Phil, I haven't rejected your analysis of the song, I just haven't had time to give it the careful reading it deserves. I'm too busy brushing up on Roman history....

Jack, it is possible to hold & even propagate an antisemitic belief without being an antisemite, as I took some pains to explain above. I hold that Carter was not an antisemite, but that one stanza of a song he wrote reflects and propagates an antisemitic belief.

Greg, generalizations about occupied countries don't necessarily tell us what happened in specific cases. The evidence that Jewish groups wanted to kill Jesus (rather than, say, protect one of their own from the brutal occupiers) comes from Christian Scripture, but it is precisely the historical accuracy of portions of that scripture that is under question here. The Jews have been an unusual people in many ways down through the years, and if they did not conform to your generalizations about military occupations, it wouldn't be all that surprising.

Back to the evidence.... Well, first I hope you'll indulge me in a little "thought experiment." Imagine that there are two early Christians, let's call them Mark and Remark, who want to write up an account of the martyrdom of Jesus. It is many years after the fact, and neither of them was actually there at the time, so they both go by what they've heard at second and thrid hand. Mark has heard that the Sanhedrin convicted Jesus of the capital crime of blasphemy, and that the Jewish mob demanded the death of Jesus, and that's what he writes. Remark has heard that the Jewish people and authorities closed ranks around Jesus, and did all they could to protect him from the bloodthirsty occupiers, but the Romans had the might and they let no one get in the way of their mission to murder him, so that's what Remark writes.

Mark and Remark write up their versions of the events and circulate them among their friends. Remark's version stirs his friends into an anti-Roman fury. The Romans get wind of this, and come down on Remark and his friends and their followers like a ton of bricks. They're all executed, and all copies of their gospel are burned. The Romans do such a thorough job that, to this day, no trace of the gospel of Remark has been found.

Now as I said, this is just a thought experiment. I'm not suggesting there really was a lost gospel of Remark. I suspect that if there was an early Christian with Remark's beliefs, he would have known the likely consequences of writing them up and sharing them with his friends, and he would have thought the better of it. The point of the experiment is simply that it's no surprise that the only surviving accounts of the martyrdom are the ones that shift most or all of the blame from Pilate to the priests and the Jewish mob. And since those are the only accounts that had any chance of surviving, they cannot be used as evidence in favor of the version of events they describe.

More to come.