The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels Read Free Book Online Page B

disciples’ awestruck admiration for the sacred
    precincts by predicting the Temple’s destruction: “There will not
    be left one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down”
    (13:2). When Peter, James, John, and Andrew privately ask what
    he means, Jesus sits with them on the Mount of Olives opposite
    the Temple and explains. He predicts a series of horrifying
    catastrophes (these are events in which Mark’s contemporaries
    would recognize their own times, especially the events of the
    war between 66 and 70): “wars and rumors of war,” famine,
    public enthusiasm for false messiahs. Jesus warns in veiled
    language that when they see “the desolating sacrilege set up
    where it ought not to be”—the pagan desecration of the
    Temple—they should flee into the mountains (13:7-14).
    Mark intends Jesus’ followers, living in terrible times, to take
    comfort in knowing that their leader had foreseen how they
    would suffer, out of their loyalty to him (“for my sake”),
    ostracism and reprisals, hatred and betrayal, even—perhaps
    especially—from their family members:

    “Take heed to yourselves; for they will deliver you up to
    councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues, and you will
    stand before governors and rulers for my sake . . . and brother
    will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and
    children will rise against parents and have their parents put to
    death; and you will be hated by all for the sake of my name”
    (13:9-13).

    What is the believer to do, facing betrayal, isolation, and
    mortal danger? Mark says that Jesus enjoined his followers to
    “endure to the end.” Now Mark has to tell how Jesus himself
    THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR / 25

    “endured to the end,” through arrest, trials in both Jewish and
    Roman courts, torture, and execution, thus giving his
    endangered followers an example of how to endure. Two days
    before Passover, Mark says, “the chief priests and the scribes
    were seeking how to arrest Jesus secretly and kill him, for they
    said, ‘Not during the festival, lest there be a tumult among the
    people,’ ” since so far the people remained on Jesus’ side. Shortly
    afterward, Judas Iscariot, obviously aware of the hostility his
    master had aroused among influential people, “went to the chief
    priests in order to betray [Jesus] to them, and when they heard it
    they were glad, and offered him money” (14:1-11).
    At night, Mark says, Judas led “a crowd with swords and clubs
    from the chief priests and the scribes and Temple officers” to
    Gethsemane, a garden on the Mount of Olives, to capture Jesus.
    One of his men fought back with a sword, injuring the high
    priest’s slave, and Jesus protested at being treated “like a robber”
    (the term that Josephus and others commonly use to characterize
    an “insurrectionist”). But the rest of his followers abandoned
    him and fled; Jesus was taken. The armed men “brought him to
    the high priest,” apparently to his residence. Although the San-
    hedrin traditionally was not allowed to meet at night, Mark tells
    us that on the night of Jesus’ arrest, “all the chief priests and the
    elders and the scribes were assembled” at the high priest’s
    residence to try his case in a formal proceeding.
    Now Mark presents the first of two trial scenes—the “trial
    before the Sanhedrin,” which he follows with the “trial before
    Pilate.” Most scholars assume that even if these events occurred,
    Jesus’ followers could not have witnessed what went on at either
    his appearance before the Jewish council or his arraignment by
    the Romans.28 But Mark is not concerned with reporting history.
    By introducing these scenes, Mark wants to show above all that
    the well-known charge against Jesus—sedition—not only was
    false but was invented by Jesus’ Jewish enemies; further, Mark
    says, the Roman governor himself realized this and tried in vain
    to save Jesus! According to Mark, the