The triumph of the cross

The ever-helpful YouTube offered me a video which, a little research showed, drew on a 1995 paper by W. E. Schmidt entitled The Crucifixion Narrative and the Roman Triumphal Procession. It was a revelation to me. The article demonstrates the remarkable, and clearly deliberate, similarity between Mark’s account of the humiliation of Jesus as he goes to the Cross and the Imperial Triumph tradition. Mark has shaped his account to show how the Romans (at the instigation of the Jewish authorities) have actually given Jesus an Imperial Triumph, culminating in the Cross as his final victory.

Many readers will have heard of the formal Triumphs that Rome traditionally gave its victorious generals, effectively making them a king, or a god, for a day. By Jesus’s time, Augustus had limited the spectacle to Emperors, presumably to hinder popular generals from getting big ideas. The table below shows the main features of the triumph in the first column.

As you will see, the day begins bright and early with an entire cohort of troops gathered at the praetorium and paying homage to the recipient as he is dressed in royal purple and a crown. He then rides his chariot in procession to the cheers of the adoring crowd, with the well-known companion whispering in his ear to remember he’s only a man. Beside him the sacrificial bull is led, by a man carrying the traditional instrument of slaughter, a double headed axe.

The destination is the Capitoline Hill, legendarily named after a head that was found there, leading to the hill being prophetically named the head of the nation. There, wine is offered to the Emperor, and by custom refused, when it is poured out as a libation. He is flanked on each side by vice-regents, over whom a placard describing his victory is displayed. The bull is then slaughtered as propitiation for the nation, and finally representative enemies (who have been led in chains in the procession) are ritually slain.

The second column shows how exactly Mark has followed this pattern, leaving little doubt that he is making both a remarkable political statement (Jesus is the real emperor) and a remarkable theological one (Jesus’s ultimate triumph is, of all things, the Cross, on which he is also the sacrificial victim).

Schmidt, accepting a post-70 date for Mark, seems to place Jewish hatred of Rome after the Fall of Jerusalem at the centre of Mark’s thinking, and likewise follows the “legendary accretion” view of liberal scholarship. Hence he doubts if a whole cohort of soldiers would assemble for a mere crucifixion, and certainly rejects the idea that Pilate would allow his own purple robe (a dye restricted to the Equestrian class and above) to be defiled. He gives the impression that much else in the account is manufactured for effect, rather than being factual.

Now, it seems to me very clear that Mark has indeed arranged his material to make his theological point, as a comparison with the other Passion accounts suggests. But if Mark was written early, such as the 42-45 for which Jonathan Bernier makes a convincing case, the implications change.

For a start, Rome, although an oppressive imperial power, was not the major enemy of the Church at that time – the problems were coming mainly from Jews. That makes the use of Triumph imagery less of an anti-Roman polemic, and more of a positive claim about Jesus as the King of the coming eternal kingdom replacing Rome, the last of Daniel’s four beasts.

Even more remarkably, it bespeaks a very early recognition of the Cross as the paradoxical means of divine victory over sin, death and Satan, the culmination both of the Suffering Servant motif of Isaiah 53, and the expectation of some second-temple Jews for an Ephraimite Messiah who would die on behalf of Israel prior to the final victory of the Davidic Messiah.

Schmidt suggests that Mark got the Triumph idea from Paul in 2 Corinthians 2:14-16 and Colossians 2:11-15. In both places Paul, too, is placing the triumph of Christ in a setting of suffering. But since Mark was a companion of Paul from an early date, he may well have gained the seed of the idea from fellowship in the gospel rather than plagiarism. In fact, it might well be that both Paul and Mark were building on an idea already current in the Church.

You’ll see from the table that Matthew’s gospel contains nearly all the same ideas, in the same order and, in fact, often with clear verbal interdependence. He doesn’t use the word “cohort,” and his scarlet robe seems less clearly royal than Mark’s purple. Matthew is generally held to be secondary to Mark (though the reverse has its advocates). But if Matthew was written by the apostle based in Jerusalem, and was produced between 45 and 59 as Bernier suggests, he must surely have been familiar with a “canonical” version of the Passion account preached there. To have picked up a particular, and politically risky, spin on it from Mark seems to me less likely than that something like that theme was part of how the early Church already theologised the death of Christ.

The other two columns show how Luke and John, written later with different aims, drop the Triumph theme, and yet between them retain most of its elements, as well as casting light on how Mark might have rearranged true occurrences to suit his theme.

Luke, in line with his stated methodology, seems to have interviewed a range of witnesses to give an orderly account. He includes more about Pilate, an exchange between Jesus and the mourners following him, the different responses of the two thieves and, most significantly, a unique appearance before King Herod. In Luke’s account it is Herod’s troops and the king himself who mock Jesus, and array him in his robe (which is purple, again). Herod was entitled to wear purple, and was probably a lot less bound to protocol than his social inferior Pilate: here we have the real source of the unlikely purple robe. Luke, remember, had access to Joanna, whose husband Chuza was Herod’s chief steward. Luke has a unique and reliable source for the episode.

John’s interest is in the personal interaction between Jesus and Pilate, and the Triumph theme doesn’t seem to figure at all in his account. Yet he still includes the crown of thorns and the purple robe, in which Pilate, after having him flogged, displays Jesus to his accusers. And so we now, between the gospels, have a plausible “chain of custody” of Jesus sent back by Herod to Pilate in a purple robe from the king’s wardrobe, Pilate continuing the sick joke (rather than purloining a king’s cloak, perhaps!), and the Roman soldiers inadvertently initiating a pseudo-Triumph, which by divine providence then plays out by the fortuitous “carrying of the axe” by Simon of Cyrene, whose story can be checked through his sons, the offering of drugged wine as a libation, the ironically true placard, and the coincidence of two flanking companions, attested in all four gospels.

Note also that, although John’s Passion has few literary parallels with Mark’s, there is more than one reference in his gospel to the lifting up of Jesus on the shameful Cross as his “glorification.” In fact, the table shows how virtually all the elements of Mark’s politically and theologically shaped narrative are included in the other accounts, even when other theological points are being made by the evangelists. Even the fact that Jesus is crucified on a “Capitoline Hill” named Golgotha is mentioned in all four gospels.

Hence I conclude that, far from being a late polemic against the Roman powers that destroyed Jerusalem in 70AD, the paradoxical victory through the world’s attempt at the degradation of God’s Messiah was recognised at an early stage, much as the astronomical events surrounding Jesus’s birth were thought by the world to be an omen for Augustus, but were actually intended for a less obvious, but more permanent, ruler.