History Memes

No strong opinions on the general historicity of the gospels here, but I would like to point out a few things:

1. I don't know that the purpose was really to brand themselves as not-rebels. I mean, hell, one of Christ's disciplines is a Zealot. It certainly didn't help them with the whole 'Please don't stamp us out' thing, since Christians were intermittent scapegoats for local problems for 300 years.

2. I think if we're giving the gospels the benefit of the doubt with regards to at least attempting to record actual events, that it does make a certain amount of sense of a Roman perspective, especially from one as disinterested in Iudean customs as Pontius Pilate. To Pilate, what he hears is "Local guy has pissed off local rulers and now they want me to kill him? What, is this what a magistrate of Rome is supposed to do? Enforce local vendettas? Fuck off, I'll bring this to the people, they'll reject what is obviously a bullshit charge, and that humiliate you and reinforce ROMAN authority in this province." But to the Iudeans, what they hear is "Dangerous heretic threatening to bring YHWH's wrath on our heads for wrongthink, the priesthood said so!" So Pilate's reaction is frustrated and confused throughout, as such a view simply would not have made sense in the context of Roman religio, but was core and intuitive to Jewish theology of the period. Especially since the Jewish priesthood was much more integrated into the core faith; Roman priests were literally elected, or appointed basically as sinecures. Hell, Cicero was a priest and an atheist. Didn't stop him one bit.

3. The supposed tradition is certainly one of the more questionable aspects of the gospels, as, to my memory, there is no such tradition recorded anywhere else before the gospels.

4. Sectarian infighting was big amongst the Iudeans of the period. A few decades later, during the First Jewish Revolt, the sects would have a 3-way (at minimum) civil war... while under siege by the Romans in Jerusalem. That's not counting the sectarian conflicts outside of the siege area.