Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] A Modern Scholar who Also Argues that Jesus Did Not Die on the Cross by Bart Ehrman in my previous post I mentioned a modern forgery that claimed Jesus never actually died on the cross.
[00:00:14] Some of those who read that will probably have immediately thought of a modern scholar who, with great sensational flair and vigour, argue precisely that. Hugh Sconefield, in his once and in some circles still popular book the Passover Plot.
[00:00:30] I discuss that as well, but only briefly, in my book forged, published in 2011 by Harper One. Here's what I say there, with an opening paragraph that sets it up by mentioning several other accounts with very interesting but completely fabricated claims.
[00:00:47] There are lots of modern apocrypha that try to report on what Jesus and those associated with him really did. There is, for example, a book called the Confessions of Pontius Pilate, which tells the story of Pilate going into exile in Vienna, where he feels deep remorse for what he did to Jesus and eventually commits suicide.
[00:01:05] Among other things, this account refers to a story in which Mary Magdalene presents the Roman emperor Tiberius with an Easter egg dyed red. Or there's the Gospel of the Holy Twelve, in which Jesus is said to espouse a strictly vegetarian view in opposition to those who kill and eat animals.
[00:01:22] In this inventive narrative, Jesus is said not to have eaten lamb at the Passover and to have fed the multitudes not with five loaves and two fish, but with five melons.
[00:01:32] One could argue that hoaxes are created not only by obscure figures trying to sensationalize accounts of Jesus, such as that Jesus studied with the Brahmans, or to authenticate their particular worldview. Jesus was a vegetarian, but by scholars who may have had obscure reasons of their own.
[00:01:50] One of the wildly popular books about Jesus during the 1960s and 70s was Hugh Schoenfeld's the Passover Plot, A New Interpretation of the Life and Death of Jesus.
[00:01:59] Schofield was a brilliant and widely acknowledged scholar of ancient Judaism with a complete set of bona fide credentials, but his historical reconstruction of what really happened to Jesus reads more like a Hollywood production than serious scholarship.
[00:02:15] The short story is that Jesus from an early age knew that he was the Messiah, and so he manipulated events during his public ministry to make it appear that he was fulfilling prophecy.
[00:02:27] In particular, he plotted with his disciples to feign his own death for the sins of others. He arranged to be drugged on the cross. When he was given the gall and vinegar, it was medicinal, so that his vital signs would slow down and he would appear dead. He would then be revived and appear to have been raised from the dead.
[00:02:46] The plot failed, however. Jesus had not counted on a Roman soldier spearing him in the side on the cross. He revived only briefly and was removed from the tomb by prior arrangement with co conspirators, not the disciples. He died of his wounds soon thereafter and he was reburied elsewhere. The disciples, however, discovered the empty tomb and mistakenly thought that they saw Jesus alive afterwards.
[00:03:10] They then proclaimed that he had been raised from the dead and thus started Christianity.
[00:03:15] The Passover plot is not a forgery, of course. That is, it's not a gospel allegedly written in the ancient world by an apostle.
[00:03:23] The author of the book Sconefield, who writes in his own name, is a serious historian, and he lets his readers know it. And it's not exactly a fabrication in that he claims that he's basing his account on historical research.
[00:03:35] Moreover, he presents it as a historical study.
[00:03:38] But as creative as it is, the major premise of the account is completely made up. There is no historical truth to it.
