Quote:He was also portrayed as an individual who had no love for the Jews and even less patience for their religious customs.
I'd like to backtrack a moment to this point you raised. There is a bit of a recurrent theme in Greco-Roman thinking. Antiochus IV was the Hellenistic king of Seleucid Empire. He is blamed in the bible for desecrating the temple.
Quote:When these happenings were reported to the king, he thought that Judea was in revolt. Raging like a wild animal, he set out from Egypt and took Jerusalem by storm. He ordered his soldiers to cut down without mercy those whom they met and to slay those who took refuge in their houses. There was a massacre of young and old, a killing of women and children, a slaughter of virgins and infants. In the space of three days, eighty thousand were lost, forty thousand meeting a violent death, and the same number being sold into slavery. ”
— 2 Maccabees 5:11–14
Those numbers are, of course, total bullshit since the city at this time had no where near the water supply needed for a population anywhere near that large.
Quote:To consolidate his empire and strengthen his hold over the region, Antiochus decided to side with the Hellenized Jews by outlawing Jewish religious rites and traditions kept by observant Jews and by ordering the worship of Zeus as the supreme god (2 Maccabees 6:1–12). This was anathema to the Jews and when they refused, Antiochus sent an army to enforce his decree. Because of the resistance, the city was destroyed, many were slaughtered, and a military Greek citadel called the Acra was established.[7]
The tendency of a Greco-Roman elite to regard the jews as primitive barbarians thus far pre-dates, Pilate.
