Posted: Sep 03, 2011 1:13 am
Alan B wrote:A short while ago, I had a brief discussion with a friend of mine (also an atheist) about why was Jesus crucified and not stoned. His reply was that under Roman rule only they could execute someone (e.g. crucfixion) and that the Jews had no autonomy in this matter (even though Jesus was given back to the Jews for sentencing - allegedly).
Yet we read (in the Bible) that on a couple of occaisions the crowd were ready to stone Jesus because he 'blasphemed'.
Could someone enlighten me on the historical practices of Roman occupation with regard to local customs and punishment? Was some autonomy granted to the occupied? Scholarly references would be useful.
I've tried Googling but all I get are the self-opinionated religious offering their views and trying to justify this or that according to their beliefs.
Your friend is wrong. The Jewish authorities - namely the Temple priests through the Sanhedrin - did have the legal right to execute people. This was mainly for religious offenses such as blasphemy, but the Sadducees were also the day-to-day rulers of Jerusalem under Roman suzerainty, with the Temple guards acting as a kind of civil and religious police force in the city. The evidence for their capacity to execute people is clear, though Christian apologists try to dance around it because it proves their gospels wrong.
The most clear evidence that the Temple priests had authority to execute is archaeological. In 1871 an inscription was found on the Temple mount in Jerusalem:
That was erected over the gate of the inner court of the Temple, marking the point beyond which gentiles could not enter. It reads:
MHQENA ALLOGENH EISPO-
REUESQAI ENTOS TOU, PE-
RI TO IERON, TRUFAKTOU KAI
PERIBOLOU. OS D AN LH-
FQH, EAUTWI AITIOS ES-
TAI DIA TO ECAKOLOU-
QEIN QANATON.
NOT ONE FOREIGNER IS TO
ENTER INSIDE THE, AROUND
THE SANCTUARY, BARRIER AND
EMBANKMENT. HE WHO IS
SEIZED, HIMSELF RESPONSIBLE
IS FOR THE FOLLOWING
DEATH PENALTY.
Later Talmudic literature referred back to the rules of the Sanhedrin in the Second Temple Period and detailed the legal procedures for capital punishment in that time (ie Jesus' time, before the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD). The priesthood were able to execute via several methods: burning, strangling, execution by the sword and, for blasphemy, stoning. Josephus makes it clear that these penalties were enforced, along with flogging for lesser offenses.
What Josephus also makes clear is that the priesthood could not carry out the death penalty without Roman imprimatur. The Romans took legal affairs in their territories very seriously and, unlike Galilee which was ruled by a Jewish client king, Judea was under direct Roman control. So while the Jewish priests could condemn and execute people for a range of civil and religious offences, they had to send to the Prefect in Caesarea for permission to do so. The High Priest Ananus was not "exploiting a loophole" when he executed Jesus' brother James in 62 AD, he was doing what any High Priest could do - having someone stoned to death. He simply overstepped his authority by doing so without Roman imprimatur, since the new Prefect was still on his way from Rome to Caesarea, and so Ananus got deposed for it. He wasn't deposed for stoning James, just for doing so without Roman permission.
The gospel accounts of the trial of Jesus are fanciful on many levels and are clearly not historical. A Sanhedrin trial could not be held at night, its verdict had to be considered for several days and nothing Jesus said, according to the gospels, was actually blasphemous anyway. But the least historical element is the idea that the Sanhedrin didn't have the power to execute a blasphemer. The earlier gospels skip around the reason the Sadducees don't execute Jesus themselves and hand him over to the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilatus instead. Only the last and latest gospel, gJohn, states (wrongly) that the Jewish leaders didn't have the authority to execute religious wrongdoers (John 18: 31).
The fact is that the gospel writers are desperately trying to get around a highly awkward historical fact: their so-called Messiah was not just executed, but crucified. This was a very difficult fact for the early Christians; one Paul referred to as "a stumbling block to the Jews and a foolishness to the Gentiles" (1Cor 1:23). Crucifixion was the worst possible form of execution and one reserved for non-Romans and even then only for runaway slaves, pirates, bandits and rebels against the Empire. Jesus wasn't a slave and clearly wasn't a bandit or pirate, so the fact that he was crucified meant that he was obviously considered by Rome as a Jewish rebel. In the wake of the failed Jewish Rebellion of 66-70 AD, when Jewish rebels were not exactly flavour of the month with the Gentiles Christians were trying to convert, this was a real PR problem. This graffito from Rome shows how awkward the fact that Jesus was crucified was for early Christianity.
The gospel of Mark, which seems to have been written very soon after the Jewish Rebellion and which was the earliest gospel and the source of Matthew and Luke, found a way to get around this awkward fact. It depicts the Sanhedrin as curiously paralysed in the face of Jesus' responses to their questioning and so has them handing him over to Pilatus on trumped up charges of sedition. Thus the author of gMark, who was most likely writing outside Palestine for a non-Jewish audience (possibly in Rome itself) made Jesus out to be the innocent victim of the wicked Jewish leaders, who were amongst the "bad guys" in the recent uprising in Roman eyes, and not a seditious rebel against Rome as his execution would imply. gMatthew and gLuke followed suit and gJohn dispensed with the idea of the Jewish leaders being to blame and made "the Jews" as a whole the bad guys (which made Jesus and co what, Eskimos?).
The idea that the Sanhedrin did not have the power to execute a supposed blasphemer is total nonsense, though it's something Christian apologists have to try to uphold because it's in their gospels. What we seen in the gospels is a clumsy attempt to explain away the fact that their Messiah was executed as a rebel: something they do with great awkwardness and which is clearly garbage. The effort they expend to explain this awkward fact away is also a clear indication that Jesus' crucifixion is historical, which is another nail in the coffin of the creaky "Jesus never existed" theories beloved of amateur bloggers and silly hobbyists.