Jesus was executed by the authorities of the Roman Empire.

This is one of the few features of Jesus’ life on which nearly all historians agree. There are many historians and biblical scholars who spend a lot of time arguing about which of the sayings and actions attributed to Jesus are likely to be historically accurate, about which of the incidents recorded in the gospels took place as historical events.

Scholars are on a spectrum from those who take the gospels as broadly accurate accounts of Jesus’ life to those who doubt all but a few details .

Virtually all of them, however, accept that Jesus was crucified. Crucifixion was a Roman method of execution (not a Jewish one) used against political troublemakers and rebellious slaves. It is almost inconcievable that Jesus’ followers, living in a tyrannical and violent regime, would have invented a story that would immediately label them as followers of someone that regime had executed as a threat.

For much of Christian history, however, Christians have put the blame on Jews – often on “the Jews” as a whole, as if every one of them bore responsibility for the killing of Jesus. This is particularly absurd given that Jesus was a Jew.

This claim has not only served as a justificiation for persecuting Jews. It has also helped to sidestep the intensely political nature of the death of Jesus. He was executed by an imperial power who objected to him promoting the Kingdom of God rather than the Empire of Rome (when you read the words “kingdom” and “empire” in an English Bible, they are translating the same Greek word, basileia).

The gospels, to varying degrees, show the Jewish leaders of the time colluding with the Roman authorities to execute Jesus. Matthew’s Gospel and John’s Gospel seem particularly keen to hold them responsible. There are various possible reasons for this, much debated by historians. All the gospels make clear, however, that in the end Jesus was executed on the orders of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate.

If the Jewish leaders encouraged Pilate to execute Jesus, this would not make all Jews responsible. But even here we need to be careful. Who were these Jewish leaders? They were the Roman-approved leaders: in practice, Rome would only allow a Jewish High Priest who did not resist Roman rule. It is unsurprising that when Jews rebelled against Roman rule in 70 CE (about 40 years after Jesus’ crucifixion), the Jewish rebels killed the High Priest and his colleagues. They were collaborators with the empire. They were not representative of the Jewish people.

I have been shocked in the run-up to Easter this year to see how persistent is the belief that “the Jews” killed Jesus. Perhaps I have become too used to academic New Testament scholarship (where Roman responsibliity is accepted) or to left-wing Christian groups (where the political nature of Jesus’ execution is emphasised).

I recently heard a street preacher in Birmingham declare that Jesus had been killed by “his own people, that’s the Jews”. I was shocked to see a reflection in the Church Times last week by Charles Moseley, in which he repeated the tired old claim that Pilate did not want to execute Jesus but gave into Jewish public opinion. Moseley did not not try to argue this point, or acknowledge that it has now been discredited. He simply asserted it as he might have done if writing 30 years ago.

Sadly, it seems that antisemitism is alive and well in many Christian circles at Easter. Ironically, those of us who campaign against the horrendous assaults of Israeli forces against people in Gaza are accused of antisemitism by political right-wingers and apologists for aggression. Yet Jesus was born in an empire, in a place where imperial soldiers controlled the population and religious leaders colluded with oppression. It is not dissimilar to the situation faced by many Palestinians today. This point is made repeatedly by Palestinian Christians, even when western Christians do not seem to have ears to hear it.

It is not resistance to empire and war that is antisemitic – to make such a claim is to conflate Jews in general with the current Israeli government and its forces. It is attempts to ignore the inherently political nature of Jesus’ death that lead to the blame being put on “the Jews”. Throughout Christian history – and still today – antisemitism has served the interests of those who want us to forget that Jesus challenged the political and social order. Following Jesus means continuing to challenge injustice and empire today.