186 A History of Judaism
not agree. Then the high priest stood up before them and asked Jesus, ‘Have
you no answer? What is it that they testify against you?’ But he was silent
and did not answer. Again the high priest asked him, ‘Are you the Messiah,
the Son of the Blessed One?’ Jesus said, ‘I am’ and ‘you will see the Son of
Man seated at the right hand of the Power,’ and ‘coming with the cloud of
heaven’. Then the high priest tore his clothes and said, ‘Why do we still need
witnesses? You have heard his blasphemy! What is your decision?’ All of
them condemned him as deserving death.Whatever the truth of the details of this narrative, the reason for which
Jesus was eventually crucified by order of Pontius Pilate was evidently
political, since the inscription on the cross stating the charge against
him read ‘The King of the Jews’. It is likely that the concern of Caiaphas
was similarly political. It was dangerous for the Jewish authorities to
have a large crowd gathering in Jerusalem in a state of eschatological
fervour on the eve of one of the great pilgrim festivals, regardless of the
content of Jesus’ preaching.^41
Whether Jesus actually claimed of himself to be the Messiah as
reported in Mark cannot now be known, but the frequent references to
him by the name Christ in the letters of Paul show clearly that this sta-
tus was ascribed to him by his followers after his death. What the name
implied is harder to pin down since, as we shall see (Chapter 8), Jewish
notions about the origins and functions of the predicted Messiah varied
greatly in this period. The word Christos conveyed no particular con-
notations at all in the epistles ‘of one called to be an apostle of Christ
Jesus by the will of God’.
Paul preached that ‘the Lord Jesus Christ’ was the Son of God, ‘the
Father of mercies and the God of all consolation’. The expression ‘Son
of God’ has many different meanings in Paul’s writings. It refers (as in
many parts of the Hebrew Bible) to Israel as a people, or to Christian
believers, as well as to Jesus. But the Gospels of Matthew and Luke link
Jesus’ sonship more specifically to his conception and birth, and the
Gospel of John goes further by describing his sonship as a relationship
which has existed from eternity, through which God has given his son
‘authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have
given him’. Ideas about the relationship of Jesus to God developed rap-
idly within the early Christian movement, culminating in the notion of
his divinity. But it is striking that for Paul, whose letters constitute the
earliest evidence for Christian thought, the most remarkable part of
Jesus’ career had come at the end, when he was ‘declared to be Son of