The Sanhedrin's plot to kill Jesus

The chief priests and the elders of the people assemble in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas, and the decision they reach is about method and timing rather than about whether to act.

They plot to arrest Jesus secretly and kill him. But not during the festival, they say, or there may be a riot among the people.

That sentence is the whole problem in miniature, and it explains a great deal about the week.

Passover filled the city. Jerusalem's ordinary population in the first century is usually estimated somewhere between thirty and eighty thousand, and the festival crowds multiplied it several times over, with pilgrims camping on the surrounding slopes and in the villages around. Josephus, whose figures are certainly too high, gives a sense of the scale by counting lambs slaughtered.

That was exactly the setting in which trouble started. The festival commemorated a national deliverance from a foreign power, in a city occupied by a foreign power, with a Roman garrison watching from the Antonia fortress that overlooked the temple courts, and the prefect had come up from Caesarea with additional troops for the occasion, as he did every year, because of what could happen.

Josephus records disturbances at festivals in which thousands died. On one occasion a soldier made an obscene gesture from the colonnade roof, the crowd threw stones, the governor sent in troops, and people were crushed to death in the panic to get out through the gates.

The council's position was not, in their own terms, cynical. They had responsibility for keeping the peace, they held their authority at Rome's discretion, and a popular movement around a Galilean during Passover was precisely the sort of thing that ended with legions in the streets. Caiaphas had already articulated the principle: better that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.

The plan was therefore to wait until the crowds went home, take him quietly, and deal with it.

What changed the timetable was Judas. A member of the inner group offering to deliver him at night, away from the crowds, made the risk manageable and made waiting unnecessary. Their delight is recorded, and so is the payment.

Everything after this moves very fast. Within about thirty-six hours of that meeting he had been arrested, tried twice, condemned, executed and buried.

The residence in question has been plausibly located. Excavations in the area traditionally identified as the high priest's quarter, on the western hill, have uncovered a large first-century mansion with mosaic floors, a ritual bath and a substantial reception room, destroyed by fire in AD 70.

That is the scale of household involved: a palace with courtyards, servants and a gate, which is why there is room a few hours later for a fire in the yard, a woman on the door and a crowd of retainers standing about while a hearing goes on indoors.

Their fear of the crowd is the same fear that runs through the whole week and it kept being justified. The temple guard later hesitates to arrest men in public in case of stoning, and the council releases prisoners it cannot punish for the same reason.