This again?
Having grown up in the years after Nostra Aetate – the Vatican document rejecting the traditional accusation that the Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus – I assumed it was a settled issue.
But only earlier this month, a major body that sets the liturgical calendar for a number of mostly Protestant churches said that “a common misreading of the Gospel story” fomented anti-Jewish bias.
The Consultation on Common Texts, or CCT, recommended modifications to the reading cycle that would dispel the poisonous notion that “Jesus died because of the behavior of non-Christian Jewish people, rather than because of the decisions by Roman officials or the sinfulness of all humanity.”
Apparently, the charge that the Jews killed Jesus is itself the slur that will not die. Earlier this month, a newspaper columnist in upstate New York casually referred to the “Jewish Leaders” who persecuted Jesus in an article lambasting President Trump’s critics. Last year, Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene tried to scuttle a house antisemitism bill that she thought would prevent the “gospel” teaching that “the Jews” handed Jesus over to his crucifiers. A month later, the NFL player Harrison Butker gave a commencement speech in which he complained, “Congress just passed a bill where stating something as basic as the biblical teaching of who killed Jesus could land you in jail.”
Such insistence on the “deicide” charge — which for centuries turned the Easter and Passover period into open season on the Jews — has kept scholars busy. This month, the historian Nathanael Andrade weighs in with a new book, “Killing the Messiah: The Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth.” In it, Andrade, a scholar of the Greco-Roman world, argues that the authors of the Gospels rewrote history to let the Romans off the hook, and shifted the blame for their messiah’s execution to the Jewish authorities in charge of the Temple in Jerusalem.
In the New Testament, Andrade told me, Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea who sentences Jesus to death, “is more or less portrayed as believing in Jesus’ innocence, while the chief priest [or Kohen haGadol in Hebrew] is bringing Jesus to him out of jealousy or envy or hostility.” By the time you get to the Gospel of John, Jesus’ tormentors are framed as “the Jews,” while Pilate lacks the backbone to stand up to the mob and “basically executes an innocent man.”
A professor of history at Binghamton University, Andrade builds on the work of scholars who have used the historian’s tools to interrogate a story that combines both history and religious myth-making. They included Paul Winter in “On the Trial of Jesus” (1961), Paula Fredriksen in “When Christians Were Jews” (2018) and Helen Bond in “The Trial and Death of Jesus” (2024).
Andrades bases his corrective account on his knowledge of Roman law and precedent, noting it would be highly unusual for a governor in Pilate’s day to consider a suspect innocent and nevertheless sentence him to a particularly cruel and humiliating form of capital punishment.
Both the Jews and the Romans certainly saw Jesus as a troublemaker. The Gospels depict Herod Antipas, the Jewish agent of Rome in the Galilee, as a fuming critic of this renegade rabbi. As for the Romans, they may not have believed that Jesus was engaged in armed insurrection, but still considered him a threat.
“He’s really envisioning a reign of God that’s going to overturn the governing order and the social economic hierarchy,” said Andrade. “And when he’s preaching at the Temple, there is a potential for him to be incendiary enough to lead to an outbreak of violence.”
Understanding Romans
To understand how the Roman authorities would have treated a dissident like Jesus, Andrade turned to a historical account of a trial that took place some 30 years after Jesus would have been executed. In that episode, the Temple priests turn over a man who has been agitating against the Temple leadership and the Romans. The Romans find him guilty, but instead of executing him flog him harshly and let him go.
To Andrade, that suggests that the Romans took crimes of sedition seriously, and makes it more plausible that Pilate considered Jesus similarly guilty. While the death sentence for Jesus was harsh, that could suggest that Pilate was a hardass, not a flunky to the Jews.
As to why the Gospels, written variously between 70 CE and 110 CE, would pin the blame on the Jews and insist Pilate thought Jesus was innocent, Andrade posits that the authors were not only hostile to the Jews who did not accept Jesus as their messiah, but hoped to curry favor with the Roman authorities who were still in charge of Judaea.
“They’re making the argument that the followers of Jesus really aren’t seditionist, they shouldn’t be prosecuted, they’re law-abiding,” said Andrade. The later Gospels become “more and more vocal about Jesus’ innocence,” insisting that Pilate thought so too.
Andrade acknowledges that he is a scholar of Roman antiquity, and not an expert on the subsequent centuries in which the original church and its many branches used the charge of deicide to justify the persecution of the Jews. “But I do think it serves various purposes in the early church, that they have a New Testament that supersedes the Hebrew Bible, and that even though there’s a shared origin, Jesus as a divine savior wasn’t accepted by people in his own community and the eyes of the early church,” he said.
That framing of the Jesus story haunted Jews for almost two millennia, as the Vatican admitted in Nostra Aetate, and the CCT explained this month. “This misreading has in turn been used to support discrimination and violence against Jews. It still inspires anti-Jewish actions to this day,” the authors of the consultation said. “This is something for which Christians need to repent. We must acknowledge how we and members of the church before us have discriminated against and mistreated Jews. We need to seek ways to amend our personal and communal understanding of Scripture that shapes our attitudes and behavior toward the Jewish people.”
Andrade, who was raised Catholic, hopes his book becomes part of the process of repentance.
“I certainly do want the book to negate that very harmful perception,” he said. “It may not be as much a part of the mainstream discourse as it once was, but it does exist in a way that raises a lot of worry. I like to think that if my work has an impact, it’s to make an argument against ethnically or religiously motivated hate in general, and in particular as it involves Christians and Jews.”
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.