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Christian: "Hello. I'd like to invite you to our new Christian church in the catacombs at the edge of town . …Roman pagan: "What does Christian mean?"Christian: "Oh, … well, … it's a religion named for someone who was crucified as a common criminal by one of your Roman governors."

Obviously, the door slams in the Christian's face. To avoid such treatment, it is claimed, believers subsequently shifted blame for the crucifixion from Pilate—who, in the revisionist view, actually wanted Jesus dead—to "the Jews," since they were hardly popular in Rome and made convenient scapegoats. The same shift, it is argued, underlay the composition of the Gospels, which have supposedly "whitewashed" Pilate's role on Good Friday and instead accused the Jews for indicting Jesus. In time, the blanket of guilt spread over all non-Christian Jews, however unfair the assumption.

Because such horrifying results attended the notion of Jewish collective responsibility for Good Friday—ghettoization, pogroms, the Inquisition, centuries of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust—Jews are justifiably furious at being tagged "Christ killers," a label that, of course, is illogical, unethical, and misinterprets the Gospels. And ever since the Second Vatican Council, which tardily absolved Jews of the charge of "deicide" (itself an impossible concept!), Christian theologians have raised a great and welcome chorus of it's our fault.However, in a concerted effort to atone for the past, it is now high theological fashion to argue that no Jews were involved on Good Friday in the manner set forth in the Passion Week accounts, and that the Gospels, skewed in their alleged anti-Semitism, are therefore historically unreliable. There are strident calls for re-editing the New Testament to purge it of presumed anti-Semitic phrases.Culpability for the Good Friday affair rests only with Pontius Pilate, it is argued. His deigning to argue with the crowd in trying to defend Jesus, as the Gospels have it, is "ludicrous," according to Rosemary Radford Ruether and many others.The high-water mark in such revisionism came with Haim Cohen's The Trial and Death of Jesus, a book that former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin presented to Jimmy Carter on a visit to Washington some years ago. In this tome, Cohen, a former supreme court justice in Israel, argues that Annas and Caiaphas, far from being Jesus' priestly opponents, were really his "dear friends," who were trying to keep him out of trouble with the nefarious Pilate. And not a month passes without publication of a new theological title, often by a Christian author, demanding that the church face up to its misinterpretation of the Passion story.

Both interpretations above of the Jewish role on Good Friday are grossly mistaken. To deny any Jewish prosecution may be almost normative in current revisionist theology, but it flies in the face of historical fact. Quite apart from the New Testament accounts, the traditions in the Babylonian Talmud about Yeshu Hannozri, Jesus the Nazarene (Sanhedrin 43a), and the minim ("heretics," particularly Christians) are very negative, an attitude fully congruent with the opposition portrayed in the Gospels. The traditions are negative also toward the house of Annas, incidentally, so any attempted rehabilitation of that priestly family must fail (Pesachim 57a).From the earliest records, the hostility between synagogue and church is well attested, and much of the apostle Paul's life and theology would have no meaning if this were not the case. Again, quite apart from the New Testament epistles and Acts, the testimony of the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus demonstrates early Sanhedral opposition to Christianity in a remarkable incident that has so many startling parallels to Good Friday that it might well be styled "Good Friday II." This incident involved James, the half-brother of Jesus, and presiding authority at the Apostolic Council ( Acts 15). Josephus reports that the high priest Ananus, son of indicted James during the interim between the administrations of Festus and Albinus as governors of Judea:

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August (Web-only) 2000, Vol. 44