Committed Critic

The Old Testament has many references to gods other than Yahweh, and scholars have spent more than a century trying to sort them all out. Baal is one of the Canaanite gods, mentioned often in the OT without much explanation; the Bible usually only cares that he was an idol that many Israelites worshiped.

Though the OT doesn’t tell us much about the Canaanite’s religion, the people originally writing and reading the OT did know more, and so it can help us understand what’s going on if we’re familiar with the stories the Canaanites told about Baal. Here is a synopsis of perhaps the most popular account. I leave out several characters, but I try to capture the heart of the story:

The story begins with El, the head of the pantheon, pictured as an old many with a grey beard sitting upon a throne as judge of the gods. While the gods pay El respect as a figurehead, his son Baal is the mighty warrior, the storm god and “Rider of the Clouds,” the giver of rain to the earth, and the one whom the gods actually obey.

But El also has another son named Sea, who is alienated from the royal family. At one of the royal feasts, while the gods eat and drink, Sea sends messengers to seize Baal so he can usurp his throne. Most of the gods are terrified, and El quickly acquiesces, ready to hand over his son.

But Baal refuses with an impassioned speech: “Lift up your heads, O gods! –– off your knees, off your princely thrones –– And let me answer Sea’s messengers!” Baal strikes the messengers, then enlists the help of a craftsman named Kotaru to carve two maces for the fight against his brother. Baal finds Sea, strikes him dead, and maintains his princely throne.

In celebration, Baal throws a great feast, after which he demands that a temple be built for him on Mount Zaphon, the great mountain to the north of Canaan. After clearing the idea with El and the chief goddess, the craftsman Kotaru is summoned again, and Baal gets his temple. In celebration, he hosts yet another feast, and the gods eat and drink yet again.

However, feeling proud of his new temple, Baal sends a boastful message to Death, who is king of the underworld and another rival to Baal’s power. Death replies with a threat: “Invite me, Baal…and eat bread with my brothers, drink wine with my kin! Have you forgotten, Baal, that I can pierce you through?” Baal is frightened and backs off his boast, but Death soon finds him and kills him anyway.

Baal’s sister Anatu, distraught at his death, wonders how the world will survive with the rain-god dead. While the other gods try in vain to find an apt replacement to fill Baal’s throne, Anatu goes instead to Death for vengeance. She cuts, burns, and grinds Death to pieces, setting Baal free to return to life.

Though Death somehow survives the drubbing, Baal reemerges as ruler of the gods, taking revenge on the rest of his foes and thwarting Death’s plots against him. The story ends with Baal on his rightful throne as ruler of the gods.

This story raises some helpful points for understanding what mythology is:

• The names of the gods are often symbolic: Sea and Death make obvious appearances in the translation I’ve used here; also, El means God and Baal means Lord.
• Symbolism is key for the story. Baal is the storm-god who brings rain to the land of Canaan, which allows the crops to grow so people can feed their children. Sea is a sort of chaos-monster; the ocean has sea-monsters like Leviathan and waves that sink ships. For Baal to conquer Sea means for the powers of order (e.g., predictable crop cycles) to conquer the powers of chaos, so that people can live safe lives.
• The other key point of symbolism is that Baal is killed by Death, but he only stays dead for a time. In an ancient agricultural society, people had to reckon with life and death every year, and the reality of winters––when crops didn’t grow and the land seemed to die––brought fear and uncertainty. The Baal myth reminds the people that even though a time of death (winter) comes each year, the rain-god only stays dead for a time, after which he comes to life again in spring.
• I don’t know how seriously people took this as a literal story, but its purpose was religious, not historical. It helped the Canaanites understand the god they worshipped, not specific historical events.
• Certainly Baal doesn’t live up to the ideas of God in Jewish and Christian scriptures –– for example, that he is just, unchanging, and intimately concerned with people. The portrait of Baal corresponds instead to something the Canaanites perceived: that whoever provided rain was fickle and inconsistent.

The Hebrew scriptures are generally more interested in what God does in history than in myth, which is why the exodus from Egypt receives so much attention. However, the OT also uses mythical images borrowed from Israel’s Canaanite neighbors.

In some passages, the OT texts seem to “demythologize” these myths, at least in part, so that Yahweh isn’t actually fighting a war against other gods. An example of this is Genesis 1: Yahweh brings order (land) out of the watery chaos, but he doesn’t have to fight any Sea-God in order to do it. And rather than describing Yahweh warring against astral deities, Genesis 1 describes how Yahweh created the sun, moon, and stars as objects, such that they’re aren’t gods at all, as other peoples thought them to be.

In other passages, however, OT scriptures use the myths themselves as apparent descriptions of what Yahweh actually did. An example is Psalm 74:12-14: “Yet God my King is from old, working salvation in the earth. You divided Sea by your might; you broke the heads of the dragons in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan.” Here God basically takes on the role of Baal from the epic above: reigning as king, fighting Sea and the dragons within him. The psalmist also applies this myth to the historical situation (he’s asking why God has allowed Jerusalem to be conquered), but he seems to have no problem with describing Yahweh using myth.

The point here isn’t that the OT is a collection of “myths,” which most people would assume to simply mean stories that aren’t true. Rather, myth is a literary genre used to argue something theological, not to recount something historical. We should consider that some authors can use myths that aren’t meant to be taken literally in order to paint images of their gods, and that in fact our Bible uses some of those images to describe our God, Yahweh.

See also my earlier post on the names of Baal and Yahweh.

My previous post compared Jesus’ trial before Pilate in Mark and Luke, and I tried to explain how Luke, who was probably basing his story on Mark’s version, changes the scene to make a different point than Mark made with it.

Here I’ll add Matthew to the mix (Mt 27:11-26):

Now Jesus was standing before the governor. And the governor asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?” Jesus said, “You say so.” And when he was being accused by the chief priests and the elders, he didn’t answer anything. Then Pilate said to him, “Don’t you hear all the things they’re testifying against you?” But he didn’t answer him with even a word, to Pilate’s great amazement.

At feast-time, it was the governor’s practice to set free for the crowd one prisoner whom they wanted released. At that time they were holding a notorious prisoner named Jesus Barabbas. Pilate gathered them together and said to them, “Which one do you want me to set free for you, Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus who is called messiah?”

While he was seated on the platform, his wife sent him a message saying, “Have nothing to do with that innocent man; I had a very painful dream about him today.”

But the chief priests and the elders convinced the crowd to ask for Barabbas, and to execute Jesus. So when the governor asked them, “Which of the two do you want me to set free for you?”, they said, “Barabbas.” Pilate said to them, “Then what should I do with Jesus who is called messiah?” They all said, “Let him be crucified.” [Pilate] said, “But what wrong did he commit?” But they shouted louder, “Let him be crucified!”

Now when Pilate saw that he was accomplishing nothing, but that it was becoming a riot, he took water and washed off his hands in the presence of the crowd and said, “I am innocent of this man’s blood––see for yourself.”

And the whole people answered, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children.”

(For all three accounts in parallel columns, see this page.)

Matthew keeps the story a lot closer to Mark’s account than Luke does, though he does add the part about Pilate’s wife, which is absent from the other Gospels. Because of her dream, we have a stronger sense that Pilate actually wants to save Jesus’ life, though Matthew doesn’t make this nearly as clear as Luke, who has Pilate practically beg the crowd to acquit Jesus.

The other major change in Matthew comes at the end of this passage, and I think it shows us what Matthew finds most important about this part of the story. Unlike any of the other Gospels, Pilate washes his hands in front of the crowd, saying that he is innocent of Jesus’ blood; then the crowd of people cry out, “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children.”

MATTHEW AND THE JEWS

This is a climactic scene, and scholars rightly suspect that Matthew’s angle on the story tells us something he holds very dear. The theme of blood shows us the point: Matthew wants to be very specific about where blame is assigned for Jesus’ death.

I wrote recently about how this passage has often been used by Christians to blame “the Jews” for Jesus’ crucifixion, and at times Christians have turned against Jews in violence for this reason. But the anti-Jewish reading falls apart, especially since practically everyone in the story (including Jesus, of course) is Jewish, and the only Gentiles we see are the Romans who carry out the crucifixion.

Probably, Matthew considered himself a Jew, and he believed Jesus really was the Messiah for the Jews. The Old Testament has a long tradition of prophets proclaiming violent punishment against Israel and Jerusalem for their faithlessness, and it is likely that that’s what Matthew has in mind here. The people who accept Jesus’ blood-guilt before Pilate are not “the Jews” as a race or religion, but rather the people of Jerusalem at that time, and Matthew (writing perhaps in the 80’s A.D.) thinks that the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 A.D. is Jerusalem’s punishment for rejecting its messiah. That doesn’t mean they stop being God’s people, just that they’re punished for disobedience.

There may even be some irony intended in the story: if Matthew is thinking of the Christian belief whereby Jesus’ blood cleanses us from our sins, then the story could both demonstrate Jerusalem’s guilt and foreshadow their forgiveness as seen, e.g., in Acts 2.

However, there’s another side to the matter: Matthew also believes that Jesus and his apostles are the leaders that Israel must now answer to, so Jesus’ teachings do effectively turn most of Israel into apostates (i.e., outsiders), since they reject Jesus’ teachings and lordship. This is a problem that Paul wrestles with in Romans 9–11, and it’s still a theological problem today. (Paul thinks all Israel will eventually believe in Christ [see Rom 11:11, 23, 25-26], but that doesn’t seem to have happened.)

In any event, from a Christian theological perspective, Matthew’s general view makes good sense: Jesus was the Jewish messiah who called all Israel to repentance and obedience, after which he invited Gentiles throughout the world to join the people of God as well.

WHAT CAN COMPARISONS GET US?

Redaction criticism is the academic term for studying how authors like Matthew and Luke copied certain parts of their Gospels from earlier works (especially Mark) but changed parts of the source text to suit their own message.

The reason redaction criticism is so important is that it helps highlight the arguments that the different Gospels are making about Jesus, since we can see where they went out of their way to change the text they used as their source for the story. It helps us draw conclusions about the authors and the churches they were writing for, which can also help us find where the author wants us to be surprised, angry, or amused by the story he tells.

For some contexts, I suppose it is fine to conflate the different stories; however, my conviction here is that these three Gospels want to tell us different things about what Jesus’ trial means, and that we are meant to understand all three of them as different insights into our faith.

In these two posts, I have suggested three very different points that the Gospels make using Jesus’ confrontation with Pilate. Each serves as a trial scene, but not exactly the kind we would expect:

• Mark emphasizes the injustice of the envious high priests manipulating the scornful and cynical Roman governor so that Jesus gets crucified by getting caught in the middle of an unjust system. In effect, it is the world that is found guilty, for no one in Mark’s Gospel (including the disiples) passes the test of believing in Jesus properly.
• Luke puts Jesus on trial before the readers of Luke’s Gospel, so that Pilate, Herod, the criminal on the cross, and the centurion by the cross all become witnesses who testify that Jesus is innocent. The jury is Luke’s Gentiles readers, who find Jesus a worthy lord despite his shameful execution.
• Matthew puts the people of Jerusalem on trial, which is ironic since they’re condemning themselves when they think they’re condemning Jesus; Jesus’ unjust punishment is crucifixion, while their just punishment is the destruction of Jerusalem 40 years later. Yet there is the possibility of forgiveness for those who later repent, even though Jerusalem will be destroyed nonetheless.

On the whole, we should compare each Gospel to a stage play rather than a history book. While a history book needs to cover all the facts and acknowledge all the subtleties of history, a play can simplify story-lines and stylize confrontations between characters in order to make us feel things and realize things that we might miss if we were only given facts. This, I’m convinced, is what Mark, Luke, and Matthew have done for us here.

A key idea of Gospel studies is that each author told the story of Jesus in order to emphasize different things about who Jesus was (or is). One way to put it is that the Gospels are works of rhetoric; they don’t just tell a story, they also make an argument.

A great place to see this at work is in the different accounts of Jesus’ trial before Pilate. Here I’ll deal with just Mark and Luke, though all four Gospels are different. Most scholars think Mark was written first, and that Matthew and Luke both copied Mark’s story as the basis for their own––so when we see differences in their stories, Matthew and Luke probably changed Mark for some particular reason.

First, Mark’s account (Mk 15:2-15):

Pilate asked [Jesus], “Are you the king of the Jews?” He answered, “You say so.” Then the chief priests accused him of many things, so Pilate asked him again, “Aren’t you going to answer anything? Do you hear all the things they’re accusing you of?” But Jesus no longer answered anything, to Pilate’s amazement.

At feast-time, [Pilate] typically set free for them one prisoner that they requested, so the crowd came up to him and began to ask him to do what he usually did for them. Pilate, knowing that the chief priests had handed [Jesus] over because of their jealousy of him, answered [the crowd], “Do you want me to set free for you the “King of the Jews”? Now, there was a man named Barabbas, who had been imprisoned with some men who had committed murder during a revolt. So the chief priests stirred up the crowd for him to set free Barabbas for them.

Then Pilate again answered them, “Then what do you want me to do with the one you call the “King of the Jews”? And they again cried out, “Crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “But what wrong has he committed?” But they cried out even more, “Crucify him!” So Pilate, wanting to satisfy the crowd, set free Barabbas for them, and he handed over Jesus to be flogged and crucified.

Now, compare the same story in Luke (Lk 23:2-25):

They began to accuse [Jesus], saying, “We found this man stirring up our nation, and stopping people from paying taxes to Caesar, and saying that he is an anointed king.”

So Pilate asked [Jesus], “Are you the king of the Jews?” He answered, “You say so.” Then Pilate said to the chief priests and the crowds, “I find no charge against this man” But they persisted and said, “He’s been stirring up the people, teaching through all of Judea, beginning in Galilee and coming all the way here.” When Pilate heard this, he asked if the man was a Galilean. When he found out that [Jesus] was from the jurisdiction of Herod, he sent him before Herod, who was in Jerusalem in those days.

When Herod saw Jesus he was very pleased, because he had wanted to see him for some time: he had heard about [Jesus] and hoped to see some sign done by him. [Herod] questioned him at some length, but [Jesus] didn’t answer him anything. The chief priests and the scribes stood there accusing him vehemently; meanwhile Herod, along with his soldiers, belittled him and mocked him, wrapping a purple cloak around him and sending him back to Pilate. That day, Herod and Pilate became friends, while previously they had been enemies.

Pilate called together the chief priests and the rulers and the people and said to them, “You brought me this man as one who was stirring up the people, but I have examined him right in front of you, and I haven’t found any charge against this man such as you have accused him of. And neither has Herod, for he sent him back to us, and look––nothing deserving death has been done by him. I will discipline him and set him free.”

But they cried out together, “Take this one! Set free Barabbas for us!” ([Barabbas] had been thrown into jail because of a certain revolt that had happened in the city and because of a murder.) But again Pilate spoke to them, wanting to set free Jesus. But they cried out, saying, “Cruficy! Crucify him!”

Then a third time he said to them, “But what wrong has he committed? I haven’t found any capital charge against him. So then, I’ll discipline him and set him free.”

But they insisted with loud voices asking for him to be crucified, and their voices prevailed. So Pilate passed judgment that their request be carried out. He set free the man they asked for, who had been thrown into jail because of revolt and murder, but Jesus he handed over to their will.

A couple of parts of the story are almost identical, but Luke has obviously made the story a lot longer with the trial before Herod and with Pilate speaking more to the crowd.

But Luke has also lost something: in Mark, the whole episode with Barabbas is really just a sly attempt by Pilate to embarrass the chief priests (Mk 15:9-10) by getting the crowd to request that Jesus be released while the priests are trying to have him killed. Jesus becomes a pawn in their political game, as the chief priests stir up the crowd to thwart Pilate’s move. Pilate briefly questions whether Jesus has done anything wrong, but he quickly gives in once they shout for crucifixion.

WHY THE DIFFERENCES?

Luke isn’t really interested in this whole exchange, at least not as a battle of wits between Pilate and the chief priests, and in fact he leaves out the explanation of why Pilate would release a prisoner to the crowd in the first place (compare Mk 15:6). Instead, Luke has Pilate declare Jesus’ innocence not just once (as in Mark), but three times.

It’s not that Pilate is being portrayed as a good guy here in Luke, even though he seems to lobby on Jesus’ behalf. If we look at the rest of Luke 23, we see that Jesus’ innocence is enormously important to Luke. Not only does Pilate insist three times that Jesus has done nothing wrong (Lk 23:4, 14, 22), but he also points out that Herod has found no charge against Jesus (Lk 23:15). Then in 23:41 we have one of the criminals on the cross declaring that Jesus has done nothing wrong (a passage that isn’t in Matthew or Mark), and in 23:47 the centurion by the cross declares, “Indeed this man was innocent” (where both Matthew and Luke have the centurion say that Jesus is the son of God).

This amounts to six proclamations of Jesus’ innocence in the span of 46 verses, which seems to be Luke’s way of hammering home a key point. Mark surely agrees that Jesus is innocent, but Luke wants to make it exceedingly clear. Pilate, meanwhile, doesn’t actually come off so well in Luke. While Mark portrays Pilate as not caring much whether Jesus dies or not, Luke makes him adamant that Jesus doesn’t deserve the punishment, which implies that Pilate is just too weak to stand up to the crowd.

We can’t know for sure exactly why Luke put so much emphasis on Jesus’ innocence, but one theory is that Luke wrote for Christians who wanted to defend the legitimacy of their religion in the eyes of sophisticated urban people, much as many Christian apologists do today. The Christian Gospel obviously included the story of Jesus’ death on the cross, which we might compare to being hanged, drawn, and quartered in more recent days. The point is that crucifixion wasn’t just painful, it was above all shameful; Roman skeptics wouldn’t have had a lot of sympathy for someone Rome had executed. So if Jesus was going to die a shameful death, it needed to be completely undeserved, a point Luke makes more clearly than Mark did.

Interestingly, Luke does the exact same thing with Paul in the last few chapters of Acts, where Paul is repeatedly proclaimed innocent even though he stays in prison and eventually (though not reported in Acts) gets executed in Rome. Paul created the same problem as Jesus: Christians were reading his letters, yet he was known to have been executed by Caesar; Luke’s two stories defend both Jesus and Paul in the same way.

SO WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?

It would be nice if we could know exactly how things went down during Jesus’ trial, but a careful reading of each of the Gospels suggests that we can’t just harmonize the different texts, assume they “mean” the same thing, and conclude that we’ve recovered what really happened. The reason is, whether Pilate declared Jesus innocent three times or one time or never at all, Mark and Luke also tell their stories in ways that suggest why Pilate did what he did, and their suggested motives differ. In Mark, Pilate comes across as fickle and uncaring, while in Luke he comes across as an earnest weakling. The only way to combine these two characterizations is to destroy both of them.

These dramatic portrayals can’t just be dismissed. Just like a movie gives totally different ideas about a character by what kind of music or lighting it uses, a story tells us things about characters by its portrayal–things that can’t be set aside for the sake of establishing the blunt “facts” of history. If I had to choose, I’d say the account in Mark is closer to history, but in reality I don’t know whether either Gospel reflects history accurately. The stories seem intended not so much to describe what happened to Jesus, but rather to explain who Jesus was and why he matters.