Why I can't take the Gospels seriously.

[Rev. Rye]

Mostly because the core story of an itinerant rabbi who may or may not have been named Jesus and preached many of the same things Jesus preached and perhaps ended up pissing off the Romans enough to give him a drawn-out death by crucifixion is plausible enough to have perhaps been real?

But did Jesus in the Gospels piss off Romans? It seems he pissed off Jews.

If Jesus was crucified in reality, it would have to be by the Romans. Judaism has some very stringent rules for capital punishment, and, the fact that there's a mess of rules so convoluted that there was something seen as seriously wrong with a court that passed a death sentence once in seventy years aside, there were exactly four methods of execution sanctioned by Jewish tradition: stoning, burning (with molten lead in the mouth), beheading, and strangling. While crucifixion might be considered strangulation of a sort, outside of the Gospels, there are ZERO confirmed cases of its use by the Jews, and is well-documented as a Roman punishment. What's more, there's a strong taboo against blood in Judaism (remember how many rules against touching blood there are in the Torah?), and notice how, even in the Gospels, the crucifixion of Jesus is actually bloodier than the process usually is, given that (in defiance of usual practice) it's combined with flogging and, instead of breaking a knee, a centurion slices into his chest.

Even if the core of the story is plausible enough, it is pretty obvious to anyone who knows the history that the Evangelists did fudge quite a few of the details in an attempt to appease Rome.