The Real Jesus
How a Jewish reformer lost his Jewish identity
The delicate governing arrangements and the political volatility of Palestine are crucial to understanding Jesus's fate. For example, Pontius Pilate was far from being Gibson's (or the Gospels') somewhat benign figure, puzzled by the high priests' insistence on punishing Jesus. He was rather, as the first-century historian Josephus relates, a notoriously harsh prefect, quick to crucify even potential political rebels.
It is not clear whether Jesus's followers thought he was the Messiah or an apocalyptic prophet declaring the imminent coming of God's kingdom. But the fact that his arrival in the city stirred up popular interest among the holiday crowds in Jerusalem would have set off Pilate's alarms that he might be dealing with a seditious leader. The Jewish high priests of the Temple were also certainly concerned about any disturber of the peace, although declaring oneself the Messiah, Vermes has argued, was not blasphemy by Jewish law. Indeed, if Jesus's crime had truly been blasphemy, as the Gospels assert, then the priests would have rightfully condemned Jesus to death by stoning--rather than handing him over to Pilate for the Crucifixion. As Boston University scholar Paula Fredriksen puts it, "I see Roman concerns exceeding priestly ones. If Pilate didn't have an itchy trigger finger, the Crucifixion, which was a specifically political punishment, probably would not have happened."
The new scholarship also emphasizes the theological variety within Judaism at Jesus's time. To be sure, there were certain constants: All Jews worshiped only one God, and all believed in the divine election of Israel, the divine origin of the law, and repentance and forgiveness. Apart from that, there were many different beliefs associated with the priestly class and clergy, the various religious parties, and, not least, the great majority of unaffiliated Jews.
The Pharisees, for instance, a party some 6,000 strong, shared with most first-century Jews a belief in life after death and developed their own traditions governing observance of the law. The Gospels, particularly Matthew, would later caricature the Pharisees as inflexible legalists in order to suggest a divide between the Jewish emphasis on the law and Jesus's emphasis on the spirit and grace. Yet as the discoveries of post-biblical Jewish texts have helped to demonstrate, the concern with mercy, forgiveness, and the inner spirit of the law was widely shared throughout Judaism, and certainly not unique to Jesus's teaching. Even the Gospel of Mark shows Jesus sharing the Pharisees' belief that love of God and love of one's fellow man are the greatest commandments.
The distancing of Jesus from his Jewish roots is a complex story involving the gradual separation of the Christian movement from Judaism both in Palestine and the rest of the eastern Mediterranean world, beginning shortly after the Crucifixion. Yet as the new scholarship emphasizes, even the belief in Jesus's Resurrection should not be considered a Christian novelty. "The resurrection of the dead was one of the redemptive acts anticipated in Jewish traditions about the End of Days," Fredriksen explains in Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. Jesus's individual Resurrection was thought by his early followers to herald a more general resurrection that would come with the establishment of the kingdom of God.
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