A Political, Patriotic Jesus

THE BIBLE

The Gospels -- the only detailed written records on the life of Christ -- record that Jesus of Nazareth was condemned by the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem on a charge of blasphemy and some what reluctantly executed by the city's Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate. Historians have long been dissatisfied with this explanation, principally because of the discrepancies among the Evangelists' accounts, and their portrayal of Pilate:

acknowledged as ruthless and opportunistic by his contemporaries, he would scarcely have been concerned with the justice of Jesus' fate. In two newly published books, British Scholar S.G.F.

Brandon offers another interpretation:

he proposes that in Roman eyes Jesus was a dangerous political rebel who was executed by Pilate on the charge of sedition.

An ordained Anglican priest and a professor of comparative religion at the University of Manchester, Brandon is not the first to make this case, but he has marshaled the best arguments for it. In Jesus and the Zealots (Scnbners; $7.95) and The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth (Stein & Day; $6.95), Brandon pictures Jesus as a politically aware activist vigorously working against the Palestinian "Establishment"--the Roman occupying forces and Jerusalem's collaborationist Jewish aristocracy. As a champion of the poor, says Brandon, Jesus went so far as to lead an abortive raid on the Temple treasury to dispossess its money-hungry directors. The raid, disguised in the Gospels as a one-man assault on the profane money changers, quickly led to Jesus' denunciation by the high priests and then to his Roman trial. Far from dying ignominiously as a Jew rejected by his nation, Jesus in effect died a patriot's death, a rebel-martyr for his people.

Temple Trophies. Except for a few tantalizing hints ("I come not to bring peace but a sword"), little of Jesus' militancy appears in the Gospels. The reason, argues Brandon, was that Christianity early in its history underwent an earth-shaking trauma: the fall of Jerusalem. In A.D. 70, the legionaries of the Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus put down a four-year rebellion led by a group of Jewish rebels known as the Zealots, and destroyed the city. In Rome, where Titus returned in triumph brandishing trophies from the ruined Temple, feelings were running high against Jewish intransigence in general and the Zealot rebellion in particular. In this climate of fear, argues Brandon, Mark wrote the first Gospel for the young Roman church. Because his audience was already suspect as subversive, Mark wrote his account of Christ's life with the implicit purpose of clearing Christians of any involvement in Jewish rebellion.

In fact, Brandon argues, Mark had good reason for wanting to clear Christ's name. Brandon carefully avoids saying that Jesus was a Zealot himself, but cites evidence suggesting that he was sympathetic to their cause. Mark, he notes, obscured the fact that one of the Apostles--Simon the Zealot, as later Evangelists confirm--was an admitted member of the movement. And he argues further that Judas Iscariot may have been a Zealot as well. The two "thieves" who were crucified along with Jesus were, as the original Greek attests, really "brigands"--a common epithet for the Zealots. Even the Gospels hint that on the night at Gethsemane some of Jesus' disciples were armed, which may have been the reason that he had to be captured by stealth.

Mark was able to disguise these unpleasant truths, Brandon contends, because he sincerely believed that Jesus was "the son of God, incarnated to accomplish mankind's salvation." A theological polemicist rather than a biographer, he was thus able to adjust some facts and ignore others without any conscious deceit. As an example of Mark's revisionist writing, Brandon cites the use of one apparently authentic saying of Jesus: "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's." In the context of Mark's Gospel, it implies an approval of tribute payments to Rome. Brandon suggests that Jesus meant the exact opposite: any Jew worthy of the name knew that Israel and all its treasure belonged to God alone.

Most Jewish Gospel. Brandon argues that Mark's attempt to exonerate the Romans of any responsibility for Jesus' death and to play down Christian involvement in the Zealot revolt was further supported by the later Evangelists, who also emphasized Christ's pacifism. Although Matthew wrote for Jewish Christians, possibly in Alexandria, he was apparently so grief-stricken by the fall of Jerusalem that he could only ascribe it to unwise political activism and divine retribution for the rejection of Jesus--which explains why this "most Jewish" of the Gospels is steeped in collective Jewish guilt. Luke, and even more so John, were by contrast profoundly affected by the theology of Paul, who, in preaching to the uncircumcised, had transformed the Jesus of history into a lofty and otherworldly "Lord of Glory." These Evangelists, moreover, wrote at a time when the young Christian church was abandoning its roots in Judaism. It was easy for them to incorporate an anti-Jewish bias into their accounts of Christ's life.

The primitive Christianity of Jerusalem, with its documents and traditions, perished in the city's destruction by Rome. What survived, argues Brandon, was not the Jesus remembered as a Messianic revolutionary who sought to cleanse Israel for the coming of God's kingdom, but a transcendent divinity who had come to all men and not merely the Jews. What also survived, says Brandon, was the anti-Semitic bias of the Evangelists that made scapegoats of Judaism--a nation of "Christ killers" for nearly 2,000 years.

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