Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

23:13–15). After
     trying
three separate times
to dissuade the Jews from their bloodlust, Pilate reluctantly consents to their demands
     and hands Jesus over to be crucified.
    Not surprisingly, it is the last of the canonized gospels that pushes the conceit
     of Pilate’s innocence—and the Jews’ guilt—to the extreme. In the gospel of John, written
     in Ephesus sometime after 100 C.E ., Pilate does everything he can to save the life of this poor Jewish peasant, not
     because he thinks Jesus is guiltless, but because he seems to believe that Jesus may
     in fact be the “Son of God.” Nevertheless, after struggling in vain against the Jewish
     authorities to set Jesus free, the ruthless prefect who commands legions of troops
     and who regularly sends them into the streets to slaughter the Jews whenever they
     protest any of his decisions (as he did when the Jews objected to his pilfering of
     the Temple treasury to pay for Jerusalem’s aqueducts) is
forced
by the demands of the unruly crowd to give Jesus up.
    As Pilate hands him over to be crucified, Jesus himself removes all doubt as to who
     is truly responsible for his death: “The one who handed me over to you is guilty of
     a greater sin,” Jesus tells Pilate, personally absolving him of all guilt by laying
     the blame squarely on the Jewish religious authorities. John then adds one final,
     unforgivable insult to a Jewish nation that, at the time, was on the verge of a full-scale
     insurrection, by attributing to them the most foul, the most blasphemous piece of
     pure heresy that any Jew in first-century Palestine could conceivably utter. When
     asked by Pilate what he should do with “their king,” the Jews reply, “We have no king
     but Caesar!” (John 19:1–16).
    Thus, a story concocted by Mark strictly for evangelistic purposes to shift the blame
     for Jesus’s death away from Rome is stretched with the passage of time to the point
     of absurdity, becoming in the process the basis for two thousand years of Christian
     anti-Semitism.
    It is, of course, not inconceivable that Jesus would have received a brief audience
     with the Roman governor, but, again, only if the magnitude of his crime warranted
     special attention. Jesus was no simple troublemaker, after all. His provocative entry
     into Jerusalem trailed by a multitude of devotees declaring him king, his act ofpublic disturbance at the Temple, the size of the force that marched into Gethsemane
     to arrest him—all of these indicate that the authorities viewed Jesus of Nazareth
     as a serious threat to the stability and order of Judea. Such a “criminal” would very
     likely have been deemed worthy of Pilate’s attention. But any trial Jesus received
     would have been brief and perfunctory, its sole purpose to officially record the charges
     for which he was being executed. Hence, the one question that Pilate asks Jesus in
     all four gospel accounts: “Are you the King of the Jews?”
    If the gospel story were a drama (and it is), Jesus’s answer to Pilate’s question
     would serve as the climax that unfurls the story’s denouement: the crucifixion. This
     is the moment when the price must be paid for all that Jesus has said and done over
     the previous three years: the attacks against the priestly authorities, the condemnation
     of the Roman occupation, the claims of kingly authority. It has all led to this inevitable
     moment of judgment, just as Jesus said it would. From here it will be the cross and
     the tomb.
    And yet perhaps no other moment in Jesus’s brief life is more opaque and inaccessible
     to scholars than this one. That has partly to do with the multiple traditions upon
     which the story of Jesus’s trial and crucifixion rely. Recall that while Mark was
     the first written gospel, it was preceded by blocks of oral and written traditions
     about Jesus that were transmitted by his earliest followers. One of these “blocks”
     has already been introduced: the material unique to the gospels of Matthew and Luke
     that scholars term Q. But there is reason to believe that other blocks of traditions
     existed before the gospel of Mark that dealt exclusively with Jesus’s death and resurrection.
     These so-called passion narratives set up a basic sequence of events that the earliest
     Christians believed occurred at the end of Jesus’s life: the Last Supper. The betrayal
     by Judas Iscariot. The arrest at Gethsemane. The appearance before the high priest
     and