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> The reason Pilate is painted as anything other than guilty is because the Jews must be guilty, and the method of the Jew in destroying all that is good is to

> The reason Pilate is painted as anything other than guilty is because the Jews must be guilty, and the method of the Jew in destroying all that is good is to sneakily take advantage of the innocent non-Jew. Do you have any evidence of this? All the earliest available historical evidence depicts the event in essentially the same way, which also makes logical sense - why would Pilate otherwise care about some random Jewish mystic? Secondly, it seems like we need to overcome the pretty big hurdle of explaining why a population of mostly Jewish people who largely continued to identify themselves as Jewish during the period in question would write books in a way that painted the Jews as guilty because of their antisemitism rather than because it was an accurate reflection of what they actually believed happened, or, most charitably, because they were afraid any anti-Roman sentiment would bring down the hammer.

dc-programmer 5y ago
There is a theory that there were two competing early Christian factions: one, led by Jesus’s brother (or kin), viewed the movement as a continuation of Judaism; the other following the vision of Paul who wanted to proselytize the gentiles. The theory goes Paul made the religion decidedly not Jewish to increase its appeal. I guess adult males did not want to get circumcised. Paul’s Hellenized vision was clearly the one that won out in this scenario. I couldn’t tell you how widely accepted this theory is however (or the motivations of its progenitor). Biblical studies seems like an area where the orthodoxy is constantly shifting.
- Amezarak 5y ago
  Yes, historiography is unfortunately a little fad-driven. The essentials of what you're saying are largely correct based on our historical understanding and the evidence of the epistles - "competing" is probably not the right word, but James certainly appears to have focused on converting the Jewish community, while Paul considered himself (and was by others) the apostle to the gentiles, and they had at least one documented disagreement. But what the GP is suggesting, in this context, would be that decades after the events, but still while eyewitnesses were around, what you would call the Pauline faction redacted all the earliest texts (canonical and non-canonical!) to be antisemitic and the almost certainly majority Jewish following just...accepted it. Actually, redacted wouldn't even be the right word; it's the only ones ever written down, as far as we know. And although historiographers argue about it, the earliest secondary sources (c 100AD) credit the gospels as written to the apostles or those working with them. (According to Papias, Peter's disciple wrote down what Peter preached as Mark; the book of John itself and other early sources claim it was written by the apostle John, Matthew was supposedly the apostle Matthew, and Luke allegedly worked with Paul; even if you don't buy the authorship as believed by people in the first century, they were all still written in the first century and had to survive criticism by people who knew what they were about.) And moreover, they edited the whole story, not just the account of his arrest and crucifixion, because all the gospels have Jesus repeatedly claiming the Jewish authorities are going to kill him, that they kill the prophets sent to them, etc. It seems like a more parsimonious explanation is simply that the non-supernatural events simply played out approximately as written. And well, if they didn't, we don't have any evidence of it, so speculating about it can be fun but isn't really doing anything but generating conspiracy theories.

dc-programmer 5y ago

There is a theory that there were two competing early Christian factions: one, led by Jesus’s brother (or kin), viewed the movement as a continuation of Judaism; the other following the vision of Paul who wanted to proselytize the gentiles. The theory goes Paul made the religion decidedly not Jewish to increase its appeal. I guess adult males did not want to get circumcised. Paul’s Hellenized vision was clearly the one that won out in this scenario. I couldn’t tell you how widely accepted this theory is however (or the motivations of its progenitor). Biblical studies seems like an area where the orthodoxy is constantly shifting.

Amezarak 5y ago
Yes, historiography is unfortunately a little fad-driven. The essentials of what you're saying are largely correct based on our historical understanding and the evidence of the epistles - "competing" is probably not the right word, but James certainly appears to have focused on converting the Jewish community, while Paul considered himself (and was by others) the apostle to the gentiles, and they had at least one documented disagreement. But what the GP is suggesting, in this context, would be that decades after the events, but still while eyewitnesses were around, what you would call the Pauline faction redacted all the earliest texts (canonical and non-canonical!) to be antisemitic and the almost certainly majority Jewish following just...accepted it. Actually, redacted wouldn't even be the right word; it's the only ones ever written down, as far as we know. And although historiographers argue about it, the earliest secondary sources (c 100AD) credit the gospels as written to the apostles or those working with them. (According to Papias, Peter's disciple wrote down what Peter preached as Mark; the book of John itself and other early sources claim it was written by the apostle John, Matthew was supposedly the apostle Matthew, and Luke allegedly worked with Paul; even if you don't buy the authorship as believed by people in the first century, they were all still written in the first century and had to survive criticism by people who knew what they were about.) And moreover, they edited the whole story, not just the account of his arrest and crucifixion, because all the gospels have Jesus repeatedly claiming the Jewish authorities are going to kill him, that they kill the prophets sent to them, etc. It seems like a more parsimonious explanation is simply that the non-supernatural events simply played out approximately as written. And well, if they didn't, we don't have any evidence of it, so speculating about it can be fun but isn't really doing anything but generating conspiracy theories.