I can buy that, given that it was just a bunch of rank-and-file soldiers doing the mockery. For them, it would have been a (bloody) holiday, a respite from patrolling and sentry-go.
Pilate wouldn’t have said, “Take him and mock him.” He’d have just told an officer, “Take him and crucify him.” Of course, he couldn’t help but know that the soldiers would make a carnival of it…
But, FWIW, I agree with most of your point here: the story doesn’t fit what we know of Roman jurisprudence. Pilate would have “washed his hands” of Jesus from the first, without the absurd spectacle of the crowd and the Barabbas nonsense.
It’s the same problem as Joseph having to return to Bethlehem to register for the census. Nuh uh. Didn’t work that way.
On what evidence do you believe that Pilate was concerned about riots on that Passover in particular, and on what evidence do you believe that he harangued the mob?
Actually, you need to provide evidence for what you have been asserting, if possible. You seem to believe that Christians are obligated to prove even the mundane parts of the various Gospels. I would hope you see how you should be subject to the same standard, when you are asserting some mundane parts of the Gospels as reliable and rejecting other, equally mundane parts which contradict you.
Could you please provide cites of other instances of Roman governors who acted in the same way? Please be specific.
Could you please provide cites of other Roman censuses that were run differently, so we know the evidence you are basing your understanding of how it did work?
While we’re on the subject, Dopers are smarter than most, and have access to internet search engines and the like. Does anyone reading this know which city his ancestors lived in 1000 years ago?
I’m afraid I didn’t see any cites of other, similar censuses or how they were run. Censuses of Roman citizens would not have required travel, but the Gospels don’t say that it was of Romans. And your cite says that Jewish censuses did require it.
We know some about Roman jurisprudence from discussions by their historians. We know about the crucifixion of Spartacus and his followers. We have a pretty fair idea of how their system worked.
The census issue is well documented: there is no extra-Biblical reference to anyone’s being compelled to return to their ancestral city to register. Caesar numbered the Franks, and other Roman censuses were performed. Here’s just one quick cite.
Cute try, but you can’t peddle nonsense by claiming to be fresh out of sense. Can you prove that the Romans ever held any other trial by a procurator in the entirety of their history?
(Can you provide any other references to the miracles at Cana or Lake Tiberius? Be specific…)
Also the Bible as I read it, the close followers, friends, and Apostles didn’t expect Jesus to come back to life, or they wouldn’t have come to anoint a dead body, act surprised that The Tomb was empty ,and Mary M was said not to recognize Jesus, and she had just seen him . So Jesus saying he would return in 3 days didn’t make his followers etc. believe Jesus as he was quoted to have said.
First, something inspired Christianity. Why not a real preacher, who was really killed by the Romans? There is nothing inherently unlikely about that.
Second, if we are going to accept a real preacher, there is no reason to accept he actually performed miracles and rose from thew dead. A real preacher who really existed is probable. A guy performing miracles, less so. Chances are good that it was later myth-making. Mythologizing doesn’t require, note, that the guy himself was a complete fabrication!
Third, if we are going to hypothesize a real preacher who was really executed by Romans, but whose life was “mythologized” by later followers - who added in miracles and the like - why not subject his whole story to the same picking and choosing, for inherent probability? It is highly improbable that a Procreator or Governor of Judea would give much of a shit about a Jewish street preacher, who whould have approximately the same status, in Roman aristocratic eyes, as a foreign street person suspected of terrorism. Making Pilate care (and go through that whole rigamoarole with Barrabas) has the same “feel” of myth-making as attributing miracles to the guy.
It’s interesting that Matthew says that the priests and Pharisees were so worried about the disciples faking a resurrection that they asked Pilate for a guard on the tomb, but the synoptic Gospels say that the disciples themselves didn’t believe Jesus had been resurrected, even when told by their closest friends, until they saw him with their own eyes. And some not even then. Luke even says they thought it was nonsense.
This in spite of all the other resurrected saints wandering around Jerusalem. Heck, according to Matthew 10:8, the disciples had long since been given the power to raise the dead. So why didn’t they raise Jesus, instead of just moping around and thinking it impossible?
Anybody? Hector?
And no, Shodan, I’m not going to give you specific examples of them failing to raise the dead.
These sentiments are expressed with way too much confidence.
First, Roman jurisprudence tells us pretty much nothing about trials before actual officials, especially not in the early 1st century. Not a great deal is known about trials at all outside of Egypt, where over 60 records of trial proceedings survive. In one papyrus record, Papiri Fiorentini 61, the Roman governor of Egypt (known as the Prefect) had one of the litigants flogged just for the hell of it, likely because he thought the matter was trivial. There were no constitutional restrictions on the Prefect’s power, and when he wanted to, he flexed it. This would not entirely have been true for the other provinces, but it is mistake to think that they were somehow constrained by the niceties of Roman law. They weren’t. Their job was to keep the provinces “pacata atque quieta,” settled and orderly, and they had a great deal of latitude to achieve this. This did not mean that Prefects were inherently abusive. What we know tends to suggest otherwise. But there is plenty of evidence that they had these powers and that knowledge of occasionally flagrant use of power was widespread.
We know a lot more about the Roman census later, and again, we know the most for Egypt. In later periods people did have to return to their home districts for the census in order to be held accountable for the poll tax.
This is not actually all that implausible. The Roman administration in Judea (and everywhere else, really) in this period was very small. People at the top, emperors included, were directly involved in a lot of the small-fry business of governance. There was an ancient tradition, in the east especially, of petitioning the ruler directly to resolve all sorts of issues, great and small. A provincial governor would have sorted out whether the widow Jones improperly registered an olive tree she planted in her back yard and who robbed Smith’s vegetable patch before dealing with yet another troublemaking longhair.
I did not say Pilate would not have dealt with Jesus. I said it was unlikely he would have given much of a shit about him, had he dealt with him.
It would, in all probability, just been another tedious day at the office - deal with a bunch of complaints by provincials at 10 AM, have a troublemaking hippie street person executed at 11 AM, followed by a light lunch, and then the afternoon agenda. That sort of thing.
The gospels have Pilate go through all sorts of rigamarole, indicating he cared - a lot - about this Jesus guy, presumably because Jesus was just. That. Awesome. Including that stuff about Barabas, intended to spare him. That just stikes me as the stuff of myth.
At one and the same time Pilate dares not let him go (though he would like to) out of fear of the priests - and pisses the same priests off, by refusing to change the sign reading “king of the Jews” to “pretend king of the Jews”. More inconsistency (and more stuff that seems like myth-making).
Going to your home district makes perfect sense, although surely they would have a provision for proxies when it was inconvenient, e.g. when your wife is nine months pregnant.
Going to the home district of your ancestor of 1000 years ago makes no sense at all, and it would be impossible for 99% of people to even have a clue where to go, even today.
I agree completely that the account on the gospels contains mythmaking, whether intentional or merely due to accretions in the transmission of the document from its putative original source.
I am more cautious of the idea that we can reject it purely based on plausibility. The governor had tremendous power over non-Romans and was free to fuck with them as he saw fit, and good evidence suggests that sometimes, governors did. To put it another way, if a provincial in AD 150 read the gospel, he probably would not have thought that the account of Pilate was crazy prima facie.
Yup, the ancestors bit requires truly heroic gospel apologetics to explain. It doesn’t jive with anything we know about later Roman censuses, about which we know a great deal. Among other things, censuses give us the best proof for widespread brother-sister marriage and reproduction in Egypt in the Roman period.