Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [28]
ben Yehoshua continues the critique as to the purported "history" of the New Testament:
The story of Jesus's trial is also highly suspicious. It clearly tries to placate the Romans while defaming the Jews. The historical Pontius Pilate was arrogant and despotic. He hated the Jews and never delegated any authority to them. However, in Christian mythology, he is portrayed as a concerned ruler who distanced himself from the accusations against Jesus and who was coerced into obeying the demands of the Jews. According to Christian mythology, every Passover, the Jews would ask Pilate to free any one criminal they chose. This is, of course, a blatant lie. Jews never had a custom of freeing guilty criminals at Passover or any other time of the year. According to the myth, Pilate gave the Jews the choice of freeing Jesus the Christ or a murderer named Jesus Barabbas. The Jews are alleged to have enthusiastically chosen Jesus Barabbas. This story is a vicious antisemitic lie, one of many such lies found in the New Testament (largely written by antisemites).
Walker points out other errors of fact and perception about the part of the world in question during the era of Jesus's alleged advent:
The most "historical" figure in the Gospels was Pontius Pilate, to whom Jesus was presented as "king" of the Jews and simultaneously as a criminal deserving the death penalty for "blasphemy" because he called himself Christ, Son of the Blessed. . . . This alleged crime was no real crime. Eastern provinces swarmed with self-styled Christs and Messiahs, calling themselves Sons of God and announcing the end of the world. None of them was executed for "blasphemy."32
Mangasarian concurs that the story is implausible:
A Roman judge, while admitting that he finds no guilt in Jesus deserving of death, is nevertheless represented as handing him over to the mob to be killed, after he has himself scourged him. No Roman judge could have behaved as this Pilate is reported to have behaved toward an accused person on trial for his life.
And Massey states:
The account of Pilate's shedding the blood the Galileans and mingling it with their sacrifices (Luke xiii. 1) has been added by some one so ignorant of the Hebrew history, that he has ascribed to Pilate an act which was committed when Quirinius was governor, twenty-four years earlier than the alleged appearance of Jesus.33
In order to shore up their fallacious claims of Christ being crucified under Pilate, Christian forgers even went so far as to produce the "Acts of Pilate," which at one point was considered "canonical." After the canon was formalized, the book was deemed "spurious," thus demonstrating that it was merely an opinion as to what was "inspired" and what was "forged." The Acts of Pilate purports to relate the trial of Jesus before Pilate, in accordance with the canonical gospel accounts but in greater detail. Some of the scenes of this book were lifted from The Iliad:
... Pilate has been turned into Achilles, ... Joseph is the good old Priam, begging the body of Hector, and the whole story is based upon the dramatic passages of the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad.34
The Acts of Pilate, also called the Gospel of Nicodemus, even goes so far as to purport to be a record of the actual conversations of the astonished faithful and prophets of old, such as David and Enoch, who have been resurrected from the dead after Jesus's own resurrection and ascension! This "true" gospel also contains a ludicrous conversation between Satan and his "prince" in Hell. The fictitious nature of such writings is obvious, as is, ultimately, that of the gospels.
Furthermore, the gospel accounts of Jesus's passion and resurrection differ utterly from each other, and none states how old he was when he died. In fact, the early Church fathers were constantly bickering over how old