"One very foundational thing will have to be understood, and that is that the people you call bad are never as bad as the people you call good.

"The bad people are bad, but they have no excuses for being bad.

"They know they are bad and they have nowhere to hide themselves. But the people who are thought to be good, respectable, honored, respected, religious are the really dangerous people – because their badness can hide in their goodness. They can murder and will not feel that they are murderous. They can kill and can go on feeling that they are doing that killing for the good of those who are being killed.

"The ordinarily bad person, the criminal, is exposed. He knows that he is not good, and that is his possibility of transformation. He can understand it and come out of it. But the so-called good person is hidden under a personality. He may not be able to understand what he is doing and for what reasons he is doing it. He can always manage to rationalize.

"That's how it happened, and not only in the case of Jesus. It has always been happening. The priests who were murderous never thought that they were doing anything bad. They thought they were saving their religion, they thought they were saving the morality. They thought, 'This man is dangerous. He is corrupting the youth.'

"The charge against Jesus was that he is corrupting people; that he is destroying the old morality, creating chaos. That was the charge against Socrates and that is the charge against me. It has always been so.

"Whether they are Hindus or Greeks or Jews makes no difference, the priests are the protectors of the old. The temple is of the past: they are the protectors, the guardians of tradition. Of course Jesus looked dangerous to them. He can destroy the whole structure.

"Not that they were deceiving themselves. They may have thought themselves perfectly right, without a single question that they weren't: 'This man is dangerous and to destroy him is to save the society.' And of course whenever there is such an alternative – of saving the whole society by killing one man – the murder is worth it. The priests killed him because of their goodness, because of their virtue, because of their morality. They killed him in the name of God. They killed him very innocently.

"This situation has arisen again and again in history."