Reply to Smart 187God and a covenant between him and the Jews his chosen people. It relates
in turn the birth of Jesus, the teaching of John the Baptist that the Messiah
was at hand, the development of Christ’s mission through gathering disciples
and preaching the priority of the Kingdom of God; his extensive use of
parable and his miraculous deeds; his entry into Jerusalem prior to Passover
(around the year 30 AD), the disturbance with the money-changers in the
Temple, the last supper, his arrest and appearance before the Jewish high
priest and his conviction for blasphemy in describing himself as ‘Messiah’ and
‘Son of God’, his transfer to Pilate who had him crucified for claiming to be
‘king of the Jews’; Christ’s death on the cross, his burial, then subsequent
appearance to various followers individually and collectively, and his final
departure ‘into heaven’.
In suggesting that this common core may be taken as it stands I am not
claiming that it is intrinsically plausible, let alone that it is self-authenticating.
The point is rather that whatever one wants to make of it there are no good
scholarly reasons for doubting that this is what was pieced together within the
lifetime of people who could and may have known Jesus, and that this is what
they sincerely believed. Whether one accepts it oneself is another matter, but
if one does not that is no good basis on which to doubt that the gospel writers
meant what they wrote. Arguments to the contrary tend to import historical
speculations less plausible than the narrative, or to make philosophical assump-
tions about what could or could not happen and then reconstruct the text as
deceitful or poetic.
Brandon’s account is of the former sort. It argues that since blasphemy was
an offence for a Jewish court, Jesus’ trial at the hands of Pilate could not have
been for that but only for sedition. Consequently, he must either have been,
or been perceived to have been, an agitator against the authority of the state.
In short, Jesus was a revolutionary (perhaps even a ‘Zealot’) not a claimant to
the title ‘Son of God’. Such limited plausibility as this account may possess
depends on not taking scripture seriously but assuming that it is foolish or
knavish. Smart quotes Brandon’s observation that one of the disciples is
called ‘Simon Zelotes’ and the implication that if Simon were a Zealot so too
might be his master. Well, to begin with the use of the term ‘zelotes’ to
identify a member of a revolutionary party only begins after the uprising of
66 – 70 and even then this was not its only meaning. Admittedly Luke prob-
ably comes after this date, but why suppose that in an account of 40 years
earlier he would choose to use an expression that did not then have a revolu-
tionary connotation? This interpretation is particularly contentious given that
‘zelotes’ (or in the Aramaic ‘cananaean’) had a definitetheologicalmeaning,
identifying a person as particularly zealous on behalf of the ‘law’, even to the
extent of enforcing it personally. Whatever its virtue or vice, this is a religious
not a political disposition.