Even virgin births can be found in pagan myth, as in the stories of Zeus’s matings with Io and Danaë, and, perhaps, in the accounts of the birth of Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome and son of Mars, whose mother was a Vestal Virgin.
6. Matthew 8:8-12, emphasis added, cf. Luke 7:1-17
7. Matthew 28:19
8. Matthew 5:41
9. Matthew 5:5
10. Matthew 5:9
11. Matthew 5:43-44 and Luke 6:27-28
12. Qumran Community Rule 9.21-22, and see Eisenman, James: the Brother of Jesus, ante, pp. 339, 826, 853-854.
13. Matthew 5:39 and Luke 6:29
14. Matthew 8:1-5 and Luke 18:17
15. Luke 2:14
16. Romans 13:1-7, emphasis added.
17. 1 Peter 2:13-17, emphasis added.
18. Colossians 3:22-24; and see, 1 Timothy 6:1-2, 1 Peter 2:18-20 and Ephesians 6:5-9. NOTE: Jesus himself assumes without criticism that masters can and will beat their slaves, as we read at Luke 12:47-49: “The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.”
19. Luke 6:20
20. Mark 10:28-31, cf. Matthew 19:27-30, Matthew 20:16
21. John 13:1-17
22. John 13:12-17
23. Matthew 18:14
24. Luke 22:24-27
25. Matthew 20:25-28
26. Mark 12:17, cf. Matthew 22:21 and Luke 20:25
27. Luke 23:2
28. Matthew 26:60
29. Mark 15:1-15, Matthew 27:11-25, Luke 23:13-25, John 18: 29-40
30. Matthew 27:25
31. The story of Jesus’s trial before Pilate, by itself, demonstrates the Roman provenance of the Gospels, indeed, that they are the handiwork of the Roman State.
The story of Jesus’s “trial” before Pilate is fiction. The findings of scholars such as those of the Jesus Seminar reflect the widespread view among critical scholars: “…the Fellows were virtually unanimous in their judgment that the account of the Judean trial [of Jesus] was mostly a fabrication of the Christian imagination.” (Funk, Robert W., Hoover, Roy W., and the Jesus Seminar, The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus: The Five Gospels, 1993, New York: Polebridge Press, p. 121) As these scholars observe, because there were no eyewitness accounts of this trial, and certainly none cited by the Gospels, the details of this episode must be regarded as later invention.
It must be added that certain details, such as the thrice-repeated demand of the crowd to crucify Jesus (reported in all four Gospels), seem entirely hatched. Just as Peter denied Jesus three times, so the crowd demands his death three times, and the number three is theologically suggestive throughout the New Testament, e.g. the Sign of Jonah, the three favored disciples at scenes such as the Transfiguration, etc.
But if this episode in the Gospels is necessarily fiction, then we must ask what motives shaped it and why its elements were inserted, removed or retained. If that thrice repeated demand to kill Jesus is a fabrication, for example, then what end does it serve—except to exonerate not just Romans, but the Roman government? Why does the crowd have to demand his death, at all? Only to overcome Pilate’s resistance. If that thrice-repeated demand by the crowd is fiction, then it was simply to explain how Pilate’s belief in Jesus’s innocence was overcome.
In fact, as we have seen, the whole underlying cause of Jesus’s enmity with Jewish religious authorities as presented in the Gospels, his opposition to the Mosaic Law, appears to have been a post-Pauline invention. This by itself undermines the historicity of the trial before the Sanhedrin, unless it was only an effort on their part to eliminate an advocate of violence and separatism, not a critic of the Mosaic Law, out of fear of the Romans.
Moreover, if, in fact, Jesus had been convicted of blasphemy by the Sanhedrin, as the Gospels assert, then that body could have executed Jesus themselves. That they did not appears to present a problem for which the Gospel of John attempts to provide an answer. According to John 18:31-32, when Pilate told the Jewish authorities to judge Jesus themselves, “the Jews,” collectively, replied that they had no legal authority to put “any man” to death. Yet, we know this was not the case: prior to the first Jewish War, the Jews routinely enforced their own law, including its various provisions for capital punishment. Among several other persuasive references, Josephus provides us with verbatim citations from multiple Roman imperial decrees commanding that the Jews be allowed to preserve and enforce their own laws (Josephus, Antiquities, Book XVI, chapter 6, sec. 1-8). And the New Testament itself provides us with evidence. For example, we are told that St. Stephen was stoned to death after being convicted by the Sanhedrin of blasphemy (Acts 6 and 7), which was precisely the same context Jesus faced, and Josephus reports the eerily similar stoning of James the Just at the command of the Jewish priesthood (Josephus, Antiquities, Book XX, chapter 9, sec. 1).
So why would the author of John’s Gospel need to mislead us like that—except in order to explain the unexplainable, namely, why Jesus was not executed by the Jews whom he had allegedly offended?
It is the nature of Jesus’s execution, crucifixion, that inescapably required an official Roman command. If Jesus really existed, then the manner of his execution is likely to have been the least flexible aspect of his tradition. If he did not really exist, then this aspect of his tradition seems to have been selected in order for Jesus to fulfill the “Suffering Servant” prophecy of Isaiah, chapter 53, regarding the messianic precursor who will be “pierced” for the “transgressions” of the Jews (Isaiah 53:5). In either case, the Crucifixion appears to have been an inescapable, and earlier, part of the Jesus tradition. Had a historical Jesus actually been executed in this fashion, it is far more likely that he was executed for advocating violence and rebellion against Rome, which would be consistent with what we have argued were the true politics of the Jewish-Christians. Whether this was the case, or whether the Suffering Servant prophecy was the source of this tradition—and even if the idea of the execution had been lifted from some other messianic personage of the period—the responsibility for the execution of Jesus would still have been laid at the feet of the Romans without the Gospel’s elaborate account.
Since there was no way to avoid a Roman trial, complex, repeated and unmistakable steps had to be taken to exonerate the Romans. Thus, the betrayal by Judas, the triple denial of Peter, the trial before the Sanhedrin, Pilate’s belief in Jesus’s innocence, the triple demand by the Jewish crowd for the Crucifixion, are all consistent with the motive to inculpate the Jews and exonerate the Roman state in the face of a method of execution that had in itself otherwise implied Jesus to have been a rebel. Matthew’s version, as we argue, simply makes this unified motivation explicit.
Finally, given the fact that the thrice-repeated demand of the Jewish crowd is found in all four of the Gospels, along with Pilate’s belief in Christ’s innocence, this motive of exonerating the Romans is inextricably linked with the original composition of the Gospel’s narrative.
32. Acts 3:13-14, emphasis added.
33. Eisenman, James: the Brother of Jesus, ante, pp. 122-123, 492 and 516.
34. Luke 6:14-16, Mark 3:18, Matthew 10:3, Acts 5:36-8, and Josephus, Antiquities, Book XX, chapter 5, sec. 1-4