Could you please provide a contemporary cite that the people of Judea complained to the Roman emperor that Pilate ordered too many crucifixions?
Could you please provide non-Biblical evidence that Jesus was one of the worst cases, and that Pilate would have considered Him a threat to the state? Thanks in advance for both cites.
Regards,
Shodan
This should be good. I love to see how ‘skeptics’, in their effort to show the Gospels to be inaccurate, end up selectively quoting…the Gospels.
There isn’t much else other than the NT that directly refers to the players in the NT story.
Even Pontus Pilate isn’t well documented - there is, I belive, a single inscription (a dedication on an ampetheatre) referring to him.
Some references in Josephus to Christianity, one of them dubious.
What can be said, is that religious ‘teachers’, zealots, would-be miracle-workers and prophets were pretty common and linked to the political unrest in Judea at the time. It would not be surprising if the Romans cracked down - hard - on any signs of unrest or disturbers of the peace. Though according the the NT account, they did not hunt down Jesus’ followers, who mostly denied him, contenting themselves with cricifying him alone, so they must not have been overly concerned about his movement.
In the NT account, Peter is the only one who (famously) denies Jesus.
And I love to see how apologists try to tap dance around very obvious contradictions in the Gospels.
But I don’t know why you seem surprised that skeptics quote the Gospels. Since the only genuine external and contemporaneous references to Jesus comprise just a couple of lines, there’s not much else to quote, especially since every appeal to the lack of any external records of all the extraordinary stuff in the Gospels is met with the banal “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Selectivity is a good thing; the Gospels are too long to quote in their entirety, just to show a specific contradiction or error. What’s important is that the sense and context are preserved. And in my experience, apologists are much worse than skeptics when it comes to intellectual honesty, especially if you restrict the comparison to professionals.
[shrug] Get Aslan’s book and check the footnotes, it’s very well-researched.
There is no non-Biblical evidence because there are no surviving non-Biblical accounts of the story at all. If we go by the Bible’s version, Jesus rode into Jerusalem receiving the traditional honors of a king from the crowd; that alone would have made him a direct threat to the state. This was a time of many false messiahs in Judea (Aslan tells their stories too) and the Romans quite reasonably viewed them all as equally dangerous.
He’s the only one who is actually recorded in the gospels who expressly denies Jesus, but it is clear that the others mostly made themselves scarce - until the Romans had gone.
At his crucifiction itself, only a few women, among them his mom, and a single male disciple (“the disciple whom Jesus loved”) showed up. Where exactly were the others? Off for a holiday, or perhaps slept in and missed the event? 
More came after he was dead and the coast was clear: Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus.
The implications are there in the gospels–there was no demonstration of solidarity on the part of his “following”. The reasons are not hard to find - his followers did not want to share his fate. Any demonstration on the part of his (male) following would likely have alarmed and annoyed the Romans, leading to more crucifictions.
Is there a reason you want me to do your research for you?
If we go by the Bible’s version, Pilate says that Jesus had done nothing deserving of death.
So, what you posted is either un-cited, or contradicted by your own sources. Shrug indeed.
Regards,
Shodan
Yeah, I already returned Zealot to the library.
The same Gospels you’re appealing to , right now, also say that Pilate said he found no fault in Jesus, did his best to realise him, and only gave in under pressure from the mob, who wanted Barabbas released instead of Jesus.
I don’t see why you choose to believe some features of the Gospel narratives, and not others.
It’s very simple: If there is no entry into Jerusalem, then there is no story there at all, none of the Passion of the Christ ever happened, Jesus never was crucified, and we can drop the whole discussion. But if Pilate is a hardass entirely unlike his Biblical version, there still is a story.
Okay, I see your point. I’m still not sure “denied” is the best word to use, but I can’t dispute anything else you’ve said.
Fair enough. I’m using “denied” in the same sense as Peter’s “denial” - Peter isn’t turning his back on the teachings of Jesus, he’s simply unwilling to publicly identify himself as a follower - presumably, to avoid the consequences.
In the various Gospel accounts, Peter denies Jesus three times, which Jesus prophesized in advance; it is pretty clear, though not expressly stated as far as I know, that he does this out of cowardice.
According to the Gospel of Matthew:
“Peter replied, “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.” “I tell you the truth,” Jesus answered, “This very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.” But Peter declared, “Even if I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” And all the other disciples said the same.”
Peter of course does “deny” Jesus in this sense - he doesn’t die (then) with Jesus, and neither do any of the other disciples. The implication is that they all more or less followed Peter’s lead (perhaps with the exception of the “the disciple whom Jesus loved”, who isn’t named) and kept their heads down.
Why? Is that something only Christians are allowed to do?
I can help you with that. If you applied to me for a job, and your resume said that you had graduated from Jefferson High in Podunk, I would believe it, even though it’s entirely possible you didn’t. If it also said you had won four Nobel Prizes, I wouldn’t believe you had, because it’s too stupid to believe.
I would assume that is because there is evidence that no one has ever won four Nobel prizes, so that contradicts the account.
What evidence do you have that contradicts the account that Pilate found nothing that Jesus did made Him worthy of death? Or is that something you believe without evidence?
Regards,
Shodan
Well, if I may answer - I have no actual evidence, other than from what I’ve read of Romans as imperial authorities, it strikes me as unlikely that a high official like Pontus Pilate would give a shit about some Jewish troublemaker accused of troublemaking.
In the gospels, he’s pictured as genuinely conflicted and disturbed by the whole process, eventually ordering the execution of Jesus because the mob forces him into it, against his concience. This simply strikes me as unlikely and unlike the more typical Roman iron-fisted rule.
Also, the gospels portray the Romans as mocking Jesus in various ways (sign, crown of thorns, purple robe) as a pretend “king of the Jews” during his execution. Why the mockery, if the excecution was held only at the behest of the mob and Pilate himself thought he was okay?
Certainly not to appease the Sanhedrin - as he goes out of his way to piss them off.
Indeed, at one point the Sanhedrin ask Pilate to change the sign on Jesus form “King if the Jews” to “Pretend King of the Jews” - and he refuses. How does this make sense, if he is only excecuting Jesus to placate them? One moment he’s ordering the horrible excecution of an innocent man to appease them, the next he deliberately pisses them off, for no good reason?
The whole story reads like it has been “adjusted” by later scribes - it simply does not ‘feel’ true to the times. How much more likely that Jesus was executed for being a troublemaker and that Pilate felt not an iota of concern about it at the time - to him, a totally routine event, just another day at the office.
You assume wrong. I wouldn’t believe it even if he said he had won “only” one. Even if the certificate was stapled to the resume, and the medal was hanging around his neck. Even if a page of the NYT with a picture of him accepting it was also stapled to the resume. It’s so unlikely that a Nobel Prize winner would want to work for me that I would assume that the documentation was faked until I verified it from sources that he could not have manipulated, and I probably wouldn’t even waste my time seeking such verification. So you can imagine how seriously I would take it if the only proof he offered was the written testimony of four anonymous friends, who also testified that he walked on water and rose up into the sky.
When there is no evidence either way (and as noted above, I consider the Gospels to be about as trustworthy as a biography of Bush by Karl Rove), then you go with what you know about Roman justice in general.
Hector asked a general question, and I gave a general answer. I actually had more ridiculous stuff in mind, like the zombies invading Jerusalem. The trial of Jesus isn’t quite that stupid, but the thought of a Roman governor, on a day that is possibly his busiest of the year because of the Passover crowds, not only taking the time to do a personal interview with a common criminal, but deciding he is innocent from a three-word defense (according to the synoptics, at least, and it’s up to Hector to explain why John’s account is so different), seems unlikely enough.
But when his overriding concern is to not allow anything to spark a riot among the biggest crowds of the year, to then go out and harangue the mob about which Jew he should execute seems absolutely, utterly, completely ridiculous, even if such a “custom” of allowing the Jewish mob to override Roman sentences wasn’t already ridiculous.
I don’t need to prove that it didn’t happen; you need to prove it did. And you can’t even show that it’s plausible. Christians have had 2000 years to find other examples of a census that required everyone in the Roman world to travel to wherever their ancestors lived a thousand years earlier, or a Roman governor who allowed the mob to overturn his sentences, and they can’t even find support for mundane stuff like that, so why should anyone believe it when the same anonymous authors also claim batshit crazy stuff like zombie invasions?
So, in essence, you reject the most detailed accounts we have of Pilate and Jesus, because they don’t ‘feel’ true to you?
That’s fine, I guess. Believe what you want. If you want to believe that Jesus was a space alien from Mars, you can believe that too. Don’t expect me to join you, though.
In all honesty, though I personally am more or less am a literalist when it comes to the Gospels, I have a lot of respect for the mythicist position. The mythicist is at least honest, he dismisses the Gospels as tall tales made up three or four decades after the fact, and so he has no reason to believe that Jesus was a real person. That person is more skeptical than me, temperamentally, but I can’t prove to him Jesus existed, so I’m content to leave it at that. I have much less respect for attempts to construct a ‘historical Jesus’ based on selecting some things out of the Gospels and rejecting other things. Because all such attempts seem to boil down to picking and choosing based on hopelessly subjectiev and arbitrary standards that simply replicate what the person picking and choosing is already determined to believe.
If you think the Gospels are just making up the details about Pilate and the Passion, why not take it a step further and just say ‘they were making up the whole thing’?
Because it’s slightly more likely that there was an actual apocalyptic preacher named Jesus around that time and place, and that his deeds were grossly exaggerated, as was the case with many others. It just so happened that he was the one seized on by one of the crazy Roman emperors, and with state backing, his cult grew, and the others faded away (or were purged).
Personally, I’m inclined to think there was an actual Jesus of Nazareth, because if there weren’t, he’d be Jesus of Bethlehem, and Matthew and Luke wouldn’t have had to come up with their outlandish (and contradictory) stories of how he wound up in Nazareth.