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In 4 B.C., angry Jews, protesting the execution of students who had tried to remove a Roman eagle from the Temple decorations, threw stones down on their occupiers from the mount's porches and set off a citywide riot; eventually 2,000 rebels were crucified. In A.D. 26, the Roman governor provocatively ordered his troops to raise flags with Caesar's face within a few hundred feet of the central shrine. A mob marched to his house in Caesarea. His soldiers drew their swords. The Jews, in an extraordinary act of passive resistance, laid bare their necks and said they would rather die than see their religious laws flouted. The governor, a normally hot-tempered newcomer named Pontius Pilate, recalled the flags.
The situations now and then are not analogous. Israel's current Jewish government, unlike the Roman Empire, is not alien to Jerusalem. The Palestinians are not as defenseless as the ancient Jews. And Israeli opposition leader (now Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon's unwelcome stroll last September around the two Islamic shrines that now occupy the Temple platform-a provocation that may have sparked the Holy Land's current strife when Muslims responded by throwing rocks down on Jews at prayer below-has no precise 1st century cognate. Still, the intertwined dynamic of military occupation and religious clash is shockingly familiar.
Two thousand years ago, the man in the middle of this potentially deadly tug-of-war was the high priest. The position, ritually paramount at the Temple, had been politically hobbled by Herod. Nonetheless, as head of the Sanhedrin, a Jewish religious and civic body, and a key participant at city council meetings, the officeholder still had great power and responsibility.
The actions of Caiaphas, high priest from A.D. 18 to A.D. 36, are traditionally attributed to rage over Jesus' challenges to his class's power and his personal standing. But historians have begun to argue for a more nuanced appreciation. Caiaphas knew better than anyone that the doomed Jewish revolts inevitably started at the Temple, frequently during Passover, as keyed-up pilgrims celebrated Israel's liberation from an earlier oppressor. He knew Pilate as a ruler, says Richard Horsley of the University of Massachusetts, Boston, who "shot first and asked questions later." Personal pride notwithstanding, the high priest had reason to act against a Jew who had disrupted the Temple and may have been plotting another grand entrance on the second day of the feast. To Caiaphas, says Lee Levine, professor of Jewish history at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, "Jesus and others like him were just a bad idea. Bad for the Temple, bad for the Romans and bad for the Jews."
Rome reserved crucifixion primarily for capital crimes and discontinued the practice in the 4th century. Historians learned considerably more about its specifics in 1968, when the remains of a man crucified in his mid 30s were discovered north of Jerusalem with a 7-in. iron nail still embedded in the heel. The state of the bones indicated that the condemned man's arms were outstretched and that his feet had been placed sideways, with the nail driven first through a small block of wood and then through both heels into the cross. Later the wood block would prevent the feet from coming free as the wound ripped and enlarged. Contrary to most representations, the knees were bent.