First-century hearers in a Roman province heard a claim about who rules, made in a world where there was an answer to that question and his portrait was on the coins.⁵

The content of the announcement is consistently an inversion. The poor are the blessed; the hungry will be filled; the first will be last; the rulers of the nations lord it over people and it will not be so among you; the mighty are pulled down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up. This is standard Jewish apocalyptic-prophetic language, and its political meaning in an occupied province required no decoding.

Two episodes sharpen the point.

The tribute question. Asked whether it is lawful to pay the tax to Caesar, Jesus asks to be shown the coin and asks whose image is on it. The usual reading (a tidy separation of church and state) is almost certainly backwards. The questioner has to produce an imperial coin in the Temple precinct, which is itself compromising; and to a Jewish audience the sting is in the second half, since the earth and its fullness are the Lord's, leaving Caesar's share rather smaller than Caesar thought. It is an evasion in form and a provocation in content, which is why the sources describe the questioners as attempting a trap.⁶

The entry into Jerusalem. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan point out what a first-century pilgrim would have seen that week: two processions entering the city from opposite sides. From the west, the prefect arriving from Caesarea with cavalry and standards, as Roman governors did at Passover to deter exactly the kind of trouble Passover invited. From the east, a Galilean preacher on a donkey, staging (deliberately, quoting Zechariah) the arrival of a king who comes without a war horse.⁷ This is street theatre performed against an imperial parade, and it is the act of someone who intends to be understood.

The act that got him killed

All four Gospels record the disruption in the Temple: tables overturned, money-changers and sellers of sacrificial animals driven out. In Mark, Matthew and Luke it happens in the last week, and it is immediately followed by the decision of the chief priests to destroy him. E. P. Sanders's argument, now widely accepted, is that this action is the trigger of the whole passion sequence.⁸

To see why, you have to see what the Temple was. It was the religious centre of the nation; it was also the treasury, the seat of the collaborating aristocracy, and the largest single economic institution in Judaea, with a high priest who served at Rome's pleasure. An attack on its commerce (even a symbolic one, even for an hour) was an attack on the point where the occupation and the national religion were joined. And it happened at Passover, the festival commemorating liberation from an earlier empire, with the city packed and the garrison reinforced precisely because Rome knew what Passover in Jerusalem could turn into.

The arrest follows the logic: at night, in a garden outside the city, away from the crowds: the sources say explicitly that they feared the people. That is not how you handle a blasphemer. It is how you handle a man with popular support.

The execution reads the case

Everything about the death is Roman and political.

The penalty. Crucifixion was a status penalty: for slaves, for rebels, for provincials without citizenship. It was designed to be slow, public and humiliating, and it was applied in bulk: two thousand after the disturbances of 4 BCE, hundreds a day during the siege of 70.⁹ Rome did not crucify people for theological error. It crucified them for defying Rome.

The charge. The titulus is the closest thing we have to a court record, and it names a political crime: claiming kingship in a province Rome administered. Its very awkwardness for the later church (a mocking notice, in the Roman voice, of a royal pretension) is the reason to think it is remembered rather than invented.

The company. He is executed alongside two lēstai. The word means bandit, but Josephus routinely uses it for insurgents, and Rome saw no useful difference. The man released in his place is described as held for an uprising in which there had been a killing.

The armed follower. The tradition remembers that at least one companion was carrying a sword and used it. One of the twelve is nicknamed the Zealot; two others carry a nickname meaning "sons of thunder." Whatever the movement was, it was not a debating society and Rome did not mistake it for one.

Then the story is edited

Here is the part that matters most for the rest of this chronicle. Compare the four passion narratives in the order they were written and one thing changes systematically: Rome gets less guilty and the Jewish authorities and crowd get more.

In Mark, Pilate is a governor who yields to pressure. In Matthew, he washes his hands and a crowd calls the blood down on itself and its children. In Luke, he declares the prisoner innocent three times. In John, he is close to a sympathetic figure interrogating a philosopher, and the villains are simply "the Jews."

The trend has an obvious explanation. These texts were written between roughly 70 and 100, for communities inside the Roman empire, in the decades after Rome had crushed the Judaean revolt and imposed a punitive tax on Jews. A movement seeking room to exist under Roman rule had every incentive to explain that its founder's death had been a local misunderstanding rather than a Roman verdict on a Roman charge.¹¹

The consequences ran for nineteen centuries. The charge of deicide, the ghettos, the expulsions, the blood libel, the pogroms and their eventual industrial conclusion all rest on an editorial decision taken by first-century writers under imperial pressure: to move the blame from the empire that did it to the colonised population that did not. It is the earliest example in this chronicle of a pattern that will recur in every chapter: the perpetrator writes the account, and the account outlives the fact.

What this sets up

Hold two things in view as you go on. First, the founder of what became the state religion of Europe was a colonial subject executed by an occupying power as a threat to public order, a fact that European Christendom would spend most of its history not thinking about while doing to others what had been done to him. Second, the editing has already started. Within forty years the movement is adjusting its story to survive inside the empire.

Chapter 4 follows what that adjustment did to the movement itself: the fight between the Jerusalem community led by Jesus's own brother and the diaspora mission of a man who never met him.

Footnotes

1. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities XVIII.63–64 (the Testimonium Flavianum) and XX.200. On the interpolation debate, John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew, vol. 1 (New York: Doubleday, 1991), pp. 56–88. ↩
2. Tacitus, Annals XV.44. ↩
3. See E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 10–11, for the standard list of near-certainties. ↩
4. Sean Freyne, Galilee, Jesus and the Gospels (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988); Richard A. Horsley, Galilee: History, Politics, People (Valley Forge: Trinity Press, 1995). The degree of Galilean immiseration is debated: Morten Hørning Jensen, Herod Antipas in Galilee (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), argues for a milder picture. ↩
5. Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and Empire (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), ch. 3; John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2007). ↩
6. Mark 12:13–17; Psalm 24:1. ↩
7. Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2006), pp. 2–5; Zechariah 9:9. ↩
8. E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), pp. 61–76. Sanders reads the action as prophetic symbolism of the Temple's destruction rather than a "cleansing" of corruption. ↩
9. Martin Hengel, Crucifixion (London: SCM, 1977); Josephus, Jewish Antiquities XVII.295; The Jewish War V.449–451. ↩
10. S. G. F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967); Reza Aslan, Zealot (New York: Random House, 2013). For the critique of the "Zealot" category itself (the organised party may not have existed until the war of 66), see Richard A. Horsley, "The Zealots: Their Origin, Relationships and Importance in the Jewish Revolt," Novum Testamentum 28:2 (1986), pp. 159–192. ↩
11. Paula Fredriksen, Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (New York: Knopf, 1999), esp. the treatment of the trial narratives; and John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus? (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), on the passion narratives and the history of Christian antisemitism. ↩