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Pesach 3789, The Last Supper [1]

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Date: 2025-04-16

On the Sunday before Pesach in the Hebraic year 3789 (30 AD in the Rome calendar), a Jewish messianic leader road into Jerusalem to challenge rule by Rome and its local collaborators. As the Maccabees did 194 years earlier, in an attack with religious significance that symbolized adherence to the tenets of Judaism, Jesus of Nazareth and his followers targeted the Holy Temple that had been defiled by the Romans. The rebels hope for a general uprising failed to occur and on the night of the Passover seder Jesus as the leader of the rebellion was taken into custody by Roman forces.

The trial of Jesus is reported on in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John that were later canonized by the Roman Catholic Church at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, approximately 300 years after the events, despite inconsistencies in their reports. The Gospels disagree about when the attack on the temple and the seder dinner occurred and the details of the crucifixion. Matthew's Gospel (Matthew 27:25) held Jewish leaders and crowds responsible for Jesus' death because Jewish religious leaders condemned Jesus as a false Messiah after the failed insurrection. Luke's Gospel shifts at least partial blame to the Roman authorities. Little is known about Pontius Pilate, the governor of the Roman province of Judaea, who presided over the trial of Jesus and ordered his crucifixion.

Jesus was condemned by Jewish leaders and Roman authorities for supposedly claiming to be the Son of God and the King of the Jews, although there is no evidence he claimed to be the King of the Jews. The claim that he was the Son of God, if it was made, can be read that all men were created by God in his image in the Book of Genesis and therefore are all men are the sons of God.

There is no independent documentation in Roman sources that Pontius Pilate offered to spare one of the men, including Jesus, condemned to death because of Passover but that the Jews of Jerusalem did not support the choice of Jesus. Many historians dismiss this claim as a historical fiction written into the Gospels to shift blame for Jesus’ execution from Roman authorities to the Jewish leadership.

Cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris in his book Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture (Vintage, 1974) argued that Jesus of Nazareth was one of a long line of Judaic militant messiahs who led revolts, some successful and others defeated, against outside empires that attempted to dominated Judaea. Leaders who failed like Jesus were generally abandoned by the populous as false messiahs.

Messiah comes from the Hebrew word mashiach, which means someone chosen by God to rule and it is not limited to one person who, in the Christian sense, is divine. In the Jewish sense Moses, David, Solomon Judah Maccabee were all messiahs or special leaders.

Harris discusses how the memory of Jesus was transformed from being a militant rebel into the pacifistic Prince of Peace of Christianity and postulates that the redefinition of Jesus was done by his disciples and later Christian proselytizers to make possible the religions survival within a hostile Roman Empire.

When the Council of Nicaea chose the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the official accounts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, it dismissed other Gospels with different messages, labeled the apocryphal gospels, as inaccurate or misleading. The Gospels of Thomas and Philip did not include anti-Jewish sentiment or emphasize conflict between Jesus and Jewish leaders. Both the Gospel of the Ebionites and The Protevangelium of James emphasized Jesus’ Jewishness and offered positive portrayals of Jewish customs and traditions.

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