Preface – See the similar, earlier post on this site: Compare the Different Trials of Jesus before Pilate.
7/6/2026 – This post contains a summary of Bart Ehrman’s post Exonerating Pilate to Implicate the Jews, posted July 5, 2026. The summary was prepared by Claude.ai.
Claude’s Response – Ehrman’s post traces how the canonical Gospels progressively shift blame for Jesus’s death away from Pilate and onto Jewish leaders and the Jewish people, a pattern he sees continuing into later apocryphal texts.
Main argument:
- Mark (the earliest Gospel) shows Pilate essentially cooperating with Jewish authorities in the decision to execute Jesus.
- Luke has Pilate declare Jesus innocent three times and try to pass him off to Herod, only crucifying him because Jewish leaders force his hand.
- Matthew intensifies this: Pilate ceremonially washes his hands of guilt, and the crowd (not just leaders) accepts responsibility with the line “his blood be on us and our children.”
- John, written later still, again has Pilate declare Jesus innocent three times, then hand him over to Jewish authorities, who become the ones performing the execution.
- Later non-canonical texts (the Gospel of Peter [see below], various “Pilate Gospels”) push this further — in some, Pilate becomes actively sympathetic to Jesus or even converts to Christianity; in Ethiopic tradition he’s eventually venerated as a saint.
Historical context Ehrman provides:
- Jesus and his earliest followers were fully Jewish; the split from Judaism came later as gentile converts began outnumbering Jewish ones and communities stopped requiring Torah observance.
- This growing rift produced Christian anti-Jewish rhetoric, which needed Rome (via Pilate) to look innocent so blame could fall on Jews instead.
- Ehrman is careful to distinguish anti-Judaism (opposition based on religion/culture) from antisemitism (opposition based on a supposed “race”), arguing the latter is a modern, 19th-century construct tied to racial theory, and that applying it to ancient texts blurs the historical record and understates the horror of the Holocaust specifically.
His conclusion: The trajectory of “Pilate gets more innocent, Jews get more guilty” across these texts reflects the church’s growing anti-Jewish rhetoric, which had devastating downstream consequences once Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire.
2nd Prompt – Provide quotes and context about how the non-canonical Gospel of Peter pushes the anti-judiasm further. Cite all sources inline.
A note first: the user preference for NRSV/ASV applies to the canonical biblical text — the Gospel of Peter is a non-canonical, apocryphal text, so I’ll cite it from standard scholarly translations rather than a Bible version.
Context
The Gospel of Peter survives only in a fragmentary form (the Akhmîm fragment), so the text picks up mid-scene, after Pilate has already washed his hands. Scholars have long noted that this document goes further than the canonical Gospels in shifting blame for the crucifixion away from Rome and onto Jewish authorities specifically. As Wikipedia’s summary notes, the text assigns responsibility for the crucifixion to Herod Antipas rather than Pontius Pilate, who is exonerated. More broadly, “the Jews” — particularly the chief priests and scribes — are cast as the villains throughout: they condemn Jesus, abuse him, crucify him, and divide his clothing among themselves. Roman soldiers barely appear until Pilate sends them, at Jewish request, to guard the tomb.
Key passages showing this shift
- Pilate’s innocence is total and passive; Herod actively gives the execution order. The text opens: “of the Jews no man washed his hands, neither did Herod nor any one of his judges: and whereas they would not wash, Pilate rose up.” Herod then takes over, ordering that Jesus “be taken away,” telling the Jewish leaders to “do what I ordered you to do to him.” This inverts the canonical order — in Luke, Herod famously declines to pass judgment on Jesus and sends him back to Pilate; here Herod is the one issuing the death order, while Pilate has already ritually distanced himself. WikipediaLivius
- Herod, not Pilate, releases the body — reinforcing that Jewish authority, not Roman, controls Jesus’s fate. When Joseph asks for the body, Pilate has to send the request on to Herod, who answers that they would have buried Jesus even without being asked, since the Sabbath was approaching, citing the Law’s requirement that the sun not set on an executed man. Rome is no longer even the party with authority to grant burial — that belongs to the Jewish king. Wikipedia
- The mockery and crucifixion itself is carried out by Jewish captors, not Roman soldiers. The text describes those who had taken Jesus dragging him along and taunting, “Let’s drag the Son of God, having authority over him,” then dressing him in purple, crowning him with thorns, spitting on him, striking him, and scourging him while mocking, “With this honor, let’s honor the Son of God.” In the canonical Gospels this abuse is largely committed by Roman soldiers; here it is folded into the actions of “the Jews” who had custody of Jesus.
- Fear of “the Jews” persists even after the crucifixion, marking them as the ongoing threat/villain of the narrative. The women who go to mourn at the tomb are described as afraid the Jews would see them, saying that although they couldn’t weep and beat themselves publicly on the day of the crucifixion, they might now do so privately at the tomb. EWTN
Scholarly assessment
The pattern is stark enough that one source bluntly states: the tone of the text is anti-Semitic, citing as an example that Herod Antipas — a Jewish client-king — is held responsible for a punishment that was, as far as we know, distinctly Roman. EWTN
This fits exactly the trajectory Ehrman describes: where Mark has Pilate and Jewish leaders cooperating, and Matthew thru John increasingly have Pilate declare innocence while “the Jews” force his hand. Then later Gospel of Peter removes Pilate from the causal chain almost entirely — Herod gives the order, Jewish captors carry out the abuse and crucifixion, and “the Jews” remain the looming, feared antagonists of the story even after Jesus’s death.
