Murder at Golgotha Read online

The Matthew, Mark, and Luke versions all refer to the guards similarly behaving violently towards Jesus without either interrogator voicing the slightest call for restraint:

  They spat in his face and hit him with their fists; others said as they struck him, "Prophesy to us, Christ! Who hit you then?" (Matthew 26:67-68)

  According to the Matthew, Mark, and Luke versions, Caiaphas ultimately put to Jesus the key question of whether he was the Jewish people's expected Messiah. Their accounts then differ on the directness or otherwise with which Jesus responded. Nonetheless, all agree that, rather than any denial, Jesus positively affirmed his Messiah status by quoting from a psalm of King David directly alluding to this:

  From this day onward you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power [i.e., God] and coming on the clouds of heaven (Matthew 26:64)

  At this declaration Caiaphas reportedly tore his priestly robe as a ritual token that Jesus had effectively signed his own death warrant. He pronounced that as Jesus had uttered an obvious, blatant blasphemy, no further witnesses were necessary. Whoever was present on the interrogation side that night, they collectively decided that Jesus deserved to die.

  Was there any justification for the verdict handed down by Caiaphas? There has been a lot of argument about how he could be so emphatic about wanting the death penalty for Jesus, merely for his claiming to be the Jewish Messiah. After all, assuming that the scriptural prophecies of the Messiah were true—as every good Jew was expected to believe—someone sometime surely had to come forward who was genuinely this new leader of the Jewish people. So why not Jesus?

  Why did not Caiaphas order his own security force to carry out the death sentence on Jesus, either there and then, or in the early hours of the following day? At least with regard to any offences committed within the precincts of the Jerusalem Temple, Caiaphas and his immediate circle of chief priests had sufficient authority. The Temple, as the Jewish world's holiest shrine, included certain areas where anyone who was a not full Jew—for example a male who had not been circumcised—was prohibited from entry under pain of death. There were notices in three languages positioned at key points to reinforce this ruling. Anybody who flouted it could almost certainly have been put to death on the spot, on the direct authority of the Jewish High Priesthood, without deference to the Roman authorities. After all, within two years of Jesus' crucifixion the first Christian martyr, Stephen, would be stoned to death in such circumstances, with no apparent censure from the Roman administration. Likewise in A.D. 62 Jesus' brother James would be thrown off the Temple parapet then stoned to death on the direct orders of a High Priest.

  So something was holding Caiaphas back. In the case of Jesus, his driving consideration seems to have been to have this irksome Galilean killed without any overt responsibility for this falling on him—and as quickly as possible. This was why Caiaphas did not want to wait for the summoning of the full Sanhedrin. What he and his father-in-law Annas had held in the middle of the night was not any proper trial, but rather a kangaroo court, in the staging of which they had decided that, while Jesus could not be allowed to live, any possible blame for killing him should be shifted to someone else.

  Here even the most tacit admission from Jesus that he was some kind of Messiah, however unworldly, could only play into their hands. The very rite of anyone becoming the "Anointed One" (as we have seen, the literal meaning of Messiah), conferred kingship of the Jewish people upon that recipient. But kingship of the Jews was nominally held at this time by members of the Herod family, sons of Herod the Great who had been appointed by, and were totally subservient to, the Romans. So any claim that Jesus made to kingship could be construed as tantamount to rebellion against Roman rule. That was a very serious matter rightly falling under the jurisdiction of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. And most conveniently, Pilate was right on the spot there in Jerusalem at this very time. . . .

  6

  The Brutality Begins

  OUR INVESTIGATION NOW follows the events immediately prior to the murder itself. According to the testimonies, morning had now arrived—indeed the cock had crowed, even while Jesus was still being interrogated. Whatever sleep anyone had managed to snatch overnight, Caiaphas's guards' task was now to lead Jesus to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. As yet another indication that the John testimony was written by someone readily conversant with the Jerusalem of Jesus' time, it alone names the building to which Jesus was taken as the Praetorium. In Latin this simply means the place where the Praetor, or governor, had his residence. Since Pilate's normal, permanent residence was at Caesarea Maritima on the Mediterranean coast, we may infer that this was his temporary residence whenever he stayed in Jerusalem.

  Do we know the exact location of this building? While even experts of the present day are uncertain exactly where this Jerusalem Praetorium was located, two possible candidates have been suggested. The first of these is the Antonia fortress built by King Herod the Great on high ground at the northwest corner of the Temple Mount. This Herod named after his friend Mark Anthony, famous for his "Friends, Romans, countrymen . . ." speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. To reach it, Jesus' captors would have had to lead him through Jerusalem's streets almost the entire south-to-north length of the city, which would have meant a high danger of possible ambush or surprise attack from Jesus' supporters.

  The alternative candidate, the so-called Citadel of Jerusalem, was located on some of Jerusalem's highest ground inside the gate commanding the steep western approach to the city, known as the Jaffa gate. Today partly occupied by the Museum of History of Jerusalem, from historical sources we know that King Herod the Great built a palace there, with three massive towers protecting it, Mariamne, Phasael, and Hippicus, named after his wife, brother, and friend, respectively. One of these towers still survives. For the Roman governors of Judaea, such a heavily fortified headquarters would have been strategically excellent in any circumstances of trouble, the Romans being full of such commonsense security measures to keep control of a troublesome province. This Citadel site therefore represents the likeliest location of Pilate's Praetorium.

  On Jesus' guards' arrival at its entrance, the chief problem for the high-ranking Jewish priestly delegation accompanying them was that this was Roman territory that they were about to step into. To convey Caiaphas's intentions for what he wanted done with Jesus, they needed to converse directly with Pilate. And any building housing a Roman governor would almost inevitably have incorporated statues and sculptures of Roman gods and goddesses, all of which idolatrous objects would make any Jew unclean for the coming religious observance. As the John testimony specifically relates:

  They did not go into the Praetorium ... to avoid becoming defiled and unable to eat the Passover meal. (John 18:28)

  Not only does this remark reinforce the John testimony's clear insistence that Jesus and his disciples' "Last Supper" the previous evening had not been a full Passover meal, it is solely the John testimony that informs us of how this problem was overcome: "So Pilate came outside to them. . . ."

  However small a detail this might seem, it accurately reflects the cultural sensibilities that prevailed between Jews and Romans at that time. It gives us good reason for continuing to regard the John testimony as including some substantially reliable eyewitness reporting. Probably the unnamed disciple "known to the High Priest," whom we suspect to have been the author of this particular testimony, followed the guard party, with or without Peter accompanying him, and he was thereby able to observe the circumstances following Jesus' handover to Roman authority.

  What do we know about that authority, the Roman governor whom all four testimonies name as "Pontius Pilate"? Near-contemporary historians such as Tacitus confirm Pilate as a firmly historical "prefect" of Judaea who governed the province on behalf of the Roman emperor Tiberius between A.D. 27 and 36. The Jewish-born historian Josephus, who lived just one generation later than Jesus, recorded several instances of Pilate's ruthlessness, cracking down on any sign
s of rebellion amongst Jews. Furthermore, in 1961 Italian archaeologists excavating at Caesarea Maritima on the coast of Israel, where Pilate had his main headquarters, found a damaged but still legible Latin inscription bearing Pilate's name:

  [CAESARIEN]S [IBUS To the people of Caesarea

  TIBERIEVM Tiberieum

  [PON]TIVS PILATVS Pontius Pilate

  [PRAEF]ECTVS IVDA[EA]E Prefect of Judaea

  This inscription seems to have been the dedication panel of a temple that Pilate had built at Caesarea in honor of the then Roman emperor Tiberius.

  Every testimony is in full agreement that when Jesus' captors asked Pilate to provide what was in effect an "on demand" human abattoir service, he exhibited considerable prevarication and reluctance. One of his first reactions was to tell them, "Take him [Jesus] yourselves and try him by your own Law."

  Why, in the light of this reluctance, was Pilate swayed? Their key argument for noncompliance, one which seems positively to have persuaded him that he had to take this priestly delegation seriously, was the allegation that Jesus was claiming to be a "king of the Jews."

  All four testimonies agree that Pilate duly proceeded to question Jesus directly on this point, asking him specifically whether he assumed any such title for himself. They then mildly disagree on how he replied. According to Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he said, "It is you who say it." John, here with much fuller reporting, as from his having been present, has Jesus respond in his typical question-for-question manner: "Do you ask this of your own accord, or have others said it to you about me?" John then follows up by quoting Jesus explaining to Pilate that his kingdom was not of our earthly world, but one that was altogether more otherworldly. In other words, something along the lines of the "Kingdom of God" that John the Baptist had foretold before him.

  Such an involved theological dialogue between a Roman and a Jew inevitably raises the question of how they were able to converse together. After all, Jesus was reared in provincial Galilee, where he and those around him would have spoken Aramaic, a language descendant from ancient Hebrew. He is most unlikely to have learned Pilate's native tongue, Latin. Conversely Pontius Pilate, even though he had been appointed responsible for a province where the inhabitants spoke Aramaic, may well never have bothered to learn their language.

  The answer is almost certainly that Jesus and Pilate, despite their very different backgrounds, had both learned Greek as their common second language. When the Greek conqueror Alexander the Great seized the Jewish world in the fourth century B.C. he and his successors had introduced Greek as the lingua franca, or common language, among all the peoples whom they subjugated, including the Jews. And although the Romans later took over most of these Greek conquests, because of their great admiration for Greek culture, they encouraged the perpetuation of Greek as a common language in their Empire. Even in Jesus' rural Galilee, a lot of the surviving tomb inscriptions from his time, which might have been expected to be written in Aramaic, are often found to be in Greek. Likewise, when Jesus gave his disciple Simon the nickname "Peter" he was actually choosing a Greek name, Petros, and specifically because of its punning the meaning, "rock." So, although Mel Gibson broke some brave new ground by having his Passion actors speak in Latin and Aramaic as the languages that he supposed was used at the time, he actually missed the opportunity to get this right in respect of Jesus' encounters with Pilate. The strong likelihood is that they conversed perfectly easily together in Greek.

  But if Pilate learned enough from this dialogue to perceive that Jesus posed no serious threat to law and order in Judaea, all four testimonies make clear that he was not able thereby just to have Jesus released. To add to the pressures on him to refuse the priestly delegation's demands, according to the Matthew testimony, even his wife came up to him while he was seated on the "judgment seat" to say that she had had a dream about Jesus, and that he should beware of becoming responsible for his death. So why could Pilate not follow his own instincts, and those of his wife? It therefore may well have been in some desperation that, according to the Luke testimony, Pilate sent Jesus to Herod the Great's son Herod Antipas, who like himself had come to Jerusalem for the Passover. Herod had recently beheaded John the Baptist, so Pilate may well have quietly hoped that he would take charge of Jesus likewise. But Pilate had no such luck. Herod interviewed Jesus, only to have the latter fail to give him any answers to his questions, so he simply sent the prisoner straight back to Pilate. Very likely he and Pilate were living within a short walk of each other inside the protection of the same Citadel/Praetorium compound.

  Pilate had just one more ploy to try. According to all four testimonies, there was a custom at Passover time for him, as Roman governor, to pardon and release one prisoner in his custody. As reported in the John testimony, he asked:

  "Would you like me, then, to release to you the king of the Jews?" At this they shouted "Not this man . . . but Barabbas." Barabbas was a bandit. Pilate then had Jesus taken away and scourged. (John 18:39-19:1)

  Not a single one of our four testimony authors provides any more information than the single word "scourged" for this, the first of the "official" punishments that Jesus received, as distinct from the haphazard physical abuses that Caiaphas's guards had meted out earlier. The John testimony mentions that Jesus was "taken away" for this procedure, and almost certainly it happened in a back area of the Praetorium reserved for Roman soldiery, away from the gaze of anyone who provided information for our four testimonies. Undaunted, Mel Gibson's Passion, on the authority of Anne-Catherine Emmerich's visions, represents Jesus' mother Mary, together with Mary Magdalen, as watching every blow that now followed. It was this gory scene of prolonged, unremitting sadism that more than any other sent shock waves of revulsion among cinema audiences right across the world, a spectacle that might conceivably have been justified had it been an authentic re-creation of how a Roman scourging actually happened. But was it authentic?

  For, as with so much else in his movie, Gibson's prime "authority" for this scene was the visions of the nineteenth-century nun Anne Catherine Emmerich, as recounted to her interpreter Clemens Brentano:

  And now came forward to meet Jesus the executioners' servants with their whips, rods, and cords. . . . There were six of them. . . . There was something beastly, even devilish, in their appearance, and they were half intoxicated. . . . Two of the bloodhounds with sanguinary rage began to tear with their whips the sacred back from head to foot. . . . Our Lord quivered and writhed like a poor worm under the strokes of the criminals' rods. . . . A large jug of thick, red juice was brought to them, from which they guzzled until they became perfectly furious from intoxication. They had been at work about a quarter of an hour . . . Jesus' body was . . . entirely covered with swollen cuts. . . . The second pair of scourgers now fell upon Jesus with fresh fury. They made use of different rods, rough, as if set with thorns. . . . Under their furious blows . . . his blood spurted around so that the arms of his tormenters were sprinkled with it. . . . The last two scourgers struck Jesus with whips consisting of small chains, or straps, fastened to an iron handle, the ends furnished with iron points, or hooks. They tore off whole pieces of skin and flesh from his ribs. . . . Only blood and wounds, only barbarously mangled flesh could be seen on the . . . body. . . . The terrible scourging . . . lasted fully three-quarters of an hour.

  All this Gibson's movie most graphically dramatized, over nine to ten minutes, almost blow for blow, blood spurt for blood spurt—except, as veteran New York medical examiner Dr. Fred Zugibe has wisely commented, if Jesus really had been subjected to a scourging of this intensity and gore, "he would have died long before carrying the cross," let alone survived for the crucifixion proper.

  The fact is that we do know a reasonable amount about Roman scourging from mentions of it in Roman literature, from depictions of the scourge weapon on Roman coins, and from an actual example of a scourge weapon found at Herculanaeum. All these give a far more accurate description of a scourging than the Gibson/Emme
rich scenario. Rather than the rods and other instruments described by Emmerich, the actual weapon used was a flagrum, a whip with leather or rope thongs to which were attached pellets of metal, or sometimes bone, called -plumbatae. These were added to inflict the maximum pain.

  Intriguingly, the one "document" that illustrates the scourging procedure with total historical fidelity is the imprint, that appears to be from a human body, on the controversial "Shroud," said to have wrapped Jesus' body after the crucifixion, preserved in Turin, Italy. Historical sources describe scourging victims to have been fully naked during the punishment, a detail which, though Gibson's film prudishly shrank from it, is readily apparent on the Shroud of Turin in the form of dumbbell-shaped marks peppering the back of the body from shoulders to ankles, and extending to the front. This convincingly shows the way that the whip, held at hand height, was lashed first in one direction and then another.

  The medical examiner, Doctor Zugibe, together with a Los Angeles-based counterpart, the late Dr. Robert Bucklin, both spent decades studying the Shroud's imprint from a forensic viewpoint. Both specialists found the dumbbell-shaped marks to be absolutely consistent with contusions from lashings with a Roman flagrum. While the Shroud "scourge marks" are nothing like as extensive as the "entire body an open wound" scenario portrayed in Gibson's Passion, Zugibe has nonetheless envisaged: