Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] The Triumphal Entry and Jesus Mistaken Identity by Bart Ehrman Even though the Gospel accounts of Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem almost certainly could not have happened as described, See the previous post for details. They clearly contain some elements of historical truth.
[00:00:20] This is often the case with the Gospels and with other historical narratives that have come down to us from antiquity.
[00:00:25] The task of the historian is to determine what's invention, what's exaggeration, and what is more or less historical.
[00:00:33] With respect to the historical elements, the following may seem reasonably secure. Even some of these, of course, can be debated. But in my judgment, the evidence for them is overwhelming.
[00:00:44] Firstly, Jesus did come from Galilee to Jerusalem to celebrate a Passover feast sometime around the year 30 to 33 CE, and the year is much debated next.
[00:00:57] While there, he preached his message to anyone who would listen. It seems unlikely it was the masses, but it could well have been small crowds.
[00:01:05] Then he offended the local Jewish authorities.
[00:01:09] Next, at the end of the week, they arranged to have him arrested.
[00:01:13] Then he was turned over to the governor, Pontius Pilate, and finally Pilate had him crucified for calling himself King of the Jews.
[00:01:21] I want to show how accepting this much as historical, helps explain in what sense Jesus was a revolutionary and why Roman authorities executed him. The fuller picture requires some background.
[00:01:35] Jesus principal message during his ministry in our earliest gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke is that the kingdom of God was soon to come. This would entail a day of judgment in which a divine emissary, the Son of Man, would come from heaven to destroy all of God's enemies, be they Roman or Jewish or whatever, and establish a new order here on earth. This kingdom would be ruled by one appointed by God.
[00:01:59] This future king was to be the Messiah, that is the appointed one. This is a virtual synonym for King of Israel. And and this is the key point. Jesus appears to have believed that it would be He Himself.
[00:02:12] There are compelling reasons for thinking that Jesus saw himself as the future king.
[00:02:16] Most obvious is that he was executed precisely for making that claim, attested repeatedly. Moreover, we have multiple accounts in various sources of him either admitting or telling it to his disciples.
[00:02:29] In addition, some of these sayings are phrased in ways that almost certainly show that they were not invented by later Christian storytellers after the fact.
[00:02:39] A good instance is the Q saying in which Jesus informs the 12 disciples that that in the future kingdom you will be seated on 12 Thrones ruling the 12 tribes of Israel. That's from Matthew 19:28.
[00:02:52] It's very difficult to imagine a later Christian inventing this Prediction it was common knowledge that Judas Iscariot, one of those 12, would be the betrayer. Surely in the later Christian view, Jesus would not have included Judas among the future 12 CO regents in the kingdom.
[00:03:10] This saying indicates that he would be making highly likely to be something that Jesus himself would have said, not knowing how the week in Jerusalem would play out exactly.
[00:03:21] If Jesus expected the kingdom to come soon, as he repeatedly says, and if he thought he would be the ruler of this kingdom, and if the disciples believed him and expected that they would be co rulers, then it made sense that the trip to Jerusalem was in anticipation of the coming kingdom in which Jesus would rule.
[00:03:41] The crowds of Jewish pilgrims would not have known that this was Jesus view, and they certainly would not have publicly acclaimed it. See the previous post. But the followers of Jesus, the disciples and the group of women who came with them, they did.
[00:03:55] And they, along with Jesus himself, may well have seen his entry into Jerusalem as the arrival of the future king.
[00:04:02] Jesus wasn't arrested right away because he and his small band were simply part of the hundreds and the thousands of people coming into town just then, and no one took any notice of them. But as he was publicly active over the next few days, word got out, rumors started circulating.
[00:04:19] After some days, the leaders of Jerusalem, who as a rule were not mingling with the hoi polloi and hearing their rumors and their gossip, they eventually learned about it and they took steps to deal with it.
[00:04:32] Jesus was arrested, tried and executed precisely for calling himself the Messiah.
[00:04:39] But he did not mean what the rulers thought that he must have meant for Jesus. This is what we would call a religious view.
[00:04:50] Jesus believed that God would intervene in history to destroy his enemies and set up a new kingdom on earth over which Jesus would reign.
[00:04:58] This would be God's doing, not Jesus, not his disciples, and not the Jewish masses.
[00:05:04] Jesus did not come into the city to foment a rebellion. He did not support insurrection, and he did not raise an army.
[00:05:11] He came in anticipation of a divine act to end the current age as we know it and to initiate a new beginning in which he will be king.
[00:05:20] Neither the Jewish leaders nor the Roman governor were particularly interested in this kind of apocalyptic theology. When they heard Messiah or future king, all they heard was was insurrection.
[00:05:32] And that indeed is how most Jews who thought about a Messiah, if they thought about it at all, would have thought about it. The future savior king would be a descendant of David, who, like his ancestor a millennium before, destroyed God's enemies with the sword and ruled Israel as a sovereign state.
[00:05:50] We have clear indications of this expectation in Jewish texts of the time outside the Bible.
[00:05:57] One of the most striking is from a Jewish pseudepigraphon called the Psalms of Solomon, roughly contemporaneous with Jesus life.
[00:06:05] Starting at verse 21, it says, See Lord, and raise up for them their King, the Son of David, to rule over your servant Israel in the time known to you. O God, undergird him with the strength to destroy the unrighteous rulers, to purge Jerusalem from gentiles who trample her to destruction in wisdom and in righteousness. To drive out the sinners from their inheritance, to smash the arrogance of sinners like a potter's jar, to shatter all their substance with an iron rod, to destroy the unloyful nations with the word of his mouth. At his warning, the nations will flee from his presence, and he will condemn sinners by the thoughts of their hearts.
[00:06:44] He will gather a holy people whom he will lead in righteousness, and he will judge the tribes of the people that have been made holy by the Lord their God. He will not tolerate unrighteousness even to pause among them. And any person who knows wickedness shall not live with them, for he shall know them, and they are all children of their God.
[00:07:04] He will distribute them upon the land according to their tribes. The alien and the foreigner will no longer live near them. He will judge peoples and nations in the wisdom of his righteousness. And he will have Gentile nations serving under him under his yoke.
[00:07:20] And he will glorify the Lord in a place prominent above the whole earth. And he will purge Jerusalem and make it holy as it was even from the beginning, for nations to come from the ends of the earth, to see his glory, to bring as gifts her children who have been driven out, and to see the glory of the Lord with which God has glorified her.
[00:07:41] And he will be a righteous king over them, taught by God.
[00:07:45] There will be no unrighteousness among them in his days, for all shall be holy and their king shall be the Lord Messiah.
[00:07:53] That's from the Psalms of Solomon, chapter 17, verses 21 to 32.
[00:07:58] And it's a translation by R.B. wright in James Charlesworth's edition, the Old Testament Pseudopigrapher, volume 2, published by Hendrix Publishers in 1983.
[00:08:09] So Jesus thinks he's the Messiah.
[00:08:12] Crucify him.
[00:08:14] In a way, you could argue that this execution that transformed all of human history was in fact simply one big misunderstanding.
[00:08:23] Not every revolutionary urges a revolution. Jesus was a pacifist revolutionary who believed that God himself, not the future king, a Jewish army or the Jewish masses would bring in the kingdom.
[00:08:35] But the niceties of apocalyptic thinking were lost on Pontius Pilate. He executed Jesus the as an enemy of the state.
[00:08:43] The irony is that Jesus was completely indifferent to the state for reasons not widely recognized.
[00:08:50] Every human institution is inextricably human, but any system not ruled by God is hopelessly flawed.
[00:08:57] Replacing this human system with another human system, therefore, cannot be the goal, or even an interim step to the goal.
[00:09:05] This is why Jesus actually didn't care one way or the other who was ruling or how they were doing it, and I will try to show that in the next post.
