Religion was thus the greatest and perhaps the only business in Jerusalem: any one who attacked religion, its representatives, its visible monument (which was the most famous and fruitful seat of religion), was necessarily considered an enemy of the people of Jerusalem, and especially of the prosperous and well-to-do.
Jesus with His Gospel threatened directly the positions and fees of these classes. If all the prescriptions of the Law were to be reduced to the practice of love, there would be no more place for the Scribes and Doctors of the Law who made their living out of their teachings. If God did not wish animal sacrifices and asked only for purity of soul and secret prayer, the priests might as well shut the doors of the Sanctuary and learn a new profession: those who did business in oxen and calves and sheep and lambs and kids and doves and sparrows would have seen their business slacken and perhaps disappear. If to be loved by God you needed to transform your life, if it were not enough to wash your drinking-cups and punctually pay your tithes, the doctrine and the authority of the Pharisees would be reduced to nothing. If in short the Messiah had come and had declared the Primacy of the Temple fallen and sacrifices useless, the capital of the cult would, from one day to the next, have lost its prestige and with the passage of time would have become an obscure settlement of impoverished men.
As a matter of course, Jesus, who preferred fishermen, if they were pure and loving, to members of the Sanhedrin; who took the part of the poor against the rich, who valued ignorant children more than Scribes, blear-eyed over the mysteries of the Scriptures, drew down on His head the hatred of the Levites, the merchants and the Doctors. The Temple, the Academy and the Bank were against Him: when the victim was ready they would call the somewhat reluctant, but nevertheless acquiescent Roman sword, to sacrifice Him to their peace of mind.
For some time the life of Jesus had not been safe. The Pharisees said that Herod had sought to kill Him from the days of His last sojourn in Galilee. Perhaps it was the knowledge of this that sent Him into Cæsarea Philippi, outside Galilee, where He predicted His passion.
When He came back to Jerusalem the High Priests, the Pharisees and the Scribes gathered about Him to lay traps for Him and take down His words. The uneasy and embittered crowd set on His track spies, destined to become false witnesses in a few days. If we are to believe John, the order was given to certain guards to capture Him, but they were afraid to lay their hands upon Him. The attack with the whips on the animal-sellers and money-changers, the loud invectives against the Scribes and Pharisees, the allusion to the ruin of the Temple, made the cup run over. Time pressed; Jerusalem was full of foreigners and many were listening to Him. Some disorder, some confusion might easily spring up, perhaps an uprising of the provincial crowds who were less attached to the privileges and interests of the metropolis. The contagion must be stopped at the beginning and there seemed to be no better way than to make away with the blasphemer. The wolves of the Altar and of business arranged a meeting of the Sanhedrin to reconcile law with assassination.
THE HIGH PRIEST CAIAPHAS
The Sanhedrin was the assembly of the chiefs, the supreme council of the aristocracy which ruled the capital. It was composed of the priests jealous of the clientele of the Temple which gave them their power and their stipends: of the Scribes responsible for preserving the purity of the law and of tradition: of the Elders who represented the interests of the moderate, moneyed middle-class.
They were all in accord that it was essential to take Jesus on false pretenses and to have Him killed as a blasphemer against the Sabbath and the Lord. Only Nicodemus attempted a defense, but they were able quickly to silence him. “What do we? for this man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation.” It is the Reason of State, the Salvation of the Fatherland which political cliques always bring out to screen with legality and ideality the defense of their particular profit.
Caiaphas, who that year was High Priest, settled their doubts with the maxim which has always justified in the eyes of the world the immolation of the innocent. “Ye know nothing at all nor consider that it is expedient that one man should die for the people and that the whole nation perish not.” This maxim in Caiaphas’ mouth, and on this occasion, and for what it meant, was infamous, and hypocritical like all the speeches made by the Sanhedrin. But transposed into a higher meaning and transferred into the Absolute, changing nation into humanity, the President of the circumcised patriciate was expounding a principle which Jesus Himself had accepted and which has become under another form the crucial mystery of Christianity. Caiaphas did not know—he who had to enter alone into the Holy of Holies to offer up to Jehovah the sins of the people—how much his words, coarse in expression and cynical in sentiment as they were, were in accord with his victim’s thought.
The thought that only the righteous can pay for injustice, that only the perfect can discount the crimes of the brute, that only the pure can cancel the debts of the ignoble, that only God in His infinite magnificence can expiate the sins which man has committed against Him; this thought, which seems to man the height of madness exactly because it is the height of divine wisdom, certainly did not flash out in the corrupt soul of the Sadducee when he threw to his sixty accomplices the sophism destined to silence their last remorse. Caiaphas, who together with the crown of thorns and the sponge of vinegar was to be one of the instruments of the Passion, did not imagine in that moment that he was bearing witness solemnly, though involuntarily, to the divine tragedy about to begin.