eggnogstick

According to the gospels, the Jews broke many laws in their trial of Jesus. For example: It was held at Night.
Well, To get to the point, and this might sound funny, What if the gospels were writtin in order to capture Jesus's teachings. Keep with me here, now the passion narative is added just to cause an uproar against the Jews for killing the early disciples leaders. Now what I mean by causing an uproar is, that the early disciples wrote and taught and perhaps even died, for hate against the Jews for killing their leader. In other words, the passion is added, it isn't real. The trial was accurate. The passion was added afterwards to piss followers off. The trial was recorded in order to show that the Jews broke their own law in order to kill.
This would answer the Objection Craig makes: 'If Jesus didn't Rise from the dead, Why didn't the Jews display his body?' The Jews didn't come forward because they didn't want to admit that they commited a crime by breaking the law!
This thought just came up, and I wanted to record it before I forgot.

Ruiner

Eh, could be. But the insignificance of the HJ means that the Jews really didn't care about any cult following that would arise and didn't seek to diminish the cultist's claims by providing a body. But I wish they would have. Though that also makes me wonder which religion would have won out over the years and whether we'd be better off - Paganism most likely the winner for the western world, which isn't half bad.

Doug Shaver

How would they have proved it was his? Never mind DNA tests. They didn't have fingerprints or dental records, either, in those days.

Also, according to Christianity's official history, it was 40 days before any of the disciples went public with the claim that he had risen from the grave. Their opponents would have had no reason to produce the body before then. It would hardly have been recognizable by then.

eggnogstick

It was 50 days before they went public.

Doug Shaver

Right, it was. Thank you.

Forty days to the ascension, then another 10 to Pentecost.

Diogenes the Cynic

1. There is no evidence that anyone made any claim of a physical resurrection before the Gospel of Matthew, 50 years after the alleged crucifixion. This "why didn't they produce the body" canard is based on an unsupported assumption that the direct followers of Jesus claimed he had risen from the dead. There is no first hand testimony of any such thing.
2. "The Jews" didn't have the body, didn't know where it was and couldn't have proven it was Jesus in any case. If there was a crucified HJ then he was either left on the cross to rot or dumped in a shallow communal grave with other criminals. There was no way to find the body or prove whose it was.
3. "The Jews" had no reason to give a shit about disproving the claims of a few nutbags anyway.

Chris Weimer

Well, even if you don't subscribe to my particular theory that Jesus was a Jew killed by Romans, the trial still looks to be heavily fictionalized. The portrayal of Pontius Pilate as some touchy-feely guy in touch with his godly side is obviously written for pleasing Rome, and the way it was handled by the bureaucacy Roman and Jewish (and Roman-Jewish - Herod) just doesn't fit what we know of Roman trials. It's possible that, being only in a province, that this may have been irregularly done with no repercussions, but I seriously doubt it. The scene remains suspect.

ETA - And what Diogenes said.