The Life of Jesus Part 35

[Footnote 1: In criminal matters, eye-witnesses alone were admitted.

Mishnah, _Sanhedrim_, iv. 5.]

[Footnote 2: Talm. of Jerus., _Sanhedrim_, xiv. 16; Talm. of Bab., same treatise, 43 _a_, 67 _a_. Cf. _Shabbath_, 104 _b_.]

We learn from the disciples of Jesus themselves that the crime with which their Master was charged was that of "corruption;"[1] and apart from some minutiae, the fruit of the rabbinical imagination, the narrative of the Gospels corresponds exactly with the procedure described by the Talmud. The plan of the enemies of Jesus was to convict him, by the testimony of witnesses and by his own avowals, of blasphemy, and of outrage against the Mosaic religion, to condemn him to death according to law, and then to get the condemnation sanctioned by Pilate. The priestly authority, as we have already seen, was in reality entirely in the hands of Hanan. The order for the arrest probably came from him. It was before this powerful personage that Jesus was first brought.[2] Hanan questioned him as to his doctrine and his disciples. Jesus, with proper pride, refused to enter into long explanations. He referred Hanan to his teachings, which had been public; he declared he had never held any secret doctrine; and desired the ex-high priest to interrogate those who had listened to him. This answer was perfectly natural; but the exaggerated respect with which the old priest was surrounded made it appear audacious; and one of those present replied to it, it is said, by a blow.

[Footnote 1: Matt. xxvii. 63; John vii. 12, 47.]

[Footnote 2: John xviii. 13, and following. This circ.u.mstance, which we only find in John, is the strongest proof of the historic value of the fourth Gospel.]

Peter and John had followed their Master to the dwelling of Hanan.

John, who was known in the house, was admitted without difficulty; but Peter was stopped at the entrance, and John was obliged to beg the porter to let him pa.s.s. The night was cold. Peter stopped in the antechamber, and approached a brasier, around which the servants were warming themselves. He was soon recognized as a disciple of the accused. The unfortunate man, betrayed by his Galilean accent, and pestered by questions from the servants, one of whom, a kinsman of Malchus, had seen him at Gethsemane, denied thrice that he had ever had the least connection with Jesus. He thought that Jesus could not hear him, and never imagined that this cowardice, which he sought to hide by his dissimulation, was exceedingly dishonorable. But his better nature soon revealed to him the fault he had committed. A fortuitous circ.u.mstance, the crowing of the c.o.c.k, recalled to him a remark that Jesus had made. Touched to the heart, he went out and wept bitterly.[1]

[Footnote 1: Matt. xxvi. 69, and following; Mark xiv. 66, and following; Luke xxii. 54, and following; John xviii. 15, and following, 25, and following.]

Hanan, although the true author of the judicial murder about to be accomplished, had not power to p.r.o.nounce the sentence upon Jesus; he sent him to his son-in-law, Kaapha, who bore the official t.i.tle. This man, the blind instrument of his father-in-law, would naturally ratify everything that had been done. The Sanhedrim was a.s.sembled at his house.[1] The inquiry commenced; and several witnesses, prepared beforehand according to the inquisitorial process described in the Talmud, appeared before the tribunal. The fatal sentence which Jesus had really uttered: "I am able to destroy the temple of G.o.d and to build it in three days," was cited by two witnesses. To blaspheme the temple of G.o.d was, according to the Jewish law, to blaspheme G.o.d himself.[2] Jesus remained silent, and refused to explain the incriminated speech. If we may believe one version, the high priest then adjured him to say if he were the Messiah; Jesus confessed it, and proclaimed before the a.s.sembly the near approach of his heavenly reign.[3] The courage of Jesus, who had resolved to die, renders this narrative superfluous. It is probable that here, as when before Hanan, he remained silent. This was in general his rule of conduct during his last moments. The sentence was settled; and they only sought for pretexts. Jesus felt this, and did not undertake a useless defense. In the light of orthodox Judaism, he was truly a blasphemer, a destroyer of the established wors.h.i.+p. Now, these crimes were punished by the law with death.[4] With one voice, the a.s.sembly declared him guilty of a capital crime. The members of the council who secretly leaned to him, were absent or did not vote.[5] The frivolity which characterizes old established aristocracies, did not permit the judges to reflect long upon the consequences of the sentence they had pa.s.sed. Human life was at that time very lightly sacrificed; doubtless the members of the Sanhedrim did not dream that their sons would have to render account to an angry posterity for the sentence p.r.o.nounced with such careless disdain.

[Footnote 1: Matt. xvi. 57; Mark xiv. 53; Luke xxii. 66.]

[Footnote 2: Matt. xxiii. 16, and following.]

[Footnote 3: Matt. xxvi. 64; Mark xiv. 62; Luke xxii. 69. John knows nothing of this scene.]

[Footnote 4: _Levit._ xxiv. 14, and following; _Deut._ xiii. 1, and following.]

[Footnote 5: Luke xxiii. 50, 51.]

The Sanhedrim had not the right to execute a sentence of death.[1] But in the confusion of powers which then reigned in Judea, Jesus was, from that moment, none the less condemned. He remained the rest of the night exposed to the ill-treatment of an infamous pack of servants, who spared him no indignity.[2]

[Footnote 1: John xviii. 31; Jos., _Ant._, XX. ix. 1.]

[Footnote 2: Matt. xxvi. 67, 68; Mark xiv. 65; Luke xxii. 63-65.]

In the morning the chief priests and the elders again a.s.sembled.[1]

The point was, to get Pilate to ratify the condemnation p.r.o.nounced by the Sanhedrim, which, since the occupation of the Romans, was no longer sufficient. The procurator was not invested, like the imperial legate, with the disposal of life and death. But Jesus was not a Roman citizen; it only required the authorization of the governor in order that the sentence p.r.o.nounced against him should take its course. As always happens, when a political people subjects a nation in which the civil and the religious laws are confounded, the Romans had been brought to give to the Jewish law a sort of official support. The Roman law did not apply to Jews. The latter remained under the canonical law which we find recorded in the Talmud, just as the Arabs in Algeria are still governed by the code of Islamism. Although neutral in religion, the Romans thus very often sanctioned penalties inflicted for religious faults. The situation was nearly that of the sacred cities of India under the English dominion, or rather that which would be the state of Damascus if Syria were conquered by a European nation. Josephus a.s.serts, though this may be doubted, that if a Roman trespa.s.sed beyond the pillars which bore inscriptions forbidding pagans to advance, the Romans themselves would have delivered him to the Jews to be put to death.[2]

[Footnote 1: Matt. xxvii. 1; Mark xv. 1; Luke xxii. 66, xxiii. 1; John xviii 28.]

[Footnote 2: Jos., _Ant._, XV. xi. 5; _B.J._, VI. ii. 4.]

The agents of the priests therefore bound Jesus and led him to the judgment-hall, which was the former palace of Herod,[1] adjoining the Tower of Antonia.[2] It was the morning of the day on which the Paschal lamb was to be eaten (Friday the 14th of Nisan, our 3d of April). The Jews would have been defiled by entering the judgment-hall, and would not have been able to share in the sacred feast. They therefore remained without.[3] Pilate being informed of their presence, ascended the _bima_[4] or tribunal, situated in the open air,[5] at the place named _Gabbatha_, or in Greek, _Lithostrotos_, on account of the pavement which covered the ground.

[Footnote 1: Philo, _Legatio ad Caium_, -- 38. Jos., _B.J._, II. xiv.

8.]

[Footnote 2: The exact place now occupied by the seraglio of the Pacha of Jerusalem.]

[Footnote 3: John xviii. 28.]

[Footnote 4: The Greek word [Greek: Bema] had pa.s.sed into the Syro-Chaldaic.]

[Footnote 5: Jos., _B.J._, II. ix. 3, xiv. 8; Matt. xxvii. 27; John xviii. 33.]

He had scarcely been informed of the accusation, before he displayed his annoyance at being mixed up with this affair.[1] He then shut himself up in the judgment-hall with Jesus. There a conversation took place, the precise details of which are lost, no witness having been able to repeat it to the disciples, but the tenor of which appears to have been well divined by John. His narrative, in fact, perfectly accords with what history teaches us of the mutual position of the two interlocutors.

[Footnote 1: John xviii. 29.]

The procurator, Pontius, surnamed Pilate, doubtless on account of the _pilum_ or javelin of honor with which he or one of his ancestors was decorated,[1] had hitherto had no relation with the new sect.

Indifferent to the internal quarrels of the Jews, he only saw in all these movements of sectaries, the results of intemperate imaginations and disordered brains. In general, he did not like the Jews, but the Jews detested him still more. They thought him hard, scornful, and pa.s.sionate, and accused him of improbable crimes.[2]

[Footnote 1: Virg., _aen._, XII. 121; Martial, _Epigr._, I. x.x.xii., X.

xlviii.; Plutarch, _Life of Romulus_, 29. Compare the _hasta pura_, a military decoration. Orelli and Henzen, _Inscr. Lat._, Nos. 3574, 6852, etc. _Pilatus_ is, on this hypothesis, a word of the same form as _Torquatus_.]

[Footnote 2: Philo, _Leg. ad Caium_, -- 38.]

Jerusalem, the centre of a great national fermentation, was a very seditious city, and an insupportable abode for a foreigner. The enthusiasts pretended that it was a fixed design of the new procurator to abolish the Jewish law.[1] Their narrow fanaticism, and their religious hatreds, disgusted that broad sentiment of justice and civil government which the humblest Roman carried everywhere with him. All the acts of Pilate which are known to us, show him to have been a good administrator.[2] In the earlier period of the exercise of his office, he had difficulties with those subject to him which he had solved in a very brutal manner; but it seems that essentially he was right. The Jews must have appeared to him a people behind the age; he doubtless judged them as a liberal prefect formerly judged the Bas-Bretons, who rebelled for such trifling matters as a new road, or the establishment of a school. In his best projects for the good of the country, notably in those relating to public works, he had encountered an impa.s.sable obstacle in the Law. The Law restricted life to such a degree that it opposed all change, and all amelioration. The Roman structures, even the most useful ones, were objects of great antipathy on the part of zealous Jews.[3] Two votive escutcheons with inscriptions, which he had set up at his residence near the sacred precincts, provoked a still more violent storm.[4] Pilate at first cared little for these susceptibilities; and he was soon involved in sanguinary suppressions of revolt,[5] which afterward ended in his removal.[6] The experience of so many conflicts had rendered him very prudent in his relations with this intractable people, which avenged itself upon its governors by compelling them to use toward it hateful severities. The procurator saw himself, with extreme displeasure, led to play a cruel part in this new affair, for the sake of a law he hated.[7] He knew that religious fanaticism, when it has obtained the sanction of civil governments to some act of violence, is afterward the first to throw the responsibility upon the government, and almost accuses them of being the author of it. Supreme injustice; for the true culprit is, in such cases, the instigator!

[Footnote 1: Jos., _Ant._, XVIII. iii. 1, init.]

[Footnote 2: Jos., _Ant._, XVIII. ii.-iv.]

[Footnote 3: Talm. of Bab., _Shabbath_, 33 _b_.]

[Footnote 4: Philo, _Leg. ad Caium_, -- 38.]

[Footnote 5: Jos., _Ant._, XVIII. iii. 1 and 2; Luke xiii. 1.]

[Footnote 6: Jos., _Ant._, XVIII. iv. 1, 2.]

[Footnote 7: John xviii. 35.]

Pilate, then, would have liked to save Jesus. Perhaps the dignified and calm att.i.tude of the accused made an impression upon him.

According to a tradition,[1] Jesus found a supporter in the wife of the procurator himself. She may have seen the gentle Galilean from some window of the palace, overlooking the courts of the temple.

Perhaps she had seen him again in her dreams; and the idea that the blood of this beautiful young man was about to be spilt, weighed upon her mind. Certain it is that Jesus found Pilate prepossessed in his favor. The governor questioned him with kindness, and with the desire to find an excuse for sending him away pardoned.

[Footnote 1: Matt. xxvii. 19.]

The t.i.tle of "King of the Jews," which Jesus had never taken upon himself, but which his enemies represented as the sum and substance of his acts and pretensions, was naturally that by which it was sought to excite the suspicions of the Roman authority. They accused him on this ground of sedition, and of treason against the government.

Nothing could be more unjust; for Jesus had always recognized the Roman government as the established power. But conservative religious bodies do not generally shrink from calumny. Notwithstanding his own explanation, they drew certain conclusions from his teaching; they transformed him into a disciple of Judas the Gaulonite; they pretended that he forbade the payment of tribute to Caesar.[1] Pilate asked him if he was really the king of the Jews.[2] Jesus concealed nothing of what he thought. But the great ambiguity of speech which had been the source of his strength, and which, after his death, was to establish his kings.h.i.+p, injured him on this occasion. An idealist that is to say, not distinguis.h.i.+ng the spirit from the substance, Jesus, whose words, to use the image of the Apocalypse, were as a two-edged sword, never completely satisfied the powers of earth. If we may believe John, he avowed his royalty, but uttered at the same time this profound sentence: "My kingdom is not of this world." He explained the nature of his kingdom, declaring that it consisted entirely in the possession and proclamation of truth. Pilate understood nothing of this grand idealism.[3] Jesus doubtless impressed him as being an inoffensive dreamer. The total absence of religious and philosophical proselytism among the Romans of this epoch made them regard devotion to truth as a chimera. Such discussions annoyed them, and appeared to them devoid of meaning. Not perceiving the element of danger to the empire that lay hidden in these new speculations, they had no reason to employ violence against them. All their displeasure fell upon those who asked them to inflict punishment for what appeared to them to be vain subtleties. Twenty years after, Gallio still adopted the same course toward the Jews.[4] Until the fall of Jerusalem, the rule which the Romans adopted in administration, was to remain completely indifferent to these sectarian quarrels.[5]

[Footnote 1: Luke xxiii. 2, 5.]

[Footnote 2: Matt. xxvii. 11; Mark xv. 2; Luke xxiii. 3; John xviii.

33.]

[Footnote 3: John xviii. 38.]

[Footnote 4: _Acts_ xviii. 14, 15.]