Summary notes on Pagels, Elaine - The Origin of Satan_ How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics (1996) 2. The Origin of Satan - Chapter 1

THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR

In 66 C.E., a rebellion against Rome broke out among the Jews of Palestine. Jewish soldiers, recruited at first from the countryside by leaders of the revolt, fought with whatever weapons they could find. But as the revolt spread to towns and cities, the Jewish population divided. Some refused to fight: in Jerusalem, the priestly party and their city-dwelling allies tried to maintain peace with Rome. Among those who joined the revolt, many were convinced that God was on their side: all were passionately intent on ridding their land of foreign domination. Three years into the war, the future emperor Vespasian and his son, the future emperor Titus, marched against Jerusalem with no fewer than sixty thousand well-trained, fully equipped foot soldiers and cavalry and besieged the city. Some twenty years later, the Jewish historian Joseph ben Matthias, better known by his Romanized name, Flavius Josephus, who had served as governor of Galilee before joining in the fight against Rome, wrote an account of what he calls “not only the greatest war of our own time, but one of the greatest of all recorded wars.”1 Josephus is the only remaining guide to these events. Other accounts of the war have not survived. Although he is a vivid historian, Josephus is also partisan. Born into a wealthy priestly family of royal lineage, Josephus had traveled to Rome when he was about twenty-six—two years before the war—to intervene with the emperor Nero on behalf of several arrested Jewish priests. Rome's wealth and military power impressed the young man, who managed to meet one of Nero's favorite actors—a Jew, as it happened—and, through him, Nero's wife, Poppea. Poppea agreed to help with his mission, and Josephus returned to Palestine. There, he says in his autobiography,

[!quote] I found revolutionary movements already begun, and great excitement at the prospect of revolt from Rome. Accordingly, I tried to stop those preaching sedition . . . urging them to place before their eyes those against whom they were fighting; and to remember that they were inferior to the Romans, not only in military skill, but in good fortune.

Hebrew term for what others called Palestine—in turmoil. Guerrilla leaders such as John of Gischala and his followers dedicated themselves to fight for liberty in the name of God. In the spring of 67, John’s fighting men, having routed the Romans from Gischala, their provincial city, burst into Jerusalem. There, urging people to join the revolution, they attracted tens of thousands, Josephus says, and “corrupted a great part of the young men, and stirred them up to war.”3 Others, whom Josephus calls older and wiser, bitterly opposed the revolt. John and other revolutionaries coming into Jerusalem from the countryside escalated the conflict by capturing “the most powerful man in the whole city,” the Jewish leader Antipas—the city treasurer—and two other men also connected with the royal dynasty. Accusing their three prisoners of having met with the enemy while plotting to surrender Jerusalem to the Romans, the rebels called them “traitors to our common liberty” and slit their throats. Having managed first to hide and then to survive a suicide pact he made with his fellow refugees, Josephus was captured by the Romans. Brought before Vespasian, the Roman commander, Josephus announced that God had revealed to him that Vespasian would become emperor of Rome. Unimpressed, Vespasian assumed that this was a trick Josephus had contrived to save his life. But after Nero was assassinated, and three other emperors rose and fell within months, Vespasian did become emperor. One of his first acts was to order his soldiers to free Josephus from prison. Henceforth Josephus traveled in Vespasian's entourage as interpreter and mediator. He returned to Jerusalem with Vespasian's son Titus when the young general took over command of the war from his father in order to march against the holy city. By that time, Josephus says, three factions divided the city: the priestly party working for peace; the revolutionaries from the countryside; and contending against both of these, a second anti-Roman party, led by prominent Jerusalemites, “men of the greatest power,” who, according to Josephus, wanted to maintain their power against the radicals from the surrounding countryside. Titus and his staff, apparently curious, entered the Holy of Holies, the sacred room where the ark of the covenant was kept. Roman soldiers looted the treasury, seizing its priceless gold furniture, the golden trumpets, and the massive seven-branched lampstand; then they set the Temple afire and watched it burn. Later that night they hailed Titus’s victory and in triumph desecrated the Temple precincts by sacrificing there to their own gods. Having devastated the Jewish armies, they raped, robbed, and massacred thousands of Jerusalem’s inhabitants and left the city in ruins. e horrifying devastation that the city’s inhabitants suffered. What makes these events important for my purpose in this book is that the first Christian gospel was probably written during the last year of the war, or the year it ended.8 Where it was written and by whom we do not know; the work is anonymous, although tradition attributes it to Mark, a younger co-worker of the apostle Peter. What we do know is that the author of Mark’s gospel was well aware of the war and took sides in the conflicts it aroused, both among Jewish groups and between Jews and Romans. Dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of accounts were written about Jesus, including the long-hidden accounts found among the so-called secret gospels discovered at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945.9 But of these numerous accounts, only four gospels are included in the New Testament. According to Mark, Jesus protested at being arrested “like a robber” (Mark 14:48). The author of Luke, writing some ten to twenty years later, says that Jesus was charged, like those crucified along with him, as a robber (Luke 23:40).11 This Greek term testes, literally translated “robber” or “bandit,” was in the early first century a catchall term for an undesirable, a troublemaker or criminal. Josephus, however, writing after the Jewish war against Rome, most often uses the term to characterize those Jews who were inciting or participating in anti-Roman activities or in the war against Rome itself.12 I agree with many other scholars that Jesus himself is unlikely to have been a revolutionary, According to Mark, Pilate’s soldiers, aware of the charge, mocked and abused Jesus as a would-be king of the Jews; apparently the same charge was inscribed over his cross as a warning to others that Rome would similarly dispatch anyone accused of insurrection. The narratives that we know as the New Testament gospels were written by certain followers of Jesus who lived through the war, and who knew that many of their fellow Jews regarded them as a suspect minority. They wrote their own accounts of some of the momentous events surrounding the war, and the part that Jesus played in events preceding it, hoping to persuade others of their interpretation. We cannot fully understand the New Testament gospels until we recognize that they are, in this sense, wartime literature. As noted before, the gospel we call Mark (although we do not know historically who actually wrote these gospels, I use their traditional attributions) was written either during the war itself, perhaps during a temporary lull in the siege of Jerusalem, or immediately after the defeat, in 70 .E.14 Matthew and Luke wrote some ten to twenty years later, each using Mark as his basis and expanding Mark’s narrative with further sayings and stories. Most scholars believe that John wrote his gospel, perhaps in Alexandria, about a generation after the war, c. 90-95 C.E.15 Only one of Jesus’ followers whose writings were later incorporated into the New Testament—Paul of Tarsus—wrote before the war and could, of course, say nothing about Jesus in relation to it. Paul mentions little that concerns Jesus’ biography, repeating only a few “sayings of the Lord” (Acts 20:35 ).16 What fascinated Paul about Jesus’ death was not the crucifixion as an actual event, but what he saw as its profound religious meaning—that, as he says, “Christ died for our sins” (1 Cor. 15:3), that he became an atonement sacrifice, which, Paul believed, transformed the relationship between Israel’s God and the whole human race. If he knew the charges made against Jesus—that he was one of many Galileans whom Josephus regards as troublemakers17 for fomenting rebellion against Rome—Paul apparently regarded these charges as so transparently false or so irrelevant that they needed no rebuttal. Paul died c. 64—65 C.E. in Rome, executed, like Jesus, by order of Roman magistrates. Jesus’ followers believed that there was no point in fighting the Romans because the catastrophic events that followed his crucifixion were signs of the end—signs that the whole world was to be shattered and transformed (Mark 13:4 29). Some insisted that what they had seen—the horrors of the war—actually vindicated his call “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is near” (Mark 1:15). Mark shares the conviction, widespread among Jesus’ followers, that Jesus himself had predicted these world-shattering events— the destruction of the Temple and its desecration:

[!quote] “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down. . . . But when you see the abominable sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand!), then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains (Mark 13:1-14).”

This was exactly what had now happened. Others believed— and some dared to say—that these very catastrophes occurred as an angry God’s punishment upon his own people for the crime of rejecting their divinely sent Messiah. Mark says that these leaders now have rejected Mark and his fellow believers, calling them either insane or possessed by demons, the same charges that they directed against Jesus himself. Mark’s motives with regard to Pilate are not simple. Insofar as he addresses his narrative to outsiders, Mark is eager to allay Roman suspicions by showing that Jesus’ followers are no threat to Roman order, any more than Jesus himself had been. Mark may also have wanted to convert Gentile readers. Yet Mark is primarily interested in conflicts within the Jewish community— especially conflicts between his own group and those who reject its claims about Jesus. Yet Mark knows that to justify such claims about Jesus, he has to answer obvious objections. If Jesus had been sent as God’s anointed king, how could the movement he initiated have failed so miserably? How could his followers have abandoned him and gone into hiding, while soldiers captured him like a common criminal? Why did virtually all his own people reject the claims about him—not only the townspeople in Galilee but also the crowds he attracted on his travels throughout Judea and in Jerusalem? And wasn’t Jesus, after all, a seditionist himself, tainted in retrospect by association with the failed war, having been arrested and crucified as a rebel? Attempting to answer these questions, Mark places the events surrounding Jesus within the context not simply of the struggle against Rome but of the struggle between good and evil in the universe. The stark events of Jesus’ life and death cannot be understood, he suggests, apart from the clash of supernatural forces that Mark sees being played out on earth in Jesus’ lifetime. Mark intends to tell the story of Jesus in terms of its hidden, deeper dynamics—to tell it, so to speak, from God’s point of view. What happened, Mark says, is this: Jesus of Nazareth, after his baptism, was coming out of the water of the Jordan River when “he saw the heavens torn apart and the spirit descending like a dove on him” and heard a voice speaking to him from heaven (1:10-11). God’s power anointed Jesus to challenge the forces of evil that now dominate the world, and drove him into direct conflict with those forces.20 Mark frames his narrative at its beginning and at its climax with episodes in which Satan and his demonic forces retaliate against God by working to destroy Jesus. Mark begins by describing how the spirit of God descended upon Jesus at his baptism, and “immediately drove him into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days being tempted by Satan, and was with the animals, and the angels ministered to him” (1:12-13). From that moment on, Mark says, even after Jesus left the wilderness and returned to society, the powers of evil challenged and attacked him at every turn, and he attacked them back, and won. Matthew and Luke, writing some ten to twenty years later, adopted and elaborated this opening scenario. Each turns it into a drama of three temptations, that is, three increasingly intense confrontations between Satan and the spirit of God, acting through Jesus. Satan, although he seldom appears onstage in these gospel accounts, nevertheless plays a central role in the divine drama, for the gospel writers realize that the story they have to tell would make little sense without Satan. How, after all, could anyone claim that a man betrayed by one of his own followers, and brutally executed on charges of treason against Rome, not only was but still is God's appointed Messiah, unless his capture and death were, as the gospels insist, not a final defeat but only a preliminary skirmish in a vast cosmic conflict now enveloping the universe?As Jesus warns his interrogator at his trial, soon he will be vindicated when the “Son of man” returns in the clouds of heaven (Mark 14:62); here Mark has Jesus recall one of the prophet Daniel’s visions, in which “one like a son of man” (that is, a human being), comes “with the clouds of heaven” and is made ruler of God’s Kingdom (Dan. 7:13-14). Many of Mark’s contemporaries would have read Daniel’s prophecy as predicting the coming of a conqueror who would defeat Israel’s foreign rulers. While at first glance the gospel of Mark may look like historical biography, it is not so simple as this, for Mark does not intend to write history, as Josephus had, primarily to persuade people of the accuracy of his account of recent events and make them comprehensible on a human level. Instead Mark wants to show what these events mean for the future of the world, or, in the scholarly jargon, eschatologically. Mark and his colleagues combine a biographical form with themes of supernatural conflict borrowed from Jewish apocalyptic literature to create a new kind of narrative. These gospels carry their writers’ powerful conviction that Jesus’ execution, which had seemed to signal the victory of the forces of evil, actually heralds their ultimate annihilation and ensures God’s final victory.

The gospel writers want to locate and identify the specific ways in which the forces of evil act through certain people to effect violent destruction, above all, in Matthew’s words, “the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of innocent Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah” (23:35)— violence epitomized in the execution of Jesus, which Matthew sees as the culmination of all evils. The subject of cosmic war serves primarily to interpret human relationships—especially all-too-human conflict—in supernatural form. The figure of Satan becomes, among other things, a way of characterizing one’s actual enemies as the embodiment of transcendent forces. But how does the figure of Satan characterize the enemy? What is Satan, and how does he appear on earth? The New Testament gospels almost never identify Satan with the Romans, but they consistently associate him with Jesus’ Jewish enemies, primarily Judas Iscariot and the chief priests and scribes.As we shall see, Jesus’ followers did not invent the practice of demonizing enemies within their own group, although Christians (and Muslims after them) carried this practice further than their Jewish predecessors had taken it, and with enormous consequences. Yet who actually were Jesus’ enemies? What we know historically suggests that they were the Roman governor and his soldiers. The charge against Jesus and his execution were typically-Roman. Mary Smallwood observes that rounding up and killing troublemakers, especially those who ignited public demonstrations, was a routine measure for Roman forces stationed in Judea.22 During the first century the Romans arrested and crucified thousands of Jews charged with sedition— often, Philo says, without trial. But as the gospels indicate, Jesus also had enemies among his fellow Jews, especially the Jerusalem priests and their influential allies, who were threatened by his activities. The crucial point is this: Had Jesus’ followers identified themselves with the majority of Jews rather than with a particular minority, they might have told his story very differently—and with considerably more historical plausibility. They might have told it, for example, in traditional patriotic style, as the story of an inspired Jewish holy man martyred by Israel’s traditional enemies, foreign oppressors of one sort or another. The biblical book of Daniel, for example, which tells the story of the prophet Daniel, who, although threatened with a horrible death—being torn apart by lions—nevertheless defies the king of Babylon in the name of God and of the people of Israel (Dan. 6:1-28). The first book of Maccabees tells the story of the priest Mattathias, who defies Syrian soldiers when they order him to worship idols. Mattathias chooses to die rather than betray his devotion to God.23 But unlike the authors of Daniel or 1 Maccabees, the gospel writers chose to dissociate themselves from the Jewish majority and to focus instead upon intra-Jewish conflict—specifically upon their own quarrel with those who resisted their claims that Jesus was the Messiah. Nonetheless it is probably fair to say that in every case the decision to place the story of Jesus within the context of God's struggle against Satan tends to minimize the role of the Romans, and to place increasing blame instead upon Jesus’ Jewish enemies. This is not to say that the gospel writers simply intended to exonerate the Romans. Mark surely was aware that during his time, and for some thirty years after the war, the Romans remained wary of renewed sedition. Members of a group loyal to a condemned seditionist were at risk, and Mark probably hoped to persuade those outsiders who might read his account that neither Jesus nor his followers offered any threat to Roman order. But within Mark’s account, the Romans, even the few portrayed with some sympathy, remain essentially outsiders. Mark tells the story of Jesus in the context that matters to him most—within the Jewish community. And here, as in most human situations, the more intimate the conflict, the more intense and bitter it becomes. Mark opens his narrative with the account of John's baptizing Jesus and relates that at the moment of baptism the power of God descended upon Jesus, and “a voice spoke from heaven, saying ‘This is my beloved son’ ” (1:11). At that moment, all human beings disappear from Mark’s narrative and, as we have seen, the spirit of God drives Jesus into the wilderness to encounter Satan, wild animals, and angels. Mark’s account, then, moves direcdy from Jesus’ solitary struggle with Satan in the desert to his first public appearance in the synagogue at Capernaum, where immediately on the Sabbath he entered the synagogue and taught.

[!quote] And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught as one who had authority, and not as the scribes (1:22).

There Jesus encounters a man possessed by an evil spirit who, sensing Jesus’ divine power, challenges him: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us?” (1:24). According to Mark, Jesus has come to heal the world and reclaim it for God; in order to accomplish this, he must overcome the evil powers who have usurped authority over the world, and who now oppress human beings. So, Mark says,

[!quote] Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him, and they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this?

Throughout this opening chapter, Mark emphasizes that Jesus healed “many who were sick with various diseases” and “drove out many demons” (1:34). He traveled throughout Galilee “preaching in the synagogues and casting out demons,” for, as he explains to Simon, Andrew, James, and John, who gather around him, “that is what I came to do” (1:38). During his next public appearance, as Mark tells it, the scribes immediately took offense at what they considered his usurpation of divine authority. By pronouncing forgiveness, Jesus claims the right to speak for God—a claim that, Mark says, angers the scribes:

[!note] “Why does this man speak this way? It is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone?” (2:7).

According to Mark, Jesus, aware of the scribes’ reaction, immediately performs a healing in order to prove his authority to his critics:

[!quote] And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, said, “Why do you question thus in your hearts? . . . But so that you may know that the Son of man has power on earth to forgive sins”—he said to the paralytic—“I say to you, rise, take your pallet, and go home.” And he rose, and immediately picked up his pallet and went out before them all, so that they were all astonished, . . . saying, “We never saw anything like this!” (2:8-12, emphasis added).

When Jesus first appeared proclaiming “Repent: the Kingdom of God is at hand!,” he must have sounded to many of his contemporaries like one of the Essenes, who withdrew to the wilderness in protest against ordinary Jewish life. From the desert caves where they lived in monastic seclusion, the Essenes denounced the priestly aristocratic leaders in charge of the Jerusalem Temple—men like Josephus and those he admired—as being hopelessly corrupted by their accommodation to Gentile ways, and by collaboration with the Roman occupiers. The Essenes took the preaching of repentance and God’s coming judgment to mean that Jews must separate themselves from such polluting influences and return to strict observance of God's law— especially the Sabbath and kosher laws that marked them off from the Gentiles as God’s holy people.

Instead of fasting, like other devout Jews, Jesus ate and drank freely. And instead of scrupulously observing Sabbath laws, Jesus excused his disciples when they broke them:

[!note] One Sabbath he was going through the grainfields; and as they made their way, his disciples began to pick ears of grain. And the Pharisees said to him, “Look, why are they doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?” (2:23-26).

Here Jesus dares claim, as precedent for his disciples’ apparently casual action, the prerogative of King David himself, who, with his men, broke the sacred food laws during a wartime emergency. Instead of postponing the healing for a day, Jesus had chosen deliberately to defy his critics by performing it on the Sabbath. Seeing this, Mark says:

[!quote] The Pharisees went out, and immediately conspired against him with the Herodians [the party of King Herod], how they might kill him (3:6).

For Mark the secret meaning of such conflict is clear. Those who are offended and outraged by Jesus’ actions do not know that Jesus is impelled by God’s spirit to contend against the forces of evil, whether those forces manifest themselves in the invisible demonic presences who infect and possess people, or in his actual human opponents. Mark suggests that Jesus recognizes that the leaders who oppose him are energized by unseen forces. Immediately after this powerful coalition has united against him, Jesus retaliates by commissioning a new leadership group, “the twelve,” presumably assigning one leader for each of the original twelve tribes of Israel. Jesus orders them to preach and gives them “power to cast out demons” (3:13). This escalation of spiritual conflict immediately evokes escalating opposition—opposition that begins at home, within Jesus’ own family. Mark says that when Jesus “went home ... his family . . . went out to seize him, for they said, ‘He is insane [or: beside himself]’ ” (3:21 ).26 Next “the scribes who came down from Jerusalem” charge that Jesus himself “is possessed by Beelzebub; by the prince of demons he casts out demons” (3:22). Jesus objects:

[!quote] “How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. (3:23-27).

According to Mark, it is apparently the “house of Israel” that Jesus sees as a divided house, a divided kingdom. Jesus openly contends against Satan, who he believes has overtaken God's own household, which he has come to purify and reclaim: Jesus wants to “bind this enemy” and “plunder his house.” As for the scribes’ accusation that Jesus is possessed by the “prince of demons,” he throws back upon them the same accusation of demon-possession and warns that in saying this they are sinning so deeply as to seal their own damnation (3:28 30). For, he says, whoever attributes the work of God’s spirit to Satan commits the one unforgivable sin:

[!quote] “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven to human beings, and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the holy spirit is never forgiven, but is guilty of an eternal sin”—because they said, “He is possessed by an evil spirit” (3:28-30).

Mark deliberately places these scenes of Jesus’ conflict with the scribes between two episodes depicting Jesus’ conflict with his own family. Mark suggests, “re-formed God's people.” From this point on, Jesus sharply discriminates between those he has chosen, the inner circle, and “those outside.” He still draws enormous crowds, but while teaching them, he offers riddling parables, deliberately concealing his full meaning from all but his intimates. Although he often criticizes the disciples—in 8:33 he even accuses Peter of playing Satan’s role—Jesus shares secrets with them that he hides from outsiders, for the latter, he says, quoting Isaiah, are afflicted with impenetrable spiritual blindness. Criticized by the Pharisees and the Jerusalem scribes for not living “according to the traditions of the elders” because he and his disciples eat without washing their hands, Jesus, instead of defending his action, attacks his critics as “hypocrites” and charges that they value their own traditions while breaking God’s commandments. Then he publicly calls into question the kosher laws themselves. again explaining his meaning to his disciples alone (7:14-23). Here Mark wants to show that although Jesus discards traditional kosher (“purity”) laws, he advocates instead purging the “heart”—that is, impulses, desires, and imagination. Now that Jesus has alienated not only the scribes, Pharisees, and Herodians, but also his relatives and many of his own townspeople, he travels with his small band of disciples, preaching to the crowds. Anticipating what lies ahead of him in Jerusalem, where he will challenge the priestly party on its own ground, Jesus nevertheless resolutely leads his followers there, walking ahead of them, while “they were astonished, and those who followed were terrified” (10:32).

Opposition to Jesus intensifies after he enters Jerusalem. Having prepared a formal procession to go into the city, Jesus is openly acclaimed, in defiance of the Romans, as the man who comes to restore Israel’s ancient empire: “Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is coming!” Then, with his followers, he enters the great Temple and makes a shocking public demonstration there:

[!quote] He entered the Temple, and began to drive out those who sold and those who bought in the Temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the Temple (11:15-16).

When the chief priests and scribes, joined by members of the Jewish council, demand to know by what authority he acts, Jesus refuses to answer. Instead he retells Isaiah’s parable of God’s wrath against Israel (12:1-12) in a way so transparent that even the chief priests, scribes, and elders recognize that he is telling it “against them” (12:12). Two days before Passover, Mark says, “the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest Jesus secretly and kill him, for they said, ‘Not during the festival, lest there be a tumult among the people,’ ” since so far the people remained on Jesus’ side. Shortly afterward, Judas Iscariot, obviously aware of the hostility his master had aroused among influential people, “went to the chief priests in order to betray [Jesus] to them, and when they heard it they were glad, and offered him money” (14:1-11). The armed men “brought him to the high priest,” apparently to his residence. Although the San hedrin traditionally was not allowed to meet at night, Mark tells us that on the night of Jesus’ arrest, “all the chief priests and the elders and the scribes were assembled” at the high priest’s residence to try his case in a formal proceeding. Now Mark presents the first of two trial scenes—the “trial before the Sanhedrin,” which he follows with the “trial before Pilate.” Most scholars assume that even if these events occurred, Jesus’ followers could not have witnessed what went on at either his appearance before the Jewish council or his arraignment by the Romans.28 But Mark is not concerned with reporting history. By introducing these scenes, Mark wants to show above all that the well-known charge against Jesus—sedition—not only was false but was invented by Jesus’ Jewish enemies; further, Mark says, the Roman governor himself realized this and tried in vain to save Jesus! According to Mark, the Sanhedrin had already prejudged the case. The trial was only a pretense in order “to put him to death” (14:55). After hearing a series of trumped-up charges and lying witnesses, some accusing Jesus of having threatened to destroy the Temple, the chief priest interrogates Jesus, demanding that he answer the charges against him. Here, for the first time in Mark’s gospel, Jesus publicly admits his divine identity to people other than his disciples, and goes on to warn his accusers that they will soon witness his vindication: “I am; and you will see the Son of man sitting at the right hand of power and coming with the clouds of heaven” (14:62). Then, Mark continues, the high priest, tearing his robe, says, “ ‘You have heard his blasphemy. What is your decision?’ And they all condemned him as deserving death” (14:64). Many scholars have commented on the historical implausibility of this account.29 Although we know little about Sanhedrin procedures during Jesus’ time,30 did this council actually assemble at night, contrary to what seems to have been its precedent? If so, why does Mark go on to add a second version of the council meeting to discuss this case—a meeting that takes place the following morning, as if nothing had happened the night before? For after Mark ends his first, more elaborate account, he lets slip what now becomes a redundancy: that “as soon as it was morning the chief priests, with the elders and scribes, and the whole council, held a consultation, and they bound Jesus, and led him away, and delivered him to Pilate” (15:1). We cannot, of course, know what actually happened, but Mark’s second version, which agrees with Luke’s, sounds more likely—that the council convened in the morning, and decided that the prisoner should be kept in custody and turned over to Pilate to face charges.31 The gospel of John, relying upon a source independent of Mark’s, offers another reconstructed account that gives a plausible interpretation of these events.32 According to John, the chief priests, alarmed by the crowds Jesus attracted, feared that his presence in Jerusalem during Passover and destroy our holy place and our nation” (11:48). The civil strife that preceded the Jewish war, as John and his contemporaries well knew, had verified the accuracy of such concerns about possible Roman reprisals. Many New Testament scholars who have analyzed the account of Jesus’ appearance before the Sanhedrin agree that Mark (or his predecessors) probably wrote the first version to emphasize his primary point: that Pilate merely ratified a previous Jewish verdict, and carried out a death sentence that he himself neither ordered nor approved—but a sentence unanimously pronounced by the entire leadership of the Jewish people.33 This does not mean, however, that Mark is motivated by malice toward the Jewish leaders. Indeed, Mark stops far short of the extent to which Matthew, Luke, and John will go to blame the Jewish leaders for the crucifixion, although the tendency to blame them had already begun before Mark’s time and had its effect on his narrative. It is no wonder, then, that, as one historian says, Mark wanted "to emphasize the culpability of the Jewish nation for the death of Jesus, particularly of its leaders. . . . [Mark’s] tendency was defensive rather than aggressive. He was concerned to avoid mentioning anything that would provoke Roman antagonism towards, or even suspicion of, the ideals for which he stood" Mark weaves into this account a contrapuntal story—the story of Jesus’ chief disciple, Peter, who, in terror, denies Jesus, an example of how not to act when on trial. For whereas Jesus stands up to the Sanhedrin and confesses his divine mission, boldly risking—and accepting—the death sentence, Peter claims not to have known Jesus. Having surreptitiously followed Jesus to the scene of the trial, Mark says, Peter stood warming his hands by the fire when one of the household servants said to him, “You, too, were with the Nazarene, Jesus” (14:67). But Peter denies this (“I do not know what you mean; . . . I do not know the man”) three times, with increasing vehemence, cursing and swearing, and finally escapes. After recognizing what he has done, Peter “broke down and wept” (14:72). Mark knows that those who publicly confess their conviction that Jesus is “the Messiah, the Son of God” (14:61) may put themselves in danger of abuse, ridicule, even threats to their lives. The terms Messiah and Son of God would probably have been anachronistic during the time of Jesus; but many of Mark’s contemporaries must have recognized them as the way Christians of their own time confessed their faith. In this dramatic scene, then, Mark again confronts his audience with the question that pervades his entire narrative: Who recognizes the spirit in Jesus as divine, and who does not? Who stands on God’s side, and who on Satan’s? By contrasting Jesus’ courageous confession with Peter’s denial, Mark draws a dramatic picture of the choice confronting Jesus’ followers: they must take sides in a war that allows no neutral ground.

Mark says that when Jesus refused to answer his questions, Pilate, instead of demonstrating anger or even impatience, “was amazed” (15:5). Mark goes further. Claiming to know the governor’s private assessment of the case, Mark says that Pilate “recognized that it was out of envy that they had handed him over” (15:10). But instead of making a decision and giving orders, Pilate takes no action. Then, hearing shouts from the crowd outside, he goes out to address them, asking what they want: “Do you want me to release for you the king of the Jews?” But the crowd demands instead the release of Barabbas, whom Mark describes as one of the imprisoned insurrectionists, who “had committed murder in the rebellion” (15:7). When the crowd shouts for Jesus’ crucifixion, Pilate in effect pleads with his subjects for justice: “Why, what evil has he done?” (15:14). But the shouting continues, and Pilate, “wishing to satisfy the crowd” (15:15), releases Barabbas and, having ordered Jesus to be flogged, acquiesces to their demand that he be crucified. The Pilate who appears in the gospels, as we have noted, has little to do with the historical Pilate—that is, with the man we know from other first-century historical and political sources, both Jewish and Roman, as a brutal governor. As Raymond Brown notes in his meticulous study of the passion narratives, except in Christian tradition, portraits of Pilate range from bitterly hostile to negative.36 Philo, an educated, influential member of the Jewish community in Alexandria, the capital of Egypt, was Pilate's contemporary. In one of his writings, his Embassy to Gains, he describes his experiences as a member of an official delegation sent to Rome to represent the interests of the Alexandrian Jewish community to the Roman emperor, Gaius Caligula. In the course of his narrative, Philo, referring to the situation of the Jewish community in Judea, describes governor Pilate as a man of “inflexible, stubborn, and cruel disposition,” and lists as typical features of his administration “greed, violence, robbery, assault, abusive behavior, frequent executions without trial, and endless savage ferocity.”37 Philo’s testimony is partly corroborated in Josephus's history of the same era. As we have seen, Josephus, like Philo, was a man of considerable political experience; as former Jewish governor of Galilee under the Romans, he writes his history under Roman patronage in a tone sympathetic to Roman interests. Yet Josephus records several episodes that show Pilate’s contempt for Jewish religious sensibilities. Pilate’s predecessors, for example, recognizing that Jews considered images of the emperor to be idolatrous, had instituted the practice of choosing for the Roman garrison in Jerusalem a military unit whose standards did not carry such images. But when Pilate was appointed governor he deliberately violated this precedent. First he ordered the existing garrison to leave; then he led to Jerusalem a replacement unit whose standards displayed imperial images, timing his arrival to coincide with the Jewish high holy days, the Day of Atonement and the Feast of Tabernacles. Pilate apparently knew that he was committing sacrilege in the eyes of his subjects, for he took care to arrive in Jerusalem at night, having ordered the standards to be covered with cloth during the journey. When Pilate refused, the crowds continued to demonstrate. After five days, Pilate, exasperated but adamant, decided to force an end to the demonstrations. Pretending to offer the demonstrators a formal hearing, he summoned them to appear before him in the stadium. There Pilate had amassed soldiers, ordered them to surround the crowd, and threatened to massacre the demonstrators unless they gave in. To Pilate’s surprise, the Jews declared that they would rather die than see their law violated. At this point Pilate capitulated and withdrew the unit. As Mary Smallwood comments:

[!note] The Jews had won a decisive victory in the first round against their new governor, but now they knew what sort of man they were up against, and thereafter anything he did was liable to be suspect. . . . But more was to follow.

Roman authorities also respected Jewish sensitivity by banning images considered idolatrous from coins minted in Judea. Only during Pilate’s administration was this practice violated: coins depicting pagan cult symbols have been found dated 29-31 C.E. Did Pilate order the change, as the German scholar E. Stauffer believes, “to force [his] subjects to handle representations of pagan culture”?39 Raymond Brown suggests that Pilate simply “underestimated Jewish sensitivity” on such matters.

Late in Pilate’s tenure as governor other provocative incidents prompted Jewish leaders to protest to the emperor Tiberius against Pilate’s attacks on their religion. In 31 C.E. Pilate angered his subjects by dedicating golden shields in the Herodian palace in Jerusalem. We cannot be certain what occasioned the protest; the scholar B. C. McGinny suggests that the shields were dedicated to the “divine” emperor, a description that would have incensed many Jews.43 Again Pilate faced popular protest: a crowd assembled, led by four Herodian princes. When Pilate refused to remove the shields, perhaps claiming he was acting only out of respect for the emperor, Josephus says, they replied, “Do not take [the emperor] Tiberius as your pretext for outraging the nation; he does not wish any of our customs to be overthrown.”44 When Pilate proved adamant, the Jewish princes appealed to the emperor, who rebuked Pilate and ordered him to remove the shields from Jerusalem. One recent commentator remarks that

[!note] the bullying of Pilate by his Jewish adversaries in the case of the shields resembles strongly the bullying of Pilate in [the gospel of] John’s account of the passion, including the threat of appeal to the emperor.

Yet characterizing these protests as “bullying” seems strange; what recourse did a subject people have to challenge the governor’s decision, except to appeal over his head to a higher authority? Pilate’s rule ended abruptly when the legate of Syria finally responded to repeated protests by stripping Pilate of his commission and dispatching a man from his own staff to serve as governor in his place. Pilate was ordered to return to Rome at once to answer charges against him, and disappeared from the historical record. Philo’s account coincides with Mark’s on one point: that Pilate, aware of the animosity toward him, was concerned lest the chief priests complain about him to the emperor. Yet Mark, as we have seen, presents a Pilate not only as a man too weak to withstand the shouting of a crowd, but also as one solicitous to ensure justice in the case of a Jewish prisoner whom the Jewish leaders want to destroy. Mark’s benign portrait of Pilate increases the culpability of the Jewish leaders and supports Mark’s contention that Jews, not Romans, were the primary force behind Jesus’ crucifixion. Furthermore, what Mark merely implies—that Jesus’ opponents are energized by Satan—Luke and John will state explicitly. Both Matthew and Luke, writing ten to twenty years after Mark, adapted the earlier gospel and revised it in various ways, updating it to reflect the situation of Jesus’ followers in their own times. Jesus' followers did not invent the practice of demonizing enemies within their own group. In this respect, as in many others, as we shall see, they drew upon traditions they shared with other first-century Jewish sects. The Essenes, for example, had developed and elaborated images of an evil power they called by many names—Satan, Belial, Beelzebub, Mastema (“hatred”)— precisely to characterize their own struggle against a Jewish majority whom they, for reasons different from those of Jesus’ followers, denounced as apostate. The relationship between Jesus’ followers and the rest of the Jewish community, however, especially during the first century, is anything but simple. Mark himself, like the Essenes, sees his movement essentially as a conflict within one “house”—as I read it, the house of Israel. Such religious reformers see their primary struggle not with foreigners, however ominously Roman power lurks in the background, but with other Jews who try to define the “people of God.”4

Even the images that Mark invokes to characterize the majority—images of Satan, Beelzebub, and the devil—paradoxically express the intimacy of Mark’s relationship with the Jewish community as a whole, for, as we shall see, the figure of Satan, as it emerged over the centuries in Jewish tradition, is not a hostile power assailing Israel from without, but the source and representation of conflict within the community.