Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - How to Get Cancelled in Ancient Judea

Episode Date: May 8, 2026

What do we know about Jesus? Kate is joined for this episode by Professor of Christian Origins, Helen Bond, to find out more about the historical record for the events of the New Testament, why Jesus was persecuted, and who by.Helen is Professor of Christian Origins at the University of Edinburgh, and co-hosts the Biblical Time Machine Podcast.This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters, it's me, Kate Lister. Welcome back once again to Betwit the Sheeds. Hello, how fabulous to see your fabulous selves. Do come in and take a seat. But before we go any further together, I do have to tell you again, and I will continue to tell you between now and the time that the show eventually gets cancelled.

This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults, about adulty things in an adultery way, covering arranged adults, subjects, and you should be an adult too. Right, proceed at your own caution. you have been warned. Between the sounds of bleating sheep, cooing dove, shouting salesmen and coins hitting wooden tables, you'd have thought I'd have taken you to a marketplace.

And I wouldn't blame you for thinking that. This place even has food stalls. But this is not a marketplace. This is a temple, and none other than the second temple, Jerusalem. And do you know what I heard? I heard that there was quite the commotion yesterday. Well, yesterday in the first century.

As if the sounds and smells and heat aren't overwhelming enough, a crowd of people turned up laying their cloaks on the path ahead of a mounted man and started shouting about his greatness. And as if that kind of drama wasn't enough in Passover week, then this guy, this great guy, this guy that some people are calling King of the Jews, then he started flipping over market tables, shouting and screaming about thieves and thievery. Honestly, it was a whole scene.

I don't know who he was, but frankly, he sounds like a troublemaker to me. Hello and welcome back to Betwixtashit, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. What do we mean when we say get cancelled today? That is a very modern vernacular, isn't it? We all know what we mean, but people weren't talking about being cancelled in the past. Although, as we're about to discover, they most certainly were. For the purposes of the next few episodes, we are defining being cancelled as being pretty unanimously rejected from society. Being cancelled is when everyone turns their back on you and goes,

no thank you very much, sling your rook, get out of ear. And although Christianity has had quite the success story in the intervening years, it's safe to say that Jesus Christ wasn't always the most popular fella. So what did he do to end up on the wrong side? of the leaders in ancient Judea? Why were people so resistant to his message about just being nice to each other? In other words, how did the establishment try to cancel Jesus? Today I'm joined by Helen Bond, professor of Christian origins at the University of Edinburgh.

And if anyone can help us answer these questions, it's her. Are you ready to do this? Well, so am I. Well, hello and welcome to Betwix the Sheets. It's only Professor Helen Bond. How are you doing? I'm doing really well, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. This is the first in our new little mini-series of how to get cancelled. And we've gone for how to get cancelled in Judea because it just occurred to me that obviously I know the story about the crucifixion of Christ. Of course I do. But I don't actually know the details of it. And I'm fascinating.

to know more about it. And you are a professor of Christian origins at the University of Edinburgh. So you are the ideal person to talk to. Yes. Jesus is my thing. He's your boy. Can I ask, how did you come to study this as a discipline? What's your, what's your historian origin story? Oh, well, I mean, the big story is I was always going to do maths at university. And then I decided I didn't like mechanics that much, but I was doing religion at school. And I just found that really fascinating. It was just so much more interesting. And I like the kind of the puzzles in religion, you know, particularly to do the gospels, who's copying off who, because there's this sort of literary relationship between them. And strange, as it may seem, that that was kind of what got me into it.

And I just, I just loved, I always loved, you know, the Egyptians and the Babylonians and all of these guys. I love those sort of the coffee table books. And so that doing, doing sort of Christian origins just seemed to kind of tick all the boxes for me. That's your point. passion. That's what you love to do. And you get to do Greek and things like that. So I guess as a starter question, this is probably the big one. It just didn't even sound like a start question. Was Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, a real person? Yes. I think there's pretty good evidence that he was. I know there's kind of a lot of people nowadays saying, oh, he's just a myth. But actually, I mean, given that he's a peasant, you know, he's a sort of a rural artisan, he's a carpenter. Most people from that

kind of status level wouldn't leave any record whatsoever. So the fact that we've got letters from Paul, St. Paul, from 20 years after his death is quite a big issue. And Paul knows Jesus's family. He knows Jesus' disciples. You know, there's plenty of people still around 20 years later to say, what are you on about Paul? You know, you're making all this up. So I think that's pretty good. So even if the Gospels, the earliest gospel, might be about 40 years after the time of Jesus, you know, I think it's still within lifetimes of people, even ancient people. That is within lifetime. I'm just thinking about like there's way more historical heft is placed on other sources, like writing about the Roman emperors. Often what we know about them was written a long time after they died.

And this was 40 years. That's next to nothing from somebody that knew it. I mean, 20 years in the case of Paul's letters. So, I mean, people sometimes say, yeah, but they're insiders. You know, they were all in on it. They're all making it up. But that just seems too complex, too sort of, you know, I mean, it just doesn't make any sense. I think it's far more easy just to believe that there was a person.

And, you know, there might have been changes to what people were believing in him later on. But I think, you know, at the basis of it, there was a job. genuine person called Jesus from Nazareth. And it's not just Paul, is it? It's cooperated in other sources as well. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so you get the Gospels and then, you know, other New Testament writings. And the Jewish writer, Jewish author, Josephus, he mentions Jesus and he does this great long sort of history of the Jews. And he mentions Jesus in writing around about 93 or so. And then you start to get Romans writing about Jesus in the early second century. So all of That is pretty early, really.

And he's in the Quran. He pops up there, doesn't it as a prophet? He does. He does, exactly. It's in Ibn Mariam. Yes, that's right. That's right. In fact, there's more references to Mary in the Quran than there are in the New Testament.

So, yeah, the two of them are quite big. So what do we know historically about who this person might have been? Because we've got people writing about him. They knew him and they are sort of religious followers of him. But as an actual person, you said there that what we know about, about him, we think, is that he was, you said a peasant, like a carpenter, a poor person, where do we think he was born? When do we think he was born? Probably not in a stable. Probably not. I mean, yeah, yeah, because the things about, I mean, only two gospels have birth stories,

Matthew and Luke. They're two of our later ones. They're probably written in the later first century. And it's just a thing, you know, ancient biography, you start your story with a great birth. Great men need a great birth. And the birth stories are full of theology and, you know, really trying to show people in picture language who Jesus was. So I think the whole thing about Jesus being born in Bethlehem is to show that he's, this is a town associated with King David. So the idea is to show he's a second King David. He's of the royal line. He's the Messiah line. So it's all of those things. And the stable actually only appears in Luke's Gospel. And the idea there, I think, is that Jesus has come for the poor and marginalized and he himself was sort of, you know,

rejected and impoverished at his birth. So, so yeah, I think, you know, there's a lot going on in those birth stories. Probably Jesus came from this small, very small village of Nazareth. It's in Galilee. It's not too far away from other big towns, but people there seem to be quite insular, quite rural. His family have a trade. They're carpenters. Probably a fairly large family. And They would have been Jewish. They're Jewish. Yeah. And everything about Jesus fits into that sort of first century Jewish kind of matrix. So probably born around about this year zero. Not that we have zero, but, you know. That was lucky. And died around about 30, 33, something like that. And he had a brother called Simon. That's one of my favorite Jesus facts. Yeah. Oh, no, no. Helen, you're going to tell me that's wrong. I love that fact. Well, he had a few brothers. I mean, his main brother was, was, was, was, called James. He sort of kept the movement going after Jesus, but he has a few brothers, and they're listed in the New Testament, too, and a couple of sisters. But we're not given the names of those, unfortunately. Yeah, because, you know, who cares about the women? Right, exactly.

So he was born Jewish, he's born poor. Do we know anything about where he grows up, or do we just have, like, what's mentioned in the Gospels? Because we do kind of have this, like, missing bit of, like, He's born and then, you know, and there's miracles attributed to that. And then he kind of reappears sort of like fully grown man of, you know, with some pretty out there wacky ideas about people being nice to reach him. Yeah, yeah, basically he just sort of emerges fully grown around about 30, Luke's Gospel says. And the first thing we know about him is that he seems to be a follower of John the Baptist. Now, John the Baptist seems to have been a bigger deal in his day than Jesus was.

Interesting. Josephus again mentions him. He actually quite approves of John the Baptist. John the Baptist seems to be, I mean, he's got this thing that he baptizes people. He wants them to repent, get themselves ready. Basically, he's saying the end of the world is coming. God is going to come. Get yourself ready.

Baptism is a sign of that. And just, you know, wait, it's going to happen soon. And Jesus seems to have gone out to John. He probably seems to have been a disciple of John the Baptist, part of this inner group. And then John the Baptist gets. killed by Herod Antipas, and after that, Jesus seems to start on his own movement, which actually is quite similar to John's. The main difference with Jesus's is that he is clearly, he finds he's a very skilled healer and exorcist, and this is the thing that probably starts to attract the crowds.

But Jesus' message is actually very similar to John. He's saying, the end of the world is coming, God is going to come. Is he? Yeah. I didn't know he was saying that. Yeah. Yeah. No, in In terms of the original message, this is what Jesus is saying. The end of the world's coming. Judgment is coming. God is going to come. Repent. Get yourself ready and just, you know, hold true because it's going to come soon. Annie, you said he got a reputation as a healer and an exorcist, which is, that's a hell of a job share to be doing that. What, what, I suppose, yeah, he was. He's healing the sick and he's making blind men see and things like that. That's a neat trick. Yeah, and I mean, when you think about the first century, you know, there's no, there's no NHS, there's no doctors, there's particularly in rural areas, you know, there's maybe one or two sort of wise women who can do things with herbs. But basically, you're pretty much left on your own. So there would have been loads of people needing some kind of healing. And I mean, Jesus isn't the only one doing this. People are going to the god Asclepius. They're believing that he can heal them. There's Jewish holy men too and sort of, you know, wise people who are thought to have skills.

But yeah, I mean, it does seem, although, you know, we may be slightly skeptical about these miracles, it does seem in his time that people did believe that Jesus had these powers. So just to zoom out for a second. So we've got, it sounds like there's a number of religious followers and people doing kind of groovy stuff and people signing up to various causes. But this was, where was this? Is it in Nazareth or Galilee? And it's under Roman occupation.

Now, how did that clash with the Roman gods and goddesses and their authority? So Galilee at this time is not under Roman occupation. It's ruled over by Herod Antipas, who's a Jewish king, or Tetarach, technically. He's one of the sons of Herod the Great, you know, the one who supposedly massacred all the children. but Roman presence is very much felt. It's the Romans who've put Herod on the throne. And as soon as Jesus goes south to Jerusalem, Jerusalem is under direct Roman rule. So there's a difference.

Where he sort of conducts most of his ministry is in this Jewish area. And he's only got to worry about Herod Antipas. As soon as he goes south, though, it's the Romans in control. And then he's got to worry about the Roman prefect. And how did Herod Antipas, how did they deal with these religious leaders and sects popping up? Was it a bit more permissive? Was it like, you know, like sort of find your own way? Or did they clamp down on this?

Was it just like one faith and we all have to have that? Or was there in some kind of religious freedom at the time? I mean, yeah, there's lots of different ways of being Jewish in the first century. And some of them clashed with the authorities. Some of them didn't. I mean, it's interesting to look at what happened to John the Baptist. he got killed. The New Testament makes out that Herod didn't really want to kill him, but Josephus is pretty clear that Herod got worried because he was attracting large crowds,

people were all going out to him in the wilderness, and Herod just starts to think, you know, I can't let this guy carry on because like everybody else, he doesn't want any kind of a riot. So he's thinking, you know, this could be trouble. So better just to nip it in the buds, you know, get rid of the ringleader. And that's a lot. And that's a little bit of the ringleader. and that's pretty much the way Rome as well treated everyone in the first century. I mean, we get Jesus is one amongst many of these sort of holy prophetic type figures. They sort of emerge, they get a following, and then the ruler of the day, generally speaking, gets rid of them. Doesn't like him.

No. So he sounds kind of a bit sort of hip and groovy at the moment. I mean, apart from the world's going to end a bit, like he's kind of, he wants to hear. people? And was his message, like, you know, peace and love and let's be nice to one another? Is that what his message was at this point? There's lots of being nice to each other. I mean, love one another, love your enemies. I mean, there's all of these things. And that would have struck people as being quite strange at the time. You know, you love your family. You love your tribe. You love your people. But, you know, you don't have to love your enemies, particularly not the Romans. I mean, nobody wants

to love the Romans. So, yeah, that would have seemed a bit strange to people. But this idea of the end of the world coming, this is actually very common in the first century. Lots of people around about this time, probably because it's, you know, turbulent political times. You've got a lot of change at the time. You've got Rome very much encroaching on the east, even though Galilee is ruled by a Jewish king. It can't have looked like it was going to be very long until, you know, Rome just sort of took them over too. So I think in this sort of troubled times, people are looking for some way out, you know. And also Jewish people are thinking, how come, you know, how come the Roman gods seem to be doing so well?

When is our God going to start sort of doing a bit of smiting? It's a fair question that, isn't it? It's what people wanted. You know, when is God going to come and just get rid of these Romans? We've had enough. Chuck them out. Yeah. So these are very, very popular types of preachers.

And we get a whole line of them, not just John the Baptist and Jesus, but a lot of other ones too. There's a whole load of them. I watched The Life of Brian for the first time. I rewatched it like a couple of weeks ago after seeing clips of it on on Instagram. I've forgotten how good that film was. They went and watched it again. And it's just, and they've got that bit, haven't there? Loads of different preachers and people running around trying to follow new people all the time.

Exactly. And I think that's one of the aspects that the film captures really well. You know, this was a kind of a time where people. People are just dreaming dreams. They want to be inspired by people. They want to think that they want to think there's something better than what they've got at the moment. That makes perfect sense. To us today, somebody coming along and going, look, let's be nice to each other and let's love each other.

And let's look after poor people. And let's not be horrible to sex workers. In fact, we're all even Stevens. We're all made. That today sounds like quite a nice message. But at the time, and indeed for a long time, afterwards and maybe still today, it's also very subversive that idea. It is.

It's very countercultural because it's not what people think. And I think one of the difficulties is that we have, you know, even if we're living in a post-Christian culture, our culture has been so influenced by this message that we just think it's normal to go around saying, you know, love your neighbor. But people in the first century didn't. They were, you know, your first duty was to your family, to your kin and your nation, your ethnic group. And again, the idea that you should sort of help the poor.

This was more of a thing in Jewish society because people did sort of give offerings and things like that to the poor. But certainly in Roman society, you know, you could be a good person without sort of bothering about the poor. You know, the poor. They had their own, you know, it was their own fault, people thought half of the time. So, yeah. I'll be back with Helen and Jesus after this short break. Well, one thing that I do know about the Romans, and I've learned after speaking to a lot of Roman historians,

is that they liked order. Yes. It was very, very important to them. Their entire society and system throughout the whole of the empire depended on this idea of order, and they were going to preserve order, and a very rigid hierarchy. This is a society that's built on.

slaves and have very clear views of what different people are supposed to be doing. They all have a box and everyone should stay in that box. Even the clothes you wear, I mean, everything proclaims your order. That's absolutely right. And so, I mean, that's, I think, what's so subversive about this Christian message, the idea that you should, you should look out for people who are not in your box. And also the idea that you should kind of make yourself a slave, be a servant to other people, That would have blown their mind. Exactly. It wouldn't have like that at all.

It's so completely the opposite. And everybody else, you know, Roman society is striving for honour, for greatness, for power, for recognition. You know, you want to be seen. Honour is the big thing. And to say, well, you should be like a servant and you should help other people is really odd. You know, odd to the point of being really certifiable. And kind of what's contained within that is it's not just, everyone should be nice to each other, but it's that people aren't better than you is the implicit

message as well in that. If everyone's equal and everyone should care for one another, it's a direct challenge to the authority. Yes, exactly, exactly. We're all there. And, you know, God is the only one in command. And that, I think, is a particular challenge to the emperor. They wouldn't like that at all. So when he's hanging around in sort of like under Jewish rule, this is okay. He's gaining a bit of prominence, we think. He's one of several people that have got these new ideas and new followers. But he moves to Judea and that's going to set him on a collision path, isn't it? Yeah, I think if he'd stayed in Galilee, he might have been all right. I mean, Herod Antipas is still kind of keeping an eye on him and might have gone after him. And the gospel suggests that, you know, there were some kind of movements in that direction. But I think as soon as he came to, as soon as he came south and particularly to Jerusalem and Jerusalem at Passover, that's what really seals his fate. Because, you know, Romans were actually pretty generous to the Jews, despite, you know, occupying their land. They did allow them to continue to have these big pilgrimage feasts.

And Passover was the biggest of the pilgrimage feasts. about hundreds of thousands of people making their way to Jerusalem from all over the Eastern Empire. So, you know, you've really got loads and loads of people all squashed together, doing no work, which is very unusual for people at the time. They're all drinking, they're meeting up with families. And so this is a potentially volatile situation. So I think as soon as you get this Holy Man coming from Galilee into this, this, this, this already slightly precarious situation, it's just a matter of time, really. What are the Gospels tell us about, like, how many followers?

Sounds like I'm going to talk about Instagram, the original, but how many followers did he have at this time? Like, was he big in his day? Was he causing a splash? Or was he just a sort of like an outside character that people were sort of keeping an eye on? Yeah, I think he did become something big in his day. I mean, one of the difficulties is it's hard to know how long is ministry. lasted. It might just been a few months. It might have been a couple of years. We don't actually

know. Certainly he had a body of very close followers. So he's got the 12 men, the 12 male disciples that kind of everyone knows about. But there's also lots of women. The Gospels say that as he's making his way around Galilee, he's got a lot of women who follow him too. So, you know, our mental picture shouldn't just be Jesus and these 12 strapping men, but women with them as well. It's a mixed group. And this large group is sort of making its way to Jerusalem. I mean, the Gospels suggest that large crowds followed him or turned up to see what he was going to do. You know, they talk about...

See, now we're getting dangerous, aren't we? Because one lone person saying this stuff is fine for the Romans, they'd probably just be okay. Lots of people now joining in, I don't think that they would appreciate that. That's right. So, I mean, you know, you hear that there's a crowd of... 5,000, a crowd of 4,000. I mean, who knows, who would have known in antiquity how big these crowds were? But, you know, we're given the impression that there are large gatherings.

And they're coming to see, they're coming to see the miracles, you know, they're wanting healing, they're wanting to see some, this is before telly and the radio, you know, this is, this is entertainment as much as anything else. But also he's got this message. And certainly some of them are going to go back and think, yeah, you know, this could be the time. This could be the guy. You know, this is, this is it. Something is going to happen now. So he is, he's, he's, he's growing in popularity. He's got all these followers. He goes to Jerusalem. Some of these followers are coming with him. He's getting new followers. Some of them are already in Jerusalem. So I think this is where it starts to get

dangerous once he's got a body of people following him in this really cramped and difficult time where everybody, But everybody's waiting for something to happen. Would it be usual for religious leaders like this to just be arrested just for being religious leaders? I mean, it sounds like something the Romans would do. They were pretty horrible. But did they do that? Well, I think the difficulty is, and it's really good that you mention this, what we call a religious leader wasn't really a thing in the first century. So we think of Jesus as a religious leader.

But in the ancient world, religion and politics were so completely intertwined that you can't just. say Jesus is a religious leader. He's also a political leader. So, you know, to say that God is going to come and establish God's kingdom on earth, that's a political statement. That's, that's saying that God is going to come. He's going to wipe away the Romans, especially the emperor, because the emperor claims to be king, but we all know that God is king. And, you know, it's a political statement. And quite a dangerous one. Exactly. A really dangerous one. And a really dangerous one. of course the Roman Empire too is based on Roman gods. It assumes that the Roman gods are in charge. What Jesus is saying is that, no, the Jewish God is going to come and he's going to smite the lot of you.

He's going to get rid of the Roman gods. He's going to get rid of Rome and its emperor and God is going to be the one in charge. So this is a political message. And as we've been saying, you know, the whole subversive tone to everyone's coming out of their boxes is again something. You know, it's challenging the stability of society. Yeah. Now, what do the Gospels say about how Jesus got arrested? My memory is a bit fuzzy, but there was Judas did something. But what I'm interested in is what would they have arrested him for?

I think we need to be a little bit cautious about the Gospels here because they want to put a lot of blame on the Jewish. leadership. But of course, Jesus is crucified and this is a Roman penalty. So I think we really need to look at who would have put him on a cross. And this is Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea. He normally lives out on the coast in a nice airy city over there, but he comes to Jerusalem for the Passover just to make sure that there's no infringements of law and order. And he's making sure that there's no riots. Although ironically, I think his very presence there with Roman troops kind of stirs up riots. So anyway, he's there, he's watching, he's waiting, he sees Jesus coming

into Jerusalem, riding on the back of a donkey. That's a statement, you know, everyone walks in. This is a pilgrimage. You walk in or you go on your knees, but, you know, to ride in on a donkey. He's got a following, as we said. He goes into the temple. in Jerusalem and he does something. He's knocking over the tables of the money changes and the dove sellers. So who knows what is doing next, you know? Why would he do that? I know it's very difficult. We've only got the gospel to tell us, but like what statement is being made in that action of turning over the table? Well, the gospel suggests that it's something to do with predicting the end of the temple. You know, the temple will be destroyed. People sometimes think maybe he's

sort of challenging over-commercial activity in the temple. But in a way, it doesn't really matter. You know, he's in the temple at the most holy time of year, or one of the most holy times of year, and he's causing a disturbance. So I think it's quite likely that Pilate has probably been watching him for some time. He's probably had a report from Herod Antipas back in Galilee. He'll know that he's been moving around. He'll know maybe he's not a big threat. He's not inciting people to take up arms, but the fact that he comes to Jerusalem with a following at the busiest time of year means that, you know, he has to be stopped. Once he starts doing things like, you know, demonstrating in the temple, he has to be stopped. And I think the gospel

suggests that the prime movers in all of this were the chief priests, the Jewish leadership, the priestly leadership in Jerusalem. And I think, although I wouldn't say that they're, the the main people in all of this, it's not at all unlikely that they had a hand in it too, because they were actually Roman appointments. The high priest has been put there by Poncha's pilot. And the whole point is that he's got to tow a pro-Roman line. And if he doesn't, he's out, somebody else is in. And probably they thought, well, you know, this guy's a bit misguided. We don't know what he's going to do either. Once he takes his message to the, Jerusalem Temple, what's he going to do next? Is he going to do something that's going to threaten

the feast? You know, he can't be allowed to carry on. So it was probably in their interest, too, to get rid of him. And maybe they thought, you know, the Roman governor will do something for us in exchange. So I think it's possible that they did have some hand in kind of, you know, a lot of people want rid of him. I think a lot of people at the top are starting to think he's dangerous. And you mentioned Judas. We don't know for sure whether Judas is a real character or not, but he might well have been. Certainly the Gospels suggest that, you know, I mean, interestingly, they suggest that Jesus was both betrayed by a follower and denied by a follower. So they don't kind of, they don't hide the fact that some of Jesus's disciples were, you know, less loyal than they might have been.

So yeah, maybe Judas is a real character. Maybe he did kind of give them some inside information about where they could find Jesus, maybe even what he was saying, what his plans were, what he was thinking. But we don't know that for sure. What do you think he would have been arrested for? Like disturbance? I mean, the Romans didn't like that at all. Is that something that they would arrest you for disturbing the peace, I suppose we'd say today?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, the thing is, you know, Rome has this very complicated. legal system, but it only kicks in if you're a Roman citizen. If you're under that radar, then, you know, stuff, yeah. You don't, I mean, it's possible that Jesus was just rounded up, stuck on a cross, that was the end of it. And I'm, I'm thinking that there's some kind of trial here or some kind of due process. That might not have been the case at all. It might have just been, just get him. Exactly. And I think it's difficult for us to remember and to realize just how low human life is treated at this point.

Yes, good point. Particularly as someone of low status. So, you know, he's a troublemaker. We don't know what he's doing next. Put him on a cross. Yeah, I was thinking that there might, there must have been some kind of due process or legal following here, but maybe not. I think it's likely that pilot did want to, you know, have a look at him. Because, I mean, it's interesting that like with John the Baptist, they just get rid of Jesus. They don't get rid of the other followers. And maybe Pilate sort of had a very brief interrogation of Jesus. Maybe he just wanted to find out, you know, is it all centered on this one person or is it, is it a wider movement? At any rate, he must have decided that it was just the one person because he just gets rid of Jesus

and the rest of them are allowed to just run off. So I wouldn't rule out some kind of very brief interrogation, but the idea that there's a formal trial with a verdict and a charge, I think, is to sort of read modern day sensibilities back into it. I'll be back with Helen and Jesus after this short break. We know that he was crucified, but let's talk about crucifixion. for a moment. Who did the Romans crucify and what kind of things would they crucify you for? It's a particularly horrendous way to go.

Yes. It's designed to be torture and humiliating and you're naked and you die in extreme agony. You die eventually just of exhaustion and suffocation when your arms can't hold you up enough. And generally speaking, there's no burial. You're just pecked away by the wild animals. it is designed to be absolutely horrendous. And I mean, so horrible that Romans actually don't tend to talk about it very much. They just talk about the extreme penalty or something like that.

The Gospels are actually our longest account of a crucifixion from antiquity. Yeah, it's strange to think that. And so people of Roman citizens couldn't be crucified, although, I mean, occasionally they were. But in theory, it had to be people lower than a citizen. It was generally people like, you know, rebels, thieves, slaves. It was thought of very much as the slave's death. And I mean, in other places, a householder could just crucify his slaves if they didn't do what he wanted them to do. See, that's the Romans that I know and love.

Yeah, exactly. Human life is just very, very disregarded by these people who are higher up the pecking order. So Jesus was probably crucified because he looked like he was going to threaten the peace. He looked like he was some kind of rebel. He was possibly inciting people to violence. From the Jewish side of things, they might have thought he was setting himself up as some kind of a false prophet, you know, leading the people astray. There are plenty of things like that in the Jewish scriptures that would lead to death as well. And the gospel suggests that Jesus was flogged beforehand.

And that does seem to have been a common thing, either beforehand or actually sometimes on the cross itself. There's horrible stories about Roman soldiers who are just having their fun with victims. They're crucifying them in strange ways. You know, if the idea that there was a sign saying the king of the Jews is true, then again, it's kind of, it's mockery. It's making fun of him. You know, this is the only king the Jews are going to have. and it can take several days often. So the whole point is that bodies are up there.

And it's a deterrent. So the idea is, you know, look what happens to enemies of Rome. You don't want to be one of them. Woody have carried his own cross or is that another? Yeah, that does. Not the whole cross, but the cross beam because the stakes seem to have been sort of already there. The upright bit because that's the bit that's going to take the longest to, you know, to make it. stable, it does seem as though people carried the cross beam and then just got attached to it

and then it would be hoisted up. And there were a different way, you know, sometimes it was more like a T, sometimes it was more like a cross, but essentially it's the same thing. You're just hung up to die. Grim, isn't it? And is it right that he was stabbed? Is that how Christ died, that he stabbed or did he die of exposure? Well, in John's Gospel, they're supposedly going to to break the legs of the people on the crosses to speed up the death. I know, it's horrendous. I mean, because obviously if your legs are broken, then that's going to put, you know, you're going to have to pull yourself up by your arms.

And once you can no longer do that, you're just going to die of suffocation. So it would kill you quite quickly. I know it's really horrible. Thanks. So, but in John's Gospel, they don't break Jesus's legs because he's already dead. And so what happens there is that a centurion sort of prods the side of. of him with a lance. So maybe that happened.

I mean, John puts that to theological purposes. He says blood and water came out. And, you know, you've got this whole idea of rebirth, rebirth in the blood of Jesus. But it's the kind of thing that guards might have done. So the poor fella is gone in the most awful way. And I suppose the theory must have been that'll do it. That will, that will, we've taken out the leader. it's done and dusted now. That must have been something that happened regularly, but it was

not to be. So when do we start to get the followers of Christ, like organizing into a religion after his death? Yeah, a lot longer than you think in terms of organizing into a religion, because for at least the first century or so, followers of Jesus were still Jews. But yeah, I mean, certainly quite soon after followers start to see Jesus, they have these appearances, visions. And again, our earliest witness to this is St. Paul in his letters. And he preserves bits that sound like they're kind of, you know, earlier tradition. And there's a tradition that Jesus rose on the third day and that he appeared to certain people, Peter the Apostle, the 12, 500 of the Christians. And last of all, he says, to me, so this must be Paul's sort of experience of Jesus on the

Damascus Road where he gets some kind of visionary thing. So when Paul is talking about it, he sounds as though they have some kind of appearances. And these appearances convince them that Jesus is alive again. The first reference we get to the empty tomb is in the Gospel of Mark, written probably in the 70s. So this is 40 years later. That doesn't, of course, stop it being a much earlier tradition, but it is a fact that we don't have it any earlier. And Paul doesn't mention an empty tomb, but it seems likely to me that there may have been something to do with the tomb. Maybe the women found it disturbed in some way, or maybe they couldn't find it, or there was something odd about the tomb. And then you start to get these reports of visions. And I mean,

again, this is something that historians can't really answer because it's outside the normal rules of the universe, you've got to either believe it if you're a follower or not. But certainly, I think we're on good historical ground when we say that the early Christians thought that Jesus had been raised from the dead. They thought that something had happened and so strong as that conviction that it does seem to have turned them into frightened people waiting, you know, running off and not knowing what to do next to being bold missionaries who took this message around the empire. In the early days, the Romans, their attitude was not, oh, there's a new religion, let's all get along together at all, was it? Like, the early Christians were ruthlessly persecuted.

Yeah, I mean, not at first. I think it took a little while before, before they were big enough, really, before anybody sort of, and whilst they're seen as Jews as well, I mean, that's, that Jews are a sort of protected ethnic group, largely because they were very helpful. to Julius Caesar back in the civil wars. And so the Jewish religion is sort of allowed, or at least, you know, Jewish peculiarities are allowed. So it takes quite a while before Christianity is a thing. Certainly the fall of Jerusalem in 80, 70, people start to think who's a Jew, who's not a Jew. And it's really by sort of the second century, you've got, by that time, you've got so many non-Jews coming into the movement that it's clear that. that it's something different to the Jewish faith.

And then I think it starts to become problematic. As people are moving from paganism into Christianity, then the powers that be start to take more notice. And is it the same reasons that Christ himself was persecuted, which is that it's a disturbance and it upsets the order of things? Is it heresy that they didn't like? Yeah, and followers can often be, accused of atheism because their allegiance to the God of Jesus, the Jewish God, I suppose,

essentially, means that they're not taking part in the civic cults. And, you know, this is one thing for Jews, because they never did anyway. But once you're starting to get a lot of Gentiles, pagans, into the movement, then, you know, this is stopping people worshipping the gods of the city. And this is dangerous because, you know, the gods of the city need to be. given their Jews. And if there's a lot of people who aren't doing that, that then starts to become problematic. But you get isolated bits of persecution in sort of various parts of, you know, for various reasons in the first and second century. It's sort of once you're getting into the late second's third century, that, you know, Christianity is distinct enough and big enough for it

to start being a threat. Where did the idea that the Jews, were to blame for Christ's death come from because he was Jewish. He was a Jewish fella. It was a Jewish. I bet if you'd said to him, are you a Christian? He'd looked at you quite blankly. Wouldn't have known what that meant. Exactly. I think that's one of the mistakes people make. People think Jesus is the first Christian, but he wasn't by any means. Even Paul, I think, you know, would say to his dying day, I'm Jewish. I would get my son circumcised. You know, the break between the two faiths, as they later became was much later than. than people tend to think.

So, yeah, in terms of blaming the Jews, I think this is a post-70 development. And 70 is a big year, because that's the year that Rome destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. There was a revolt of the Jews in 66. Rome came, of course, and put it down brutally, burnt the temple to the ground. And then you get all of these people trying to work out,

you know, what does this mean? Does this mean that the Roman gods are stronger than the Jewish gods? How do we explain the fact that the temple has fallen? This is incredible. It had happened before centuries earlier, but it had been rebuilt. And the way that they explained it centuries before was to say that the people themselves had sinned. They'd done bad things. And because of that, God had come and destroyed the temple. and then, you know, as a punishment, and then things would be okay later on. And so they use exactly the same explanation here. So a lot of Jewish writers start to say, well, you know, it must be something about the people. We did something wrong. And I think the Christians, and you get this early, first of all, in Mark's gospel, Christians start to think it was because of the death of Jesus that the temple fell. And who's to blame for the death of Jesus? Well, it's the priestly aristocracy in Jerusalem. And so I think that's where it first came from.

That's why I think the Gospels are so negative about the priestly aristocracy. They put all the blame onto them. And at the same time, by the late first century, they know that most of the new converts to the religion are going to be from the pagan world. And so they don't want to kind of say too much about, you know, oh, yeah, Pontchus Pilate, the Roman governor thought Jesus was a troublemaker, so they put him on the cross. They want to kind of distance pilot from all of that and suggest that actually, you know, the ones to blame are the Jewish leaders. And you get this, I think, even magnified in the Gospels as they go along.

And particularly in the early second century, you get some of these church, fathers, as they're known, sort of leaders, bishops and people who really, really kind of double down on this, you know, the Jews are to blame. And of course, this has been a disastrous thing over the years. And particularly that horrible saying in Matthew's Gospel, pilot washes his hands of the whole thing. And the people say, his blood be on us and on our children. So it made sense in its time when the Christian group were just a very, very small. part of the Jewish faith, but read later on, particularly in the Middle Ages, when now Christians are the majority, it reads very differently and has led to all kinds of terrible things.

So this series is about how to get cancelled. And it sounds like Christ was cancelled because he was a disruptor, that he was too much of a threat to established authorities. Yeah, I think that's right. He was a disruptor. he's also wrong place, wrong time. So, you know, had he kept to those rural villages and just kept there, even if he'd come into Judea and just kept to the villages, he might have been okay because no one really cares what's happening in the rural hinterland. It's the cities that Romans are bothered about. So, yeah, no, I think that's a good way to describe him a disruptor, but also a disruptor in the wrong place. It always interests me. Like somebody who studies the Bible

and the original messages of Christ, I often wonder what he'd have to say if he came back today. I'm sure that there's a lot of people who claim that they're doing things in his name, and I'm pretty sure he'd hate them. I'm pretty sure about that. Well, I mean, one very basic thing is that, as we said earlier, you know, Jesus' message was about the end of the world coming and getting ready for it. Yes. After Jesus's death and the resurrection, the message changed now to be largely about Jesus himself. and what God had done through Jesus.

So just the very message of Christianity is something different. Maybe he was kind of cancelled then because if his original message was the world's going to end and then they executed him and then the message changed, maybe they did manage to cancel him. I think he would find it quite surprising the direction that Christianity had gone. I mean, of course, people would say, well, this is all sort of led by the spirit and this is the way that it was going to go anyway. but there's a lot of sort of readjusting. And I mean, Christians too thought the end of the world that was going to come until fairly recently.

I mean, all the way through the Middle Ages, people were expecting the end and then they expected Jesus to come back. And, you know, those elements have not quite gone from Christianity, even if they're not as central now. Helen, you have been magnificent to talk to. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and your work,

where can they find you? They can look on the website, for the University of Edinburgh, or they can listen to my podcast, which I do with the glorious Lloyd Llewellyn Jones, a classicist, and it's called Biblical Time Machine. And we go back to Bible times and we look at everything to do the sights, sounds and smells of the Bible. Oh, that sounds fabulous. Thank you so much. You've been a treat. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Helen for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along whatever it is, you get your podcasts.

Coming up, we are finding out how to get cancelled in 1920s Hollywood and how'd you get cancelled when you're a medieval royal mistress. And if you'd like us to explore a subject or if you'd just want to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Hannah Theodore of and produced by Sophie G. The Senior Producer was Freddie Chick. Join me again, Betwixt O'Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.