I'm going to try to show that the gospel accounts which implicate Jews in the death of Jesus can't be taken seriously.

If you aren't interested, please read something else instead.

If you've just come to this thread and you're wondering why I'm going to do this and what it has to do with Lord of the Dance, and you'd rather not read through the first 300 messages to see, here's a brief summary.

One stanza of LotD, to my reading, accuses the Jews of complicity in the death of Jesus. Just to make things clear, in this context when I write "the Jews" that's an abbreviation for "some or all of the Jews of the time of Jesus." I maintained that the Jews had nothing to do with the death of Jesus. Several people responded that the Jews must have had a great deal to do with the death of Jesus, since the gospels say so. I responded that the gospel accounts were wrong. I was asked, by several people, to provide evidence for this belief of mine. Since they asked, that's what I'm going to do, in this message.

Again, if you aren't interested, you have the option of not reading.

I have already noted in earlier posts that there is, to the best of my knowledge, no evidence outside of Christian scripture for a Jewish role in the death of Jesus (and no one has contradicted me, so perhaps we can now take that as given). I have also noted that the gospel writers had a motive for shifting as much blame as possible from the Romans to the Jews, as this would serve to differentiate the Christians from the Jews in Roman eyes, and perhaps spare the Christians of some of the persecutions that the Romans were visiting on the Jews at the time. Now let's look at the description of events given in the gospels and see whether it is at all credible.

In Mark, Chapter 14, Jesus is arrested at night, on the first night of Passover. He is brought for trial before the Sanhedrin at the house of the high priest that night. (Mark doesn't actually use the word, Sanhedrin, referring instead to the chief priests, the elders, and the scribes, but that's the Sanhedrin). Now, this is all impossible. The Sanhedrin is not the Mafia; it's the highest judicial body of the Jewish community. You wouldn't be far off if you thought of it as analogous to the British High Court, or the American Supreme Court. Like those courts, it had a long list of laws to follow. It did not meet at the house of the high priest, any more than the Supreme Court would ever meet at the house of its Chief Justice. It did not meet on Passover, the most important religious festival of the day. It was forbidden to have people arrested at night, and forbidden to try capital cases at night.

Mark has the Sanhedrin looking for testimony against Jesus. In fact, the Sanhedrin was commanded to look for testimony exonerating the accused. In verse 62, Jesus speaks, and in reply, in verse 64, the high priest declares Jesus' words to be blasphemy, and gets unanimous agreement (I'm not going to write out quotations from the gospels, because then we'd get into arguments about whether I'm using a reliable translation; rather, I'll ask you to look at a translation you consider reliable, and see for yourself). But in fact blasphemy has a very narrow definition in Jewish law; it means using the special name of God. Jesus didn't do this, so it is not believable that the Sanhedrin unanimously finds him guilty of it.

Interestingly, Luke 23:50-51 says that there was a member of the Sanhedrin who didn't agree with the Sanhedrin position. If that's correct, it stops the action immediately, since by Jewish law a death sentence had to be unanimous.

John 19:7 gets around the blasphemy problem by having the Jews say that by their law Jesus ought to die for saying he is the son of God. But in fact there was no such law, nor anything like it, and the Jewish leadership could not have made such a ludicrous claim.

Back to Mark. Then comes perhaps the most incredible accusation of all; in verse 65, some members of the Sanhedrin spit at Jesus, and strike him. Again, picture the Sanhedrin as the British High Court, and imagine the justices spitting at a defendant, and hitting him.

Now evidently the Sanhedrin reached its verdict on the spot, and, according to Mark, Chapter 15, took Jesus to Pilate as soon as it was morning. This can't have happened; Jewish law required the Sanhedrin to take a full day before passing sentence in a capital case. Then 15:6 says that every year Pilate would release to the Jews any prisoner of their choice. There's no independent evidence for this, and it's about as likely as the US having a custom of releasing to al-Qaeda the prisoner of their choice once a year.

There are some other impossibilities in the Pilate story. Luke 23:6-7 says that Pilate sends Jesus to Herod when he finds out Jesus is from Galilee, because Galilee is in Herod's jurisdiction. If you commit a crime in London, and the London authorities find out you're from Liverpool, do they hand you over to the Liverpool authorities? In Matthew 23:24, Pilate washes his hands before the crowd and says he's innocent of the blood of Jesus. Have a look at Deuteronomy 21:6-9, which is presumably where Matthew got the idea, and ask yourself why Pilate would adhere to such a Jewish custom.

Finally, in Luke 23 (and also in John 19), Pilate repeatedly proclaims Jesus innocent, but sends him off to be crucified anyway. Now, judicial murder is, alas, not unknown to us; many is the judge who has sent a man off to his death, knowing full well that the man is innocent. But it's generally done in secret - Pilate is the only one I know of who announces to the public that he is about to commit judicial murder. Is it credible that he alone acted that way?

So, to sum up: there's no external evidence that it happened the way the gospels say it did; there's plenty of external evidence that it couldn't have happened the way the gospels say it did; and the gospel authors (and their sources) had good political reasons for saying what they said, whether it happened that way or not. There is no good reason to think the Jews were complicit in the death of Jesus, and more than enough reason to think they weren't.