askchapo

They Suffered under Pontius Pilate: Jewish Anti-Roman Resistance and the Crosses at Golgotha. Fernando Rubio, 2023. This one takes a look in detail at the Gospels' stories, arguing 1) Jesus was arrested, tried and executed by the Romans for rebellion, not the Jewish priesthood for blasthemy; 2) the early christians transformed his fellow martyrs, on his right and left, into bandits to dissociate their movement from rebellion; 3) the focus on Jesus and his divinity is a complete departure from his teachings which; 4) replace the actual socioeconomic sufferingsof the period and his parables with focus on the spiritual sufferings (e.g. transformation of "blessed are the poor" to "blessed are the poor in spirit")

I've been exposed to this argument before, and it has profoundly changed how I read the Gospels. The cracks that break it all down are two very single observations:

1. The Romans by all objective accounts were the Christkillers, not Jews. It was the Romans who scourged Christ, it was the Romans who drove the nails into his body, and it was the Romans who almost ran a spear through his body in order to hasten his death.

2. Despite the objective fact that the title of Christkiller should be placed upon the collective heads of the Romans, do the received Gospels actively portray the Romans as Christkillers or do they try to obfuscate this objective fact?

A lot of the parables and events also make more sense when you remember that Judea is being occupied by Rome. Jesus chasing out the tax collectors was him decolonizing a temple by throwing out Roman collaborators. Jesus telling the young rich man he's not going to heaven is basically him telling off some Roman collaborator who got rich out of selling out his fellow Judean. Judas was the ancient equivalent of a Palestinian working with Mossad for money.