The Origin of Satan (8 page)

demonstrating anger or even impatience, “was amazed” (15:5).

Mark goes further. Claiming to know the governor’s private

assessment of the case, Mark says that Pilate “recognized that it

was out of envy that they had handed him over” (15:10). But

instead of making a decision and giving orders, Pilate takes no

action. Then, hearing shouts from the crowd outside, he goes out

to address them, asking what they want: “Do you want me to

release for you the king of the Jews?” But the crowd demands

instead the release of Barabbas, whom Mark describes as one of

the imprisoned insurrectionists, who “had committed murder in

the rebellion” (15:7). Pilate seems uncertain, wanting to refuse

but afraid to go against the crowd’s demand. As if helpless, he

again asks the crowd what to do: “What shall I do with the man

whom you call the king of the Jews?” (15:12). When the crowd

shouts for Jesus’ crucifixion, Pilate in effect pleads with his

subjects for justice: “Why, what evil has he done?” (15:14). But

the shouting continues, and Pilate, “wishing to satisfy the

crowd” (15:15), releases Barabbas and, having ordered Jesus to be

flogged, acquiesces to their demand that he be crucified. But

according to Mark, Pilate never pronounces sentence, and never

actually orders the execution. As Mark tells the story, even

inside Pilate’s own chamber, the chief priests are in charge: it is

they who make accusations and it is they who stir up the crowds,

whose vehemence forces Jesus’ execution upon a reluctant Pilate.

The Pilate who appears in the gospels, as we have noted, has

little to do with the historical Pilate—that is, with the man we

know from other first-century historical and political sources,

both Jewish and Roman, as a brutal governor. As Raymond

Brown notes in his meticulous study of the passion narratives,

except in Christian tradition, portraits of Pilate range from

bitterly hostile to negative.36 Philo, an educated, influential

member of the Jewish community in Alexandria, the capital of

Egypt, was

30 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

Pilate's contemporary. In one of his writings, his
Embassy to

Gains
, he describes his experiences as a member of an official

delegation sent to Rome to represent the interests of the

Alexandrian Jewish community to the Roman emperor, Gaius

Caligula. In the course of his narrative, Philo, referring to the

situation of the Jewish community in Judea, describes governor

Pilate as a man of “inflexible, stubborn, and cruel disposition,”

and lists as typical features of his administration “greed,

violence, robbery, assault, abusive behavior, frequent executions

without trial, and endless savage ferocity.”37 Philo writes to

persuade Roman rulers to uphold the privileges of Jewish

communities, as he claims that the emperor Tiberius had done.

In this letter, Philo sees Pilate as the image of all that can go

wrong with Roman administration of Jewish provinces.

Philo’s testimony is partly corroborated in Josephus's history

of the same era. As we have seen, Josephus, like Philo, was a man

of considerable political experience; as former Jewish governor

of Galilee under the Romans, he writes his history under Roman

patronage in a tone sympathetic to Roman interests. Yet Josephus

records several episodes that show Pilate’s contempt for Jewish

religious sensibilities. Pilate’s predecessors, for example,

recognizing that Jews considered images of the emperor to be

idolatrous, had instituted the practice of choosing for the Roman

garrison in Jerusalem a military unit whose standards did not

carry such images. But when Pilate was appointed governor he

deliberately violated this precedent. First he ordered the existing

garrison to leave; then he led to Jerusalem a replacement unit

whose standards displayed imperial images, timing his arrival to

coincide with the Jewish high holy days, the Day of Atonement

and the Feast of Tabernacles. Pilate apparently knew that he was

committing sacrilege in the eyes of his subjects, for he took care

to arrive in Jerusalem at night, having ordered the standards to

be covered with cloth during the journey.

When the people of Jerusalem heard that Pilate and his troops

had introduced images they regarded as idolatrous into the holy

city, they gathered in the streets to protest. A great crowd

followed Pilate back to Caesarea and stood outside his residence,

THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR / 31

pleading with him to remove them. Since the standards always

accompanied the military unit, this amounted to a demand that

Pilate withdraw the garrison. When Pilate refused, the crowds

continued to demonstrate. After five days, Pilate, exasperated

but adamant, decided to force an end to the demonstrations.

Pretending to offer the demonstrators a formal hearing, he

summoned them to appear before him in the stadium. There

Pilate had amassed soldiers, ordered them to surround the

crowd, and threatened to massacre the demonstrators unless

they gave in. To Pilate’s surprise, the Jews declared that they

would rather die than see their law violated. At this point Pilate

capitulated and withdrew the unit. As Mary Smallwood

comments:

The Jews had won a decisive victory in the first round against

their new governor, but now they knew what sort of man they

were up against, and thereafter anything he did was liable to be

suspect. . . . But more was to follow.38

Roman authorities also respected Jewish sensitivity by

banning images considered idolatrous from coins minted in

Judea. Only during Pilate’s administration was this practice

violated: coins depicting pagan cult symbols have been found

dated 29-31 C.E. Did Pilate order the change, as the German

scholar E. Stauffer believes, “to force [his] subjects to handle

representations of pagan culture”?39 Raymond Brown suggests

that Pilate simply “underestimated Jewish sensitivity” on such

matters.40

Pilate next decided to build an aqueduct in Jerusalem. But to

finance the project, he appropriated money from the Temple

treasury, an act of sacrilege even from the Roman point of view,

since the Temple funds were, by law, regarded as sacrosanct.41

This direct assault upon the Temple and its treasury aroused

vehement opposition. When Pilate next visited Jerusalem, he

was met with larger demonstrations than ever; now the angry

crowds became abusive and threatening. Anticipating trouble,

Pilate had ordered soldiers to dress in plain clothes, conceal their

weapons, and mingle with the people. When the crowd refused

to disperse, he signaled to the soldiers to break it up with force.

Several peo-

32 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

ple were killed, and others were trampled to death in the

stampede that followed.42 Even the gospel of Luke, which gives

an astonishingly benign portrait of Pilate in the trial narrative,

elsewhere mentions how people told Jesus about certain

Galileans “whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices”

(13:1).

Late in Pilate’s tenure as governor other provocative incidents

prompted Jewish leaders to protest to the emperor Tiberius

against Pilate’s attacks on their religion. In 31 C.E. Pilate angered

his subjects by dedicating golden shields in the Herodian palace

in Jerusalem. We cannot be certain what occasioned the protest;

the scholar B. C. McGinny suggests that the shields were

dedicated to the “divine” emperor, a description that would have

incensed many Jews.43 Again Pilate faced popular protest: a

crowd assembled, led by four Herodian princes. When Pilate

refused to remove the shields, perhaps claiming he was acting

only out of respect for the emperor, Josephus says, they replied,

“Do not take [the emperor] Tiberius as your pretext for outraging

the nation; he does not wish any of our customs to be

overthrown.”44 When Pilate proved adamant, the Jewish princes

appealed to the emperor, who rebuked Pilate and ordered him to

remove the shields from Jerusalem. One recent commentator

remarks that

the bullying of Pilate by his Jewish adversaries in the case of

the shields resembles strongly the bullying of Pilate in [the

gospel of] John’s account of the passion, including the threat of

appeal to the emperor.45

Yet characterizing these protests as “bullying” seems strange;

what recourse did a subject people have to challenge the

governor’s decision, except to appeal over his head to a higher

authority? Five years later, when a Samaritan leader assembled a

large multitude, some of them armed, to gather and wait for a

sign from God, Pilate immediately sent troops to monitor the

situation. The troops blockaded the crowd, killing some and

capturing others, while the rest fled. Pilate ordered the

ringleaders executed.46

THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR / 33

Pilate’s rule ended abruptly when the legate of Syria finally

responded to repeated protests by stripping Pilate of his

commission and dispatching a man from his own staff to serve as

governor in his place. Pilate was ordered to return to Rome at

once to answer charges against him, and disappeared from the

historical record. Philo’s account coincides with Mark’s on one

point: that Pilate, aware of the animosity toward him, was

concerned lest the chief priests complain about him to the

emperor. Yet Mark, as we have seen, presents a Pilate not only as

a man too weak to withstand the shouting of a crowd, but also as

one solicitous to ensure justice in the case of a Jewish prisoner

whom the Jewish leaders want to destroy.

Mark’s benign portrait of Pilate increases the culpability of the

Jewish leaders and supports Mark’s contention that Jews, not

Romans, were the primary force behind Jesus’ crucifixion.

Throughout the following decades, as bitterness between the

Jewish majority and Jesus’ followers increased, the gospels came

to depict Pilate in an increasingly favorable light. As Paul Winter

observes,

the stern Pilate grows more mellow from gospel to gospel

[from Mark to Matthew, from Matthew and Luke to John]. . . .

The more removed from history, the more sympathetic a

character he becomes.47

In depicting Jesus’ Jewish enemies, the same process works in

reverse. Matthew, writing around ten years later, depicts much

greater antagonism between Jesus and the Pharisees than Mark

suggests. And while Mark says that the leaders restrained their

animosity because the crowds favored Jesus, Matthew’s account

ends with both leaders
and
crowds unanimously shouting for his

execution. Furthermore, what Mark merely implies—that Jesus’

opponents are energized by Satan—Luke and John will state

explicitly. Both Matthew and Luke, writing ten to twenty years

after Mark, adapted the earlier gospel and revised it in various

ways, updating it to reflect the situation of Jesus’ followers in

their own times.

34 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

Jesus' followers did not invent the practice of demonizing

enemies within their own group. In this respect, as in many

others, as we shall see, they drew upon traditions they shared

with other first-century Jewish sects. The Essenes, for example,

had developed and elaborated images of an evil power they called

by many names—Satan, Belial, Beelzebub, Mastema (“hatred”)—

precisely to characterize their own struggle against a Jewish

majority whom they, for reasons different from those of Jesus’

followers, denounced as apostate. The Essenes never admitted

Gentiles to their movement. But the followers of Jesus did—

cautiously and provisionally at first, and against the wishes of

some members. But as the Christian movement became

increasingly Gentile during the second century and later, the

identification of Satan primarily with the Jewish enemies of

Jesus, borne along in Christian tradition over the centuries,

would fuel the fires of anti-Semitism.

The relationship between Jesus’ followers and the rest of the

Jewish community, however, especially during the first century,

is anything but simple. Mark himself, like the Essenes, sees his

movement essentially as a conflict within one “house”—as I read

it, the house of Israel. Such religious reformers see their primary

struggle not with foreigners, however ominously Roman power

lurks in the background, but with other Jews who try to define

the “people of God.”48 Yet while Mark sees the Jewish leaders as

doing Satan’s work in trying to destroy Jesus, his own account is

by no means anti-Jewish, much less anti-Semitic. After all,

virtually everyone who appears in the account is Jewish,

including, of course, the Messiah. Mark does not see himself as

separate from Israel, but depicts Jesus’ followers as what Isaiah

calls God’s “remnant”
within Israel
(Isaiah 10:22-23). Even the