RE: Forgetting Jesus Freak Bullshit, Let's Stick To History:
October 20, 2015 at 1:30 pm
(This post was last modified: October 20, 2015 at 1:39 pm by Minimalist.)
Back to history:
As the gospels progress the depiction of the jews becomes ever more strident. But the question of when is such abject hatred of the jews likely to have arisen. Yes, the Great Revolt took 4 years to suppress but that was mainly because Vespasian took two years off watching political events in Rome. And why not? He had the city effectively cut off by controlling the roads in and out and the desert to the south would have been crossable but not by large numbers. He could afford to let them rot while seeing who emerged on the throne and finally took his chance and won it himself. But the jews were crushed and their city sacked and burned and the Romans had bigger fish to fry with a new dynasty on the throne. This is one of the reasons that I can't take Joseph Atwill's theory (Caesar's Messiah) seriously. Aside from the generally shitty scholarship the Romans had crushed that revolt the same way they crushed every other revolt.
But, by the time we reach the mid-2d century the jews were definitely on the shit list. There had been two more revolts and the second one may well have been a Parthian-inspired 5th column movement to divert the Romans from their attack on Mesopotamia under Trajan. Again, it is around this time that we begin to see the Romans noticing a group called "xtians." Not before. Which is odd considering their whole "multitudes of xtians" in Rome itself in the first century bullshit story.
Quote:Luke is eager to give his Gospel the respectability of a genuine historical account, but he exhibits none of the qualities of a real historian – not even by the standards of historians from his own time. His “research” appears limited to picking scenic period details from other writers and using them to spruce up a re-write of Mark’s Gospel based on his own theological slant.
Jesus’ Trial on TrialAnd was Mark’s account a historical one to begin with? His frequent mistakes about the fundamentals of Judaism and Judean geography betray that he is no early first century eyewitness on the scene. And several of the most basic elements of his story don’t hold up to historical realities. For instance, modern Jewish scholars have listed problems with the trial of Jesus since at least the 18th century.2 The proceedings described by Mark and company go against everything we know about the Judaic legal system. Jewish legal authority Haim Cohn (Attorney-General of Israel and later Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court) scrutinized the different Biblical accounts of Jesus’ trial with a fine-toothed comb in The Trial and Death of Jesus,3 and his verdict is harsh: even where the Gospels do agree with each other, on point after point he finds that the Gospel writers get their facts wrong, sometimes ridiculously so.
The trial is incompatible with multiple well-established provisions of ancient Jewish law; in fact the violations of Jewish law in Jesus’ trial dog-pile on each other so fast it’s hard to keep up. All of them are virtually inconceivable, and of course highly improper: neglecting Passover, meeting by night, holding trial in a private home, conducting a trial in secret, the High Priest acting as interrogator himself and even striking the defendant with his hand, the failure of the witnesses to agree, mocking and beating the prisoner, and many more, any of which should have resulted in a mistrial. Even worse, they appear to have deliberately misrepresented certain aspects or the trial to paint the Jewish religious leaders as stereotypical villains.
As the gospels progress the depiction of the jews becomes ever more strident. But the question of when is such abject hatred of the jews likely to have arisen. Yes, the Great Revolt took 4 years to suppress but that was mainly because Vespasian took two years off watching political events in Rome. And why not? He had the city effectively cut off by controlling the roads in and out and the desert to the south would have been crossable but not by large numbers. He could afford to let them rot while seeing who emerged on the throne and finally took his chance and won it himself. But the jews were crushed and their city sacked and burned and the Romans had bigger fish to fry with a new dynasty on the throne. This is one of the reasons that I can't take Joseph Atwill's theory (Caesar's Messiah) seriously. Aside from the generally shitty scholarship the Romans had crushed that revolt the same way they crushed every other revolt.
But, by the time we reach the mid-2d century the jews were definitely on the shit list. There had been two more revolts and the second one may well have been a Parthian-inspired 5th column movement to divert the Romans from their attack on Mesopotamia under Trajan. Again, it is around this time that we begin to see the Romans noticing a group called "xtians." Not before. Which is odd considering their whole "multitudes of xtians" in Rome itself in the first century bullshit story.
