riest's question whether the witnesses are speaking the truth:
Thou has said: nevertheless I say unto you, Hereafter shall ye see the Son of man sitting on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds of heaven (Matt. 26:64).
Jesus having already been accused by and among the Jews, that response is problematic for Jesus's position vis-a-vis Rome as well. The reference to the right hand of power can be interpreted, not as a theological statement of higher truth but rather as a direct challenge to Roman civil authority. And that, Rome simply cannot have, particularly in the context of assorted Jewish insurgencies against Rome in Palestine during the period of and in the decades just following Jesus's death. Thus the accusation of Jesus appears to have offered an opportunity for the Jewish high priesthood very protective of its religious authority to cooperate with Roman magistracy very protective of its civil authority--even though the evidence of history is that the relationship between Jews and what Campbell calls "Great Rome" (1978, pp. 349ff) was a difficult one. Consider the very history of the transformation of Rome from a republic to an empire, complete with imperial (monarchical) rule, which began with the assassination of Julius Caesar and accession to the imperial throne by Augustus Caesar several decades before the birth of Jesus and which had been consolidated as a theory of state by the time of the reign of Tiberius Caesar (AD 14-37).
The imperial Roman historian Suetonius (born AD 69) notes that an "ancient superstition was current in the East, that out of Judaea at this time would come the rulers of the world" (Suetonius, 1982, p. 280). For Suetonius, "this time" referred to AD 70, the year of the destruction by Roman legions of the temple at Jerusalem and the once-for-all suppression of the Jewish rebellions against Rome and the forced dispersion of Jews throughout the empire. Suetonius says that the supersti...