Posted by Pierre Charles on July 15, 1998 at 18:45:51:
Has anyone read The Making of the Messiah, by Robert Scheaffer ?
Strange that Jesus death is described like Judas one...
"The Making of the Messiah" presents a compelling argument that Jesus was never "crucified" by the Romans, or anyone else. The familiar Gospel account of Jesus' death is termed the "cruci- fiction story." Biblical scholars generally acknowledge that the confusing and contradictory Gospel accounts of Jesus' two trials make absolutely no sense from the perspective of either Roman or Jewish law. Resolving this dilemma, the book presents compelling evidence that Jesus was indeed condemned by the Sanhedrin as stated in Mark 14:64, stoned to death, and hanged on a tree until sundown: the inescapable penalty under the Mosaic law for blasphemers and heretics. All of the ancient Rabbinical texts mentioning Jesus' death are totally consistent in recalling that he was "slain and hanged on a tree." There are even a fe! w passages remaining in the oldest books of the New Testament proclaiming Jesus to have been slain and "hanged on a tree" - for example, Acts 5:30 and Galatians 3:13. These passages are NOT metaphor: they describe the punishment Jesus MUST have suffered if found guilty of the charges he faced! (See Deuteronomy 13:10; 21:22.) How did the cruci-fiction story arise? Several decades after Jesus' execution, when the infant Church sought to recruit converts among the Gentiles, the tale of a Jewish prophet "slain and hanged on a tree" probably failed to excite or inflame the listener. But when the story was changed to have Jesus "crucified" by the Romans, the tale electrified the resentful throughout the vast Empire.