Romans were
invincible, or because they hoped for financial or political
advantage. Jesus’ followers believed that there was no point in
fighting the Romans because the catastrophic events that
followed his crucifixion were signs of the end—signs that the
whole world was to be shattered and transformed (Mark 13:4-
29). Some insisted that what they had seen—the horrors of the
war—actually vindicated his call “Repent, for the Kingdom of
God is near” (Mark 1:15). Mark shares the conviction,
widespread among Jesus’ followers, that Jesus himself had
predicted these world-shattering events— the destruction of the
Temple and its desecration:
And as he came out of the Temple, one of his disciples said to
him, “Look, rabbi, what wonderful stones, and what won-
derful buildings!” And Jesus said to him, “Do you see these
great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon
another, that will not be thrown down. . . . But when you see
the abominable sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the
10 / THE ORIGIN OF SATAN
reader understand!), then let those who are in Judea flee to the
mountains (Mark 13:1-14).”
This was exactly what had now happened. Others believed—
and some dared to say—that these very catastrophes occurred as
an angry God’s punishment upon his own people for the crime of
rejecting their divinely sent Messiah.
In any case, Mark insists that Jesus’ followers had no quarrel
with the Romans but with the Jewish leaders—the council of
elders, the Sanhedrin, along with the Jerusalem scribes and
priests—who had rejected God's Messiah. Mark says that these
leaders now have rejected Mark and his fellow believers, calling
them either insane or possessed by demons, the same charges
that they directed against Jesus himself.
Mark takes a conciliatory attitude toward the Romans,
although it was known that the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate,
had sentenced Jesus to death. Nevertheless, the two trial scenes
included in this gospel effectively indict the Jewish leaders for
Jesus’ death, while somewhat exonerating the Romans. Mark
virtually invents a new Pilate—a well-meaning weakling
solicitous of justice but, as Mark depicts him, intimidated by the
chief priests within his own council chamber and by crowds
shouting outside, so that he executes a man he suspects may be
innocent.
Other first-century writers, Jewish and Roman, describe a
very different man. Even Josephus, despite his Roman
sympathies, says that the governor displayed contempt for his
Jewish subjects, illegally appropriated funds from the Temple
treasury, and brutally suppressed unruly crowds.18 Another
contemporary observer, Philo, a respected and influential
member of the Alexandrian Jewish community, describes Pilate
as a man of “ruthless, stubborn and cruel disposition,” famous
for, among other things, ordering “frequent executions without
trial.”19
Mark’s motives with regard to Pilate are not simple. Insofar as
he addresses his narrative to outsiders, Mark is eager to allay
Roman suspicions by showing that Jesus’ followers are no threat
to Roman order, any more than Jesus himself had been. Mark
may also have wanted to convert Gentile readers. Yet Mark is pri-
THE GOSPEL OF MARK AND THE JEWISH WAR / 11
marily interested in conflicts within the Jewish community—
especially conflicts between his own group and those who reject
its claims about Jesus.
Despite the hostility and suspicion he and his movement
aroused among both Jews and Gentiles, including, of course, the
Romans, Mark wrote to proclaim the “good news of Jesus of
Nazareth, Messiah of Israel” (1:1). Yet Mark knows that to
justify such claims about Jesus, he has to answer obvious
objections. If Jesus had been sent as God’s anointed king, how
could the movement he initiated have failed so miserably? How
could his followers have abandoned him and gone into hiding,
while