The Origin of Satan (21 page)

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charge implicit in Mark and Matthew—that Satan himself

initiated Judas’ treachery:

“During supper, the devil had already put it into the heart of

Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, to betray him. . . . Then after

the morsel, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, “What

you are going to do, do quickly.” . . . So after receiving the

morsel, [Judas] immediately went out; and it was night” (13:2,

27-30).

Because John insists that Jesus, fully aware of the future

course of events, remains in complete control of them, he writes

that Jesus himself gives Judas the morsel that precedes Satan’s

entry (thus fulfilling the prophecy of Psalm 41:9). Jesus then

directs Judas’s subsequent action (“What you are going to do, do

quickly”). At that fateful moment, which initiates Jesus’

betrayal, John, like Luke, depicts the “power of darkness” (cf

Luke 22:53) eclipsing the “light of the world”: hence his stark

final phrase,
en de nux
(“
it was night
”).

Here the passion narrative is more than a story; in the words

of John’s Jesus, it is a
judgment
, or
crisis
(to translate literally the Greek term
krisis
). When Jesus predicts his crucifixion, he

declares that instead of showing a judgment against
him
, it

shows God’s judgment against “this world”; instead of

destroying Jesus, it will destroy the diabolic “ruler of the

world”:

“Now is the judgment [
krisis
] of this world; now the ruler of

this world shall be cast out; and I, when I am lifted up from the

earth, will draw all people to myself.” He said this to show by

what death he would die (John 12:31-32; see also 14:30).

John’s readers are thus warned that the events he describes—

and, for that matter, John’s account of them—also serve to judge

and condemn as “sons of darkness” those who have participated

in Jesus’ destruction. John, like Luke, suppresses all traces of

Roman initiative in Jesus’ execution. In nearly every episode,

John displays what one scholar calls “bizarre exaggeration” to

insist that the blame for initiating, ordering, and carry-

LUKE AND JOHN CLAIM ISRAEL’S LEGACY / 107

ing out the crucifixion falls upon Jesus’
intimate
enemies, his

fellow Jews.

Apparently using an early source independent of the other

gospels, John reports that before Jesus’ arrest

the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the Sanhedrin

together and said, “What shall we do? This man performs

many signs. . . . If we let him go on like this, the Romans will

come and destroy our holy place and our nation” (11:47-48).

I agree with those, including the British classical scholar

Fergus Millar, who regard this part of John's account as perhaps

closer to the actual events than the other gospel accounts.22

Unlike the elaborate trial that Mark and Matthew present, John

shows the council members concerned about the disturbances

Jesus arouses among the people, a plausible motive for their

judgment, for they want to protect their own constituency from

the risk of Roman reprisals, even at the risk of a wrongful

execution. After “Judas, procuring a band of [presumably

Roman] soldiers, and some officers from the chief priests of the

Pharisees” (18:8), betrayed Jesus, the arresting party seized and

bound him and led him to Annas, “father-in-law of the high

priest,” who, after interrogating him, “sent him bound to

Caiaphas the high priest.” Rosemary Reuther observes that John

here intends to suppress political charges against Jesus—that he

had claimed to be king— in favor of a religious one, that he

threatened the Temple.23

Although John reports no other trial by a Jewish tribunal, he

leaves no doubt that the chief priests want Jesus killed. John

depicts the priests as evasive and self-righteous when Pilate

inquires about the charge: “If this man were not a malefactor, we

would not have brought him to you” (18:30). When Pilate, still

having heard no charge, answers, with indifference or contempt,

“Take him yourselves and judge him by your own law,” the

“Jews” answer, “It is not lawful for us to put anyone to death”

(18:31).

Some scholars insist that this last statement is wrong. Richard

Husband claims that under first-century Roman law the Jewish

108 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

Sanhedrin retained its traditional right to execute people for

certain crimes defined as religious, such as violating the Temple

precincts, transgressing the law, and adultery.24 Husband and

other scholars point out that only about five years after Jesus’

death, in 36 C.E., Jews stoned to death his follower Stephen for

“speaking against the law.” But was this a lynch mob, or a crowd

carrying out a Sanhedrin sentence?

Josephus writes drat in 62 c.E. the high priest Ananus II

assembled the Sanhedrin and condemned Jesus’ brother James to

death by stoning, along with several others, on charges of

transgressing the law. These executions apparently cost Ananus

II his position as high priest after some Jerusalemites complained

to the Jewish king, Agrippa II, and to the Roman procurator,

Albinus, that Ananus had executed James and others without

notifying the procurator, much less gaining his permission.

Josephus describes a later case—one that suggests that Jewish

leaders had become more cautious about executing without

Roman permission. A man named Jesus bar Ananias, who had

loudly predicted the downfall of Jerusalem and its Temple, was

arrested and beaten by prominent Jewish leaders. When they

brought him before Albinus, the same Roman prefect,

apparently hoping to secure the death penalty,

Jesus refused to answer the prefect’s questions, and so Albinus

let him go as a maniac. Thus, despite their anger, the Jewish

leaders, who could arrest and flog, did not dare execute this

Jesus as they had executed James (
War
6.2).

By the sixties, then, Roman permission to execute seems to

have been a necessary, or at least an expedient, measure. For lack

of definitive evidence, intense scholarly investigation and debate

have not solved the issue. In the case of Jesus of Nazareth,

however, Christian sources seldom suggest that the Jews

actually executed Jesus, whether or not this act was ratified by

the Romans. Although the gospels do not describe Pilate

actually sentencing Jesus to death, the historical evidence and

the gospel accounts indicate that the governor must have ordered

his soldiers to execute Jesus on grounds of sedition. As for what

took place between

LUKE AND JOHN CLAIM ISRAEL’S LEGACY / 109

Jewish authorities and the governor, our only evidence comes

from the gospels themselves and from later Christian and Jewish

reinterpretations of these events, charged as they are with

mutual accusation and polemic. Whatever the legal situation of

the San-hedrin in regard to capital punishment, the point John

wants to make is clear enough: that although Romans were

known to have carried out Jesus’ execution by their own peculiar

method (see 19:32), they did so only because “the Jews” forced

them to.25

When Pilate asks Jesus, “Are you a king?,” Jesus parries the

question, and Pilate retorts, “
Am I a Jew? Your own nation and

the chief priests have handed you over to me
: what have you

done?” (18:35; emphasis added). Were his kingdom an earthly

one, Jesus says, “my servants would fight so that I might not be

handed over to the Jews” (18:36)—an ironic Johannine reversal

of the charges in Mark, Luke, and Matthew, which repeatedly

describe the Jews “handing Jesus over” to “the nations.”

In John as in Luke, Pilate three times proclaims Jesus innocent,

and proposes three times to release him; but each time the chief

priests and those John calls “the Jews” cry out, demanding

instead that Pilate “crucify him” (18:38-40; 19:5-7; 19:14-15).

John “explains,” too, that Pilate allowed his soldiers to scourge

and torture Jesus only in order to arouse the crowd’s compassion

(19:1), and so to placate what British scholar Dennis Nineham

calls “the insatiable fury of the Jews.”26 John adds that when

they protest that Jesus has violated their religious law, and

therefore “deserves to die,” Pilate is “more terrified” (19:8).

Returning to Jesus as if he still hoped to find a way to acquit

him, Pilate instead receives from the prisoner relative

exoneration of his own guilt: speaking as if he were Pilate's judge

(as John believes he is), Jesus declares to the governor that “the

one who delivered me to you has the greater sin.” When the

crowd threatens to charge Pilate with treason against Rome

(19:12), Pilate makes one more futile attempt to release Jesus—

“Shall I crucify your king?”—to which the chief priests answer,

“We have no king but Caesar,” and at last Pilate gives in to the

shouting. At this point, John says, Pilate, having neither

sentenced Jesus nor ordered his execution, “handed [Jesus] over

to them to be crucified” (19:16). In this

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scene, as C. H. Dodd has commented, “the priests exert

unrelenting pressure, while the governor turns and doubles like

a hunted hare.”27 Immediately after Pilate hands Jesus over to the

Jews, the narrator goes on to say, “they took Jesus . . . to the place

called in Hebrew Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with

him two others” (19:17-18).

After John's account of the crucifixion, in which he shows

how Jesus’ ignominious death fulfills prophecy in every detail,

he adds that Joseph of Arimathea, “a disciple of Jesus, though a

secret one for fear of the Jews” (19:38), petitions Pilate to allow

him to recover Jesus’ body and to bury it. The story implies that

Jesus’ enemies are so vindictive that Joseph and another secret

disciple, Nicodemus, are afraid even to offer him a decent burial.

Many scholars have discussed John’s motives for thus depicting

Pilate as wishing to free the innocent Jesus, while presenting the

Jews as not only the “villains, but the ultimate in villainy.”28

Instead of completely exonerating Pilate, however, John’s

Jesus, playing judge to his judge, as we saw, pronounces Pilate

guilty of sin, although “less” sin than the Jews. Nevertheless, as

Paul Winter observes:

The stern Pilate grows more mellow from gospel to gospel

[from Mark to Matthew, from Matthew to Luke and then to

John]. The more removed from history, the more sympathetic a

character he becomes.29

With regard to the Jews, Jesus’ “intimate enemy,” a parallel

process occurs, but in reverse; the Jews become increasingly

antagonistic. In the opening scene of Mark, Jesus boldly

challenges not his fellow Jews but the powers of evil. Then he

comes into increasingly intense conflict, first with “the scribes”

and then with the Pharisees and Herodians, until crowds of his

own people, in a conflict Mark depicts as essentially intra-

Jewish, persuade reluctant Roman forces to execute him.

Matthew, as we saw, writing some twenty years after Mark,

depicts a far more bitter and aggressive antagonism between

Jesus and the majority of his Jewish contemporaries, even

casting King Herod in the role

LUKE AND JOHN CLAIM ISRAEL’S LEGACY / 111

of the hated tyrant Pharaoh. Indeed, no sooner was Jesus born

than Herod and “all Jerusalem with him,” specifically including

“all the chief priests and scribes of the people,” were troubled,

and Herod decided to kill him. Matthew describes the Pharisees,

religious leaders of his time, as “sons of hell,” destined, along

with all who reject Jesus' teaching, for eternal punishment in the

“fire reserved for the devil and all his angels.” Yet I agree with

recent analysis by Andrew Overman that even Matthew intends

to show, in effect, a battle between rival reform groups of Jews,

each insisting upon its own superior righteousness, and each

calling the other demon-possessed.30

Luke, as we have seen, goes considerably further. No sooner

has the devil appeared to tempt and destroy Jesus than all Jesus’

townspeople, hearing his first public address in their synagogue,

are aroused to fury, and attempt to throw him down a cliff. Only

at the climax of Luke’s account does Satan return in person, so to

speak, to enter into Judas and so to direct the operation that ends

with the crucifixion.

Writing c. 100 C.E., John dismisses the device of the devil as an