Killing Jesus: A History

calls out the same thing. Soon, some in the crowd beg to be healed, right there in the Temple. The Pharisees, as always, are watching. “Do you hear what these children are saying?” the chief priests and scribes call out indignantly to Jesus. The chief priests have now joined the crowd and observe Jesus with great concern. They will report his every move back to Caiaphas and perhaps even to Annas, the powerful former high priest who is also Caiaphas’s father-in-law. The aging Annas is just as wily as Caiaphas and still wields a great deal of influence.
    More Hosannas ring throughout the Temple courts, shouted again and again by children.
    “Do you hear what these people are saying?” the chief priests repeat.
    “From the lips of children and infants, you have ordained praise,” Jesus tells them, quoting from David.
    The religious leaders know the psalm well. It is a call for God to bask in the adoration of the children, then to rise up and strike hard at the powers of darkness that stand against him.
    If the Pharisees’ interpretation is correct, Jesus is actually comparing them with forces of evil.
    Still, they don’t motion for Jesus to be arrested. Nor do they try to stop him as he leaves the Temple, trailed by his disciples.
    The sun is now setting, and the first cooking fires are being lit on the Mount of Olives. Jesus and the disciples once again make the long walk back to Bethany. For now, he is a free man.
    For now.
    *   *   *
    Six hundred years ago, when Jeremiah prophesied that the Temple would be destroyed, he was punished by being lowered into an empty well. He sank up to his waist in mud and was left to die.
    Thirty-two years from now, a peasant named Jesus ben Ananias will also predict the Temple’s destruction. He will be declared a madman at first, but his life will be spared by order of the Roman governor—but only after he is flogged until his bones show. 1
    But the time of Jesus is different. He is not a lone man but a revolutionary with a band of disciples and a growing legion of followers. His outbursts in the Temple are an aggressive act against the religious leaders rather than a passive prediction that the Temple will one day fall. Jesus is now openly antagonistic toward Temple authorities.
    Caiaphas has seen what happens when political revolt breaks out in the Temple courts and remembers the burning of the Temple porticoes after the death of Herod. He believes Jesus to be a false prophet. Today’s display truly shows how dangerous Jesus has become.
    The threat must be squelched. As the Temple’s high priest and the most powerful Jewish authority in the world, Caiaphas is bound by religious law to take extreme measures against Jesus immediately. “If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder,” the book of Deuteronomy reads, “that prophet or dreamer must be put to death for inciting rebellion against the Lord your God.”
    Caiaphas knows that Jesus is playing a very clever game by using the crowds as a tool to prevent his arrest. This is a game that Caiaphas plans to win. But to avoid the risk of becoming impure, he must move before sundown on Friday and the start of Passover.
    This is the biggest week of the year for Caiaphas. He has an extraordinary number of obligations and administrative tasks to tend to if the Passover celebration is to come off smoothly. Rome is watching him closely, through the eyes of Pontius Pilate, and any failure on the part of Caiaphas during this most vital festival might lead to his dismissal.
    But nothing matters more than silencing Jesus.
    Time is running out. Passover starts in four short days.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    JERUSALEM
TUESDAY, APRIL 3, A.D. 30
MORNING
    The serenity of Lazarus’s home provides Jesus and the disciples instant relief. After the day in the Temple and the two-mile walk from Jerusalem back to Bethany, the men are spent. Hospitality is a vital aspect of Jewish society, dating back to the days when the patriarch Abraham treated all guests as if they were angels in disguise, offering them lavish meals of veal, butter, bread, and milk. So it is that the spacious home of Lazarus, with its large courtyard and thick door to keep out intruders at night, is not just a refuge for Jesus and his disciples but also a vibrant link to the roots of their Jewish faith.
    Lazarus’s sisters, Martha and Mary, 1 dote on Jesus, though in opposite ways. Martha is the older of the