The Gospel of John and Christian Origins (7 page)

With reference to Julius Wellhausen’s commentaries on the Synoptic Gospels, published just over a century ago between 1905 and 1911, Rudolf Bultmann wrote (in English):

Written in 1926, these words are as true today as they were then and are no less appropriate as a defense of historical criticism against what its advocates call
the third quest
than they were as Bultmann used them, that is to say, as a defense of form criticism against attempts being made at the time to use the Synoptic Gospels as sources for the life of Christ.

So let us consider the significance of the simple fact that the Gospels were written many years after the events that they record. Though narrating events that took place in the first half of the first century
ce
, the evangelists were addressing themselves to their own contemporaries in the second half of the same century. So we have to bear in mind the differences between the social and political conditions prevailing during Jesus’ lifetime and those of the time of the composition of the Gospels.
^[2]
That these differences were so great is almost entirely consequent upon the catastrophic failure of the Jewish uprising against Rome in 66
ce.
In the remainder of this chapter I will illustrate these differences by reflecting on the significance of one expression (“chief priests and Pharisees”), which occurs five times in the Gospel of John (7:32, 45; 11:47, 57; 18:3), and twice in Matthew (21:45; 27:62), always in a context of these two groups’ murderous opposition to Jesus. I want to ask first how far this conjunction was plausible during Jesus’ lifetime (for the two groups arguably had at best an uneasy relationship), and, second, what it will have meant to John’s readers, living as they did in a period when the priests had lost their power and authority had reverted to the Pharisees.

If we are primarily concerned with the period of Jesus’ public career, the problem arises from the presence of the Pharisees; for in the passages in the Fourth Gospel where they are seen to be actively cooperating with the priests, they appear to be credited with much more than the moral authority they had throughout their history. We have already seen that John is not the only evangelist to implicate the Pharisees in this conspiracy. Matthew, who makes his animosity toward the Pharisees all too plain, uses the conjunction “chief priests and Pharisees” at one point, like John, in telling of an attempt to arrest Jesus (21:45-46; cf. 27:62). Mark, surprisingly early in his Gospel, concludes a series of controversy stories by declaring that “the Pharisees went out, and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy him” (Mark 3:6).

First, though, let us reflect on the authority of the chief priests,
^[3]
which is best understood from a consideration of the historical context. At least from the time of Ezra, in the second half of the fifth century
bce
, the high priest was not just a priest but a prince, the political leader of the nation. The authority of the high priest was at its height during the reign of the Hasmonean priest-kings, a period of some eighty years (142–63
bce
), the only time in the Second Temple era that Israel could claim to be truly independent of any foreign power. This period of independence came to an end in 63
bce
, when the reigning king Aristobulus was defeated by the Roman general Pompey. Aged forty-three at the time, Pompey was then the most powerful man in the western world. Two years later, celebrating a magnificent triumph in Rome, he forced Aristobulus to walk in front of his chariot. The last of the Hasmonean priest-kings was Aristobulus’s son, Antigonus, who reigned (with the consent and approval of Rome) for a brief three years, between 40 and 37
bce
, when Herod the Great finally succeeded in gaining control of Jerusalem and getting him killed. The Roman authorities, who had already taken charge of the appointment of the high priest (which meant that tenure of this office was no longer for life), passed on their power of appointment to Herod. Having no intention of restoring power to the priests, Herod withdrew their hereditary rights permanently; moreover, his own choice did not always fall upon a member of one of the traditional priestly families. The power of appointment rested with Herod and his son Archelaus until 6
ce
, when Archelaus (never given the title of king) was dismissed and exiled by the emperor Augustus. Rome then took back the right to appoint the high priest and exercised it, through the governors of the province of Syria, until the fall of the temple in 70
ce
.

Since some of the governors used this power of appointment quite frequently, besides the incumbent high priest there were often several ex–high priests around. All of them had at one point held the actual title, so the historian Josephus refers to them by the plural form of the word. The translation “chief priests” (never “high priests” in the plural) reflects the fact that only one of them could be high priest at a time. Josephus also occasionally used the term of members of the four leading families who had not in fact officiated as high priest. (In any case they were a privileged lot, aristocrats.) “Different races,” he comments, at the beginning of his
Life
, “base their claim to nobility on various grounds; with us a connection with the priesthood is the hallmark of an illustrious line” (1.1). In what he says next he emphasizes that this is really true only of a relatively small number of families, of which his own was the most eminent. And he goes on to list his own pedigree, a series of high priests, starting from his own great-grandfather’s grandfather.

So how much power was the high priest left with under Roman dominion? The answer is, quite a lot. Not only did he perform all the major sacrifices in the temple, but he presided over the Sanhedrin, and hence over the civil affairs of the nation, and was still usually chosen from among a few privileged families. So under the sovereignty of the Romans and Herodians the families from which the high priest was mostly drawn were still an influential aristocracy (Josephus,
Ant.
2. 227-28), and the Sanhedrin, the supreme legislative council, retained its original character, which was that of a representation of the nobility, not a council of scholars, even though it will have included some Pharisees in its ranks. At the same time one consequence of the subordination of the high priest (and of the Sanhedrin) to the Roman authorities must have been a loss of some of their prestige in the eyes of the people.

So much, then, for the chief priests. What about the Pharisees?  In the first couple of centuries of the postexilic period (539–333
bce
) the two leading influences on Israel’s internal development were the priests and the scribes, reflecting the double focus of the life of the nation: the temple and the Torah—the law. In this early period there was no reported dissension between the two groups; but during the first two centuries of the so-called Greek era that followed (333–63) they grew farther and farther apart, until by the end of the Maccabean wars (175–135) they were in sharp opposition. The Sadducees, who were primarily aristocrats, keen on maintaining both political power and social standing, emerged from priestly circles.
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The Pharisees, whose first concern was always with the strict observance of the law, came from among the scribes, or Torah scholars, and were distinguished from the outset by their legal orientation.

It is not easy to give a clear picture of the Pharisees, largely because the society of ancient Israel was so different from our own. Of all countries it is perhaps present-day Iran that offers the closest analogue. We call these societies theocracies, a term that seems to suggest that they are governed by God. But their real rulers are the religious leaders. Think of the literal sense of the word hierarchy, formed from the same two words as ἀρχιερεύς, one meaning priest, the other chief or leader. Like modern Iran, whose supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is first and foremost a prominent cleric, ancient Israel, once it had recovered from the traumatic experience of exile in Babylon, and once the temple had been rebuilt, was a hierarchy in this, the etymological sense of the word, with the high priest as the supreme authority in the land. In the second place, just as present-day Iran, like other Muslim countries, claims that its people should live their lives according to the precepts of the Qur’an, so the lives of the people of ancient Israel were largely controlled by the Torah (as of course is true of Orthodox Jews today).

Accordingly we may think of Second Temple Judaism as an era when the lives of the people had a double focus: first there was the temple, which automatically ensured that the high priest in particular, but also more generally the priestly aristocracy to which he belonged, enjoyed great powers and privileges; second, there was the law or Torah. Like any other corpus of legal precepts, the Torah requires interpretation, and it was in this area that the Pharisees came to acquire a moral authority different from that of the priests. For most of what we know about the Pharisees we are indebted to the Jewish historian Josephus, who writes of them first as one of three different forms of philosophy: εἴδη φιλοσοφεῖται (
War
2.119) or Jewish sects (αἱρέσεις;
War
2.162), asserting that they are considered the most accurate interpreters of the νόμιμα, that is, the precepts of the Torah (
Life
191), and hold the position of the leading sect. Himself a member of the priestly aristocracy by birth, Josephus says that he began his political career by following the sect of the Pharisees (
Life
12), a remark that illustrates one crucial difference between the two groups: you are
born
a priest, you
choose
to be a Pharisee. (It should be added that it is quite wrong to think of the Pharisees as a sect in the sense of a religious group that has seceded from the main body.)

The history of the Pharisees is far too long and complicated to be discussed in detail here, but two events recounted by Josephus illustrate the nature of their authority. The first of the Hasmonean priest-kings, John Hyrcanus I (134–104
bce
) regarded them with some favor early in his reign, but when they subsequently urged him to give up the high priesthood, he responded angrily by abrogating previous legislation that had favored Pharisaic teaching (Josephus,
Ant.
13.288-98). Some time later (76–69), under the reign of Queen Alexandra, the widow of Hyrcanus’s son, the violent and irascible Alexander Jannaeus, they came into favor again: Alexandra put them in charge of the internal affairs of the nation, with the result that for a short period of six or seven years they came to dominate Jewish public life.

These episodes show, first, that by the closing decades of the second century
bce
at the latest, the Pharisees had become a political interest group, eager to attain as much authority as they could over the Jewish people, but also, second, that they could not manage this without the consent of the government in power at the time.
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The fortunes of the Pharisees during the long reign of Herod the Great (37–4
bce
) confirm these conclusions, since once again they enjoyed Herod’s support early in his reign but lost it when they allied themselves with a faction that opposed him. In this respect things were the same under the Roman governors (6–66
ce
): the Pharisees won political clout by ranging themselves alongside the imperial power. In an attempt to avert Roman wrath, Josephus tells us, the most powerful people of Judea, shortly before the outbreak of the Jewish war, faced with what seemed to be certain disaster, assembled with the chief priests and the most notable Pharisees (
War
2.411). So during Jesus’ lifetime, when both priests and Pharisees were collaborating with the Roman authorities, we should not be surprised when John tells us repeatedly that they joined forces in a matter of common concern. Nevertheless, a word of caution is in order. For reading the Gospels today and focusing on the story of Jesus, we can all too easily attach as much importance to the Pharisees as to the priests and, furthermore, associate the whole Pharisaic movement with the handful of men who may have joined with the senior members of the Sanhedrin in persecuting Jesus. When the term
Pharisees
is used in the Gospels to refer to people cooperating with the chief priests, we should probably understand it to refer, as it does in the passage from Josephus I have just quoted, to the most notable among them. With this proviso, the conjunction “chief priests and Pharisees,” used as it is in John’s Gospel exclusively in contexts where they join forces to arrest Jesus and cause him to be condemned by the Roman authorities, makes perfect sense.

Should we conclude, therefore, that these passages are historically reliable? By no means. The decision to seek Jesus’ death is ascribed by Mark (14:1) and, following him, Luke (22:2) to “the chief priests and the scribes,” while Matthew, in the same context, writes of “the chief priests and the elders” (27:1). John’s only mention of the scribes and the elders is in the spurious account of the woman taken in adultery (8:2, 9). When he implicates the Pharisees, along with the chief priests, in the two attempts on Jesus’ life—first in the earlier episode in the temple (7:32, 45) and then in the final, successful, effort (11:47, 57; 18:3)—he is probably retrojecting his current enmity with the Pharisees back into the story. It could be said that for him the coupling “chief priests and Pharisees” is equivalent to “the Jews” in the typically hostile sense in which he uses this appellation. But in the two contexts in which a decision is taken to have Jesus arrested and killed, the fourth evangelist needs a more specific designation—though whether he was aware that the Pharisees (or some of them) did on occasion cooperate with the chief priests is open to doubt. We should never forget Wellhausen’s salutary warning concerning sources and Bultmann’s reminder of it, quoted at the beginning of the present chapter. Of course John wanted to tell the story of Jesus, but only because, as newly remembered, it had an immediate bearing on the life of his community. In certain respects the Fourth Gospel resembles Shakespeare’s history plays, insofar as Shakespeare too was prepared to play fast and loose with the historical facts if by doing so he could shed his own light upon what he found in his sources. Shakespeare was not a historian; nor was John. They were much less concerned with historical accuracy than with putting their own particular slant on the story they were telling.