Inevitably, totally innocent people were crucified. Some were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, as was Joseph in Jose Saramago's novel The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Many others were guilty of nothing more than voicing an opinion, being related to the wrong person, or having incurred the enmity of someone who then accused them of inciting rebellion against Rome. Guilt was not the issue; power was. The fear this engendered was, and still is, the main weapon of a totalitarian state, where the aim is to keep the population subdued and compliant, forestalling even the possibility of opposition.
As biblical historians Richard Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman put it: "Crucifixion was one of the purest forms of governmental violence. It was as much communal punishment and state-sponsored terrorism as it was judicial vengeance against a particular crime . . . The crosses planted outside the cities warned potential rebels, runaway slaves, and rebellious prophets of what could happen to them." Warned them, that is, and anyone who aided and abetted them.
Crucifixion had been used this way for hundreds of years by Maryam's time. The Romans probably adopted it from the Carthaginians, though we know it was also used by the Persians, and before them by the Assyrians and the Scythians. It had even been used by Judeans against Judeans.
The Temple Scroll, part of the cache of Essene scrolls found at Qumran on the Dead Sea, lists "hanging from a tree" as punishment for betrayal of the group. And though it is unclear if the Essenes ever carried out the punishment, it is very clear that the Hasmoneans made what could be called liberal use of it during their hundred-year regime. Alexander Janneus, for example, one of the most expansionist and tyrannical Hasmonean rulers, had eight hundred captives crucified as entertainment while he feasted with his concubines.
Throughout the Mediterranean and the Middle East, hundreds of thousands of people—mainly men, but occasionally women too—were put to death this way. The crosses were the inevitable aftermath of slave rebellions in Rome or Carthage, or of popular uprisings in Palestine or Alexandria. But for all its deliberate ghastliness and humiliation, crucifixion was far from a shameful death. On the contrary, it was the punishment for daring to dream of freedom.
"Anyone who was put to death by Pontius Pilate—one of the most notorious thugs in the history of the Roman empire—would have been a hero," as A. N. Wilson noted. He was no longer merely a victim, but part of something much larger. The punishment intended to deter resistance instead inspired more of it. To knowingly risk such a death was the ultimate badge of courage.
By the time Maryam stood vigil at the foot of the cross, crucifixion had become the symbol of resistance. Ever since childhood, when she saw the rebels occupying the garrison town of Sepphoris crucified en masse, she had known that this was the fate of the noblest and the bravest. That sight had created in her what it created in so many others of her time: not the submissive resignation that the Romans intended, but quite the opposite. Like others, she came away full of a fierce despair, committed more strongly than ever to the idea of rising up against oppression, no matter how many lives that might cost.
As in modern Palestine, so two thousand years ago, shame was converted into honor, humiliation into pride. To be killed in the struggle for independence was to achieve a form of immortality. It was to be celebrated in song and story as a death chosen rather than one imposed. Whoever died this way became a model to be emulated by others, his death seen not merely as a physical sacrifice, but as a metaphysical one. His life would be glorified, elaborated, mytholo-gized. He would become greater in death than he ever had been in life. He would become a martyr.
Then as now, the figure of the martyr rose out of the combustible mix of politics and religion. Inevitably, legends were born out of that mix. What actually happened was not nearly as real as what should have happened. As the legends were told again and again, they were embroidered, shaped, honed to the purpose of their telling, until they reflected more about the thoughts and desires of those telling them and listening to them than about the events they related.
When the gospel writers took pen to parchment to record the story of Jesus' life and death some three generations later, they did not set out to write fiction; but neither did they intend to record history. Their concern was theology, and their aim was to do what only theology can do: to create new life out of death. They wrote to inspire their readers by linking what had happened to what had been foretold. Or, as the John and Matthew authors wrote repeatedly, "to fulfill the words of the prophet" and "to fulfill the scripture."
The gospel accounts of the crucifixion refer back again and again to the Hebrew bible. Jesus' last words in Matthew—"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me"—are from the start of Psalm 22. His last words in Luke—"Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit"—are from Psalm 31. The "darkness over the land" is from Amos; entering the city on "the foal of an ass" from Zechariah; the vinegar-soaked sponge from Psalm 69; the pierced hands and feet, along with the casting of lots for the garments, from Psalm 22. As always, those seeking signs of scripture revealed, could find them. The gospels provided what biblical scholar John Dominic Crossan has called "prophecy historicized."
Most scholars now agree that there could have been no trial in front of Pontius Pilate. There would be no reason for a peasant preacher like Jesus to be taken high up the chain of command for formal interrogation, let alone for trial. There was no earthquake as Jesus neared death, no eclipse of the sun, no rending of the great temple curtain at the entrance to the holy of holies. These are all things that should have been, and so, in the telling, became. Like the massacre of the innocents, like the flight into Egypt, like the visits of the three magi, they were all part of what Joseph Campbell called "the adventure of the hero."
"Those who told the story to each other in this way would have known very well that such details were not 'historical,'" says historian James Carroll. "They would have known, say, that the 'seamless robe' had nothing to do with the robe Jesus wore but was an allusion-rich metaphor, since the only figure who wore such a robe was the high priest, and only upon entering the holy of holies. To that first circle, such details proved nothing. The point was not 'proof,' it was expression. The point was lament. The point was grief. The point was drawing order out of chaos, out of the worst thing that could have happened. The point was the story."
Yet if prophecy was historicized in this manner, there was also a strong element of self-fulfilling prophecy in the death of Jesus. Certainly Maryam can have been in little doubt that sooner or later, and probably sooner, she would see her son crucified. He was an activist preaching equality and justice; he had gathered a following, albeit only in the northern province of Galilee; now he was publicly baiting the powers-that-be on their own turf, Jerusalem. Every step he took seemed to be leading inexorably to Golgotha.
His message of the poor and the downtrodden reclaiming the kingdom was downright subversive in the ears of the wealthy elite.
To take this message to Jerusalem at Passover could only have been seen as a deliberate provocation. Since Passover celebrated the classic liberation tale of the exodus from Egypt, it was always a time of high political tension, with the Herodian military out in force and ultra-alert for any signs of disturbance. Overturning the money changers' tables in the temple forecourt could have only one result: arrest, and execution.
Maryam must have been steeling herself against this eventuality for months, if not years. She must have hoped against hope that it would never happen, even as she knew it was inevitable. But knowing it was coming would not have made it any easier to bear. On the contrary, it would have been all the harder. She was living her own nightmare, face to face with the worst thing that could possibly happen to a mother: the death of her child.
Strangely, Maryam never seems to age in all the great paintings of the Piety, where she cradles her dead son in her arms. She still looks as young and fresh-faced as at the Annunciation. Yet even by conventional reckoning, she was forty-six years old—old eno
ugh in her time for her hair to have turned gray and her face to be deeply lined with time and weather and experience.
Forty-six was indeed old by the standards of Palestinian peasant life two thousand years ago, and yet we know Maryam was in good health: how else could she have followed her son as he wandered around Galilee and trekked to Jerusalem? Far more likely, however, she was ten years younger: only thirty-six.
We know she was thirteen when she became pregnant. We also know—or think we know—that Jesus was thirty-three in 30 A.D., the year of his crucifixion. But this assumes that he was born in the year 4 B.C., and this assumption has been increasingly questioned by biblical historians. Most will now say only that Jesus was born somewhere between 4 B.C. and 6 A.D.
The earlier date was seized on for one major reason. If Jesus was born "in the days of Herod the king," as Matthew puts it, then it had to be by the year 4 B.C. at the latest, since that was the year Herod the Great died.
But there was more than one Herod who was king. After Herod the Great's death, the Romans divided his territory among his three surviving sons, making each one a client ruler with the title "Herod the king." The oldest, Herod Archelaus, got Judea, but only for ten years until the Romans banished him to Gaul and appointed a series of procurators, or sub-governors, to run the province under the direction of the Roman governor of Syria. (The most infamous of these procurators would be Pontius Pilate, who served from 26 A.D. 36 A.D.) The second son, Herod Philip, got Iturea, in what is now southern Lebanon and Syria. It was the youngest of the three—Herod Antipas—who got Galilee, and ruled it throughout Jesus' lifetime. And this is the Herod whom the gospels conflated with his father, Herod the Great.
The Matthew story of the massacre of the innocents at the birth of Jesus should surely peg the year to Herod the Great's reign, except that there is no historical evidence of his ever ordering all newborn males in the area of Bethlehem to be killed. The story, however, was almost bound to develop. Historian E. Mary Smallwood calls it "a typical tyrant-legend of the kind which readily grows up posthumously to blacken the memory of a hated despot." Matthew's account of Jesus' escape from the massacre—the unlikely flight all the way south into Egypt—was "typical of the stories of miraculous escapes from danger which cluster around the infancy of great men."
The only real indication of the year of Jesus' birth, in that case, is the census—the given reason for Mary and Joseph's journey to Bethlehem. In the gospel of Luke, this took place when "Herod, king of Judea" was in power, at the order of Quirinius, the Roman governor of Syria. But Quirinius (a.k.a. Cyrenius) was not governor in the reign of either Herod the Great or Herod Archelaus. He was only appointed in the year 6 A.D., after the Romans had deposed Archelaus. Josephus confirms in his Antiquities oj the Jews that there was indeed a census that year, and certainly ordering a census for tax purposes would have been a logical first step for a new governor.
The Herod in question, then, had to be Antipas, the client king of Galilee. The year had to be 6 A.D., not 4 B.C., which makes Jesus twenty-one years old when he began preaching, and twenty-three when he was crucified.
There are thus no "missing years" in Jesus' life—no mysterious chronological gap in the gospel accounts such as has been assumed by those in constant search of the esoteric. There is no need for fanciful scenarios of Jesus learning the secrets of sorcery in India or China. In fact, such scenarios are self-defeating. In the reality of first-century Galilee, peasant villagers would have nothing to do with a thirty-one-year-old preacher and miracle worker who had suddenly appeared in foreign dress and with foreign notions. Jesus attracted followers because he was of his time and place, because he spoke to people's immediate concerns. He was one of their own, speaking in the Galilean peasant accent, in the language of the great Israelite prophets. And at twenty-one, he had all the energy, idealism, and audacity of his age—the very qualities so clearly in evidence in the gospels.
He would be executed two years later, and that means that Maryam was thirty-six years old when she stood at the foot of the cross. In modern terms, she was still a young woman; in the terms of her own time, she was the equivalent of a western woman in her early fifties today, with a sure sense of her own strength and power and ability. All of which she would need now.
How does a mother survive watching her child die in such a way? She survives, of course, in the most literal sense, but how does a large part of her not die with him when she sees him reduced to tortured helplessness? She feels his agony as her own even as she knows that hers can be only a fragment of his. And then she has to endure the almost greater agony of being unable to help. Forced into passivity, jeered at by soldiers, what can she do?
She rails, of course. Cries out and curses and protests until she is so hoarse the words stifle in her throat. She weeps, though her tear ducts have long dried up and she cries on empty. And those around her both encourage and expect her to do this. Crucifixion is the most public of deaths, and so her grief, whether she wants it or not, is the most public of griefs.
Anyone who has been close to a mother whose child is killed in war has seen how the personal is subsumed into the national. The sheer wrongness of a child dying before his parent is terrible enough, but then the mother has to deal with an extra level of horror: the onus of being the center of attention when all she wants to do is curl up in a ball and die herself.
You can see it happening at the funeral of an eighteen-year-old Israeli soldier. Or of teenage terror victims cut down doing something as normal as buying a slice of pizza or hanging out at the mall. Or of a young Palestinian olive farmer shot dead as he tried to harvest his trees, or a ten-year-old killed for throwing stones at a tank, or a five-year-old who stuck her head out the door during curfew only to encounter a bullet. The worst of all: the terrible pathos of the funeral of a very young child, the corpse tiny under the shroud used in both Moslem and Jewish burials.
You see the family gathered tight around the grave—the extended family, for every family at such times, even the most westernized one, becomes extended, ignoring degrees of removal and stretching out to encompass first cousins, second cousins, in-laws, great-aunts, all manner of relatives by marriage as well as by blood. And crowded in on the family are the human vultures—not just the media, but the hangers-on, the ones who are always there in times of tragedy and loss. They feed off it, pressing forward to get their faces in the photographer's lens, inflating their sense of self-importance by being part of the action and assuming someone else's tragedy as their own. Some do it for political reasons, some for pathological ones. For most, it's an odd mixture of the two. They are reacting, without necessarily knowing it, to a terrible truth: violent death brings people to life. It brings them together. It unites them in adversity.
And at the center, always, is the mother. Whether veiled and stoic, or beside herself with grief, the focus is on her.
The private is made unutterably, nakedly public. Even her tears are used to rouse the anger or compassion of others. She barely notices the cameras until later, when she sees the pictures of herself and is appalled. How could she not be? Being photographed as she mourns—her features distorted, her clothes disheveled, her whole body bent in pain—is surely one of the deepest invasions of privacy. It is as though the camera itself were trying to steal her grief.
In the days following the funeral, the flow of people coming to pay their respects is more disconcerting than comforting. Sometimes she doesn't even know their names. Total strangers hold her hand, hug her, stare deep into her eyes as though they understand. She knows they don't, knows they can't, but mourning has weakened her, and she hasn't the strength to rebuff them.
She realizes that they are merely trying to make her feel better. Or more likely, make themselves feel better. They mean well. Most of them, at any rate. But she also knows the simple, raw truth that is the province of every grieving mother: no consolation is possible. There is no such thing for the death of a child.
The com
forters fall back on the repeated reassurance that this shall not be for nothing. He died the doing right thing, they tell her. He died for his country. For honor. For freedom. For justice. He is in heaven along with the martyrs or the saints or the angels. Rest assured that he will be revenged.
Yet she does not rest assured. She does not rest at all. Her son has suddenly been elevated into some kind of superior being, and she feels now as if he has been taken from her a second time—first by death, and then again by all those who claim her grief as their own. She tries to tell the comforters that revenge is pointless. That nothing anyone can do will bring her child back to life. It is all in vain. Every violent death of every human being. Each one an affront to justice, to freedom, to humanity itself. She feels that terrifying, primordial wail rising up again within her, from a place so deep it seems as though the whole earth is crying out in protest and despair. As it takes hold of her, she has no illusions of grace under pressure. She knows only one thing for sure, and that is that this death is wrong, wrong, wrong.
That artistic image of a calm and composed Maryam cradling her dead son with a look of infinite compassion may be well-intentioned, but it has the effect of a cruel lie. To think of her as stoic and accepting in her grief is not just to deprive her of the capacity to mourn; it is to deny her humanity.
Let us at least allow her to feel and express real grief. Let us give her the relief of being able to cry out loud, to rail against the forces who committed this crime, against the fates or the gods or Yahweh or the Romans or Herod or the temple, whomever she chooses—all of them guilty in her eyes. Let us hear her loud and long, in that animal wail so piercing that even if we cover our ears it still penetrates deep inside us, like an iron nail piercing the heart.
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