(March 13, 2015 at 8:23 pm)abaris Wrote: Big fucking deal that educated people knew who was governor and high priest at a certain point in time. Even the common people, who probably provided these stories would have known. Everything else, at least as told in the bible, is seriously off. The story of Jesus and Caiaphas or Jesus and Pilate don't make any sense at all. The jewish priesthood were puppets installed by the Roman authorities and Jesus, if he really claimed to be king of the jews, wouldn't have gone before them for blasphemy, since he already commited the crime of high treason against Roman authority with this claim.
It's Pilate, who would have run the show from start to finish. And he certainly wouldn't have offered Jesus up for amnesty, if Jesus repeated the king claim before him. He would have been on the fast track to crucifixion. The Romans also weren't picky choosy when it came to insurgents. They would have crushed anyone even remotely connected to this Jesus character. So the apostles would be out of the picture or deep in hiding.
The grave story is also pretty much out the window, since it was Roman habit to leave the executed on the cross to rot and to ultimately toss the remains into some ditch.
I don't disagree with most of the above. But here we have another example of this "all or nothing approach" - the idea that if any of what is obviously a polemical story can be argued to probably be incorrect or historically unlikely, the whole thing has to be thrown out wholesale.
That doesn't follow logically at all.
Take your main points above. Those elements also make sense if a historical Jesus was seized by the Temple priesthood before he caused any more trouble and then handed over to Pilate. Which would leave the Christians later, after the failed Jewish Revolt, with a PR problem. After all, it would have been hard to sell a Jewish guy nailed up by a Roman prefect to Romans straight after a failed Jewish insurrection against Rome. The solution? Put the blame on the Jews. So we get this garbled fiction of the Jews being unable to execute him for blasphemy (why?) and so they hand him over to Pilate who reluctantly (why?) executes him while telling the Jews it's all their fault.
That accounts for not only all the things you mention, but a number of others as well.
But if there was no historical Jesus story to put this spin on, why did they invent a Messiah who dies? That was not in the Messianic tradition? And why crucified? That put him under a curse according to Jewish tradition. And it made the whole idea that he was some kind of exalted uber-man absurd to non-Jews.
So if these things aren't in the story because they happened, where did they come from? Why would someone make up a Messiah like that?
