The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem

by Marcus J. Borg

Many of us who grew up Christian were taught that the relationship between the two testaments is one of prophecy and fulfillment. The Old Testament prophesies the coming of the Messiah, and this is fulfilled in Jesus. This relationship of prophecy and fulfillment was commonly understood as prediction and fulfillment. Many of us learned that there were scores of predictions of Jesus and the events of his life in the Old Testament. These not only demonstrated that Jesus was the Messiah, but also proved the truth of the Bible and thus Christianity—only a supernaturally inspired scripture could predict the future so precisely.

This way of seeing the relationship between the two testaments has an important effect upon how the life and death of Jesus are seen. It easily and naturally, if not inevitably, leads to the inference that things had to happen this way. These events were foreknown, foreordained, are part of God’s “plan of salvation.” They happened through divine destiny and even necessity. Divine destiny: God planned it this way. Divine necessity: it had to happen this way. And this often connects to the substitutionary sacrificial understanding of Jesus’s death as well: Jesus’s death was foreordained and necessary because God can forgive sins only through adequate substitutionary sacrifice.

The Jewish Bible was the sacred scripture of early Christians, and many of them knew it well, whether from hearing it orally or being able to read it. Thus, as they told the story of Jesus, they used language from the Jewish Bible to do so. This practice produced what we call “prophecy historicized.” A passage from the past (in this case, from the Jewish Bible) is “historicized” when it is used in the narration of a subsequent story (the gospels and the New Testament). “Historicizing” here does not make something historical or historically factual. It simply means using an older passage in a newer story in an attempt to connect that newer story to the earlier tradition and lend credibility to it.

But Jesus was not simply an unfortunate victim of a domination system’s brutality. He was also a protagonist filled with passion. His passion, his message, was about the kingdom of God. He spoke to peasants as a voice of peasant religious protest against the central economic and political institutions of his day. He attracted a following and took his movement to Jerusalem at the season of Passover. There he challenged the authorities with public acts and public debates. All of this was his passion, what he was passionate about: God and the kingdom of God, God and God’s passion for justice.

Jesus’s passion got him killed. To put this meaning of passion and a narrower meaning of passion into a single sentence: Jesus’s passion for the kingdom of God led to what is often called his passion, namely, his suffering and death. But to restrict Jesus’s passion to his suffering and death is to ignore the passion that brought him to Jerusalem. To think of Jesus’s passion as simply what happened on Good Friday is to separate his death from the passion that animated his life.

is important to realize that what killed Jesus was nothing unusual. We have no reason to think that the temple authorities were wicked people. Moreover, as empires go, Rome was better than most. There was nothing exceptional or abnormal about it; this is simply the way domination systems behave.

This realization generates an additional reflection. According to Mark, Jesus did not die for the sins of the world. The language of substitutionary sacrifice for sin is absent from his story. But in an important sense, he was killed because of the sin of the world. It was the injustice of domination systems that killed him, injustice so routine that it is part of the normalcy of civilization. Though sin means more than this, it includes this. And thus Jesus was crucified because of the sin of the world.

As Mark tells the story, was Jesus guilty of nonviolent resistance to imperial Roman oppression and local Jewish collaboration? Oh, yes.