Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Exonerating Pilate to Implicate the Jews Written by Bart Ehrman Read by Ken Teutsch why did early Christians portray Pontius Pilate, who ordered Jesus crucifixion, as increasingly innocent in Jesus death?
[00:00:20] Was it to blame the Jews for being Christ killers?
[00:00:25] In a couple of recent posts I've talked about a couple of the Pilate Gospels apocryphal accounts of Jesus trial and crucifixion in which Pilate himself is shown to be innocent and the Jews, either their leaders or the entire people, were at fault for the execution of the Son of God.
[00:00:44] These accounts may have started to appear in the second century, but the texts we have now are from later periods when anti Jewish hatred in some parts of the Christian church had become standard rhetoric, sometimes leading to violence.
[00:00:59] This rhetorical strategy did not originate after the New Testament period, but can be found already in the canonical Gospels.
[00:01:07] I should stress that the earliest Christians, starting obviously with Jesus himself and his disciples, were Jewish through and through, with nothing non Jewish, let alone anti Jewish about them. Jesus did not plan to start some kind of religion other than Judaism, let alone opposed to it, and his followers saw them themselves as Jews who realized the Messiah had finally come.
[00:01:33] Even though he was a Messiah, no one expected one who was to be sacrificed for the sake of others.
[00:01:40] Soon, however, Gentiles started being converted into the Christian faith and the big question was whether they had to convert to Judaism to follow the Jewish Messiah.
[00:01:52] Early on most followers of Jesus said yes. Some, possibly starting with the Apostle Paul, began saying no.
[00:02:00] And by the time most of the New Testament was written, most members of the Christian communities were Gentiles with no interest or intention as identifying themselves as Torah observant Jews.
[00:02:12] This led to a breach with Judaism in some times and places as Christians set themselves over against those Jews who did not acknowledge the Messiahship of Jesus, leading to antagonism, leading to opposition to Judaism, ultimately leading to accusations that it was Jews, not Romans, who had killed the their own Messiah.
[00:02:36] To make that claim, Christians had to show that it was not the Roman Governor Pilate's fault that Jesus died, but the Jewish leaders or the Jewish people.
[00:02:47] This is the beginning of a long and ugly history of Christian anti Jewish rhetoric that in the end led to far more horrible things with the rise of antisemitism itself leading to violent acts of oppression culminating in the Holocaust.
[00:03:04] You can see the beginning stages of this movement already in the New Testament Gospels. Here I'll explain and show how the exoneration of Pilate increases over time from One gospel to the next. Before that, I need to state strongly that I do not think that the gospel writers or anyone else in their time was antisemitic. This requires some explaining because today, in very recent times, antisemitism has come to mean something that makes little sense from a historical perspective. I will not go into this current issue, but I do want to say that the idea and reality of antisemitism long before our current situation are both modern and are based on modern sense of race, as these were developed by the anthropologists of the 19th century.
[00:03:55] Here I explain.
[00:03:57] The idea that there was a Semitic race has been used for all sorts of hateful purposes in the modern period.
[00:04:06] Throughout the Middle Ages, before the modern period and on into the 19th century, Jews were understood to be people who subscribed to and and followed the Jewish religion, but not that they had racial characteristics. There were indeed persecutions of Jews since the conversion of the Roman empire in the 4th century. For Jews to escape persecution, they needed to stop being Jews and convert to become Christians. It was that way up through the Enlightenment. But with the development of race theories, it came to be thought that Jews were a different race from others. That being a Jew was literally in a person's blood.
[00:04:47] That is why during Nazi antisemitism resulting in the Holocaust, it simply didn't matter. If a Jew converted, say to become Lutheran or Roman Catholic, she or he was still a Jew by race and so needed to be exterminated. This is obviously even more insidious than the anti Judaism that existed in earlier centuries when being Jewish was a matter of having the wrong religion.
[00:05:14] Now it was being the wrong kind of human. A problem that could not be changed, no way and no how.
[00:05:22] Anti Judaism is opposition to Jews because of their religious and cultural beliefs and practices.
[00:05:28] Antisemitism is opposition to Jews because of their race.
[00:05:33] Big difference. It is not appropriate to call early Christianity or Christianity at all until the development of race theories antisemitic. That doesn't exonerate anyone for horrible things they did. But it clarifies historical issues.
[00:05:50] If we call an ancient Jew hating Christian anti Semitic, we are watering down the even greater horrors of the modern period by assuming it was all the same thing.
[00:06:01] There is clear anti Judaism in the New Testament opposition to Jews for their Jewish culture, beliefs, religious practices, and in particular refusal to recognize the Messiahship of Jesus. And one place that shows up is in the accounts of Jesus trial before Pilate recounted in each of the Gospels, but increasingly in a way that claims his innocence and therefore Jewish culpability In the earliest account, mark, written about 40 years after the event itself, Pilate is shown cooperating with the Jews and together, more or less, they decide that Jesus has to die. It is interesting that in Luke's Gospel, Pilate is forthright in not wanting to execute Jesus.
[00:06:46] In fact, he declares Jesus innocent of all charges on three occasions and tries to fob him off on the Jewish king Herod for trial and finally has his hand forced by the Jewish leaders and so offers Jesus to be crucified.
[00:07:01] But it's not what he wants.
[00:07:03] This is even clearer in Matthew's Gospel where Pilate declares Jesus innocent and washes his hands. This is only in Matthew declaring that he is innocent of Jesus blood. And the Jewish crowd, all the crowd, not just the leaders, cry out those infamous words, his blood be upon us and our children.
[00:07:25] Matthew 27:25.
[00:07:28] Here the Jewish people accept the responsibility for Jesus death and agree to pass on the guilt to their descendants.
[00:07:36] In some ways, the final canonical gospel, John, some 15 years later, is even more graphic. Here again, as in Luke, Pilate declares Jesus innocent on three occasions. But in an extended dramatic retelling of the scene, his hand is forced by the Jewish leaders to condemn Jesus to death. He does so and then hands him over to them, the Jewish authorities to be crucified. They are the ones then who do the deed.
[00:08:07] As time goes on, Pilate becomes more and more innocent. In the Gospel of Peter, the Jewish responsibility for Jesus's death and their guilt for causing it is heightened. And then you get those Pilate Gospels I've already discussed in which Pilate is even more unwilling to to have Jesus executed. In one of them I indicated Pilate actually converts to become a Christian. In later Ethiopic tradition, Pilate becomes canonized as a Christian saint.
[00:08:37] Pilate, a Christian saint completely innocent of Jesus death.
[00:08:44] Why would the tradition move in that direction?
[00:08:47] For a clear and obvious reason.
[00:08:50] If Pilate and the Roman authorities were innocent in the death of Jesus, the Son of God, who was guilty, it was those hard headed and wicked Jews.
[00:09:02] Both in order to show that Jesus and his followers were not guilty before the Roman state and in order to blame the hated enemies, the Jews. The stories of Jesus death were altered over time.
[00:09:15] This is a not so subtle result of the rising anti Judaism in early Christianity which resulted in such horrible things. Once the Empire converted to the new religion and took its earlier prejudices against Jews and started acting out on them in vicious anti Jewish legislation and mob activity.
