The high priest under whose tenure Jesus was arrested, charged, and crucified. Appointed in 18 AD, his tenure as high priest was one of the longest under the Romans, and overlapped the entirety of Pilate's governorship. The two of them seemed to have worked very well together. Caiaphas was removed from office in 37.
Though Caiaphas, inevitably, operated much in the shadow of his father-in-law Annas—when Jesus was arrested, for example, he was brought first to Annas for questioning before being sent on to Caiaphas even though Caiaphas was the official high priest—he was also capable of independent judgment. It was he who "advised the Jews that it would be good if one man died for the people" (Jn 18:14).
Somewhat surprisingly, Caiaphas warranted almost no attention at all from Josephus in his histories of the Jews.
Thoughout the long history of the Church, also, Caiaphas's name appears only in written records. In an accident in November 1990 in Jerusalem, a truck smashed through the buried roof of an ancient tomb that dated to the 1st cent. From the tomb archaeologists recovered a number of ossuaries. On the sides of one of the more ornate ones was inscribed in Hebrew 'Yehosef ben Qafa,' (Joseph son of Caiaphas). The ossuary—in one of the rare cases where authenticity of the find was pretty much undisputed—contained the skeletal remains of a 60-year-old man, a woman, a teenager, and two infants; archaeologists believed they had located the family tomb of Caiaphas's family and, probably, the skeletal remains of the high-priest himself.
CONCORDANCE:
Caiaphas is mentioned 9x in the NT:
Matt 26:3 — Then the chief priests and the elders of the people assembled in the palace of the high priest, whose name was Caiaphas, [and they plotted to arrest Jesus in some sly way and kill him.]
Matt 26:57 — Those who had arrested Jesus took him to Caiaphas, the high priest, where the teachers of the law and the elders had assembled.
Lk 3:2 — In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar . . . during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the desert.
Jn 11:49 — Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, "You know nothing at all! [You do not realise that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.]"
Jn 18:13-14 — [They bound him] and brought him first to Annas, who was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, the high priest that year. Caiaphas was the one who had advised the Jews that it would be good if one man died for the people.
Jn 18:24 — Then Annas sent him, still bound, to Caiaphas the high priest.
Jn 18:28 — Then the Jews led Jesus from Caiaphas to the palace of the Roman governor. By now it was early morning, and to avoid ceremonial uncleanness the Jews did not enter the palace; they wanted to be able to eat the Passover.
Acts 4:6 — Annas the high priest was there, and so were Caiaphas, John, Alexander and the other men of the high priest's family. [They had Peter and John brought before them and began to question them: "By what power or what name did you do this?"]
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