LOWERED EXPECTATIONS ABOUT THE PASSION NARRATIVES

As I mentioned in my previous post “Raymond Brown on the Trial of Jesus before Pilate“, Brown expresses significant doubt about the historical reliability and historical accuracy of the Passion Narratives in the Gospels.

From the opening pages of his massive two-volume commentary on the Passion Narratives, The Death of the Messiah, the eminent New Testament scholar Raymond Brown lowers expectations of historical reliability and historical accuracy from these important parts of the Gospels.

On the first page of the introduction, Brown makes this strong statement:

Yet Jesus did not write an account of his passion; nor did anyone who had been present write an eyewitness account.[1]

In one sentence, Brown rejects both the idea that any of the authors of the Gospels were eyewitnesses to the events they write about in the Passion Narratives and also the idea that any of the Gospel authors made use of a written account by an eyewitness to those events.

Brown also notes that we have no direct access to the early Christian traditions made use of by the authors of the Gospels in writing their Passion Narratives:

That intervening preGospel tradition was not preserved even if at times we may be able to detect the broad lines of its content.[2]

Brown draws the appropriate skeptical conclusions from these points:

When we seek to reconstruct it [an early Christian tradition behind a passage in a Gospel Passion Narrative] or, even more adventurously, the actual situation of Jesus himself, we are speculating.[3]

If NT scholars are typically “speculating” when they infer “the actual situation of Jesus himself” based on careful scholarly interpretation and analysis of passages from the Passion Narratives in the Gospels, then we clearly should not expect much in terms of historical reliability and historical accuracy from those Passion Narratives.

SPECIFIC DOUBTS ABOUT THE GOSPEL ACCOUNTS OF THE TRIAL OF JESUS BEFORE THE SANHEDRIN

One of the important stories included in the Passion Narratives of the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew is the story of an alleged trial of Jesus at night before the Jewish Supreme Council, known as the Sanhedrin. The Gospel of Luke also has Jesus examined by the Sanhedrin, but this allegedly happens early in the morning, just before Jesus is brought to Pilate (Luke 22:66-71). Brown’s skeptical view of the Passion Narratives fully applies to this particular portion of the Passion Narratives.

Early on in his discussion about the alleged trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, Brown raises some historical doubts about this portion of the Passion Narratives:

Yet were they [the authors of the Gospels] in a position to know in detail what had actually happened in Jerusalem thirty to seventy years before they wrote? Did the fact that often in Jerusalem a Sanhedrin was involved in religious questions of public import cause Christian tradition to assume that it was involved in the death of Jesus? Was a less structured Jewish involvement dramatized into a formal Sanhedrin involvement? In fact, no detailed legal court record of Jesus’ trial was preserved, and so surely the Gospel narratives involve dramatization and simplification…[4]

Brown expresses doubt about the Sanhedrin gathering together on the night Jesus was arrested, as indicated in the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew (Mark 14:53-65 & Matthew 26:57-68). He leans towards the view that the Gospel of John is more historically accurate on this point, namely that there was a meeting of the Sanhedrin about what to do with Jesus, but this meeting took place weeks before Jesus was arrested:

A serious possibility is that John’s arrangement [i.e., the account in the Gospel of John] is more original and perhaps even more historical. If there was a Christian memory of a Sanhedrin called to deal with Jesus, only John, which has multiple visits of Jesus to Jerusalem, would have been free to date the Sanhedrin session to any period other than the last days of Jesus’ life. Mark (followed by Matt and Luke) could have run together that memory with another, namely, that on the night before he died, Jesus was interrogated by the high priest before getting handed over to the Romans. Historically, having a Sanhedrin session weeks before Passover would be more plausible than one gathered hastily in the middle of the night. Moreover, as mentioned before, an interrogation just before handing Jesus over to the Romans for a trial makes better sense than a full-scale Sanhedrin trial.[5]

Brown also expresses doubt about the description of what was said during the Sanhedrin session. In Mark 14:61, the high priest asks Jesus, “Are you…the Son of the Blessed?”, but Brown argues that this question was NOT asked during the Jewish interrogation of Jesus. That question was formulated based on a title given to Jesus by Christians sometime after Jesus’ crucifixion:

Thus there is reason in the Gospels, read perceptively, to think that unlike “the Messiah,” the title “the Son of God” was not applied to Jesus in his lifetime by his followers or, a fortiori, by himself. It was a revealed, early post-ministry insight. This would mean that the high priest’s question phrased in Mark 14:61, “Are you…the Son of the Blessed [= God]?” was not the formulation in a Jewish investigation of Jesus in AD 30/33.[6]

Similarly, Brown thinks that the high priest’s accusation that Jesus was guilty of blasphemy is anachronistic if that accusation is understood as a response to Jesus claiming to be “the Messiah”, which is suggested by the fact that the high priest had just directly asked Jesus if he was “the Messiah” and “the Son of God”:

But Jesus was silent. Then the high priest said to him, “I put you under oath before the living God, tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God.” (Matthew 26:63)

The view that appears to be attributed to the high priest is a later Jewish view (that developed sometime after Jesus was crucified) that the Christian belief that Jesus was the Messiah was blasphemous:

But more likely such a rejection of Jesus’ messiahship as blasphemous came after his condemnation and crucifixion, not as the cause for condemnation. It came with the proclamation of the risen Jesus as the Messiah-Son of God. Overall, then, if Jesus was accused of blasphemy in AD 30/33, it is not likely that the sole or even principal basis for that accusation was that his followers hailed him as the expected Messiah of the House of David.[7]

Also the tradition [behind the Gospel accounts of the alleged trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin] portrayed Jesus being asked the question, “Are you the Messiah?” In the postresurrectional decades when the preGospel tradition was being formed, the issue of Jesus’ identity was the great divider between the Jews who believed in Jesus and those who did not. Consequently, in describing Jesus’ answer to the proposals that he was the Messiah, the tradition reflects Christian sensibilities caused by debates with nonbelievers. In particular, the “Messiah” title is often glossed by “Son of God,” a formulation from Christian confessions.[8]

In other words, it is the theological conflicts that developed AFTER the crucifixion of Jesus (between Jews who followed Jesus and Jews who did not follow Jesus) that shaped the contents of the Gospel accounts of the alleged trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, as opposed to reliable historical information about what actually took place at this trial (if the alleged trial actually happened).

CONCLUSION

The eminent New Testament scholar Raymond Brown has expressed significant doubt about the historical reliability and historical accuracy of the Passion Narratives in the Gospels.

An important part of the Passion Narratives in the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Matthew, and the Gospel of Luke, is the account of an alleged trial or examination of Jesus by the Sanhedrin after Jesus was arrested. The Gospel of John does not mention this Jewish trial. Brown’s skepticism about the Passion Narratives applies fully to the alleged trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin.

Brown points out that the Gospel accounts of this trial before the Sanhedrin are NOT based on eyewitness testimony nor on any written records from this event. Brown notes the difficulty of writing an accurate account of this alleged trial given that the authors of the Gospels were writing thirty to seventy years after the trial allegedly took place.

Brown also notes that some specific points in these accounts are historically dubious:

• the historically implausible gathering of the Sanhedrin at night
• the contradiction between the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew (Mark 14:17-65 and Matthew 26:20-68) compared with the Gospel of Luke (Luke 22:66-71) on the time of day of the alleged trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin
• the anachronistic issue of whether Jesus claimed to be the “Son of God”
• the anachronistic issue of Jesus claiming to be “the Messiah” being blasphemous
• the contradiction between the Synoptic Gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) and the Gospel of John concerning whether the Sanhedrin meeting about Jesus took place during Passover (Synoptics) or weeks before Passover (John)

Brown’s careful and scholarly analysis of the Passion Narratives in general, and the Gospel accounts of the alleged trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, provide a number of good reasons to doubt the historical reliability and the historical accuracy of the Gospel accounts of the alleged Jewish trial of Jesus.

END NOTES

1. Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, Volume One (New York, NY: Doubleday,1994), p.4.

2. Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, Volume One, pp. 4-5.

3. Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, Volume One, p. 5.

4. Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, Volume One, p. 373. 

5. Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, Volume One, pp. 425-426. 

6. Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, Volume One, p. 482. 

7. Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, Volume One, p. 535. 

8. Raymond Brown, The Death of the Messiah, Volume One, p. 558.