- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@piefed.social
- cross-posted to:
- historymemes@piefed.social
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Explanation: In the Christian Gospels, Pontius Pilate comes off as a reasonable-if-aloof figure. He, in a very Roman fashion, doesn’t seem to care much about the religious quarrels of the Iudeans, and seeks legal cause for his actions and inaction. He is eventually pressured into crucifying a man whom he believes does not really merit the harsh punishment by the implicit threat of rebellion.
In other histories, however, Pilate comes off as… less sympathetic. He constantly treads on Jewish norms in favor of Roman norms, threatening the Jewish population and only relenting when sufficient pushback is presented, and in general running roughshod over the provincial Iudeans, including the Iudean king. In one notable incident, Pilate ordered legionaries in plainclothes to gather along with an angry Iudean mob and, at a preordained signal, begin beating the Iudeans with clubs to confuse and disperse them from within.
There is a certain amount of similarity in these depictions, insofar as Pilate is consistently portrayed as without much in the way of understanding or sympathy for Jewish culture, but in the Gospels, he comes off as distant; whereas in other histories, he comes off as more distinctly hostile.
I’m not sure why it says “Flavius and Josephus”; I suspect the original meme-maker meant “Philo and Josephus”, a typo confusing Flavius Josephus’s full name with another historian of the period.
I just finished “Zealot” by Reza Aslan. Its a book about the historical Jesus but its mostly about making assumptions based on everything else we know about this time period. Which I recommend heavily to anyone who wants to know more.
But according Reza, Pilate had to be rehabilitated because of the Jewish revolt that lead to Rome’s total destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE.
The short version, Jesus was actually a Jewish ethno Nationalist rebel (modern terms on ancient people but basically that) the biggest piece of evidence for this is that he was crucified, an execution the romans only gave to people who commit sedition. He was also an itinerant preacher. He was mostly the first thing but he said enough based things and did enough good magick (debatable miracles see Celsus) that he formed a religion on accident it seems.
After Jesus’s death, it was hard to convert Jews to be a follower of Jesus because they would have known his Messiah claims to mean King of the Jews and liberator from the Romans, which you can’t do if you’re dead. So Paul, to the disdain of the actual disciples of Jesus in Jerusalem who are fully still alive and doing things including Jesus’s brother James who Jesus named as his successor, Paul starts converting non-jews (gentiles) in Rome.
Then after Jerusalem is destroyed completely by the romans, Pauline converts and inheritors of the faith, have to heavily tone down the whole brutality of Rome thing to be within the authorities good graces and not get crucified for promoting the words of a seditious rebel.
Unfortunately, this meant they could only make one other group the bad guy here since class consciousness wasn’t really a thing (Jesus was probably more mad at the wealthy hereditary priest class of the Jewish cult than anything) so the Jews got the blame for Jesus’s death and laid the justification for 2000 years of European and Asian antisemitism.
I just finished “Zealot” by Reza Aslan. Its a book about the historical Jesus but its mostly about making assumptions based on everything else we know about this time period. Which I recommend heavily to anyone who wants to know more.
It’s… an extremely dubious piece even as speculation.
The short version, Jesus was actually a Jewish ethno Nationalist rebel (modern terms on ancient people but basically that) the biggest piece of evidence for this is that he was crucified, an execution the romans only gave to people who commit sedition.
The Romans only crucified citizens who were treasonous (or deserters).
Provincials, like Jesus, would have been eligible for crucifixion for a much wider variety of crimes.
Then after Jerusalem is destroyed completely by the romans, Pauline converts and inheritors of the faith, have to heavily tone down the whole brutality of Rome thing to be within the authorities good graces and not get crucified for promoting the words of a seditious rebel.
Paul is generally accepted to have died before the First Jewish-Roman War, and the Romans continued to regard Christianity as dangerous and fringe for the next 200 years - including intermittently crucifying Christians for spreading the word of their faith.
Unfortunately, this meant they could only make one other group the bad guy here since class consciousness wasn’t really a thing (Jesus was probably more mad at the wealthy hereditary priest class of the Jewish cult than anything) so the Jews got the blame for Jesus’s death and laid the justification for 2000 years of European and Asian antisemitism.
More realistically, the bad blood between Christians and Jews was basically from the start. To the Jews, especially in that period of fundamentalism, the Christians were heretics and cultists who were threatening to bring YHWH’s wrath down on the Jewish people by violating the contract of the Jewish people with YHWH. Jewish and Christian sects violently quarreled by some interpretations as early as Claudius’s reign, though that early position requires some serious speculation about a single incident mentioned by primary sources.
Furthermore, the Romans generally, and especially with the Jews, let communities run their own affairs according to their traditional ways, generally under traditional elites. To Jewish community leaders all across the Empire, encountering Christians would be encountering people whose primary evangelical goal is to weaken your community (and thus your power). Hostility is thus to be expected from Jewish communities, which feeds the cycle of feuding.
On top of that, Christianity is in the strange position of acknowledging, in Abrahamic mythology, the supremacy of the Jewish people as YHWH’s chosen people, but also insisting that there is no room for any other religious practice in a Christian society. “There is no way to the Father except through me.” So antisemitism has much more to do with it being ‘uncomfortable’ for Christians to entirely obliterate the Jewish population by force (Jesus was a Jew, and Jews are God’s chosen people, after all!) despite that being the preferred option when dealing with every other faith.
It’s… an extremely dubious piece even as speculation.
I honestly don’t know how any piece on the historical Jesus could be less speculative. It seems we only have one non biblical text that mentions Jesus specifically and its Josefus saying they killed James brother of Jesus sometime before 70 CE. I can’t remember if that was solid evidence for some other reason than timing since both James and Jesus were incredibly common names.
In my opinion, Aslan did a fine job explaining the tensions and why they were high outside of Jesus’s cult and then extrapolating from there. But this is just my first book on the historical Jesus I’ve ever read and it was recommended by some guy on reddit I guess 4 years ago.
So please consider any defenses as Luke warm defenses at best. I’m not married to these ideas
Paul is generally accepted to have died before the First Jewish-Roman War, and the Romans continued to regard Christianity as dangerous and fringe for the next 200 years - including intermittently crucifying Christians for spreading the word of their faith.
Yes, I was referencing the people who would have followed Paul’s tradition since he is the one who makes claims about a metaphysical kingdom of god in heaven as opposed to the claim that this is about restoring Israel to Jewish rule. The idea was attractive to non-Jews thus facilitating new Roman Christians and it was common practice to attribute writings to a founder of a tradition which is why most of Paul was probably not written by him (?). Same thing as to why all of Socrates was written by Plato.
I honestly don’t know how any piece on the historical Jesus could be less speculative. It seems we only have one non biblical text that mentions Jesus specifically and its Josefus saying they killed James brother of Jesus sometime before 70 CE.
That doesn’t change the ability to roughly estimate the likely position of the historical Jesus as an anti-establishment Jewish preacher active around roughly ~30 AD who quarreled with the established Jewish priesthood and was executed with the acquiescence of Roman officials (who would not have been fond of the Jewish priesthood sentencing people to death without Rome’s consent). Shit, if mentioning magic and divinity was disqualifying, even Herodotus would have to be cast out. Sources are examined critically, to see how they fit with or clash with other sources of the time, their own narratives, known practices, archeology, etc.
We recreate from imperfect sources, like the Gospels and Pauline Epistles, all the time; not to mention the general consistency of Christian writers in the first two centuries AD in an era before the printing press, amongst less-literate populations of the Empire, cast over a great geographical area, and forced to operate in secret due to tensions with the Jewish communities and the Roman government.
The idea of a historical Jesus is generally an attempt to fit the likely real historical preacher of Yeshua bar Yoseph with later accounts; thus, the idea of a historical Jesus is to minimize baseless speculation and maximize what is likely from what we know. Aslan gets basic facts wrong in addition to his wild and baseless speculation. It’s not a great starting point.
I’m not saying it’s wrong to have enjoyed it or found it thought-provoking, but it’s definitely not a text that gets mentioned without comment when there’s some pedantic Romaboo dragging his knuckles around the comm. :p
I’m not saying it’s wrong to have enjoyed it or found it thought-provoking, but it’s definitely not a text that gets mentioned without comment when there’s some pedantic Romaboo dragging his knuckles around the comm. :p
This is specifically why I like you Pug. I think it’s far too common on the internet for some one to share a fun fact they learned and then get dog piled by people just wanting to be right without respect for that person’s desire to learn.
That being said, those are all points that seemed important and Aslan did bring up and I latched onto. I as a fresh enjoyer of the field of Christology, couldn’t tell you where the problems are and I’m gonna be annoying and ask for a good intro to why Aslan sucks AKA SoUrCe? but I’m also gonna go looking on jstor and my university library for book reviews after.
Otherwise, I was going to read Bart Erhman’s “Did Jesus Exist?” book next. Maybe I’ll check for reviews first this time, but what are your suggestions for historical Jesus stuff?
Otherwise, I was going to read Bart Erhman’s “Did Jesus Exist?” book next. Maybe I’ll check for reviews first this time, but what are your suggestions for historical Jesus stuff?
Honestly, I probably couldn’t recommend a better source. Not because that’s necessarily the best around, but because that was probably the most recent book on Christology I read, and I read it back when I was in college. XD
Ehrman’s work is very much within the academic consensus about the historical nature of Jesus. Forgery And Counter-Forgery is the only other book of his I read (also largely on early Christianity), and I remember enjoying it very much.
I probably wouldn’t even be aware of Aslan’s work except that it became infamous in like, my first or second year of college (and that a few of the arguments presented, such as Jesus as an anti-Roman rebel, are regularly floated online).
