The earliest reference to Jesus’ death and why it happened was in a side note by Paul.
For you, brothers and sisters, became imitators of God’s assemblies in Judea, which are in Christ Jesus: You suffered from your own people the same things those assemblies suffered from the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets and also drove us out. They displease God and are hostile to everyone in their effort to keep us from speaking to the Gentiles so that they may be saved. In this way they always heap up their sins to the limit. The wrath of God has come upon them at last.
1 Thess. 2.14-16
This passage was previously thought of as an interpolation but when you go into the actual arguments most were made for theological reasons. The proponents of interpolation had thought the passage was anti Judaic, but ‘the Jews who killed’ Christ were specific Jews, namely the collaborating High Priest who smoothed Roman rule along with the Prefect of Judea. Killing the prophets refers to prophet martyrdom also mentioned in Romans 11.3. These are all internal historic Judaic in-fighting that Paul uses to describe the now internal problems facing the Jesus assemblies. In the words of Simon J. Joseph:
The authenticity of this passage has been disputed, yet the allegedly anti-Judaic tone and content of 1 Thess 2:14–15 is fairly consonant with Pauline theology. In Romans, Paul writes that the Jews have been “broken off ” or “cut off ” from the tree of Abraham (“because of their unbelief”; Rom 11:20) and will not be grafted back until the future, when God’s “wrath” against them comes to an end (cf. Rom 11:11–29). Paul repeatedly appeals to the theme of God’s “wrath” in Romans (2:5, 8; 3:5; 4:15; 5:9; 9:22; 12:19). It seems safe to conclude that not only were some Jews involved in the death of Jesus, but we can be even more specific by identifying the high priest (and chief priests) as disliking him enough to form conspiratorial attempts to stop him, a dislike that ultimately led to a judicial action by the “Sanhedrin” and to Jesus being “handed over” to Pilate, who sentenced him to death. [1]
More recently other arguments were added for interpolation by Carrier when he applied the phrase “But wrath has come upon them at last!” to the Temple destruction. Yet this was a common retrospective fallacy, many historians can fall for such a fallacy as history is done backwards, yet life is lived forwards. The ‘wrath of God’ was a common expression of the Tanakh and could be applied to many catastrophes happening in Paul’s day. In the words of Robert Jewett:
Furthermore, Paul’s statement in I Thess. ii. 16, ‘but God’s wrath has come upon them at last’, may refer to the disturbance which occurred in Jerusalem during the Passover of 49 when twenty to thirty thousand Jews were supposed to have been killed. Cf. Josephus, Ant. 20.112 and War 2.224-7. Since this disturbance was instigated by Zealots (War 2.225), Paul could well have interpreted the massacre as punishment for the persecution against the Christians in Judea.[2]
And of course we could also add other possible disasters that Paul could have had in mind such as Judea suffering famine in 45-47 CE (Ant. 20:49-53). Another reason this passage is unlikely an interpolation is that it is in all the manuscripts and is included in Marcions (the first) New Testament. When we triangulate Paul’s epistles, the gospels and Josephus works, the picture becomes very clear the Jesus was executed by crucifixion (epistles) for being ‘King of the Jews’ (the Titulus crucis in the gospels and Jesus being referred as messiah in the epistles, that is a title signifying an anointed figure such as a king). Bart Ehrman shows that what the Christian sources claim, Jesus crucified under Pilate “accords perfectly well with what we know about the Roman administration of justice in first-century Palestine[3].”
Anyone who attracted crowds, especially the charismatics, messiah figures and of course the Sign Prophets were politically dangerous because they were a threat to Roman security. Ellis Rivkin said that Caiaphas would immediately silenced Jesus as he was “so ominous a threat to law and order” and Pilate would have “made short shrift of a case like this.” Jesus put himself in the firing line of “Rome’s determination to eradicate anyone who challenged its rule.”.[4] Loveday Alexander observes “ It must be borne in mind that Josephus saw in Messianism as the cause of the 1st Jewish War and that he had personally tried to put a stop to this dangerous current in his eyes by calling Vespasian Messiah.”[5]
Messianism was a dirty word in the aftermath of the Great Jewish Revolt 66-70CE. Much suffering came “in the footsteps of the messiah” and is reflected in this Mishnah passage here: “In the footsteps of the messiah insolence (hutzpah) will increase and the cost of living will go up greatly” (Mishnah soter 9.5).
Yet messianism can be detected in Josephus as Novonsen cutely observes:
John Barclay comments on the Antiquities and Against Apion, “These works show us a Diaspora Jew making a supreme—and in fact the last extant—effort to interpret Judaism for non-Jews in the Graeco- Roman world.” This is the most compelling explanation for why Josephus calls the Jewish insurgents “diadem-wearers” and not “messiahs.” It is not, as de Jonge and Rajak suggest, that they were not messiahs. In all likelihood, at least some of them were, as Josephus implies in the passage about the “ambiguous oracle” that drove them to war. [War 6.5.4- the same passage that applied this same oracle to Vespasian]. Nor is it the case that, as Momigliano suggests, Josephus was blithely unaware of Jewish messianism; here again, Josephus gives us reason to think that he does know something about it. [Examples given in footnote 131 by Novenson: War 6.312–13; Ant. 10.210; Ant. 17.43–45] Nor, finally, contra Feldman, does Josephus avoid the word “messiah” because he fears that using it would make him sound anti-Roman. On the contrary, Josephus presents himself as a reporter, not a partisan to the revolt, and he makes the insurgents’ anti-Romanness more clear, not less so, by rendering it in a Roman idiom. The explanation, rather, is that Josephus is constrained by literary convention, by his own chosen project of cultural translation from a Jewish idiom to a Roman one. He calls the insurgents “diadem-wearers” for the same reason that he calls the Pharisees “Stoics”: because that is the term by which his audience will understand what he means.[6]
We will finish off this blog with an extract from John Domic Crossan book Render Unto Caesar. Crossan shows how Josephus tries to sweep Jewish messianism under the mat.
“Finally, twenty years after his Romanizing of Jewish eschatology in his Jewish War, Josephus had to face the book of Daniel in his Jewish Antiquities. Although written in the 160s BCE, the book was fictionalized as if written in the 500s BCE and so all its “prophecies” were infallibly accurate (JA 10.188–281). But what about the parallel Jewish eschatological promises of the rule of God on earth in Daniel 2:44 and 7:14, 22, 27?
In Daniel 2 and 7, the imperial rules of the Babylonians, Medes, Persians, and Greeks were to be destroyed and, along with Alexander’s successor sub-empire of the Syrian-Greeks, to be replaced by the rule of God on earth. But how could Josephus record such Jewish eschatology, especially since “in the very same manner Daniel also wrote concerning the Roman government, and that our country should be made desolate by them” (JA 10.27b)
Watch how he handles Daniel’s Jewish eschatology in those two particular chapters, first with Daniel 2 and its dream vision of a Great Statue and the Great Stone […] having avoided mention of Judaism’s eschatological rule of God in Daniel 2:44, Josephus avoids it again by totally omitting all of Daniel 7. That omission is also quite obviously deliberate. Although Josephus copied the stories in Daniel 1–6 in their proper sequence (JA 10.188–218, 232–63), he then skipped Daniel 7 completely and picked up again with Daniel 8 (JA 10.269–76).
As Josephus describes the Jewish response to Romanization, his first negation is of any God-founded eschatological motivation for it or any God-decreed messianic expectation about it. For Josephus, Jewish eschatology was mistake at best, delusion at worst, because the climax of time, the end of history, the last or eschatological “rule of God” on earth was the rule of Rome itself. Any validity to a Jewish eschatological vision or a Jewish messianic hope was buried by Josephus in the charred wreckage of Jerusalem.[7]
This shows that Josephus (like most Jews badly affected by it) hated messianism. To him some of the less well known messianic figures that failed to get a mention in Josephus first book War, made it into his later book Antiquities. Even the minor figures that did make it into War, barely register a mention and are quickly moved over. Josephus preferred to talk about himself and made a good chunk of the book about his exploits as commander of the Galilean forces.
[1] Simon J. Joseph, Jesus and the Temple, pp.22-23.
[2] Robert Jewett, The Agitators and the Galatian Congregation, 1971, New Testament Studies, 17(2), p. 205, fn. 5.
For Carriers arguments see Richard Carrier, ‘Pauline Interpolations’, Hitler Homer Bible Christ, The historical papers of Richard Carrier 1995-2013, (Richmond, California: Philosopher Press 2014), pp. 203-211
Also see Matthew Jensen, The (In)authenticity of 1 Thessalonians 2.13-16: A Review of Argument, Currents in Biblical Research 18(1), (2019), pp. 59 –79.
[3] Bart Ehrman, Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene”, pp.222-223.
[4], Rivkin, What Crucified Jesus?, p.82
[5] Loveday Alexander, “The Gospel according to Celsus, Celsus’ Representation of Christianity” ch 8 in Celsus and his World, Paget and Gathercole (eds).
[6] Matthew V. Novenson, The Grammar of Messianism: An Ancient Jewish Political Idiom and Its Users, (Oxford, 2017), p.147-8.
[7] John Dominic Crossan, Render Unto Caesar, ch 11
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