He wasn’t the Messiah they were expecting. There are many (many, many) competing analyses of the life of Jesus, of what happened and what it meant, and some of those are, inevitably, political. Many scholars hold that the Jews rejected Jesus’ claim of being the Messiah because they were expecting a political and military leader, a great liberator who would drive out the hated Roman occupation and restore Jewish sovereignty over Israel. Pontius Pilate and Herod both seem to have been perplexed by Jesus’ understanding of His own kingship — “My kingdom is not of this world” — because they...