The Prince of Peace?

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The Capture of Christ, fresco by Fra Angelico (c. 1395–1455), Florence, Italy. View full image

In a provocative reading of the Gospels, a Yale professor suggests that Christ and his disciples were—at least on one fateful occasion—armed with swords and prepared for holy war.

“I’d call Jesus a strategic, rather than an absolute, pacifist,” says religious studies professor Dale B. Martin ’88PhD. One key source for his argument is a verse in the Gospel of Mark (14:47) about the arrest of Jesus in Gethsemane: “One of those [disciples] standing there drew a sword and struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his ear.”

“If Mark’s Gospel were the only account we had, we would assume, I think, that the group, as a group, was armed,” writes Martin, in the September issue of the Journal for the Study of the New Testament. The Gospel of Luke (22:49) supports that idea: a disciple asks Jesus, just before the ear-slashing incident, “Lord, should we strike with the sword?”

In Rome, only designated individuals could carry swords, and Martin says it is “almost certain” that the Roman forces occupying Jerusalem would have enforced the same prohibition. Leading a group of armed men into Jerusalem would have been grounds for crucifixion.

In the other two Gospels, Jesus rebukes the sword-wielding disciple with the famous aphorism “All who take the sword will perish by the sword” and heals the slave’s ear. Martin says, however, that the incident may have been a later addition—to “whitewash the Jesus movement of any hint of being political or subversive.”

Some experts question Martin’s interpretation, saying there’s no evidence of a prohibition against carrying swords in Jerusalem, and that the disciple’s “sword” could be a mistranslation for “knife.” But Martin notes that the Gospels call Christ a lestês—a term used by first-century Jewish historian Josephus for other Jews who mounted assaults against the authorities.

Martin adds, “Jesus couldn’t have thought that a handful of fishermen and laborers was going to try to overthrow the Roman Empire. He was, however, an apocalyptic prophet. His group was armed because if God intervened, they wanted to be ready to join the battle.”