As has been noted of the Bible, rarely has a people’s own sacred writings been so brutally weaponised against them. Few more so than the Gospel of John.
John makes extensive use of Jewish scriptures – quoting from them directly, referencing important figures from them, and using narratives from them as the basis for several of the discourses – and exhibits a deep familiarity with Jewish customs and day-to-day practices. Thus, although its authorship is disputed, whether he was indeed John the Apostle, or someone else in the early Christian community, he was almost certainly Jewish. He was also possibly a member of the hypothetical Johannine community, a late first-century group believed to have recently been excommunicated from the mainstream Jewish community.
So, whether intentionally or not, John became the primary basis for millennia of Christian persecution of Jews. Especially over the claim that ‘the Jews killed Christ’. But did they?
Outside the four Gospels we have almost nothing. Virtually every serious historian still agrees on the two facts that matter: Jesus existed and he was crucified under Pontius Pilate. The rest is argument about memory, theology and who found it convenient to hold the hammer.
Mark is written around 70 AD, John last, perhaps 90–100. That is after Rome has flattened Jerusalem. Christians are a fragile sect living under the empire that just demolished the Temple. That had several ramifications for the next 2000 years of history, some of them beneficial, others very much not so. The beneficial part is that, no doubt keen to reassure Rome that they weren’t a pack of bomb-throwing revolutionaries, the gospel coin the phrase “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”. We owe much thanks to that line for the separation of church and state.
On the other hand, pinning the death of their Messiah on Caesar wasn’t a good move for anyone trying to keep out of Rome’s bad books, when getting in Rome’s bad books usually meant a very sticky end, indeed. So, shifting the heat onto the local priesthood is safer politics. Whether that pressure shaped the text is the oldest fight in New Testament studies. It does not change who signed the warrant.
Jesus did not get himself killed by being merely rude. He walked into the economic and religious heart of Jewish life and overturned the tables. That is not a sermon, but a public challenge to the men whose job is to keep the province quiet, Caiaphas and Pontius Pilate.
The important thing to remember about Caiaphas is that he was not a wild-eyed Jewish zealot. He was middle management. Rome appointed the high priest and could sack him the next day. Most lasted a year or two. Caiaphas lasted 18. He kept the job by keeping the taxes flowing and the streets calm. John’s Gospel gives him the cold arithmetic:
“It is better that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.”
From his desk that was not theology, but risk management. Unpredictable crowds plus a man calling the Temple a den of thieves meant trouble, and if there’s one thing Rome wouldn’t put up with, it’s trouble. Better one troublemaker, then, than the end of what little Jewish self-rule was allowed under the Roman yoke.
The Sanhedrin could arrest and try. Execution that smells of politics needed the governor. So, the Temple authorities reframed Jesus’ offence for Roman ears: not blasphemy, sedition. “King of the Jews” was a slogan Rome answered with a cross – and you better believe Pilate was ready to nail anyone who caused trouble in his province.
This is something too often either conveniently ignored, or just unknown: Pilate was not the reluctant hand-washer of Sunday-school pageants. Other sources paint him as a brute, even by the standards of a Rome that lined the Appian Way with six thousand crucified slaves after Spartacus. Pilate’s hesitation over one Galilean preacher is the least plausible detail in the whole file. He still gave the order. Roman soldiers drove the nails. The titulus said King of the Jews. That is the charge that really mattered in Roman eyes.
Matthew alone had the crowd shout “His blood be on us and on our children”. One verse, one Gospel, and it became a warrant for badges, ghettos, Holy Week pogroms and, eventually, the legal furniture the Nazis merely modernised. But is that a licence to blame all Jews? Is it fair to extrapolate from a single crowd of rabble-rousers in Jerusalem, to an entire people? In fact, it makes about as much sense as blaming all New Zealanders for a violent near-riot against one feminist in an Auckland park.
The crowd at Pilate’s steps was a fraction of Jerusalem at Passover. Most Jews were at home preparing the meal. The fight was intramural: Jews arguing with other Jews about whether this Jew is the Jewish Messiah. The apostles were Jews. The first church was a Jewish sect. ‘The Jews killed Jesus’ only became a sentence after the religions split and the empire that actually crucified him made Christianity its official cult.
Having Rome murder your God is awkward branding. Having “the Jews” do it is administratively tidier.
In 1965 Rome finally said the quiet part: no collective guilt. Most Protestants followed. The great shame remains that 15 centuries of contempt were aimed at the people who produced Jesus, Mary, the Twelve, Paul and the entire library Christianity cannot stop quoting.
The nails were Roman. The politics were Caiaphas protecting his franchise. The text that got waved as a blood libel was written by a Jew who knew the Scriptures better than most of the men who later used it to burn his cousins.
Because if the theology is true, and if you are one of its believers, Jesus is not a victim of any race. He is a willing participant in a plan. Christian doctrine is blunt on this point. Isaiah, 700 years earlier: “He was pierced for our transgressions… by his wounds we are healed”.
And John, again, the same Gospel so often recruited as a weapon: “No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.”
If all have sinned and Jesus died for all, the only coherent collective is the human one.
