Jesus must have sought to lead an anti-Roman uprising, since otherwise he would never have been executed by the Romans as “king of the Jews.” The story in the Gospels of a weak-minded Pontius Pilate letting himself be pressured by a Jewish mob into crucifying him for no good reason is patently absurd. Indeed, only by assuming that Jesus’ crime was rebellion is it possible to understand many details in the Gospels that are otherwise inexplicable, such as the presence among his followers of several men with names suggesting that they were Zealots; the incendiary remark attributed to him that “I have come not to bring peace but the sword”; his violent assault on the Temple; his supposedly ordering his disciples to arm themselves on the night of his arrest; the information that an “insurrection” took place in Jerusalem during his own last days there; etc.

None of these items, or others pointing to the same conclusion, claims Maccoby, makes sense if one accepts the traditional Christian portrait of a pacific messiah who had no political aims and whose kingdom was not of this world. On the contrary, Jesus’ success in convincing his disciples of his messianic mission is itself proof of his anti-Roman activism, since the contemporary Jewish concept of messiahship was predicated upon belief in an individual who would free Israel from foreign bondage, and could not possibly have applied to anyone declining this role.

Why then is the Jesus portrayed in the Gospels so unlike the actual “apocalyptic Pharisee” who was crucified for leading a popular insurrection in Jerusalem? Because, answers Maccoby, all four Gospels are deliberate reworkings of the Jesus story in order to render it palatable to the growing Christian communities of the Roman empire, which—especially after the failure of the Great Revolt and the wave of anti-Jewish sentiment that followed it—had a crucial interest in suppressing the fact of Jesus’ militant Jewishness and in shifting the blame for his death from the Romans to the Jews. Paradoxical though it may seem, the Christianity of the New Testament was concerned above all with effacing the historical career of its own savior, which was a source of acute embarrassment to it. And precisely because such a rewriting of history took place, any reconstruction of the actual events must be based on whatever isolated details filtered through about the real Jesus of Nazareth, the Galilean insurgent who sought not to save mankind from sin but to free his own people from Roman subjugation.

pp. 320 #050325