Crucified for blasphemy

Why did the Jewish authorities hand Jesus over to Rome for crucifixion? It cannot have been because he was judged to have been a false prophet, a deceiver of the people, opposed to Torah, opposed to the temple, or even a messianic pretender. On the last point, Brant Pitre quotes the Spanish theologian Armand Puig I Tàrrech: ‘[N]ever in the history of the Jewish people had a messianic pretender, for the simple fact of being such, been accused of being an enemy of God’s and sentenced to death” (249). Rather, Pitre will argue that Jesus was condemned and executed because he was found guilty, on more than one occasion, of blasphemy.

They picked up stones

The Judeans (Pitre prefers this to the more general term “Jews”) accuse Jesus of being a demon-possessed Samaritan. His response is that God is his judge, and he adds: “Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death” (Jn. 8:51). Pitre notes that this echoes Psalm 89:48-52:

What man can live and never see death? Who can deliver his soul from the power of Sheol? Lord, where is your steadfast love of old, which by your faithfulness you swore to David? Remember, O Lord, how your servants are mocked, and how I bear in my heart the insults of all the many nations, with which your enemies mock, O LORD, with which they mock the footsteps of your anointed. Blessed be the LORD forever! Amen and Amen. (Ps 89:48-52)

Even Abraham and the prophets died, so is Jesus claiming to be greater than “our father Abraham, who died” (Jn. 8:52-53)? Jesus again says, in effect, that God will vindicate him (54-55), and then asserts: “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he might see my day, and he saw and rejoiced. … Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am” (56-58*).

In this way, Pitre says, Jesus both ‘declares his eternal “preexistence”’ and identifies himself as the God who appeared to Moses as the absolute “I am” (255-58). Not surprisingly, then, the Judeans take up stones to throw at him, in accordance with Torah: “Whoever blasphemes the name of the LORD shall surely be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him” (Lev. 24:16).

In defence of the historical plausibility of the incident, Pitre notes the similarities with the Apocalypse of Abraham (263-64). I think this demonstrates, rather, the historical plausibility of John’s reconstruction of Jesus’ confrontation with the Jews.

I suggested recently that this is not the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels speaking but “a Jesus who emerges out of an engagement with later Jewish-Christian, apocalyptic speculation.” It is the literaryJesus who is shown to be contextually credible, not the actual historical person. It is controversies at the time of writing that shape the story, not controversies surrounding the historical Jesus.

You make yourself God

During the Feast of Dedication, the Judeans ask Jesus if he is the Christ. He directs them to the significance of his “works,” but says that they do not believe because they are not among the sheep given to him by his Father. Then he makes the “even more staggering statement” (278): “I and the Father are one” (Jn. 10:22-30).

Pitre understands this as an allusion to the Shema: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4). “Jesus is answering the Judeans’ question about his identity not only by implying that he is the messiah, but also by identifying himself with the one God of Israel” (279). He is distinguished from the Father but he is nevertheless divine.

The Judeans move to stone him, charging him with blasphemy: “you, being a man, make yourself God” (10:33). Pitre suggests that this evokes the “divine claims of the pagan king of Babylon and the prince of Tyre” (Is. 14:13-14; Ezek. 28:1-2). “The reaction of the Judeans clinches the case for a divine self-claim on the lips of Jesus” (281).

In his defence, Jesus appeals to scripture:

Is it not written in your Law, ‘I said, you are gods’? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be broken—do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, ‘You are blaspheming,’ because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’? (10:34-36)

But, in Pitre’s view, this does not “allay his audience’s objection that he is making blasphemous divine claims.

However…

1. In the absence of any mention of “Lord” and “God,” I see no reason to think that “I and the Father are one” alludes to the Shema. The relationship is explained instead, I think, by the earlier passage about Abraham. Jesus is “of God” inasmuch as he “hears the words of God” (Jn. 8:38, 47). The Judeans claim to have “one Father—even God” but they are not “of God” and do not “hear the words of God”; therefore, they are of their father the devil (8:41-47). In effect, though it is not said, they and their father are one.

2. Jesus repeatedly points to his “works” which he does “in my Father’s name” (10:25) to answer the question about who he thinks he is. If he is the Christ or the “Son of God,” it is because he is doing exactly what he was sent to do. He is accused of making himself equal to God, but in the end it comes down to the sort of agency indicated by these subordinate categories. Pitre much too easily dismisses the progression from “make yourself equal to God” to “you are gods” to “I said, ‘I am the Son of God’” (10:33-36).

3. The express reason given by the “Judeans” for seeking Jesus’ death is given at his trial: “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has made himself the Son of God” (19:7). Against the background of conflict with the synagogues, what lies behind this is likely to be this “law” against division in Israel caused by a maverick prophet who performs signs and wonders:

If a prophet or a dreamer of dreams arises among you and gives you a sign or a wonder, and the sign or wonder that he tells you comes to pass, and if he says, ‘Let us go after other gods,’ which you have not known, ‘and let us serve them,’ you shall not listen to the words of that prophet or that dreamer of dreams. … But that prophet or that dreamer of dreams shall be put to death, because he has taught rebellion against the LORD your God…, to make you leave the way in which the LORD your God commanded you to walk. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. (Deut. 13:1-5)

This is certainly more relevant than the pagan ruler texts. The term “blasphemy” does not occur here, but its usage was broad enough to encompass such rebellion against YHWH (cf. Wis. 1:6-11). Moreover, the passage accounts for both the emphasis on Jesus’ works and the recourse to stoning.

4. The oneness that he has with the Father is comparable to the unity that he desires for his disciples and those who come to believe through their testimony:

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. (17:20-23; cf. 17:11).

He seems to include all these others in the unity that he has with the Father, which must have some bearing on how “I and the Father are one” is understood. It comes down not to identity or ontology but to purpose.

The charge of blasphemy at the trial

In Matthew and Mark, Pitre notes, Jesus is asked by the high priest at his trial whether he is the Christ and Son of God. In the Jewish scriptures, the Davidic king relates to YHWH as a son to a father (2 Sam 7:14); and the enthronement psalms “seem to depict the Davidic king as a superhuman figure” (300).

In his response, Jesus identifies himself with both the king who sits at the right hand of God (Ps. 110:1-2) and the ‘heavenly “son of man” who comes on “the clouds” (Dan. 7:14). According to Pitre, these are both heavenly persons. The king has an equality with YHWH, seated at his right hand; the one like a son of man is ‘a heavenly being who acts like God himself by riding on the “clouds” of heaven and receiving human worship” (302).

The council concludes that he has spoken blasphemously and that he deserves death. The high priest tears his clothes in horror at Jesus’ claim to be “a heavenly messiah who is somehow equal with God” (305).

The first objection to Pitre’s analysis is that Jesus’ assertion is prophetic or apocalyptic in a forward-looking sense. The claim is that he will be a divine messiah or heavenly king seated at the right hand of God, and we know how this will happen:

This Jesus God raised up, and of that we all are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God…. For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, “‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”’ Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. (Acts 2:32-36)

…concerning his Son, having been from seed of David according to flesh, appointed Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness from resurrection of the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord… (Rom. 1:3-4*)

Jesus is made Lord and Christ, appointed Son of God at the right hand of YHWH by virtue of his resurrection from the dead, and this is what differentiates him from David.

Significantly, after he is accused of blasphemy, some of the council goad him to “Prophesy” or “Prophesy to us, you Christ” (Matt. 26:68; Mk. 14:65).

For more on the flaws in Pitre’s argument about the Son of Man see this post.

Jesus is not deified after the resurrection

In a section in the final chapter of Jesus and Divine Christology, on “Implications,” Pitre refutes the argument that Jesus was deified only after the resurrection (333-36). His argument is that the early Jewish followers of Jesus could not have come to the conclusion that he was divine on the grounds of the resurrection alone. Various first century Jewish figures were thought to have been raised from the dead: John the Baptist, Jairus’ daughter, the widow of Nain’s son, Lazarus. But “there is zero evidence that any of their Jewish contemporaries ever thought to deify or worship any of these figures as a result” (335).

Of course not.

My argument here is not that he was deified after his resurrection but that he was understood to have ascended into heaven and to have become part of the heavenly court, seated at the right hand of God, to rule throughout the coming ages.

The second important point to make is that the authority he would as Israel’s king was limited: he would not rule over all things in the way that the creator was sovereign over all things; he was a king who would rule over his people in the midst of his enemies. It is strictly a political appointment, and when the last enemy of his rule has been defeated, he will restore the kingdom to God the Father (1 Cor. 15:24-28).

To sum up…

In the closing paragraph of the book, Pitre asserts 1) that Jesus spoke and acted “as if he were a divine messiah”; 2) that the Judeans thought he had spoken and acted blasphemously; and 3) that the early church took centuries to work out how Jesus could be a “divine messiah” and remain distinct from the one God because “Jesus himself had spoken and acted as if he were divine without abandoning early Jewish monotheism” (351).

My view is 1) that Jesus spoke and acted as if he knew that he was destined to become the heavenly judge and ruler of reformed Israel—and that “divine messiah” is biblically incoherent; 2) that such claims to a decisive and divisive eschatological authority were considered blasphemous by the Jews; and 3) that the Greek church understandably reduced the Jewish apocalyptic scenario, which was an engagement with history, to the painstaking ontological distinctions of trinitarian orthodoxy, leaving biblical history behind.