Thank you for your insightful, thorough, and straightforward treatment of this subject. I think it is the most complete explanation I have ever seen.
I’m going to put http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mjesuskill.html as a link on my pages http://webbpage.topcities.com/crucifixion.html#101 and http://webbpage.topcities.com/crucifjewish.html#101
;j
Shalom
John
You’re very welcome.
In more than one sense – welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards, and we hope to see more of you here.
One point that was forgotten was the political place of Caiaphas in the larger Roman Empire. The position of High Priest was not merely the man in the middle, he was personally appointed and dismissed by the Roman Prefect. Thus, Caiaphas did not only have to keep a lid on everything, he had to be on good personal relations with Pilate.
<< Thus, Caiaphas did not only have to keep a lid on everything, he had to be on good personal relations with Pilate. >>
I thought that had been made pretty clear in the Staff Report, but it’s certainly worth emphasizing. The High Priest who didn’t suck up to the Roman authorities was not going to hold his position (or his life) very long.
That’s a bit of an overstatement. Pilate was an unqualified arriviste who had married into the Claudians, and was scared to death of making trouble for the Emperor. More than once he had to back down when he found he had ruffled Jewish feathers without a good enough (from the Imperial viewpoint) reason.
But Pilate was not the High Priest.
Precisely. He was a nobody with a job too big for him, and didn’t want any reports getting back to the Emperor about things going wrong.
So the image of the High Priest quivering in fear of Pilate is a bit exaggerated. There were several times when the Jews stood up to him and he backed down, because he was afraid of getting into trouble back in Rome. His main drive was, “How do I get through this without getting blamed?”
That doesn’t mean that the priests didn’t have to worry about Pilate. But they weren’t exactly terrified of him, either.
I didn’t say the High Priests was “quivering in fear.” I said he had to suck up. And I said “Roman authority” which is broader than just Pilate, although Pilate was the local rep.
Pilate had survived a purge by Tiberius of all the associates of (I think) Sejanus, who was suspected of conspiring against the Emperor, so it would be understandable that Pilate would be concerned if “the local elders” of the people he was governing messaged the Emperor that Pilate was insufficiently loyal.
Something I’ve been wondering about- if perhaps Jesus’s opponents among the Judaen establishment had feared, and Pilate had wondered- if Jesus, with his talk about turning the other cheek, was open to making a deal with Rome; that Pilate had thought maybe this Jesus would be a more reliable puppet king than the Herods.
Perhaps.
But, as Dorothy L. Sayers points out in her comments on her radio-play cycle, The Man Born to be King, there was another factor playing on Pilate’s nerves that day. He was a classical pagan. To him, the idea of Jesus actually being the son of the mysterious god of the Jews was a real possibility. Unlikely, perhaps, but real…
♫Remember Ceasar,
you have a duty
to keep the peace so crucify him!♫
Yep. Pilate, on his own authority, deposing the Herodian tetrarchs, and placing one Yeshua “Who?” ben Yosef on a throne, rather than a cross, with “INRI” inscribed over it. That would have convinced Tiberius of Pilate’s loyalty to him…not.
The Herodian dynasty was neither more or less politically reliable than average; several of them, indeed, got enthroned outside of territory that even Solomon would have claimed he ruled. Archelaus was not deposed by Augustus for disloyalty, but incompetence (granted, Rome needed a degree of competence in its puppets which wasn’t really demonstrated by any member of the dynasty except Herod himself and, perhaps, his grandson Agrippa I.)