I’m a bit confused by the parts involving Pontius Pilate. Some of that is simple ignorance: I understand that the Jewish priests don’t like Jesus, but I don’t understand why the Roman governor should care. And the part with the crowd clamoring for Pilate to free Barabbas doesn’t ring true to me. (E.g. the crowd shouting “His blood be on us, and on our children” from Matthew 27:25: in what circumstances would a crowd shout that?) Those issues aside, I’ll see Pilate’s lack of desire to kill Jesus as a sign that (as in Matthew 21-23) the real war here is between Jesus and the priest elite, not between him and traditional government forces.
We see a return of the humanity from Matthew 26 in Jesus’s crying “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (from Matthew 27:46), and for that matter, a crueler version of humanity in the mocking comments in Matthew 27:40-43. (Which do ring true to me, unlike the bit from Matthew 27:25 quoted above.)
At the end of Matthew 27, Jesus dies and is buried; and, in Matthew 28, he’s resurrected. I find that chapter very odd: there’s an amazing lack of detail, no power in the phrasing, and so much uncertainty that it’s acknowledged in the text in Matthew 28:15 and Matthew 28:17 with only a passing attempt at a rejoinder. A sad ending…
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The involvement of the Romans is one of the most opaque parts of all the gospels, and one of the least agreed upon. It’s clear that the Romans were the ones who executed Jesus, and it’s reasonably transparently deducible that they would actually have done so because they thought he was claiming to be the head of a revolutionary movement, as they executed several other would-be messiahs.
But the gospels tell it very differently, each in its own different way, and a logical interpretation is that each evangelist’s community needed it to be the fault of the Jews more than of the Romans; otherwise, there’s little reason for Christians to start their own sect, because Jesus wouldn’t have been recognized as both potentially messianic and threatening to the priests and the Herodian authorities by the Jewish authorities themselves. The bit with the Jewish crowd seems clearly to be a way to shift responsibility from the Romans, for example.
The resurrection narratives are very tough to deal with, for several reasons, and I’ve never found a good reason not to leave them for individual readers to make up their own minds about. NT Wright argued for their veracity on the basis of there being no good reason to make such a thing up, but although I consider him brilliant in every other argument of his I’ve ever read, I find that one sadly, sadly lacking.
1/4/2011 @ 8:18 am
Okay, so there’s a reason why I’m confused; good to know! Seems like these parts are something I should pay attention to when going through the other gospels, too.
1/4/2011 @ 9:10 am
I believe it was PBS that aired a show in the last few months that addressed why the Jewish priests went to Pontius Pilate about Jesus. But if I didn’t see this on PBS, then I think it had to be the Discovery Channel. The show got into recorded history of the time, rather than dwelling on the words as recorded in the gospels.
1/5/2011 @ 12:49 am