“As soon as the first daylight had come (dès les premiers lueurs du jour), a reunion was held at the house of (chez) the chief priest,” where it was without doubt [!] arranged that they should content themselves with denouncing the Galilean prophet to the Roman authority as a disturber and a false Messiah. But it was necessary to arrange the terms of the accusation and distribute the rôles, to get together and prepare the witnesses. These measures were soon taken. As soon as morning had come (dès le matin) the priests brought their prisoner chained before the tribunal of Pontius Pilate.[6]
One certainly cannot call this manipulation of the texts “superficial.” It is sheer deliberate dissolution and reconstruction of the narrative, by way of substituting something more plausible for the incredible original, when all the while the credibility of the original is the thesis maintained. And yet even the reconstruction is so thoughtlessly managed that we get only a slightly less impossible account. Only a scholar who never followed the details of a legal process could suggest that the task of hunting up witnesses and arranging a procedure could be carried through between “earliest dawn” and “morning.” And for the headlong haste of such a procedure, only an hour or so after the arrest of the prisoner, no explanation is even suggested. A violent impossibility in the record, destructive of all faith in its historicity at this point, is sought to be saved by a violent redaction which simply “makes hay” of the very documents founded on. And this illicit violence is resorted to because M. Loisy recognizes that if he is to retain a historical Jesus at all he must bring the whole trial story into a historical shape. He certainly had cause to take drastic measures. Long ago it was pointed out that by Jewish law a prisoner must not be condemned to death on the day of his trial: Judicia de capitalibus finiunt eodem die si sint ad absolutionem; si vero sint ad damnationem, finiuntur die sequente.[7] This might alone suffice to “bring into doubt” the priestly trial; to say nothing of the modern Jewish protest that a capital prosecution and execution on either the day after or the day of the Passover, at the instance of the High Priest, was unthinkable.[8] There were good reasons, then, for seeking to found on the trial before Pilate.
Let us now survey broadly the process of historical criticism thus far. 1. At an early stage the reconstructors gave up as pure fiction the third trial before Herod, which appears solely in Luke. They did not ask what historical knowledge, or what sense of history, can have existed in a community among which such an absolute invention found ready currency. 2. The next step was to reject as “unhistorical” the narrative of the fourth Gospel, in which Jesus (a) is examined by Annas the high priest, but in no sense tried; (b) is then sent bound to Caiaphas the high priest; (c) is immediately passed on from Caiaphas to Pilate, who examines him within doors while the priests remain outside, there being thus no Jewish witnesses; (d) tells Pilate “My kingdom is not of this world,” and convinces him that he is not punishable. Rejecting this account, as they well might, the reconstructors failed to ask themselves what such an invention signifies. 3. Next disappears the so-called historical narrative of the trial before the high priest and chief priests in the synoptics.[9] That in turn, taken on its merits, is found flagrantly incredible; and now M. Loisy in effect puts it aside, reducing it to a fundamentally different form.
Three of the trial stories are thus in turn rejected as hopelessly unhistorical. And now we are invited to regard as “incontestable” the fourth, the trial before Pilate as related in the synoptics; the Johannine version being dismissed as fiction. In the scientific sense of the word[10] the rejected stories have been classed as myths. And still we are told that the “myth-theory” is outside discussion.
Yet, even in coming to the trial before Pilate, M. Loisy has to begin by noting the improbability that the entire sanhedrim should have attended it, as is alleged by the synoptics. “In the minds of the evangelists the sanhedrim represents the Jews, and it was the Jews who caused the death of Jesus. Hence the general expressions which the redactors used the more willingly because they were very incompletely informed on the facts.”[11] Still, the trial must stand good. Judas goes the way of myth; but the unintelligible procedure of Pilate must be salved. With his general loyalty to the facts as he sees them M. Loisy notes, with Brandt, that in the synoptics as in John there is no Jesuist eye-witness or auditor to report for the faithful what took place. “Here begin the gaps in the Passion-history,” remarks Brandt.[12] “Tradition could learn only by indirect ways the general features of the interrogation and the principal incidents which passed between the morning of Friday and the hour of the crucifixion,” says Loisy.[13] The student really concerned to get at history is compelled to pronounce that the record thus avowed to be mainly guesswork is myth. Let us take the report as we have it in [Mark]:—
And straightway [after the condemnation by the priests] in the morning the chief priests, with the elders and scribes and the whole council, held a consultation, and bound Jesus and carried him away, and delivered him up to Pilate. And Pilate asked him, Art thou the King of the Jews? And he answering saith unto him, Thou sayest.... And Pilate again asked him, saying, Answerest thou nothing? behold how many things they accuse thee of. But Jesus no more answered anything; insomuch that Pilate marvelled.
To this meagre record, in which a capital case is carried before the governor without the slightest documentary preliminaries, and in which he begins to interrogate before a word has been said about the indictment, Matthew adds nothing save the story of Pilate’s wife’s dream, which the reconstructors are fain to dismiss; while Luke, who sees fit to premise specific charges of anti-Roman sedition, follows them up simply by Pilate’s question and Jesus’s assenting answer; and then, quite unintelligibly, makes Pilate declare “unto the chief priests and the multitudes, I find no fault in this man.”
What can it mean? All the exegetes now agree that the “Thou sayest” of Jesus has the force of “I am.”[14] By avowing that he called himself King of the Jews he committed a very grave offence towards Rome, unless he explained the title in a mystic sense; and the records exclude any such explanation. In Mark and Matthew the effect is the same: Pilate finds no guilt, and proposes release; but yields to the multitude and the priests. Could any serious student bring himself to regard this as history unless he presupposed the historicity of the crucifixion and was ready to let pass any semblance of motivation for it?
Once more we must affirm that the documents merely reveal entire ignorance of any judicial procedure. Pilate finally puts to death a Jewish prisoner at the request of the sanhedrim and the multitude on a charge for which he finds no evidence. That Pilate should make light of a Jew’s life is indeed easily to be believed: he is exhibited to us by Josephus as an entirely ruthless Roman; but both the synoptics and the fourth Gospel present him in an entirely different light; and no record or commentary makes it intelligible that the Roman governor should crucify a politically unoffending Jew for a purely ecclesiastical Jewish offence. The offence against Rome he is expressly represented as finding imaginary; and yet on the other hand the offence as avowed is very real. By the method of mere accommodation or partial critical rationalism the ascription of the prosecution to the Jews is accounted for as the result of the later developed anti-Judaism of the Christians. But on that view what historical basis have we left? If the later Christians could invent the trial and the Resurrection, what was to prevent their inventing the crucifixion? M. Loisy admits that if the trial goes the historicity of Jesus goes with it; then the crucifixion becomes myth. To say that this is impossible is to beg the question: the myth theory offers the solution.
Given the datum of an original cult-sacrament which had grown out of an ancient ritual-sacrifice, the crucifixion is the first step towards the establishment of a biography of Jesus. A trial and a condemnation, again, are necessary preliminaries to that; and when we critically examine these we find that they are patently unhistorical. Upon no theory of historicity can their contradictions and impossibilities be explained. Once we make the hypothesis, however, that the crucifixion is itself myth, the imbroglio becomes intelligible.