WHERE WE ARE

I am arguing that the Passion Narrative in the Gospel of Luke is historically unreliable.

The Passion Narrative in Luke is found in Chapters 22 and 23 of the Gospel of Luke. I am beginning my careful examination with Chapter 23, which contains the following six parts:

• Part 1: Jesus Before Pilate (verses 1-5)
• Part 2: Jesus Before Herod (verses 6-12)
• Part 3: Jesus Sentenced to Death (verses 13-25)
• Part 4: Crucifixion of Jesus (verses 26-43)
• Part 5: Death of Jesus (verses 44-49)
• Part 6: Burial of Jesus (verses 50-56)

In Part 1 of this series, I argued that the opening section of Chapter 23 (Jesus Before Pilate) was historically unreliable. Here is my conclusion about Luke 23 verses 1 through 5:

In addition to eight general reasons for doubting the historical reliability of the Gospels, and in addition to another general reason for doubting the historical reliability of the Gospel of Luke (i.e. it begins with a FICTIONAL birth story and ends with FICTIONAL stories about appearances of the risen Jesus in Jerusalem), there are a number of more specific reasons for doubting the historical reliability of the opening passage of Chapter 23 of the Gospel of Luke (Jesus Before Pilate). Therefore, we have good reason to doubt the historical reliability of that opening passage (i.e. Luke 23:1-5).

PART 2: JESUS BEFORE HEROD (LUKE 23:6-12)

Of course, the general reasons for doubting the historical reliability of the Gospels and of the Gospel of Luke apply to Chapter 23 of the Gospel of Luke. Furthermore, we now also have the more specific reason that the opening five verses of Chapter 23 are historically unreliable (see Part 1 of this series). So, we have good reason to doubt the historical reliability of Luke 23:6-12, even before we examine the specific content of that passage.

Here is the second passage from Luke Chapter 23:

6 When Pilate heard this, he asked whether the man was a Galilean. 7 And when he learned that he was under Herod’s jurisdiction, he sent him off to Herod, who was himself in Jerusalem at that time. 8 When Herod saw Jesus, he was very glad, for he had been wanting to see him for a long time because he had heard about him and was hoping to see him perform some sign. 9 He questioned him at some length, but Jesus gave him no answer. 10 The chief priests and the scribes stood by vehemently accusing him. 11 Even Herod with his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him; then he put an elegant robe on him and sent him back to Pilate. 12 That same day Herod and Pilate became friends with each other; before this they had been enemies.

Luke 23:6-12, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

First, no other Gospel says anything about a trial of Jesus before Herod. Luke is the only Gospel that has Jesus appear before Herod. This is an indication that this particular story could be fiction.

Second, as with the alleged trial before Pilate, Jesus’ disciples had previously abandoned Jesus and gone into hiding, so they were not present at the alleged trial before Herod. This fact casts as much doubt on the historical reliability of this passage as it did with the alleged trial before Pilate.

Third, that the author of Luke is motivated by the apologetic concern to have both Jesus and (by implication) his followers found innocent of being an enemy of Rome, is shown in this passage in at least three ways:

• Pilate again shows his reluctance to condemn Jesus by handing Jesus over to Herod for judgment
• Herod, like Pilate, does not condemn Jesus of any particular crime or wrongdoing
• As with the trial before Pilate, blame for Jesus’ death is shifted to the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem (see verse 10)

Fourth, if the trial before Pilate was fictional, then the handing over of Jesus from Pilate to Herod is also fictional, as is the handing over of Jesus from Herod back to Pilate. If Pilate’s reluctance to condemn Jesus was fictional, then that also casts significant doubt on the idea that Pilate would hand Jesus over to Herod in order to avoid condemning Jesus himself. Therefore, the historical unreliability of the opening passage of Chapter 23 (about Jesus Before Pilate), directly casts significant doubt on the historical reliability of this second passage of Chapter 23.

Fifth, in Acts, the companion volume to the Gospel of Luke, an Old Testament passage is quoted by Jesus’ disciples Peter and John as a prophecy of the trials of Jesus before Pilate and Herod:

24 When they [i.e. Peter and John] heard it, they raised their voices together to God and said, “Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth, the sea, and everything in them, 25 it is you who said by the Holy Spirit through our ancestor David, your servant:
‘Why did the gentiles rage
and the peoples imagine vain things?
26 The kings of the earth took their stand,
and the rulers have gathered together
against the Lord and against his Messiah.’
27 “For in this city, in fact, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the gentiles and the peoples of Israel, gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, 28 to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place.

Acts 4:24-28, New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

Luke has Peter and John quote from Psalm 2 as a prophecy or prediction of the trials of Jesus before Pilate and Herod. Presumably, Luke believed that Psalm 2 was a divine prophecy that predicted Jesus’ trials before Pilate and Herod. If so, then this is another good reason to doubt the historical reliability of the trial of Jesus before Herod, because that event may have been based on the prophetic passage rather than being based upon eyewitness testimony from someone who was present at this alleged event.

Sixth, another problem is that the Gospel of Luke itself indicates that Herod wanted Jesus to be killed (Luke 13:31). Pilate provided a perfect opportunity for Herod to have Jesus executed, but Herod declined the opportunity. This is implausible. Since Herod wanted Jesus killed, he probably would have gladly accepted the opportunity to condemn Jesus to be executed. The author of Luke has given us a good reason to doubt the historical reliability of this event where Herod allegedly fails to condemn Jesus for any crime or wrongdoing.

Finally, this event where Jesus appears before Herod is implausible because it adds yet another hearing or meeting of officials to decide Jesus’ fate in a morning that is already fully packed with events. According to Luke, the following events occur before Jesus was crucified:

• “When day came” a meeting of Jewish leaders in Jerusalem was held to discuss what to do with Jesus (Luke 22:66-71)
• The Jewish leaders in Jerusalem took Jesus to Pilate and accused Jesus of various wrongdoing. Pilate questions Jesus and then declares Jesus to be innocent (Luke 23:1-5)
• Pilate sends Jesus to be examined by Herod. Herod “questioned him at some length” then Herod and his soldiers mock Jesus and put a robe on Jesus, and then send Jesus back to Pilate (Luke 23:6-11)
• Pilate then calls together the Jewish leaders and a crowd of other Jews and re-iterates that he found Jesus to be innocent, and that Herod also failed to find Jesus guilty of any wrongdoing (Luke 23:13-15).
• The leaders and the crowd demand the release of another criminal and the crucifixion of Jesus. Pilate proclaims Jesus to be innocent for a third time, and offers to just flog Jesus and let him go (Luke 23:16-22).
• But the Jewish leaders and Jewish crowd loudly demand that Jesus be crucified, and Pilate finally approves their demand to crucify Jesus (Luke 23:23-25).
• Jesus is then led off to be crucified outside the city of Jerusalem (Luke 23:26-32).

According to the Gospel of Mark, Jesus was crucified about 9am in the morning (Mark 15:25). Luke appears to follow Mark’s chronology for the day of Jesus’ crucifixion, because Luke, like Mark, has the sky darken at noon, and has Jesus die around 3pm (Luke 23:44-46 and Mark 15:33-37). So, Luke has all of the above events occurring between 6am and 9am, but three hours does not seem sufficient for all of these events.

Given that no other Gospel corroborates the trial of Jesus before Herod, and given that the morning is already full of meetings and events, we have good reason to doubt that there was a trial of Jesus before Herod squeezed in between two different hearings or meetings about Jesus involving Pilate.

SOME JESUS SCHOLARS REJECT THE HISTORICITY OF THIS STORY

Jesus scholar Robert Funk judges the alleged trial of Jesus before Herod as unlikely to be historical:

In addition, items 16 through 19 in Table 9 were inserted into the [Passion] story by Matthew and Luke. None of them is likely to be historical. [NOTE: Luke’s story of Jesus’ Hearing before Herod is item 18 in Table 9].

Honest to Jesus by Robert Funk, p. 226

Jesus scholar John Crossan also rejects the historicity of the hearing before Herod:

This specific Herodian trial is a pure Lukan creation.

Who Killed Jesus? by John Crossan, p.114

Jesus scholar Marcus Borg indicates that he takes the additions made by the author of Luke to the events of the Passion Narrative in the Gospel of Mark to be fictional:

I see Mark’s Passion story as the earliest. Matthew and Luke each had a copy of Mark, and I see the additions they made to Mark’s Passion story as imaginative elaborations.

“Why Was Jesus Killed?” by Marcus Borg, from The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, p.86

Since the hearing of Jesus before Herod is clearly an addition to the events found in Mark’s Passion story, Borg views that hearing as being an imaginative elaboration by the author of Luke.

Jesus scholar Gerd Ludemann rejects the historicity of the hearing before Herod:

The composition of this scene is completely redactional and goes back to an early Christian exegesis of Ps. 2.1f. …

[As for the historical information contained in Luke 23:6-16:]

The yield is nil.

Jesus After 2000 Years by Gerd Ludemann, p. 401 & 402

SKEPTICISM ABOUT THE GOSPELS’ PORTRAYAL OF PILATE

Jesus scholar E.P. Sanders does not specifically reject the historicity of the hearing before Herod, but his skepticism about how Pilate is portrayed by the Gospels indicates that he would have significant doubts about the historicity of the hearing before Herod, because Pilate handing Jesus over to Herod implies that Pilate was reluctant to condemn Jesus to death, and because Pilate uses Herod’s failure to find Jesus guilty of a crime to once again pronounce the innocence of Jesus (in Luke 23:13-16):

The gospels…want Jesus to have been condemned by the Jewish mob, against Pilate’s better judgement. …These elements of the story of Jesus’ last hours derive from the desire of the Christians to get along with Rome and to depict Jews as their real opponents. In all probability Pilate received Caiphas’ charge, had Jesus flogged and briefly interrogated, and, when the answers were not completely satisfactory, sent him to the cross with not a second thought….The stories of Pilate’s reluctance and weakness of will are best explained as Christian propaganda; they are a kind of excuse for Pilate’s action which reduces the conflict between the Christian movement and Roman authority.

The Historical Figure of Jesus by E.P. Sanders, p. 273-274 (emphasis added)

The addition of the hearing before Herod fits perfectly with the purposes of such Christian propaganda, so Sanders presumably has significant doubts about the historicity of that story in Chapter 23 of the Gospel of Luke.

Jesus scholar James Dunn expresses similar skepticism about the portrayal of Pilate in the Gospels, including in Chapter 23 of the Gospel of Luke:

There can be no doubt that he [Pilate] would have had no qualms about arbitrarily executing somone who could be plausibly accused of trouble-making or worse. …

…they [the Gospels] clearly evidence a strong tendency to shift responsibility for the execution of Jesus away from the Roman to the Jewish authorities. Pilate ‘perceived that it was out of envy that the cheif priests had handed him over’ (Mark 15.10). He gave the crowd the option of saving Jesus or Barabbas (Mark 15.6-15). Luke emphasizes that Pilate sent Jesus to Herod (Luke 23.6-12). He declared Jesus innocent and wanted to let him off (Luke 23:14-15, 20, 22). Matthew has the story…of Pilate’s wife warning him to ‘have nothing to do with that just man’ (Matt. 27.19), as also the account of Pilate washing his hands and declaring himself ‘innocent of this man’s blood’ (27.24). …

…the depiction of Pilate being in effect bullied by the high priest and his counsellors, to execute a man of whose innocence he was convinced, almost certainly owes more to political motivation than to historical recollection. Of course, the policy of excusing Roman injustice is understandable for a movement which soon sought to win converts through the eastern territories of the Roman Empire.

Christianity in the Making, Volume 1: Jesus Remembered by James Dunn, p. 775-776 (emphasis added)

Again, the story of Jesus before Herod in Chapter 23 of the Gospel of Luke, serves this political motivation well. It helps to shift responsibility for the execution of Jesus away from Pilate and Rome, shifting it towards the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem.

Jesus scholar Geza Vermes expresses similar skepticism about how the Gospels portray Pilate:

He [Pilate] was prepared to let him [Jesus] go–maybe after a good beating–or make him candidate for the Passover amnesty. Pilate’s almost abject pleading with the priestly leaders and the Jewish crowd, and his fear of a riot seem to be baseless and out of character. An order to his legionaries would have made all the vociferous Jews run for their lives. On the whole, the Roman governor of the Gospels is pictured as a man who believed Jesus to be innocent but allowed himself to be manipulated by the Jews and ended by sending their king to the cross.

However, the Pilate of the New Testament has little in common with the Pilate of history.

[…]

All told, the Pilate picture of the Passion story is best held to be fiction, devised by the evangleists with a view to currying favour with Rome, in whose empire the nascent Church was developing. …Also, by the time of the recording of the Passion narratives the Jewish rebellion had been put down by the armies of Vespasian and Titus. It was therefore politically doubly correct to blame the Jews for the murder of Christ and to absolve the Roman Pontius Pilate.

The Passion by Geza Vermes, p. 120 and 121 (emphasis added)

I am not aware of Vermes explicitly rejecting the historicity of the hearing before Herod, but given his skepticism about how the Gospels portray Pilate, he presumably has significant doubts about the historicity of this alleged event found only in Chapter 23 of the Gospel of Luke.

RAYMOND BROWN ON LUKE 23:6-12

The great scholar of the Passion Narratives, Raymond Brown, rejects the historicity of Jesus’ hearing before Herod:

The theory of formation just expounded indicates that the scene in Luke 23:6-12(14-15) is scarcely a direct historical account. But there remains the question whether the tradition of Herod’s deadly hostility toward Jesus–the tradition that Luke drew upon and interpolated into the trial–is historical.

The Death of the Messiah, Volume 1 by Raymond Brown, p. 783 (emphasis added)

In my judgment we must settle for a Lucan author of 23:6-12 who is neither a simple recorder of historical fact nor totally a creative, imaginative novelist. He transmits early tradition about Herod Antipas–tradition that had a historical nucleus but had already developed beyond simple history by the time it reached Luke.

The Death of the Messiah, Volume 1 by Raymond Brown, p. 785 (emphasis added)

Brown points out that there were three different Herods mentioned in the New Testament, and all three were kings. As a result, it is not clear who the “early tradition about Herod” was about:

Yet the very accounts [the Gospels and Acts] that preserve the tradition show considerable imaginative elaboration, so that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to know whether one, two, or three Herods was/were hostile to Jesus (and to his followers).

The Death of the Messiah, Volume 1 by Raymond Brown, p. 785 (emphasis added)

According to Brown, the author of the Gospel of Luke compromised between the early tradition about Herod and the account of Jesus’ trial before Pilate in the Gospel of Mark. As a result, Luke modified the early tradition about Herod:

All this points to the existence of an early tradition about lethal Herodian opposition to Jesus…. The story we encounter in Luke 23:6-12 is…another Lucan variation of the early Antipas tradition, fleshed out by three agenda: (a) material from Mark about the questioning of Jesus during the trial (in Mark by Pilate), about the silence of Jesus before the questioner, and about the mockery of Jesus; (b) a schema of the Roman governor inviting a Herodian prince to examine a Jewish prisoner accused by the leaders of his own people–a schema similar to that in the account of Festus inviting Agrippa II to examine Paul in Acts 25:13-26:32; (c) sayings pertinent to Herod, preserved especially in Luke 13:31-33.

The Death of the Messiah, Volume 1 by Raymond Brown, p. 785 (emphasis added)

In other words, although the author of Luke is drawing on an early tradition about “lethal Herodian opposition to Jesus”, the author is also borrowing details from the Gospel of Mark about the trial of Jesus before Pilate (the silence of Jesus and the mockery of Jesus). So, those details are NOT from the early tradition “about lethal Herodian opposition to Jesus”, and those details are NOT historical, but are details from a different event (the trial before Pilate, which might well be fictional itself!), according to Brown.

Now Brown indicates that the author of the Gospel of Luke modified the early tradition about Herod:

The early tradition had Herod hostile to Jesus…. The omission of direct reference to the Jewish people is suited to the major change Luke makes in 23:11b, 14-45 whereby, despite the contempt and mockery, Herod becomes an affirmer of Jesus’ innocence. In the COMMENT I underlined the import of this change: The readers see that both the Jewish tetrarch [Herod Antipas] and the Roman prefect [Pilate] think Jesus not guilty of arousing the people against Caesar and being a royal pretender. But one must still ask what prompted Luke to change the hostile Herod tradition in this way…. In any case what Luke has done is a compromise. He has changed the Marcan outline by introducing Herod, but he has not changed the flow of the trial: Pilate remains the controlling judge making the final decision. …in the Gospel, where he [Luke] is working from Marcan guidelines, Luke has adapted that Herodian tradition [about lethal Herodian hostility to Jesus] preserving only part of the hostility and using it for a different effect. That change in the Gospel presentation of Herod was in preparation for the last words that will be spoken about Jesus in the Lucan PN: “Certainly this mand was just [dikaios].”

The Death of the Messiah, Volume 1 by Raymond Brown, p. 783 (emphasis added)

In other words, although the author of the Gospel of Luke was aware of an early tradition about lethal Herodian hostility towards Jesus (i.e. Herod Antipas wanted Jesus dead), Luke created a fictional version of Herod Antipas who declared Jesus to be innocent (thus giving up the opportunity to have Jesus executed), and Luke did this for the apologetic purpose of showing Jesus (and by implication his followers) to be innocent of rebellion against the Romans.

Clearly Brown does NOT believe that any of the specific details about Jesus interacting with Herod are historical. In fact, it appears that Brown doubts that there was any interaction at all between Jesus and Herod Antipas on this occasion.

CONCLUSION

In addition to the eight general reasons for doubting the historical reliability of the Gospels, and in addition to the general reason for doubting the historical reliability of the Gospel of Luke (i.e. it begins with a fictional birth story and ends with fictional resurrection appearance stories), we have several specific reasons to doubt the historical reliability of Luke 23:6-12 (Jesus before Herod):

• The opening passage of Chapter 23 about the trial of Jesus before Pilate is historically unreliable, casting doubt on the rest of Chapter 23.
• No other Gospel corroborates the alleged interrogation of Jesus by Herod.
• Jesus’ disciples were not present to see or hear this alleged event.
• As with the trial before Pilate, Luke is clearly motivated by the apologetic purpose of shifting blame for Jesus’ death from Pilate to the Jewish priests and a Jewish crowd.
• If the trial before Pilate is fictional or if Pilate’s portrayal is fictional, then so is the hearing before Herod.
• Luke believed that the trial of Jesus before Herod fulfilled an OT prophecy.
• It is unlikely that Herod would have passed up the opportunity to have Jesus executed (see Luke 13:31-33).
• It is implausible that all of the events described by Luke took place between 6am and 9am.
• Some Jesus scholars reject this story as unhistorical, and a number of Jesus scholars have significant doubts about the historicity of this story.

For these reasons, we may reasonably conclude that the passage Luke 23:6-12 (Jesus before Herod) is historically unreliable.