Q&A: Did They Kill Jesus?
Did They Kill Jesus?
Question
Supreme Court Justice Haim Cohen, of blessed memory, proved that it was not the sages of Israel who sentenced him to death.
For one does not hold court at night, nor on the Sabbath or a holiday, nor on the basis of a person's own confession; and one who blasphemes is not liable unless he explicitly curses using the Divine Name, whereas the strange definition of “son of God” is not considered blasphemy. Also, if everyone finds him guilty, he is acquitted. And perhaps there are several other laws of the Sanhedrin as well.
Question:
A. Achan was apparently executed on the basis of his own confession.
B. Is it possible that before they arranged it all in order (wrote it down?)—these laws were not practiced?
(And only afterward did the Sanhedrin legislate all these rules.)
C. Apparently this was a Sadducee court and not a Pharisaic one (or at least a mixed one, as with Jesus’ two disciples, who therefore escaped the situation in the Sanhedrin)
Answer
A. On the basis of the statement (and there was also evidence).
B. Possibly, but Jesus was executed when the Oral Torah was already fairly well crystallized. In any case, I would not build overly elaborate constructions on the arguments you described here. A court may also execute outside the strict letter of the law.
C. I didn’t understand.
A correction was added to the question in another thread:
A major correction.
So that, God forbid, no mistake should come about through me.
The ones who killed Jesus and hung the sign here saying “King of the Jews” were of course the Romans, not the Jews.
That is not what I meant to ask about.
He was put to death, and in the eyes of the Romans he did not need to go on living even one more second, since they identified in him a potential threat to their rule, since he called for honesty and fairness. That was certainly more than enough for the regime not to leave his head on his shoulders for even an extra minute.
The question was only about the Sanhedrin that judged him worthy of death, and only about some of the proofs of Supreme Court Justice H. Cohen, of blessed memory.
Is it possible that it was even Pharisaic, at least in part [as among his disciples, where at least one of them cried out to the judges, “I am a Pharisee, son of a Pharisee, please,” and created an uproar in the mixed Sanhedrin and thus was saved; and likewise the second one, according to Pharisaic law [the Sages], was not liable to death], and that the laws that were arranged [or written] about 200 years later in the Mishnah, and later in the Talmud, were not practiced then at the time of Jesus’ trial?
Or was it simply a Sadducee Sanhedrin, for whom there is no problem with holding court at night, or on the Sabbath or a holiday, or with the rule that a person cannot make himself into a wicked person by his own confession; and the definition of a blasphemer may also have been more general, and likewise the rule that if everyone finds him guilty he is acquitted does not follow from the plain meaning of the verses.
So that according to their mode of conduct, he was indeed liable to death.
The question is only about the Sanhedrin’s deliberation in Jesus’ case, of course, and not about the execution itself, which was clearly carried out by the Romans.
And the Mishnah does not lose its place.