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So too, apparently, would have the title Messiah, or Christ, as the word has come down through time by way of Greek. Brown says Jesus was the first individual ever to be named as the Messiah by Jews. (The next so proclaimed was Bar Kokhba, during a Jewish revolt against Rome a century later.) Though Jesus responded with ambivalence when questioned about this at the trials, the charge presumably justified Pilate's sentence and the placard calling him King of the Jews.
The Death of the Messiah deals with many matters central to the Christian faith, as well as iconic motifs such as the Judas kiss and Pilate's washing his hands. The book's scholarship will upset Christian traditionalists, although it fits well with new warnings against "fundamentalism" from the Pontifical Biblical Commission. Brown treats numerous familiar details as imaginary rather than literal (the dream of Pilate's wife, the darkness at noon as Christ died). And he disdains uninformed literal readings of Scripture. The Gospel texts, contends Brown, must be interpreted carefully because they were completed decades after Jesus' life and were shaped, for example, by tensions in that later period when synagogue and church were splitting permanently. In Brown's meticulous exegesis, the troublesome verse "His blood be on us and on our children" is not a self-inflicted curse at all but an acknowledgment in terms of scriptural law that this specific group of Jews was willing to be responsible before God for an execution that it believed to be justified. In Leviticus, the phrase "their blood is upon them" is used repeatedly when the death penalty is prescribed.
Brown's work is emblazoned with a church imprimatur. And it will receive no quarrel from many Jewish religious scholars. From the beginning, says Judaic , studies professor Shaye J.D. Cohen of Brown University, the Jewish tradition "had no trouble accepting the simple story that Jews executed Jesus as a sinner and a criminal, even to the extent of ignoring the role of the Romans." In modern times, Jews have adopted more favorable opinions about Jesus, just as Christians have worked to eradicate lingering anti-Semitism. But Cohen considers revisionism about the trial "pointless" because Jews cannot reasonably expect Christians to rewrite their Scriptures. Cohen himself thinks the Jewish leaders of the time did in fact decide to have Jesus killed. "Were their motives noble? I suppose they were. Did Jesus deserve to die? Probably not."