As Cohn rightyl points out, the Prophetic tradition and the talmudic approach to it was tolerance and trust in God. Even in Judas’s case, we do not know what motivated him; things certainly did not turn out the way he had intended or expected. Behind everything lurked a strong undercurrent of fear, albeit misplaced fear, that Jesus was an evil magician. Matthew and Mark seem to place the ultimate burden on the Romans, since it must have been Roman soldiers who led Jesus away into the Praetorium (Mark 15:16); but in John, Pilate gives Jesus back to the Jews “and they [the Jews it would seem] took Jesus” (John 19:16) and directed the crucifixion with Pilate’s acquiescence. Phobias are everywhere in this story—far more than people usually think. When Jesus prophesied about his death in Matthew 16:21, he mentioned only the chief priests, elders, and scribes as being involved. evil spirits” (Mosiah 3:5); but “even after all this they shall consider him a man, and say that he hath a devil, and shall scourge him, and shall crucify him” (Mosiah 3:9). We live with four accounts of the Creation, three versions of the Sermon on the Mount, and several accounts of the First Vision. A justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, writing as an expert on Jewish legal history, who is proud of Jesus' here challenges the descriptions and interpretations of the trial and death of Jesus as presented by the Evangelists in the New Testament. Reflection 1. An interesting pattern emerges by carefully examining every reference to these chief priests: It is the chief priests and scribes whom Herod asked about the birthplace of the Messiah. In total, three Jewish trials took place followed by three Roman trials, concluding with an appeal to the Jewish people with the consent of a Roman leader. Blasphemy, sedition, encouraging tax protesters, and declaring himself a king are all mentioned, but none of these charges really stuck. Jesus told Peter, “Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” (Matthew 26:53); and when Peter cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant, Jesus “touched his ear, and healed him” (Luke 22:51). Peter was a Jew. Buy Online Access Buy Print & Archive Subscription. We can now turn to our second main question: Who killed Jesus? One reason is to introduce Jesus’ prophesy of his death from the beginning; another is to show Jesus working at a cleansed temple, where he often went throughout his ministry. It is somewhat surprising that not one legal ex. The number was far fewer who did not. Actually, one may scan the four New Testament Gospels and find precious few explicit indications of what actually motivated any of these people. All this looks like attempted allegations of maiestas. The New Testament writers were interested in the events leading up to Jesus' death, but these events created two problems. Even Pilate had to ask, “What is it these men accuse you of?” No one ever gave a straight answer. Having tried in several ways to get the chief priests to drop their complaint against Jesus, Pilate saw that nothing was working but “that rather a tumult was made” (Matt. It was supposed to happen. He was tried twice in two separate trials. The chief priests also were deeply afraid. We’d love your help. In Matthew 9 we read that Jesus healed a man who had been paralyzed by some kind of stroke. But concern over Jesus’ mighty power would seem to explain best all that is reported by the four New Testament Gospels. Even in discussing the synoptic accounts, it is something of a misnomer to speak of the “trial” of Jesus. Pilate is treated like a Roman Governor rather than a simpering wimp, and the Jewish Sanhedrin is given a fair reading. It will long remain impossible to give a definitive description of the so-called “trial of Jesus.” Too little is known today about the laws and legal procedures that would have been followed in Jerusalem during the second quarter of the first century A.D., and too little is known about all that was done so long ago for any modern person to speak with any degree of certainty about the legal technicalities of this case. The final 70 pages or so were a little long, but Jesus' execution was clearly well deserved within Roman law, and had nothing to do with Jewish opposition to his teachings. But Pilate was still worried enough by the situation that he was willing to take action or to go along with Jesus’s accusers. Reflection 8. They worried that this, his last “trick” (planē), would be worse than his first. It was well thought out and thought provoking but got to be rather long. People have also long puzzled over the distance that John puts between the cleansing of the temple and the death of Jesus. 1556332. Anyone in the group of arresters hearing or seeing these things must have been stunned. We may attribute to these people a wide range of political, commercial, social, personal, religious, or legalistic motives; but in most cases the motives that seem the most plausible to us stem from our own retrojections. If you have already purchased access, or are a print & archive subscriber, please ensure you are logged in. 2019 Oct 12: Hebrews: The Sacred Powers of Jesus, the Great High Priest, 26 January 2019 “In the Beginning Were the Words”, A Celestial Commentary on 1 Corinthians by Craig Blomberg, July 29, 2016, Conference: New Mormon Ideas about Mark and Hebrews, “Now Since the Children Share Flesh and Blood, [Christ] also, in Just the Same Way, Shared Their Humanity”: The Low Christology of the Lord as Viewed in Hebrews 1–2, Consider the Lilies: How Luke Treats the Story of His Master by S. Kent Brown, Stately Women of the New Testament by Kaye Terry Hanson, The Modern Day Relevance of Paul’s Letters to the Corinthians by Michael D. Rhodes, Reading between the Lines: Luke’s Omission of Mark 14:3–9, “Jesus Tells It All in the Nazareth Synagogue” by S. Kent Brown, Latter-day Saint Reflections on the Trial and Death of Jesus, http://www.jrcls.org/clark_memo/issues/cmF00.pdf, The Legal Cause of Action against Jesus in John 18:29–30, https://rsc.byu.edu/easterconference/2006, Farewell Discourses and the High Priestly Prayer, Plagues, Pestilences, Pests and Pandemics in These Latter Days, Narrative Atonement Theology in the Gospel of Mark. In the cosmic conflict presented in the Gospel of John, this worldly hate of truth is the theological opposite of divine love; but that antipathy would seem to be too broad to provide a specific legal motive for killing Jesus, for these statements apply to all people, both then and now, who reject Jesus in any way, personally as well as legally. Matthew, whose purpose is often to show how Jesus prevailed over the Pharisees, is the only Gospel writer to tell the story of the chief priests and Pharisees asking Pilate to secure the tomb in which Jesus was buried, but to no avail. Scholarly prudence and Christian charity behoove us to withhold casting any aspersions and to follow a more cautious, sensitive approach as we attempt to ferret out the motives of Caiaphas, the chief priests, or Pilate. In this regard, we should also remember the testimony of Paul. Reflection 4. The first one was at a Jewish high court for Sanhedrin (the Jewish tribunal and ruling body), at the Jerusalem basilica, presided over by Caiaphas, the high priest of Jerusalem, who questioned Jesus. It was well thought out and thought provoking but got to be rather long. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. And of us it is required that we forgive all people. Indeed, the word planos, in other early texts such as the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and the Sybilline Oracles, can mean especially one who deceives through evil powers or spirits and fools even the elect through nature miracles, including churning up the sea or raising the dead. Jesus said: “But me [the world] hateth, because I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil” (John 7:7); “If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18), for “I am not of the world” (John 17:14). For John and for Latter-day Saints it would appear that the whole world killed Jesus. for this man doeth many miracles” (John 11:47). This is the most famous punctuation mark in the world; it is known as the “antisemitic comma.” But based on the Greek construction of this sentence, no punctuation mark should be there, and thus Paul spoke here only of “those particular Jews who killed Jesus.” Indeed, many Jews accepted Jesus. Start by marking “The Trial and Death of Jesus” as Want to Read: Error rating book. Latter-day Saints, and all people, should approach this subject with humility and cautiousness. Latter-day Saints are not immune from such inclinations. Even the powerful Joseph of Arimathaea kept his loyalty to Jesus secret “for fear of the Jews” (John 19:38). As Peter said a few weeks later to those very people in Jerusalem who had “killed the Prince of life,” “I [know] that through ignorance ye did it, as did also your rulers” (Acts 3:15, 17). Some knowledge of sorcery was even “a requirement to be appointed a member of the Sanhedrin,” presumably so that such cases could be properly prosecuted. In response to the question Of what crime was Jesus accused?, there also is no simple answer. Look who arrests him in John’s account: not just a group of men with torches, as in the other Gospels, but a cohort of soldiers, servants of chief priests and Pharisees (see John 18:3), and the commander or chiliarchos (see John 18:12). Since the publication of the Temple Scroll from the Dead Sea in the 1970s, many scholars acknowledge that hanging on a tree (or crucifixion) could serve as a possible Jewish mode of execution. Here John is particularly interesting. in three days I will raise it up.”. Judas Iscariot? More commonly, Latter-day Saints assert that Israel’s judges were motivated by hate. When Pilate heard the words “he has made himself the son of God,” his reaction was fear. In the final analysis, overwhelmed with irrational fear, all of them knew not what they really did. This is often considered by Christian sources to have been a deliberate contradiction by the … It will be argued that, even during the Roman occupation, the Jews had the right to exercise the death penalty and that statements to the contrary in the New Testament are apologetically motivated.