Non-Jews killed a potential Jewish leader, as they had killed the Maccabean heroes long before. This was emphasized by the title inextricably associated with the stories of Jesus’s last hours and said to have been affixed to his cross: ‘King of the Jews’. Like ‘Son of Man’, this was not a title for which the later Christian Church found any use and so its survival in the tradition is all the more instructive. That ‘King of the Jews’ phrase is an inescapable repeated refrain through the Passion narratives, even despite the embarrassment which it was to cause Christians in the fraught political
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