It is important therefore that we should clear our minds of the notion
that Jesus died, as some are in the habit of declaring, for his social
and political opinions. There have been many martyrs to those opinions;
but he was not one of them, nor, as his words show, did he see any more
sense in martyrdom than Galileo did. He was executed by the Jews for the
blasphemy of claiming to be a God; and Pilate, to whom this was a mere
piece of superstitious nonsense, let them execute him as the cheapest
way of keeping them quiet, on the formal plea that he had committed
treason against Rome by saying that he was the King of the Jews. He was
not falsely accused, nor denied full opportunities of defending himself.
The proceedings were quite straightforward and regular; and Pilate,
to whom the appeal lay, favored him and despised his judges, and was
evidently willing enough to be conciliated. But instead of denying the
charge, Jesus repeated the offence. He knew what he was doing: he had
alienated numbers of his own disciples and been stoned in the streets
for doing it before. He was not lying: he believed literally what he
said. The horror of the High Priest was perfectly natural: he was a
Primate confronted with a heterodox street preacher uttering what seemed
to him an appalling and impudent blasphemy. The fact that the blasphemy
was to Jesus a simple statement of fact, and that it has since been
accepted as such by all western nations, does not invalidate the
proceedings, nor give us the right to regard Annas and Caiaphas as worse
men than the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Head Master of Eton. If
Jesus had been indicted in a modern court, he would have been examined
by two doctors; found to be obsessed by a delusion; declared incapable
of pleading; and sent to an asylum: that is the whole difference. But
please note that when a man is charged before a modern tribunal (to take
a case that happened the other day) of having asserted and maintained
that he was an officer returned from the front to receive the Victoria
Cross at the hands of the King, although he was in fact a mechanic,
nobody thinks of treating him as afflicted with a delusion. He is
punished for false pretences, because his assertion is credible and
therefore misleading. Just so, the claim to divinity made by Jesus was
to the High Priest, who looked forward to the coming of a Messiah, one
that might conceivably have been true, and might therefore have misled
the people in a very dangerous way. That was why he treated Jesus as an
imposter and a blasphemer where we should have treated him as a madman.