The Origin of Satan (19 page)

kingly power and return” (19:12). When the nobleman succeeds

and returns in triumph, his first act is to demand that his

enemies be killed: “
As for those enemies of mine, who did not

want me to rule over them, bring them here and slaughter them

before me
” (19:27; emphasis added). Luke makes the parallel

unmistakable: “While saying these words, Jesus traveled before

[the disciples], going up to Jerusalem.” When he arrives, he

immediately orders his disciples to prepare for his royal entry

into the city (cf. Zech. 9:9). But Luke alone, among the synoptic

gospels, inserts the words “the king,” taken from Psalm 118, into

the acclamation the disciples shouted at Jesus’ arrival in

Jerusalem:

LUKE AND JOHN CLAIM ISRAEL’S LEGACY / 93

“Blessed is the one, the king, who comes in the name of the

Lord!” (Ps. 118:26; Luke 19:38). When some Pharisees in the

crowd, apparently shocked by this open proclamation of Jesus as

king, admonished Jesus, “Rabbi, rebuke your disciples,” Luke

says, he answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the very

stones would cry out.”

Then, Luke says, as that fateful Passover drew near, “the chief

priests and the scribes were seeking how to put him to death.”

This was the opportunity for which Satan had been waiting:

“Then Satan entered into Judas Iscariot,” who immediately

conferred with the chief priests and the Temple officers, to

arrange the betrayal. But here, as in Mark, Jesus himself declares

that neither Satan’s role nor God’s preordained plan absolves

Judas’s guilt: “The Son of man goes as it has been determined;

but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed” (22:22; cf. Mark

14:21).

John mentions armed Roman soldiers among the arresting

party, but Luke mentions only Jews, and omits a saying common

to Mark and Matthew, that “the Son of man is betrayed
into the

hands of sinners”
(that is, Gentiles). Instead, when the armed

party arrives in Gethsemane, Luke’s Jesus turns directly to “the

chief priests and temple officers and elders who had come out

against him,” and identifies them as Satan incarnate: “Have you

come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs? When I was

with you in the temple every day, you did not lay hands upon

me. But this is
your
[plural]
hour, and the power of darkness
”

(22:52-53; emphasis added).

Like Mark, Luke says that the arresting party “seized Jesus and

led him away, bringing him to the high priest’s house,” while

Peter followed surreptitiously into the high priest’s courtyard.

But at this point Luke diverges from Mark, omitting Mark’s

elaborate scene of a trial before the Sanhedrin in which, as we

have seen, the whole Sanhedrin gathered at night to hear a

parade of witnesses and to witness the high priest’s interrogation

of Jesus, which culminated in the unanimously pronounced

death sentence for blasphemy. Mark—and Matthew following

him—depicts members of the Sanhedrin spitting on Jesus,

beating him, and mocking him before the guards join them in

beating him (Mark 14:65; Matt. 26:67-68).

94 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

Luke tells a starker and simpler story: After his arrest, Jesus is

held and guarded all night in the courtyard of the high priest’s

house to await a morning session of the Sanhedrin. Luke says it

is not members of the aristocratic Sanhedrin but “the men

holding Jesus” who entertained themselves during the long

night by beating and mocking the prisoner (22:63-65). In the

morning, the guards lead Jesus to the council chamber near the

Temple for interrogation by the assembled Sanhedrin. Instead of

a formal trial, this seems to be a kind of court hearing—an

interrogation with no witnesses and no formal sentence.

Nevertheless, the Sanhedrin decides to take Jesus to Pilate to

present formal—and capital—charges against him.

Did Luke have access to independent—perhaps earlier—

accounts of what led to the crucifixion? Many scholars,

prominently including the British scholar David Catchpole,

believe that he did.3 Luke reconstructs a scene in which the

Sanhedrin members interrogate Jesus:

“If you are the Messiah, tell us.” But he said to them, “If I tell

you, you will not believe; and if I ask you, you will not answer.

But from now on the Son of man will be seated at the right

hand of the power of God.” And they said to him, “Are you

the Son of God, then?” And he said to them, “You say that I

am” (22:67-70).

Luke’s account, like Matthew’s and John’s, contradicts Mark’s

claim that Jesus resoundingly and publicly affirmed his divine

appointment at his trial (Mark 14:62). In Luke, Jesus answers

only evasively. Given the lack of supporting evidence, no one can

say what actually happened, though hundreds of scholars,

Jewish and Christian, have attempted an answer. One has only to

glance at Catchpole’s meticulous monograph
The Trial of Jesus
to

see that every act in every episode has become the subject of

intense debate.

Despite these uncertainties, everyone who interprets the texts

has to sort out the tradition to some extent, and to reconstruct,

however provisionally, what may have happened, and

correspondingly, what each evangelist added, and for what

reasons.

LUKE AND JOHN CLAIM ISRAEL’S LEGACY / 95

Catchpole himself argues that Luke’s account of the Sanhedrin

trial is more “historically reliable” than any other.4 This would

mean that the Sanhedrin members accused Jesus of claiming to

be Messiah and Son of God. Raymond Brown disagrees, and

sides with those who are convinced that the titles Messiah and

Son of God emerged later, from Christian communities (in this

case, from Luke’s community) and not from the Jewish

Sanhedrin. In any case, Luke’s account suggests that Jesus had

received public acclaim as king (19:38) and, as we noted, even

when the Pharisees warned him to silence those who were

shouting these acclamations, Jesus refused to do so (19:39-40).

Whether he made these same claims for himself, as Mark alone

insists (14:61), or merely accepted what others said of him, as

Matthew, Luke, and John say, apparently mattered less to the

Sanhedrin than the effect that such claims could have upon the

restless crowds gathered for Passover. Consequently, Luke says,

Jesus’ enemies decided to bring him to Pilate, accusing him of

three charges calculated to arouse the governor’s concern: “We

found this man guilty of perverting our nation [apparently, of

teaching in opposition to the designated religious leaders],

forbidding us to pay tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself

is Messiah, a king” (23:2).

Mark and Matthew said that Pilate was skeptical of the

charges, but Luke’s Pilate pronounces Jesus innocent no less than

three times. At first Pilate says, “I find no crime in this man.”

Then, after the chief priests and the crowds object and insist that

Jesus is guilty of disturbing the peace, Pilate tries to rid himself

of responsibility by sending Jesus to King Herod. While Mark

and Matthew show Pilate's soldiers mocking and beating Jesus,

Luke further exonerates Pilate by showing that it was Herod and

his officers (like the Jewish officers involved in the arrest) who

abused and mocked Jesus as a would-be king (23:11).

Jesus is then returned to Pilate, who formally assembles “the

chief priests and the rulers and the people.” These three groups,

which had previously divided between the leaders, who hated

Jesus, and the people, whose presence had protected him, now

present a united front against him. To all those assembled before

him Pilate declares again:

96 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

“You brought me this man as one who was misleading the

people, and after examining him before you, behold, I did not

find this man guilty of any of your charges against him;

neither did Herod, for he sent him back to us. Behold, nothing

deserving death has been done by him; I will therefore chastise

him and release him.”

But Luke says that the Jewish leaders and people, hearing

Pilate’s decision, unanimously protested: “They
all
cried out

together
, ‘Away with this man’ ” (23:18; emphasis added).

According to Luke, Pilate still refused to give in, and “addressed

them once more, desiring to release Jesus, but they shouted out,

‘Crucify him, crucify him!’ ” Luke apparently thinks he cannot

emphasize this too much, for he now repeats Pilate’s verdict a

third time: “What evil has he done? I found in him no crime

deserving death; therefore I will chastise him and release him.”

But the onlookers, Luke says,

demanded with loud cries that Jesus should be crucified, and

their voices prevailed; and Pilate ordered that their demand be

granted, and . . . he gave Jesus over
to their will
(emphasis

added).

In earlier passages, nevertheless, Luke had followed Mark in

saying that Jesus’ enemies delivered him “to the Gentiles”

(18:32); later, Luke, like Mark, will mention a Roman centurion

present at the crucifixion. These clues, along with Luke’s

acknowledgment that the written accusation was that Jesus had

claimed to be “king of the Jews,” and the charge was sedition

(23:38), indicate that Luke knew that the Romans had actually

pronounced sentence and carried out the execution. Yet as Luke

tells the story, he allows, and perhaps even wants, the reader—

especially one unfamiliar with other accounts—to infer that after

Jews had arrested Jesus and a Jewish court had sentenced him to

death, it was Jewish soldiers who actually crucified him.

Luke changes many details of the death scene to emphasize

Jesus’ innocence, and to give a more uplifting account than

LUKE AND JOHN CLAIM ISRAEL’S LEGACY / 97

Mark’s of how God’s faithful should die. When Jesus is crucified

between two robbers (that is, as we have seen, between two

lestai
, men perhaps also charged with sedition), he prays for his

tormentors: “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what

they are doing.”5 Mark had shown the extreme humiliation to

which Jesus was subjected, saying that even the other

condemned criminals joined in ridiculing Jesus, but Luke offers a

different version of the story:

One of the criminals who were hung there kept mocking him,

and saying, “Aren't you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”

But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God,

since you are under the same sentence? And we are justly

condemned, since we are getting what we deserve for what we

did. But this man has done nothing wrong.” Then he said,

“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." He

replied, "Truly, I tell you, today you shall be with me in

Paradise.”

Thus Luke again emphasizes Jesus’ innocence—innocence

recognized even by a condemned criminal—and shows that even

the dying Jesus has power to forgive, to redeem, and to save the

lost. Luke omits Jesus’ anguished cry (“My God, my God, why

have you forsaken me?” Psalm 22:1), along with Jesus’ last,

inarticulate scream, and replaces them instead with a prayer of

faith taken from Psalm 31:5: “Then Jesus, crying with a loud

voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.’ Having

said this, he breathed his last.” Thus Luke banishes the scene of

agony and replaces it with trusting submission to God. Finally,

Luke goes so far as to say that many of the bystanders, seeing all

this, repented what they had done: “When all the crowds who

had gathered there for the spectacle saw what had taken place,

they returned home, beating their breasts” (23:48). He also

changes Mark’s account to say that the Roman centurion who

saw Jesus die “praised God,” and echoed Pilate’s verdict:

“Certainly this man was innocent!”

In the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles Luke again

emphasizes the role of the Jews rather than of the Romans in

98 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN

Jesus’ crucifixion. Peter specifically addresses the “men of

Israel,” charging that they “crucified and killed” the righteous

one whom God had sent to Israel. Shordy after, Peter again

addresses the “men of Israel,” preaching of Jesus,

“whom you delivered up and denied in the presence of Pilate,

when Pilate had decided to release him . . . you denied the holy

and righteous one, and you asked instead for a murderer to be

granted to you.”

Luke provides many details that have contributed to later

Christians’ perceptions that Pilate was a well-meaning weakling

and that the Jewish people—that is, those he regarded as the

apostate majority—were responsible for Jesus’ death and for the

deaths of many of his followers. The well-known French

commentator Alfred Loisy says that according to Luke, “The