Killing Jesus: A History (16 page)

“I tell you the truth: among those born of women, there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist.”

*   *   *

Another year passes. One night, through the thick stone walls of his prison cell, John can hear the sounds of music and dancing. Antipas has invited the most powerful men in Galilee—high officials, military commanders, and all his wealthy friends—to join him at Machaerus for a lively dinner banquet to celebrate his birthday. Inside the palace, the men and women dine in separate banquet halls, as per custom. In the chamber where Antipas dines with the men, he calls for entertainment and then watches in rapt attention as his stepdaughter, Salome, steps into the great hall and performs an exotic solo dance. The beautiful young teenager with the raven-colored hair flits slowly around the room, seductively swaying her hips to the beat of the tambourines and cymbals. The men are entranced and unable to take their eyes off her. They roar with approval as the song ends. Antipas is particularly enchanted.

“Ask me for anything you want, and I’ll give it to you,” he calls out to Salome.

The request, however, does not end there. Knowing that his guests have become enraptured by the beautiful Salome, Antipas wants to make a grand gesture that will impress them. “I swear an oath, whatever you ask, I will give you, up to half my kingdom.”

Salome is young, but she is also clever. She rushes from the room to find her mother for advice. “What shall I ask for?” Salome asks.

This is the moment the vengeful Herodias has been waiting for. She tells her daughter: “The head of John the Baptist.”

Salome does not hesitate and immediately races back into the banquet hall. Looking directly at her stepfather, she says in a loud voice, “I want you right now to give me the head of John the Baptist on a silver tray.”
⁹

Antipas is shocked. He is a man who understands political intrigue, for he has played this game his whole life. He grew up in a household where a father would kill his sons at the slightest sign of disloyalty. His knowledge of this game spared him from execution. But now he is being outwitted and outfoxed by, of all people, his own wife.

Killing a man of the people could bring grave consequences. Though fond of perversion, vice, and other self-indulgences, Antipas is still a Jew—even if just marginally faithful. He has enough faith to wonder if there will be divine consequences to such a lethal action. In fact, ten years after the Baptist is executed, the Jewish historian Josephus will proclaim that Antipas’s loss of his kingdom was a direct result of God punishing him for the murder of John the Baptist.

And yet he has sworn an oath. To back down in front of these men would put his good word in doubt. When it came time to make a promise to one of his guests on another occasion, they would never believe him.

So it is that John the Baptist hears the creak of his cell door swinging open. An executioner carrying a broad, sharpened sword enters alone. By the light of the moon, he forces John to his knees. The Baptist is resigned to his fate. The swordsman then raises his weapon high overhead and viciously brings it down.

John does not feel the weight of the heavy steel blade as it slices his head from his body.

The voice of one crying out in the wilderness is now silent.

Grasping John’s head by the hair, the executioner places it upon a tray and delivers it to Salome and her mother.

*   *   *

Herodias has had her revenge against the Baptist. But if she (or Antipas) thinks that killing John will end the religious fervor now sweeping through Galilee, she is very wrong. John may have stirred strong emotions by cleansing believers of their sins, but another presence is challenging authority in ways never before seen or heard.

Jesus of Nazareth has one year to live.

CHAPTER TEN

GALILEE
APRIL, A.D. 29
DAY

Jesus has become a victim of his own celebrity, and with every passing day, his life is more and more in danger. Many Galileans believe Jesus is the Christ—the anointed earthly king who will overthrow the Romans and rule his people as the king of the Jews, just as David did a thousand years ago. Because of this, the Roman authorities are paying even closer attention to Jesus. For, under Roman law, a man who claims to be a king is guilty of rebellion against the emperor, a crime punishable by crucifixion. Knowing this, Jesus takes great care no longer to proclaim publicly that he is the Christ.

The chief Galilean administrator of the Jews, Herod Antipas, does not believe the Nazarene is the Christ but, instead, the reincarnation of John the Baptist. It is as if Antipas is being haunted by the dead prophet as punishment for ordering his murder. Antipas is openly fretting about Jesus and the troubles he could cause. And the tetrarch is prepared once again to use extreme measures to solve the Jesus problem.

But Pontius Pilate and Antipas are not acting yet. So far, Jesus has shown himself to be a peaceful man. Other than the lone incident with the Temple money changers, nothing Jesus has done threatens them or their way of life. He has never once suggested that the people of Galilee rise up against Rome. Nor has he told his vast audiences that he is king of the Jews. So the Roman governor of Judea and the Jewish administrator of Galilee are content to watch Jesus from afar.

Not so with the religious authorities. Led by the Temple high priest Caiaphas, the teachers of Jewish law see Jesus as a very clear and present danger. Caiaphas has amassed his wealth and power through Temple taxes, profits from the money changers, and the Temple concession for sacrificial lambs. His family also owns tenant farms outside Jerusalem, so he has a great deal more than just religious teachings at stake.

Just as an armed revolutionary is a military threat to Rome, so Jesus’s preaching is a threat to the spiritual authority of the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Temple teachers and scribes. Thus these self-proclaimed men of God have devised a specific plan for handling the Nazarene: a quiet arrest followed by a hasty execution.

But the religious leaders would be rendered impure if they murder the Nazarene in cold blood. They cannot pay someone to run him through with a sword or to wrap their hands around his throat and strangle him in his sleep. No, the Pharisees must play by traditional rules, and this means killing Jesus for a public violation of religious law.

In search of such an offense, a select team of Pharisees and scribes now travels from Jerusalem to Galilee to observe Jesus in person. They are men well versed in Scripture. If anyone can find fault with the Nazarene, it is they.

Or so the religious leaders believe.

*   *   *

Things go wrong from the start. The Pharisees and Sadducees are frustrated at every turn, for Jesus is a spiritual and intellectual rival unlike any they have ever faced. Despite their best efforts to weaken his movement by interrogating him publicly, the Nazarene outwits them at every turn, and his popularity continues to soar. The people of Galilee begin to monitor Jesus’s travels so closely that they anticipate where he is going and then race ahead to wait for him. Stories of Jesus turning water into wine and making the lame walk and the blind see have so electrified the region that it is now commonplace for almost anyone with an ailment to seek him out, even if that means being carried for miles to await his appearance. Indeed, the Pharisees themselves witness a puzzling event, as Jesus apparently heals a man’s severely withered hand on the Sabbath,
¹
an act that the Pharisees promptly and publicly condemn as a violation of religious law.

Jesus shows himself to be an adroit intellectual foil by using logic and words of Holy Scripture to upend their arguments. “There is nothing unlawful,” he reminds the Temple squad, “about doing good.” Making matters more difficult for the holy men is Jesus’s ability to amaze the peasants of Galilee by seemingly performing supernatural acts. The Pharisees now hear that he transformed two fish and five loaves of bread into a feast that fed five thousand people in the mountains near Bethsaida early this spring. And even more fantastic is word that Jesus allegedly brought a dead girl in Capernaum back to life. Finally, the most astounding happening of all: Jesus’s disciples claim to have seen him walk atop the Sea of Galilee in the midst of a violent storm.

The Pharisees refuse to believe any of this, even though they have witnessed firsthand an unexplainable act of healing. Yet a staggering number of witnesses are attesting to each and every one of these
pela’oth
,
othoth
,
and
mophethim
. The Greek of the Gospels will later translate these Hebrew words into
dunameis
,
semeia
, and
terata
—power (or force), signs, and wonders. The simple Aramaic-speaking people of Galilee prefer just one word to describe the acts of Jesus:
nes
.
²

The Pharisees believe in miracles but not in Jesus. Time and again throughout Jewish oral history—from Moses to Job to Esther—God reveals himself through such actions. When the Pharisees finally put the oral tradition of the Jewish people onto the page two centuries from now, the Talmud will be filled with stories of God’s miracles.

But Jesus is not God, of that the Pharisees are sure. He is an agitator, a false teacher, a dangerous charlatan. Rather than a heavenly palace, Jesus takes a room in the simple earthly home of his disciple Peter. Clearly this cannot be the supreme deity whom the Pharisees have spent their lives contemplating.

This troubles the Pharisees deeply. Jesus is undermining their authority. If allowed to flourish, his movement will destroy their way of life, stripping them of wealth and privilege. And that cannot be allowed to happen. For as much as the Pharisees say they love God, most of them are arrogant, self-righteous men who love their exalted class status far more than any religious belief system.

It is a status the Temple priests have enjoyed for almost six centuries. Since the time of the Babylonian captivity, when the last true Jewish king was toppled from the throne, a power vacuum has existed among the Jewish people.
³
Holy men such as the Pharisees have filled that void by strictly interpreting the laws of Moses. They gained respect from the Jewish people by adding hundreds of new commandments and prohibitions to Moses’s original list of ten, then passing them on through an oral history known as the Tradition of the Elders.

Few ever question these laws, especially not the uneducated peasants of Galilee. But now Jesus, through his actions and teaching, has shown many of these mandates to be absurd and the behavior of the Pharisees and Sadducees to be even more so.

The time has come to move against the Nazarene.

*   *   *

One spring day, a Pharisee taunts Jesus: “Why don’t your disciples live according to the traditions of the elders instead of eating their food with unclean hands?”

Jesus is calm. He begins by answering a question with a question, a technique he often uses. “Why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?”

It is April in Galilee, a time on the Roman Empire’s Julian calendar when shepherds and their flocks dot the hillsides and farmers conclude the barley harvest and turn their attention to the great fields of wheat. Jesus and his disciples have just purchased a meal in the marketplace and have retired to enjoy it. Soon a circle of Pharisees gathers around to condemn them for not engaging in the ceremonial washing of the hands. This ritual includes a pre-meal cleansing of cups, plates, and cutlery, and is far more suited to the Temple courts than a Galilean fishing village. Of course, the famished disciples are in no mood to indulge in such a lengthy process.

Jesus says little at first. The Pharisees take this as a sign to move closer. A crowd of curious onlookers gathers just behind them. The two groups form a tight ring around Jesus and his disciples. It is a noose of sorts, within which the Nazarene is trapped. He has nowhere to run—just as the Pharisees planned.

The trap is baited. The Pharisees hope that Jesus will now utter words of blasphemy and heresy. If he does that, he can be condemned. The pronouncement that the Pharisees want to hear more than any other is a claim of divinity, a public proclamation by Jesus that he is the Son of God—not an earthly king, but one exalted above the angels and seated on the throne with God.

That would be enough to have him stoned to death.

The religious leaders are dressed in expensive robes adorned with extra-long blue tassels. Small wooden boxes are fastened to their foreheads by a headband. Inside each is a tiny scroll of Scripture telling about the exodus from Egypt. Both the fringe and the phylactery, as this box is known, are designed to call attention to the Pharisees’ holiness and to remind one and all of their religious authority.

But Jesus does not recognize this authority.

He stands to address the Pharisees. The people of Galilee press closer to hear what the Nazarene will say. These simple artisans and fishermen look poor and tattered in comparison with the Pharisees. Jesus, their fellow Galilean, is dressed just like they are, in a simple square robe over a tunic, with small fringes and no phylactery.

The people know that this is not the first time the Pharisees have tried to goad the Nazarene into a public incident, and the drama and wit of Jesus’s responses are widely known.

“Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites,” Jesus says, looking directly at the Pharisees and Sadducees. The Nazarene then quotes from the Scripture: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’”

Jesus is fearless. The force of his words carries out over the crowd. There is a deep irony to his lecture, for while the Pharisees have come here to judge Jesus, the tone of his voice makes it clear that it is
he
who is judging them. “You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men,” he scolds his accusers.