A Political, Patriotic Jesus

THE BIBLE

The Gospels — the only detailed written records on the life of Christ — record that Jesus of Nazareth was condemned by the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem on a charge of blasphemy and some what reluctantly executed by the city's Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate. Historians have long been dissatisfied with this explanation, principally because of the discrepancies among the Evangelists' accounts, and their portrayal of Pilate:

acknowledged as ruthless and opportunistic by his contemporaries, he would scarcely have been concerned with the justice of Jesus' fate. In two newly published books, British Scholar S.G.F.

Brandon offers another interpretation:

he proposes that in Roman eyes Jesus was a dangerous political rebel who was executed by Pilate on the charge of sedition.

An ordained Anglican priest and a professor of comparative religion at the University of Manchester, Brandon is not the first to make this case, but he has marshaled the best arguments for it. In Jesus and the Zealots (Scnbners; $7.95) and The Trial of Jesus of Nazareth (Stein & Day; $6.95), Brandon pictures Jesus as a politically aware activist vigorously working against the Palestinian "Establishment"—the Roman occupying forces and Jerusalem's collaborationist Jewish aristocracy. As a champion of the poor, says Brandon, Jesus went so far as to lead an abortive raid on the Temple treasury to dispossess its money-hungry directors. The raid, disguised in the Gospels as a one-man assault on the profane money changers, quickly led to Jesus' denunciation by the high priests and then to his Roman trial. Far from dying ignominiously as a Jew rejected by his nation, Jesus in effect died a patriot's death, a rebel-martyr for his people.

Temple Trophies. Except for a few tantalizing hints ("I come not to bring peace but a sword"), little of Jesus' militancy appears in the Gospels. The reason, argues Brandon, was that Christianity early in its history underwent an earth-shaking trauma: the fall of Jerusalem. In A.D. 70, the legionaries of the Emperor Vespasian and his son Titus put down a four-year rebellion led by a group of Jewish rebels known as the Zealots, and destroyed the city. In Rome, where Titus returned in triumph brandishing trophies from the ruined Temple, feelings were running high against Jewish intransigence in general and the Zealot rebellion in particular. In this climate of fear, argues Brandon, Mark wrote the first Gospel for the young Roman church. Because his audience was already suspect as subversive, Mark wrote his account of Christ's life with the implicit purpose of clearing Christians of any involvement in Jewish rebellion.