Holy Thursday (Agony & Arrest)

THE EVENTS OF HOLY THURSDAY - Part 2
The Agony, the Arrest and the Trials

Jesus Leaves the Upper Room for the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives

Holy Scripture says: "He went out." Jesus knew that as He went out the Upper Room and left the Last Supper, that He was walking to His death. From its situation in the highest part of the town the house where the Last Supper was held must have given a complete view of the city. Close by was the High Priest’s palace; to the left, Herod’s, flanked by the gardens of Gareb; and opposite, beyond the shadow of the Tyropeon, beyond Ophel and Sion at the foot of the Temple, arose the massive Tower of Antonia, the symbol of humiliation.

Jesus, in a glance around, could count the three “stages” of His “trial.” But Golgotha would not be visible; it lay behind the square block of the Tower of David. Over the sleeping town shone the bright moon of the month of Nisan, the full moon of the Passover, “blessed in that it hath delivered us.” A burning brazier marked the watchtower of Phazael, and somewhere, in a hidden Temple police trap, Judas also kept watch.

Gethsemane
The diect road, from the house of the Cenacle to the Mount of Olives, crossed the bridge which led over the Tyropeon to the Temple and through it out of the city by the Golden Gate. Since no one but the priests could go into the Temple after nightfall, Jesus and His disciples would have to descend into the lower part of the town, skirting the southeastern corner of the fortifications. Perhaps they went down by that graduated pathway which has been uncovered by the Assumptionists on their land there, a road with steps wide enough to allow asses and camels to go up and down comfortably. At the bottom of the narrow valley ran the furious waters of the brook Cedron, whose name in Hebrew signifies “dark” or “dirty”; they would not run very long, only during four or five weeks in the springtime, but in this brief period they rush and spume with great force until the heat of summer turns the river into a dry channel full of boulders.

The place for which Jesus was bound this night was a grove planted with olive trees which St. Mark and St. Matthew call Gethsemane, a name signifying “oil press.” Probably it was one of those primitive outfits still to be found in Palestine, to which neighboring proprietors bring their olives while a donkey attached to a rotating wheel patiently works a wooden press.

Today, in a rather too tidy little garden planted with formal flower beds, eight huge dessicated trees still manage to produce on their scrawny branches a few meager olives. But there is no possibility that these ancient ruins could ever have given shelter to Jesus in their youth because, although the olive tree is incredibly long-lived and there are trees in Corfu and Mytilene which are said to have weathered more than a thousand years, it is certain that no trees in this particular situation could have survived the assault of Titus. A few yards from the enclosure is a subterranean chapel, with violet stained-glass windows in rather poor taste, filled with the odor and the glitter of hundreds of candles. But this is no longer regarded as being the place where Christ prayed in agony, since the Franciscans have uncovered in the actual enclosure of Gethsemane the remains of a fourth-century basilica built in commemoration of those dark hours.

The Agony
“Sit down here, while I go in there and pray,” said Jesus to His disciples; “do you abide here, and watch with Me.” Only Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, James and John, were with Him. Fear and disgust and an overwhelming sadness took possession of Him. “My soul is ready to die with sorrow.” He went a little further off, only a stone’s throw, and knelt and prayed: “My Father, if it is possible, let this chalice pass Me by; only as Thy will is, not as Mine is.”

The strange tormented hour is reported by the three synoptics (Matthew 26:36-46; Mark 14:32-42; Luke 22:40-46). It must have been cold there in the shadow. Beyond the Cedron rose the walls of the Temple, blue-white under the moon. The rumbling of the torrent made a part of the silence, interrupted at regular intervals by the cry of the Roman sentinels on the Tower of Antonia. In that place, only a few yards from His friends, Jesus was more alone than He had been in the wilderness; and here, in the hour when destiny took Him by the throat, He experienced, in the most agonizing crisis He had ever known, the clash of the two natures within Him. But His disciples, ordinary men, had gone to sleep. “Had you no strength, then, to watch with Me even for an hour?” He said sadly when He went back to them. “The spirit is willing enough, but the flesh is weak.” Again He went away to resume the supplication: “My Father, if this chalice may not pass Me by, but I must drink it, then Thy will be done.” “And He had sight of an angel from Heaven, encouraging Him. And now He was in an agony, and prayed still more earnestly; His sweat fell to the ground like thick drops of blood.”

Praying Unto Blood
The bloody sweat is mentioned only by Luke the doctor, and it is a vivid reminder of the human side of Christ. The physiological phenomenon of sweating blood has been observed in cases of severe stress; it is one of those singular manifestations which nature can wrench from extremity, like the blanching of hair in a single night. Throughout this scene we are deeply conscious of the human nature of Jesus and this is why it moves us so profoundly. He was a young man, only thirty years old, and death was closing in on Him; He could breathe it in the cold night air, hear it in the growl of the torrent. He would not have been human had His flesh not quaked and revolted at the thought of the death He must die. No other scene in the entire Gospel narrative, not even that of the Temptation, has such profound psychological truth; how well we recognize the heavy heart, the consciousness so distraught that it implores God for a miracle which would deny everything for which He had striven. If Jesus were an invention and His life story the fabrication of successive hagiographers, would they have produced an episode like this? From the martyrs who were to go joyfully to the torture, like the young Blandine of Lyons, we can learn little—or too much!—because the grace which upheld them seems so exceptional, so far removed from us. “But the example of Jesus shows us that God does not despise the anguish of our nature and that the highest Christian virtue can be content to overcome it without pretending to stifle it,” wrote Fr. Lebreton.

There is, however, something else in this scene besides its moving evocation of human weakness. The troubled flesh was not only man but God; the distraught consciousness was still aware of that to which it aspired. St. Teresa of Avila has written of certain mystic states in which the creature feels the distress of such strivings. “The soul receives no consolation neither from the Heaven which it has not reached nor from the earth to which it is no longer bound.” Agony, the term which St. Luke uses, does not mean in the original Greek the stage before death, as it has come to mean today, but expresses the idea of a mortal combat, a violent drama. This is the sense in which Miguel de Unamuno uses it in his book The Agony of Christianity.

The Battle of the Human with the DIvine
The Agony in the Garden was a conflict of the divine strength against human weakness; a conflict between the most pure and noble of souls and the Prince of Darkness, against the temptation to withdraw and give up. Yet for all its tragic humanity, the supernatural element is so strong that the scene has defeated almost all the great artists; only Rembrandt in an engraving which is little more than a sketch, full of lunar lighting and fathomless shadow, has approached the sense of conflict which the Gospel evokes. “Jesus in His Passion,” said Pascal, “suffers the torments men inflict upon Him, but in His Agony He suffers the torments He inflicts upon Himself—turbare sernetipsum. It is a wound dealt by a hand which is not mortal but all-powerful, and only the all-powerful could sustain it.”

The essential quality of the scene is not its communication of almost unbearable distress but of a decisive acceptance. Distraught as He was, on the edge of death, Jesus can still repeat, in a sort of sublime stammer: “Only as Thy will is, not as Mine is.” The union of the Father and the Son, one will, one design, is clearly manifest. When the anti-Christian polemicist Celsus sneered at the God who wept and groaned, instead of producing a miracle to confound His enemies, he only revealed his complete misconception of Christianity.

The heaviness and disgust which, as the Gospel tells us, rose up in Jesus like nausea is something the sinner knows only too well. “Christ never knew sin, and God made Him into sin for us,” says St. Paul (II Cor. v, 21 ), and a French commentator has remarked on this: “Sin is not transferred from man to Christ but it reaches out from man to Christ . . . the Redemption operated under God in accordance with the principle of solidarity: Jesus Christ had to be man in order to redeem mankind; to be subject to the Law, to deliver men from it; to be a member of the sinful human family in order to save sinners, to assume the flesh that He might conquer it in its own sphere.”

It was the sin of man that the man-God took upon Himself in the hour when His death was to ransom it, and it was the suffering of the world which He assumed, which He dignified and to which He has given meaning.

Then, in the distance, there was a confused burst of sound, voices and the clanking of arms. A red glare of torches became visible through the darkness. Jesus got up and returned to His disciples. “Sleep and take your rest hereafter,” He said; “as I speak, the time draws near when the Son of Man is to be betrayed into the hands of sinners.” Some commentators have seen a mordant irony in these words, but the true accent is surely that of an infinite compassion. He was to ensure their salvation very soon now, that was His mission, He who had come to vanquish fear, death and sin.

The Arrest
Judas knew exactly where Jesus would be likely to pass the night for it was not the first time that the band of disciples had accompanied their Master there. He might have watched them leave the house of the Cenacle and followed them discreetly. Once sure of his facts, he had to warn the priests and the elders as quickly as possible. If the arrest was to be made quietly without arousing attention before the legal ceremonies of the Passover began, there was no time to be lost. The men who accompanied him would be the Temple servants, bearing lanterns and torches, and a detachment of soldiers armed with swords and staves.
“The traitor had appointed them a signal; It is none other, he told them, than the man whom I shall greet with a kiss; hold Him fast. No sooner, then, had he come near to Jesus than he said, Hail, Master, and kissed Him” (Matthew 26: 48-49). “Jesus said to him, Judas, wouldst thou betray the Son of Man with a kiss?” (Luke 22:48).

The custom of the disciple kissing the hand of his master was very common; the Talmud laid it down as obligatory. But Christian art has always shown Judas as kissing Jesus on the cheek or on the forehead and all who have seen Giotto’s fresco at Padua will recall the frightful head of Judas, with its low forehead and gross sneering mouth. There is something symbolical in this horrible kiss, the archetype of all those lying caresses which are the current coin of our human loves, yet perhaps it has a less ignoble significance. It might have been that, at the last moment, shame and remorse prevented Judas from pointing his finger at Jesus and crying, “That is He.”

Responsibility?
Who was responsible for the arrest of Jesus? It is a vexing question, much in evidence throughout the trial to the end, and history has since debated it incessantly. Is the legal responsibility for the death of Christ to be charged to the Roman or to the Jewish authorities? The records suggest that there was a good deal of confusion and it cannot be said that either authority emerges with much credit. From the four Gospel narratives (Matthew 26:47-56; Mark14:43-52; Luke 22:47-53; John 18: 2-12) there were obviously Roman soldiers among those who arrested Jesus. The Greek spena, used in the texts, does not mean a cohort in the sense of a definite military unit but only in the sense of an undefined party of troops. Similarly a chiliarch is just an officer, and not, as sometimes it has been translated, a tribunus, who was, in the Roman army, a senior officer almost equivalent to a brigadier. It seems most likely that the Roman soldiers took part in the arrest at the request of the Jewish authorities, without knowing whether it had been definitely sanctioned by Pilate or not.

In any case, the responsibility of the Jews is established clearly enough. St. Matthew, St. Mark and St. John all state definitely that the arresting party was sent by the priests and the elders and the Pharisees, and when reading of the staves carried by the rabble we recall what the Talmud says about the Chief Priests belaboring the people. The Gospel narrative suggests anything but an orderly, judicial arrest, and Renan’s statement, “A strong sense of public order and protective police action characterized its procedure,” seems very wide of the mark. It was obviously inspired by nothing higher than hatred and fear, a sordid get-together of politicians and self-styled theologians. The use of a traitor as the instrument of arrest is typical. This, as a matter of fact, was illegal. The Mosaic Law was the only legal code in the ancient world which forbade the use of spies and informers: “Do not whisper calumnies in the public ear, and swear away thy neighbor’s life” (Leviticus 19:16).

Two Kinds of Courage: With the Sword and Without the Sword
Jesus asked them: “Who is it you are looking for? Jesus of Nazareth, they answered; and He told them, I am Jesus of Nazareth. . . . When He said it to them, they all shrank back, and fell to the ground.” This incident is reported only by St. John (18:4-6). Whether it means that there was a kind of miracle, a last manifestation of the supernatural power of the Son of God; or whether simply that the agents of the Temple were once more disconcerted, as they had been upon a previous occasion by the calm majesty of Christ, we do not know. At this moment Simon Peter, brave and impetuous as ever, drew his sword for the attack and cut off the ear of one of the Temple servants. “Whereupon Jesus said to him, ‘Put thy sword back into its place; all those who take up the sword will perish by the sword.’”

Then He touched the wounded man and healed his ear. St. John, writing a long time after the synoptics, tells us that the name of the wounded man was Malchus, a detail which the earlier Evangelists omit, doubtless because, as we have observed in another context, it would be dangerous to call attention to him if, as tradition says and as we can well believe, he was converted by the miracle. It is a name which occurs often in Josephus and which seems to have been common among the Nebaioth Arabs. Probably he was one of the Bedouin or Idumenean soldiers, of whom there were many among the Temple guards as well as in the Roman armies. Jesus had once told His disciples that He came as a lamb among wolves and there was no question of resisting arrest. “You have come out to My arrest with swords and clubs, as if I were a robber,” He said; “and yet I used to sit teaching in the temple close to you, day after day, and you never laid hands on Me.”

We wonder how the disciples took this calm acceptance of the fact, whether they succumbed to panic. We know that they all fled. “There was a young man there following Him, who was wearing only a linen shirt on his bare body; and he, when they laid hold of him, left the shirt in their hands, and ran away from them naked.” St. Mark alone records this incident and its few lines are almost a personal signature, for who would have remembered this but the man who experienced it? It has been supposed that the Gethsemane property belonged to his mother, one of those holy women who supported Jesus, and that hearing the noise in the night the young man got up and ran hurriedly to the scene, following Jesus some way behind. Perhaps it was at that moment that he received the gift of faith, which sealed him forever to the One who had set his feet on the way of the Cross.

Before Annas
And so Jesus was taken back, down the stepped pathway and the narrow sloping streets to the place from which He had come. Jerusalem by night is a strange unearthly city and, even today, the visitor has little difficulty in visualizing the nocturnal passage of Jesus surrounded by a hostile crowd. In the darkness one can forget the staring monuments, disproportionate and inharmonious, which the piety of successive generations has built, without the slightest regard for local architectural traditions. We see nothing but the high walls and narrow climbing streets, with their worn, shining stones and the wells of shadow formed by houses massed together above the roadway. Wrapped in their mantles, men lie asleep, on many of the street corners. So it must have looked that night, as the sad procession passed along the road which was to end at Golgotha.

Where was Jesus first taken? St. John alone gives us any information: he says definitely that He was taken to the house of Annas, the former High Priest. Unfortunately, the sequence of events in the Fourth Gospel is not at all clear at this point. We read (John 18: 23): “They led Him off, in the first instance, to Annas, father-in-law of Caiphas, who held the high priesthood in that year.” Then comes an account of the interrogation followed by the opening scene of the denial of Peter, which the synoptics place during the interrogation by Caiphas. Following this we read (18:24) that Annas had sent Jesus bound to Caiphas, and then the continuation of the denial by Peter. It would seem as though the proper place for verse 24 is after verses 23-14, which it, in fact, occupies in an early Syriac manuscript and in Cyril of Alexandria. It is clear that Annas sent Jesus to Caiphas but we do not know what took place during the first interrogation.

But the mere fact that Jesus was first taken to Annas is of itself significant. Annas was the former High Priest; he had received the office under the Legate Quirinius in 7 AD of our era and held it until 24 AD, the year of the accession of Tiberius. This, as Josephus says, was a “considerable time.” Although deposed by the Romans, he continued to wield very considerable power in sacerdotal circles, as witness the fact that five of his sons and his son-in-law succeeded him in attaining the miter and the pectoral. He was an able man— “none so astute as he in enriching himself,” says Josephus. It is probable that there was a distinctly anti-Roman sentiment among those who supported him; he was unquestionably the leader of the Jewish community. Renan regarded him as “the leading spirit in the drama . . . the real instigator of the judicial murder that was to be carried out.”

He may not even have said anything at all to Jesus. He held the strings manipulating those who seemed to be managing the affair, and once it was set in motion he knew perfectly well where it would end. We can picture the encounter face to face between the rigid old man, hidebound in his formalism, but consumed by all the passions which hatred and fear can foster in the heart of man, and the young Prophet who had flung at him and his kind “the whitened sepulchres” of contempt and anathema. Annas considered all this, and sent Jesus on to Caiphas.

Archaeologists and exegetes are inclined to the view that the two High Priests, former and actual, shared the same palace, their quarters being separated only by a courtyard. Meanwhile, Jesus was probably put in a cell. On the presumed site of the palace of the High Priests, at the end of a small Greek chapel embellished with ivory and mosaics in gold, is a small low-ceilinged room, like a miniature sacristy, which purports to be the actual prison where Jesus spent a few hours during that night. Its walls are covered with a soft blue tiling, lit from above by a flush of golden light. Like so many of the holy places in Jerusalem, it appeals only by the memories that it calls up and by the invisible spiritual deposit with which centuries of pious devotion have invested it.

Before Caiphas
The second stage of the “trial” brought Jesus before Caiphas. He was the officiating High Priest and, as such, the conduct of the politico-religious proceedings against Jesus devolved upon him. He received the pontificate under the Procurator Valerius Gratus in 18 and he succeeded in holding his office throughout the term of Pontius Pilate. He was not relieved of his post until 36 AD, by the Syrian Legate Vitellius, and so long a retention of such a difficult office, which one after another of his predecessors had been obliged to relinquish after a very short time, suggests that he had considerable powers of adaptability.

To be quite frank, he was one of those vulgar careerists from whom at all times and in all countries the powerful have chosen their creatures. The chief motivating power of his ignoble soul was fear, that fear of what people may say which haunts such men in office. A man like Caiphas could not permit an adventurer, a nobody, to upset the established order and perhaps arouse comment in Rome. He must be got rid of; the religious issue was a mere pretext.

In the meantime, news of the arrest had spread and the priests, scribes and doctors had rushed to the palace to form a council of sorts. Again we are up against a chronological difficulty. The Gospels do not seem to agree upon the time of Jesus’s appearance before the court. St. Matthew and St. Mark place it during the night, before cock-crow, and record a continuation of the hearing on the following morning. The Fourth Gospel gives one hearing only, during the night, while St. Luke, who also records only one hearing, places it immediately after daybreak. (Matthew 26:57-66; Mark 14:53-64; Luke 22:54, 66-71; John 18:13-14; 19-23.)

Illegal Night Trial
There are reasons for preferring the chronology of Matthew and Mark, that is, an unofficial hearing during the night preceding a formal indictment before the Sanhedrin. First, such unofficial meetings had obviously taken place previously, for instance, the meeting which decided to arrest Jesus; secondly, it is psychologically more likely that these men who had decided to make the decisive move should get together as quickly as possible, even during the night, to have a look at the man they had laid hold on; finally, had there only been one meeting and that a nocturnal convocation of the Sanhedrin, it would have been so unorthodox that strict Jewish opinion would have disapproved violently, for the Mishna states that “all proceedings in which the life of a man is at stake must take place in the full light of day.”

Where passages from the Talmud are cited in criticizing aspects of the proceedings against Jesus in this and the following chapters, it is only fair to remind the reader that the Talmud was not compiled, even the earliest portions of it, until at least two or three centuries after the death of Christ, so that it cannot be affirmed with certainty that usages and customs codified in the Talmud were in fact current in the time of Jesus. But in view of the rigidity of Jewish tradition, many authorities declare that the Talmudic legislation enshrines centuries of unchanging custom and is in direct descent from the Mosaic Law.

The reconstruction of events seems to be that Jesus, after being taken from the palace of Annas, was brought at once before the group of men who had decided upon His death. When day came, the Sanhedrin was convened to pass judgment but the verdict had in fact been decided in advance and the Grand Council could only agree to it. By this means the people, taken by surprise, would have no time to act, while the Roman authorities would be faced with an accomplished fact. All this accords with what we know of Caiphas, who had said (and St. John reminds us of it) that “it was best to put one man to death for the sake of the people.”

The Accusations
The High Priest interrogated Jesus about His disciples and His teaching. “I have spoken openly before the world,” replied Jesus; “My teaching has been given in the synagogue and in the temple, where all the Jews forgather; nothing that I have said was said in secret. Why dost thou question Me? Ask those who listened to Me what My words were; they know well enough what I said” (John 18:20-21). The reply was astute as well as veracious: it was designed to protect the Apostles and to bring the proceedings back to reality, the reality of a trumped-up case in which interrogation was merely a pretence. One of the officers of the Court struck Jesus for these words, saying: “Is this how Thou makest answer to the high priest?” If any evidence were needed, even at this early stage, that the enemies of Jesus were not going to be embarrassed by regard for the niceties of the Law, this incident provides it, for the blow was definitely illegal. The Talmud lays down penalties for judges who strike a prisoner or allow others to do so, and St. Paul reproves Ananias for ordering him to be struck “contrary to the law” (Acts 23:3).

But it is abundantly clear that the forms of legality were going to be called upon in this case only if they were susceptible of being turned against Jesus. In a capital charge under Jewish law, a single witness was not sufficient; two at least must be found (Deuteronomy 17:6; 19:15; Numbers 35:30). That, however, was no trouble; witnesses could be provided. With that mixture of formality and illegality which characterizes the whole affair, they listened to various witnesses, “but their accusations did not agree.” Then came two who testified that they had heard Him say: “I will destroy this temple that is made by men’s hands, and in three days I will build another, with no hand of man to help Me.” But their testimony did not agree either.

Jewish law attached great importance to corroboration of details in testimony; it will be remembered that the Prophet Daniel, in the affair of Susanna and the Elders, trapped the lecherous old men by discrepancies in their accounts; one said the guilty pair lay under a mastic-tree and the other, beneath a holm-oak. St. Matthew and St. Mark report these false testimonies differently; in the first as “I have power to destroy”; in the second as “I will destroy.” Jesus had in fact said, (John 2:19) as an hypothesis: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up again,” and the words seem to have scandalized nobody at the time. The accusers of the chaste Susanna had, in accordance with the Law, suffered the penalty which would have been meted out to their victim, but we are not told what happened to those creatures of Caiphas who testified against Jesus.

Then the High Priest put the question: “I adjure Thee by the living God to tell us whether Thou art the Christ, the Son of God?” Jesus did not seek to evade the question put to Him by the competent authority in the name of God. He replied—“Thy own lips have said it. And moreover I tell you this; you will see the Son of Man again, when He is seated at the right hand of God’s power, and comes on the clouds of Heaven. At this, the high priest tore his garments, and said, He has blasphemed; what further need have we of witnesses? Mark well, you have heard His blasphemy for yourselves. What is your finding? And they answered, The penalty is death.”

Manipulation
The scene was well staged and it produced the calculated effect. The cunning priest knew exactly how to manipulate opinion, just as, centuries later, other astute theologians were to secure a verdict by analogous methods against Joan of Arc. If they are examined strictly, the words spoken by Jesus did not justify the verdict of death according to Jewish law, nor need Caiphas have rent his tunic “the length of the palm of the hand” as was the prescribed usage when blasphemy was heard. For the law as to what constituted blasphemy was very precise and the Talmud gives very lengthy particulars.

Blasphemy was to insult the majesty of God and this offense was incurred only if the sacred name of Yahweh, which God revealed to Moses, was uttered, not any of the synonyms which were in general use, such as the Almighty or the Blessed One, not even the abbreviation of the sacred name, Yahweh, but the name itself. Although Jesus affirmed that He was the Son of God by using the term “the right hand of God’s power,” He escaped the charge of blasphemy and if He did utter the sacred name itself—which we do not know since the Gospel texts have come down to us in Greek—it was not only the High Priest who should have rent his garments but everyone present. We get the impression that Caiphas staged the gesture to impress the audience. There was, moreover, a special ceremony necessary for convictions of blasphemy. The two witnesses were installed behind a curtain, the accused was prominently stationed in full view of the court and was questioned very carefully as to why He had used the sacred word and whether He was prepared to retract it, before His conviction could be registered. There is no hint of any of this during these hasty proceedings.

It was not blasphemy for a man to state that He was the Messias. Caiphas put forward that Jesus had no right to say so, but there was no legal justification of his case. Everything the accused man said about the return of the Messias in glory followed logically from His initial affirmation, and was based upon a prophecy of Daniel (7:13-14). The accusation of blasphemy in fact was groundless. The appeal of Caiphas to the court to consider Jesus condemned by His own words was even more flagrantly illegal than the rest of the proceedings, for the Law held that the statement of the accused could not be regarded as valid unless confirmed by witnesses, so that no man who was sick, deranged or ashamed could choose this way of terminating his life. But forms can always be disregarded when it is a question of overthrowing a political adversary: for then the end justifies the means and justice would only serve to cheat equity.

The Denials by Simon Peter
While the interrogation was proceeding, several of Jesus’s disciples, recovering from their first panic, guessed where He had been taken and were loitering about outside the High Priest’s house. The courtyards of rich men’s houses in the East are always full of gossips, servants, clients and hangers-on. The spring night was chilly, so some of them lit a brazier for warmth and among the circle of men gathered around it the presence of the disciples was noticed and commented upon. One of the Apostles, almost certainly John, since he alone gives the details, had some acquaintance with Caiphas and so slipped in unnoticed; Peter evidently followed Him and also stood in the group of men around the fire.

One of the High Priest’s maidservants, following the usual Jewish custom, was in charge of the gate. Catching sight of Peter, she came up and scrutinized him. “This is one of them,” she said. “Thou too wast with Jesus the Galilean.” But He denied it: “I do not know what thou meanest.” Then he went out of the courtyard toward the terrace and another maid noticed him and said to the other servants: “This fellow was in his company.” At that moment the cock crew. Sick with worry and fear, the Apostle may not have noticed it; he went back around the fire and, it would seem, almost out of bravado, denied Christ again, with oaths.

An hour passed and the incident seemed forgotten. Peter joined in conversation with the others. But the accent of the Galilean peasant was noticeable in Jerusalem, for they confused certain letters of the alphabet and it was said that nobody could tell whether they were saying immar (a lamb), camar (wool), hamar (wine) or hamor (an ass). So it was inevitable that somebody would detect Peter’s Galilean accent. “It is certain that thou art one of them; even thy speech betrays thee.” Then one of the High Priest’s servants, a relative of the man whose ear Peter had wounded when Christ was arrested, joined in: “Did I not see thee with Him in the garden?” Feeling himself attacked on all sides Peter lost his head, repeating denials and curses, and “then came the second cockcrow.”

Peter was no coward, as is shown by his behavior when they laid hands on Christ. But he was one of those men who, although they can cope with danger when it comes, are scared at the thought of it. St. Paul, in his Epistle to the Galatians, reports an incident at Antioch when St. Peter seems to have succumbed to a similar temptation, when he “had been eating with the Gentiles,” but when certain Jews came he withdrew; “the rest of the Jews were no less false to their principles.” “I opposed him openly,” says St. Paul; “he stood self-condemned.” Peter inclined perhaps to moral rather than physical cowardice; he was all too human. The passage can at least be taken as guaranteeing the authenticity of the Gospel; no one would deliberately have invented it and it is notable that St. Mark, who is generally regarded as having based his Gospel upon Peter’s own reminiscences, gives the fullest account of it.

“Then came the second cock-crow.” Some witnesses who have made a study of the crowing of the cock in Palestine around the beginning of April have deduced from this that the time must have been about half-past two or three. Other observers say that certain types of birds in the East crow at intervals of an hour or so throughout the night. It may have been the harsh, guttural cry which struck at the disciple’s conscience; it may even have been that it was about that time that Jesus, escorted by the guards, was taken out of the council chamber and led across the court.

From Denial to Repentance
There is no need to suppose that Jesus heard His disciple’s denial, for He who could pierce hearts with a single look need only have gazed for a moment at Peter. But it was enough to bring the memory back to him: “This night, before the cock crows, thou wilt thrice disown Me.” The shame and self-contempt we feel when we realize the depths to which we have fallen welled up in Peter; he went out quickly, and he wept. Some three hundred yards from the site of the house of the Cenacle, though a good way from that of the High Priest’s palace (which has led to a good deal of argument), can be seen a new church built on the site of a fifth-century basilica, the name of which it still bears. St. Peter in Galicante, St. Peter at Cockcrow, must be the only church in the world dedicated to the memory of a sin, or rather of its repentance, but if the edifying fashion had caught on the earth would be bristling with them.

But perhaps it commemorates not so much the Apostle’s lapse, consoling as this may be to all of us, as the look of understanding which Christ gave His unfaithful servant as He passed him in the night. “You see, Peter, how much your fine words about defending Me with your life are worth. You are only a man like other men, but it is for you and for all the others, for all the weakness of mankind, that I am offering My agony and My death.”

(Matthew 26:58, 69-75; Mark 14:54, 66-72; Luke 22:55-62; John 18:17-18; 25-27.)

The First Abuses
The midnight conclave being over, Jesus was left in the hands of the Temple guards and the servants. Such as these need little encouragement to abuse any unfortunate who is at their mercy without any of the safeguards against violence which society normally imposes. Many degrading and disgusting scenes occur in prisons, especially during unsettled times, and there was nobody to protect Jesus. Indeed, the members of the Sanhedrin, in leaving Him defenceless, were as guilty as if they had abused Him themselves. So the underlings had it all their own way; they spat upon Him, jeered at Him, bound His eyes and rained blows upon Him, saying: “Prophesy . . . tell us who it is that smote Thee.” This cruel game of blind man’s buff (the game is very ancient: it was played by children in Greece) went on for some time; blows, oaths and insults were spewed out at Him. (Matthew 26:67-68; Mark 14:65; Luke 22:63-65.)

This was undiluted hatred, showing itself in its most primitive form. Among the dignitaries in the council chamber, hatred had been veiled by the trappings of legality; among the rabble it was unmasked. We can see in the actions of these men all the vilest passions of the human heart, political strife, religious bigotry, the resentment which those who serve the powers that be feel for those who will not submit themselves to the yoke. The Prophets had known this too: “loathe and shun me, and make bold to spit in my face” (Job 30:10). “I offered my body defenceless to the men who would smite me, my cheeks to all who plucked at my beard; I did not turn away my face when they reviled me and spat upon me” (Isaias 1:6). Jesus accepted the full ignominy and, throughout His Passion, cruel mockery alternated with cruel suffering to the end. Whoever wishes to walk with Christ must accept His shame, St. Paul was to say, and the silence of Jesus amid His tormentors is a lesson to us all.

Morning Trial Before the Sanhedrin
Jesus was then kept in a cell until the Sanhedrin could be formally summoned, which was as soon as the scribes and the priests could be gathered together, before the first rays of the sun shone on the mountains of Moab, as soon, as the saying went, “as the blue could be distinguished from the white.” We notice the same urgency through the whole proceedings; the day pulsates to a feverish rhythm, the haste with which evil deeds are pursued. For the official Passover began when the evening shadows fell upon the hills and no orthodox Jew could forget this.

So, in that shivering dawn, Jesus was brought to the Temple where the Sanhedrin was assembled, down the broad steps of the street of David, across the Xystus, which was a kind of square flanked by the Herodian and Asmonean palaces, and across the bridge which connected the upper town with the Temple esplanade. The British archaeologist Robinson has uncovered the colossal foundations of this bridge, which, in a single giant arc, spanned the valley of the Tyropeon, with the houses huddled together below it.

Already in the courts of the Temple, the faithful, with their faces toward the east, were waiting for the exact moment of the sunrise to begin their psalms: “Blessed be the eternal God, Lord of the universe, who has created light and darkness.”

St. Matthew, St. Mark and St. Luke, reporting the meeting of the Sanhedrin, say that it met “At daybreak” (Matthew 27:1); “No sooner had day broken” (Mark 15:1); “When day came” (Luke 22:66). St. Mark emphasizes that it was “the whole council,” not a more or less clandestine committee, but the body in which was invested the political and religious authority of Israel. The “trial” of Jesus, if indeed we can use such a term, has now formally begun.

What exactly was the Sanhedrin?
We have already explained the constitution and powers of the Sanhedrin. It was a senate, a permanent council, and the high court of justice by virtue of the principle of the Jewish community which united all the civil and judicial powers under the supreme spiritual authority. The word Sanhedrin, which never occurs in the Old Testament but is frequently used in the Talmud, is a corruption of the Greek sunedrion, though the rabbis went to great lengths to provide it with a Hebrew origin, deriving it from san (order) and hederin (applying)—thus, the body which applies the law and maintains order. The supreme council had, in fact, developed in Israel at the time when the Greek influence; under the Seleucid Kings, was strongest, but with their usual attachment to tradition the Jews related it to the Council of the Elders which God had ordered Moses to institute (Numbers 11:16). The number of its members was also attributed to divine ordinance: “How can we prove,” said the Talmud, “that the Grand Sanhedrin should have seventy-one members?” “Because it was said, Gather unto me seventy men of the elders of Israel—and with Moses, this makes seventy-one.” It is also recounted, in all gravity, that the venerable founder was greatly embarrassed because he could choose only seventy members. Six from each tribe made seventy-two, so it was necessary to draw lots.

The Sanhedrin was composed of priests, scribes or doctors of the Law, and elders of the people, although there was no requirement that the three categories should be equally represented. Members had to be of pure Jewish blood, of a sufficiently impressive personal appearance, and fathers of families. Among those who were explicitly disqualified were blind men, eunuchs, bird-sellers, dice-players, usurers and those who operated a black market during the Sabbatical year. Recruitment was by co-option and the High Priest laid hands upon the newly elected judge.

Before the Roman occupation the Sanhedrin had definite political powers. It elected the King and governed in his absence; its consent was necessary before war could be declared. But its powers had been whittled away. Herod received his authority directly from Antony and Augustus, and when Archelaus was deposed, the Sanhedrin was not allowed to elect a new King in his place. But it still retained full juridical authority, at least where violations of the religious Law were concerned. Women suspected of adultery were brought before the Sanhedrin and submitted to the ordeal of being plunged in water up to their heads. False prophets, heretical sects or families came before the Sanhedrin, which was competent to try all the graver cases beyond the scope of the jurisdiction of the provincial Sanhedrins. It was therefore normal that a man charged with blasphemy and sedition, a “false prophet,” should come before the Grand Sanhedrin.

It is not possible to give the names of the council of that time, beyond saying that the two great sacerdotal families of Annas and Boetus would certainly be well represented. We may guess that Rabbi Gamaliel, the renowned teacher of St. Paul, was a member; perhaps also his son Simon, who fell in the defence of Jerusalem in 70 AD; Rabbi Jonathan ben Azziel, a disciple of Hillel who, we are assured by the Talmud, lived to be son; Rabbi Onkelos, a circumcised pagan proselyte; Rabbi Helias, the treasurer of the Temple, and Abba Saul, whose amazing powers of dialectic were said to be due to his possession of the shin bone of Og, King of Bashan. A Life of Jesus, written by one Sepp, and published in Germany in 1814, gives biographical particulars of forty alleged members of the Sanhedrin, but truth compels us to admit that the chronology of the Talmud is so vague that we cannot positively name anyone.

It was usual for Jewish tribunals, as it is in certain Mohammedan countries today, to sit by the gates of the city. The Grand Sanhedrin had an official local meeting place near the gate of the Temple, by the bridge over the Tyropeon. This was the Liscat Haggazith or “hall of the polished stones,” part of it within the sacred enclosure of the Temple and part on profane ground. The judges entered from the side within the Temple; the accused from the other side, but it is not altogether certain that Jesus was in fact tried here. It was not necessary, save in cases of exceptional gravity, to convene all the seventy members of the Sanhedrin; ordinarily, twenty-three members formed a quorum. If a judge wished to retire during a session, he had to make sure that there would be twenty-three without him. There were two presiding dignitaries, the Nasi or prince, and the “father of the Assembly” the Abh-Beth-Din, the oldest member. The members sat in a circle to the right and the left of these two, so that they could be consulted; at the end of each half circle sat a scribe to record the votes, the one for acquittal, the other for conviction. A third scribe, in the center, kept the register.

The proceedings of this tribunal were in accord with the solemnity of its constitution. A prosecution, which in Jerusalem, as in Greece or Rome, could be brought by any citizen (there was no public prosecutor), was not granted until the High Priest had previously considered the charge and sanctioned its hearing. If the charge related to a capital offence, the complainant was solemnly warned that he bore upon him “the blood of the accused and all his descendants to the end of the world.” The witnesses, not less than two, were similarly admonished and the obligation upon them to take part in the execution themselves if their testimony led to condemnation was calculated to make them reflect before giving evidence, though perhaps not so much as the penalties for false witness which were the same as would have been meted out to the accused. The Judges must be “impartial,” the Law was very insistent on this, and in the case of capital offences no one under forty was allowed to vote. If a conviction was decided upon, the judges must adjourn for a day spent in prayer, fasting and meditation. Once the verdict was given,. it could be reversed only in favor of the accused, and a majority of one was decisive for an acquittal but not for a condemnation. Yet where were these scrupulous, honorable provisions, so creditable to the Jewish law, so just in their regard for the human rights of the accused, in the proceedings against Jesus?

Fast Farce Trial
According to St. Mark and St. Matthew, the meeting of the Sanhedrin lasted only a few minutes; they say flatly that “The chief priests and elders and all the council tried to find false testimony against Jesus, such as would compass His death.” St. Luke gives more particulars but his account conveys the same impression of a hurried session in which the legal forms were barely honored. “All the elders of the people, chief priests and scribes, brought Him before their council; ‘If Thou art the Christ, they said, tell us!’ ‘Why?’ He said, ‘If I tell you, you will never believe Me: and if I ask you questions, I know you will not answer them, nor acquit Me. I will only tell you that a time is coming when the Son of Man will be seated in power at God’s right hand.’ And they all said, ‘Thou art, then, the Son of God?’ He told them, ‘Your lips have said that I am.’ And they said, What further need have we of witnesses? We have heard the words from His own mouth’” (Luke 22:66-71).

It was merely a repetition of His interrogation by Caiphas, except that they dropped the accusation of sedition, since it had hardly been established that Jesus had wished to destroy the Temple. The accusation of blasphemy, however, could, through the carefully put question, be based upon Christ’s reply to the question: “Art Thou the Son of God?”--which was interpreted as His agreeing that He was. Provided that the accused was given an opportunity of retracting if He wished, the charge of blasphemy might be considered proven, but it is perfectly clear that the decision to condemn Jesus to death had been taken even before the hearing, which was in itself a crime against justice. Even had the forms of the law been respected, the “proceedings” would still have been nothing more than a machination to get rid of a man who was considered embarrassing.

There has been considerable argument as to whether a Jewish tribunal at that time was competent to pronounce the death penalty. Josephus says that the power of condemning to death was taken away from the Jews forty years before the destruction of the Temple. The Romans were unwilling to leave the power of life or death in the hands of a people whose fanaticism they knew only too well, and the Sanhedrin could not even meet to consider a capital charge without the express permission of the Procurator. This is proved by the fact that when the Jews went to Pilate about Jesus, he thought that they had come to ask for this authority and he told them to judge Jesus according to their own law (John 18:31). The Talmud states that, after the Sanhedrin lost the power of condemning to death, they met in the Hall of Polished Stones only in exceptional cases. When the High Priest Ananias, taking advantage of the absence of the Procurator of the time, had St. James and other Christians stoned to death, there was considerable outcry, which is reported by Josephus. The assembly which condemned Jesus had, therefore, no legal authority whatever.

Even had the case been sanctioned by Pilate, it does not follow that the condemnation would have been legal. Renan, and many other writers, have held that the Jews could condemn if the Procurator implemented the sentence. But such a division of power is inconceivable when we remember the Roman contempt for the Jews. It is hardly likely that they would have consented to be the “secular arm” for the Jewish clergy. In Roman law there is no division between the jurisdictio, that is, the power to judge the case, and the imperium, the power to carry out the sentence.

If the Sanhedrin instituted proceedings against Jesus on a capital charge and condemned Him to execution, they were usurping the functions of the Procurator. They were only competent to lay the charge before Pilate, who could then consider whether he would or would not allow it. It goes without saying that they could not obtain from a Roman official authority to execute a man on some vague religious grounds. That is why, when Jesus was brought before Pilate, the accusation of blasphemy was not even mentioned; three political charges were trumped up instead: He disturbed the people, He condemned the payment of tribute, He proclaimed Himself King. The alteration of the charge is in itself an admission.

The Remorse of Judas
It could not be long before the Sanhedrin’s decision to put Jesus to death became known in Jerusalem. We know how rumors spread in our own vast cities. In the small towns of the Orient “hearsay flies faster than a bird.” More than anyone else, Judas must have been waiting for the outcome of the arrest and we can guess what he, the agent responsible for it, must have felt. St. Matthew (27:3-10) gives us a last glimpse of the dark soul of the wretched man and the testimony is confirmed later in the Acts of the Apostles (1:16-20). “And now Judas, His betrayer, was full of remorse at seeing Him condemned, so that he brought back to the chief priests and elders their thirty pieces of silver; I have sinned, he told them, in betraying the blood of an innocent man. ‘What is that to us?’ they said. ‘It concerns thee only!’ Whereupon he left them, throwing down the pieces of silver there in the Temple, and went out and hanged himself.”

St. Peter adds in the Acts that “afterwards, when he fell from a height, and his belly burst open, so that he was disembowelled.”

The scene as reported has a brutal directness. The contempt of the priests for the spy is apparent in their scornful words. His remorse was of no interest. And yet—we seem to see in the abandoned creature some last gleam of the light that had been shed on him, some trace of his attachment to Jesus. Perhaps we can even elucidate from his remorse a possible motive for the betrayal; perhaps he did not desire his Master to be condemned but only thought to teach Him a lesson. It is not only the riddle of Judas but of so many other men; what if all of us, like him, were made to suffer for our treachery in full! Origen, without venturing to defend the traitor, advances the explanation that Judas hanged himself so that his soul, released from his body, might go before the soul of Jesus and implore mercy. Yet a tear, a word, or a look at the foot of the cross would have served. The penitent thief was saved.

“The chief priests, thus recovering the money, said, It must not be put in the treasury, since it is the price of blood; and after consultation, they used it to buy the potter’s field, as a burial place for strangers; it is upon that account that the field has been called Haceldama, the field of blood, to this day.” On the other side of Gehenna, above the frightful ravine where the heathen kings had burnt human sacrifices so that Gehenna is to this day a synonym for Hell, there is a piece of that accursed ground, which is still identified as Potter’s Field. Whether it was bought by the Sanhedrin, as the Gospel says, or by Judas himself, as is stated in the Acts (according to the latter account, he hanged himself there), it is forever associated with the traitor.

The name “Potter’s Field” may have been derived from the gate to the area which was close by, called Pottery or Ceramics, just as there was a Ceramic Quarter in Athens, and a Jardin des Tuileries in Paris. The word, however, had also a prophetic echo, for the Gospel says: “And so the word was fulfilled which was spoken by the Prophet Jeremias, when he said, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of one who was appraised, for men of the race of Israel appraised him, and bestowed them upon the potter’s field, as the Lord has bidden me.” It is clear from the prophetic allusions that all these things had to be; it was necessary that the political animosity of the Jews should crush Jesus but it was necessary for reasons that had nothing to do with law and politics. And there could be no question of allowing the victim to profit by the retraction of the man who had betrayed Him.