Word: christe
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RELIGION: Why Was Christ Crucified...
...year 30 or 33, Jesus of Nazareth was arrested, hauled before a religious court, tried by a Roman governor, sentenced to death and crucified. And what did that come to mean? That, explained the Apostle Paul, "God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us . . . We are now justified by his blood." And thus it began...
...tainted by the search for blame in the death of the Redeemer. According to Matthew, a Jewish mob cried, "His blood be on us and on our children" while demanding the death of Jesus. And centuries of Christians would oblige them with massacres and persecutions, pogroms and expulsions of "Christ killers" and the depredations of the Inquisition, laying groundwork for the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust. Anti-Jewish passions came not only from misinterpreters of faith but from the spiritual authorities themselves, from John Chrysostom, from Thomas Aquinas -- both saints of Christendom -- indeed, from Martin Luther, who turned against...
Other modern revisions of Christ's death portray the Nazarene as a martyred revolutionary a la Che Guevara, but Brown says the details do not fit that scenario, and besides, Jewish insurrections only arose a generation later...
...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...