The Pope has officially exculpated the Jews from the murder of Jesus Christ, and high time too.  But is there a class of people upon whom the blame should rest?

I name five classes of culprits:

1. God Himself.  God required a bloody sacrifice to appease Him for Adam’s impudence, and sent His Son to be the sacrifice.  The crime is infanticide.

2. Jesus.  He descended in accordance with (1) and gave Himself up.  Indeed, when charged with being “the King of the Jews” he admitted it.  Suicide.

3. The Sanhedrin would no doubt have liked to execute Jesus under Jewish law, by stoning, but they didn’t dare. In their eyes, his crime was blasphemy, but his real offense was in exposing their lack of true religion. Whom do they most resemble in modern life?  They were the established religion of Judaea, and the most right-wing or “conservative” element. The Religious Right still doesn't really like the doctrines Jesus actually taught, which were basically liberal.

4. Jesus was executed under Roman law for the crime of treason against the Empire.  In a way, he admitted guilt, but the record says that Pilate wasn’t convinced there was any threat to the Empire.  Pilate had him executed anyway, because he didn’t want to offend the local religious authorities.  He was a timorous government official, too cowardly to do what was right and face down the bigots.  We still have them.

5. Don’t forget the rabble. Pilate had a terrorist on hold, one Barabbas.  Pilate knew that Jesus was not guilty of inciting rebellion against Rome, and asked the crowd outside whom they would rather he release, Jesus or Barabbas? Their response was “Barabbas”, a violent “patriot”.  Jesus taught all along that violence was not the way to the Kingdom of God, and the mob were not willing to heed him.  All those who ally religion with violence, war and “patriotism” belong to the same crowd.