Committed Critic

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.

One of the more apparently out-of-place exchanges in Luke, it seems to me, occurs at the last supper. Jesus, preparing to give himself up to the authorites for crucifixion, tells his disciples to arm themselves with swords:

And Jesus said to them, “When I sent you out without purse or bag or sandals, you didn’t want for anything, did you?”And they said, “No, nothing.”

Then he said to them, “But now, whoever does have a purse should pick it up––and likewise whoever has a bag––and whoever doesn’t have a sword should sell his cloak and buy one. For I tell you, this writing must be fulfilled in me: ‘Indeed, he was considered one of the lawless.’ For indeed, it has its fulfillment in me.”

So they said, “Lord, we have two swords here.”

And he said to them, “That’s enough.” (Luke 22:35-38)

According to messianic expectations, it would make perfect sense for Jesus to tell his followers to get swords. He was about to be ambushed, and weapons could come in useful. Perhaps, the disciples may have reasoned, Jesus had finally decided to set aside his non-violent ways and take his throne by force.

But there’s a problem: What use are two swords to twelve men? They’re about to face an angry mob, and two swords are enough? What are Jesus and the other nine disciples supposed to do?

The story soon overturns the disciples’ expectations anyway:

While he was still talking, suddenly a crowd came, with the one called Judas, one of the Twelve, leading them. He walked up to Jesus to kiss him, but Jesus said, “Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?”Then, when those with Jesus saw what was happening, they said, “Lord, should we strike them with the swords?” And one of them struck the slave of the Chief Priest and cut off his right ear.

But Jesus responded, “No more of this!”, and he touched the ear and healed it. Then Jesus said to those before him––the Chief Priest and the captain of the temple, and the elders––“Have you come out as if you were after a bandit, with swords and clubs? Every day when I was with you in the temple, you didn’t stretch out your hands against me, but this is your hour––the authority of darkness. (Luke 22:47-53)

This second story seems to explain why the apostles didn’t need more swords, but the problem remains: Why did Jesus tell the disciples to bring swords at all if he didn’t want them to use them? Presumably he didn’t simply change his mind in the middle of the story.

I would argue that the two swords at the last supper were “enough” precisely because they weren’t meant to be used. Jesus isn’t intending the swords to serve as weapons, but rather as props. The two swords aren’t enough to fight with, but they are enough to fulfill the scripture: “Indeed, he was considered one of the lawless.” The swords, then, create a sort of miniature drama whereby a rabbi and his disciples are transformed into a band of criminals, just in time for an angry mob to come hunting them down.

The important point, though, is that they’re a rather pathetic band of criminals, with no chance of fighting off the mob. When one of the disciples does try to defend himself, he manages only to cut off a servant’s ear. Jesus, of course, heals the ear and again says, “That is enough.” One swing accomplished what the swords were for.

It is precisely the disciples’ inability to defend themselves that allows Jesus to confront the Chief Priest and his mob the way he does: they show their own weakness and injustice by arranging for a clandestine, violent confrontation with a man who poses them no physical threat but whom they have been too afraid to arrest in daylight.

Thus the arrest on the Mount of Olives is loaded with an irony that is not lost on Jesus. The two swords Jesus’ disciples hold highlight the absurdity of the situation by portraying Jesus’ disiples as the very thing the Chief Priest’s response suggests they are. In the end, Jesus manages to use the entire scene to mock the most important Jews in Jerusalm for gathering late at night and pulling together a gang of ruffians in order to subdue the Rabbi Jesus and his mismatched, and only nominally armed, band of disciples.

In Luke’s portrayal, Jesus is above all innocent, and the arrest of a band of disciples as if they were a gang of bandits emphasizes the injustice of the crucifixion.

Irony in the Divine Drama

In addition to its place in Luke-Acts, I think this episode works as a commentary on the nature of evil and injustice as they are confronted by the kingdom of God.

In Christ, God engages the world with truth rather than with force; but because the world is no match for Christ’s truth, it uses violence to take advange of his refusal to use force. This is something we witness (and some of us experience) every day, and it can be excruciating for those who suffer––believers or otherwise.

What makes Christians different is that we get the irony of the story. Take away the irony from Luke’s Gospel, and all you have is a horrible injustice perpetrated against an innocent man. But careful readers have two key advantages: (1) recognition that the kingdom of God is present even if invisible, and (2) knowledge that resurrection will follow death. This fundamentally changes the meaning of Jesus’ death in Luke’s Gospel, and it fundamentally changes the meaning of the life and death we experience.

If there is no kingdom and no resurrection, then we (humans) are indeed to be pitied. But knowing the reality behind the appearances, even if it still can’t make suffering meaningful, does remind us that our world––which comes at night with swords and clubs to attack the truth it cannot defeat in daylight––may yet be redeemed.