Quote:
"Hide the prophecy, tell the narrative, and invent the history."

- Dr. John D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus (372)

- WWJ (123)

That seems a brilliant explatation of why Jesus of Nazareth was born at Bethlehem, unless, of course, one knows anything of Roman history and Roman, or indeed any, bureaucracy (Scharer-Vermcs 1.399-427). First, there never was a worldwide census under Augustus. Second, the Palestinian census was undertaken by the Syrian legate, P. Sulpticius Quirinius, in 6 to 7 C.E., about a decade after the birth of Jesus. You will recall, from chapter 6 above, that its occasion was the annexation of Archelaus' territorics under a direct Roman prefecture. Third, and above all, even if Augustus had ordained a complete census of the Roman world, and even if Quirinius had overseen its administration in Archelaus' territories, the Roman custom was to count you in the place of your domicile or work and not in that of your ancestry or birth. That is little more than common sense. Census was for taxation; to record people in their ancestral rather than their occupational locations would have constituted a bureaucratic nightmare. That agrees with the younger Tryphon's documentary papyri seen from Roman Egypt in chapter I above. His brother Thoonis was registered at one year of age among the extended family of the elder Tryphon in I I to 12 C.E. But, later, in 44 C.E., it is certified legally that he is out of work and has left the area.

Luke, however, is interested in portraying Jesus in close interaction with major events of "Roman history," interested, that is, in the historicization of prophecy, of rephrasing prophetic allusion as "historical" narrative. If the details arc all wrong, or if one gets into convoluted arguments on their historical verisimilitude or administrative plausibility, so much the better. One is still arguing over Augustus and Jesus, and, then or now, Luke has succeeded in his project. We shall see exactly the same process below when the Cross Gospel attempts to write, from prophetic allusions, a first "historical narrative" about the passion of Jesus. Hide the prophecy, tell the narrative, and invent the history.

Under Pontius Pilate

I take it absolutely for granted that Jesus was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Security about the fact of the crucifixion derives not only from the unlikelihood that Christians would have invented it but also from the existence of two early and independent non-Christian witnesses to it, a Jewish one from 93-94 C.E. and a Roman one from the 110s or 120s C.E..

The Jewish witness is the description of Jesus in Flavius Josephus'lewish Antiquities, 18:63, which seems to be presumed before and by the passing mention in 20:200. This Testimonium Flavianum has generated an immense bibliography, annotated recently and superbly by Louis Feldman (679-703), and an intense controversy, reviewed recently and superbly by John Meier. The problem is that Josephus' account is too good to be true, too confessional to be impartial, too Christian to be Jewish. It is either a total or a partial interpolation by the Christian editors who preserved Josephus' works. Here are the two Josephan texts; notice how the second one seems to presume at least some earlier and more detailed one.

(1) About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvellous things about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

(2) And so he [Ananus, the high priest] convened the judges of the Sanhedrin [in 62 C.E. during the interregnum between the prefects Festus and Albinus] and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus who was called the Christ, and certain others. (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18:63; 20:200)

The words in bold italic represent interpolations deliberately but delicately Christianizing, in the words of John Meler, the "fairly neutral-or even purposely ambiguous -tone" of Josephus' original description.

In 1971 Shlomo Pines of Jerusalem's Hebrew University drew attention to an Arabic version of that first Josephan text preserved in the Kitab al'Unwan or Book of the Title, a history of the world written around the middle of the tenth century by Agapius, Melkite bishop of Phrygian Hierapolis in Asia Minor.

Similarly Josephus [Yfisiffis], the Hebrew. For he says in the treatises that he has written on the governance [?] of the Jews: "At this time there was a wise man called Jesus. His conduct was good, and [he] was known to be virtuous [or: his learing/knowledge was outstanding]. And many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. But those who had become his disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion, and that he was alive; accordingly he was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders." (Shlomo Pines 10-11, 16; my emphases)

It is possible to argue that, despite Christian preservation and translaion from Greek to Syrian to Arabic all under Christian auspices, we have I wic the original and uninterpolated text of josephus. But notice what I have I I I; iced in bold type. The italic bold words could indicate a simple summary (,I Josephus' sentence about Jesus'deeds and words, miracles and teachings. kiit the words in roman bold pick up two of the same three Christianizations wcn in our official josephan version. "We are thus left," in Pines's conclusion, with two possibilities: either the version of Agapius is the product of Christian censorship applied to the original text in a less thoroughgoing form than in the case of the vulgate recension, or it did not undergo censorship at all...". His first hypothesis seems to me to be the more probable one, but for no very conclusive reason. At the moment this is anybody's guess" (70). But we can probably go beyond that. A good interpolation, as distinct from an editorial comment, is a delicate process. "They reported" about the resurrection and "perhaps" about the Messiah, in the Arabic text, are better, because more oblique, Christianizations of a Jewish text that one wants to retain as a Jewish witness than are the more overtly confessional inserts in the Greek, text. And by the same token, the omission of "men of the highest standing amongst us" is probably not just scribal error but ideological deletion. I agree, therefore, with James Charlesworth's admission, albeit amidst somewhat overheated enthusiasm, that "some Christian alterations are found in the Arabic recension, even if they are more subtle in the Arabic version than in the Greek" (1988:96). It is probably better, actually, to relegate the Arabic text of Agapius to a footnote, as John Meier does with the comment, "I am doubtful that this 10th-century Arabic manuscript preserves the original form of testimonium, especially since it contains sentences that ... are probably later expansions or variants of the text" (89 note 36). We are left, in other words, with that Greek text of Josephus but minus the boldface Christian I I iserts. And all that debate should not diminish the importance of Josephus' commentary. That is how Jesus and early Christianity looked to a very prudent, diplomatic, and cosmopolitan Roman Jew in the early last decade of the first century: miracles and teachings, Jews and Greeks, our "men of highest standing" and Pilate, crucifixion and continuation.

The Roman witness is Cornelius Tacitus, who, having detailed the Flavian decline in his Histories, described the Julio-Claudian one in his Annals. The former study was written in the second century's first decade, the latter in its second and mayne even into its third decade. He has just told how a rumor blamed Nero for the disastrous fire that swept Rome in 64 CE.

Therefore to scotch the rumor, Nero substituted as culprits, and punished with uytmost refinements of cruelty, a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for the moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judaea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue. (Tacitus, Annals 15.44; Moore & Jackson 4.282-283)

My point, then, is not that there is the slightest doubt about the fact of Jesus' crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. The point is the provenance of those specific details, quoted dialogues, narrative connections, and almost journalistic hour-by-hour accounts of the passion of Jesus. Is the passion narrative from history or from prophecy? from the prophetization of history or the historicization of prophecy? from applying prophecy to an underlay of detailed history or from applying an overlay of history to detailed prophecy? I remind you of the difference between prophecy and history by comparing these twin texts on the passion of Jesus:

(1) For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures. (I Corinthians 15:3)

(2) Our Lord is ... truly nailed [to a tree: not in the Greek text] in the flesh for our sakes under Pontius Pilate and Herod the Tetrarch. (Ignatius of Antioch, To the Smyrnaeans 1:2)

In both cases Jesus died for us, but in the former according to the Scriptures, in the latter according to the decree of Pilate and Antipas.

What follows now depends on my earlier and much more complete study on the origins of the passion and resurrection narratives (1988a). I proposed that, first of all, Jesus'closest followers knew nothing more about the passion than the fact of the crucifixion, that they had fled and later had no available witnesses for its details, and that they were concerned, in any case, with far more serious matters, such as whether that death negated all that Jesus had said and done, all that they had accepted and believed. Seeond, what followed in one very literate and highly sophisticated stream of tradition was an intense search of the Scriptures, similar to that at Qumran. It discovered verses and images each of which could be applied to the passion as a whole but not, of course, to its individual details, for no such details existed in their memories. Third, those individual scriptural connections and specific proplictic fulfillments could be organized into a coherent and sc(InciflEil stom hul, for this, some overarching form, shape, pattern, or genre had to be conceieved or adopted. Finally, once such a narrative had been achieved, its historicity could be improved by more accurate verisimilitude and refined by more precise detail. The process developed, in other words, over these primary steps. First, the historical passion, composed of minimal knowledge, was known only in the general terms -recorded by, say, Josephus or Tacitus. Next, the prophetic passion, composed of multiple and discrete biblical allusions and seen most clearly in a work like the Epistle of Barnabas, developed biblical applications over, under, around, and through that open framework. Finally, those multiple and discrete exercises were combined into the narrative passion as a single sequential story. I proposed, furthermore, that the narrative passion is but a single stream of tradition'flowing from the Cross Gospel, now embedded within the Gospel of Peter, into Mark, thence together into Matthew and Luke, and thence, all together, into John. Other reconstructions are certainly possible, but that seems to me the most economical one to explain all the data (see appendix 7).