“Jesus is Going to Be Stoned”

Anti-Semitic interpretations of the gospels and Christian hostility towards Jews are both rooted, in terribly complex ways, in the first centuries of the Christian era. The death of Jesus is certainly the “most resentment-laden” theme in Christian history. But this chapter argues that it is not a sign of primitive Christian resentment that the gospels depict a Judaean moment in Jesus’ legal ordeal in Jerusalem—an ordeal which culminates in a Roman verdict, and a Roman punishment. In fact, the Judaeans’ condemnation of Jesus is less decisive in the gospels than in many revered Judaic texts. This chapter thus seeks to reconstruct a Judaic ‘passion’ narrative in which Jesus dies, and Pilate is innocent, from the ‘Judaean’ testimonies of a pagan philosopher (Celsus), from the pages of an illustrious rabbinic collection (Babylonian Talmud), and from a tradition of parodic ‘gospels’ (Toledot Yeshu).