The Ghost in the Gospels: The True Story of How Jesus Died and How We All Missed It for 2,000 Years

Copyright © 2006 by Leon Zitzer

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ISBN-10: 0-595-85215-7 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Notes

Abbreviations

1

The Hardest Things to Say, to See

2

Pharisees, Sadducees, and Oral Torah—Plus Some Comments on Terminology and Emotions

3

A Taste of Jesus’Jewishness—And How Staged Readings of the Gospels Prevent Us From Seeing

4

The Offensive Jesus

5

A Cast Of Caricatures, Undone—Unveiling What Really Led To Jesus’ Death And The Major Clues That Support It

6

More on Barabbas

7

A Fresh Look at the Priests and Other Jewish Leaders

8

Joshua and the Temple

9

Judas—His Friend to the End

10

The Long Road Ahead—An Open Letter to Christians from a Lonely, Wandering Jew

APPENDIX A

Our Emotional History with Josephus

APPENDIX B

Pontius Pilate

APPENDIX C

The Implicit Rhetoric of Violence in René Girard’s Work

APPENDIX D

The Attempted Rescue Scenes—Two Possible Versions of The High Priest Trying to Persuade Jesus

Bibliography

This book is dedicated to

THE SIX MILLION JEWS WHO WERE KILLED IN THE HOLOCAUST

—Without your deaths, this book would not have been possible. It took a disaster to get anyone to begin to examine this history with more honesty. Any possibility of progress in this field is owed entirely to you. You were on my mind from the beginning. And I don’t think you would mind if I also dedicated this to

ALL WHO HAVE BEEN PERSECUTED BY RELIGION, IDEOLOGY, CULTURE, OR POLITICS

—May this book help reduce violence in the future so that all peoples can be free,

and to

A HOMELESS WOMAN WHOSE NAME I KNOW NOT

—whose name I am ashamed to say I never learned. I met you on a corner one day and asked you, in all seriousness, what is the first thing I should do if I become homeless. I was closer than usual at that time. You asked me my name. I told you. You placed one hand on my shoulder, lifted your face heavenward, and said, Dear God, don’t let Leon become homeless. That is the worst thing that could happen. He don’t want that. Please save him from that. So far, so good, babe, wherever you are. I’m still here by the skin of my teeth. I hope you ‘re not displeased with what I’ve been working on while still in my apartment.

Acknowledgments

I am proud to say that this book is brought to you the same way many independent films are—through friends, relations (well, one relation, my sister), credit cards, and food stamps (many years ago, but still it was part of the process).

Also, as with all films, it is a relatively small circle of people that made it happen. Draw a circle around the camera, which would include the actors, the director, the cameraperson, and throw in the screenwriter (no bodily harm intended), and that’s where the film happens. If it isn’t happening there, it isn’t happening.

So too this book. A small number helped this book see life: My sister Ruth and her husband Art Mann, my friends Susan Rowley, Mark Felber, and Sean Moran, former girlfriend Lana Forrester, my ex-wife Justine Darewska (since remarried, but I don’t know her new last name), and Allan Goldsmith. Without any one of them for support, things would have turned out very differently. (Since Allan completed the circle, I will save him for nearer the end of these acknowledgments.)

In my first round of research, Justine allowed me to quit my job and do nothing but study and take notes for nine months. We lived on one income while I went to the library every day. The work was off to a good start because of her.

Ruth and Art saved me from eviction once or twice, maybe more. It’s been touch and go ever since. They have continued to help me with I don’t know how many months of rent and dental bills (actually, I do know, it’s all in a notebook).

And Susan. What can I say? You’ve been there for so long. Can you believe this moment has arrived? I don’t quite believe it myself yet. It could not have happened without your financial help that was above and beyond the call (way beyond; you’re in that notebook too) and what was probably even more important, your emotional support. Susan never put pressure on me to achieve any result. She has no yardstick for success. How many people would tell you that the journey itself is everything and to enjoy the journey? Susan did.

Mark and I speak on the phone almost every week. He is always encouraging me not to lose hope and picks up my spirits. I’m grateful, Mark. Mark also supplied the computers (two no less!) that made both my Web site and this book possible, and further extended himself by working so hard to translate Wolfgang Stegemann’s essay. My thanks also to his son Jeremy for help setting up the first computer and for the gift of the second computer, and to wife Mary for giving me some lessons.

Lana and I were together for a couple of years. The first draft of this book was almost completed during that time. Lana was supportive all the way and was very generous with her time, reading much of the work, discussing it with me, and listening to my ruminations. Thanks for all of it, Lana, and for all the dinners.

Sean is my email buddy from England. Sean was the first and longest lasting supporter who found me on the Internet. We have communicated several times a month for more than three years now. Even though Sean did not know the full theory, he knew there was something valuable here, and we had many fruitful discussions about Jesus’ Jewishness. Sean’s interest and confidence in this was another factor that gave me hope.

I also have to thank Steve Imparl who discovered my Web site much later and was not only not offended by my severe criticism of scholars, he actually found it inspiring. Like Sean, he knows that facing up to the deep prejudice in the scholarly world is a necessary beginning to making things better. Rolf Gompertz was yet another Internet contact who helped by recommending iUniverse. Check out his novel A Jewish Novel About Jesus. The Internet is also where I met Michael F. Diedenhofen who pitched in to help finish the translation of Stegemann’s essay (which, it seems to me, has been sadly neglected as he is the only scholar, outside of Haim Cohn, who realized that it is unjust to blame Jewish leaders for Jesus’ death; it is a rather unique essay).

There were many other people on the Internet who mentioned my Web site on their blogs or sites. I cannot remember them all now and some I am probably not even aware of. I do remember Lynn Gazis-Sax and Cynthia Bussiere. Thanks to all of them.

When I put my Web site online, I made some acknowledgments at the end of the essay Missing the Obvious. The essay should still be there. (The site by the way is www.historicaljesusghost.com

) Some of the people mentioned there have already been named here, so I will just repeat the end of those acknowledgments where I thanked some more people for helping me with the site: My thanks as well to Terry Ballard, Daniel Radosh, and Claire Warga Landsberg for their advice, and to Adegoke Adediran for actually getting this site online. Humongous gratitude to all of you.

That brings me to the Internet generally without which this book would not have found its way in the world. I’m no fan of the Internet. There is too much bad stuff out there, too much sheer garbage, to be thrilled about the Internet. Discussions about the historical Jesus are particularly bad. But the Internet makes communication so much easier. Most importantly, it provides a way for anyone who has something important to say but is blocked by a power structure to get his or her message out to a wider public. Without my Web site, Sean Moran would never have found me and without Sean, I never would have found Wolfgang Stegemann in Germany whom I will credit more fully very shortly. The Internet also allowed me to communicate with William Klassen, author of the best book on Judas. So it’s been a plus for me and I am extremely grateful for its existence.

As long as I am on larger topics, I have to express my indebtedness to the black civil rights movement. If I have learned one important thing from African-Americans, it is to find my voice, to speak up loud and clear on matters of injustice, and not be afraid to identify racism wherever and whenever it happens. I would not have any courage at all if it were not for what blacks have done for this country. I think they identify with something Samuel Adams wrote in 1768: "I know very well that to murmur, or even to whisper a complaint, some men call a riotous spirit. But they are in the right of it to complain, and complain ALOUD (quoted in Draper, 325). Blacks figure that if they are going to criticize us for raising complaints politely and quietly, we might just as well shout it out. The whole point as Adams went on to say was to avoid becoming the slaves of dirty tools of arbitrary power." So my thanks to all the African-Americans who inspired me to take up my own cause just as vigorously.

I would also mention a deep debt to Muhammad Ali who means something to me more personal than I can relate here. Thanks as well to the African writer Frantz Fanon who taught me that it is not a bad thing to take a close look at the way the dominant, imperialistic society affects your own internal make-up.

And to all my acting teachers, a big kiss and hug for giving me life and spirit: Jane Dentinger, Anna Pannaro, Rex Knowles, Sherry Landrum, Terry Sommer, and Maria and Tony Greco. I talk about what acting gave me in the last chapter of this book. But, man oh man, I don’t know what I would have done without improv classes. And I cannot forget Leigh Harris, a primal therapist who helped me find my way to acting. Thanks, Leigh, for freeing me up.

Many people read parts of my work over the years it took to produce this. If I listed them all, it would just be an extremely long list of names that would lose some meaning in its very length. So I am going to limit my gratitude to those who either had many discussions with me or made a lengthy written response or two. This means repeating some names I have already mentioned but that only shows how much I owe them on so many levels: Lana Forrester, Susan Rowley, Mark Felber, Marian Ingham, Barbara Brown Taylor, Wolfgang Stegemann,

William Klassen, Sean Moran, Steve Imparl, Stephen and Hope Sibson, Cynthia Bussiere, and Lynn Gazis-Sax.

Professors Taylor, Stegemann, and Klassen were the only scholars who were willing to spend time communicating with someone who lacks official credentials in this field. I am grateful they thought I was worth their time. Prof. Taylor and I wrote letters back and forth the old-fashioned way for several months. That exchange helped clarify for me how I wanted to present the evidence. Prof. Klassen was very encouraging and shared some of his personal concerns with me. It gave me a little insight into academia.

The final shape of this book is very much due to Prof. Stegemann. He has been trying to get this translated and published in Germany. Hopefully, it will happen one day. But his enthusiasm for this and his offer to help promote this book filled me with more concrete hope than I have had in a long time. I had written many summaries of my theory, but the last one was written specifically to see if it could inspire Wolfgang to see the importance of this. He was duly impressed and this convinced me to make it the present Chapter 5. In a way, most of the final version of this book was written to appeal to him—or to anyone who has a heart as generous as his.

My gratitude to the City Congregation, a secular Jewish humanist group to which I belong, for allowing me to address the group back in January1999 on this topic. It was a chance to sustain a logical presentation for a couple of hours and to hear some questions.

Carl Busch is the superintendent of the building where I live. He retired just before this book was published. I have a lot to thank him for. For several years now, he has left The New York Times Book Review at my door every week. Some of the books I read about there have ended up influencing this work and are in the bibliography. Carl also puts out books and magazines on the table in our lobby. It may well have been him who left that September 1996 issue of Harper’s Magazine with the article by Vince Passaro. That was the article that was the immediate catalyst for this book. I may never have restarted my research were it not for that article. Carl gets my deepest appreciation for that.

To my fellow ushers at the 92nd Street Y in NYC where I worked several years ago—Steve Bydal, Heather Jacksy, and Holly Schlesinger—thank you for helping me pick the title of this book. To each one separately, I offered three titles with the word ghost in it and they all chose this one. I was startled at how sure they were, especially because I liked a different one, which another usher, Forba Shepard, liked as well (thanks Forba for confirming my poetic sensibility).

Here are two names you will almost certainly never see linked together again: Tom Waits, American singer-songwriter, and Leo Pinsker, 19th century Russian-Jewish Zionist. Both were the immediate impetus for the title of this book. The umpteenth time I heard Tom Waits’ song Tom Traubert’s Blues, a phrase he used leapt out at me and suggested the title A Ghost Selling Memories (the one Forba and I liked). Then I remembered that Leo Pinsker had called antisemitism a fear of ghosts (for a condensed version of the famous essay in which he made this observation, see Chazan and Raphael, 161-74). It got me to thinking about how so much lost information about Jesus wanders through the Gospels like ghosts.

Thanks to my current co-workers for listening to my almost daily tales of the obstacles, big and little, on the way to publishing this book: Elizabeth Venturoso, Kevin Caufield, and David Misner. And thanks again to David and to Guy Spencer for answering all my computer questions.

And what would we do without libraries? I feel a kind of ecstasy just passing near one or even thinking about them. The New York Public Library system is fantastic. I especially owe a heap of gratitude to their research divisions. The staff has always been friendly and helpful. The library at Union Theological Seminary had almost everything I needed which I could not find in the public library. I am grateful they allow members of the public to use their rich facilities.

One of my biggest inspirations has been radio station WFUV, 90.7 FM in NYC (and streaming on the Web, as they like to say). Almost this entire book was written while listening to FUV. (As I retype this part, I’m listening to Vin Scelsa interview Leah Siegel, a wonderful new performer, in between her live sets in the studio. She is the real deal.) FUV gave me the energy to write this book. I tried turning off the radio once and within five minutes I was completely drained and could hardly form a sentence. Thanks for all the interviews with songwriters and musicians, but mostly, of course, for the great music—for Bob Dylan, Tom Waits (and for playing Tom Traubert’s Blues so often), John Prine, Steve Goodman, Emily Lou Harris, Leonard Cohen, Dan Bern, Bright Eyes, Citizen Cope, the Beatles, Rufus Wainwright, Loudon Wainwright III, the McGarrigle sisters, the Roches, and everyone I’ve left out. How come you haven’t played David Massengill in a long while? Can I make a request? I promise I’ll make a donation if I actually earn any money from this book.

Last but not least, I have to thank Allan Goldsmith for prompting me to think about self-publishing more seriously and for joining me in this venture, and again to Susan Rowley for kicking in with additional support. I hope we’ll be able to make an impression on the world.

It is mind boggling to think of everything it took to make possible the discovery of the historical Jesus and the public debate this book will hopefully generate. Allan was the last link in a chain. Think of what a chain it has been. I used to think, and still think, that for any human being to properly tell the story of his or her life, you’d have to go all the way back to Adam and Eve. Once upon a time, a man and a woman were living in a garden… Tell everything that happened from that point on and you can understand how each of us got to be here at this moment in this situation.

It’s no less true for this book. Allan was the last link. Even to cut the tale shorter and not go all the way back to that garden, it’s still quite a trip. The one thing I have not talked about anywhere in this book, not in these acknowledgments or later on, is that a book like this could only have been written by an exceptionally lonely person, though loneliness alone won’t do it. If you don’t stay connected to whatever your favorite art is and all the great work that actors, musicians, directors or whoever, are doing, you’ll end up brain dead and brain dead is no way to study history. Still, you have to have a lot of time on your hands, all by your lonesome, to think about these things, to look for and collect all the dots, to connect them, then to teach yourself to talk about things no one else wants to talk about.

The distance travelled has been great and it started so very far away. Once upon a time, a boy attacked another boy in a playground. The second boy ran. Where could he run to? To a house where a mother and a father beat the shit out of him every day? It was the beginning of a long road of loneliness and no place to call home.

And before that, there was the murder of six million Jews, a phenomenal event in history, which made a lot more than just one little boy lonely. Somewhere else, someone was fiddling around with numbers and equations and theories, and computers flickered their way into life, and decades later, the Internet arrived. And there was the black civil rights movement, and a war in Viet Nam, and constitutional battles fought in court, and it’s all going into a blender. The State of Israel blossoms, a new wave of racism against Jews billows up in Poland, a Polish-Jewish girl leaves for Israel, then to America, we meet, we’re married, we’re divorced. And I’m running again, only this time to find a life. Many part-time jobs along the way, all the movies I saw which helped to make me who I am, the songs that carried me through another day, my beloved acting teachers whom I’ll never forget. And I can’t even begin to guess at all the things that formed Allan who has worked as a stand-up comic, a pizza maker, in advertising, on Wall Street, and God knows what else, and why he would ever offer to invest in someone like me to help publish this book. What a world, what a freaking world. I’ll never understand it. And this book is just one tiny bit of it.

Note on Notes

There are no footnotes or endnotes in this book. You never have to turn to the back ofthe book or the end ofa chapter to check anything. I do not use notes for additional comments. Everything I have to say is in the text, including my references to other works which are in parentheses.

I refer to each book or article by the author’s last name and page number, and sometimes abbreviated title (if there is more than one work by an author in the bibliography). If I occasionally omit the author’s name from the parenthetical citation, it is because it should be clear from the subject of the sentence or a preceding sentence which author I am referring to. I hope there will be no confusion. Complete information on all books and articles is, of course, in the bibliography.

Abbreviations

General

Adv. Jud.—Adversus Judaeos (John Chrysostom)

Ant.—Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus)

BR—Bible Review

EJ—Encyclopaedia Judaica

JW—Jewish War (Josephus)

Life—Life of Flavius Josephus (by Josephus)

NCE—New Catholic Encyclopedia

NRSV—New Revised Standard Version (Bible)

PC Early—Penguin Classics Early Christian Writings

RA—A Rabbinic Anthology by Montefiore and Loewe

RSV—Revised Standard Version (Bible)

Rabbinic Literature

A—Tractates are listed below in B. In this book, most citations of a tractate are from the Babylonian Talmud. Any citation not preceded by j, m, or t is from the Babylonian.

j—Jerusalem Talmud m—Mishnah t—Tosefta

B—Tractates for the Mishnah, Tosefta, and Talmud

AZ—Avodah Zarah Ber.—Berachoth BB—Baba Batra BK—Baba Kamma BM—Baba Metzia Ker.—Keritot Ket.—Ketubot Kid.—Kiddushin

Mak.—Makkot Meg.—Megillah

PA—Pirke Avoth (Mishnah tractate only)

Pes.—Pesachim

San.—Sanhedrin

Shab.—Shabbat

Sof.—Soferim

Sot.—Sotah

Suk.—Sukkah

Taan.—Taanith

Yad.—Yadayim

C—Other

ARN—Avoth de Rabbi Nathan (supplemental tractate to Talmud; this is the commentary on PA above; all quotes are from version A unless B is noted)

Deut.R.—Deuteronomy Rabbah

EZ—Eliyyahu Zuta (second part of Tanna debe Eliyyahu)

Gen.R.—Genesis Rabbah

Lev.R.—Leviticus Rabbah

Pes.K.—Pesichta Kahana

Pes.R.—Pesichta Rabbah

Tanch.B.—Tanchuma (ed. by S. Buber)

The past is indestructible. Sooner or later things turn up. One of the things that turns up is a plan to destroy the past.

—Jorge Luis Borges

The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.

—Harry S. Truman

We shall live again, we shall live again.

—from the song

Ghost Dance

by Robbie Robertson and

Jim Wilson

1

The Hardest Things to Say, to See

We cannot solve our problems with the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.

—Albert Einstein

How difficult it is to look clearly at oneself and at others, to not tell lies, not create myths.

—Czeslaw Milosz (Milosz, 151)

If I were not so frightened, I would know exactly how to begin this book. But I am frightened, so let me begin with some reassurances.

There is good news in this book for Christians in general, for Jews as well. Difficult news for scholars, though difficult might be an understatement.

The good news? Nothing here threatens the essential Christian faith or what could be Christian faith once it is free of all prejudices about Jews and Judaism and about the wrongly imagined Jewish violence towards Jesus. The only thing Christians will lose is the false idea that Jesus was surrounded by Jewish enemies who did him in. Almost everything else about Christian faith will remain intact.

I know that a majority of people right now will probably say that Jewish violence towards Jesus is not in our imagination, it is in the Gospels. That’s the issue, isn’t it? That’s what this entire book is about. A piece of the Gospels may say this. There is no denying this is one story in the Gospels. But it is not the only story there. There is another story, supported by plenty of Gospel evidence, that we have never paid attention to. There is more in the Gospels than people realize. The whole Gospel story is something very different from what we have been told.

The search for the true circumstances of the historical Jesus’ death is an intellectual detective story. This is primarily because the clues are all in words in the texts—the texts of the very well-known Gospels—and it is those clues we have to unravel. But it is also because we’re looking for what blinded us to the obvious. This is very much an internal search. A very wide pattern of clues is right there before our eyes. How did we miss it?

There is a popular, and even a scholarly, idea that the historical Jesus and the answers to what happened to him might be buried in the sand like an archaeological object or hidden in a cave in a long lost, secret document. But that is not where he is. If he has been buried at all, it is beneath our prejudices, fears, and preconceptions. Uncover these and the historical, Jewish Jesus stands before you, hidden in plain sight. The Gospels hold new discoveries for us, though you can hardly discover what has always been there. What you really discover is why you have always been blind to it. That is as genuine a detective story as ever there was.

But what is unaffected in Christian faith is considerable. If Christians believe that Jesus’ death was a sacrifice, a saving grace, that is not going to change. You can still believe that he reveals the nature of God better than anyone else. If that’s how you relate to Jesus, nothing in this book will change that. The personal Jesus who aids and comforts, he is still there. If Jesus challenges you, he still will. The Jesus of faith will not disappear. History—genuine historical investigation—is not a threat to Christianity.

If the historical Rabbi Joshua of Nazareth brings about any changes in these beliefs, it will only be to deepen them. They will grow stronger, not weaker. He will become more sublime, not less. You may even be surprised at what items of Christian faith are reinvigorated as historically well-grounded.

The fear has always been that Jesus’ complete Jewishness will diminish him and rob him of mystery. It won’t. If Christians can handle the paradox of Jesus being fully human and fully divine, they will find that Jesus being fully Jewish and fully inspirational to Christianity is no more paradoxical. Making him an utterly Jewish human being—a Jew at home, not at odds, in his own culture, amongst his own people, including Jewish leaders—is not a bad or a lesser thing. He will lose none of his mystery or sublimity. Jesus does not need lethal Jewish enemies to be great, nor does Christian theology need this. When you grasp that,

the Jesus of faith will be as near as he has ever been.

Can one begin a book twice? Is it permitted? If I could imagine myself a little less fearful, though not completely unafraid, of the consequences this book will bring—a little less anxious about all the hostility that will come from facing the truth about how our entire culture suppressed (and still suppresses) the rational search for the real circumstances that led to Jesus’ death—I would take a chance that we can be inspired to take a long, deep look into what the Gospels really say about how Jesus died. I would imagine for a moment that hope and inspiration can trump fear and hatred. I would imagine, just for a very brief moment, that the Bible could stimulate more love than violence, that it could stimulate the courage to face the lies we tell about the Bible (lies told by both religious and secular folk, and that includes scholars), that we could be bold enough to admit that lies are violence, and I would begin again. I would begin perhaps this way.

A Jesus at odds with his fellow Jews is a myth that has a deep hold on us. We are prone to see it everywhere in the Gospels, even in the places (and there are so many of them) where it does not appear at all. Jesus in conflict with Jews and Judaism is still emotionally appealing to many people, scholars very much included and Jews as well since Jesus is a part of popular culture. This means that the imagined Jewish enemies in his story (such as Judas or the high priest Caiaphas) feel emotionally right to us. We are convinced they are real as enemies even before we pick up the ancient texts. Our emotions have not prepared us to see anything else there. I know this is going to be a hard thing to talk about and a hard thing for people to admit. Emotions still control our ability to read the Gospels and to study history. They are at the bottom of all this. Who will be eager to face that? The factual problems in history are relatively easy to resolve, the emotional willingness to get there is not nearly as achievable.

So let me begin in a simpler place, though this will quickly bring us round to our emotional difficulties. We want to know whether the past is recoverable and, if so, how it can be recovered. As we’ll see, it comes down to the most basic question of all: Do we want to remember the past?

How far away are we from the 1st century? Do you think, as many do, that we will never know the truth about how Jesus died? Not so.

We say it has been 2,000 years and it feels immense, as if we were saying 2,000 light years. Surely we cannot reach it by just stretching out our arms. Can a past that far away be recoverable? Can we be intimate with events 2,000 years ago? Two thousand years is just a number. In this case, a number that creates an illusion. If you have enough information (and, on the face of it, there is a lot of information in the Gospels and in Josephus, the 1st century Jewish-turned-Roman historian), the past is much closer than you think. The truth about how Jesus died—and about all the people in this story, Barabbas, Judas, the priests, the Pharisees, Pontius Pilate—is just a short series of half-truths and half-lies

away, covering up a plethora of truthful details in the Gospels. Very little stands in the way of accurately reconstructing what happened.

Now I will admit that it depends on how you look at this. Consider Judas as one example (what I say here can be more or less duplicated with all the other figures). If you take every time that Judas has been called a traitor, or every time his name has been used as a synonym for traitor, to be a fresh blow, then yes indeed, over a span of 2,000 years, the real Judas has been buried under an avalanche of blows. That would mean a tremendous amount of digging to get to him. But the avalanche, like the 2,000 years, is an illusion.

There have not been many new details added in the time since he and Jesus embraced each other in love. The rumor of his alleged betrayal could not have started right away. There is good reason—that is, definite signs in the Gos-pels—to believe that Judas or his friends protested and resisted the false accusation, thus stalling the development of the lie. But once the rumor gathered momentum, the false charges accumulated very quickly and very few new ones were added over the years.

Much later he would be described or painted with stereotyped Jewish features and sometimes with red hair (but then Jesus too was sometimes given red hair, perhaps based on a tradition that David’s hair was that color; see BR article June 1998, 2, and the fascinating readers’ replies in BR, Oct. 1998, 4, 6-8). Putting the evil into Judas’ physical features in any sort of bizarre way was nothing new. Abraham Santa Clara’s exhausting series of 17th century sermons, every Sunday for ten years, cursing every part of Judas’ body is no different from Bishop Papias in the first half of the 2nd century describing a grossly disfigured Judas (all of him swollen, body, head, eyelids, genitals) who created a foul odor after he died. The imagination of lying is very limited.

Nor is a more recent charge that Judas was pure evil without any motive very new. It is essentially just a repetition of the charge in Luke and John that the devil made him do it (this is one of perhaps two or three negative statements about him in the Gospels; most of the Gospel information is very neutral or bland). So it is just a small, finite series of jabs that separates the original Judas from us. The same is true of the priests and most of the other important players in Jesus’ story. They are not that far away.

I do not have the chutzpah to tell you how Judas smelled or the color of his hair. I do not even have the scholarly chutzpah to guess about things on which the Gospels are utterly silent, such as what it was about Jesus that Judas allegedly betrayed (his abode, his activities, his teachings, his secrets?) and what was Judas’ alleged motivation (the Gospels offer nothing with one slight exception in Matthew, his apparent greed for a paltry sum of money, and most scholars dismiss it, then proceed to offer their own fantastic answers).

Guessing about the color of Judas’ hair and about his motivation are essentially no different from each other. Both add unwarranted dimensions to what the Gospels say. Both are themselves motivated by an assumption that Judas must be bad. The assumption is then used to color in what the Gospels left colorless. Tradition and scholars may be this audacious. Science is much humbler. It sticks to what we can reasonably know, the core facts, and then asks what is the minimum that can reasonably be deduced from this tight set of facts or data. Or to put it another way: What is the best rational explanation of the facts we have? The hard part of this is to see the facts in their simplicity—because the typical scholarly approach is to begin with knowledge (e.g., we know Judas was a traitor) and then rewrite the facts to make them fit the supposed knowledge we have.

Minimal reconstruction of history (seeing and sticking to the core facts) often yields big conclusions precisely because it is so bound to the data (a delicious paradox which is not really a paradox at all, as future chapters will reveal). Leaping to conclusions or gross assumptions disguises the peculiar set of minimal facts we have in the Gospels (I will shortly demonstrate their peculiarity). Science never leaps. Like art, it begins in ignorance. It needs to see afresh. It doesn’t know that Judas was a traitor or that Jewish leaders put Jesus on trial. It knows nothing. The first principle is We know nothing until the evidence tells us something. Pay attention to the evidence and the minimal deductions therefrom and you get real history which is closer than you think.

I think A.J. Liebling captured the closeness of history best. A journalist who could vividly convey certain realities, Liebling wrote in the very first paragraph of his book on boxing, The Sweet Science, about the way boxers hand on a series of blows from one to the next (he names a long line of them) so that a punch landing on a boxer’s nose today carries with it the force of a punch from a pugilist of yesteryear, whether the boxer knows it or not. Liebling concludes this way: It is a great thrill to feel that all that separates you from the early Victorians is a series of punches on the nose. I wonder if Professor Toynbee is as intimately attuned to his sources. The Sweet Science is joined onto the past like a man’s arm to his shoulder.

In truth, we too are just an arm’s length away from the real events surrounding Jesus’ death. It is not just boxers and athletes, and others like the abused and abusers, who are connected to the past by a series of blows. We are all connected to historical affairs that intimately. We just do not want to see it. Most of us tell ourselves that that aching or twitching muscle could not possibly be a historical memory. It must be something else.

What stands in the way of regaining our muscular knowledge of all that came before is an opposite belief that the past quickly fades into a weak place that is only dimly perceived. Many of us believe that even recent events fit this description given by Antonio Muñoz Molina in his novel Sepharad (which combines fiction, memoir, and the actual history of very real people, stories of what certain men and women endured under the Nazis and Stalin’s regime): They disappear one day, they are lost, erased forever, as if they had died, as if they had died so many years ago that they are no longer in anyone’s memory and there is no sign they were ever in this world…The most stable things vanish, the worst and the best, the most trivial along with those that were necessary and decisive…Love, suffering, even some of the greatest hells on Earth are erased after one or two generations, and a day comes when there is not one living witness who can remember (Muñoz Molina, 92-93).

The odd thing is that everything else in his book belies this sentiment. Even in connection with this passage (which recounts a man’s visit years later to a concentration camp, now a clearing in the forest, where his mother and two sisters perished), Muñoz Molina observes that the remains of the camp have not completely disappeared. Hidden in the underbrush and the ground are railroad tracks, metal bowls and spoons once used by prisoners. The rest of the book is in pursuit of the thought he does not expressly state here. Muñoz Molina is looking for the life of the past which still touches us. He looks for its traces so that we can honor those who passed this way. So we can remember their pain, their joy, their fates. He may be concerned with events sixty or seventy years old, but much of what he says could apply to any piece of history.

He writes about a couple who are desperately trying to survive both the Nazis and Stalin’s agents who will catch up with them one day. There are people who have seen these things: none of it has sunk into the absolute oblivion that claims events and human beings when the last person to witness them, the last person to hear a certain voice or meet a certain pair of eyes, dies (Muñoz Molina, 130). A train trip to Madrid will remind Muñoz Molina of other train trips to concentration camps or to escape from Soviet agents or of Franz Kafka going to meet his lover Milena Jesenska who would one day die in a camp. A sleepless night in a hotel room, lying next to his wife, will cause him to relive the flight and fate of a man half a century ago. Muñoz Molina will wake up from a fitful sleep thinking for a moment that he is that man.

It is as if the railroad tracks and hotel rooms carry forward their memories like a series of punches on the nose. Muñoz Molina wants to relive the memories of others. He wants that intimate connection to the past that Liebling wrote about and that professional scholars too often lose, though the evidence to the past is right under their noses, plowing straight into them. The real Judas has not sunk into oblivion. Nor Barabbas, nor the priests and Pharisees. They are standing beside you breathing into your ear. They are just a whisper away. The evidence is there in the Gospels; the witnesses to the past are there. If only all the noise that scholars create did not intrude.

So why did Muñoz Molina write that totally contradictory passage about time erasing the past? Because that is a reality too. There are forces that work to achieve this. Complete forgetting can happen if we let it. He is writing about this danger and about our ability to defeat it, if we want to. He is writing in the fear that witnesses and the past can disappear.

That man Muñoz Molina sometimes confuses himself with in the middle of the night was hung in a forest more than fifty years ago, but his wife Babette survived until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a few months, she will die and then: The face of Willi Münzenberg will be lost with her, the smell of his body and the cigars he smoked, his enthusiasm, and the way he was sapped first by losing his faith [in Communism], then by the suspicion that he was being followed and the conviction that there would be no forgiveness for him (Muñoz Molina, 144). As strange as the fact that this man once existed is the fact that there is almost no evidence of his sojourn in the world (151).

Most of Muñoz Molina’s book is an attempt to fight this erasure. He seeks a faithfulness to the past greater than anything mere tradition could give us. He wants at least some of the lost details to come to life again. The dead return during the sleepless hours, people I have forgotten and people I never knew, all prodding the memory of one who survived a war sixty years ago, telling him not to forget them, to speak their names and tell how they lived, why they were carried off so early… (Muñoz Molina, 128).

Much about Judas and the others have disappeared and will remain lost. The color of their hair, the way they smelled, what their voices sounded like are all gone. But not all trace has been lost. We may yet learn what carried off Judas to an unusual end. Enough remains to tell us something important about them. I cannot bring all of them back to life. But these people cried out in their lifetimes about an injustice that was being done to them and their cry lingers yet in the air of the Gospel texts.

The preeminent purpose of tradition (so we are told) is to remember, to make sure the past is never lost. The truth is that tradition serves quite a mixture of purposes. It does want to keep the past close. We do want to remember. We set up traditions to keep memories alive. But we choose—or our leaders choose—what should not be forgotten and what should be tossed away into oblivion. It is not just magically handed to us. Somebody chooses, somebody decides. And by this choosing to remember, some things are discarded. It is not the case that past generations made choices and we are stuck with them. We are stuck with nothing. Each generation chooses again. When we repeat certain things, we make a decision to repeat. Repetition becomes our choice. Scholars play a big role in this. They may use fancy language to obscure what they are doing, but they cannot escape the fact that they too repeat.

We remember by repetition and repetition serves blindness as much as it serves seeing. Tradition wants to honor the past, but it also erases the past. There are many ways of connecting to historical events. Repetition is just one. We can also study and search and examine and analyze. We can struggle—yes, actually struggle—to look for clues and to think things through. We can remember by active looking and listening and thinking. Repetition is but one choice. There are other ways of relating to the past. We can choose to relive it with a very active sympathy as Muñoz Molina does.

There are many excellent ways to remember. So why choose repetition? Because it is convenient, because it is easy, because it seems to cost so little? It can be as easy as watching a Passion play, or reciting the Passion events in a sermon, or retelling it the same way in a scholarly treatise, or calling someone a Judas, or watching a float in a pageant pass down the street during Holy Week, as Muñoz Molina remembers from his childhood.

On the Last Supper float, Judas was as scary to us as Dracula in the movies, with his hooked nose and pointed beard and the green face of betrayal and greed that turned to sneak looks at the bag that held the thirty pieces of silver (Muñoz Molina, 351). When he takes his own children to see the green, sinister face of Judas on the Last Supper float, we were consoled by the sense that life was repeating itself, that time didn’t pass in our city, or that it was less cruel than the nerve-racking and jumbled pace of life in Madrid (9). Repetition gives comfort, but it has hidden costs. It is easy to accept the caricatures and hatred and fear that repetition gives us. It is easy not to think about the harm all this creates, which will take centuries to undo. Our children will pay and we hope they won’t think of us too harshly for doing this to them. We pay more than we realize for the easiness and comfort of repetition. We can even lose our minds because of it.

Tradition repeats and repeats without thought. A blind man could follow it. And that’s the point. Tradition wears a groove that is so well-worn you don’t need to see or think your way through. You merely follow—follow blindly—the track. You don’t have to look to the right or the left and spot that odd object hidden in the grass. Tradition does not want you—and that means the purveyors of tradition do not want you—to look to the right or the left.

I am afraid that tradition seeks to bury as much as it seeks to keep things in the light. In the case of traditions about Jesus’ death, we know this is true. We can actually measure the gap between history and the traditions of pageant floats, Passion plays, sermons, scholarly writings, popular films about Jesus and the like. They all do damage to our understanding of the past. If you go through the Gospels carefully, you can see where tradition says…but the Gospels say.

Tradition says a lot of things about Jewish leaders plotting to kill Jesus, Jews in power worried about his influence, a hostile trial, Jews cooperating with or even egging Rome on to carry out the execution. Why did they go after Jesus? What was the danger? Why didn’t the people protest? Why was this not strictly Rome’s problem? Tradition and scholars have answers for everything even if the Gospels do not. They just make it up and improve on the Gospels. But improving the evidence we have is definitely not valid scientific procedure.

For the moment, again, let’s focus on Judas. Tradition says he betrayed Jesus. Do the Gospels say that? Think of Judas as a prisoner on a train or a truck. He is being sped away to a dark location far from his origins. Before he is gone, banished by time and tradition, he tosses his name to us on a scrap of paper (another image from Muñoz Molina’s book)—his real name, his real deed on a scrap of paper picked up by the Gospel authors.

I’m not a traitor, he says. Indeed, Mark never uses the Greek word for betray to tell Judas’ story, but a neutral word having no connotation of betrayal, and all the other Gospels follow suit in their storytelling (the one apparent exception is at Luke 6:16 and it is not much of an exception because it is not from the storytelling part of Luke; Luke here mentions Judas Iscariot, the traitor as part of a list of names, but when Luke recounts the Last Supper, he uses the same neutral word all the Gospels use; and none of the other Gospels call Judas the traitor, a fact which scholars are eager to forget).

I had no motive to do such a thing, Judas says. Indeed, Mark does not relate one or any conflict between Jesus and Judas (and Matthew’s slight hint of greed is not very believable for reasons to be discussed in future chapters).

My fellow disciples never accused me of anything, he says. Indeed, this is totally missing from all the Gospels. No one fires any denunciations at him. No one is ever upset with him for betraying Jesus, which is not what you would expect if he really did what he is accused of doing. A very late accusation from John at 12:6 that he stole from the poor is not made by any disciple but by the Gospel author; this cannot make up for its absence in the previous Gospels, nor does it offer any sensible explanation for why he would betray Jesus. All the hatred against Judas came much later and that too has been so easy to forget. It is not in the Gospels. If Judas was disgruntled with the group or if they were dissatisfied with him (either before or after the alleged betrayal), the Gospel authors managed to keep it a big secret.

If this is a story of treachery, it is the most bizarre story of betrayal ever penned. The particulars more closely resemble details from the life of an innocent man falsely accused whose story has been thrown to us on a scrap of paper, thrown to us across time, and caught in the pages of the Gospels. His real name, his real deed, if we care to listen. Remember me. [T]he melancholy of a long exile Muñoz Molina calls it in the last words of Sepharad. The facts in the Gospels are trying to punch scholars in the nose, but scholars use tradition to ward off the blow. Tradition says we cannot think about these things. Or more simply: We cannot think.

The constant repetition that Judas was a traitor does not make him a traitor. That is what scholars and tradition do. To be more precise, they constantly repeat that the Gospels say Judas was a traitor without any consideration of the evidence. This is just an assault on the character of Judas and it is equally an assault on the Gospel writers who are made to say things they never said. Assault is not proof. Assumption is not proof. In science, it does not work this way that the scholars with the biggest fists win. In genuine science, it is the one with the smallest fists who wins (i.e., the one who does least violence to the texts).

I may be naive for believing that non-violence is the way of true science, but it gives me comfort. It makes me happy to believe in this fantasy.

Admittedly, all the repetition can make a powerful impression and put a great distance between us and the past. So in one sense, the past is very far from us. It can be quite difficult to recover—but not because time is a barrier separating us from history. It is because of what we do that the past feels immensely far away. In reality, it is not that far and it certainly is not that far away in the Gospels. The last living witnesses left something behind. Once you understand the techniques that scholars use to misrepresent the past, their force diminishes, the years melt away, and 2,000 years is not that far off. It is as close as a whisper, as close as a note on a scrap of paper held between our fingers.

The Gospels contain a peculiar set of facts (and not only concerning Judas; e.g., the Jewish trial scenes in all four Gospels are just as strange, if you assume it was a trial). We have erased their peculiarity in two ways: By imposing a uniform version (i.e., tradition) on them which effectively eliminates all the really interesting information and by taking the tactic of saying there are so many contradictions and inconsistencies, it is impossible to make sense of it all, so it must be mostly fiction. The latter is one of the most arrogant techniques scholars use. They read the contradictions and problems into the Gospels. They assume the Gospels do not make full sense. They never stop to think that the contradictions are not in the Gospels but in their own worldview. Get rid of the worldview of Jesus in conflict with fellow Jews and maybe the supposed contradictions would disappear as well. That is something scholars would rather not consider. But we should, and I will return to it further on in this chapter.

Both of the above responses to the Gospels kill our remaining alive and alert to the exciting information in them. Both responses are irrational because they play havoc with the evidence. They silence the voices that could wake us up.

Historical figures who become mythical or stock figures in a morality play (such as Judas or the high priest) have lost control of their lives. They have been deprived of life, turned into ghosts. It is the job of the honest historian and genuine science to give them back their lives. Muñoz Molina has captured this too, that is, what it is like to suffer the ill designs of later gossipy storytellers who squeeze the original life out of a person. These words written by Muñoz Molina could have been uttered by Judas or Caiaphas, the high priest, or any of the other Jewish figures wrongly implicated in Jesus’ death:

Without your knowledge, other people usurp stories or fragments from your life, episodes you think you’ve kept in a sealed chamber of your memory and yet are told by people you may not even know, people who have heard them and repeat them, modify them, adapt them according to their whim or how carefully they listened, or for a certain comic or slanderous effect…Bits and pieces of you are left behind in other lives.Far from you, scenes from your life are relived, and in them you’re a fiction, a secondary character in a book, a passerby in the film or novel of another person’s life.

If the details are lost, the easy thing is to invent them, falsify them, profane what was a painful part of another human being’s experience by claiming it as your own.

(Muñoz Molina, 118)

Judas and Jewish leaders have been trapped in a story created by others who came after the Gospel writers . It is not their own story as they would tell it. They were taken prisoner long ago and hustled off in the dark. The rewriting by others was so successful that we stopped carefully reading the original sources long ago. The clues in the Gospels can save Jesus’ fellow Jews. This is not just about correcting an ancient myth. We have to correct a myth that is recreated every single day; we choose to believe this myth anew each day, it is not just handed to us. Merely repeating tradition is not enough to establish an intimate connection with the past. Not for the historian. There is too much overgrowth, too much neglect.

There is a time to wake up and a time to sleep. Now is the time to listen and wake up.

We did not put Jesus on trial, say the ancient Jewish leaders. We tried to save him. We are telling you this in the Gospels. Why don’t you listen?

We are not listening because we have chosen not to. We have chosen to repeat tradition, and only a certain tradition at that, forgetting that there were other traditions. Tradition at its best memorializes much that is valuable. At its best, it remembers dissenting and minority views. In Jewish-Christian relations, we have forgotten some of these other traditions. Some Christians even as late as the 19th century had a tradition of sometimes naming a child Gamaliel, the Pharisee who comes to the aid of Peter and others in Acts 5. (It was the middle name of President Warren Harding and the name of the writer Gamaliel Bradford, 18631932.) But we have chosen to forget the original Rabban Gamaliel and who the Pharisees really were. For the first four or five centuries after Jesus died, many Christians worshiped on Saturday, celebrated Easter at Passover time, mingled and conversed with Jews. That would end soon enough (because the Church imposed its ending) and Christians would forget Jewish traditions.

When the Church rediscovered the Talmud in the 13th century, it was a big shock to learn that Jews had an ongoing culture, different interpretations of Torah, and their own historical memories (one of the shocks was to learn that Jesus’ name, Yeshua or Joshua, was a common name in the 1st century). But in earlier centuries, Christians like Jerome and Augustine knew about Jewish oral traditions, and they knew there were Aramaic or Hebrew Gospels. The memory of a living Jewish connection was close at hand. It took time for the Church to wipe this out. Our culture chose and still chooses to forget all this.

Even when it is in the canonical Gospels, we choose to ignore the Jewish voice. We know about the anti-Jewishness in the Gospel of John. It is stark and bold. You cannot miss it. He attacks Jews so often. Less obvious, but just as strong a theme in John, despite our neglect of it, is his Jewishness. All the Gospels are suffused with Jewish teachings, as developed by the Pharisees and rabbis, but people have forgotten that this includes John.

His opening words in 1:1-5 (In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God.) are just a restatement of the Jewish belief that Torah (the Word) existed alongside God before the world was created and that the continued existence of the world depends on Torah (PA 6:10; Gen.R. 1:1 [when creating the Universe, God consulted Torah as an architect would a plan]; Pes. 68b; Shab. 88a). John’s .and the darkness has not overcome it (1:5) corresponds to the rabbinic thought that Torah prevents creation from slipping back into chaos (Shab. 88a). (The only line in John that does not fit Jewish thinking is and the Word was God [1:1]; the rabbis would never say that about Torah; but everything else in John 1:1-5 is pure Jewishness.)

The argument that if circumcision is permitted on Shabbat, then so should healing (John 7:22-23) is similar to one about saving life on Shabbat found in the Tosefta (tShab. 15:16) and in Tanchuma (Tanch.B. 81a, as quoted in RA#667). Just as the rabbinic sources argue that if circumcision, which affects only one member of the body, annuls the usual rules of Shabbat, then