“King of the Jews” and the Disciples’ Perspective
“King of the Jews” and the Disciples’ Perspective
In the Gospels, Pilate ordered Jesus executed on the charge of sedition, for claiming kingship. Most scholars hold that this charge against Jesus as “king of the Jews” (Mk 15:2, 9, 12, 26) is historical.12 First, it fits what we know of the period. As we shall observe in ch. 21, the priestly aristocracy would arrest and the Romans execute anyone who offered the slightest grounds for suspicion of treason against Rome (grounds that could include reports about acclamations at the triumphal entry, Mk 11:8-10). Likewise, Romans crucified many self-proclaimed kings and their followers.13
Moreover, Christians would not have invented the charge “King of the Jews.” It does not reflect any traditional Christian confession; Jesus’ “you say” in the tradition (Mk 15:2) suggests that it is not even the title the tradition believed that Jesus would have emphasized. More importantly, Christians would have hardly invented the claim that Jesus was crucified on these grounds, since such a claim invited potential repression for themselves as well (cf. Acts 17:7).14 As broadly as “treason” could be defined in Roman law15 and especially in Sejanus’s Rome,16 the charge of claiming to be a king on the part of an otherwise unimportant provincial might require little investigation to secure condemnation. Ironically, Pilate, though known from an inscription and from Jewish sources, appears in extant Roman history only as the governor who ordered Jesus’ execution.17
Once we grant that Jesus was executed on this charge, his immediate context makes skepticism about his messianic claim implausible. Both Pilate (who had Jesus executed) and the earliest extant views of Jesus’ followers on the question portray Jesus as a Jewish king. Yet neither Pilate nor the disciples got the idea from each other; certainly the later church did not get the idea from Pilate. What source did Pilate and the disciples have in common? Surely Jesus himself is the likeliest source. Or did both Pilate and the disciples, who were privy to more information about Jesus than we are, coincidentally both misinterpret him — the only true interpreters being modern skeptics of the claim? (Modern skeptics, incidentally, must explain away all the early textual evidence for the claims and then argue from the silence that remains.)
His disciples claimed him to be Messiah; his execution as king indicates that others believed that he considered himself Messiah.18 It is inherently likelier that Pilate and the disciples shared in Jesus a common source for this idea than that the disciples derived it from Pilate or that Pilate got it from renegade disciples who affirmed something that their teacher denied. That Jesus is the common source is a likely inference, and is more than that: it is in fact what our only extant sources claim.
E. P. Sanders thus thinks that many scholars have been too cautious about assuming that Jesus believed he was a king:
Jesus taught about the kingdom; he was executed as would-be king; and his disciples, after his death, espected him to return to establish the kingdom. These points are indisputable. Almost equally indisputable is the fact that the disciples thought that they would have some role in the kingdom. We should, I think, accept the obvious: Jesus taught his disciples that he himself would play the principal role in the kingdom.20
“Messiah” was a Jewish category, not a Gentile one, so the suggestion that the title was invented by later Gentile Christians can be rightly deemed hopeless. “Christ” was a natural way to translate “Messiah” in Greek,21 hence it translates “anointed one” (not just in the royal sense) regularly in the Septuagint. But as we have noted, because that term in regular Greek usage simply meant “ointment” — an image the royal nature of which was wholly unintelligible to most Greeks22 — Paul in the Diaspora normally uses it as Jesus’ surname rather than as a title,23 in contrast to the more primitive usage in the Gospels.24
A primary objection that scholars traditionally raised against Jesus claiming to be messiah was that the sources portray him accepting the claim only privately and at the end of his ministry. We shall examine this “messianic secret” below, but first should note that even where the Gospels note Jesus as messiah, they qualify the traditional sense of messiahship.