Life Without The Boring Bits Read online

  In the Roman mind, Christianity was inevitably entangled with Judaism. From time to time the Imperium was shaken by fears of a pan-Jewish uprising, for no part of the Roman sphere of influence was without a fairly large Jewish population, and the two cultures were at ideological loggerheads. Because of their religion’s Judaic roots, early Christians were all too often lumped in with Jews willy-nilly, though after the death of Jesus Christ and his contemporaries, Christianity ceased to have any attraction for Jews. In fact, quite the opposite. Most Jews avoided it as one more burden. This, combined with Roman belief that Christians and Jews were one and the same, only served both to increase and diversify antisemitism, a great tragedy.

  Christianity was never a religion of enlightenment. It was a religion of revelation for the abjectly poor designed to help them bear their unenviable lot. They could neither read nor write. Thus for the first two generations at least the religion was orally disseminated to believers; what was written down by a very few was vestigial and read aloud to gatherings. The importance of the Epistles cannot be over-emphasized, as their writers knew well how unlearned the congregations were.

  A hierocracy is natural to a system of beliefs wherein few have learning; those who had it gradually became known as bishops, responsible for instructing more junior ministers, the priests.

  However, I don’t wish to discuss the Christian hierocracy any further: it is not germane.

  There are great differences of opinion upon the date when the four Gospels were formally written down. Many scholars argue for a time as close to Christ’s death as thirty or forty years. However, one large group opts for a date after the first third of the second century AD as their very earliest; circa 133 AD, a century after the crucifixion. The hypothetical “Q” is said to be at least a generation earlier — if there ever was a Q. The four Gospels, apparently teaching aids aimed at new converts, were written in Greek, an indication to me that if this date is right, it reveals an upward trend in converts toward those who were literate. Q is said to have been written in Aramaic, a pan-Syrian semitic language, but to me Greek sounds more logical for the early Christian writers. It was the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean, and the earliest Christians seem to have been Greek-speaking.

  What is known is that Christianity made great strides, that its adherents multiplied rapidly, and that by the time Constantine spent his childhood among the barbarian Picts and Scots, they also were converting to Christianity. Jesus Christ’s simple credo, with its emphasis on the life hereafter and its promise of a happiness eternal, was perfect for its time.

  That today it is dwindling is due to such gargantuan changes in the human condition, at least for western peoples, that its simplicity and promise are deemed antiquated, unappealing rubbish.

  Its greatest appeal remains among those peoples who are abjectly poor, under-educated, and politically oppressed. However, there are some prosperous peoples who have found vigorous versions of Christianity robust enough still to offer spiritual comfort. I am not wrong. Godlessness is growing in the Christian world.

  Back now to the life of Jesus Christ the man.

  The problem is that absolutely nothing about him was written during his lifetime or for a generation after. He lived and died unrecorded in the contemporary annals of either Rome or Jerusalem; the little we know comes from the Epistles, the Gospels, and Josephus, and is not very helpful, for they were not concerned with the man per se. Using these sources, Christ was a Jew from Galilaea who seems from his teachings not to have had much time for the finer points of Judaic religious law, inextricably bound up with Jewish government as it then was. He seems not to have hated Rome or viewed it as anything but a temporal power. He preached tolerance and was not a bigot. He believed in Satan, demons, angels and archangels, in living by the rules of goodness and decency, and, above all, by love. He had a kind word to say about almost everyone, and taught that the most hardened of sinners could be redeemed. His preferred method of teaching was the parable. It was a benign, inoffensive credo that made some inroads in Galilaea and other rural regions. A man of thirty, he commenced three years of fairly limited walks and wanders, often attended by large crowds. Only at the very end of his career did he go to Jerusalem.

  Why then did he die? And why was he sentenced to the death of a slave?

  Already condemned by a trial before the Sanhedrin, he was hied before the Prefect of Judaea as a traitor to Rome. And, since slaves didn’t need Roman permission to be killed, it would seem as a free man. Whereupon the Prefect examined the evidence, pronounced it spurious, and dismissed the charges. After which the Sanhedrin, present, created such a furore that Pilatus Praefectus actually recanted his verdict and authorized Christ’s death by crucifixion.

  None of it makes a scrap of sense.

  The text of the four Gospels as they exist today is so non-specific that various and different assumptions may be made.

  The first is that Jesus Christ really was a slave, an assumption I dismiss. If in truth he were a slave, the Sanhedrin was not obliged to ask Rome’s permission to crucify him. Whereas only the Roman governor or his prefect could sentence a free man to death, be he a Roman citizen or a citizen of his nation.

  Under Roman law any free man, Roman or other, was in full ownership of his slaves, and at complete liberty to kill them arbitrarily. Slaves were as cattle, they had no rights at law.

  The second is that Jesus Christ had committed capital murder. This fits better legally, even if he had no criminal history prior to committing capital — premeditated — murder.

  Even so, I dismiss it. Nothing in Christ’s career as we know it indicates a capital crime. Nor did the Prefect pass a death sentence; he debunked the charges as patently ridiculous. Only fierce and remorseless bullying by the Sanhedrin caused him to reverse his original decision.

  Apropos Pontius Pilatus’s craven crumbling, Jerusalem had been a nucleus of sedition and rebellion for years by 33 AD, the commonest date attributed to the crucifixion. Pompey the Great’s siege was seventy years in the past, but fresh Roman insults to the Jewish homeland came hard on the heels of each revolt, and after 6 AD never were the Jews of Jerusalem without a resident overlord. A son of Aristobulus named Antigonus had even ruled Judaea as a Parthian puppet; there were still Jews known to favor Parthian to Roman rule. If the legion of southern Syria was not in Jerusalem’s vicinity during that Passover of 33 AD, Pilatus may well have thought the cohort (600 men) garrisoning the city was not militarily capable of putting down open revolt. I imagine the sheer violence of the Sanhedrin’s reaction to his decision came as a terrific shock to Pilatus, and, for all he pitied this poor wretch, he wasn’t prepared to risk a fragile peace. That at least is feasible and understandable.

  What if Jesus Christ really was the genuine King of the Jews?

  Robert Graves’s treatise fascinated me from the time of first reading forty years ago; it was one answer to some of the most puzzling questions as to why Jesus Christ had to die — and why the title King of the Jews was bruited during the hearing before Pilatus — and why Pilatus tried to defuse the situation by holding Christ up as a figure of fun — and why a note was fixed to the top of Christ’s cross announcing that here hung the King of the Jews, a slave with grand pretensions.

  When Christ entered Jerusalem riding on a donkey he was hailed as King of the Jews, and even by some as the Messiah. If his mother was the heiress of the House of David, her firstborn son, no matter who his father, could claim to be the King of the Jews. If Graves is followed, the identity of his father was known, increasing his claim, but anathema to the Sanhedrin. If they had to have a Herod, better by far to have the torpid Antipas, as apolitical as he was corrupt.

  At this distance in time, it isn’t possible to know without better evidence how word of Christ’s regal identity would have reached the ordinary residents of Jerusalem, but according to the Gospels he was met by cheering crowds who strewed the path of the King with palm leaves. Since his entry into Jerus
alem seems to have been a public announcement of his kingly status, he may have worn purple — of which, more anon.

  Because Graves’s answer is the only one makes real sense to me, I am going to postulate that it is true.

  Following this line, the treason charges laid against Christ to Pilatus were that he plotted to have himself made King of the Jews and foment rebellion against Rome. The Sanhedrin’s argument failed to carry weight with Pilatus, who, if one looks at what is known objectively, seems to have regarded Christ as a crazy man whose lunacy he tried to debunk by flogging, a crown of brambles and a broken reed in one hand as a sceptre. Relevant to later events that will be mentioned in due course, the lash appears not to have broken the skin, nor the crown caused typical copious bleeding of the scalp. “Behold the King of the Jews, ha ha ha!” But the Sanhedrin didn’t laugh; to them, this was no joking matter. Whichever way one looks at it, this hearing was not Pilatus’s finest hour. Only one thing was going to pacify the Sanhedrin: the death sentence of a slave.

  Certainly Jesus Christ seems to have become a threat only after he entered Jerusalem; no important Jew seems to have taken any notice of him during his three years of wanderings outside the city. The reaction among the general populace of Jerusalem must then have come as a shock, particularly if he wore the purple.

  If one considers Christ’s career as an orchestrated bid to spread his heretical ideas to the people, thus offering them a gentler, more unbiased kind of code that made room for the humble, the poor and the powerless in the scheme of things, then his entry into Jerusalem marked a change. It increased his importance immeasurably, and was perhaps the first step in a peaceful bid for the throne. If he could trace his lineage back to David, he himself would have seen nothing incendiary anent his claim. As a Galilaean Jew, his political thinking was probably naive, at least to some extent; the power plays and intrigues among those at the top of the urban social mix would have been foreign to him.

  Religious leaders are rarely done to death at the beginning of their careers; only after they have stirred up the political ant heap do they court extirpation. And in Judaea two thousand years ago politics and religion were intermingled, further complicated by a political overlord in Rome that ran counter to Jewish autonomy of all kinds. Did Christ have kingly plans, they would not have been out of character for the man as I see him: he just wanted a simpler, less materialistic, more tolerant attitude to life and living, which, good Jew that he was, he knew stemmed from God. He disliked theologians and didacticians, religious leaders who interpreted God as rigid, intolerant of human frailty. Christ’s view was that all human beings were frail, and God loved them anyway.

  Jesus Christ as King of the Jews was extremely dangerous to the established Jewish religious governors, the Sanhedrin. If the Sanhedrin plus Herod Antipas comprised Christ’s body of accusers, then there were seventy-two men involved.

  Christian leaders throughout the ages have thrown up men who blame the Jews for the crucifixion: a manifest injustice. Equally unjust is the retaliatory allegation that the Romans were to blame. The truth is in the Gospels, at least as we have them: including the Roman prefect, seventy-three men exclusive to that time and that place were responsible. No one else.

  One, the Roman prefect, acquiesced unwillingly, yet still he acquiesced, while the other seventy-two would not be cheated of their death even at the possible price of provoking the prefect to a military solution. It wasn’t necessary. Pilatus backed down — but were they sure he would? All considered, it reads to me as if they were willing to dare everything to achieve Christ’s crucifixion.

  Pontius Pilatus had been Prefect of Judaea for six years by 33 AD, and, given the Emperor Tiberius’s known policy of keeping nobly born, wealthy Romans on foreign duty for many years, he expected to remain in Judaea for more years to come. As indeed proved to be the case. He was not recalled to Rome until three years after the crucifixion, which negates the contention of some Christians that he was recalled to answer for crucifying Jesus Christ — a ridiculous assertion. Why would Tiberius, senile and living on Capri for a decade by this — or his Greek freedman bureaucrats — care about the death of three Jewish slaves, entered in the books of the Antonia fortress and then forgotten?

  Such things were not reported to Rome. No doubt Pilatus wrote a report on the matter of Jesus Christ to his boss in the capital, Antioch — the Governor of Syria. He would have described a potentially explosive incident nipped in the bud at the price of one Jewish life. That accomplished, it appears the Sanhedrin settled down.

  By all accounts a severe and dour man, Pontius Pilatus would have couched the matter in a factual light, neither spared nor praised himself, merely informed the Governor that though his decision had been a prudent one at odds with Roman law, it did the trick: threats of an uprising faded away.

  It is not astonishing that we hear no more of Pilatus upon his return to Rome. Within a year of that, Tiberius was dead and Gaius Caligula emperor. My feeling is that a man who, on the whole, had successfully governed a notoriously difficult people for ten years, would have had great sense and remarkable antennae for trouble. The motion pictures that portray him as an effete nonentity are far from the mark.

  On the ascension of Gaius Caligula, Pilatus may well have retired to his estates, kept his head down and lived out the rest of his days in peace and quiet. In fact, were it not for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, Pontius Pilatus’s name would have been entered on the fasti and utterly forgotten otherwise. I find it a pity that he is almost universally vilified; to him, in that place at that time, to give in must have seemed the best course of action. A goodly proportion of the few Jews he knew personally would have been members of the Sanhedrin, which would have given him a basis for his decision. He knew they meant it, it was written on their faces, in their eyes, their very bodies.

  I have come to think that it was Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, home of the Great Temple, lies at the bottom of that death by crucifixion. Given the paucity of our sources, it is the most logical possibility. How could the Jewish heads of state defuse the situation Christ had provoked? Clearly the ordinary people knew of him through his preaching and approved of his message, which is best summarized in the Sermon on the Mount — a radical departure from the sterner orthodoxy of the Sanhedrin, and from the traditional concept of a rather unforgiving God. So when Christ entered the city, his reception badly alarmed the Sanhedrin, whom I acquit of worldly motives for their hatred.

  In their eyes Jesus Christ was apostate and had to be put down. But how? How could seventy-one men deal with what they had seen on that day of palms? By achieving Christ’s death, yes, absolutely, but in such a way that his teachings died with him. These men were wise in the ways of men, even if they were not exactly stuffed with common sense. Social disgrace rather than apostacy had to seem the reason for his death, and the Roman prefect its author.

  The Sanhedrin was more than a religious government; it was also the Jewish court of justice, and empowered to hear charges against fellow Jews. Also to levy sentence, save for death, the province of Rome alone. But death by sword or axe was the death of a free man: it would not answer. Crucifixion would. If this man who was thought the rightful King of the Jews was deemed a slave and went to a slave’s death, he was branded a pariah — especially if he had pretended to be free, and gathered many ardent followers.

  Someone thought of it, but who? And what did they need Judas Iscariot for? Identification of Christ’s person doesn’t wash; after his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, his face was known. Was it Judas’s function to testify before the Prefect that Christ had openly boasted of setting himself up as King of the Jews in a war against Rome? Did Judas testify that he was actively courting the Parthians as allies?

  He was paid thirty “pieces of silver” for his services — denarii, I imagine. Not a big sum of money, save perhaps to an impoverished upcountry Galilaean who counted his wealth in mere sesterces, three or four at a time. Maybe he had a small
gambling debt; there are faint suggestions that he may have been a gambler. Or perhaps he secretly hankered for the fleshpots? We will never know, beyond the fact that thirty denarii were enough to buy a despicable betrayal. Gaius Trebonius springs to mind: a man who had been superbly honored by his superior, Julius Caesar, and in gratitude amassed envy, resentment, feelings of impotence. All Caesar’s assassins were men he had advanced, and they had hated him for his power to do so. Perhaps Judas Iscariot was that kind of man. Such men hate sourly, implacably, even coldly.

  What is certain is that the Sanhedrin needed Judas to further their ends, not identify a face. What, you think every member of the Sanhedrin stayed home that Palm Sunday refusing to set eyes upon a sudden enemy? That’s not human nature. They were there, in the crowd.

  Crucifixion as a slave it was going to be, and so it was. It’s the best of the possible solutions to the mystery, and detracts not in the slightest from the eventual structure that grew out of Christ, his life and slave’s death: Christianity.

  What kind of man was Jesus Christ, as distinct from his message? Nobly born, that seems evident, but he had one superlative gift that is indeed God-given — charisma. He drew people to himself nigh effortlessly, and once he had them, they remained his. Perhaps uniquely in a misogynistic time, he treated women as his equals, permitted them to follow him, had them among his closest friends, and respected their opinions.

  There is nothing in the Gospels that indicates Christ was a poor man, though he abrogated wealth. The two are not the same. Carpenters are not poor men, they have a trade that amounted to a skill, for it included what now would be called cabinet making and the crafting of elegant furniture. Joseph’s workshop may have been a large one employing a number of craftsmen. When Christ quit his trade to wander he seems never to have wanted for money, accommodation, sustenance. Whether or not he worked miracles is beyond the scope of this essay, nor does his declaration of his godhead depend for proof upon the ability to work miracles. It is an article of faith, and faith alone.