See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 Part 5  Part 6

Upon the release of his movie, The Passion, Mel Gibson was asked whether it was true that the Jews killed Jesus. “Well, it wasn’t the Scandinavians,” he replied. No, it wasn’t. But neither was it the Jews, per se. It was the religious leaders of the Jews that did the deed. Jealous at Jesus’ sway with the crowds, agitated at his challenge to their authority, they manipulated the crowd present there in the middle of the night to turn against Jesus. Days before, the little people, the ones who had to sleep at night for the working day ahead and so were not at that hasty trial, had welcomed Jesus with unbridled enthusiasm. It wasn’t the Jews. It was their leaders at the time. Why can’t revisionists make that distinction? Who today says Germans killed the Jews during the Holocaust? Nobody blames the entire German people. It is enough to say Hitler killed the Jews—and that is how it is said.

Ms. Pagels bends over backwards to qualify all four gospel accounts on this point. They all reveal that the Jewish authorities instigated Jesus’ death. She tries to spin it that they didn’t. There is precious little basis for challenging the point, but she challenges it anyway on all four of them. Pilate was cruel, she points out, summing up sparse accounts of his life. He would not have gone out on a limb to free a Jew, she insists; he despised Jews. It is unconvincing to me. Why would he not have tried to free Jesus, especially if doing so annoyed the ruling Jews, whom he probably despised more? They woke him out of a sound sleep to kill a clearly innocent man just to satisfy their religious envy. Why wouldn’t he thwart them? If you “despise” a people, won’t you despise the leaders of them more?

Pagels writes of how shocked she was upon discovering that the charge of Jews killing Jesus had fueled countless pogroms throughout history. Isn’t that behind the modern determination to pin Jesus’ death on Pilate and the Romans alone? To be sure, preventing pogroms is a noble cause. It is hard to fault her for motive. But one need not gut the scriptures to do it. It works perfectly well to paint the Jews as hijacked by their religious leaders, just as the Germans were hijacked by Hitler two thousand years later. In fact, it works even better; Both deeds were done in the dark, but only Jesus’ trial was literally in the dark.

To those whose religious sensibilities takes decidedly a second place to human peacekeeping efforts, it will be, ‘Who cares who killed him? He’s dead. Spin it whatever way placates the masses.’ They will be totally oblivious to any sense of Jesus foretelling his own death, such as at John 22:24: “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just one grain; but if it dies, it then bears much fruit,” ‘Naw, that line was thrown in after the fact,’ they will say, viewing it that he was a preacher who failed in his mission, but later opportunists managed to build a religion out of it.

Other conclusions seem equally doubtful. ‘Jesus wouldn’t have insulted the Jews,’ Pagels writes, referring to passages such as the 23rd chapter of Matthew. ‘He was a Jew.’ She has never heard of class distinction? Frankly, I think she goes easy on the educated rulers of the time because she also is of that educated class. It is not just her, but virtually all of today’s theologians. They are not drawn from the lower disadvantaged classes that included Jesus and the majority of those heeding him. They are from the higher classes. As such, they are generally inclined to say of the lower, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ It will be as in the 2011 film Inside Job, in which the director expresses dismay that no specific individuals of the 2008 financial collapse were ever brought to justice:

   Charles Ferguson (film director): “Why do you think there isn’t a more systematic investigation being undertaken?”

   Nouriel Roubini (Professor, NYU Business School): “Because then you will find the culprits.”

Culprits and regulators alike belonged to the same social set and were members of the same country clubs; they had no desire to turn on one another. So it is that today’s theologians cannot see religious leaders of the past as anything but well-intentioned. They are of the same background and class. They will not turn on each other.

To be Continued

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