Rome and the East
embodying different narrative structures. Any attempt to answer the ines-
capable question of ‘‘what really happened’’ must therefore involve a choice.
No arguments for any particular choice can be conclusive, but without such
a choice our selection of elements to prefer must remain merely arbitrary.
Given the necessity of choice, this paper offers the suggestion that, both as
regards the narrative of Jesus’ life and the culminating story of how he met
his death, we should give our preference to John.
The expression of such a preference can in itself be no more than a hy-
pothesis. That is to say that our position should be as follows: if, hypotheti-
cally, we accept John’s Gospel as offering us the best account which we have
of the steps which led to the crucifixion, what are the consequences?
Firstly, the arrest, successive examinations, and crucifixion of Jesus took
place not on the first day of Passover, but on the day before, from evening
to midday. The Last Supper was therefore not a paschal meal at which the
paschal lamb was eaten, following the custom by which, by extension, a cere-
mony originally conducted solely in public in the Temple had become also a
domestic ritual. Instead it was merely a meal on the night before. We would
thus have to accept that it is the Synoptic accounts which have turned it, not
very convincingly, into a paschal meal.^19
Secondly, we would have to accept the assertion, unique to John, that the
arrest of Jesus was carried out by a Roman cohort under a tribune, guided
by Judas and assisted by attendants sent by the high priests and Pharisees. If
so, that places him closer to the category of the long succession of popu-
lar religious leaders, all viewed as instigators of popular disorder, who are
known from the pages of Josephus, and all of whom, with their followers,
Jewish and Samaritan, were repressed by Roman forces. Jesus must by im-
plication have been viewed as being more like these than like the solitary
and apparently unbalanced pseudo-prophet, the other Jesus, arrested by the
Jewish magistrates at Tabernacles of.. (see above).
Most important of all, however, is the fact that John’s narrative, in which
Passover has not yet arrived, gives Passover a much more fundamental rele-
vance to what happened—and how—than do the Synoptics, which, while
describing these events as occurring on the first night and morning of Pass-
over, ignore the significance which we must presume to have attached to
it in real life. For it is indubitable that Passover was the most important of
the annual Jewish festivals in this period. Matthew and Mark, it is true, do
not claim any more than that the Jewish authorities arrested Jesus on that
night, examined him in the house of a high priest, and accused him before
. So, e.g., Segal (n. ), .