11-23-2009, 06:25 PM
Quote:Let's not forget that up until the last minute the governor Pilatus and puppet King Antipas assumed that they'd be crucifying Barabbas, who is identified as an "insurrectionist." They might well have laid on a heavier armed detail than usual for fear of an attempted rescue by Barabbas's friends.I think this is also true for Jesus. He had created a riot on the Temple Mount after entering the city on a donkey, which was a claim to royalty (Zechariah 9:9). Note that, writing at the end of the first century, the writer of the gospel of John still felt embarrased: he took away the story of the cleansing of the Temple from Christ's final days (where the synoptic gospels place it), and removed it as far as possible, to the beginning of Jesus' public life (John 2.12ff). Also note the extreme visibility of the execution: at the main entrance to the city (the old wall of Jerusalem joined another wall only a couple of meters from the traditional site of Golgotha; there was a gate). Any pilgrim entering Jerusalem must have understood the message that the authorities wanted to convey: no messianic hopes this year. The riot must have been a very heavy one, the authorities acted accordingly, and I would say that the incident was remembered as the direct cause of Jesus' arrest.
For clarity's sake: I am not claiming that the man who coined the phrase about the other cheek was a terrorist, but he attracted freightingly large, and not always peaceful crowds. There were at least eight types of messianology back than, but to Caiaphas and Pilate all signs suggested that Jesus was one of the "Davidic" type: restoration of Israel by violent expulsion of the Romans. The priest and the prefect had good reasons to be suspicious, and I would therefore think that the crucifixion was done by armed soldiers.
About the details of Jesus' final eighteen hours, a good book is Raymond Brown's The Death of the Messiah (1992), which does not treat the types of armor and arms, but does discuss such details as the shape of the cross, the cause of death, the reliability of the identification of Golgotha and the tomb, the vinegar offered to Jesus, and so on. (If that is relevant, the book received a bishop's nihil obstat and is, generally speaking, conservative in tone; this is not the liberal approach of the Jesus Seminar, but serious scholarship.)
