“Pontius tried to fob it off”
Barabbas the scapegoat. Very interesting stuff.
What I found interesting are the following books
1. the day christ died - by Jim Bishop
2. first century Judaism in crisis - Neusner
3. Christ or Allah - Nabeel Qureishi
The historical background that there were 5 sects of Judaism in 30 AD to 69 AD is fascinating:
1. the Sadduccees - they held to the written Torah and the prophets. Didn’t believe in life after death and were the high priests and elites
2. the Samaritans - descendents of Ephraim and Manasseh, they held only to the Torah, but have(and had) their own Torah which doesn’t have Jerusalem but Mt Gerizim
3. The Pharisees - they held to the written AND the oral Torah
4. the Essenes - vegetarian ascetics
5. the Jesus movement
And the Zealots were a branch of the Pharisees that believed in action now.
Finally with the destruction of the temple in 69 AD after 42 months of war (as seen in the vision of John of Patmos in the book of the Revelation) - the 1260 days you ahve only the Jesus movement and the pharisees surviving because they find different ways of worship without the temple and its sacrifices.
these two were the christian and modern jewish religions.
The other fascinating piece that I was researching was Jewish presence in what is now (and was Israel).
In short, there has never been a time with no Jewish presence in the holy land - not since 1000 BC.
The Babylonian exile still left some behind.
In 69 AD with the 2nd temple and Jerusalem destroyed, the Judeans were still in the villages and towns all over Judea and Galilee etc.
In 117 AD the Jews rose in the Kitos war and slaughtered the gentile (not Christian either) populations of Cyrene (Libya) and Cyprus - these areas became depopulated.
As a follow-up the Bar Kochkba revolt of 132 BC which failed led to Hadrian deciding that the Jews needed to be run out of Jerusalem completely and renaming their land after their long assimilated enemies, the Philistines. But Jews still remained in Ceasarea.
And Jerusalem was rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina — the “Old Jerusalem” we have today dates from this time period - the oldest parts of Jerusalem are from Hadrian’s Roman city with the exception of the Wailing wall.
The Wailing wall was a wall of the BASE of the temple mount (it’s not a wall of the temple).
But Jews remained - and when the ARabs came in the 600s, they gave the city to control of the Jews temporarily until Arab rulers came along.
And Jews remained there even under the Crusader states, under the Mameluks, Turks, etc.
Jewish presence in the holy land has been a constant feature for 3000 years.