The passion stories play a special role in the New Testament. They don’t teach abstract theology, like the letters of Paul. Nor are they collections of sayings, like the parables. They are narratives, the longest in the Christian Bible, that track the final days of Jesus through his execution as a criminal and the scattering of his scandalized followers-from Gethsemane to the grave. Unlike some other religious figures, such as the Buddha, how Jesus died matters greatly to Christians. It would be a very different religion if Jesus had suffered a fatal heart attack on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
How reliable, though, are the passion stories? There’s the rub. In the last few years, dozens of polemical books have been published rejecting the passion stories as pious-even pernicious-fabrications. Armed with the latest tools of Biblical analysis, maverick scholars have won headlines for theories that advance a radically different Jesus from the crucified Christ of tradition. Among members of the Jesus Seminar, a group of 77 scholars who meet twice a year to vote on which words of Jesus really came from his mouth, there are some who argue that the “real” Jesus was an illiterate populist reformer (page 53). For Roy Hoover, professor of religion at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., the aim of the Seminar is to “rescue Jesus from the spin doctors” who wrote the Gospels.
But there are about 4,800 Scripture scholars in the United States, and most of their work rarely attracts popular attention. Now, one of the most revered New Testament scholars, Father Raymond E. Brown, has just published a monumental study, “The Death of the Messiah,” an exhaustive, 1,608-page commentary on the last days of Jesus. Twenty years in the making, Brown’s two-volume work (Doubleday. $75) assesses the work of more than 2,000 scholars. His range is encyclopedic, covering Christian and Jewish research in nearly a dozen ancient and modern languages. The result: a stunning array of fresh insights into how the passion stories came into being and what-scene by scene-the four Evangelists really say about the arrest and crucifixion of Jesus.
The outline of Jesus’ life is not in doubt. He preached; was considered a healer and miracle-worker; was arrested, tried by Jewish authorities, convicted and executed by Roman officials sometime between A.D. 30 and 33. Beyond that, scholars often disagree on which details in the Gospels are historically accurate. Although Jesus’ trial and death were public events, attested to by non-Christian historians, the Evangelists were not eyewitnesses to the incidents they describe. Composed 35 to 70 years after the Crucifixion, the Gospels are proclamations generated by the early church. They were based on memories and traditions kept alive through the oral traditions of preaching and teaching. Even now, scholars are unable to identify the actual authors or pinpoint where the men called Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote their stories. And so scholars-believers and skeptics alike-ask questions. Who really was responsible for the death of Jesus? Exactly what crime did he commit? Why do the four Gospels differ in the stories they tell? Can they really be trusted?
In sharp contrast to vivisections of the Gospels, Brown, a Roman Catholic priest, treats the four passion stories as magnificent dramas. Otherwise, he remarks, “their work would not have moved so many people-artists and simple folk alike-for so many centuries.” The meaning of each passion story, he insists, cannot be separated from the author’s powerful narrative effects. In Brown’s view, each Evangelist was a master of composition, arranging his material to sustain a story line revealing how, “in Jesus, God’s plan for his Kingdom was achieved.” Through Brown’s own vigorous prose the familiar drama of Holy Week, the ageless characters-above all, a primal Jesus-are born again.
A sampling from his scene-by-scene approach:
Of the four Gospels, Mark’s scene on the Mount of Olives is uniquely dour and tragic. As Brown reads it, the disciples not only abandon their leader, fearful that they, too, will be arrested, but lose faith in Jesus until after the Resurrection. Distressed and utterly alone, Jesus repeatedly prays to his father, asking that the “cup” of his imminent suffering and death be taken from him. What readers often fail to notice, says Brown, is that Jesus is asking God to deliver him from the same fate that his disciples will refuse to share-and for which he soundly rebukes them. But God does not answer his prayer. Despite his weakness, Jesus finally accepts his fate in an act of total obedience. Mark’s Jesus is the most human of the four portraits, afraid as any mortal facing death. It was written, Brown believes, for a persecuted Christian community-possibly in Rome-where many had rejected martyrdom. Mark, he suggests, is assuring them that Jesus himself struggled with a tortured, ignominious death.
HE HIMSELF WITHDREW from (the disciples) about a stone’s throw, knelt down and began to pray: “Father, if it be your will, take this cup from me. Yet not my will but yours be done.” And now there appeared to him an angel from heaven bringing him strength, and in anguish of spirit he prayed more urgently; and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground. Luke 22: 41-44
THE ENCOUNTER WITH the angel is mentioned only by Luke. For centuries scholars have debated whether this was a later addition to the Gospel, perhaps a second-century message to Christian martyrs facing ugly deaths. Scholar Raymond Brown, author of “Death of the Messiah,” credits Luke’s authorship and notes, too, that the whole passage instructs Christians on the proper method of prayer: kneeling, not prostrate.
In this scene, Judas betrays Jesus to his adversaries by identifying him with a kiss. Matthew, Luke and John report that one of Jesus’ disciples (John identifies him as Simon Peter) responds by cutting off the ear of one of the high priest’s servants. Jesus, however, rebukes this act; in Luke, who consistently portrays Jesus as a healing and forgiving Savior, he even restores the severed ear. Through careful analysis of the texts, Brown concludes that this is one of a number of places where the written Gospels incorporate reactions to previous oral preaching. For the earliest generation of believers, he surmises, it was a burning question whether Jesus would want them to resist arrest. The answer, as it emerges in this Gospel scene, is an unequivocal “no.”
HE CAME UP TO JESUS TO kiss him; but Jesus said, “Judas, would you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” When his followers saw what was coming, they said, “Lord, shall we use our swords?” And one of them struck at the high priest’s servant, cutting off his right ear. But Jesus answered, “Stop! No more of that!” Then he touched the man’s ear and healed him. Luke 22:47-51
ALL THE GOSPELS DESCRIBE the attack on the priest’s servant, and in three Jesus rebukes his armed defender (Matthew 26:52, “All who take the sword, by the sword will perish…”). But only Luke refers to the miracle healing. This is, according to scholar Brown, an example of Luke portraying Jesus as “savior” during the passion itself. It may also be a reference to Isaiah: “By his bruises we are healed.”
This scene, which each Evangelist treats differently, is one of the most sensitive parts of the passion for Jewish-Christian relations. Some Christian scholars focus on the Jews as the agents responsible for condemning Jesus to death. Others claim it was the Romans, not the Jews, who sealed his fate. The Gospels themselves offer evidence to support various conclusions. After minute analysis, Brown favors the opinion-following John-that some Jewish authorities wanted Jesus executed, decided this at a meeting among themselves and merely interrogated him after his arrest.
But on what grounds? Sifting a broad range of opinion, Brown concludes that one major reason was religious: Jesus was considered a blasphemer. “I think he was seen as arrogant in making claims that belong to God alone,” he says. But he finds other reasons as well. “Jesus did something to threaten the temple,” he notes, which was at the center of Jerusalem’s economic life, And any threat to the temple was of grave political concern to Rome.
After examining what is known about Roman legal procedure, Brown doubts that Pontius Pilate put Jesus through anything like a modern trial. The Gospels offer little guidance, he says, since they are stories, not transcripts. Luke’s account, he argues, may have been influenced by what the Evangelist wrote of the trials of Stephen and Paul in the Book of Acts. Matthew’s account is unique in the vivid stories of the suicide of Judas, of the dreams of Pilate’s wife and of the governor’s now infamous act of washing his hands “of the blood of this just man.” Matthew’s blood imagery stains all of the drama’s principal characters-Judas, the Roman soldiers, Pilate, the high priest and “the people” who clamor for Jesus’ death. This literary device, Brown comments, “is Matthew’s way of saying that no one can escape responsibility for the death of Jesus.”
John’s trial scene is longer and dramatically very different. “It is not the trial of Jesus before Pilate,” Brown writes, “but the trial of Pilate before Jesus.” When Pilate asks his prisoner, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus retorts that that is not the issue. For John’s Jesus the issue is truth. Here, as throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus is always the son of God and thus always in control of his own destiny. “You have no power over me,” he tells a quaking Pilate.
THEN THE SOLDIERS … stripped him and dressed him in a scarlet cloak; and plaiting a crown of thorns they placed it on his head, and a stick in his right hand. Falling on their knees before him, they jeered at him: “Hail, King of the Jews!” They spat on him, and used the stick to beat him about the head. Matthew 27: 27-31
FOR BROWN, THE MOCKery scene appears to date to the pre-Gospel, oral tradition. There was ample ancient buffoonery mimes, theater, carnivals, political abuse-to inspire Christian preachers. So, Brown concludes that “The content of what is described about the Roman mockery is not implausible, whether historical or not.”
Working from archeological evidence, Brown concludes that Jesus most probably died on the rocky rise now situated inside Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. How he died is another matter. Modern physicians writing in medical journals have tried to explain what caused his death. Many doctors concluded that he died of asphyxiation. “It’s as if they thought the Gospels offered a medical report on the body of Jesus of Nazareth,” Brown remarks. But again, the details are for narrative purposes: John, for example, has water and blood issuing from Jesus’ body-a symbol of his ‘pouring out the Holy Spirit on the early church.
Far more important are the last words attributed to Jesus on the cross. Mark and Matthew have him quoting a desperate line from Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?“signaling the utter abandonment of Jesus to God’s will. Luke quotes Psalm 31, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit,” which completes that Gospel’s vision of a son who dies at peace with his father. In John, Jesus remains in control of his life, even at the point of death. His last words are, simply. “it is finished,” thus dramatizing John’s theology of a God-sent Messiah who has completed his mission on earth. But what Jesus said-or if he said anything at all-Brown concludes, is one of those many aspects of Jesus’ life where history commends silence.
At 65, Brown is an emeritus professor at New York’s Union Theologial Seminary and one of the most productive experts on New Testament texts. “He’s a scholar’s scholar, the premier American in the field, above everyone else in terms of the volume, quality and maturity of his work,” says Southern Baptist Alan Culpepper, a professor of religious studies at Baylor University. “Brown’s work takes what are essentially the most difficult texts in Christian theology-and in Christian-Jewish relations-and explicates them with absolute fearlessness,” says Rabbi Bur-ton Visotzky, of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. “He goes wherever he thinks the evidence takes him. I count him among my rabbis.”
Brown has no interest in reconstructing another historical Jesus. Although he readily judges which elements he considers most credible as history, his main concern is “to explain in detail what the Evangelists intended and conveyed to their audiences.” Where radical scholars see impassable gaps between the passion stories and what actually occurred 2,000 years ago, Brown finds bridges to what he believes were the earliest Christians’ memories of their messiah. These bridges were built on primitive preaching and teaching, he argues, and even include elements of audience response in the final written versions. “Fifty percent of the passion story is about characters other than Jesus,” he notes, and their reactions to Jesus often reveal the concerns of first-century Christians.
But despite his evenhanded scholarship, Brown’s “Death of the Messiah” is certain to rub raw a number of religious nerves. The issue of Jewish involvement in the death of Jesus “is very scary,” says Princeton University scholar James Charlesworth. “Today there is hatred of Jews all over the world.” Unlike Brown, Charlesworth believes that “it is not entirely clear that the [Jewish] high priest was Jesus’ enemy.” For Richard Horsley, professor of religion at the University of Massachusetts, “it’s especially difficult to believe the charge of blasphemy against Jesus.”
Brown is well aware that the Gospels of Matthew and John are layered with anti-Jewish sentiment. That, he says, is partially explained by the Evangelists’ audiences, who were caught in the first-century tensions between the synagogue and e emergent Christian Church. But in a long and eloquent indictment of Christian charges of Christ-killing, the New York-born scholar argues that responsibility for Jesus’ death was limited and should not be confused with guilt. Like the prophet Jeremiah, he writes, Jesus was widely seen as a “disturber of the religious structures of his time.” Were Jesus to appear in our own day, Brown declares, he would probably be arrested and tried again. “Most of those finding him guilty would identify themselves as Christians,” he writes, “and think they were rejecting an impostor.”
Was Jesus a political revolutionary, then, the Che Guevara of his time? Brown resolutely rejects this view, one often favored by liberation theologians and social activists. Reversing a number of popular assumptions, Brown argues that the political atmosphere in the years Jesus preached was remarkably pacific for a country under foreign domination. Indeed, unlike the Jewish kings who preceded him, Pilate himself was not a tyrant, Brown finds. Yet this judgment is unlikely to sway other scholars who insist that Jesus led a populist uprising in rural Galilee. To Sanford Lowe, professor of religion at Santa Rosa Junior College in California, Jesus remains “a barefoot preacher to the poor,” the Jewish equivalent of Steven Biko, the South African anti-apartheid activist.
Can the Jesus of history ever be separated from the Gospels’ Christ of faith? As “The Death of the Messiah” makes painstakingly clear, the four Evangelists drew heavily on the psalms and books of the Hebrew prophets. Jesus’ agony on the Mount of Olives, for example, echoes the end of the Book of Zechariah. The image of Jesus as the suffering servant shadows the words of Isaiah. Judas strongly resembles the Judah in Genesis who sells Joseph for pieces of silver. And the psalms supply numerous quotes and details, including the vinegary wine that the centurion offers the crucified Jesus.
Did the early Christians merely hunt up relevant passages to equip their Lord with divine credentials? That is the view of scholars like Scripture scholar John Dominic Crossan of DePaul University in Chicago, a leading voice of the Jesus Seminar. But here, too, Brown takes a slightly different view. “Their minds were naturally imbued with Biblical images and phrases,” he says. “They were interested in the significance of what happened, and the only language they could use to answer that question was scriptural.”
Scholarly squabbles may not disturb the faith of ordinary believers. Yet they do have a way of affecting what is eventually taught and preached. In his recently published study of support groups, “Sharing the Journey,” Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow estimates that there are 900,000 Bible-study circles in the United States; they involve one adult in 10-and this does not include Sunday schools. Many of these adult students are naturally disturbed when they discover that their divinely inspired Bible is not literal history. But Brown, for one, thinks that the search for historical precision often misses the point. “One can believe that the Scriptures are the word of God without thinking that God chose to communicate only in historical accounts,” he writes. “Imaginative poetry, parables and didactic historical fiction are other possibilities.”
Such a variety of forms is found in the New Testament. And for all the debate they cause, they are the stories that guide the faith of Christians. For Brown, who also has a book on the infancy narratives, “The Birth of the Messiah,” Christian faith begins with an understanding of what the early church preached and proclaimed. But he refuses to complete his own quest for understanding with the obvious sequel: “The Resurrection of the Messiah.” Like most believers, he is reluctant to improve on Scripture. “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” wrote the author of the Book of Job. The rest would just be commentary.
BY NOW IT WAS ABOUT midday and a darkness fell over the whole land, which lasted until 3 in the afternoon: the sun’s light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus uttered a loud cry and said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit”; and with these words he died. Luke 23: 44-46
THE GOSPELS OFFER three different versions of the last words of Jesus. They can’t all be last. Mark and Matthew both have Jesus dying with the words of Psalm 22 on his lips: “Why have you forsaken me?” But Luke’s Gospel refers instead to Psalm 31 and pointedly has an unalienated Jesus addressing God as “Father.” Some mysteries of the Scripture are not meant to be solved.
THEY TOOK THE BODY OF Jesus and following Jewish burial customs they wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen cloth. Near the place where he had been crucified there was a garden and in the garden a new tomb, not yet used for burial; and there, since it was the eve of the Jewish sabbath and the tomb was near at hand, they laid Jesus. John 19:38-42
ONLY JOHN DESCRIBES the site of Jesus’ burial as a garden. The others talk of a tomb “hewn of rock.” There is no real contradiction. Jews of that era often were buried in gardens. Also, the prophet Nehemiah referred to King David’s garden tomb. Was John seeking a link to David, from whose line the Messiah was to come? Commentator Brown finds such symbolism attractive to John.
