Stephen Williams reflects on Mark’s account of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion.
The story of the death of Jesus is set in a real historic context. It’s also a prominent theme in the New Testament. However, this talk is not about what might or might not have happened in history and I leave Biblical scholarship to the experts. Rather it’s about a story, and it follows recent discussion in the Birmingham SOF group about the importance and value of the stories we tell each other.
There is a psychology experiment where a succession of individuals repeat a story to each other. In time the story gets shorter but there is a pattern to this. What seem irrelevances get left out. So do apparent inconsistencies but they can also be smoothed out so that things are added. Other stuff gets added too, often to make the story more memorable. People and places acquire names. Eventually the story is consolidated and starts to be repeated without change and you have an oral tradition which becomes the basis of a standard written version.
In real life, it’s more dynamic. Instead of a single line of transmission, the process draws on multiple memories. One person will challenge someone else’s version and things that have been dropped from the story find their way back, but the end point, the emergence of a standard account is usually the same. The story of the death of Jesus has gone through that process and there is now an established version, ‘the one everyone knows’, which tends to be the modern point of reference. Later writers, even when they’re looking for an original take on the subject, often draw on that version as the one that their audiences will recognise.
The process took time and the earliest accounts in the gospels belong to a more primitive stage. It’s been said that we have more information about Jesus than about almost anyone else from that time. The problem is that it’s suspect, mostly coming from people with an axe to grind, and it’s tempting to dismiss the whole lot as manufactured propaganda. There’s some validity to that, but if the gospel stories were simply put together to support a case, then you have to acknowledge that the authors made a pretty poor job of it. There are still lots of loose ends and elements that contradict the general theological thrust, if there is one. It makes more sense to see them as work in flux.
There are three quite independent narratives in the New Testament. Luke often draws on Mark but is quite selective and when it gets to the Passion he disregards Mark almost entirely in favour of his own source. John again uses his own material. There are points, however, where the three versions agree, and these may be suggestive of elements of the earliest versions of the story, perhaps there from even before people started to write it down.
Firstly, all agree that Jesus was crucified, i.e. he was punished under Roman law. The official who authorised it was Pontius Pilate, and Jesus’ offence was to be the king of the Jews. It all happened around the time of the Jewish Passover and the priests were instrumental in having Jesus arrested and bringing him to Pilate’s attention. One of Jesus’ followers, Judas, has a role in this. There are also a couple of characters who turn up in all three, Barabbas and Joseph of Arimathea. It’s not obvious who they are but they must have been important to the first tellers of the story. More generally, all place the story in the context of a contentious society, characterised by competing religious and political values.
If we move forward to what I’ve called the established version, we find a more theologised account, whose oddities we tend not to notice because it’s so familiar. At its heart is the notion that this is some kind of cosmic drama with a divinely preordained outcome. Implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) it has Jesus colluding in his own death because the plot requires it. Hilary Mantel has said in the context of Wolf Hall that we must remember that people like Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell didn’t think of themselves as historical figures; they were living in their present and didn’t know what would happen next. Similarly we have to remember that neither Jesus nor anyone else in the story had read the letter to the Romans or the first chapter of John. The stories deserve to be treated seriously as the kind of things that happen in real life and it’s down to the protagonists, and to us reading the stories centuries later, to make what sense we can of them.
Mark gives us enough to be getting on with. (We can come back to Luke and John another time.) There’s now a generally held view that by the time Mark was written, parts of the church had adopted the idea of a 24 hour vigil as a memorial of the death of Jesus. Because of this, the central part of Mark’s story is artificially reorganised to fit within exactly 24 hours with the key events occurring at three hour intervals. Recognising this solves one of the obvious problems with Mark, the sheer pace at which everything happens and also means we can ignore the fact that Jewish law prohibits trials at night. It’s all much easier if we give it more time. But there are still some intriguing riddles and anomalies.
The first is there at the outset in chapter 14 verse 1:
Now the Festival of Passover and Unleavened Bread was only two days off; and the chief priests and the doctors of the law were trying to devise some cunning plan to seize him and put him to death. ‘It must not be during the festival,’ they said, ‘or we should have rioting among the people.’
But according to the story that’s exactly what did happen. Something caused an urgent change of mind but we are not told what.
Verse 10 offers a candidate: ‘Then Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve, went to the chief priests to betray him to them.’ As many people have pointed out, one of the puzzles in all versions is why Judas was necessary. (He later became a focus for Christian anti-semitism but there’s no hint of that here.) It must be assumed that the priests had their own means of keeping track of people and they wouldn’t have needed Judas just to reveal where Jesus could be found. Is there a hint that the betrayal was more about divulging information that injected a new urgency and that would allow Jesus to be arrested and brought to trial? Again we don’t know.
We move to verse 13:
So he sent out two of his disciples with these instructions: ‘Go into the city, and a man will meet you carrying a jar of water. Follow him, and when he enters a house give this message to the householder: “The master says, ‘Where is the room reserved for me to eat the Passover with my disciples?'”‘
This is like ‘Look for the man with the copy of the Times open at page 7’. It’s secret signs and passwords. It’s reminiscent of the incident a few chapters earlier when a couple of his followers collect the donkey for the entry into Jerusalem and are also given specific words to use. The received version of the Jesus story has him in a unique relationship with the twelve, but here he seems to have had a second network of contacts.
The story moves on to Gethsemane and verse 43:
Suddenly, while he was still speaking, Judas, one of the twelve, appeared and with him was a crowd armed with swords and cudgels.
Are we to deduce that Jesus and his companions were taken by surprise by this development? Or could they have been expecting it? They had been waiting for what seems quite a long time and at least one of Jesus’ companions was armed himself. Unless we buy into the collusion explanation, Jesus must have had some other reason for his actions but in the event matters take a different course. Jesus’ plan, whatever it might have been, is forestalled and he is arrested.
The chief priests and the whole Council tried to find some evidence against Jesus to warrant a death sentence. (verse 55).
We are now into a trial and it seems clear from the story that, whatever their ulterior motives, the authorities want to do things by the book. Only one specific charge is mentioned, something to do with destroying the temple. It’s sometimes assumed, on the basis of a verse in John’s account, that the Jewish authorities were barred from imposing a death sentence but there’s no other evidence for this and there are instances elsewhere of the use of the Jewish penalty of stoning, so if Jesus had been found guilty after a proper trial, that is probably what would have happened.
Then comes verse 59: ‘Even on this point their evidence did not agree.’ Jesus is acquitted! And now it’s the priests’ plan that has gone awry. According to the story, they get him to claim to be the Messiah and put together a new plan offering him to Pilate as the king of the Jews i.e. a threat to public order. In the event even that is touch and go. The historical Pilate has a reputation as a ruthless authoritarian who would have few qualms about having anyone crucified. However, as the story unfolds in chapter 15, he looks indecisive and confused. Unless he has suddenly become a model of Roman justice, here surely is someone trying to work out what game these priests are playing at. He is feeling got at and is not going to be taken for granted. He looks for ways out of the situation but fails and is even manoeuvred into releasing a known rebel, whom one might assume he would have preferred not to. Eventually all the trials and interrogations are over, Pilate becomes someone else in this story for whom things work out other than how they intended, and matters take their course. The narrative continues through to Jesus’ execution and death.
Tellingly, it is Mark’s version of the story that has Jesus dying in chapter 15 verse 34, with the words: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’
The story moves to the burial and ends, in keeping with all that’s gone before, in chapter 16 verse 8, with a group of confused women unable to fulfil their plan of anointing Jesus’ body:
Then they went out and ran away from the tomb, beside themselves with terror. They said nothing to anybody, for they were afraid.
So what are we to make of all this? I started by talking about how stories get consolidated into received versions. There can be no definitive version of any story and those that survive over long periods do so because of their impact on those who experience them. I am not knocking the ‘story that everyone knows’ when it comes to the death of Jesus, which is a version with a power in the inner life of individuals, and a potential to inspire profoundly the public realm of art, music and literature. But that process of consolidation is driven by imagination and debate, and it’s sometimes worthwhile to retrace those steps and ask what got people excited in the first place!
Looking at the story free from the presumptions of what we think we know, we realise that there are other possible readings of it. The history is as elusive as ever. We have a story but one that is full of gaps and loose ends, although as imaginative creatures we can be creative in filling the gaps and tying up the loose ends. There are hints of secret plots and plans; Jesus might have been up to something, possibly aimed at the temple, and Judas might have betrayed this to the priests. The priests were desperate to regain control of the situation. In the end nothing goes as planned and everyone is left trying to make the best of it.
I want to suggest that that is what real life is like. We win some and we lose some. The power of the story of the death of Jesus is not in its grand cosmic implications, but in its recognisability as human experience. Jesus is shown not as the passive recipient of divine providence but as an actor in the world. And to be an agent is worth something even if it ends in failure.
This article is based on a talk by the author to the Birmingham SOF group on 19th March 2015. Quotations are from the New English Bible. Stephen Williams is a former SOF Treasurer, followed by a year as SOF Chair.