The case against Jesus
Jesus
Did Jesus know what he was doing in the events leading up to his execution?
Many experts believe that, more than anyone else, the person responsible for the death of Jesus was Jesus himself.
There is a considerable body of evidence to suggest that everything he did was planned and that he knew what the consequences would be.
Jesus' motive
Jesus believed profoundly that he was on a mission from God and everything he did was to fulfil that mission.
Acting out the prophecy of the Messiah
In the events of Holy Week, Jesus seems to be deliberately acting out the prophecy in Hebrew scripture about Israel's true king, the anointed one, the Messiah, coming at last to be God's agent to redeem Israel.
His arrival in Jerusalem on a donkey was a fulfilment of prophecy but it would not have been enough on its own to get Jesus killed.
Attacking the religious establishment
Jesus went to the Temple and launched not only an attack on the commercial activity of the moneychangers but a symbolic attack on the Temple itself.
Jesus was steeped in the religious culture of his time; he knew the potential consequences of his actions. He knew what it meant to proclaim the Temple's destruction and to claim that a new kingdom was forming, the Kingdom of God.
Jesus knew that it would not be long before the authorities took action against him, and he knew that the sentence was likely to be death. The obvious thing for Jesus to do was to leave Jerusalem and hide, and he had plenty of time to run.
But Jesus continued to put himself directly in the path of danger; he stayed in Jerusalem and celebrated the Passover with his disciples.
During that Last Supper Jesus seemed to be predicting his own death. As he and the disciples sat together, Jesus called the bread they were eating his broken body and referred to the red wine they drank as his spilled blood.
Later, Jesus identified Judas Iscariot as his betrayer. In one of the Gospels Jesus says to Judas, "Do what you have to do, but do it quickly."
Sweating blood
The story of the night in Gethsemane contains powerful medical evidence to support the theory that Jesus knew what he was doing.
It was there that Jesus was touched by dreadful doubt - was death really what God wanted for him? He begged God to release him from his fate.
At that moment, St. Luke - himself a doctor - records that Jesus sweated drops of blood onto the path before him.
Doctors know that the sweat glands all over our body are supplied by small blood vessels. Under extreme stress these vessels can break and blood can leak into the sweat itself. The medical term is haematohydrosis - blood sweat.
If Jesus knew the torture and agonising death that lay ahead, the stress would have been unbearable, quite enough to cause him to sweat blood.
So was Jesus guilty of his own death?
Not in any sense of guilt that most people would understand. A soldier who goes on a mission that is certain to lead to death is a brave man, not a guilty one.
Jesus was faithful to his vocation, even though it led to his death; but he was not guilty in the same sense that Caiaphas and Pilate are guilty.