Who was responsible for Jesus’s death?

Rome’s sentence

The death itself was Roman from start to finish. Crucifixion was Rome’s punishment for slaves and rebels, meant to be seen. The charge on the placard, “King of the Jews,” was political: a man accused of claiming a throne in a province ruled for Caesar. And the sentence belonged to one man.

Pilate, wishing to please the multitude, released Barabbas to them, and handed over Jesus, when he had flogged him, to be crucified.

Roman auxiliaries carried it out; Josephus says most of them were recruited in Caesarea and Sebaste, non-Jewish cities of the region. Even the Roman historian Tacitus names Pilate as the man who executed him (Annals 15.44). For the governor himself, see who Pontius Pilate was.

The council’s part

The Gospels also give a role to the Temple leadership. The high priest Caiaphas, appointed by Rome and answerable to its prefect, holds a night hearing with the council, and at dawn they hand Jesus over to Pilate (Mark 15:1). John gives their fear: a popular prophet at Passover could bring down the legions.

If we leave him alone like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.

Even in the Gospels this is not a whole people’s decision. The chief priests want a quiet arrest because “they feared the people” (Luke 22:2), who crowded to hear Jesus. Joseph of Arimathea, a council member, “had not consented to their counsel and deed” (Luke 23:51). The crowd at Pilate’s gate was one crowd in a festival city of tens of thousands, and Luke has “a great multitude of the people” follow Jesus to the cross, mourning (Luke 23:27). Jesus, his disciples and the women at the cross were Jews.

How the Gospels tell it

Read in the order they were written, the Gospels make Pilate more and more reluctant:

• Mark, around AD 70: Pilate hands him over “wishing to please the multitude” (15:15).
• Matthew: Pilate washes his hands, and the crowd takes the blood on itself (27:24–25). See why Pilate washed his hands.
• Luke: Pilate declares him innocent three times: “I have found no capital crime in him” (23:22).
• John: Pilate shuttles between prisoner and accusers, and asks, “What is truth?” (18:38).

Many historians think the Gospels, written after the Jewish war with Rome for readers inside the empire, had reasons to soften Rome’s part. Christian faith gives another answer altogether. Jesus says of his life, “No one takes it away from me, but I lay it down by myself” (John 10:18), and the Catholic Catechism teaches that all sinners were the authors of his Passion.

How the blame was misused

From the second century on, some Christian preachers turned the story against the Jewish people as a whole. Around AD 170, in an Easter sermon, Melito of Sardis accused Israel of murdering God, and the charge of deicide followed Jews for centuries. Matthew 27:25 was read as a curse on every Jewish generation. It fed contempt, expulsions and massacres, and Holy Week was often a dangerous time for Jewish communities in Europe.

Nostra Aetate, 1965

After the Holocaust, the churches faced that history. On October 28, 1965, the Second Vatican Council issued Nostra Aetate, its declaration on other religions. Its fourth section says that what happened in the Passion cannot be charged against all the Jews then alive, without distinction, nor against the Jews of today; that Jews must not be presented as rejected or accursed by God; and that the Church deplores antisemitism, at any time and by anyone. The World Council of Churches had already called antisemitism a sin against God and man in 1948, and many Protestant and Orthodox churches have said the same since.