The Last Week of Jesus's LifeSýnishorn

Wednesday, April 1, 33 AD

Two days until Passover. Jesus knows his actions and teachings have sealed his fate. He tells his disciples as much in Matthew 26:2: “You know that after two days the Passover is coming, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified.”

Sure enough, “the chief priests and the elders of the people gathered in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas, and plotted together to arrest Jesus by stealth and kill him. But they said, ‘Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar among the people’” (Matthew 26:3–5).

The temple elites are desperate to off Jesus without causing a festival riot. They not only have to get through Passover but also the following six days of the festival until the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims go home sometime after Thursday, April 9. There’s no way Jesus won’t make another scene before then. They have to arrest him covertly before he pulls a stunt that forces the Romans to get involved and sell the high priesthood to someone else. But how to do the deed?

There are essentially only three things that nearly all biblical and secular scholars agree on: The first is that Jesus was a Jewish healer who preached in Judea and Galilee. The second is that his message was something he called “the kingdom of God.” And third, this so-called kingdom—earthly, spiritual, or otherwise—eventually posed a big enough threat to the Roman Empire that they executed him for it.

Before we proceed to Jesus’s arrest, trials, and execution, we must stop and ask a question most historians and theologians have overlooked for centuries: What capital crime did Jesus commit?

We know that Jesus is not killed for calling himself the Jewish messiah, because it is not illegal to call oneself a messiah. Indeed, all sorts of folk had called themselves a messiah and not one received so much as a rap on the wrists from the temple elite. It is not his claim of messiahship that brings down the wrath of Annas’s synedrion, so perhaps they believe that he claims to be God himself, and is therefore a blasphemer. But this poses two major problems:

The first is that temple elites aren’t legally allowed to execute anybody even if they wanted to (John 18:31). Annas knows he can’t just execute Jesus, because it would risk Caiaphas’s seat and their political dynasty. But he still needs to find a way to get the Romans to end Jesus’s life.

The second problem is that Romans don’t give two hoots about Jewish theology. They don’t execute rabbis for claiming to be a god they don’t even believe in. If you were to tell a polytheistic Roman that Jesus claims to be God, said Roman might respond, “Which one?”

No, Jewish blasphemy doesn’t earn you a Roman execution. It’s the physical here-and-now, political declarative that makes the Romans pay attention. Let the temple elite administer the opioid of religion to the masses, just don’t declare yourself king of the Jews. Annas understands this dynamic perfectly well. Scripture makes it clear that Jesus was not killed by the Jews. He was killed by the Romans, and not for his “errant” theology. He must have been assassinated for political reasons.

Let us put ourselves in the luxurious shoes of the high priest and his corrupt father-in-law for a moment. We have a fellow who says he is the Messiah and the Son of God. He undermines our credibility and erodes public trust. He disrupts our highly profitable businesses and makes us into a laughingstock. For several years we have been trying to concoct a basis for accusing him to the Romans (John 8:6), yet his power and following keep growing. If it were up to us, we would execute him under the guise of blasphemy. But we are under the boot of the Romans, and it is their decision. As it stands, this apocalyptic rabble-rouser is worse than his forebear John the Baptizer, and if we can’t find a way to kill him, he will spark a Passover uprising that sees Rome destroy Jerusalem, raze the temple, and unseat us from our lofty place in the power structure, if not crucify us while they tear down our city’s walls. Can we build a case against this rabbi that will convince our overlords to do away with him once and for all?

That is the task to which Annas and Caiaphas and their synedrion now set their sights.