Politics,
conspiracy, and assassination are not words typically associated with Jesus,
but they are fitting descriptions of the
circumstances surrounding Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion. Jesus was
executed by the Roman state for the alleged crime of sedition or insurrection.
The Gospels protest that Jesus was innocent of such charges and attribute the
guilt for Jesus’ death to the political machinations of Jewish
high priestly leaders. According to the Gospels, Jesus’ death was an
assassination, “the murder of a
prominent person or political figure by a surprise attack, usually for payment
or political reasons, motivated by religious, ideological, or military
motives.” Assassination is one of the oldest tools in
power politics, as old as recorded human history.
It was also a conspiracy, an "agreement" between two or more persons to commit a crime or achieve
some other secret goal. Conspiracies
have common features including illegal or sinister aims,
carefully orchestrated acts, and secret planning. That is, conspirators conspire. Unfortunately, the relatively neutral meaning of this term – which
simply involves a secret agreement between two or more parties to perform an
act – has picked up a derogatory meaning signifying a paranoid tendency to
detect the influence of some malign covert entity orchestrating
historical events. The term is now often used to dismiss historical claims that are considered to be too ridiculous, paranoid, unfounded, or irrational. Historians tend not to use the word, relegating it to theories which lack
veracity. A conspiracy theory, in other words, is often thought to be illegitimate knowledge. If the desired goal of a conspiratorial
assassination is to re-present the act as accidental by obscuring the real
parties responsible, then Jesus’ death - the result of a
conspiratorial alliance between the Jewish high priesthood and Pontius Pilate - seems to qualify. At least the authors of the Gospels seem to have thought
so.
The Gospels portray the Jewish high priest
– among other Jewish religious leaders – as secretly plotting Jesus’ death. Did
the author of Mark invent this “conspiracy?” Or was Jesus’ death the result of an “institutional
conspiracy” orchestrated in secret? The author of Mark presented Jesus’ death as part of a divine plan: the son of man must suffer and die at the hands of the religious
leaders. This explained why Jesus died ("for our sins"), but did so by constructing a conspiratorial narrative that over-exaggerated a political conspiracy between the high priests into a full-blown drama involving all "The Jews" (Matt 27:25). Now Jesus' death was not just a political execution based on religious
conflict, but a voluntary sacrifice for the sins “of many.” Jesus' death was a political assassination orchestrated by a small group of priests threatened by his authority and influence. It was then turned into a divine drama that set the Jews against Jesus, Jesus against Judaism, and Judaism vs. Christianity - all based on a tragic misunderstanding of history.
