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And we don't even know that the man who said that WAS Jewish. This may have been a "rent-a-crowd" made up mainly of the security guards and low-level employees of the Temple, who are said to have been mostly Idumean and Arabs and the like, shabbos-goyim if you please, who could do the dirty work and handle blood and corpses and what all.

Jesus and all the Good Guys in the NT were Jewish, so if a few of the BAD Guys are Jewish, why, that is just par for the course. To be expected. Why is this such a big deal?

Very much of the problem comes from the translation of "Judaeans" in the Book of John as "JEWS," a blatant mistranslation in our English bibles. This word means "Southerners, Jerusalemites" and thus usually Sadducees or Pharisees; ---

as opposed to the Northerners or "Galileans," which is the appropriate contrasting or opposite term. [The girl said to Peter, "I perceive you are one of them; you are a Galilean."]

The people [including John himself, a Kohan] who were tossing the "insult" Judaeans at Jesus' critics, those of the southern sects.......were just as much Jews by race, descendants of Abraham, as well as by Religion, though of the Northern sect[s] (Nazarenes, Essenes)...as were the targets of the insult.

We need a simple redo of the book of John translation in English, the original has no such anti-Semitic implication...

The reason I think it was a rent-a-crowd is that this day, the Friday, was a day in which any observant Jews were very busy cooking and preparing for the Seder meal that night, that Friday night... much too busy to be hanging around the streets heckling people.

Lambs cooked while Jesus suffered, and the Seder was eaten that night after Jesus was dead.

And we don't even know that the man who said that WAS Jewish. This may have been a "rent-a-crowd" made up mainly of the security guards and low-level employees of the Temple, who are said to have been mostly Idumean and Arabs and the like, shabbos-goyim if you please, who could do the dirty work and handle blood and corpses and what all.

Good point. People seem to think/assume that the infamous "crowd" was all "Jews", but from what we know of that time period the Romans used e.g. Syrians to keep rebellions down etc. and there were many other foreigners moving around, there's no reason to believe this crowd of people was "the Jews".

To continue in this vein, another thing which bothers me is that people speak as if all "Jews" are the same, that the "Jews" of that time period are the same as the "Jews" we know & love today. (You hint to this by talking about the "Judeans"/"Galileans" split.) Clearly for all Jews today there is a cultural descendence as well as blood descendence (by one's mother) from *someone* who would have (probably) been considered a "Jew" back then, but this all seems to ignore big important things like the Ashkenazi/Sepphardic split. It also ignores that at that time there was far from any kind of homogeneity to "the Jews" and certainly lots of infighting/factions/etc (like any other nation).

The whole controversy seems to be based on the idea that writing, presenting, or filming a story that takes place 2000 years ago on the other side of the world, and which has ONE (1) character saying "his blood is on us" or whatever, and that character would have been a historical analogue of what we now today call a "Jew", this is all THE SAME THING AS saying that 'The Jews' killed Jesus!

Like I said, the controversy is so irritating :)

Jesus and all the Good Guys in the NT were Jewish, so if a few of the BAD Guys are Jewish, why, that is just par for the course. To be expected. Why is this such a big deal?

Exactly. The corollary seems to be that you can't write a story in which a character who's Jewish (or even *presumably* Jewish!) does something bad. This seems to deny Jews their humanity. Jews are people too, and like all other nations/cultures of people, some of them do bad things. To use kid gloves about this is to infantilize them.

One more thing here, the idea that all the Jews who indirectly got Jesus executed did something "bad" is questionable in and of itself. I'm not just talking about theology (where would "Christianity" be if not for his execution & resurrection?), I'm talking about by the moral social & political standards of that time. Jesus claimed or sneakily implied to be the "son of God". Were *I* a member of the Sanhedrin I'm not sure *I* wouldn't have voted to turn him over to the Romans...