Not only is the Roman governor Pilate unable to find any fault in Jesus but, in all four Gospels, Pilate actually announces Christ’s innocence. The Roman governor is elaborately portrayed, again, in all four of the Gospels, as being compelled by the Jewish crowd to order Jesus’s crucifixion. (29) Famously, no less than three times must the crowd demand Jesus’s death before Pilate reluctantly yields, according to all four Gospels. In the notorious scene from Matthew, often credited among the origins of the tradition known as the “blood libel” against Jews and Christian anti-Semitism generally, the crowd assumes full responsibility for the Crucifixion, shouting in unison: “His blood is on us and on our children.” (30)
The original intention of the story is obvious even without the assumption of collective guilt by the crowd in Matthew. It is meant to exonerate the Roman government of any responsibility for the death of Jesus so that the responsibility and the consequences may be assigned exclusively to the Jews.
Just as Jesus had issued an unmistakable warning against rebellion, predicting complete destruction of Jerusalem and its famous Temple, so the Gospels provide a theological explanation for the Jewish defeat in that war: they misconstrued the nature of their own savior and killed him. The crowd takes full responsibility, even including their own children—the very generation who would suffer ignominious defeat at the hands of the Flavians as Christ had foreseen. This was certainly how the first Christian writers who discussed the Jewish War, such as Origen and Eusebius, regarded that defeat—as the deserved punishment of the Jewish people for the murder of Christ.
To fix blame on Jews it wasn’t really necessary to exonerate Pilate. The Roman governor could have also been shown to be culpable even as he admitted the charges to be false, thus indicting all mankind in a universal and broadly philosophical statement. Pilate could have even consulted the crowd as a means of helping to cravenly cover his own shared guilt in the terrible deed.
Instead, Pilate is specifically depicted as exceptionally, even inordinately hesitant to order the death of Jesus, and it is only the crowd’s repeated demands that finally cause him to relent to their bloodlust. He immediately orders a basin of water and melodramatically washes his hands to illustrate his innocence of their crime in a demonstration as exaggerated as a political cartoon.
The exoneration of Pilate himself was not necessary even to appease Rome. The 1st Century historian Josephus, almost certainly reflecting the official imperial position of his Flavian patrons, was a critic of Pontius Pilate’s administration of Judea, repeatedly describing how he provoked Jewish anger and near-insurrection by an insensitivity to Jewish customs that was not shared by other Roman governors.
Yet, in the Gospels, the exoneration presented in the Gospels is not so much an exculpation of Pilate himself as it is of the Roman state itself.
If Pilate’s declaration of Jesus’s innocence, and the crowd’s thrice emphasized demand for his crucifixion, are part of an artificial exoneration of the Romans for the Crucifixion (and, implicitly, the war itself), then we must ask two questions:
How did these stories become woven into the basic narrative of the life of Jesus in the Gospels?
Who would want to exonerate the Roman government so emphatically other than the Roman government?
Just as in the story of the centurion whose faith Jesus praised as above any Jew, Rome’s official fingerprints are impossible to ignore. (31)
When the Apostle Peter (Cephas), according to the Book of Acts, addresses his “fellow Israelites,” as he puts it, he summarizes the death of Jesus thusly: “You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he [Pilate] had decided to let him go. You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you.” (32)
St. Peter, we are being told, is against the Jews. He is accusing them and blaming them—and in the same breath, curiously, he is clearing the Roman governor of any blame.
With similarly broad political symbolism, in all of the Gospels, Jesus is betrayed by his own disciple, “Judas,” who shares the name of the patriarch who gave his name to the whole nation of “Judea” and the whole tribe of “Jews.”
Again, the metaphor is as glaring as any propaganda poster.
According to Josephus, early in the 1st Century the first author of the rebel “philosophy” was named “Judas the Galilean.” It was this Judas who founded the “Zealot” sect of insurrectionists. Jesus and many of his disciples are explicitly identified as “Galileans” of the early 1st Century in the Gospels.
Curiously, the title of this same Judas, Iscariot, also suggests he was a rebel, a member of the militant sect known as the “Sicarii,” who had caused so much trouble for Rome. Judas Iscariot is almost synonymous, therefore, with “Jewish Rebel.” (33)
Simon (not Peter, we are reassured, but another one of Jesus’s disciples who is called by that name) is referred to as “the Zealot.” Another disciple is named “Thaddeus,” a name resembling that of a person called “Theudas,” which itself may be a corruption of the name “Judas,” but who is also described by Flavius Josephus as a troublesome Jewish rebel figure. (34)
There are 12 disciples—the number of Jewish tribes. This is no accident. Jesus himself tells the disciples at the Last Supper that they will “sit on thrones judging the Twelve Tribes of Israel.” (35) Their number is symbolic of Israel itself.
And yet the Gospels show these disciples, who seem to echo notorious figures of the Jewish rebellion, repeatedly failing to grasp their master’s message, lacking sufficient faith, denying their relationship with Jesus, doubting his resurrection, betraying him with a kiss, and exchanging his life for the amount of silver the Temple charged for a sacrificial lamb. (36) The very name of Christ’s betrayer is, at least in part, symbolic of his whole people.
6th Century mosaic in Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuova, Last Supper
The Gospels even tell us that Jesus was rejected by his hometown and his own family. (37) (This may be referencing an older tradition, for those who joined militant or separatist Jewish sects may also have faced rejection by their own families.) In John, we are told that some of Jesus’s own disciples abandoned him. (38)
Although executed by the Romans in a manner common to them, crucifixion, Jesus was actually convicted by Jewish officials for violating Jewish law, according to the Gospels. His trial and execution are the climax of Jesus’s rhetorical jousts with Jewish authorities, from the scribes to the priests to the Pharisees, and punishment for his own attack on the Jewish Temple as a “den of thieves.” (39) The charges that condemn him confound the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.
In attacking the “money changers” at the Temple, Jesus enacts another criticism of Mosaic Law. To Gentiles, the merchants who exchanged pagan coins displaying forbidden graven images of gods and emperors for currency that was religiously acceptable to Jews must have seemed like “thieves” charging the poor money in the name of an empty symbolism, even as Romans might have taken offense to images of their gods and rulers being condemned as blasphemous.
And, of course, with his attack on the Temple as related in the Gospels, Jesus foreshadows—perhaps even commences—Titus’s own subsequent razing of the Temple that Jesus correlates with his return.