Chapter 6 — The Life of Christ

Of all the figures William has read against the grain, Jesus of Nazareth is the one he treats with the greatest care, and the greatest insistence. The story most people have inherited — of a heavenly visitor delivering timeless spiritual lessons to an ungrateful nation — is, in William's reading, a later overlay laid down on top of something far more concrete, far more political, and far more tragic. To recover the life beneath the legend, the reader has to be willing to set aside what the Gospels eventually became and ask what the man himself was actually trying to do.

This chapter follows William through that recovery. Four threads run through it. First, that Jesus's mission was concrete and political: a plan to relieve the pressure between Rome and Judea, not a course of abstract metaphysics. Second, that an early opportunity to fold him peacefully into the religious establishment was missed when his family fetched him back from the temple at twelve. Third, that the man who should have mediated between Jesus and the high priest — John the Baptist — was already dead by the time the crisis arrived, leaving Judas to attempt the mediation and to be deceived in the attempt. Fourth, that the Gospels themselves must be read critically, with an eye to which passages were preserved despite the later editors and which were inserted to please them.

Christ's identity and mission

William's first move is to put Jesus back inside his own people. Before any theology, there is a man with a passport and a postcode, and both of them are Jewish.

The first thing to know about Jesus is that he was a Jew. He was born a Jew; his parents were Jewish. He lived as a Jew, was circumcised, ate kosher food, went to the temple to worship, and was buried as a Jew. He was as Jewish as one could be. Sometimes people think he came from heaven or was some kind of spiritual teacher, but actually, he was Jewish. The reality in which he found himself was that Israel was occupied by the Romans. That was the world in which he found himself; he was born a Jew and lived in Israel occupied by the Romans. That was the environment in which he acted and conducted himself, and we need to understand that to understand why he did what he did and why he taught what he taught. He wasn't teaching abstract spiritual truths; he was trying to address a reality that he found. (from Life and Teachings of Jesus - Part 1)

The reframing is small but enormous. If Jesus were principally a teacher of timeless interior truths, then the date of his birth and the politics of his region would be incidental. But William's claim is that they are everything. The mission was situated. There was an occupier, an occupied people, and a rising temperature that any serious Jew of the period could see was tending toward catastrophe. Within forty years of Jesus's death, that temperature would in fact boil over into the war that ended with the destruction of the Second Temple. Read in that light, the parables and beatitudes are not detached spiritual aphorisms but the practical counsel of a man trying to avert a war.

That practical project also explains, in William's reading, why Jesus was a Pharisee rather than a religious outsider. He worked within the rabbinic tradition he had been raised in, and his disagreements with his colleagues were the ordinary disagreements of a tradition that argued for a living.

All of Jesus' teachings and practices fall somewhere on the spectrum between two major schools of Pharisees: Rabbi Shammai, who was very strict, and Rabbi Hillel, who was more liberal. Often, the Gospels mention that the Pharisees criticized Jesus, but it would be more accurate to say that some Pharisees criticized him, as he was a Pharisee within that tradition. Jesus taught that the Pharisees sit in Moses' seat, and he instructed his disciples to do everything they say... Even if Jesus had original interpretations or different readings of the text, it would not have been a reason for him to be killed. In Judaism, there is no sense that people should be killed for having slightly different interpretations of the law. (from Life and Teachings of Jesus - Part 3)

This is the hinge on which the whole reading turns. If Jesus was killed, he was not killed for his interpretations of the law. Judaism did not, and does not, execute its own teachers for unusual readings of the text. Whatever brought him to the cross was something else — something political, something that frightened Rome rather than something that scandalised the synagogue.

What that political mission actually amounted to, William sketches by reaching back into Persian history for the precedent Jesus and his contemporaries would have known intimately.

There were 70 of his disciples or connected to him, would have become the king of Israel. Cyrus's policies allowed the Jewish people to return to their homeland and rebuild their community, marking a significant turning point in their history... a surprisingly modern understanding of religious freedom and tolerance, demonstrating that ancient societies could possess advanced ideas about governance and human rights. (from Life and Teachings of Jesus Part 1, by William Haines)

The reference to Cyrus is not antiquarian. It is a working model: an imperial power that had, against the grain of empire, granted the Jewish people the freedom to return and rebuild. Rome could, in principle, have been led to behave the same way. A figure of sufficient stature, with a settled following — seventy disciples is the number William emphasises — could have served as the focal point for that arrangement.

John the Baptist's role

That arrangement, however, required a broker. Jesus could not walk up to the gate of the high priest's house and explain himself. Someone with credibility inside the priestly establishment had to make the introduction. The man whose biography was tailored to that exact role was John the Baptist.

John the Baptist was the son of the high priest; he would have grown up in the temple. Even though he left the temple to do his ministry by the River Jordan, he would have known the chief priests and probably knew Caiaphas personally. He could have approached Caiaphas and said, 'Hi, Uncle Caiaphas, I want to tell you about Jesus. You think he's a real problem, a threat, but actually, he's got a plan to try and solve this problem between the Roman occupation and the Jews. He's trying to teach the Jewish people not to hate the Romans, not to have a violent uprising, but to turn the other cheek.' If the high priest had understood what Jesus was really about, he would have realised that Jesus was safe... But the problem was that John the Baptist was not there. (from Life and Teachings of Jesus - Part 3)

This is, in William's account, the central absence at the heart of the Passion narrative. The mediator who could have explained the project to the establishment had already been killed by Herod. With him gone, no one inside the temple hierarchy had any reason to read Jesus as anything other than another agitator in a long line of agitators, in a country that produced one every few years and watched Rome crucify them in batches.

There is an earlier missed opportunity that William traces back to the famous scene of the boy Jesus in the temple at twelve years old. Had his parents understood what was happening and left him there, the religious establishment would have absorbed him as one of their own, and the later catastrophe might never have arrived.

Mary and Joseph took him to Jerusalem for festivals. During one visit, they lose track of him and find him in the temple, engaging with teachers. Jesus expresses his need to be in his Father's house, indicating his deep connection to God and his desire to study the scriptures. This moment reflects the tension between his divine mission and his earthly family's understanding of him. The narrative suggests that Jesus was not just a passive child but actively seeking knowledge and understanding of his role. The depiction of this scene, including the body language of Jesus and his parents, highlights the misunderstandings and conflicts that arose from Jesus' unique identity and mission. (from Life and Teachings of Jesus - Part 1)

A twelve-year-old already capable of holding his own with the teachers in Jerusalem belonged in Jerusalem. Brought back to Galilee instead, he would in time have to return as an adult, without the long apprenticeship that an institutional welcome would have given him, and without the protectors that apprenticeship would have produced.

The crucifixion as substitute plan

The cross, in William's reading, is therefore not the original plan. It is the substitute that became necessary when every other route had closed. To see this clearly requires reading the Gospels critically, and reading them critically begins with looking honestly at the Roman governor who carried out the sentence.

Who was Pilate? He was a Roman governor for ten years who disrespected Jewish traditions and was chastised by the emperor on several occasions. He took money from the temple for his own purposes, slaughtered Samaritans, and eventually caused so many problems in Palestine that he was withdrawn by Rome. Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Jesus and Pilate, wrote that Pilate's tenure was associated with briberies, insults, robberies, and constant executions without trial. Pilate was a very harsh ruler... However, scholars have found no evidence of such a custom of releasing a prisoner on Passover; it simply did not happen. Pilate was certainly not the kind of person who would do that. (from Life and Teachings of Jesus - Part 3)

This is the figure who, in the canonical text, is shown washing his hands and trying to release the prisoner. William's response is straightforward: that portrait was painted later, by a Church that needed to live under Roman rule and could not afford to keep saying out loud that Rome had killed its founder. The blame was shifted to the Jewish authorities because the alternative was to keep antagonising the very empire whose tolerance the early Christians depended upon. The historical Pilate, the one Philo described, did not negotiate with crowds and did not free condemned prisoners.

Once the political reality of Pilate is restored, the political nature of the charge against Jesus becomes harder to evade. And once that is admitted, the most uncomfortable of William's readings can be put on the table: that Jesus's last act in Jerusalem was not a symbolic cleansing but an attempted seizure of the temple itself.

The early Jewish-Christian tradition suggests that Jesus not only drove the money changers from the temple but also entered the Holy of Holies. His brother James, one of his disciples, is said to have donned the breastplate of the high priest, while John the Beloved wore the miter of the high priest. This suggests that Jesus was attempting to overthrow the priestly establishment and take control of the temple. (from Life and Teachings of Jesus Part 3, by William Haines)

A man who walks into the Holy of Holies with his brother in the high priest's breastplate is not committing a theological infelicity. He is staging a coup — a non-violent one, in keeping with everything he had taught, but a coup nonetheless, intended to replace a compromised priesthood with one that could carry out the original plan. With John the Baptist long dead, and the establishment unwilling to listen, this was the last lever available. It failed. Judas, who in William's reading was probably trying to arrange the very meeting between Jesus and Caiaphas that John should have arranged years earlier, was deceived by the men he approached, and the matter passed out of Jewish hands and into Roman ones. The charge was insurrection; the punishment was the cross.

The resurrection and what the Church became after

The resurrection, in this reading, is the seal placed on a mission that did not unfold as it should have. The cross was not the goal; it was the price exacted when the substitute course had to be taken. What followed was a community that, of necessity, lived under Roman power and edited its founding documents accordingly — softening Pilate, hardening the priests, and translating a concrete political mission into a more portable spiritual one that could survive in a hostile empire.

This is why William insists that the Gospels must be read with two hands. Passages that cut against the grain of the later tradition — that show Jesus inside Pharisaic Judaism, that show his brother in priestly vestments, that show a Pilate the texts elsewhere try to exonerate — are likely to be authentic, preserved because they were too well known to remove. Passages that conveniently support the later position of the Church under Rome are likely to be the editors' work. The reader's task is the same one William has trained throughout this book: to listen for what the text could not bring itself to say, and to weigh it against what the text was eager to put forward.

What the Church became after the cross is therefore both more and less than what its founder set out to make. Less, because the immediate political reconciliation he was working for did not happen, and the Jewish-Roman war that followed swept the temple itself away. More, because the figure who was meant to be a peacemaker for one people in one occupied country became, over the following centuries, a figure carried across the world. William reads that expansion soberly. It was not the original plan. It was the resurrection of a plan that had been killed.