Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

founded upon the destruction
     of the present order and the removal from power of every single person who now stands
     in judgment of him. What else is there to say?
    When morning comes, Jesus is bound again and escorted through the rough stone ramparts
     of the Antonia Fortress to appear before Pontius Pilate. As governor, Pilate’s chief
     responsibility in Jerusalem is to maintain order on behalf of the emperor. The only
     reason a poor Jewish peasant and day laborer would be brought before him is if he
     had jeopardized that order. Otherwise therewould be no hearing, no questions asked, no need for a defense. Pilate, as the histories
     reveal, was not one for trials. In his ten years as governor of Jerusalem, he had
     sent thousands upon thousands to the cross with a simple scratch of his reed pen on
     a slip of papyrus. The notion that he would even be in the same room as Jesus, let
     alone deign to grant him a “trial,” beggars the imagination. Either the threat posed
     by Jesus to the stability of Jerusalem is so great that he is one of only a handful
     of Jews to have the opportunity to stand before Pilate and answer for his alleged
     crimes, or else the so-called trial before Pilate is a fabrication.
    There is reason to suspect the latter. The scene does have an unmistakable air of
     theater to it. This is the final moment in Jesus’s ministry, the end of a journey
     that began three years earlier on the banks of the Jordan River. In the gospel of
     Mark, Jesus speaks only one other time after his interview with Pilate—when he is
     writhing on the cross. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).
    Yet in Mark’s telling of the story, something happens between Jesus’s trial before
     Pilate and his death on a cross that is so incredible, so obviously contrived, that
     it casts suspicion over the entire episode leading up to Jesus’s crucifixion. Pilate,
     having interviewed Jesus and found him innocent of all charges, presents him to the
     Jews along with a bandit (
lestes
) named bar Abbas who has been accused of murdering Roman guards during an insurrection
     at the Temple. According to Mark, it was a custom of the Roman governor during the
     feast of Passover to release one prisoner to the Jews, anyone for whom they asked.
     When Pilate asks the crowd which prisoner they would like to have released—Jesus,
     the preacher and traitor to Rome, or bar Abbas, the insurrectionist and murderer—the
     crowd demands the release of the insurrectionist and the crucifixion of the preacher.
    “Why?” Pilate asks, pained at the thought of having to put an innocent Jewish peasant
     to death. “What evil has he done?”
    But the crowd shouts all the louder for Jesus’s death. “Crucify him! Crucify him!”
     (Mark 15:1–20).
    The scene makes no sense at all. Never mind that outside the gospels there exists
     not a shred of historical evidence for any such Passover custom on the part of any
     Roman governor. What is truly beyond belief is the portrayal of Pontius Pilate—a man
     renowned for his loathing of the Jews, his total disregard for Jewish rituals and
     customs, and his penchant for absentmindedly signing so many execution orders that
     a formal complaint was lodged against him in Rome—spending even a moment of his time
     pondering the fate of yet another Jewish rabble-rouser.
    Why would Mark have concocted such a patently fictitious scene, one that his Jewish
     audience would immediately have recognized as false? The answer is simple: Mark was
     not writing for a Jewish audience. Mark’s audience was in Rome, where he himself resided.
     His account of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth was written mere months after
     the Jewish Revolt had been crushed and Jerusalem destroyed.
    Like the Jews, the early Christians struggled to make sense of the trauma of the Jewish
     Revolt and its aftermath. More to the point, they had to reinterpret Jesus’s revolutionary
     message and his self-identity as the kingly Son of Man in light of the fact that the
     Kingdom of God they were awaiting never materialized. Scattered across the Roman Empire,
     it was only natural for the gospel writers to distance themselves from the Jewish
     independence movement by erasing, as much as possible, any hint of radicalism or violence,
     revolution or zealotry, from the story of Jesus, and to adapt Jesus’s words and actions
     to the new political situation in which they found themselves. That task