The Pharisees didn’t kill Jesus

In Mark 14, the scene is tense. Jesus stands before an assembly of the high priest, all the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes. False witnesses rise and tell tales meant to condemn Jesus, but their accounts don’t add up. So the high priest asks Jesus a pointed question: “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” “I am,” Jesus says. At this, the high priest tears his clothes and accuses Jesus of blasphemy. The assembly agrees and condemns Jesus to death for it.

Interestingly, according to Israel Knohl, a leading Jewish biblical scholar, things could have gone differently. In The Messiah Confrontation, Knohl traces the complex story of the messianic idea in Jewish thought leading up to Jesus’ death. The story concludes with Jesus standing trial before a group of religious leaders who did not believe a (semi)divine messiah was coming to restore the Davidic kingdom. These were the Sadducees. Had it been the Pharisees presiding over Jesus’ trial, Knohl suggests, “Jesus would not have been condemned to death, convicted, and crucified.”

The Pharisees, like most Jews in that period, hoped for the kingdom to be restored by a messiah who bore godlike qualities. The Pharisees may have disputed and rejected Jesus’ self-identification as the Messiah, but it would not have been considered blasphemy worthy of capital punishment. (The Pharisees would only have condemned someone to death for speaking God’s ineffable name.) For the Sadducees, however, Jesus’ claim to be the Son of the Blessed One was a grave offense.