The Sentence Written Above Him

Of everything the gospels say about the death of Jesus, the detail a Roman official would have understood first is the placard. Mark records it in five Greek words, ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων, “the King of the Jews,” and calls it the inscription of the charge, ἡ ἐπιγραφὴ τῆς αἰτίας (Mark 15:26). The four evangelists disagree about a great deal in the passion, from the hour of death to the last words spoken, yet they agree on the substance of what Rome wrote over the man, and what Rome wrote was a political accusation. Somebody, in the governor’s judgment, had reached for a throne.

The punishment carried that meaning before any theology arrived to soften it. Cicero, prosecuting Verres in 70 BCE, called crucifixion crudelissimum taeterrimumque supplicium, the cruelest and foulest of penalties (In Verrem 2.5.165), and the force of his outrage depends on the assumption that a Roman citizen ought never to suffer it. The cross was for slaves, for bandits, for provincials who forgot their place. After Herod the Great died in 4 BCE and Judea erupted, the Syrian legate Quinctilius Varus crucified two thousand men (Josephus, Antiquities 17.295), a number meant to be remembered by everyone who walked past the bodies. Martin Hengel gathered the ancient testimony in Crucifixion in the Ancient World (1977), and the picture his sources give is of a penalty designed as public speech, the state addressing the conquered in the one language none of them could mistake.

So the story of the cross begins as a political story, and the gospels know it. John has the chief priests come to Pilate asking that the wording be turned from a statement into a claim, “that he said, I am King of the Jews,” and Pilate refuses them: “What I have written I have written” (John 19:21-22). John adds that the title was posted in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek (19:20), so that a pilgrim at Passover could read it in whatever tongue he had brought to the city. I have gone back and forth on whether that trilingual detail is John’s own embroidery. It may be, and nothing in the evidence allows me or anyone else to settle the matter, though an invented detail still tells us what its author believed the scene required, and John believed it required the charge to be legible to the world.

What deserves attention is how quickly the gospels go to work emptying the charge of content. Mark’s Jesus never claims the royal title in public before his arrest, and to Pilate’s direct question he answers σὺ λέγεις, “you say so” (Mark 15:2), a reply that concedes nothing a magistrate could write down. Inside the passion, every person who calls him king does it in mockery. The soldiers dress him in purple, crown him with thorns, and salute him (15:17-18), and the chief priests jeer at “the Christ the King of Israel” to come down from the cross (15:32). The title travels through the whole scene, but always in the mouths of enemies, so that a reader in Rome hears it as slander rather than report.

That move is the first thing The Gospel as Mirror sets out to trace. A charge that was true of someone has been fastened, in the telling, to someone of whom it was false, and Christian readers have spent nineteen centuries agreeing with the evangelists that the placard lied. The book asks a narrower and less comfortable question, which is whose charge it was in the first place.

Two Men Under One Name

The name was common, which is where the trouble starts. Josephus alone mentions a crowd of men called Ἰησοῦς, among them a high priest, Jesus son of Damneus, installed in 62 CE (Antiquities 20.203), and Jesus son of Ananias, the countryman who walked Jerusalem’s streets for seven years crying woe against the city until a stone from a Roman engine killed him during the siege (War 6.300-309). A modern reader hears “Jesus” as a word belonging to one person. A Judean of the first century heard Yeshua, a name about as distinctive as John in an English village roll, and needed a patronymic, a town, or a nickname to know which Yeshua was meant.

The Gospel as Mirror argues that the passion accounts preserve the memory of two of these men and fuse them. The first is a Galilean teacher of parables and sayings, the man whose birth Luke sets in the census of Quirinius (Luke 2:1-2), a census Josephus places in 6 CE (Antiquities 18.1-2), and whose Jerusalem opponents in John tell him, “Thou art not yet fifty years old” (John 8:57). In the book’s reconstruction, John preserves this man’s longer life and later debates, carried on into the early 50s, while the Synoptic passion belongs to someone else.

That someone else is a Herodian. Here the evidence has to be sorted with some care, because three different kinds of claim are stacked on top of one another. The source is Josephus, who lists among Herod the Great’s wives a Cleopatra of Jerusalem and names her two sons, Herod and Philip (Antiquities 17.21; War 1.562). Philip went on to rule as tetrarch until his death in 34 CE. His brother Herod drops out of the record. The inference, which Volume One develops from the order in which Josephus names the brothers (Mahlon H. Smith’s note in Into His Own first drew my attention to it), is that this Herod was still a child when his father died and was passed over in the final will, which would put his birth near 6 BCE. The reconstruction, and it is only that, is that this vanished son of Herod became a royal claimant in his own right.

On the question of his Davidic claim, what remains is the proposal that the claimant’s descent from David ran through his mother, and I should say directly that no ancient text names Cleopatra’s lineage at all. The proposal rests on a gospel passage rather than a genealogy. In Mark 12:35-37 the speaker asks how the scribes can call the Christ the son of David, when “David himself calleth him Lord; and whence is he then his son?” A Galilean craftsman’s son had no reason to raise that objection against himself. A prince whose father’s house was Idumean, and whose royal blood came by another line, had every reason to.

Matthew then supplies a detail that the later tradition worked hard to forget. In a number of witnesses to Matthew 27:16-17, among them Codex Koridethi, the manuscripts of family 1, and the Sinaitic Syriac, the prisoner offered to the crowd is “Jesus Barabbas,” and Pilate’s question becomes “Whom will ye that I release unto you? Jesus Barabbas, or Jesus which is called Christ?” Origen knew copies with this reading and was uneasy at the thought of a sinner bearing the name, and the Nestle-Aland text has printed the name in brackets since its twenty-seventh edition. Bar-abba means “son of the father.” For a man whose father was Herod the King, the epithet stops looking like a nickname and starts looking like a title, the kind of name a crowd would shout for a prince.

The Office Handed Over in the Garden

John’s version of the placard differs from the others in one small and telling way. Where Mark has only “the King of the Jews,” John’s reads Ἰησοῦς ὁ Ναζωραῖος ὁ βασιλεὺς τῶν Ἰουδαίων, “Jesus the Nazorean, the King of the Jews” (John 19:19). The charge names a man and a title together, and Volume One treats “Jesus the Nazorean” as precisely that, a title, a designation of office that could pass from one bearer to another the way a high priesthood or a governorship passed.

The Hebrew word the book uses for such an office is pequddah, פְּקֻדָּה, a charge or appointed oversight. It turns up in a verse every reader of Acts has met without noticing it. When the eleven gather to replace Judas, Peter quotes Psalm 109:8, “let another take his office,” where the Hebrew has pequddato, his office, and the Septuagint renders it ἐπισκοπή (Acts 1:20). The single passage in the New Testament that applies the vocabulary of a transferred office to a named individual applies it to Judas, which I found startling the first time I set the Hebrew beside the Greek and still find startling now.

The arrest in John reads, once the title is in view, like a handover. The soldiers arrive, and the man in the garden asks whom they seek. “They answered him, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus saith unto them, I am he.” When they fall back and ask again, he repeats the answer and adds a condition: “if therefore ye seek me, let these go their way” (John 18:4-8). In the reconstruction of Volume One, the man who steps forward to claim the name “Jesus of Nazareth” in that exchange is the Herodian claimant, the son of Cleopatra, the one the tradition would remember under two other names, Judas Iscariot and Jesus Barabbas. He takes the pequddah of the Galilean Teacher onto himself, and the Teacher goes his way.

Mark keeps the Teacher’s departure in two verses that have embarrassed commentators since antiquity. “And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: and he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked” (Mark 14:51-52). The Greek for the linen cloth is σινδών, the same word Mark uses a chapter later for the shroud Joseph of Arimathea buys (15:46). I changed my mind twice about this young man, and for a time I identified him with Herodion, the claimant’s son. My final position is that he is the Teacher, and that Mark has drawn the transfer of office as a garment abandoned in the dark, the linen left behind for the man who would be buried in it. The young man in white whom the women find inside the empty tomb (16:5) is, on this reading, the same Teacher, whom Mary Magdalene fails to recognize in John as well.

The verb that carries all this is παραδίδωμι, to hand over. Judas hands Jesus over (Mark 14:10), the priests hand him over to Pilate (15:1), and Pilate hands him over to be crucified (15:15). Appendix B of the book follows the verb back into Semitic territory through the root SKR, which in Isaiah 19:4 gives wesikkarti, “I will give over” the Egyptians into the hand of a cruel lord, and proposes that “Iscariot” belongs to this root rather than to a village. The same appendix sets beside it Philo’s account of Karabbas, the Alexandrian madman whom a crowd crowned with papyrus and saluted as lord in 38 CE to mock the visiting Agrippa I (In Flaccum 36-39). The etymology is the softest ground in the book, and I say so there; Semitic roots are generous to anyone who goes looking for them. What gives it weight is the convergence with other details, a claimant born in Egypt and a betrayer’s silver spent on a field “to bury strangers in” (Matthew 27:7).

The mirror of the book’s title is now in view. In the gospel, the crowd chooses Jesus Barabbas, he walks free, and Jesus the Nazorean dies. In the reconstruction, the son of Herod died under the title “Jesus the Nazorean,” and the Teacher left the garden naked and alive, so that the scene before Pilate shows the true outcome reversed, as a mirror reverses a face without changing a single feature of it.

Why the Story Had to Turn Over

Mark was written, on the dating I accept, in the years around 70 CE, when Titus had burned the Temple and Rome was celebrating the defeat of Judea as a founding victory of the new Flavian house. A book composed for readers in that world could not say what the placard had said. A sect whose founder had died as a Herodian prince claiming David’s throne, and whose members expected him to return as king, would have been a sect of insurgents in the eyes of any magistrate who read its scripture, and the Roman memory of 4 BCE, of 66 CE, of two thousand crosses along the roads, was long.

So the story turned over, and it turned over in a recognizable pattern. The Roman governor becomes reluctant, then innocent. Matthew gives Pilate a wife troubled by a dream (Matthew 27:19) and has Pilate wash his hands before the crowd (27:24). The royal claimant is divided and his parts distributed, the title passing to the man on the cross where only mockers speak it, the name and patronymic attaching to a prisoner the crowd sets free, and the act of handing over ending up as a disciple’s betrayal. John finishes the reduction in four Greek words, “Now Barabbas was a robber” (John 18:40). The word is λῃστής, which is also Josephus’s ordinary word for the men who fought Rome in the hills, and a reader who knew Josephus’s usage would have heard “insurgent” where a later reader hears “thief.”

I should be careful about how much intention to assign here, because the evidence gives us texts and not authors’ minds. I do not picture Mark writing with a cipher key in one hand. What the texts do show is that the gospels contain their own admissions of double speech, and those admissions are hard to explain away. In Mark 4:11-12 Jesus tells the inner circle that “unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: that seeing they may see, and not perceive.” In the middle of the apocalyptic discourse, Mark breaks the frame of his own story to speak past his characters to his audience: ὁ ἀναγινώσκων νοείτω, “let him that readeth understand” (Mark 13:14). A narrator who stops to tell his reader to understand is a narrator who expects some readers not to.

A blunter way to say it: the gospel had two audiences, and only one of them was supposed to get the joke. The outsiders were to see a peaceable teacher falsely accused, a governor who washed his hands, a bandit released by a fickle mob, and a traitor who hanged himself or burst open in a field, depending on which account one trusts. The insiders were to see, through the same sentences, the death of a king and the escape of a teacher. That doubleness is what makes the gospel a mirror rather than a window, and it is also what raises the question that brought me, by a long road, to a Roman freedman who wrote animal fables under Tiberius.

What Phaedrus Said About Slaves

Phaedrus, styled a freedman of Augustus in the titles of his manuscripts, was turning Aesop into Latin verse during the same reign in which Pilate governed Judea, from 26 to 36 CE. In the prologue to his third book, addressed to a patron named Eutychus, he stops to explain where the fable came from, and the lines deserve to be heard whole:

Nunc, fabularum cur sit inventum genus, brevi docebo. Servitus obnoxia, quia quae volebat non audebat dicere, affectus proprios in fabellas transtulit, calumniamque fictis elusit iocis. (Phaedrus, Fabulae 3, prologue 33-37)

“Now I shall briefly show why the genre of fables was invented. Slavery, exposed to punishment, because it did not dare to say what it wanted to say, carried its own feelings across into fables and slipped past false accusation by means of invented jokes.” Two words carry the weight of the passage. Calumnia is a courtroom term, the malicious charge brought by an accuser, and Phaedrus knew the courtroom from the inside. A few lines later he says that he widened Aesop’s footpath into a road, ego illius pro semita feci viam (line 38), and then complains that if his accuser, his witness, and his judge had been anyone other than Sejanus, he would admit he deserved his troubles. The fable had not protected him after all. Sejanus, the praetorian prefect who ran Rome for Tiberius until his fall in 31 CE, had seen through the animals.

The other word is transtulit, carried across, the verb from which Latin later drew translatio. People who cannot say a thing aloud go on saying it by moving it, the way a household moves its valuables into a room the bailiff will not think to search. Phaedrus’ first fable shows the method at work. A wolf and a lamb drink from the same stream, the wolf invents one charge after another against the lamb, and when each is answered he eats the lamb anyway, and the closing moral says the fable was written against men who crush the innocent with fabricated cases (Fabulae 1.1.14-15). A slave could recite that in a master’s hearing, and the master, unless he happened to be a Sejanus, would hear nothing but a story about animals at a stream.

I have to be careful here, since Phaedrus and Pilate touch in the evidence only at one remove. Philo claims that Sejanus wished to destroy the Jewish nation and that Tiberius, after the prefect’s fall, ordered his governors to leave the Jews undisturbed (Legatio ad Gaium 159-161). Some modern historians have gone further and made Pilate a Sejanus appointee, and I cannot follow them, because no ancient source says so. What can be said is narrower. The man who explained the fable as the speech of the punished and the man who wrote the placard over the cross served the same emperor in the same decade, under a regime in which saying the wrong thing to the wrong official could end a career or a life.

The analogy limps in one place, and I would rather show the limp than hide it. Phaedrus’ fables announce themselves as fables. In the prologue to his first book he promises a double gift, laughter and counsel for living (duplex libelli dos est), and no reader mistakes a talking wolf for a court record. The gospels present themselves as history, which made the disguise far more durable and far more dangerous, because a disguise that does not admit it is one can outlast the people who knew what lay beneath it. Within a few generations the masters who failed to recognize the form included the churches that read it aloud every Sunday. Tacitus, writing in the second decade of the second century, knew only that a certain Christus had been executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate under Tiberius (Annals 15.44), which is to say that Rome remembered the placard and nothing else, while the Christians had kept the story and forgotten the charge.

Phaedrus thought Aesop had cut a footpath and that he himself had widened it into a road. If Volume One is right, the evangelists did something larger with the same slave’s device, laying a road broad enough for an empire to travel for nineteen centuries, reciting at every station the death of a peaceable teacher under a false accusation, and never once stopping to ask whether the one sentence in the whole scene that Rome had written down in three languages might have been, about a different man of the same name, the truth.