Who Killed Jesus? Acts 5:29–31
The apostles had been ordered not to teach "in this name." And there was the accusation: "you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching and intend to bring this man's blood upon us." That was the accusation. It wasn't the intent of the apostles at all. Blame goes where blame was deserved in terms of them as particular individuals but not as a collective whole.
This is an issue that has a real minefield of historical and theological revisionism. It is one that is extremely emotional for some people, especially a Jewish audience—this question of who killed Jesus. This is the issue that lies at the very root of Christian anti-Semitism, which sadly and unfortunately characterized much of the first fifteen hundred years of Christianity. Not in the first century, but it developed in the early to mid part of the second century, or at least the seeds were sown during that period and then it began to produce its poison by the end of the fourth century and into the fifth. It characterized much of Christianity down through the Protestant Reformation, continued in the Roman Catholic tradition up until recently, and it was gradually expunged from the Protestant tradition. That distinction is made because Jewish writers do not seem to really understand the distinctions, the important distinctions between Protestant theology (especially evangelical beliefs) and Roman Catholic beliefs. From their perspective we are all just Christians. So when some of these things that come up that have been at the very root of horror and torture down through the ages we can have a measure of sympathy for why they react the way they do.
The title that we want to give this (Who Killed Jesus?) lies in myths ancient and modern. This whole discussion is filled with revisionism—biblical, theological, and historical revisionism. The early second-century Christians began to revise aspects of the New Testament and reinterpret it because they brought in a non-literal interpretation. And while in a general sense it is true that the early church generally had a literal interpretation it was a mixed bag. It wasn't thought through consistently and there were elements of allegory then, and that allegory comes to a horrible fruition under the church fathers of Origen in the early 300s, and later under Augustine who was the bishop of Hippo who lived from approximately 370 or 380 and about 430. He basically institutionalized a non-literal interpretation. This point is being made early because as we go through this material we think that we can really resolve the issue that would have been resolved and staid resolved from the early first century if people had just consistently taken the text at face value. But when people begin to allegorize the text and spiritualize the text and get away from that literal meaning then what happens is you get into all kinds of horrible interpretations, because they have really slipped the anchor to any guideline to protect them from serious error.
So there was revisionism on the part of early second century Christians, Medieval Christians took it to whole new levels, and modern historical and theological revisionism has continued; but now it comes under the guise of liberal Protestants and liberal Roman Catholics who are burdened by guilt over what their Christian ancestors did, and so they swing the pendulum completely in the opposite direction. And Jewish writers tend to pick up on whatever liberal Protestants and liberal Catholics say negatively about the historic accuracy of the Bible because their battle is to just basically destroy the veracity of Christianity. So they are going to use any ammunition they can get. They see liberal Christians attack the veracity of the Bible and they just pick up whatever argument they hear that sounds good and adapt it to their use—which is completely understandable in terms of a debate technique.
What we see is that the evidence is completely distorted by a failure to interpret the Scripture literally and to assume that the writers of Scripture are who they say they are and are doing what they say they are doing.
So to answer this question we want to look at the historical evidence that is included in the New Testament books, and we need to assume that the historical evidence that is presented there is truthful and honest—that they were writing when they said they were writing, and therefore there were people around who were eyewitnesses to the events that they were recording and would have called them on it if they were misrepresenting the facts. In liberal Protestant theology coming out of the 19th century it was assumed that none of the people who were believed to have written the Gospels wrote the Gospels, these were just names that were added later on to give these stories that were eventually written down some measure of credibility. They assumed that they were actually written into the second century and not by eye-witnesses. And some of the Roman Catholic and Jewish writers accept this view. On the other hand there are rabbis who say they all know that Paul wrote all of his epistles within 20-30 years of the death of Jesus. Okay, well which is it? They are going to pick whatever argument they can that they think will work for them in attacking the Christian truth claims. So we have to assume that these books were written by the men who history has traditionally said wrote them when they wrote them unless there is compelling evidence to the contrary.
The second thing we have to do is interpret the Gospels according to the normal rules of language, usage and meaning. This is generally referred to as a literal interpretation, where you interpret the Scripture according to the normal usage of language.
Third, we have to treat the witnesses of the Gospels and Acts as a unified, non-contradictory whole. In other words, you can't come in with a razor blade and take one phrase of one sentence out of context in one place and do the same thing with a phrase somewhere else and say there is a contradiction here. We have to look at things within their context and we have to assume that the writers of Scripture weren't stupid, that they understood what they were writing, and that what may appear to us to be a contradiction or a discrepancy can be perhaps explained of we had a little more information, if we thought about it in a different sense. In other words, start by giving them the benefit of the doubt and seeing if there can be a resolution to the apparent conflict rather than starting with the assumption that they don't know what they were talking about, that they were making this up, and it just can't possibly be true. That is the assumption of liberal theology, i.e. God can't reveal Himself to us because we can't understand it. Everybody who writes from a liberal framework is writing on this side of Immanuel Kant where you can't know truth, you can only know perceptions. So there is no objective truth. From the get-go their philosophy of knowledge or epistemology has been amputated from the source of objective truth. They don't think you can get there so they are not going to assume that to be true. Whereas as a Christian we assume there is objective truth and it is knowable and that the writers of Scripture are intelligent and represent truth. Liberals are going to assume that truth isn't knowable and they don't represent truth, and nothing in the Bible is what it literally claims to be.
What we need is a measure of objectivity and clarity. So we look at this: a) in terms of the historic problem; b) in terms of the biblical testimony; c) in terms of some of the early historical testimony, and then pull it together with a theological rationale.
When we look at this particular topic we realize that it is one that is of contemporary significance. In 2004 Mel Gibson came out with the film The Passion of the Christ and there was a lot of hubbub about the fact that this was going to resurrect Christian anti-Semitism and the charge of "deicide," which means "the murder of God"—a contradictory term. God by definition can't be murdered. There were a lot of Jews who were extremely concerned about how the Jews were presented in the film. Abe Foxman, the national director of the Jewish Anti-defamation League, made the statement that for almost 2000 years four words rationalized, fuelled and justified anti-Semitism: "the Jews killed Jesus."
There's something many might not know about Abe Foxman that is interesting. He was the only son of Polish Jews and was born in Nazi-occupied Poland. When his parents were taken off to the camps he was taken in by his Roman Catholic nanny. A distinction is made here between Roman Catholics and Protestants because it is really important to understand them. Roman Catholics historically have bought into a non-literal interpretation and at the very core of Roman Catholic theology, despite any claims to the contrary recently, they hold to a replacement theology; that the Jews lost whatever promises God made to the Jewish people when they rejected Jesus as the Messiah, and those promises are now going to be given to the church spiritually. Replacement theology is really the seed bed of all of Christian anti-Semitism. Abe Foxman makes the comment that he knew he was loved by his Roman Catholic nanny, but he says that when he disobeyed her she called him Judas. It is that inherent anti-Semitism that came out of her Roman Catholic training and heritage which has had for centuries this strain of anti-Semitism. But when he tells the story he just tells it of her as a Christian, which reveals that he doesn't understand the core difference between her as a Roman Catholic Christian and evangelical Protestant who should not (in most cases would not) be infected by replacement theology—even though there are probably about 20-30 per cent of evangelicals who have been infected by replacement theology.
Michael Rydelnik who is the head of the Jewish studies department at Moody Bible Institute is the son of holocaust survivors. They came to the United States after World War II to find safety and security. He tells the story of his older brother who when he was a young boy attending school had his eye put out by some Christian kid who threw a rock at him and called him a Christ-killer. That was in the early 1950s. So this kind of horrible anti-Semitism is still with us today. It is based on the charge that the Jews and the Jews alone were responsible for the death of Christ. This really became mainstreamed into what became Roman Catholic theology by Augustine of Hippo who said that it was the Jews who put the nails in His hands and the sword in His side. Augustine said that all Jews all over the world in all generations crucified Jesus. That later developed into the pernicious view that the Jews were corporately guilty of the death of Christ—every single Jew. Therefore every single Jew got whatever they deserved if they went through any suffering. It wasn't until the early sixties in Vatican II that the Roman Catholic church began to recognize the error of its ways and back away from the deicide charge.
This concept of Jewish collective responsibility for the death of Jesus has its foundation in a Scripture text: Matthew 27:25 where Pilate is turning Jesus over to the Jewish mob and they say, "His blood be upon us and on our children." This text is not teaching that God said that Christ's blood is on them and their children. There are three things we should note here. First, only God can invoke a curse biblically. People can't, it doesn't matter what they said; that was just an emotional statement that crowd made on that historical day. It should never have been taken to apply to anything else. That was a failure on the part of the early church in terms of bringing in a non-literal interpretation. Second, God never endorsed this curse. It is never endorsed anywhere in the New Testament. Instead, Jesus said of those who sacrificed Him when He prayed top the Father: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." Jesus never called upon His followers to curse the Jews, He never cursed those who crucified Him; He simply prayed that God would forgive them. Third, we know from Scripture that biblically children cannot be held accountable or punished for their parents' sins, it violates the who principle of personal responsibility as laid down in the first three chapters of Genesis.
But now in the modern context we have an equal and just as horrible reaction to the horrors that began in the early church. It is now claimed by sceptics and Protestant and well as Roman Catholic revisionists that believers in the early church didn't write these things down right away and over time they shifted the blame for the crucifixion from Pilate who, according to this revisionism today, actually wanted Jesus dead to "the Jews." Since the Jews were not popular in Rome they became convenient scapegoats. That is the new mythology. The same shift, i.e. from Pilate to blaming the Jews, they claim under girds everything in the Gospels, which have really been whitewashed so that Pilate's role on Good Friday is kind of glanced over, and instead the Jews are the ones who are blamed for indicting Jesus. So as time developed in the first three or four centuries of Christianity this guilt was applied to all non-Christian Jews.
An important point is that behind a lot of modern attempts to address this issue from the liberal Roman Catholic revisionists to Jewish revisionists is a view of the New Testament as sort of a patchwork quilt that is put together by the followers of Jesus from oral tradition over a period of 100-150 years. That idea, as we have seen, came out of 19th century Protestant liberalism. But in the early sixties a liberal theologian by the name of John A. T. Robinson, who also wrote a book called Honest To God where he was sort of promoting the death of God, wrote another book on the writings of the New Testament. And here this liberal is forced by the discoveries of archaeology to redate all the books of the New Testament, and he redates them earlier than any traditional conservative evangelical would date them. He puts them a little too early in the first century. But we still have a lot of scholars today who hold on to things that were put out in the 19th century that are outdated and don't fit archaeology anymore, but it makes them comfortable, it is their tool for suppressing the truth in unrighteousness, and so we hear these things regurgitated who have never really studied them; they've just heard it on the History channel or the Discovery channel.
Unfortunately to make this view of the New Testament work you have to do to the New Testament exactly what Christians wrongly did to the Jewish people for centuries. You have to torture it, persecute it, distort it and murder it. It is not justified to do that to the Jewish people and it is not justified to do that to the New Testament. We have to have a higher view of early Christians than to think of them in such a low light.
In 1990 Paul Meyer who is a Christian scholar wrote an article for Christianity Today called "Who Killed Jesus?" Beginning that article he quoted Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits who made the statement: "In its effect upon the life of the Jewish people Christianity's New Testament has been the most dangerous anti-Semitic tract in history." It is suggested that that level of libel and distortion is just as foul and unacceptable as any form of anti-Semitism; it is just as wrong, and wrong is wrong. His opinion, though, is shared by a lot of modern multicultural, sensitive liberal post-modern Christian theologians, who along with many in the Jewish community claim that parts of the New Testament need to be taken out. They're advocating the exclusion of the Gospel of John because it always refers to the Jewish leadership as "the Jews" and this is anti-Semitic in their view. And in the late eighties was that arrogant group of scholars known as "The Jesus Seminar," the ones who had their little five coloring pens for going through the Gospels and color the things that they were sure Jesus said, the things that they were sure He didn't say, the things He might have said and might not have said, and the things they weren't sure about. Very few things passed muster for them so that they believed that they were actually things that Jesus would have or could have said. What they were doing was just taking their pre-conceived notions of what they thought Jesus should have been and imposing that upon the text. Anything that didn't fit that they got rid of.
This has also been picked up within the Jewish community. There are a number of Jews who think that there needs to be a complete rethought of the crucifixion because the Jews didn't really have anything to do with Jesus' crucifixion either. That is just the typical action and reaction where you go all the way to the opposite extreme and neither of which is very good.
Roy Ekhert who is Emeritus Porfessor at Lee High University in Pennsylvania even suggested that Christians should abandon the resurrection of Jesus since is remains a "primordial and unceasing source of the Christian world's anti-Judaism." Isn't that insane! How can they in any sense be called Christian?
So we see today that on the one extreme we have anti-Semites who want to blame the Jews for everything, and on the other hand there are people who want to say the Jews didn't have anything to do with it whatsoever. This would include a former Supreme Court justice in Israel who wrote a well-known book in the Jewish community called The Trial and Death of Jesus (a book that the late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave to President Jimmy Carter back in the 70s). In that book it was said that Annas and Caiaphas, instead of being Jesus antagonists, were really His dear friends, and that it was all the horrible Romans and Pilate who were behind Jesus' crucifixion. But see what they have done? It is that they want to be historical, but we can't listen to the Gospels because that is not a historical document! They have made this bifurcation between the secular and the sacred, and if it is sacred, religious, then it can't have any truth in it except just some sort of feel-good emotional meaning.
We have an early church father named Justin Martyr who died in 165 AD, and one of his more well-known writings that has survived is called The Dialogue With Trypho. Trypho was a Jew who had become a Christian and was also being persecuted by the synagogue, the same level of hostility directed towards him as we see directed towards Jesus in the Gospel accounts and towards James the leader of the church in Jerusalem who was to be martyred under Herod Antipas.
Mileto of Sardis who died in 180, the bishop of Smyrna, added that they killed God. He was the first to bring the charge of deicide against the Jews—as if it were possible to kill God! By 400 approximately Augustine basically institutionalizes the view that the Jewish people were like Cain who killed his brother Abel. Cain put a mark on Cain's head so he would wander the earth and never be killed, so God was putting a mark, according to Augustine, on the Jews and they would perpetually wander the earth and , never disappear because they had killed Jesus; they would perpetually suffer. In the fourth century in approximately the same time as Augustine, there was in the eastern church one of their primary saints, John Chrysostom. He wrote six sermons against the Jews and they consistently made statements like this: "The Jews are the odious assassins of Christ, and for killing God there is no expiation possible—no indulgence, no pardon. Christians may never cease seeking vengeance, and the Jews must live in servitude forever. God always hated the Jews. It is incumbent upon all Christians to hate the Jews." That is just some of the milder stuff that was preached under the guise of Christianity.
Why? Because they lost literal interpretation, and so they misinterpreted and misapplied the Scriptures. As a result of this there were many myths and lies about the Jews in the Middle Ages, one of which was the blood libel, the idea that on Good Friday the Jews would kidnap and murder Christian children and use their blood to make Passover Matzo. They would say that the Jews would sneak into the churches on Good Friday and steal the host that the Roman Catholics use in the mass, take it home and stab it until it would bleed. They accuse the Jews also of many, many other things in terms of desecration of churches and of Christ. This blood libel is still found in some areas of eastern Europe and in Muslim countries where it is often taught that at Passover, Purim and at other times the Jews go out and kidnap and kill Arab babies to use their blood in making their pastries. This does nothing to make them pleasing in the site of the Jews who are justifiably outraged at being called Christ-killers. The Bible never says that.
In fact, what the Bible does say is that the death of Christ was a conspiracy of guilt that is completely controlled and under the authority of God's plan, and that ultimately it is God who allowed this and it was His plan for Jesus to be killed in this manner so that redemption could be accomplished. So rather than being upset about the death of Christ and who killed Jesus Christians should rather rejoice that He was killed in this manner, and it doesn't really matter what humans were involved because by crucifying Jesus our sins were paid for.
In the New Testament we have the blame spread to everybody. Gentile involvement: In Luke 18:31, 32 Jesus is talking top His disciples. NASB "Then He took the twelve aside and said to them, 'Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and all things which are written through the prophets about the Son of Man will be accomplished. For He will be handed over to the Gentiles, and will be mocked and mistreated and spit upon." There it is the Gentiles who were responsible. Mark makes it even more clear in his Gospel. Mark 10:33, 34 NASB "saying, } 'Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes; and they will condemn Him to death and will hand Him over to the Gentiles. They [the Gentiles, the Roman soldiers] will mock Him and spit on Him, and scourge Him and kill {Him,} and three days later He will rise again.'" Judas was operating as an individual; he is not a representative in any way, shape or form of the Jewish people.
Acts 4:27 NASB "For truly in this city there were gathered together against Your holy servant Jesus, whom You anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel." So there is enough blame to go around everybody, but primarily in that prayer the blame is put on Herod and Pontius Pilate as the ultimate authorities of each group. But ultimately it is God. They made the decision but it was the actual implementation of what God had purposed before to be done. [28] "to do whatever Your hand and Your purpose predestined to occur."
When we get into the passages of the Gospels that deal with the trial itself we find that Pontius Pilate interviews Jesus three times and he comes out with the claim, "I find no fault in this man." Luke 23:4; 23:14, 24. Pilate yields to them and washes his hands, but no amount of washing can absolve him of the guilt of his passive decision when he had the authority to have stopped this.
We also know that the people in general were not against Jesus. Matthew 26:3-5 NASB "Then the chief priests and the elders of the people were gathered together in the court of the high priest, named Caiaphas; and they plotted together to seize Jesus by stealth and kill Him. But they were saying, 'Not during the festival, otherwise a riot might occur among the people.'" They understood that the people were pro-Jesus and that if they did things the wrong way then they could have an insurrection on their hands. So the Gospels are a long way from giving an indictment to all of the Jewish people. Furthermore, the people knew that there was a plot among the leadership to kill Jesus. John 7:25 NASB "So some of the people of Jerusalem were saying, 'Is this not the man whom they are seeking to kill?'" Matthew 21:45 NASB "When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard His parables, they understood that He was speaking about them. [46] When they sought to seize Him, they feared the people, because they considered Him to be a prophet." The multitudes were with Jesus, not with the leadership. So there was a strong popular opinion of Jesus. Mark 3:6 NASB "The Pharisees went out and immediately {began} conspiring with the Herodians against Him, {as to} how they might destroy Him." Mark 11:18 NASB "The chief priests and the scribes heard {this,} and {began} seeking how to destroy Him; for they were afraid of Him, for the whole crowd was astonished at His teaching."
What was their motivation? It was a power motivation. They saw a legitimate threat from Jesus. Jesus clearly made them feel uncomfortable. John 11:47-53 NASB "Therefore the chief priests and the Pharisees convened a council, and were saying, 'What are we doing? For this man is performing many signs. If we let Him {go on} like this, all men will believe in Him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.' But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, 'You know nothing at all, nor do you take into account that it is expedient for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish.' Now he did not say this on his own initiative, but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but in order that He might also gather together into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. So from that day on they planned together to kill Him."
The Sanhedrin continued to plot against Jesus. They were filled with envy. Matthew 27:18 NASB "For he knew that because of envy they had handed Him over." In Mark 11:18 it was because of fear. NASB "The chief priests and the scribes heard {this,} and {began} seeking how to destroy Him; for they were afraid of Him, for the whole crowd was astonished at His teaching."
It comes back to the emotional scene where Pilate turns Jesus over to the people and they say: "Let His blood be upon us and upon our children." If this were true, it is a violation of Jewish law. Deuteronomy 24:16 NASB "Fathers shall not be put to death for {their} sons, nor shall sons be put to death for {their} fathers; everyone shall be put to death for his own sin." Ezekiel 18:4 NASB "Behold, all souls are Mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is Mine. The soul who sins will die." So early church fathers who got sucked into anti-Semitism were biblically ignorant and hermeneutically impoverished. They could not interpret their way out of a wet paper bag, and because of that they brought this horrible cancer into Christianity known as Christian anti-Semitism. Thousands of Jews were supporters of Jesus. We don't hear people talk about Joseph of Aramathea who provided the grave where Jesus was buried. We never hear about Nicodemus who was one of the chief Pharisees at the time and of his support for Jesus.
In Jewish sources from the time we also learn that the Jews recognized that from that time they were culpable. But what we see from Jewish writers today demonstrates that the arrogance of modern man since the Enlightenment is that we know more than they did. They may have written it down that they knew that they killed Jesus but they didn't understand it, they just did that because the Christians had already made them feel guilty about it and so they are just doing this is response to Christians. How disrespectful they can be of their elders! They just want to make everything fit their little phoney, non-historical approach.
The Talmud has traditions. For example, in Sanhedrin 43a it talks about the Christians. This is in the Babylonian Talmud. In the Jerusalem Talmud which is what was primarily read and promoted and copied in the west this paragraph had been expunged several centuries ago. But in Sanhedrin 43a there are very negative statements made about the menin (heretics), a term that was applied to Christians. There traditions also were very hostile to the house of Annas because they understood that it was the house of Annas that brought some of this upon them, and that that high-priestly house should fail. Josephus also reported that a later high priest than Annas was one who was responsible for indicting James, the leader in the early church.
The Sanhedrin tractate emphasizes that Jesus was put to death by a Jewish court for the crimes of sorcery and sedition. They clearly accepted that. Jewish folk literature produced an apocryphal biography of Jesus. It traces back to as early as the early fourth century and it assigned responsibility for the death of Jesus to the Jews. Josephus assigned responsibility to the Jews. If we talk to many Jews today they will say, well the Gospels are anti-Semitic because John writes and accuses "the Jews" of crucifying Jesus. But John is using the Term "the Jews" the same way Josephus does. It was the idiom of the first century to refer to a certain group that opposed you, the group of leadership, as the Jews. It wasn't a negative, racist term but simply the way they spoke. We can't impose our 21st century understanding of of that as a possible racist epithet and impose that back into the first century. That is historical revisionism at its absolute worst. There is nothing anti-Semitic in the Gospels. They were written by Jews, they were written about the Jewish Messiah, and they represent tens of thousands of Jews who followed Jesus. How can any of that be anti-Semitic? It is not.
Jesus' death was the result of the will of God. In the Gospels Jesus predicts His death and that it is at the will of God. And because it is God's will then this is the way in which salvation is provided. All throughout the Old Testament there is the talk about all human beings, Jews and Gentiles alike, being guilty of sin. 1 Kings 8:46 NASB "…for there is no man who does not sin…" Ecclesiastes 7:20 says there is not a righteous person on the earth that does good and does not sin. Cf. Isaiah 64:5, 6. What is needed is forgiveness, and this is exactly what Jesus' death was all about. When He died He said: "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." When the Gospel writers and the apostles in the early church are preaching the gospel they are emphasizing to their heaters again and again that if they accept Jesus there is complete forgiveness of sins. So blaming the Jewish people was not what they were saying. They were blaming the people who were actually responsible, the Sanhedrin, the chief priests and the religious leaders; they are not addressing the Jewish people as a whole.
The truth is that Jesus died because God sent Him. He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. It does not matter whether the Romans, the Jews, the Edomites, Europeans, Chinese or Indians crucified Him. Whatever people He had come to would have crucified Him because that was God's plan so that we could be saved. All mankind is guilty of His death, and that is the point.
