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Transcript of Edgemont Stake Book of Mormon Classes by John W. Welch, 2007 to 2009

Trial of Jesus

Thank you all for being here tonight on the evening of the first day of Passover. When I put the schedule together a couple of months ago and realized that this Thursday night would be obviously the Thursday night before Easter, I could not resist the idea of taking this time to think through, once again, what happened on that evening and that night and on the events of the morrow. No events are more important on the history of the world than what happened on these days and in these hours and we celebrate this whole Easter season - the culmination of Jesus’ ministry. It is something that we do want to understand as best we can but we probably never will quite understand everything that we would like to know there.

(Student) You said the first day of Passover. How many days are there?

I do not know exactly how many, but I think it starts tonight and then there is a preparation day and then there is the actual celebration. There - I do not know, it just said on my calendar, First Day of Passover. It did not say when the last day was. But I will look that up. Does anyone know? Are there seven? I know there are seven days of the Feast of Tabernacles so it makes sense that it will be the same but - no problem. Keep me in my place. I appreciate that.

As I was saying, there are many things we do not know, like how many days of Passover there are. And that is a wonderful lead-in to the fact that there are many details that we will question and wonder about and ponder and try to figure out - put all of these pieces together but we will never be completely successful, I think, in this life with all the things that we would like to know.

We were blessed last Sunday morning to hear from Elder Holland I hope that if you - sorry about this microphone - I think if I stand over here - for some reason it does not like Brother Kepas- too much power from over in your part of the room. But let me say, as far as I know the written copy of Elder Holland’s talk is not yet posted on the…is it on now? You can also listen to it again. Maybe you recorded it. I think we will want to re-listen, revisit, and listen to that again on several occasions. I think it is the best statement we have ever had in the Church about the events of the arrest and the crucifixion. There are - question? No.

I do not want to take away in any way from what he was saying. He had a particular point he wanted to make about remembering the solitary, lonely nature in that only Jesus could do what he did. I imagine that one of the real heartbreaking things about it all for him was not just that he was alone, but knowing that there were people like Peter who wanted to pull out his sword and help in any way he could - how inept that. But looking out and knowing that his own disciples were in agony themselves over wanting to be able to help their master whom they loved, and knowing that there really was nothing they could do. So it was a solitary time, as it had to be.

I have about a dozen points here that I would like to cover tonight, which means we will have to move through them fairly quickly, but as we get to the end of each point or every few, if you have questions that you want to ask about what I have raised or the points that we have been talking about, please ask. I thought we might try to focus our questions and discussion in the order in which I have raised them. Then if I get to the end, and I have not covered something that you would like to, we can talk about that at the end, rather than just saying, “Do any of you have questions about the arrest and the trial of Jesus?” If any of you do not have questions about that, Trial of Jesus, 9 April 2009 (file 090409)

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you have not been reading the scriptures carefully enough because as you will see there are lots of interesting things.

1. An enormous amount written

My first point for you tonight is to just draw to your attention the fact that there has been an enormous amount written about the trial of Jesus. It is easily the most important and yet the most problematic legal event in the history of the world.

Elder Holland in his talk said that never has there been more infamy purchased for less money than what Judas got for his 30 pieces of silver. We could also say never has there been more ink spilled over a more intractable and difficult topic than the trial of Jesus.

You may not be aware of all of this but if you Google, or go on the Web or look in Libraries, you will find books and articles and literally thousands of things written about the trial of Jesus. Brother Kepas?

(Student) In a trial, we have the accused, but was there a defense lawyers?

There were no defense lawyers in the world and there was…

(Student) That is not a trial then.

You are right. It is called “The Trial of Jesus,” but I will argue with you that that is a misnomer. We will come to some reasons for that, but let us hold a few of those points for just a few moments, let me complete this first little thought about just the fact that there has been a lot written and it is very difficult to understand.

Elder McConkie once said about the trial of Jesus, and this is one of my favorite quotes about the whole experience, and I think Elder Holland spoke in the same vein as this. Elder McConkie said, “There is no divine ipse dixit - that means a voice of God speaking for Himself - no voice from an archangel, and as yet no revealed latter-day account of all that transpired when God’s own son suffered himself to be judged by men so that he could voluntarily give up his life on the cross.” We need to really internalize what he is saying. There has been no revelation given on all of the points that we would like to know about. This means we must approach this subject, as sacred as it is, with a great degree of humility and it opens and invites a lot of investigation and consideration, but I do not want to pretend to have all the answers for you tonight and I do not.

Elder Holland in his talk spoke on one occasion about how difficult it was to understand, especially the role of Judas. He said, “This is just something we really cannot even know about, and it is not for us to judge.” Of course, Judas played a role. Jesus even said to him, “What you must do go and do quickly.” But we also know that “It might have been better for him,” Jesus said, “If he had not been born.”

We do not know how much of Judas’ fate was sealed because of what he did that night, or maybe what he did earlier. We do not know; we do not have enough to really judge as Elder Holland said.

One of the themes I would like to emphasize tonight is we do not know enough about a lot of these people. In the same way, we really cannot judge - we cannot judge Pilate, we cannot judge Caiaphas, and I think that ultimately, trying to point a finger of blame, and that is what a lot of Trial of Jesus, 9 April 2009 (file 090409)

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this literature is all about - trying to figure out, “Who killed Jesus, who is responsible?” Why do they want to know? Because they want to blame someone, and I do not think that blame is a part of this picture.

2. Is this an important question?

My second point is, is it, however, important for us to get involved in this and to try to understand it? Is this an important question? There is a yes and a no there. Yes, it is important because it matters to a lot of people, but no, it is really not important. In a way, if the scriptures had just said, “After the Last Supper Jesus went into the Garden of Gethsemane, he bore our sins, he came out of that and was crucified and rose from the dead,” as if all of these hours of taking him from one place to another were simply a black box. He went into the black box; he comes out of the black box. The important thing is already known. The details of what went on inside the black box are really not the important part of this story.

Yet, for a lot of people, those details become absolutely crucial and why? First of all, there is a lot going on with Jewish-Christian relations here. Christians have for a long, long time blamed all of the Jews because in Matthew they said, “His blood be upon us and our posterity.” They have been called people who killed God, accused of deicide. In the middle ages, Jews were harassed, put in prisons, put in towers - the holocaust of World War II was not the first time by any means that the Jews have suffered, largely because of their involvement with the trial of Jesus as if all Jews were responsible. It is almost like saying all Americans are responsible for the death of Abraham Lincoln. Some Americans were, but certainly not all Americans, and indeed, lots of Jesus’ followers at this time, if not all of them, were Jews. They were not involved in the events that transpired here.

Jewish-Christian relations have always been very tense because of some of the things that I think get misread in the New Testament. When a person said, “His blood be upon us,” all they were saying from a legal perspective is, “We are telling the truth. Pilate, you can trust us.” Pilate should have had good reasons not to trust them but, “His blood be upon us,” is just an idiom for a way of validating their oath or their testimony and it really need not extend beyond that one purpose.

Now the holocaust, of course, led to the death of 6 million Jews in World War II and there were many reasons for the holocaust, but one of them was the willingness of the German people to follow Nazi doctrine and execute these people because they saw them as eternal villains and sub-human. My daughter Allison happens to be in Nuremberg today. I spent the first 8 months of my mission in Nuremberg, which is where Hitler’s world capitol was going to be. It was the center of anti-Semitism, some of which I could still pick up in old bookstores in 1966, twenty years after the end of World War II.

The main market in Nuremberg is a great, big, open square in the middle of this old, medieval city. How did you get a big, open square? Steve, you, you know medieval cities were crammed wall to wall. Well, in the 15th Century, they threw all of the Jews out of Nuremberg, leveled the Jewish neighborhood, and made the Haufbahn. Nuremberg has always been a part of this anti-Semitic tradition.

Trial of Jesus, 9 April 2009 (file 090409)

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After World War II, the Jews became absolutely committed to proving that they had nothing to do with the trial of Jesus, that it was really all the Romans who did it. In fact, the Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court in 1960, this is shortly after the Jews have begun returning to Israel, wrote a book called The Trial of Jesus. He argues for 400 pages that the Jews not only had nothing to do with it, but that when they go to arrest Jesus and bring him to Annas, Caiaphas, and all these people, they are really trying to help him. They are trying to convince him that he is in trouble with the Romans, and if he will only cooperate with them, because they have political influence with Pontius Pilate, they will see that Pilate does not come out and capture him as if he were a robber and treat him as a criminal. When Jesus will not cooperate with them, then they have no choice but to choose to turn him over. Why are the Jews in the 1950s so concerned about re-writing and explaining away anything that looks like it has anything that implicates them in the trial of Jesus?

The answer to that question can be found in the dedication to the first of these books, which was published in Prague in 1955 by a lawyer there named Karl Venter. The dedication is, “To My Mother, My Father, My Aunts, My Uncles, My Nephews and Nieces Who Died at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Mauthausen…” and on down the list. Does it matter how we interpret the trial of Jesus? It is at this point that the tiny details become lynch pins of arguments, of interpretation. It becomes crucial that people not overstate in one way or another, even though we may never really be able to know how this might be. Jews still feel very passionate about this.

I attended a meeting of the Jewish Law Association a few years back. We met in Paris on that occasion, and a friend of mine who was the President of the Jewish Law Association presented a paper, just a literary paper, analyzing the similarities between the trial of Jeremiah in Jeremiah chapter 26 and the trial of Jesus as reported in the synoptic gospels. He found that there were really strong echoes in the New Testament, that there were similar themes and ways in which it was presented. I sat in this lecture hall and watched as a number of orthodox, obviously orthodox, Jews got up and left as Professor Jackson got up to the microphone. They all came back into the room when he finished. I talked to him afterwards and just said, “What was going on there?” He said, “Well, they still will not be in the same room when the trial of Jesus and the name of Jesus are being discussed.” There are strong feelings and so does it matter? As I say, yes and no, and perhaps. Perhaps the L.D.S. understanding of the trial of Jesus can help to, as I hope to show you tonight, give a different understand which is another reason why I am very interested in removing any desire on our part to blame, to find out who the culprit is. Whodunit? Why? I think we will get an answer to that question. I just want you to know I think it is a pressing and important question.

Any questions about that? Mark.

(Student) I went to the Holocaust Museum and found the same rationale portrayed there.

This is in Washington?

(Student) In Washington. You go into a room with a special film showing how the Romans killed Jesus. On the wall, I saw that my neighbor gave a million dollars to this museum. When I got home, I asked, “What is this all about?” He said that here is a faction in Jewish community that wants to distance itself from that history


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It is not a faction. A little overstating the case.

(Student) There is a little hubris in this issue.

Hubris? We will see, we will see.

3. Why is it so difficult for us to get to the bottom of this?

I do not want to overstate the difficulties because I think we have answers as well, but you have to know the subject matter that we are dealing with. Let us just think of several reasons.

First of all, this happened a long time ago. It is hard enough for lawyers to get straight what really happened. You know, in the financial crisis a few months ago, when we had all kinds of information; we could not figure this out. How can we ever figure out what happened 2,000 years ago?

It happened in unknown cultures. We do not know, really, what is going on in the mind of a Roman or of Herod Antipas who was a Hellenistic Jew. We have a hard time knowing what these cultures and what these words meant. It is hard for us to know what the Roman law was at this time because we are in a very interesting transition period.

Augustus Caesar had created the imperial law of Rome and had taken over and made himself an emperor. Before Augustus Caesar, Rome was ruled as a Republic and the Senate was in charge and they had a whole body of laws that Augustus Caesar rewrote or changed as he became the emperor, and decrees from Augustus Caesar started going out and he was the law. How much of the old republican laws were still in effect we do not know, but by the end of the 1st Century, at the end of the dynasty that follows Augustus Caesar, we have a lot of legal problems settled in Roman law. Thus, we do not know where we are on that continuum, because we have very few documents from the time of Tiberius, and Jesus’ trial would have been about 30 A.D., so some 15 years or so after Augustus Caesar had died.

At the same time, Jewish law is in a great flux. The Sanhedrin is controlled about two-thirds by Sadducees and one-third by Pharisees. This means that the Pharisees are not the controlling party. The Sadducees are very Hellenistic; they are Roman collaborators. They are friends with the Romans, and yes, they have the franchise, the temple is under their control. They are very strict, letter of the law people but they only believe things if they happen to find them in writing in the Torah. They are minimalists as far as the Jewish law is concerned.

The Pharisees believed in the oral law as well as the written, and so they had a lot of other traditions and interpretations and understood the law very differently than the Sadducees. So if people tell you they know what the Jewish law was, for example, that it was illegal to have a trial at night (and you will read about that), yes it is true that the Talmud says that you could not continue a trial into the night. The Talmud does not actually say you could not begin a trial real early in the morning, but even at that, the Talmud is the Jewish law given to us by the Pharisees.

When the temple is destroyed, the Sadducees are basically all eliminated. The surviving Jewish religion was that of the Pharisees. So we do not know what the dominant Sadducean rules would have been. It is extremely hard to say, even in the Jewish context, what was the law. We know that certain things like blasphemy were against the law. There is no question about that. Even the Sadducees would have agreed with that because after all, in Leviticus 24, we have laws against Trial of Jesus, 9 April 2009 (file 090409)

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blasphemy, but as to the definition of blasphemy, the Sadducees would have been very narrow in their definition. We have reason to believe that unless you pronounce the name of Jehovah, the ineffable Tetragrammaton out loud, a Sadducee would not have considered that blasphemy, but a Pharisee would have been much more open to any kind of insolent speech. Something derogatory about the temple could have been treated as blasphemy.

You remember, Paul will be brought before the Sanhedrin, and this is even 30 years after Jesus and Paul, a great lawyer himself, manages to dodge the accusation brought against him by simply getting the Pharisees and Sadducees into an argument. While they are arguing, Paul just walks out of the courtroom. I mean it is a great scene, but there is no reason to believe that this would have all been clear and easily understood. Then what we really know about Jesus is filtered through four gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Matthew was a disciple. He was one of the Apostles, and Matthew was a tax collector and probably knew a good deal about the law, so Matthew’s account is probably quite well founded. However, Matthew was only interested in writing to the Jews so he emphasizes Jewish involvement and Jewish problems. If you make a chart - in fact, there is a whole book of charts on the New Testament that shows what Matthew emphasizes, what Mark emphasizes, and what Luke emphasizes.

Because of the audiences they are writing to, each of the gospels gives us quite a different story, and they are not always as easy to piece together. In fact, sometimes there are just flat contradictions. Mark says that Jesus was taken and crucified at the 3rd hour. John says it was at the 6th hour. Kind of hard to put those two together unless you… well, there may be a little bit of wiggle room; it begins at the 3rd hour; it finishes at the 6th hour. The 3rd hour, by the way, was 9:00 in the morning. They did not have a clock like we do. When the sun came up, that is when the day started, and then you have twelve hours of the day; you have no hours at night, so little details like that that make us wonder exactly who is where and what are they doing?

John’s gospel it turns out is very different from the Matthew, Mark, and Luke account. They are all quite different but John is almost totally different. Interestingly, John was there. I think that John was the disciple who was known to Caiaphas and Annas. It does not say that he goes into Caiaphas’ house, but it says that when they take him to Annas, a disciple goes in and is there watching, and John is also there at the cross at the end. If he is there at the beginning and he is there at the end, the implication is, he is there the whole time. And as a member of what we might call the First Presidency, Peter, James and John, this is, I think, the most credible of all of the Four Gospels so when there are differences that have to be reconciled, I tend to privilege John.

That is different from the way most historians approach this. The tradition for years and years has been that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are the historians and John is the theologian. However, if John was there, and if John is writing after he knows of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he needs to fill in things that they have left out and correct a few things that they have not gotten right. John gives us, I think, some very important historical information, and by the way, in the last ten years, New Testament scholars have been giving John much, much more credibility in terms of his historicity. I have been to seminars where they talk about John as a historical source. You never would have seen that a few years before then.Trial of Jesus, 9 April 2009 (file 090409)

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In terms of one other example of how difficult it is to really know what is going on, think of just the question, who was there at the arrest of Jesus? Let me give you the facts and then argue that there is some importance here.

Matthew was very clear that it is the Chief Priests and the Elders. They are the ones who come out and arrest Jesus. The Chief Priests are the Sadducees who are in complete control of the temple. The Elders are the older men of the community. Maybe some of them are on the Sanhedrin, but it is unlikely that you have got seventy Elders out there. It is a fairly small. The Chief Priests, probably not more than four or five Chief Priests at this time, so we have a group of maybe ten people who have come out to arrest Jesus, and according to Matthew, there are no soldiers there. It is the Chief Priests and the Elders. That is it.

Mark says that it is the Chief Priests, the Scribes, and the Elders. Who are the Scribes? The Scribes are the legal advisors to the Chief Priests. The Scribes are the ones who come out to Galilee when Jesus drives out the demons and they go into the bodies of the swine and rush down into the Sea of Galilee. They call the Scribes up from Jerusalem, to find out from Jesus, “By whose power have you done this?” The Scribes are the legal consultants, so the Chief Priests and the Elders, according to Mark have brought their lawyers along to kind of be sure they get this worked out right.

Luke says it is the Chief Priests, the temple guard, the temple guards, so they have guards who prevent any kind of encroachment on the temple, people like Paul coming into the temple when he should not be there. These are not Roman soldiers; these are Jewish soldiers, probably Levites, who have an obligation to take the temple recommends when people come in. In other words, sure, they carry weapons, they are like the police force; they are not soldiers, but they are the guards of the temple. They also bring some Elders but still it is a very small arrest party.

John says that it was a band, meaning a lot more people, and he says that there are some officers from the Chief Priests and some from the Pharisees, so he has got them along on this. John says that there was a chiliarch - this is a commander of a thousand. This is probably a Roman officer of some kind, and officers of the Judaioi. This is not the Jews, but the Judaioi. This is a political party, more than just the nation. We have officers of this group, but here you have a much wider array and a much larger group of people for John. Does this matter? Yes, it matters a lot because the question of who starts this, who has jurisdiction, relates to what the concerns are and who is really driving this through. The one common factor in all of them is the Chief Priests. They are there in all of the accounts and I believe that the Chief Priests are the engine that thrusts this through to completion. They probably brought some Romans along. The Chief Priests would not have been so stupid as to do something like this without having first consulted with the Romans.

Pilate is in town for the Feast of the Passover. They probably alerted Pilate to the fact that they were going to do this. They bring Jesus to Pilate very early in the morning and Pilate is not surprised. Pilate, of course, gets up early as all Romans do. The Romans were usually at their desk working by 5:00 in the morning, but it is not likely that they would have done all of this without being sure that their alliances were all in place. John, I think, wants us to see that really the whole group led by this one factor is combining against Jesus.


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We could spend more time on that but you can see how that little detail all of a sudden blossoms into a larger bit of information that can be argued in a lot of different ways.

4. Was this trial illegal?

There were a lot of things that you can say were illegal about the trial of Jesus, and I have no doubt that there were irregularities. It is true that under normal circumstances a court could not begin until after the morning sacrifices in the temple. No question that Jesus is brought before several interrogation bodies, whether they were trials or courts or not is another question. But this is all happening long before the morning sacrifices, and so would not have been considered a really pure or proper proceeding. There are a few other things that sound like there may be problems, just like the trial at night. That may be an illegality, it may not. Interestingly, Matthew and Mark say that the trial begins at night. Luke says, “When it was morning they took him to Caiaphas,” so Luke does not give us support for the idea that this began at night. The timing may be such that you must have him in some kind of custody and trial before morning, but at least Luke does not support the idea that there is a legal problem there. However, I do not want to dwell on that.

I gave my law students on Wednesday a true/false test. It was not really a test, but I gave 30 questions, things that are normally said about the trial of Jesus and the key to the test was easy to provide because the answer to every one of the questions was false. They are things that are normally believed, but do not really pan out when you look at them under scrutiny. I have written about that on a number of occasions, but I just found something that I think pulls a lot of this together, and I want to share this with you because I said there may be illegalities here, but more than that, there are irregularities here. This is not a regular, usual experience. We would call it an emergency. Are there emergencies, even in our legal system, when things have to happen quickly? Where the normal procedures are not followed, but we allow those irregularities to happen in the interest of protecting broader interests that simply have to be.

(Student) They were allowing for a situation of danger.

That is right. They considered Jesus very dangerous. What I have here...let me just read a few lines to you from a treatise on human rights in Jewish law and it is just a paragraph about the ability to suspend normal judicial and legal rules when you are facing an emergency. “When the court sees that certain misconduct has become epidemic …” Has the following of Jesus become epidemic? One of his great days of triumph may have been the thing that got them really scared. So if they see that certain misconduct has become epidemic, “It is the duty of the court to check it at its best discretion, not as a matter of law which stands for generations, but as an emergency measure. The judges may exercise their discretion in these matters according to the needs of the hour.”

The Talmud says that “extra-legal punishments can be imposed when necessary for upholding the authority of the law or of the court, and enforcing observance of the law.” It goes on to say “There are in the course of time under Jewish law, many matters of which the ancient law had taken no cognizance, and which required drastic action for the maintenance of public order. By virtue of the Talmudic authorization further specified by Maimonides,” a medieval Jewish scholar, the greatest of all Jewish scholars, “courts assumed criminal jurisdiction in all these


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matters and even imposed capital punishment, not only for offenses declared capital in biblical law;” in other words, the things that the Sadducees would have gone along with, the written cases, when you could impose capital punishment, “but also for offenses that were considered particularly dangerous or obnoxious in the circumstances that were prevailing.” What does that tell us? There is a legal principle of responding to emergencies, and just because what they did was irregular, does not mean it is illegal. If it truly was in their mind an emergency. Okay? You follow the logic anyway?

(Student) We have martial law, when there is rioting, people can be shot on sight for being in areas of…

That is correct, and if you remember the burning of lots back in the 1960s, even in civil settings…

(Student) And in a time of war…

Only a few months ago we had bailouts being declared - were emergencies, right? Highly irregular. We will look back on that and -

(Student) They were not by the courts, they were by the legislature.

That is a matter of interpretation. Yes. All I am saying is it was legal in a sense, and in their minds, I think, most of the people involved in this from the Jewish point of view, the ones who are pushing this through, if you asked, “Are you acting legally?” They would have said, “This is an emergency. Yes.” It is a point of view. Are they getting it wrong? Yes, in a way. But this comes back to how difficult it is to really get into the minds of these people and it gives me a sense of mercy and not being judgmental about what they are wondering. Did they feel that this was an emergency? This was my next point.

5. Did this all happen quickly?

Elder Holland talked about “in their rush to judgment” and “as they declared their verdict quickly.” Did this all happen quickly? It happened in split seconds. Let us walk through the timing and just see what are we looking at here in terms of the actual events?

Jesus starts somewhere in Jerusalem, I do not know where, let us just say here at the Last Supper. It must have started after sundown. This time of the year the sun would go down around 7:00 p.m. They had had a Passover meal; there was no lamb there because the lambs had not been sacrificed. That will be the next day, but it still looks like the celebration of a type of Passover meal. Maybe it is because Jesus was the Lamb of God. He was the Passover meal. He gives them bread to eat and he was the bread of life. He speaks to them at length, John chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17. They sing hymns. How long does that take? When are they finally finished?

Did Jesus go eagerly off to Gethsemane? Did he want to see if this cup would pass? I do not think they were in a rush. They may even have lingered a little; they may have then strolled a bit, I do not know how fast they walked. It is about three quarters of a mile from the middle of Jerusalem out to a high enough place on the Mount of Olives. We have here the Kidron Valley so you would go down and then up - it is fairly steep up the other side, so what time do you think they get to the Garden of Gethsemane? Ten o’clock, Eleven o’clock? Something like that. What time is he arrested? Let us say 11:00 p.m. How long is he there? Long enough for his disciples to Trial of Jesus, 9 April 2009 (file 090409)

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fall asleep three times, right? Jesus comes back three times and finally says, “Just sleep a little longer.”

The battle that he is fighting is of cosmic proportions. You know when it says he was “in an agony,” the Greek does not say he was in agony; it says he was in an agon. What is an agon? A war. It is a battle, a struggle. He is fighting a war and that is why he is exerting so. How long did that take? I suppose more than ten minutes. Maybe another hour or so. Let us just be conservative. I would say 3:00 a.m. is when the arrest party finally shows up. Four hours in Gethsemane. There is not much time for more than that.

What happens after that? There are some events that happen at the arrest. The ear of the High Priest is injured, cut off. Jesus heals that. The disciples flee and the arrest party may have begun to go after them, and Jesus says, “No, do not go after them, I am the one you want.” He spares the lives of his disciples and then they go where? To Annas’ house. Probably down here somewhere [See map of Jerusalem].This is going to be a good mile walk down, then up, you cannot just go forward, this is a cliff right here. Into the city through, maybe the dung gate or the water gate, and then to Annas’ house. So let us say he gets there, I do not know, this is a big party. You cannot run with these people. They have torches I suppose. How long does it take to walk a mile under these conditions? Let us say we wake up Caiaphas at 4:00 a.m. and we say, “We are here.”

Some people have said that this part of the trial experience is illegal because it was against the law for a single judge to hand down a verdict. Does Annas hand down a verdict? No. He interrogates Jesus. What does he ask him about? You read this if you read the material in John. He asks Jesus about his disciples and his doctrines, and Jesus does not give him much of an answer. He says, “You can ask anybody. I speak in the open. I am not hiding anything,” and of course that is viewed as some kind of insubordination. One of the guards who is there slaps Jesus and Annas does not do much more, but they then go to Caiaphas’ house and probably not into the temple itself where the Sanhedrin would normally have met. The Sanhedrin would not have been open for business at this time of the day, night, or morning, but wherever Caiaphas lived, and let us put it here; we have got him there now at 4:30 in the morning. I do not think things happen, very much happens, there, but let us say they at least try to call some witnesses.

There are questions about whether Jesus had actually said, “I will destroy the temple.” There are witnesses who claim that he said that, but they were false witnesses, and there is no evidence that he ever spoke anything like that against the temple. He did say, “You have made my father’s house a den of thieves, a den of robbers.” There is no doubt that people were worried that he might destroy this temple. How could he destroy the temple? Is he going to get a chisel out and a pick and start taking those huge Herodian stones apart? No. If Jesus could walk on the water, Jesus could cause an earthquake. Ancient buildings as we learned with today’s earthquake in Italy were not earthquake proof, and the way ancient cities were all destroyed was through earthquakes. All of the Mediterranean is in an earthquake zone. They worried about that, and if Jesus could cause something... yes, he could have destroyed the temple, but -

(Student) .He said he could destroy it and rebuild it the third day.


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John says that, referring to his body. That is right. He protects Jesus by saying, “No, he did not ever say anything disrespectful about the temple, but there were people apparently who wanted to accuse him of that. So there must have been some substance to it. Why were they afraid of that? We will come back to that in a minute. In any event, I do not know how many of the seventy required judges would have been up at 4:30 in the morning. However many they have, and how many could you get in to Caiaphas’ house, I do not know. It does say that they all called out, this is in Mark’s account, they all cried out, “He is worthy of death.” That is not yet a judicial verdict. They have said, “We think he deserves it,” but there has not been a vote, we know how they all voted. This is for sure, they voted one at a time, and there is no indication that they are actually doing that.

In any event, let us say this went on for about an hour, and we have to get him up; let us say 5:30 a.m. That is a little late for his 5:00 appointment with Pilate whose office was in the middle of the Antonia Fortress. They get in and I think that the initial discussions with Pilate would have been fairly short. Pilate asks a few questions. We will come back to that in just a minute, and then he immediately sends Jesus to see Herod Antipas. Why? Jesus is a Galilean. Herod Antipas is the ruler of Galilee. He happens to be in town as most people did for the Feast of the Passover.

Herod’s palace is over here, and we now have got to go through all the winding streets and find Herod Antipas and let us say he gets there at 6:30, and what happens here? This is where they put the crown of thorns on him, where they ridicule him; they put the robe and say, “Well if you want to be a king, we will treat you like one.” They beat him, which is a light form of punishment, which is usually imposed under Jewish law to correct a disobedient Elder, so Herod does at least impose some form of punishment but maybe just trying to say, “Alright, I did something, anyway.” Herod does not want to get involved with Jesus. He learned his lesson with John the Baptist. He killed John and I do not think Herod wanted to repeat that. It cost him a lot in terms of popularity. But once again, we have got to get him back, Jesus has to get back here to Pilate and let us say that is 7:30.

He then talks with Pilate at some length, and John may be there when Pilate says, “Well are you a king?” and Jesus says, “Yes, but my kingdom is not of this world.” Pilate then gets all the more frightened, and then he goes out and sees that a riot is about to occur. Then we have the Barabbas episode, and we do not have a lot of time here, but let us say the Barabbas release is at 8:00. Then we also have the conversation and some kind of delegation of responsibility as Pilate says to the Jews, “I find no fault with him.” He says that three times in the gospel of John.

There is no Roman verdict issued against Jesus, as there had not yet been a Jewish verdict as far as I can tell, but the momentum of this is going forward, and Pilate finally says to the Jews, “You can go and do whatever you want with him.” Hollywood will always show the Roman soldiers taking Jesus off, but John and Luke both say that Pilate gave Jesus to the Jews and not to all the Jews of course; to whom? To the Chief Priests. A very small group. The Pharisees are not even there at this point. Why? They would not go into the Roman fortress because that would defile them, and then they could not celebrate Passover properly. So the only group that is left standing, and not only is Jesus alone, the Chief Priests are alone and Pilate then says, “You can basically go do whatever you want.”


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So let us say at 8:15 a.m. we finally get through with that and it is going to take now a while. Golgotha is just north of the city. We have to go up through what is now the Via Dolorosa, up through the Damascus gate, up the back because you cannot go up the cliff side here to get to where the crucifixion would occur. We have to get him there by 9:00 in the morning because I think Mark is right about the execution beginning at the 3rd hour.

(Student) Is “Chief Priest” a title?

Yes. The archierei. It is an office under the High Priest, and they were kind of CEOs of the temple, the chief executive execution officers.

(Student) Weren’t they appointed rather than elected? Weren’t they more of a political appointment?

Yes. At the beginning, just before Pilate came, Pilate’s predecessor had appointed a number of the Chief Priests. So they had to be approved by the Romans, but some people have said that they have been just pawns of the Romans and I do not think that is right. The Romans had an appointment power, but they never removed anyone. So it was something that they wanted to be sure they had an influence on, but shortly after Pilate came, that power of appointment was transferred from Pilate up to the Governor of Syria, because it turns out that Pilate is not a Procurator, he is not a Senatorial Legate. He is not a high-ranking government official.

There are seven different levels of Roman Governors and they come with different social and legal status, and Pilate is the lowest of them all. He is a Praefectus, so he does not have the appointment power and if he cannot appoint, he certainly could not remove either. These Chief Priests are not beholden to Pilate. Pilate does not have what is called the imperium, which is the right to rule as if he were Caesar himself. A higher-ranking governor would have that power. Pilate was of what we call the equestrian class. He is not even senatorial class, and Pilate had political influence only through a friend of his named Sejanus.

Sejanus had been one of Tiberius’ great advisors. In 31 A.D., which is either right after the trial of Jesus or shortly before, Sejanus is convicted of treason and a lot of other things in an emergency proceeding, and in the midst of lots of jeering and irregularities in Rome, Sajanus is executed. Pilate may also now be very fragile or vulnerable. He knows that his big supporter in Rome is not in power. Maybe he is not even there, so when the Jews play their trump card against Jesus, “If you do not do something, you are no friend of Tiberius Caesar.” Pilate, he is not a weakling, as sometimes he is convicted, but he is in a weak position and the Chief Priests are in a strong position.

My point of going through all of this is that we do not have a long time at any one of these stations for anything like a full judicial proceeding, so why are they moving so quickly? What can be… this is my next point.

6. Why are they acting this way? What is the emergency?

(Student) They are afraid of the people, they like Jesus Christ.

But why does that have to be handled right now? Why can’t they just put him in jail? Why do they have to kill him?


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(Student) They had to take care of this before Passover…

But why? Why couldn’t they just say, “We have got him, we have got him arrested; he has no weapons. Why can’t we just put him in the dungeon? We have got places to hold people like this, and we will deal with this after Passover.” Why is this an emergency?

(Student) If they wait until morning and they drag it out for several days, he has got so many friends in town that they would probably vote out the priests and everybody else.

They could not vote out the priests. This is not a Democracy. That is not a problem. They are in the driver’s seat and they could buy some time if they wanted, and beside that, most of the people, even though they might support Jesus, are getting their Passover lamb, they are going home to have their Passover feast. They are not demonstrators; they are not going to be out creating problems.

7. Why was Jesus arrested?

It comes back to the question, why, really, was Jesus arrested? Here we have to look at the Gospel of John again. John is the one who tells us when the arrest warrant was sent out for Jesus. It is in John chapter 11 at the end. Jesus has just raised Lazarus from the dead. Right? And what is the reaction? Look at verse… first of all there is a discussion about this…verse 47. Then gathered the Chief Priests and the Pharisees a council and said, “What do we do?” Why? What is the problem? “This man does miracles! He has got power and if we leave him alone, all of the men will believe on him.”

Miracle working alone was not a problem. Moses worked miracles, but Deuteronomy chapter 13 says that if a person comes working signs and wonders and says, “Come let us go worship some other God other than the one that we are used to, you shall not listen to him, and even if he is your brother, you must take him and kill him.”

The problem with miracles is when, at least in the minds of the ruling people, you use them to lead people into apostasy. That is what they are worried about with Jesus and in verse 57, the Chief Priests and the Pharisees gave a commandment, so they sent out an order, “If any man knows where Jesus is, you had better let us know so that we can come and take him.” Jesus was arrested for the raising of Lazarus, and if there is any doubt about that, look at chapter 12, verse 10. Who else do they send an arrest warrant out for? Lazarus. Why? He is the proof of what?

(Students) Miracles.

Yes, but do they want to prove that this is a miracle or a conspirator, right. They think he is an accomplice. They do not believe Jesus is really doing these things. At least they cannot admit that. Throughout the Gospel of John, they will accuse him of being a deceiver. Somehow, he is doing this. The deception can either be it is just a straight-out hoax or he is doing it through the powers of Satan. You see these people, unlike modern people, really believed in miracles. They were afraid of evil spirits like we are afraid of anthrax. You cannot see them, but they are there and they can do a lot of harm.

What you get in all four Gospels and this is the one thing that unifies the story, everywhere people are scared spitless. In Matthew, every time there is a miracle it will say in your King James Bible, “and the people were amazed.” The Greek word says phobeō they were scared. Trial of Jesus, 9 April 2009 (file 090409)

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They are afraid. Wow, this is an unusual, terrifying thing to see this kind of power manifested. Pilate is afraid after they say, “He makes himself like the Son of God.” It says, “And Pilate was exceedingly afraid.” The Chief Priests, when Jesus says, “You made my Father’s house a den of thieves,” it says, “they feared Jesus.” You go down the list. Herod Antipas fears the people. There is not one person, Joseph of Arimathea is afraid. He is afraid of the Jews. The Jews are afraid of the Romans. What we have here is the proliferation of everybody being really scared. That is why it becomes an emergency.

When people are afraid, how do they act? Do they act reasonably? Calmly?

(Student) Irrationally.

Irrationally. Yes. When Jesus is on the cross, he says, “Forgive them Father.” Why? “They know not what they do.” The J.S.T. tells that he is specifically referring to those who are crucifying him, but that may also be the chief priests who are certainly still there.

8. Who actually carried out the Crucifixion?

I am skipping ahead through some of my points because it is getting a little late, but some people say it has to be the Romans who are driving the nails, because crucifixion is a Roman form of execution. True or false? Was execution exclusively used by the Romans? No. In fact, it does not even originate with the Romans. We know that it originates in the Middle East, probably with the Persians but we do not know for sure.

(Student) The crowd called out….

Yes. The Jews are saying “Crucify him!” They know this. For a long time people believed that Jews never crucified anyone, and so you will still find in the literature, and that is another reason why people will argue that the Jews could not have had anything to do with this. If they had really convicted him of blasphemy, the Bible says that the punishment for that is stoning. If they had really convicted him of that or of anything else, the Jews would not have used crucifixion, but what did I read to you about emergency? They could convict people and impose capital punishment even of extraordinary nature beyond what was allowed in the Bible if it is an emergency.

More than that, we now have the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are two passages, one of them is in a temple scroll, that talk about crucifying traitors, people who have turned against Israel, people in other words who are leading people into apostasy. So we know that for some Jews, crucifixion was in fact being used. The Talmud even tells us that some time about 50 years before the birth of Christ, 70 witches, people who were involved somehow in magic or divination. We do not know what the witches were doing, but this had become so widespread that the Sanhedrin convicted all 70 of these witches and crucified them. The Talmud will later condemn this as something that did not need to be handled that urgently. But if you really believe that these witches can cause real damage by the powers that they can call down by their incantations, then there is reason to fear and reason to act quickly.

(Student) They wanted Pilate involved.

Yes. They need an ally here.


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(Student) If they wanted Jesus for blasphemy, they would have stoned him, but they needed Pilate because that made it so that there would not have been backlash.

9. Getting the Romans involved

Possibly. They also needed the Romans to fulfill the prophecy in 1st Nephi chapter 19, that the whole world would kill Jesus. It is everybody. They are smart enough to know that, “We have a problem here with miracle working, and that violates our law, but we have got to get the Romans involved.” Interestingly, the Romans also had laws against magicians. A magician was called a maleficius - the word mal - bad, ficius - maker or doer. A maleficius is an evildoer or a bad-doer.

When they bring Jesus to Pilate he asks them, “What is the cause of action against Jesus?” This is in John chapter 18, and look at verse 29. Pilate then went out unto them and said, “What accusation bring ye against this man?” In a legal setting, before the highest-ranking Roman officer in the land who is in charge of the Roman judiciary, if someone asks, “What is the accusation?” He is not saying, “What is the problem here? Do you have some kind of grievance?” He is saying, “What is the legal cause of action?” And the Greek word here is aitia what is the complaint, in a legal sense, in a technical legal sense. They answered and said, “If he were not a malefactor.” That is the English translation of the Greek word kakopoios, which is the equivalent of kako - evil; poios - doer. It is the equivalent of maleficius. The Greek word kakopoios means a magician.

They are saying, “We would not have brought him to you if we had not found him to be a magician - a wonder worker. When they say, “If you do not do something with him, you will be no friend of Tiberius,” how on earth can Jesus, a peasant from Galilee, do any harm to Tiberius Caesar. If he has supernatural powers, he can cast those spells worldwide, and he can do it instantly. And usually he had to have a wand and we have early Christian art showing Jesus holding a wand. He would have to use his hands in some way, so they bind his hands. That is the first thing they bind, so they have tried to restrain him as much as they can, and I think this is why it is an emergency, why it has to go quickly.

Why have you not heard this before? Why don’t people read John and say, “Oh, I get it.” The reason is, most historians and certainly most Jews who read this do not believe the miracles ever happened. The miracles are not historical. To them the miracles were retrojections of piety by people who later believed Jesus really was something grander than he really was, but critical New Testament scholars today, some of them are beginning to say, “We at least have to think that people believed that he was working these miracles.” But they will not grant that he actually did any of them.

For us. That is not an option. You may wonder, “How did I get on to this? How did I start thinking about this? By the way, as I went into legal research on “What do the Romans do with a maleficius?” crucifixion was the ordinary punishment for a magician. We actually have trials from the 1st Century. I am not saying that Jesus was convicted of being a maleficius, but the Jews were smart enough to know that this was a concern that they could get Pilate’s attention over.

It is also a concern that they have, a big concern. They had a lot of other concerns. There is a difference in ancient law and modern law. In modern law, you have to be accused of a specific crime and then you have to prove each crime individually. They believed in a cumulative theory Trial of Jesus, 9 April 2009 (file 090409)

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of guilt or innocence, and you could pile on all kinds of accusations. Even though the charge of blasphemy was a very weak one, if you can somehow injure a person’s reputation, anything you can do to injure an accused person will help you to finally pile on enough things that you eventually can find a judge or people willing to act against them.

I think that the maleficius charge, which we often see coupled with charges of maiestas, which is a form of treason, not being loyal. Remember in Luke, it says that Jesus told people not to pay their taxes. He did not really say that, but again, you could add that onto the pile, even though it might not be a really persuasive thing. It is just one more thing that you could heap on, but the fear is driven by being a maleficius.

10. Where did this idea come from?

Back to how the Book of Mormon helps us with this. Go to Mosiah chapter 3. We are doing great. Mosiah chapter 3 verse 9. I was reading through King Benjamin’s speech several years ago, and looked at the words that the angel spoke to King Benjamin about the coming of the Messiah, and in verse 5, let us go there first, Mosiah 3:5. The Lord will come. “He will come down from heaven among the children of men and shall dwell in a tabernacle of clay” and shall go forth among men doing what? “Working mighty miracles such as healing the sick, raising the dead” (Lazarus), “causing the lame to walk, the blind to receive their sight, and the deaf to hear and curing all manner of diseases and he shall cast out devils or the evil spirits which dwell in the hearts of men.” Does not even say anything about teaching.

Over and over again, the dominant thing that is mentioned about the mission of Jesus is the working of these miracles, and the result - jump down to verse 9. “And lo he cometh unto his own that salvation might come unto the children of men, even through faith on his name, and even after all this,” meaning what? After all these miracles, they shall consider him a man and shall say that he hath a devil.” Where is he getting the power to do this? From the dark side. “And they shall scourge him and shall crucify him.” The Book of Mormon tells us that it was the miracles that got Jesus in the greatest amount of trouble. You can also go to 2nd Nephi chapter 10 verse 4. You may remember a couple of years ago when we read this and I promised you that someday we would come back to these verses. Here we are.

2nd Nephi 10 verse 4 again has Jacob revealing, “For should these mighty miracles be wrought among other nations, they would repent and know that he be their God.” Why don’t the Jews recognize these miracles? It goes back to Moses and Passover. Moses performed all kinds of miracles there in Egypt; all the plagues one after another. But who else also performed miracles? Pharaoh’s priests. So in the Jewish world you have this built-in question. All miracles are not taken automatically as being from the right source. You always have to ask, “Is this black magic or is this good, divine miracles?”

We know from the Talmud one of the requirements in order to serve on the Sanhedrin, was you had to be an expert in distinguishing between good miracles and bad ones. We do not have any of their texts but we know that they had extensive treatises. We know of four titles of books that the Jewish judges had to study so that they could distinguish whether they were doing like Moses or doing like Pharoah’s priests. Nobody else in the world made that distinction, Greeks, Romans, the miracles were all pretty welcome there.


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Also, as long as we are here with 2nd Nephi 10, why is it then that they will crucify Jesus? Look at verse 5. “But because of priestcrafts,” who were the priestcrafts? The chief priests. What does the Book of Mormon mean by priestcrafts? Money. Right? What do the chief priests worry most about? The temple franchise, and they want to protect that. We know that they are concerned that if this somehow does not get under control real quickly, the Romans will “take away from us the Holy place.” John tells us that the consequence is what they are worried about, and that is again a part of the engine of fear here, and so on.

The Romans also cared about this. In fact, in the year 16 A.D. the Senate handed down an edict called the Senatus Consultum that said that if anyone performed any kind of magic or predicted the death of, or somehow imposed a curse upon Augustus Caesar, his wife Livia, or his son Tiberius, anywhere in the empire, the punishment was death. The Jews would have known that.

Jesus had not done that, but if they could get Pilate to be worried enough about it, they thought they might be able to get Pilate to take jurisdiction and actually do the dirty work for them. But when that does not work, they have played that card, and things had been set in motion. It has gone too far, and Pilate sends some Roman Soldiers. Are they at the cross? Yes. They are there. So we know that the Centurion, when the clouds turn dark at 12:00, and they say, “Surely, the God of Nature suffers.” We know that the Centurions were there, but we know that other people were there too. Probably a fairly large crowd, many of whom went along with Jesus, mourning and lamenting and even Simon the Cyrenian carrying part of the cross. There were a lot of people there; the whole world is there.

11. Who does Jesus forgive?

Now back to my point. Who does Jesus forgive? “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do.” They are doing this in ignorance. They really do not know. If they knew, yes they have resisted. Yes, they could have found out, but even in the Book of Acts, Peter will say to the Jews gathered there, “You and your leaders, all of us, killed Jesus in ignorance.” They “wot not,” they did not know what they were doing.

Ignorance is not an excuse, but it certainly mitigates the culpability of people, and they are acting again out of this urgency. It is not like… I think you get my point.

12. Why does this happen?

All right, finally, let me come to my conclusion. I am back to Elder Holland. So why does it happen? Why does it unfold the way it does? Why does he stand silent? Why doesn’t he answer people when they ask him, “What do you teach?” “Who are you?” “Are you the Son of God?” In most cases, he will not answer.

I had one of my law students do a paper a while back on this and came up with the idea that it was really out of mercy that Jesus did not give them more knowledge. The more they knew, the more their condemnation would be. We usually look at that and say, “Well, silence - he had a right to remain silent.” But under ancient law remaining silent was considered an admission of guilt and it may have been treated at least as not resisting the charge but more than that, it is an act of mercy. He, “Neither do I condemn thee.”


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Jesus knew, as Elder Holland says, that he had to die. That this was ordained from the beginning of the world. It needed to happen somehow, and it is true that there was only one nation that was concerned enough and wicked enough to make this happen, but at the same time, it had to happen. If you go to a Greek city and say, “I am the Son of God,” nobody will care. They have got gods all over the place. It was only the Jewish nation that cared enough about worshipping the one and only God where this could even become an issue.

Jesus was in complete control. He could have stopped this at any time. He indeed could have called down legions of angels. They were mocking him, “Well why don’t you do this?” Sometimes we feel like we have to be real sorry for Jesus - that he is a victim - that his 5th Amendment Rights were violated, and we, of course, want to enhance our appreciation for the suffering, what he went through, and not just the suffering in Gethsemane, but it dawned on me, how many miles has he walked? He must have been exhausted at 3:00 a.m. What has he got left in the way of strength? He was a mortal. He suffers temptations and pains beyond everything we can imagine. His full share of mortality was at that point at its ultimate limits, but they then walk him. I am sure they did not give him a police… put him in a paddy wagon and drive him there. He is walking along and stumbling, and he probably walks between six and seven miles under adverse circumstances as you make this loop all the way and the last mile or so, carrying a heavy beam of wood. He is exhausted.

But he could have stopped it. He could have said, “Enough!” But he does not. He could have intervened with the judges; he could have intervened with Pilate. Pilate says, “Don’t you know I have power to execute you?” Jesus could have said, “Don’t you know I have power to obliterate you?” He resists the temptation, and it must have been an enormous one, to even show the power. He does heal, according to Matthew, Pilate’s wife, so he is willing to still use his powers. He heals that ear of the High Priest’s servant. He does not favor Herod Antipas with a miracle even though he wanted to see one. But he does not use his powers for his self-protection or aggrandizement or only to help people all the way through to the very end.

If Jesus wanted it to happen, then we ought to want it too, in a profound way, not that we are glad that he suffered in the sense that we would want anyone to have to suffer that way, but out of gratitude that he would have done even that. There was no other good enough, and he did everything. As Elder Holland says, “It was as complete as it was voluntary and solitary.”

Any questions about that? About anything?

(Student) This seems like rather an anti-climax, but I do not understand why they took him to Annas first. I know who Annas had been, but I do not understand that.

Here is my theory on that. That I think they need to call some people and get them to Caiaphas’ house. So they take him to Annas to see if they can talk to him, just kind of hold him in a safe place. When they bring him in to Caiaphas’ house the court is there, or whoever they have got in the way of judges. But they must have sent out word, “Okay we are here” and it would have taken them a little while to assemble the body of whoever the judges were. So it seems to me that …does that make sense? I think they probably would have taken him there, unless the court was sitting up all night waiting for this to happen, but they did not know when they went out whether they would find Jesus or not. They had paid Judas and said, “Show us where he is,” but whether


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they would actually find him, whether they would succeed in bringing Jesus in… would Jesus exercise some un… I think they were terrified. When they went out to arrest him.

(Student) John said they just stepped back and were awed when he said “I am he.”

I mean this is not just, “Oh, let us go arrest him” kind of thing. Who want to volunteer for this kind of duty? That is why the chief priests have to go and do it themselves. They cannot even get some lowly person to be trusted to go and do this. They have to match His powers with theirs.

(Student) Elder Holland’s talk. Could you give the reference?

It was Sunday morning conference just this last week, so it is on lds.org and it will be in the November or the October Ensign - November Ensign - I am sorry, it is May. What month are we in here?

(Student) Do we have any idea what became of Lazarus.

You know, we do not. Lazarus is not mentioned ever again, and what happened there is not told.

(Student) You said that crucifixion was used to kill magicians. Why were the two thieves being crucified at the same time?

Crucifixion was also a form of execution for robbers. They were not thieves; they were robbers, so they are like Barabbas. They would have been treated that way. Barabbas as a robber, we have got to close off here, but Barabbas as a robber; remember when they come out to arrest Jesus he says to them, “Why do you come out against me as if I were a robber?” So, anyway, crucifixion was also of robbers.

We have gone way, way over tonight, but…

(Student) You ask the question who was ultimately responsible for the death of Jesus? I think it was the Father, the Son, and us.

And the whole world. I agree with that. I think it was part of the plan. One more?

(Student) We have evidence for the birthdate of Christ, but what season of the year did all this happen in.

If indeed this is Passover, it has to be the first week in April.

(Student) I wondered what evidence we have, but I know that this is not important.

We have clear reference in the scriptures that it was the day of preparation, and that it was the Passover. Whether it is the week before or the actual day of, we do not know. You can get a little bit of discussion on that, but I think everybody would place it very close to Passover. We do not know for sure, and especially when you then try to project back to the birthdate of Jesus, the Book of Mormon tells us that Jesus lived 33 years and four days. That is a given. How that works with birth and death is not crystal clear, let me just leave it at that.

I hope, in any event, I have given you a way to begin to understand the dynamics that were involved here and to appreciate all the more what a powerful and coherent record we really do have. All of those confusing details I said, maybe the L.D.S. point of view can help people outside of our own tradition to recognize this does make good sense of everything that we know


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here. It does require faith, but as Elder Holland concluded his talk on this point, faith became the - I will not read it - because I cannot find it - oh here it is, I do want to just end with his final words.

“But Jesus held on; he pressed on. The goodness in him allowed faith to triumph. When Christ’s determination to be faithful was as obvious as it was utterly invincible, then finally, and mercifully, it was all finished. With faith in the God he knew” - I am sorry there has been a typo here - “that he could say in triumph, ‘Father into thy hands I commend my spirit.’”

So brothers and sisters, let us go forward with faith, faithfully accepting the wonderful atonement and blessings of Jesus at this Easter time which to me are marvelous. I stand all amazed with the love that Jesus extended to us and all that he said and did, and I testify that he is our Savior, the King of this world, and the one through whom we can receive eternal life because of the blessings that he gave us. I testify of that in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. Transcribed by Carol H. JonesEdited by Rita L. Spencer


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