Freeing guilty criminals at Passover?

[Pat Mustard]

Even if Jesus did exist, if he was crucified, it would have to be by the Romans. Everything I know about Judaism and the death penalty points against the Jews as the culprit, because A) they had four sanctioned methods of execution: stoning, burning, beheading, and strangulation (you’ll notice that crucifixion does not fall into any of these categories), and B) In death penalty cases, the burden of proof was so absurdly high (one prerequisite for execution was that there had to be at least two witnesses, non-related males known to keep the commandments and familiar with the law, both had To separately inform the defendant that what he was about to do was a capital offense, and the defendant had to say that he was familiar with the law, announce that they were going to sin anyway and start to do it, all within the time it took to say “peace unto you my rabbi and my master”) and the procedure so convoluted (falling just short of being so contradictory that it was logically impossible to convict) that there was considered something seriously wrong with a Court that had done it twice in a span of anywhere between ten and seventy years.

Which raises more problems for the godbotherers. Because, at least as written in the gospels, Yeshua bar Yosef did nothing to give the Romans cause to crucify him. Instead, with multiple instances of stuff like "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's", if he was as prominent as portrayed, it was in their interests to make sure he lived, even manoeuvring him into positions of prominence.

The gospel stories are senseless ni matter what direction you come at them from.