According to Dr. Wink, ” Brandon’s works reflect the spirit of the times in every bit the same way that the old ‘ liberal’ lives of Jesus reflected rationalist, Enlightenment Europe of the nineteenth century. Brandon is not the first to paint Jesus in the colors of a religio-political revolutionary, . . . but his is the first really thorough attempt for which the times were ripe.”

Having thus evaluated the significance of my interpretation in its historical context, Dr. Wink goes on to deal with the danger which he thinks might stem from its influence. He fears that some readers of my books will eagerly accept the interpretation set forth in them ” because they need Brandon’s Jesus in order to be operationally relevant in radical political circles “.

However, he warns against the danger of the outright dismissal of my views ” for reasons of orthodoxy, temperament, or vested interest “.  I must admit that I read this assessment of the influence of my writings with some astonishment and considerable concern. I had anticipated that my analysis of the tradition of the pacific Christ might have disturbed some representatives of orthodoxy ; but I never imagined that my conclusions about the attitude of Jesus to his nation’s cause against Rome would be welcomed in the ” radical political circles ” of which Dr. Wink apparently knows.

There is perhaps an unintentional irony in the fact that it is Dr. Wink who thinks that my service as a Regular Army Chaplain has led me to interpret Christian Origins in terms of military involvement, and yet he also thinks that I depict ” the Jesus which Social Christianity needs in order to justify involvement in revolution ‘. I do not intend in this lecture to answer all the points of criticism made by Professors Hengel, Wink and Klassen, or by other scholars. They do not question my acquaintance with the relevant evidence, but contest my interpretation of it.

On many points, of course, the evidential situation is such that several different interpretations may legitimately be made, and scholars must be content to state their case and leave it for others to choose according to their own criteria of preference. In this connection, too, I would mention the new edition (1969) of Josef Blinzler’s Der Prozess Jesa. In this valuable work of conservative scholarship, it is significant how much attention its author has felt obliged to give to what he calls the Zelotenhypothese.

However, in all cases, both for and against, it must be recognized that on the last analysis, decision is subtly influenced by considerations of a deeply personal kind, and from that assessment I must not except myself. But what is important, and on this point a notable advance has been achieved, is that it is now generally recognized by most of the critics that the extant evidence concerning Christian Origins is of such a nature historically that other interpretations, besides the traditional one, can be legitimately drawn. This is a topic that I now wish to develop in connection with an adverse aspect of the reaction aroused by my interpretation of Christian Origins.

In seeking, as a historian, to understand why the Romans executed Jesus of Nazareth for sedition, I have found myself obliged to question the explanation given of the event in the Gospels. This explanation, briefly, is that Jesus was innocent of such sedition, in fact, the Gospels maintain that he had actually endorsed the Roman Government of Judaea by ruling that the Jews should pay tribute to Caesar. That the Romans should have put one who thus supported their rule to death for sedition was due, according to the Gospels, to the plotting of the Jewish sacerdotal aristocracy and other Jewish leaders. These men hated Jesus and planned to destroy him from the start of his ministry. They finally succeeded in fabricating a charge of sedition against him, and forced a reluctant Roman governor, who recognized the innocence of Jesus, to order his crucifixion as a rebel.

This account of the death of Jesus is both sacrosanct and wholly convincing to most people. And it has become so essentially a part of Christian belief that even those who are prepared to be critical about other aspects of the Gospels, e.g. their stories of miracles, accept it without question. It is, moreover, the record of a deeply-moving tragedy, and it is presented in a vivid narrative that appears self-authenticating. Consequently, to question it seems to be both perverse and insensitive surely no one, it would seem, who has sensed the pathos of this drama, can fail to be convinced by it ?

I can fully appreciate why many of my critics have protested that I have charged the Gospel writers with deliberately falsifying facts, thus denigrating their characters, and, by implication, robbing the death of Jesus of that unique spiritual significance which constitutes the very quintessence of the Christian doctrine of salvation.  But this view, I must say with all respect, mistakes the nature of the Gospel record, both in its moral intent and intrinsic character. For, much as we may reverence the Passion Narrative, it must be recognized that it is essentially an explanation of a complex series of happenings in Jerusalem about the year A.D. 30. Moreover, what we conveniently call the ” Passion Narrative ” comprises four accounts of what transpired, and these accounts differ seriously on a number of points, as is well known.

Consequently, since no responsible scholar would today maintain that the Gospel accounts of the events in Jerusalem during that last fatal week preserve four exact eye-witness accounts of what occurred, we are inevitably faced with complex literary and historical questions when we seek to evaluate their evidence for what happened then.

For our purposes now it will be enough to note that it is generally agreed that the Markan version is the earliest, and was known by Matthew and Luke, and probably by John. This priority of Mark naturally concentrates our attention on its origins and credentials. The date of its composition is not, of course, self-evident. I date it, myself, for the year 71 or just after, 1 and I think that I can claim that the general consensus of critical opinion now seems inclined to place it after the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.

But I would not press the point now, and would content myself by saying that it is generally accepted that the Gospel of Mark was written during the decade A.D. 65 to 75. But what is more important to note here is that the composition of this Gospel coincided with the Jewish revolt against Rome, which started in the year 66 and ended disastrously in 70. On its place of origin there has always been general agreement among scholars, namely, that it was written in Rome3 for the Christian community there.

To historians, therefore, the Markan Gospel is an account of events leading to the Roman execution of Jesus for sedition which was written by a Christian in Rome some forty years after those events, and at a time when Rome was involved in a hard and bitter struggle to suppress rebel Judaea. This being so, it is the obvious duty of the historian, in seeking to assess the evidential value of this account, to inquire whether the fact that the Markan Gospel was written in Rome at this time has any bearing on what it tells about the execution of Jesus as a rebel against Rome forty years before.

Briefly, in my opinion the Markan Gospel is essentially an ” Apology to the Christians in Rome”, designed to help the Christians of Rome in a situation of great danger and perplexity in which they found themselves in consequence of the Jewish revolt against Rome. It is concerned to explain away the embarrassing fact of the Roman execution of Jesus for sedition by transferring the responsibility for it from the Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, to the Jewish high priest and Sanhedrin. To this end it represents Jesus as loyal to Rome in endorsing the Jewish obligation to pay the Roman tribute, which was fiercely repudiated by the Zealots, the Jewish nationalist party, and it depicts Pilate as, himself, testifying to the innocence of Jesus and intent on saving him from Jewish malice.

The Gospel of Mark completes this encouraging picture of Roman understanding and Jewish hatred by depicting the Roman centurion, in charge of the Crucifixion, as witnessing to the divinity of the dying Jesus while the Jewish leaders gloat over his sufferings and deride him. To complain, as some critics have done, that this interpretation of the Markan Gospel charges its author with deliberate falsification of the facts, confuses and emotionalizes the issue. As a historian, I have been concerned to understand this important document, not to pass a moral judgment on its author.

Moreover, anyone who knows anything of the methods and mentality of ancient writers will appreciate that our modern standards of literary probity are not applicable here. To us Mark’s account is certainly not a reliable objective record of what happened in Jerusalem during that fateful week. But Mark was not writing as an objective historian, and probably would not have understood what such a role meant; he was writing to help and encourage fellow-Christians in Rome at a time of sore perplexity and danger.

To him, Jesus could just not have been guilty of rebellion against Rome as were the Jewish prisoners who were paraded through the streets of Rome in the Flavian triumph of A.D. 71. But the fact that Jesus had been executed on such a charge was too well known to be denied ] ; it could only be explained away. And so Mark explained it in a way that made Pilate a witness to the innocence of Jesus, and not his executioner. And, in so doing, he presented the hated leaders and people of rebel Judaea as the murderers of Christ thereby, unwittingly, providing scriptural authority for centuries of Christian persecution of the Jews. That Mark would not have dared to present such a tendentious version of facts which could have been checked, as some of my critics have argued, overlooks the fact of the relative obscurity of Mark’s writing. His Gospel was designed for Christian reading, and it supplied a welcome explanation of an embarrassing event.

It was unlikely to have been on sale in the bookshops of Rome, or commanded the attention of the Roman intelligentsia. It is worth while to reflect in this connection that just over a century later Tertullian, in an apologia professedly addressed to the magistrates of the Roman Empire, declared that the Emperor Tiberius, convinced of the divinity of Christ, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Senate to endorse his view. Tertullian implies that all this was recorded in the Roman archives. But no historian today would treat Tertullian’s claim as founded on fact in other words, this Christian apologist, also, was prepared in the interests of his faith to make assertions of fact that he could not possibly have substantiated, if challenged to do so. But he, too, was doubtless unconscious that by our standards he was guilty of deliberate fraud. Another line of criticism, taken by some scholars, has been that my interpretation of Christian Origins is essentially a complex of hypotheses, erected on a selection of the available evidence. In one sense the first part of this charge is justified. My interpretation is indeed hypothetical; but so must be every attempt to reconstruct from the relevant data an intelligible account of how Christianity began. And that, I must insist, goes also, in a very true sense, for the accounts given in the Gospels themselves and in the Acts of the Apostles.

For, as I have just endeavoured to show, the earliest account of the Passion, namely, that in the Markan Gospel, is essentially an apologetical reconstruction of the events leading to the crucifixion of Jesus, and it is evidently based upon a selection of traditional information about the event. And it must be remembered also that, according to the testimony of St. Paul, within twenty years of the Crucifixion there were already two rival interpretations of the person and mission of Jesus current in the Church, namely, that which Paul calls his ” gospel ” and that of the Church of Jerusalem indeed, Paul goes so far as to accuse his opponents of preaching ” another Jesus “.  Quite obviously, then, we must accept as fundamental and beyond dispute that we just do not possess any account of Jesus that is not an interpretation of the significance of his life and teaching, and is in that sense hypothetical. But it is necessary to be certain what we mean by ” hypothetical ” in this context.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines an hypothesis as a ” supposition made as the basis for reasoning, without reference to its truth “. In science the conclusions drawn from an hypothesis can be tested by experiment, thus proving or disproving the soundness of the hypothesis ; but such demonstration is not possible in a field of study such as Christian Origins. However, there is a form of validation that can be usefully applied. Confronted with the only two facts about Jesus which can be regarded as certain, namely, that the Romans executed him as a rebel, and that a religion stemmed from Jesus which exalts him as God, certain suppositions can be made as bases for interpreting the relation of these two facts. The supposition or hypothesis made by Christian orthodoxy, and which originates in the teaching of Paul, is that Jesus was the incarnated Son of God and that his death was ” a ransom for many ‘. On that hypothesis the great edifice of the Christian religion has been constructed. But faced with the same two facts, the historian of religions seeks for a more mundane hypothesis to explain them.

This is what I have done in my books. And I would maintain that my interpretation is no more hypothetical than that of traditional Christianity. And I would go further and submit that in the context of the history of religions, with which I am concerned, my hypothesis provides a reasonable explanation of how the Christian movement began, and how it achieved, by the end of the first century, the pattern of belief that was to become Catholic orthodoxy.

Source: https://www.preteristarchive.com/Books/pdf/1971_brandon_jesus-and-the-zealots-aftermath.pdf