Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

was made
     somewhat easier by the fact that many among Jerusalem’s Christian community seem to
     have sat out the war with Rome, viewing it as a welcomed sign of the end times promised
     by their messiah. According to the third-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea, a
     large number ofChristians in Jerusalem fled to the other side of the Jordan River. “The people of
     the church at Jerusalem,” Eusebius wrote, “in accordance with a certain oracle that
     was vouchsafed by way of revelation to approved men there, had been commanded to depart
     from the city before the war, and to inhabit a certain city of Peraea they called
     Pella.” By most accounts, the church they left behind was demolished in 70 C.E . and all signs of the first Christian community in Jerusalem were buried in a mound
     of rubble and ash.
    With the Temple in ruins and the Jewish religion made pariah, the Jews who followed
     Jesus as messiah had an easy decision to make: they could either maintain their cultic
     connections to their parent religion and thus share in Rome’s enmity (Rome’s enmity
     toward Christians would peak much later), or they could divorce themselves from Judaism
     and transform their messiah from a fierce Jewish nationalist into a pacifistic preacher
     of good works whose kingdom was not of this world.
    It was not only fear of Roman reprisal that drove these early Christians. With Jerusalem
     despoiled, Christianity was no longer a tiny Jewish sect centered in a predominantly
     Jewish land surrounded by hundreds of thousands of Jews. After 70 C.E ., the center of the Christian movement shifted from Jewish Jerusalem to the Graeco-Roman
     cities of the Mediterranean: Alexandria, Corinth, Ephesus, Damascus, Antioch, Rome.
     A generation after Jesus’s crucifixion, his non-Jewish followers outnumbered and overshadowed
     the Jewish ones. By the end of the first century, when the bulk of the gospels were
     being written, Rome—in particular the Roman intellectual elite—had become the primary
     target of Christian evangelism.
    Reaching out to this particular audience required a bit of creativity on the part
     of the evangelists. Not only did all traces of revolutionary zeal have to be removed
     from the life of Jesus, the Romans had to be completely absolved of any responsibility
     for Jesus’s death.
It was the Jews who killed the messiah
. The Romans were unwitting pawns of the high priest Caiaphas, who desperately wantedto murder Jesus but who did not have the legal means to do so. The high priest duped
     the Roman governor Pontius Pilate into carrying out a tragic miscarriage of justice.
     Poor Pilate tried everything he could to save Jesus. But the Jews cried out for blood,
     leaving Pilate no choice but to give in to them, to hand Jesus over to be crucified.
     Indeed, the farther each gospel gets from 70 C.E . and the destruction of Jerusalem, the more detached and outlandish Pilate’s role
     in Jesus’s death becomes.
    The gospel of Matthew, written in Damascus some twenty years after the Jewish Revolt,
     paints a picture of Pontius Pilate at great pains to set Jesus free. Having been warned
     by his wife not to have anything to do with “that innocent man,” and recognizing that
     the religious authorities are handing Jesus over to him solely “out of jealousy,”
     Matthew’s Pilate literally washes his hands of any blame for Jesus’s death. “I am
     innocent of this man’s blood,” he tells the Jews. “See to it yourselves.”
    In Matthew’s retelling of Mark, the Jews respond to Pilate “as a whole”—that is, as
     an entire nation (
pas ho laos
)—that they themselves will accept the blame for Jesus’s death from this day until
     the end of time: “May his blood be on our heads, and on our children!” (Matthew 27:1–26).
    Luke, writing in the Greek city of Antioch at around the same time as Matthew, not
     only confirms Pilate’s guiltlessness for Jesus’s death; he unexpectedly extends that
     amnesty to Herod Antipas as well. Luke’s copy of Mark presents Pilate excoriating
     the chief priests, the religious leaders, and the people for the accusations they
     have dared to level against Jesus. “You brought this person to me as one who was turning
     the people away [from the Law]. I have examined him in your presence and found him
     guilty of none of the charges you have brought against him. Neither has Herod, when
     I sent [Jesus] to him. He has done nothing worthy of death” (Luke