Nice touch...with the bold
and color.
When do you step up to ALL CAPS?
You are still doing the Wallenstein MX130 routine, though.
Here, try this on for size:
Jesus Before Pilate: What’s Wrong with This Picture?
From your link.
The third incident in Josephus’s triptych describes the death of a Samaritan prophet and Pilate’s removal from office.It appears in Antquities18.4.1-2.
Samaria was an independent Jewish nation that rejected the Jerusalem-centered Temple tradition.
Your link is telling big lies.
Samaritans were descendants of the ten tribes of Israel who were exiled beyond the Euphrates. Great masses of the Israelite were sent out of the land, but always the farmers and poor class stayed in the land to keep it and avoid them to become wild or deserts. You can easily identify what I state when the Samaritan woman told Jesus that her ancestors owned the well, and the well in question was indeed the well of Joseph, one of the sons and head of one of the tribes of Israel.
Samaritans weren't Jewish. Samaritans were descendants of Israelite mixed with other peoples who inhabited that region after the exile.
Who was the Samaritan prophet?
hey had their own versions of the Books of Moses that justified Samaria 15 War,2.9.4, 176.as the center of Israelite polity. Samaria lay between Judea and Galilee and was apparently part of Pilate’s administrative domain.According to Josephus’s account, a revered Samaritan prophet said that he would go up Mount Gerizzim, the holy mountain of the Samaritans,and dig up sacred vessels placed there by Moses. Large crowds gathered in preparation for the trip up the mountain and many were armed. Pilate sent a military force in to slaughter the gathered Samaritans and ordered the troops to hunt down and kill any who escaped. The prophet appears to have been among the dead although Josephus doesn’t specifically say he was killed.
Surely that Samaritan prophet wasn't Jesus.
Lets continue
This certainly sounds like a monstrous act on Pilate’s part, a great offense to Jews that seems to have remained in the popular memory.But unfortunately, we have no further details about what happened and why.The evidence above clearly depicts a Pilate who is obstinate and violent and who doesn’t care what Jews think of him or what they want. If he gives an order he backs it forcefully, even if the opposing parties disagree for good reasons. He was a man who, among the many accusations against him, had no qualms about executing people without trials or evidence. He was ultimately removed from office for slaughtering a beloved Jewish prophet and his followers...
First, the letters say of a Samaritan prophet, and later the conclusion of Pilate's personality ends with a "Jewish prophet."
Definitively something wrong with your picture.
And again, when Pilate killed lots of Galileans, it is not saying killing "Jews". which should have been identified as such in Josephus writings.
On the other hand, Josephus dedicated a special narration about Jesus, even Josephus said the following:
About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.
- Jewish Antiquities, 18.3.3
Oh, but... sure, for you Antiquities 18.4.3 is valid but Antiquities 18.3.3 is a n aggregate "someone" wrote later. Isn't true?
Lets go now with the High Priest vestments.
The narration in your link shows that Pilates and Caiaphas were buddies.
Caiaphas served as High Priest throughout Pilate’s entire ten-year reign. He was appointed to the position eight years earlier by the previous governor, Gratus.
Raymond Brown has observed that Pilate was the only Governor who didn’t remove a High Priest from office whereas Gratus removed four High Priests in rapid succession
prior to appointing Caiaphas and this, he suggests,shows that there was a stable government under Pilate, which in turn, he further suggests, indicated reasonably good relations with the Jewish people.21Actually, it only shows a stable relationship between Pilate and the High Priest without defining what that relationship was.
What it can be assumed is that Pilate was piss off after the cadaver of the Christ wasn't found and in revenge took the broken vestments of the High Priest.
Pilate might have been a cruel governor, and he might was a great enemy of the Jewish people all the time, and for this reason Jews hated him even before the crucifixion of the Christ.
Pilate found a great opportunity to be against the Jewish people in front of him by playing the merciful authority. He even washed his hands making mockery of the Jewish tradition.
Your link is not giving the information of when the High Priest vestments were taken by the Roman authority. You have no base foundation to establish that Caiaphas didn't wear those before the crucifixion.
Later your link tries to discredit the gospels because one says "king of the Jews" the another says "the Messiah", and so forth.
What a great amount of incompetence!
Even in any case where there are four witness of an accident that happened yesterday night, the version of the four witness will contradict one to another in several details.
If all the gospels said exactly the same in their different passages, then the whole gospels should be a fraud.
But, the differences in relating the events and describing the characters show that they indeed are four different persons.
The one who is completely different than the rest, even when his narration coincides with the others, is Luke, because he wasn't one of the witness when the events happened. Luke collected the words of different witness and tried to put the versions in chronological order.
On the other hand, the other gospels are not in chronological order, something that is very natural in people when tell the story of a movie, or something that happened around.
To conclude.
The picture is that the Jewish authorities weren't sure of Jesus (Yeshu) as the expected Messiah. They knew that a Messiah will come, but they didn't expect their Aaronic priesthood to be dismantled when the Messiah arrived.
Before the Aaronic priesthood was the priesthood which we know by the scriptures was the Priesthood of the Order of Melchizedek.
This is the priesthood that Abraham knew and from which he learned YHWH's laws and statures, and etc.
The Aaronic priesthood was always to be a temporary priesthood, to be replaced by the priesthood of the Messiah.
The picture presents the Jewish authorities pushing their luck with a test of fire, proving if Yeshu was the Son of God.
They incited people to demand the sacrifice of Yeshu. They manipulated everything to verify the identity of Yeshu. They sent "spies" (Nicodemus) they hired traitors (Judas) and finally they got what they wanted, to make a foreign authority the one who ordered the death of Yeshu, just in case he becomes the real Messiah they can say...
who? ... me?... but I didn't order any killing that day...
Not only Caiaphas broke the High Priest vestments but the Temple's veil which covered the entrance of the Holy of Holies place went broken right when Yeshu died.
In other words, the Aaronic priesthood was over.
There is a new sheriff in town.
One one hand, the Jews were right, there wasn't other way to check the identity of the Messiah, but on the other hand they should accept their lost and recognize their mess.
In vain they try to point as guilty to Pilate, because it wasn't Pilate the one who ordered the arrest of Yeshu.
And a dude with two people with knives and the rest with fear is not a revolution that requires movement of troops. Come on.
Nice try but what is done is done and the excuses shown in the link given by you won't change what happened that day, that Pilate washed his hands mocking the Jews and tried the releasing of the one the Jews wanted dead.
Finally, what the heck, for Pilate was the same the son of Man or the son of God, he just wanted to watch the game at home with the family and those Jews were making too much scandal. He conceded the petition of his buddy Caiaphas and Yeshu was crucified.
End of the story.
