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00:00No trial or execution in history had such a momentous outcome as that of Jesus in Roman
00:11occupied Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. But since that time, the killing of Jesus has come to be
00:19seen as an execution that was little short of murder. Historical evidence suggests that
00:31there are three main suspects. Caiaphas, the high priest of the great temple at Jerusalem,
00:42Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, and, surprisingly, Jesus himself, who was deeply
00:52implicated in his own death. So who was responsible for the death of Jesus?
01:12The trial and crucifixion of Jesus was dramatic, swift and brutal. To examine the evidence,
01:31we need to revisit the fateful week before the murder of Jesus.
01:47Jerusalem, 30 AD. Thousands are pouring into the city to celebrate the festival of Passover.
01:58Jesus, a rebel from Galilee, is making a big impact. He enters the city on a donkey, fulfilling
02:12ancient prophecies about the arrival of the Messiah. The next day, inside the great temple,
02:21Jesus attacks the money changers for defiling the holy place.
02:30The high priests of the temple call a secret meeting. They see Jesus as a threat to their
02:35power and authority. He must be stopped. The following day, the Romans are alerted. To them,
02:45Jesus could be the cause of an uprising against imperial Rome. That night, Jesus is arrested
02:52in the Garden of Gethsemane by temple guards. He is dragged for trial before Caiaphas, the high
03:00priest of the temple. And then, before Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor. In less than 24 hours,
03:12Jesus is sentenced to death by crucifixion.
03:24There are three main suspects for the killing of Jesus. And there is strong evidence against
03:29all of them.
03:33Suspect number one is Caiaphas, high priest of the temple of Jerusalem. His fingerprints
03:40are everywhere. And he had good reasons to want Jesus dead.
03:54Caiaphas was the most powerful high priest in the history of Judea. He was a man of enormous
03:59influence right across the life of Jerusalem. He was high priest for 18 years when the average
04:06survival time in office was just four. He also had supreme political skills and a shrewd ability
04:14to cooperate successfully with the Romans, the ultimate rulers of Judea.
04:26For Helen Bond, Caiaphas is an enigmatic figure. She is researching his life and has studied
04:33the power structure of the high priests in the Jerusalem temple and their relations with
04:37the Romans.
04:41Caiaphas is a wealthy Jerusalem aristocrat. He comes from a good priestly family and is well
04:46connected. He has an enormous amount of prestige in Jerusalem because of his position.
04:53He is the high priest in the Jerusalem temple. This puts him at the very top of Judean society.
05:02Although Judea was controlled by the Romans, civil and religious law was in the hands of
05:07the Sanhedrin, the supreme council of Jews. It had 71 members, mostly chief priests, and
05:16was presided over by the high priest, Caiaphas.
05:21The way the system worked was that the Romans appointed a governor, the governor appointed the
05:26high priest, and in this case Caiaphas and Pilate seemed to have had a very cosy relationship.
05:33The high priest Caiaphas and the other high priests depended completely on the Roman approval,
05:40and to maintain Roman approval they had to maintain order in the society.
05:46Position and power are precisely what Caiaphas and all the chief priests stood to lose if the
05:52people began to follow Jesus. That could lead to unrest, maybe even revolution in Judea.
05:58And they stood to lose something else, much more concrete.
06:09Archaeology is now showing that even though they were priests of the temple,
06:14Caiaphas and his associates lived a life of luxury.
06:17James Strange spends much of his professional life studying the evidence for events described in the Gospels.
06:29He believes there are good archaeological signs that Caiaphas and the chief priests lived in some style,
06:36and in the very best part of town.
06:38The houses that have been excavated that help us the most have been found in the old city of Jerusalem,
06:45in the Jewish Quarter. They were found beneath modern ruined houses which were undergoing renovation.
06:56The workmanship in these ancient houses was of the very finest quality.
07:01The people who lived here had money. The interiors were richly decorated with mosaic floors, painted ceilings,
07:10and elegant furnishings, and elegant furnishings.
07:15All of this conspires to suggest something about their lifestyle.
07:19They have ample room, they live in large rooms, much larger than we expect to find in ancient houses.
07:25As the archaeologists dug beneath the floors of these lavish houses, they made an even more important discovery.
07:42They unearthed a ritual bath.
07:45It was important for all Jews to use a ritual bath in order to purify themselves before any act of worship.
07:52But these houses had so many ritual baths, they could only have belonged to the high priests.
08:05This discovery was a clue to something else that Caiaphas stood to lose.
08:11A lucrative income.
08:12Under Jewish law, most people arriving in Jerusalem for Passover were deemed to be unclean.
08:23That meant that if you had, in the recent past, come into contact with something which creates impurity,
08:32like a corpse, or if you had had intercourse with a menstruating woman,
08:36it was expected of you to purify yourself.
08:43Before they could enter the temple, everyone had to be ritually clean.
08:50Immersion in the water of a ritual bath would ensure purification.
08:54The priests had baths strategically placed outside the temple for public use.
09:06Everyone, even the poorest, had to pay for these rituals.
09:10And they were not cheap.
09:11They were not cheap.
09:14Ronnie Reich has found no fewer than 150 ritual baths around the temple.
09:24This was a sort of mania.
09:27To add more and more obligations, say, for this you have to be pure and for that you have to be pure.
09:32And each of this regulation demanded so many more thousands of ritual bathings for the entire public.
09:39And for this they had to provide the means for this.
09:42And that's the reason why we have so many of these installations.
09:49The baths must have generated considerable income for the priest.
09:52But Jesus was teaching that elaborate and expensive purity rituals were unnecessary.
10:03The whole elaborate temporal apparatus was designed to bring revenues in for simple matters like purification,
10:11for forgiveness of sins, for incidental sins.
10:15It's clear that this is a major bone of contention that Jesus has with the temple and the high priests.
10:19He's declaring that the kingdom of God is available without all those elaborate purification rituals.
10:25He is opening the kingdom of God to beggars and sinners and people who can't even afford to pay those rituals and sacrifices,
10:34so that people can receive the blessings of God without paying for it through the temple system.
10:41Jesus wasn't only attacking the priest's control over the economy.
10:45He was raising the stakes right across the board.
10:50In the eyes of Jews everywhere, he was directly challenging the authority of Caiaphas.
11:00Caiaphas had maintained quite a strong control over the religious life of Jews,
11:05and not only Jews in Jerusalem and not only Jews in Judea, but in fact the worldwide Jewish community in this period.
11:16Jesus was by no means the first Jewish rebel to take on Caiaphas.
11:21But this time Caiaphas had good reason to worry.
11:27Jesus had chosen the most volatile week of the year to make his challenge.
11:32Passover, the largest annual festival in the Jewish calendar.
11:36Pilgrims came to Jerusalem from all over the world, some from as far away as Babylon and Italy.
11:49In front of such huge crowds, Caiaphas could not afford to be humiliated.
11:54Although there are no records of the population in Jerusalem during Passover,
12:02a revealing yardstick is the number of lambs sacrificed.
12:06The first century historian, Josephus, says the high priests at one Passover in Jerusalem
12:13counted 255,600 lambs killed and eaten for the festival.
12:18He calculates one lamb feeds ten people, so the crowds in Jerusalem that week could have been as great as two and a half million.
12:31Any attack now on the authority of Caiaphas would be devastating.
12:36The chief priests in Caiaphas would have been very worried by Jesus.
12:41Any kind of preacher coming to Jerusalem at the crowded time of Passover was a potential threat.
12:48They would, I think, have been worried on one hand by his authority,
12:52the fact that he's getting quite a following amongst the people,
12:55the fact that the people are listening to Jesus rather than they themselves.
12:59But I think perhaps much more importantly, they'd have been very worried about what Jesus could do to the temple.
13:05What if Jesus started some kind of revolt or riot in the temple?
13:11It is likely Jesus was already known to Caiaphas and the high priest.
13:15Not much escaped their notice in the holy city.
13:20At Passover, they would be tracking his every move.
13:25It was an explosive setting for what was to come.
13:29It was an explosive setting for what was to come.
13:38In the temple, Jesus made his first move.
13:40He accused the money changers and sacrificial dove sellers of extortion and of turning the temple into a den of thieves.
13:55But this action was also a powerful symbol.
14:01Jesus was saying that God would destroy this temple and all its corruption.
14:05The high priests would have been extremely alarmed to see this demonstration and this trouble happen in the temple courtyard at Passover time.
14:19The temple, of course, is the place where the high priests held sway.
14:25They were the sacrosanct high priests that carried out the sacrifices on behalf of the whole people.
14:32And in their mind, this action of Jesus would simply have been a blasphemy.
14:36It is an act of arrogance.
14:42This guy thinks he is somebody, he can just walk into the temple and do things like this.
14:47It is an act of insult.
14:50It is an act that shows grave dissatisfaction with the way things are.
14:55It is done in a very public time.
15:00Hundreds of people might have been witnesses to it.
15:03And so I think that this is a very troubling act to Caiaphas and his council.
15:10And it signaled to them that Jesus was dangerous.
15:14Perhaps the best way to put the dangerousness is to say this.
15:18If he would do that, we don't know what he will do next.
15:21The man may be uncontrollable.
15:26But what do you do with a man who is uncontrollable, who is charismatic, who has a following?
15:33You stop him.
15:42Stopping Jesus was exactly what Caiaphas set out to do.
15:46He called a secret meeting of the chief priests at his house in the old city.
15:53Matthew's Gospel says Caiaphas urged them to take action.
15:59Jesus must be killed.
16:01They argued about how and when.
16:04If they killed Jesus now, at Passover, there could well be massive riots in the city.
16:10Whatever their discussions, we know that Caiaphas decided to strike.
16:19It is the middle of the night.
16:23The streets of Jerusalem are deserted.
16:26The crowds are all at home, celebrating Passover.
16:29He can do it secretly and swiftly.
16:31After their own supper, Jesus is praying while his disciples rest in the garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives.
16:46He is interrupted by the arrival of a detachment of temple guards, sent to arrest him.
16:55Here. Here. Here. Here.
17:03Caiaphas could argue, in his defence, that arresting Jesus was perfectly legal.
17:08He had simply brought in a known rebel who was endangering the public peace.
17:16Hardly the actions of a murder suspect.
17:25Caiaphas then put Jesus on trial.
17:27But experts believe that at this point, Caiaphas leaves the law behind.
17:35In legal terms, the so-called trial is a sham.
17:43The whole Jewish trial of Jesus, as it's presented in the Gospels, is a complete travesty of justice.
17:48We know something about Jewish trials at the time from later Jewish writings known as the Mishnah.
17:53And they give us a fairly comprehensive idea of how trials ought to be run.
17:58And nearly everything in Jesus' trial is illegal.
18:03It takes place at night, which was illegal.
18:06It takes place not in the normal council chamber, but in the high priest's house.
18:11It takes place on a feast day, which was also not allowed.
18:16The only sources we have for what took place at the trial are the four Gospels.
18:20They do vary.
18:23But they reinforce the suspicion that what took place that night was not entirely above board.
18:31Caiaphas will serve as both the chief judge and the prosecuting attorney.
18:36This is the general role taken by the person who convenes a court.
18:39And the judges are there to give a kind of cover so he can say, well, it was a proper trial.
18:49So he had this rather sneaky nighttime trial with whatever close allies he wanted to call him.
18:58Caiaphas believed he had a case against Jesus.
19:00He arrested him because he had threatened to destroy the temple, an offense against God and treason against the state.
19:12Jesus would stand accused of blasphemy and sedition.
19:15The trouble was, he needed witnesses.
19:21The Bible says that Caiaphas produced witnesses who claimed they had heard Jesus saying he would destroy the temple.
19:30Under Jewish law, at least two male witnesses had to agree, and very nearly word for word.
19:45But the witnesses contradicted each other.
19:49They contradicted themselves.
19:51In some confusion, they were dismissed.
19:58The charge of sedition had failed.
20:01Caiaphas now had a problem.
20:03His problem was simple.
20:06I want him killed.
20:08The witnesses didn't work out.
20:11We had him. We had him.
20:14He threatened to destroy the temple.
20:16That's what he actually did.
20:21Turning over the tables.
20:22That's what he did.
20:23That it makes him such a dangerous man.
20:25That's why we've got to get rid of him.
20:27Whatever he says, I'm going to say he deserves death.
20:32And convening a trial and going through the pretense just gives a legal cover.
20:38I held a trial, he can later say.
20:41I never execute someone arbitrarily.
20:45Without witnesses, Caiaphas had to change tack.
20:48If he could provoke Jesus to say something blasphemous, he would have him for breaking Jewish law.
20:55He asked Jesus point blank.
21:00Are you the Son of God?
21:05The Son of the Blessed?
21:07Are you the Messiah?
21:09Here the Gospels vary a little, and only in Mark's account does Jesus answer that he is.
21:15Caiaphas declared that Jesus had spoken blasphemy.
21:21The other members of his court agreed.
21:24The penalty for this was death.
21:27I think it didn't matter what Jesus answered precisely.
21:33Caiaphas, when he decided to arrest him, had decided to execute him.
21:37The case against Caiaphas seems unanswerable.
21:42He arrests Jesus, tries him in a kangaroo court, and convicts him on a religious charge.
21:47There is just one small problem.
21:58Judea is under the iron rule of the Romans.
22:02Caiaphas is not permitted to execute a death sentence.
22:05So Caiaphas had the motive, but not the power.
22:21In the end, no matter how much he wanted Jesus dead, he couldn't deliver.
22:25The case against Caiaphas is a strong one.
22:30But to find out who really killed Jesus, we'll have to look elsewhere.
22:36Judea, in the time of Jesus, is a Jewish province governed by the Roman Empire.
22:51All power, including that of life and death, is vested in one man, the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.
23:02Pilate has 6,000 crack troops at his command.
23:07Up the road, in Syria, a further 30,000 soldiers are on call to back him up.
23:13Rome had actually only been ruling Judea directly for the last 25 years by the time of Jesus.
23:19And so the control was still fairly tenuous and uncertain.
23:25So Pilate's main job is to make sure that law and order prevails in Judea.
23:33If there's an obvious suspect anywhere in the killing of Jesus, it's Pontius Pilate.
23:39Pilate was the man who sent Jesus to be crucified.
23:43He has got to be the prime suspect.
23:45In the Bible, Pilate is made out to be innocent in the death of Jesus.
23:53But this may not be the whole story.
23:56In fact, all the evidence from sources outside the Bible paints a picture of a very different man.
24:03According to the historian Philo, writing at the time, Pilate was calculating, cruel and often brutal.
24:14He also had an intense dislike of Jews.
24:19So much so that he based his headquarters here in the city of Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast and not in the Jewish capital, Jerusalem.
24:35Caesarea was 60 miles from Jerusalem, a good two and a half days march.
24:40Pontius Pilate seems to have been arrogant, brash and particularly insensitive in his treatment of the Jews.
24:47He probably had a typical Roman's disdain for any other culture, probably thinking that they weren't anything like as civilised as the Romans themselves.
24:55But Pilate could not avoid his annual visit to Jerusalem for Passover.
25:03As Roman governor of Judea, it was part of his official duty to attend the most important festival in the Jewish calendar.
25:13To make his trip more bearable, Pilate took his wife with him to Jerusalem.
25:17Even so, there would have been a lot on his mind.
25:24Pilate would have been particularly concerned about the preservation of law and order at the Passover.
25:29This was a great national feast that commemorated the time when the Israelites came out of Egypt into the Holy Land,
25:36brought there by God, shaking off foreign oppression.
25:38And so, of course, it was natural that at the time of the Passover, people started to think about Roman overlords.
25:45They started to think about nationality.
25:48They thought about foreign oppressors.
25:50And it's no accident whatsoever that nearly all of the riots that we hear about in the first century took place at Passover.
25:57So, if there's going to be a Jewish revolt, it's almost certain to happen here in Jerusalem, quite probably in the temple.
26:03And if anything threatened to disturb the peace, Pilate would have stamped it out straight away.
26:11Pilate had an extensive network of spies and informers right across the city.
26:16He would have known about Jesus and the following that he was gaining,
26:20and about some kind of incident in the temple.
26:23And now, the trial that Caiaphas had held only the night before, with its sentence of death.
26:33It is now just after sunrise on the morning after the trial.
26:39Caiaphas had sent Jesus to appear before Pilate,
26:43because only the Roman governor could carry out a death sentence.
26:48Pilate was well known for having executed prisoners even without trial.
26:53But little would have prepared him for the strange case of Jesus of Nazareth.
26:57The charge which Caiaphas had brought against Jesus was blasphemy, a Jewish crime, and nothing to do with Roman law.
27:10But overnight, the charge had disappeared.
27:12There would have been no reason for Caiaphas to mention blasphemy one way or the other.
27:18He didn't have to say anything about that at all, because he had a perfectly good accusation to bring against Jesus that Pilate would listen to in a minute.
27:26Namely, Jesus was guilty of sedition.
27:29Jesus thought, or his followers thought, or people said that he was the king of the Jews.
27:34That would make him guilty of a very high crime against Rome, and that would get him killed very quickly.
27:45This is alarming for Pilate.
27:48The case now has legal meaning under Roman law.
27:51It is a charge of sedition and treason, punishable by death.
27:59Pilate must take action, and, at the very least, give Jesus a hearing.
28:04Roman trials were often held in public.
28:14A crowd began to gather in the fevered atmosphere of Passover Jerusalem, as news spread that Jesus of Nazareth was on trial for his life.
28:25Pilate now asked Jesus if he was calling himself King of the Jews.
28:45Jesus made little or no reply.
28:47Pilate could find no evidence against Jesus, and said, this man is innocent.
28:58At this point, Pilate could have dismissed the case, but he had to take into account an unexpected factor.
29:06The crowd.
29:08His verdict of innocence angered them.
29:12They began to shout for Jesus to be crucified.
29:14It's quite possible that the crowd was a mob, whipped up by the chief priests to put pressure on Pilate.
29:25Pilate now faced a dilemma.
29:28Release Jesus, and there may well be riots.
29:32But why should he execute an innocent man?
29:34Pilate is in a bit of a cleft stick because all that we know from him, from other sources as well as the Gospels, like the historian Josephus who writes about him, make it clear that Pilate really didn't care about offending people.
29:50And actually, when he looked at Jesus and read the reports that he had from his officials, it was quite clear that Jesus wasn't leading a military revolution.
29:59So Pilate then says, I don't find anything wrong with him. I don't think he's guilty of these charges.
30:07Pilate then decides on what he thinks is a masterstroke.
30:11There is a Passover amnesty, which allows the Roman governor to release a prisoner.
30:20He offers the crowd a choice between Jesus and Barabbas, who is imprisoned for murder.
30:25At this point, Pilate is plunged into an even greater dilemma.
30:43In Matthew's Gospel, Pilate's wife comes to him, deeply upset.
30:49She begs her husband not to harm Jesus.
30:51Last night, she had a dream in which Jesus was innocent.
30:58But Pilate is interrupted by the crowd,
31:01praying for him to release Barabbas and crucify Jesus.
31:09Unable to make a clear decision, Pilate tries to have it both ways.
31:13He passes an extraordinary sentence.
31:23Declaring Jesus to be innocent,
31:26Pilate nevertheless condemns him to death by crucifixion.
31:29This action alone is enough to incriminate Pilate as a suspect.
31:40Pilate then symbolically washes his hands before the crowd,
31:45telling them he is innocent of this man's blood.
31:47Jesus is taken away to be whipped.
31:53But for all his attempts to wash his hands of the affair,
31:58the very fact that Jesus was crucified puts Pilate firmly under suspicion.
32:03Pilate could argue, in his defence, that it was his duty as Roman governor to execute rebels who threatened the state.
32:19So was Pontius Pilate the man who killed Jesus?
32:22He had the power, but it was Caiaphas who had the motive.
32:29Pilate gave the execution order, but the crowd were shouting for it, demanding crucifixion.
32:37So the case against Pilate remains unproven.
32:41But there was one more suspect.
32:46He was at the heart of the action every step of the way,
32:49and many experts believe that he, more than anyone else,
32:53was truly responsible for the death of Jesus.
33:03To examine the evidence, we go back a little, to the start of Passover week.
33:12Like hundreds of other pilgrims, Jesus travelled to Jerusalem.
33:16His entry into the city is now legend.
33:24Riding into Jerusalem on a donkey.
33:27On the face of it, a very simple event.
33:31But there is more going on here than meets the eye.
33:35This action by Jesus is deeply provocative.
33:38Since the days of Moses, the Hebrew Scriptures have foretold the arrival of a great Messiah,
33:53a powerful leader appointed by God who would bring a perfect golden age,
33:59the defeat of all evil, and a new kingdom of God on earth.
34:03One of the prophets, Zechariah, foretold that the Messiah would enter the city of Jerusalem riding on a donkey.
34:14Exactly what Jesus did.
34:16It seems as though, for Jesus, all sorts of bits of Israel's story are coming together, and that he's in the middle of it.
34:27The particular prophecy that he seems to be deliberately acting out is about Israel's true king, the Anointed One, the Messiah, coming at last, and he will be God's agent to redeem Israel.
34:38So Jesus seems to be saying, this is it, this Passover is the moment when I am going to be revealed, if you like, as the true Messiah.
34:48So it's very much about his perception of who he was in the plan of God at that moment.
34:54The final suspect is Jesus himself. There is a considerable body of evidence to suggest that every action he took was deliberately planned and that he knew what the consequences would be.
35:12Controversial though it was, his triumphant arrival in Jerusalem would not have been enough to get Jesus killed.
35:26But he didn't stop there. He raised the stakes.
35:29For years, money changers and the sellers of animals and birds for sacrifice had plied their trade in the temple courtyards.
35:44Passover is their busiest and most lucrative time of the year.
35:49People are paying their annual temple tax, which Jews from all over the world paid to the temple in Jerusalem.
35:56But the rate of exchange was appallingly bad.
36:08Declaring that the temple was a house of prayer and not a den of thieves, Jesus took his most provocative action in this whole extraordinary week.
36:16This was an attack on the commercial activity of the money changers. But it was, above all, a symbolic attack on the temple itself.
36:31I think we can be sure that Jesus knew the risks he was taking, that he knew the potential consequences. He knew what it meant to proclaim the temple's destruction, to claim that a new kingdom was forming, the kingdom of God.
36:52He knew that the risk was arrest, and trial, and conviction, and death.
37:02The case for seeing Jesus as being wholly complicit in his own fate becomes more and more compelling as these dramatic days unfold.
37:19After his battle with the money changers in the temple, Jesus could easily have left Jerusalem. He could have avoided any possible trouble.
37:30Instead, he chose to stay in the city and celebrate Passover with his disciples.
37:37There are clear signs at the Last Supper that Jesus was aware that his future may now be sealed.
37:48As he and his disciples sat together, Jesus called the bread they were eating his broken body, and referred to the red wine they drank as his spilled blood.
37:59Jesus seemed to be predicting his own death, and he seemed to be doing everything possible to bring that end closer.
38:20His very next action bears out that idea all too clearly.
38:24Jesus identifies the person who will betray him, Judas Iscariot, one of his own chosen disciples.
38:41In one of the Gospels, Jesus says to Judas,
38:45Do what you have to do, but do it quickly.
38:48To put himself directly in the path of danger, and so consistently, might suggest that Jesus was undergoing some kind of crisis.
39:01But we have to remember that he believed profoundly that he was on a mission from God.
39:06We know from several points in the Gospels that Jesus' own family said he's out of his mind.
39:17We know that some of the people who listened to his teaching said he's absolutely crazy, why bother listening to him?
39:22And then when you find yourself on trial for your life because of this vision that you've got, this vocation that you've got,
39:27then, again, the question must come, maybe I've made a terrible mistake.
39:33And I am quite sure that Jesus must have faced that question again and again and again during his life,
39:39and that each time he faced it, he came back with the same answer.
39:42No, it may look crazy, but this is what I have to do.
39:44There is one final incident during this night that confirms Jesus was fully aware of what he was doing.
39:55After the Last Supper, he and the disciples went to the Garden of Gethsemane, just outside the city walls.
40:03The Gospels say that here, for the first time, Jesus began to have doubts about his destiny.
40:12They described the event as the agony of Jesus.
40:27He asked God if he could be spared the awful fate that awaited him.
40:32It's at this point that Jesus' complicity in his own death is fully revealed.
40:39According to Luke's Gospel, Jesus sweats blood and drops of his blood fall on the path before him.
40:48Scholars have always assumed that this was a detail made up by the Gospel writer,
40:56a dramatic literary device to express Jesus' fear and anxiety.
41:00But forensic pathology suggests that this event may actually have happened,
41:07giving us our best evidence yet that Jesus knew the fate that lay before him.
41:12Physicians refer to the fact that each of the sweat glands that are all over our body is supplied by small capillaries, small blood vessels.
41:24Under stress, capillaries can break and blood can issue forth into the sweat itself and be a mixture of sweat and blood.
41:32The medical name for that is hematohydrosis, blood sweat.
41:41If you read Luke, the Gospels, and you find out that Jesus sweated blood, I'm not surprised.
41:45I mean, the mind-body relationship has been known for a long time that when you're under enormous stress,
41:52it can come out in some form, in his form with a very, very rare condition, but stimulated by stress.
41:58And confronted in the garden, ready to be taken off for a trial.
42:02This is a time of maximum stress, and in one form or another, it's going to come out.
42:07And it came out in a very rare form of sweating blood.
42:15The idea of Jesus being complicit in his own death may seem controversial, but all the facts stack up.
42:23On many occasions, Jesus had the opportunity to leave Jerusalem.
42:30But every time, he refused to take the easy way out.
42:33At no time during this fateful week did Jesus make any attempt to escape.
42:42He stood his ground.
42:45Judas betrayed him with a kiss, and the awful end game began.
42:54Everything he had done since that first day at the gates of Jerusalem,
42:59every step of the way seemed to be the fulfilment of a destiny.
43:07The case against Jesus is strong.
43:12But no matter how often he put himself in danger, he did not take his own life.
43:18That was done by others.
43:19Let's review the evidence.
43:32The first suspect, Caiaphas, wanted Jesus dead.
43:37He considered Jesus a threat to his religious power and his privileged lifestyle.
43:42He held a sham trial and convicted Jesus of blasphemy.
43:46Who is the guilty party is naturally Caiaphas.
43:50And I think that that's the right man to name.
43:53He is the guy who decided.
43:56So here's the man that I think is actually the guy who did it.
44:00Pilate may have played an unwitting role in this crime.
44:05He saw Jesus as no threat.
44:08He declared him innocent.
44:10But Pilate had the ultimate power.
44:14It was he who ordered the execution of Jesus.
44:18Of course the one who convicted him and sentenced him to death was Pilate, the Roman governor.
44:23No question about that.
44:25Pilate has to take the responsibility for that.
44:32The final suspect.
44:35Jesus.
44:37He knew exactly what he was doing and why.
44:40He deliberately provoked Caiaphas with his actions.
44:43He made no attempt to escape and he refused to defend himself at his trial.
44:49Jesus was successful in achieving his goal.
44:53His destiny.
44:55I think ultimately it was Jesus himself who was responsible for his own crucifixion.
45:01Because he passionately believed that it was the will of God that he should die on the cross.
45:09So who, then, is responsible for the death of Jesus?
45:14It is clear from the evidence of the three suspects.
45:18Clear, but far from simple.
45:22They all are.
45:24In a sense it's all three, but it's a different sense for each one.
45:28Pilate is definitely a guilty man.
45:31He's got blood on his hands and he knows it.
45:33Caiaphas is definitely a guilty man.
45:36He's a wily old politician sending an innocent man to his death.
45:39Jesus, I wouldn't say Jesus was guilty in that sense.
45:44Jesus is being faithful to his vocation even though it leads to his death.
45:51Pontius Pilate killed Jesus.
45:54But Pilate had help.
45:56He had the help of Caiaphas and the temple priesthood who accused Jesus.
46:02Caiaphas surely has to answer for that.
46:04And Pilate had the help of Jesus who took a great risk in proclaiming his message and suffered as a consequence.
46:14The Romans were masters of crucifixion.
46:19The public execution of Jesus was intended as a lesson for all Jerusalem.
46:24According to the Gospels, Jesus' mother was brought to see her son.
46:34The disciples had scattered, probably in fear of their lives.
46:39They might be next.
46:43After six hours on the cross, Jesus was pronounced dead.
46:48One chapter in the life of Jesus had come to a close.
47:01But the story was far from over.
47:03And how does history record the fate of the three suspects?
47:23Pilate was recalled to Rome to be tried for his brutal treatment of Jews.
47:28But the emperor Tiberius died, and Pilate was never brought to trial.
47:34He is thought to have committed suicide in 37 AD, not long after the crucifixion.
47:44Caiaphas was removed from office soon after the death of Jesus,
47:49and lived quietly on his farm near Galilee.
47:51He is buried at Talpiot in Jerusalem.
47:56Jesus will always remain as a major figure in world history and in religious faith.
48:04At the age of the recruited Church of theúa.
48:05.
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