Jacob Berman and Godless engineer debated the historicity of Jesus tonight regarding Paul and other things:

I’m mentioning this because the passage in Paul of The Jews killing Jesus (which I first talked about following Benjamin White HERE) came up, as well as Paul’s claim that the archons of this aion (rulers of this age) killed Jesus (which I look at in my mythicism essay), meaning the evil spirits controlling the rulers, like the gospels saying Satan entered Judas. This must be the case because for Paul the rulers of this age who killed Jesus were evil, and Paul elsewhere says we should obey our human leaders because they are good and chosen by God (Romans 13:1-7). Of course, these good leaders can do evil, but this is because they can be under the influence of evil spiritual forces. This is why the resurrected Christ indwelling in you and possessing you as a spirit is so important because it sanctifies and purges you of evil influence. In other words, the Romans under evil influence killed Jesus, such as Pilate who denied Jesus justice and executed him because it would have been a nuisance not to, and as Matthew says this was orchestrated by the Jewish high council, and so the blood was also on the hands of the Jews (Matthew 27:25). Jesus’s death in Mark is a literary pair with the humiliating unjust death of John the Baptist, just as Jesus’s death in Luke-Acts is a literary pair with forgiving Stephen’s death.

Paul’s idea that Jews killed Jesus is attested to in Mark’s reception history of Paul.

Pauline expert Benjamin White disagrees with the idea that “The Jews Killed Jesus” passage is inauthentic and does not find reason to dismiss it as an interpolation. Paul seems to be a first century apocalyptic Jew navigating through other Jews like the pharisees, Essenes, he says he is not of the super apostle Christ group, etc., and we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls these groups were always going after one another as to who the true people of God are. In this way it was common back then for Jews to be calling other groups of Jews mean and nasty things. It is certainly plausible Paul speaking among gentiles to speak badly of Jews he thought killed Christ. I would note too Paul thought the apocalypse was underway, he says the resurrected Christ being the first fruits of the general resurrection harvest of souls at the end of the age, so he thought the judgment of the enemies of God had begun, and so need not refer to post-70 CE destruction of Jerusalem.

As I noted in an earlier post, the gospels have expertly crafted a satirical Jewish trial scenario (e.g., meeting on Passover eve) to show the Jewish elite manipulating God’s word and Jewish tradition in order to provide “surface respectability” to the process even though as the Gospel of John notes they knew God wouldn’t let them kill Jesus and so they tricked Rome into doing it. To flesh out Paul’s description of the Lord’s Supper, Mark has superimposed two scriptures from Paul, the one about the Lord’s supper (1 Cro 11:17-34) and the one that the Jews killed Christ (1 Thess 2:14-16), inventing the character of Judas, as the name Judas suggests representing the Jewish people who turned on the historical Jesus.

Reception history isn’t a solid historical lock, but it does reflect how a writer was being understood very early.

The notion of Jesus’s wrongful death by way of the corrupt Jewish elite and bloodthirsty crowd fits nicely with the idea that the wrongful death of God’s beloved (agapetos) convicts us of our sinful disposition and thereby circumcises our hearts to reveal the law written on them – as with the unjust death of Socrates, but on a grander scale of God’s murdered beloved Jesus. Matthew thus notes: 25 Then the people as a whole answered, “His blood be on us and on our children!” (Matthew 27:25). Dr. Joel Marcus points out that Paul says the Jews are beloved by God because they come from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but enemies of God for rejecting Jesus and his message (Romans 11:28). This fits with Paul’s passage that the Jews killed Jesus.

The history of the Jewish people is one of them repeatedly disobeying God, and them becoming reconciled with Him when He forgives them. In the case of Jesus, God sent his uniquely beloved (agapetos) son into the world and the Jewish high council responded by conspiring for Jesus to receive a more gruesome and humiliating death than the arch villain Hamon. If there is anything God should not be able to forgive, it’s this. Thus, the temple cult is impotent in such a case. And yet, Jesus forgives and teaches love of enemy.