No Robots

And the high priest said to him: I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us if thou be the Christ the Son of God.
Jesus saith to him: Thou hast said it.--Mt. 26:63-4

For he knew that for envy they had delivered him.--Mt. 27:18

It's like the old joke: What do you ask the mystic hot dog man? To make you one with everything.

No Robots

Nope. Call me old peg leg.

Boro Nut

Scene : Woodstock

Hey man. Gimme a hot dog.

Hey man. The hot dogs are ALL GONE, man.

Oh Wow....... Better gimme two.

Boro Nut

jakejonesiv

In an earlier post, I examined how the meta text of the story the betrayal and execution evolved over time. It bears all the ear marks of a myth evolution. But now we come to the final stage of attribution of guilt.

Ultimately, the Christians came to blame the Jews for the alleged execution of Jesus and whitewashed the Romans (and themselves!). That is why the betrayer was named Judah/Judas.

Ugly antisemitism is found throughout the New Testament.

Matthew 27:25
And all the people said, "His blood shall be on us and on our children!"

How convienent. What a perfect excuse for Christians to persecute Jews through the centuries.

In fact, there are hints of an alternate tradition where Jesus was crucified by the Jews, not the Romans.

Pilate is reported to say to the chief priests and their officials, "You take him and crucify him.." John 19:6. If we take this literally, it is explicit permission from the ruling Roman authority for the Jews to crucify Jesus themselves.


Let's look a little closer.

Luke 24:20
20and how the chief priests and our rulers delivered him to the sentence of death, and crucified him.

Acts 2:22-23
22Men of Israel, listen to these words: Jesus the Nazarene, a man attested to you by God with miracles and wonders and signs which God performed through him in your midst, just as you yourselves know--
23this man, delivered over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God, you nailed to a cross by the hands of godless men and put him to death.

Even when the Romans perform the execution, there is no mitigation for the Jews. And the guilt is not attributed to the Jewish rulers alone, but all Jewish people.

Acts 13:27-29
27For those who live in Jerusalem, and their rulers, recognizing neither him nor the utterances of the prophets which are read every Sabbath, fulfilled these by condemning him.
28And though they found no ground for putting him to death, they asked Pilate that he be executed.
29When they had carried out all that was written concerning him, they (Jesus' enemies?) took him down from the cross and laid him in a tomb.

Even the post-Pauline interpolation of 1 Thessalonians reeks of antisemitism.

1 Thessalonians 2:14-15
the Jews, who both killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets

We are back to the Jews killing Jesus without any mention of the Romans.

Boro Nut titles this thread approprately, A Rather Embarrassing Question for Christians.

This is bad stuff. All Christians need to be ashamed of what their holy book says, especially those who claim the Bible is inerrant. But even moderate and liberal Christians need to examine their religion, since it is based on a tissue of intolerance. And the most bitter irony is that it was all based on the alleged death of a guy who probably never existed.

Jacob Jones IV

dzim77

I never understood this idea... Jesus is a Jew, Peter and Paul are Jews, Mary is a Jew, all the "good guys" in the NT are Jews. Just because Pilate 'washed his hand' does not mean the NT writers didn't consider him guilty.
Paul said he would let his soul be eternally condemned for his people, the Jews, if that were possible. Jesus said "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."

The NT does not condemn an ethnic group, rather it warns those who reject God's grace given to us in Jesus...and the people who did that in the gospels happen to be Jews.

(Notice that there are Greeks who reject the message of Christ in the book of Acts, too!)

edit:
The OT is full of rebuke towards the people of Israel. Is the author of Malachi anti-semetic too?

No Robots

Not bad. Not bad at all. (Tip)

Gundulf

Perhaps that's why crucifixion was used - the Roman soldier could just say, "Hey man, all I did was nail him to the 2X4s and left him there. He went and died on his own."

Slightly more seriously - Peter (in Luke's account, at least) seems to blame God and people both - "This man was handed over to you by God's set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross."

No Robots

The entire NT was written by, for, and about Jews. Some of these, notably John, "had become", in Constantin Brunner's words, "such fervent Christians in their enthusiasm for the new knowledge that they had to demonstrate a commensurate hatred for the other Jews and their Judaism" (Our Christ, 441).

Gentile Christians have long tried to uproot Christ from his Jewish background. Mythicists merely perpetuate this ignoble tradition.

jgibson000

I wrote:

Where do we find "self identification" (let alone a "mystical one") with the father" at the seat, or as the cause, of the charge of blasphemy that is reported as having been leveled against Jesus in any of the Gospel accounts of his trial?

"No Robots" (sheesh) replied:
Good gawd. Are you actually saying that a confession that one is the Christ/hUIOS TOU QEOU was not only considered blasphemous in first century Judaism, but that it is essentially a claim to be the God of Israel???

If so, I suggest that you know nothing of first century Judaism, what was and was not regarded therein as blasphemous, what such titles as XRISTOS and hUIOS TOU QEOU meant in that milieu, and what Matthew (or his source Mark) was intending to convey in having the High Priest react as he does in response to Jesus' answer to his question.

Perhaps you'd like to test your assertion -- as it appears that you haven't previously -- against (1) the data on (a) what constituted blasphemy in first century Judaism and (b) whether a christological confession such as we find in Matthew and Mark was (and would have been) regarded by Mathew and Mark, let alone Caiaphas, as an "identification" with God, that is set out in Ray Brown's The Death of the Messiah (or via: amazon.co.uk), Darrell Bock's Blasphemy and Exaltation in Judaism: The Charge against Jesus in Mark 14:53-65 (or via: amazon.co.uk), and Adela Yarbro Collins' "The Charge of Blasphemy in Mark 14:64" in the volume edited by G. Van Oyen and T. Shepherd entitled The Trial and Death of Jesus: Essays on the Passion Narrative in Mark, as well as (2) the arguments on Mk. 14:64 that I presented in my article "The Function of the Charge of Blasphemy in Mark 14:64" that was published in the Van Oyen/Shepherd Volume.

And I'm still waiting for an actual explanation of what "mystical identification" is and how functionally and behaviourally is distinct and differs from any other type of "identification. Your likening it to an old joke was neither helpful nor an answer.

JG

jgibson000

Umm, was Galatians written for Jews? Was 1 Thessalonians? Colossians? Luke (was Theophilus a Jew?)?

:banghead:

JG