darstec

You take far too much for granted. Use the gospels, Acts, and epistles and try naming all the disciples comparing one to another. Do not leave out any. That project is as irreconcilable as the Easter Challenge.

If you can't get that right, why even bother going on?

darstec

Are you saying that because the two stories start out with a dream that the continuation of the story is part of that same dream? If so, that is the first time I heard that take on the gospels and I thought I had been subjected to almost all of them.

What does that do for Mark which does not open with a dream (or at least specifically mention one)?

darstec

Could you give us a list of at least 5 of those non Christian scholars along with their credentials?

Oh, and one other thing, nobody can be on your list that was at any time in their life a Christian or born into a Christian family that way we can exclude any excess baggage they might bring to the table. And exclude Mormons because they consider themselves Christian. Also exclude and Jews for Jesus and Muslims as a part of their religion is predicated upon Christianity and Judaism. Will you have anyone left on your list? I wonder.

darstec

Géza Vermes was a Catholic priest born to Jewish parents that were baptized Catholic. Bart Ehrmann was an Evangelical Christian minister. Paula Fredriksen describes herself as Fredriksen has described herself as an Italian, pre-Vatican II Catholic who became an Orthodox Jew. So all of your non Christian experts were in fact Christians or at least brough extensive Christian baggage to the table.

Although in Paula Fredriksen's case I will make allowances as she is very beautiful woman. And I like that -- brains and beauty in one package.

So, now, what is that you were saying about an education?

spamandham

If you were a Roman charged with trying to alter history, is this the kind of nonsense you would come up with? Of course not.

You would simply claim he had been guilty of treason. You also would not have Pilate performing Jewish rituals (washing his hands of the whole thing), nor would you allow Rome to appear to be weak and easily manipulated (Pilate giving in to an angry mob of Jews), nor would you have a Roman centurion saying "hey what do you know, this guy was God afterall", nor would you work Isaiah 53 and Psalm 22 into the entire flow of the story.

I really don't see any merit to what you are suggesting at all.

Paul never says Jesus was crucified by Rome. The crucifixion he refers to is very vague, as if in the far distant past. Paul never indicates the Jesus he refers to is someone from the recent past.

It would make a hell of a lot more sense just to say he was guilty of a crime, rather than concocting some absurd story that shows Rome to be a weak puppet of the Jews.

Unless he was a criminal of course. Which is how any state, including ancient Rome, who had just finished destroying the temple as a demonstration of power, would have spun it. The idea that they would write a bit of revisionist history that caters to those who they were slaughtering left and right is patently absurd.

Koyaanisqatsi

You would if the event in question was important to the people in the region, so that you were constrained by having to spin facts into a fiction.

Not if the whole point was to destroy the real man's actual role and dissuade any notion that he was a treasonist martyr.

Of course you would, if the whole point is to appeal to and undermine belief in Judaism while at the same time exonerate Roman involvement! The propagandist would use whatever familiar literary tools he would have at his disposal to (a) convince his intended audience that he was "one of them" and knew what he was talking about and (b) to apply as much Jewish dogma as possible to make it resonate.

We're talking about a propaganda attempt by the Romans to scuttle a martyr and destroy later generation's loyalty and adherence to their elder's anti-Roman teachings, so it would have to include the veneer of those teachings for anyone to even remotely pay any attention to it. Hence all the clumsy references to the OT to establish that Jesus was not a martyr, but a messiah.

Two distinctly different symbols.

If your job is to exonerate the Romans and blame the Jews, you'd have little choice. Beside, the story doesn't make Rome appear to be weak; it makes Pilate to be sympathetic, to be a friend to Jesus, desperately trying to set him free, but he cannot due to the fear of the crowd.

It would be necessary "plausible deniability" in modern parlance and since Pilate was long disgraced, or at least otherwise removed by Rome decades before such a story would have been written, putting the focus all on Pilate and then exonerating him again makes perfect sense from a pro-Roman perspective.

This isn't that difficult to grasp and I simply refuse to accept that you cannot see both the logic and the blatancy of this, but apparently you can see neither.

Yes you would! You'd have to in order to change a martyr into a messiah and the reason you'd have to do that is because the belief that Jesus was in some way touched by god (through martyrdom) would be impossible to dissuade.

The whole point of propaganda (any propaganda) is to flip the truth around so that black is white and white is black. If the insurrectionists already "worshipped" Jesus as a martyr for their cause against the Roman occupation for a good thirty to forty years, then a Roman propagandist would have to spin that, not flat out deny it. Denial wouldn't achieve anything at all and would immediately be rejected.

And once again, since the Romans killed him that axiomatically makes him a martyr. Jesus was killed. No way around that. And he was killed by the Romans. No way around that. He was also deified in some fashion by his followers. No way around that. Simply writing a story that Jesus wasn't in some way a special messenger from Jehovah wouldn't work, you'd have to find a way to destroy the idea that he was a martyr for their cause and the way to do that would be to turn him into a messiah; to "one up" the martyrdom. And then once you've done that by culling through the OT to tie Jesus to messianic prophecy you blame the Jews for betraying and killing him. You then would no longer have a martyr for a cause against Rome; you'd have a Jewish messiah that even the Romans could see was a messenger from their God that the Jews killed.

All blame goes to the Jews (as, btw, has historically been the case) while Pilate is not just exonerated, but appears to also mysteriously just know that Jesus is divine or "of their god" in some way and thus you employ more Jewish culling and have him wash his hands of the whole affair, culminating in even a lowly Roman guard acknowledging Jesus' special divinity; a divinity made all the more incongruous because it comes from a Roman and therefore makes the story all the more believable.

That would be the point, of course; to make the story believable to Jews and you do that by using as many Jewish references as you could get away with. Indeed, having Pilate wash his hands implies that he was more "Jewish" than the San Hedrin and including a Roman guard recognizing Jesus' messianic divinity states, "See? Even a non-Jew knew what your fathers and grandfathers knew!"

It explains the entire Roman Christian Empire and how and why it got started and how and why its legacy is our foreign (and domestic) standard operating procedure.

He goes even further and states it is the Jews who killed Jesus:

Which makes it all the stranger that Mark would then come along a few years later and write a story in which it is the Romans who killed Jesus, unless, of course, Paul's "message" was repeatedly challenged and not accepted by those who knew that it was the Romans who had killed Jesus.

Once again, it does not.

That's assuming the story Mark wrote down came after the Temple was destroyed and not either just prior or coincident. Once again, when we send troops into a country we also drop tons of propaganda pamphlets just prior to and throughout; all of which paint us to be the good guys and their "leaders" to be all brutal, worthless, untrustworthy bastards that no one should follow or have any allegiance to.

It didn't "cater" to them at all. Remember, it is a story about their fathers and grandfathers, not about those living thirty to forty years later and its clear intention is to make their Jewish fathers and grandfathers out to be deceitful, conniving liars who colluded with their enemy to kill a person they knew to be their own messiah; the man their fathers and grandfathers were theoretically telling their children was a martyr for their cause against Rome.

Well, at the height of this movement, here comes a story that says Jesus was not a martyr for their cause killed by the Romans, but their messiah forced to be killed by the Jews. Pilate not only declares him innocent, but sets him free and he would have been free, but for the bloodthirsty Jews; the fathers' and grandfathers' jealousy right at the time when the Jewish revolution against the Romans was in full revolt.

As if to say to the children of those fathers and grandfathers, "You have no quarrel with the Romans; it is your own fathers and grandfathers who killed your beloved leader. Jesus did not come with a sword, he came to bring peace as a messiah from your god and your elders killed him because of it."

Once again for auld lang syne, classic military propaganda techniques that would have been employed during any kind of revolution; in particular one as severe as the Jewish revolt of 67 C.E. was.

:huh:

spamandham

Well, at least we both agree the story reads like fiction.

If that were the case, then why does the story read as if he is a martyr?! For someone trying to prevent building him up as a martyr, they certainly went out of their way to build him up as a martyr.

How does having Pilate perform Jewish rituals undermine Judaism? Put yourself in the place of ancient Jews reading this story. Would the idea of Pilate capitulating to your unlawful demands and performing Jewish rituals tend to placate you, or to embolden you? Rome is represented as farcically weak.

If Pilate is the procurator, and he is afraid, the implication is that Rome is weak. Was it commonplace in times of war for the winning side to send out propaganda making themselves appear weak?

That isn't further, it's orthogonal.

You can start to see why the story in Mark involves the Jews being guilty...because that's what Paul said. Paul never involves Rome in any way. The fact that Paul says Jesus was killed by the Jews, and Mark seems to be spinning it as "well, yes, but not entirely", is an indicator that Mark was written by a Jew straddling the fence, not a Roman trying to revise history.

The author is someone who didn't want the Jews to be guilty, yet also can't get away with denying what Paul had said. The author is familiar with Jewish scriptures, hence the parallels with them. The author is either so immersed in Judaism that he doesn't recognize the absurdity of Pilate performing Jewish rituals, or intends Pilate to represent something else. None of this indicates a Roman revisionist history.

Another possibility is that the story is a work of actual fiction, designed to harmonize competing ideas the author had. Gee, does this sound at all familiar?

Koyaanisqatsi

Absolutely. Indeed, it is clearly fictional; the only question I have is whether it was based on some sort of real event and I think I've made that case.

It doesn't! That's the point. A martyr to a first century Jew under Roman occupation would mean that he died fighting against the Romans; not that he was a radical Rabbi betrayed by the San Hedrin out of some sort of implied divine jealousy in order to maintain their control/power.

No, they build him up as a messiah, which, again, is entirely different than a martyr.

First of all, he doesn't perform Jewish rituals, plural; the author uses one reference to 2 Samuel (an incongruous one, in fact, for a Jewish writer to use as you attempted previously) and he uses it to imply that Pilate is more Jewish than the leaders of the Jews; that he tried everything he could to free Jesus, but it was "the Jews" who demanded he kill their messiah and thus he washes his hands of the whole affair.

I have repeatedly and the inclusion of this particular reference makes perfect sense if it were written by a Roman culling the OT for relevant references to establish all that I've laid out.

Again, Pilate does not capitulate; he goes to great lengths to free Jesus (and actually does). Then he performs a Roman ritual (that never happened anywhere in Roman history) of freeing one convicted criminal on Passover. It is the crowd of Jews who demand he crucify Jesus, so the depiction is one of Pilate overwhelmed by the fickle, confusing bloodlust of a crowd that has been "riled up" by the San Hedrin and Pilate basically goes, "You're all fucking nuts, I wash my hands of it, you are the ones who demanded this innocent man--one of your own--be killed. So be it."

No, Pilate is presented as (farcically to history) sympathetic to Jesus and the "crowd of Jews" are depicted as being the ones who so desperately want Jesus killed (for no apparent reason, either; just because the San Hedrin somehow managed to rile them up).

And, again, we're talking about a story that was written some thirty to forty years after Pilate had already been recalled to Rome due to all of the complaints against his rule; a story about a different time when the Jewish revolution as the audience of Mark would have seen it as being in its infancy and Roman brutality not nearly as prevalent as it was currently (i.e., to the audience in Mark's day).

No, it would be, at best, that Pilate was weak and since he was recalled thirty to forty years before this story was written, who would care? No one in Mark's audience would think that the current batch of Roman occupiers were weak in any way just from reading a story about the past where a recalled Roman procurator "washed his hands" of what he saw as a crazed, bloodthirsty crowd of Jews being influenced by their own religious leaders.

Enough with the straw, yes? The story in no way would make the then current occupiers appear weak; at best it would only make a long since recalled "governor" look weak from thirty or forty years ago.

That would be like writing a story today making New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller appear to not be tough enough on Abby Hoffman or the hippy movement of the early seventies.

Not at all. Considering Paul comes before Mark, his initial attempts would be to blame the Jews for killing their own Lord. It doesn't work because it is well known that it was the Romans who killed Jesus, so the propaganda gets revised to spin that.

Which, again makes even less sense that Mark would then include not just that the Romans were involved, but that they were central; that they, in fact, killed Jesus.

Unless, of course, if they actually did kill Jesus and no one was buying Paul's version as preached.

Categorically false. Mark tells the story that the Romans tortured, mocked and crucified a Jewish messiah, going to great, ridiculous lengths to blame that torture, mockery and crucifixion on the Jews (and not just the San Hedrin; not just the orthodoxy). No Jew would write such a story.

He doesn't deny what Paul has said at all and he clearly does want the Jews to be guilty; he goes to great lengths to establish that, including using the reference of the washing of the hands to imply where the "true" Jewish sentiment resides; to say to his audience of Jews that Pilate was more truly Jewish than the San Hedrin and the earlier generation of Jews were, so don't do as your fathers and granfathers tell you to do; hate them, not the Romans. Your elders are lying to you; the real story is this one, where Pilate did everything in his power to free a Jewish messiah, but your own people wouldn't let him, so he recognizes their insanity and washes his hands of the whole affair, just as in 2 Samuel...etc., etc.

Black is white and white is black.

Yet gets them fundamentally wrong like a Jew would not, hellenized or no.

ONE reference to a Jewish ritual. Please stop stuffing that strawman.

Exactly. To represent the "true" Jewish Scotchman, if you will, at least in sentiment and understanding that none of the Jews of his day are capable of seeing, due, presumably to their evil, blind devotion to their own power structure. The San Hedrin are depicted as people who tacitly sense Jesus' divinity and yet incongruously do everything in their power (including attempted collusion with the Jews mortal enemy of the day) to get him killed (when they could have just killed him themselves at any time they wanted to and supposedly tried twice before).

Again, categorically false, IMO. All of it points to precisely that and certainly not toward Jews writing any of this pro-Roman, anti-Judaic nonsense.

Competing ideas about what? That it was the Jews who are to blame for killing their own messiah, because that's the story whether it comes from Paul or from Mark?

spamandham

I don't think we're going to see eye to eye. Your explanations seem terribly contorted to me, and neither am I making any inroad in establishing any concensus other than what we both started with - a fictional account.

Koyaanisqatsi

Let me try one last time to sum up the chronology as I see it and if you still don't see any merit in it, so be it:

1. A leader of a popular Jewish insurrectionist movement in 30 C.E. (circa) is captured, tried, publicly tortured and mocked, then crucified as a warning to all would be insurrectionists (in keeping with what crucifixion was typically used for)
2. The effect of this event causes this leader to become a martyr in the eyes of his "soldiers" (for lack of a better term), who do as they were told to do and go into hiding, so from a Roman perspective, the crucifixion did its job and the "movement" is destroyed
3. While in hiding, however, they regroup clandestinely and start to rebuild their insurrectionist movement, only now they have a powerful symbol to recruit with; that of a martyr, whose legend and "divine" status as such grows from telling to telling at recruitment/training meetings all around the region
4. In 36 C.E. the man responsible for turning their leader into a martyr is recalled by Rome due to the many complaints against his rule, thereby affording a sort of power vacuum at the changing of the guard, as well as a vindication of this new insurrectionist's movement. In short, they are emboldened by the fact that their primary enemy--who martyrd their fallen leader--has been disgraced
5. Over the ensuing two decades (36-56 C.E.) this new movement grows and they resume the seditionist attacks, only now they have a sort of deified symbol--the Martyr Yeshua--to focus their recruitment and drive and mission, etc., around. This was not just a man, but a messenger from Jehovah who came to bring a sword, not peace against the enemies of God's chosen people and his legend also grows exponentially. He could heal the sick, raise the dead, feed the hungry, etc. His martyrdom is automatically a symbolic cheating of death and his movement continues in his name. Not even death can stop Yeshua or for those who believe in him
6. This growing revolution becomes a great concern to Rome, so they dispatch operatives to infiltrate the group. Intelligence recon, if you will, say around 56-60, if not sooner. The "intel" describes a now fanatical devotion to the Martyr Yeshua--a demigod to most, or some variant of a messenger from their God--whose anti-Roman teachings and seditionist ways are indoctrinated into the new generation of insurrectionists
7. Based on this kind of intel, Rome decides that this movement must be cut off at its ideological head in order for it to die and that means propaganda, so they send in Paul as "one of them" and his mission is to try and subvert their hatred of Rome and shift it on to the Jewish leaders (turning brother against brother; again, classic military propaganda techniques, which the Romans are no strangers to)
8. Paul's attempts in and around 64 C.E. to blame the Jews for killing their own leader/Lord don't really work on the main targets, but he finds it works with "fringe" Jews and Gentiles. The main reason it doesn't work is that the main targets--the new Yeshua movement--know that it was the Romans who killed their leader, not the Jewish San Hedrin and their hatred for the Romans is, by now, a religious fervor. Yeshua was martyrd in his fight against the Romans, the enemies of the Jews and that martyrdom is the basis for claims Yeshua was a special messenger from their God to instruct them on how to behave toward their oppressors, etc.
9. So a new story needs to be written and disseminated; a far more in depth one that uses their own religion against the Jews; new propaganda that acknowledges and incorporates the Roman role in Yeshua's death, but flips it around so that it is the Jewish leaders and the "crowd of Jews" during their high holiday who kill not a martyr, but their own messiah! A more damning accusation could not be made.
10. Just as our own war time propaganda attests, this story is disseminated just prior to or coincident with the military response to the Jewish revolt a few years later; as the troops move in to sack the city, so do the propagandists to convince anyone they can that it wasn't the Romans to blame, but the Jews and thus the revolution is not warrented and their own leader--their messiah--was sent to tell them to obey earthly authority and render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and that their true enemy is their own Jewish leaders; their fathers and grandfathers who conspired with Pilate--who refused, but had no choice, even washing his hands of the whole affair, just like your Jewish ancestor, etc.--to kill your savior! Do not follow your Jewish leaders for they are lying to you and we aren't your enemies, they are; your own parents and grandparents are to blame for what we are now forced to do to you and your holy city

Consider all of the historical incidents where this kind of incongruous propaganda has been used by tyranical oppressors; the Nazis putting "Work Shall Set You Free" on the gates of Auschwitz is an excellent example, up to and including the propaganda campaigns that are part and parcel to every American military involvement.

As the troops move in to brutally slaughter the Jews in Jerusalem, so too would the propagandists move in just prior and throughout, doing everything they could to get any Jewish revolutionary to see black as white. Your leaders are to blame for all of this. Your God sent his "only son" to you and your leaders killed him and this is your God's response; this is your punishment for not seeing who the true enemies among you were.

And once the smoke cleared and the Temple was sacked and the revolution destroyed, all of the propaganda is now vindicated. What else could a deeply superstitious people like the Jews think after their holy Temple was destroyed by what was supposed to be their enemies and therefore the enemeis of their God?

And since the victors are the ones who write the history, there you have it. The use of the propaganda still holds currency; there are still surviving members of the insurrectionist revolt of 70 C.E. now spread throughout the region, once again in hiding, so the job of the propagandists--of the new "christian" cult--is not finished and a useful tool is kept in place and augmented and itself grows to ensure that everyone in the region and beyond knows that it was the Jews who brought their own destruction upon them by killing their own savior and the Romans (through Pilate) who had recognized this divinity and did everything in their power to prevent the bloodlust of the Jews. Hate the Jews; scourge the Jews; the Jews were wrong!

Which naturally must mean the Romans were right and therefore as the only ones who saw it and tried to prevent it, they must be beloved by Jehovah and must be the chosen ones and not the Jews as was once claimed.

Co-opt and flip Judaism and black is white turning a one-time martyr into a timeless messiah--a God, no less as Roman pantheism would necessitate--and you now have a complete understanding of how the Roman Empire becomes over time the Holy Roman Empire, with a religion that is the "new covenant" (with paganism and pantheism thrown in over the years) and no one from that day forward (but the Jews) questions it. Or if they do, they will be killed.

:huh: