Robert said

brown.connor4 said
And now forgive me for my next comment: when you say
And the Roman-installed local aristocratic sunedrion in Jerusalem, which was specifically tasked over its 80+-year history with replacing, limiting, or reporting any exercise or claim to royal authority would have found and dutifully punished or turned over to Pilate (at the time of Passover when he was present in the city) for punishment.
You only expose yourself as an amateur. Anyone who knows the relevant history and languages will say about your comment, "this person has never even read Josephus, let alone in greek, and is getting all his/her information from online, probably from wikipedia."

Please, no apology necessary. You're absolutely right, I am not at all a professional historian, and have never claimed to be one, but my view of the role of the system of the sunedria, as first imposed by Gabinius and as it seems to have continued to function after it's (partial?) dissolution by Julius Caesar and its continued role under later rulers is based almost entirely on my reading of Josephus. Thus I've endeavored to at least or at best to understand the sunedria as Josephus did. And it's also true that I typically read Josephus in translation, but I do like to refer to the Greek when that seems important or merely interesting. This I did some 12 years ago when I was reading through all of Josephus' various uses of the term συνέδριον.

Now, I do not wish to disparage amateurs from engaging topics here.  But i have noticed a rampant, almost pestilent disregard for "authority" on forums such as this one.  It is almost as if "anyone's 'thought' is as good as anyone's." 
It is not true.  A good response should be a) logical and b) BACKED UP.
that is how history works.   

Perhaps in your role as a professional historian (and even an authority of some kind?) you can correct my view or those of Josephus on how the various kinds of sunedria functioned over time?
  

What I will expose is this....I am a jackass who sometimes writes aggressively when I should be going to sleep.  I should probably look into why posts in a free debate get me so irrationally angry.  I think that I get frustrated with Dr. Ehrman's books and lash out here.  

I am embarrassed by my post.  I apologize. 

Stephen said
I think at any kind of disturbance in the Temple during Passover, Jesus would have been arrested outright.  Consequently the events recorded in the gospels between the Temple incident and the crucifixion, the trials and Judas' betrayal, are probably not historical.     
  

I think your assessment lacks historical imagination.  "Arrested Outright"?  There are hundreds of thousands of people in Jerusalem.  You seem to have an image of the historical scene borrowed from older popular movies where there are a couple hundred people on the stage with Jesus.  This is poor historical imagination.  The historian must reconstruct, imaginatively, plausible scenes.  That means crowds upon crowds.  That means Jewish authorities who are not sitting around idly waiting for some incident.  They had jobs to do.  It is the Passover.  Hundreds of thousands of people coming to the temple to have a lamb slaughtered.  Even when a disturbance should arise as the one Jesus created, they weren't waiting for it.  They had a hundred other concerns during this time.  So there is no way they would have been prepared to simply arrest Jesus on site.  That is not even how modern arrests operate.  Arrests take time, even today with our technology.  

It is strange and even alarming to me how little historical imagination historians exercise.  A world of nonsense would be expunged if we would all just close our eyes and imagine a plausible scene.

Serene said
... It also isn't held where he'd be broadly recognized, he basically does his preaching in Galilee-Peraea and Samaria (Herod Antipas' tetrarchy). 
  

To be fair, if he had an angel cut his hair in the Roman style and shave his beard, to be able to walk around without being recaptured, that might do it.

DavidFord said
Thomas de Wesselow, _The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection_ (2012), 448pp., on 333

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Page 333 — We began this book by asking what sparked Christianity, and we can now provide a very simple, if surprising, answer:
the Turin Shroud.
Finding a peculiar image on the inner surface of his burial cloth, the followers of Jesus became convinced he had been raised from the dead and exalted to heaven.
This belief led to the emergence of a new sect within Judaism— Christianity-to-be.
The real founder of Christianity was not Peter or Paul or even Jesus, but the Shroud.
  

If David Ford has correctly represented the views of this author, Thomas de Wesselow, an art historian who apparently presumes that the original disciples of Jesus were at at some time in possession of the Shroud of Turin, thereby considers himself qualified to speak about the historical origins of Christianity. That's quite a presumptuous claim, completely outside the domain of the expertise of an art historian, and thus not really relevant to the historical topic of this thread. I suggest that all posts relating to the Shroud of Turin be moved to a separate thread where questions related to the dating of the Shroud of Turin can be handled more appropriately. Any objections?

What shroud are you looking at?

AIs have been known to hallucinate, and some of those hallucinations have even appeared in opinions issued by judges.

Two Federal Judges Apologize For Issuing Opinions With AI Hallucinations - 10.24.2025
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In July, I wrote about Judge Julien Xavier Neals of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, who withdrew an opinion that used generative AI.
Judge Henry T. Wingate of the Southern District of Mississippi likewise withdrew an opinion that used generative AI.
Both opinions included made-up citations, which were obvious hallucinations.

Thomas de Wesselow, _The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection_ (2012), 448pp., on 333, 341
amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0525953655/
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Page 333 — And what about the 1988 carbon-dating result?
This is a question that keeps niggling, even after you have delved into it and discovered how easily the result is undermined.
Faith in a scientific verdict supported by popular opinion is difficult to shake off.
The temptation to abandon a “heretical” line of thought and simply accept what you have been told— and what everyone else believes—is extremely strong.
It is not an impulse that affects only the religious.

Page 341 — The only apparent problem with the Shroud theory is the 1988 carbon dating.
Skeptics, no doubt, will pin their colors to this rickety mast.
I have shown why we should have no faith in this uncorroborated result, although it is impossible, as yet, to determine what might have gone wrong.
One badly conducted scientific test proves nothing.
As Oxford’s Professor Ramsey insists, the 1988 carbon dating was far from definitive and needs to be reassessed in the context of a multidisciplinary research program.^2

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Lev February 28, 2018 at 6:44 am
Are you familiar with the story of Raymond Rogers who was the Director of Chemical Research for the Shroud of Turin Research Project?
He studied the Shroud in 1978, and he was convinced that the Carbon 14 tests in 1988 proved it was a medieval forgery.
That was until the year 2000 when a couple of amateur researchers published a paper showing a seam from a repair attempt running diagonally through the area from which the C14 sample was taken.
When Rogers saw the paper by Marino and Benford, his reaction was that they were not scientists, their theory was ridiculous, and that he still had fibre samples he had taken from the Shroud that could disprove their theory.
You can probably tell where this is going…

Upon examining the fibres under a microscope, Rogers concluded that, as they had hypothesized, a cotton patch had been woven into the linen fibres and then dyed to match the colour of the linen.
The C14 tests were correct, but they were from a medieval sample, not an ancient one.
Rogers was dying of terminal cancer, but was able to conduct further chemical tests and just weeks before he died he was able to publish a peer-reviewed paper that concluded the shroud was 1,300-3,000 years old.
More here: ** you do not have permission to see this link **
Perhaps the Shroud of Turin provides us with an image of Jesus after all.

BDEhrman March 1, 2018 at 4:32 pm
Death bed conversion!
But, of course, if it was 1300 years old it would be what people have claimed, a medieval forgery.

Lev August 29, 2019 at 11:53 am
I thought you might be interested in this recent development over the Shroud of Turin:

[July 24, 2019
Study of data from 1988 Shroud of Turin testing suggests mistakes
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“A team of researchers from France and Italy has found evidence that suggests testing of the Shroud of Turin back in 1988 was flawed.
In their paper published in Oxford University’s Archaeometry, the group describes their reanalysis of the data used in the prior study.
After studying the data for two years, the new research team announced that the study from 1988 was flawed because it did not involve study of the entire shroud—just some edge pieces. Edge pieces from the shroud are rumored to have been tampered with by nuns in the Middle Ages seeking to restore damage done to the shroud over the years.
In a recent interview with L”Homme Nouveau, Tristan Casabianca, team lead on the new effort, claimed that the raw data from the 1988 tests showed that the test samples were heterogeneous, invalidating the results.”

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January 20, 2005: A peer reviewed scientific paper by Raymond N. Rogers, retired Fellow of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is published in the journal _Thermochimica Acta_, Volume 425, Issues 1-2, Pages 189-194.
Titled "Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin," the paper concludes:

"As unlikely as it seems, the sample used to test the age of the Shroud of Turin in 1988 was taken from a rewoven area of the Shroud.
Pyrolysis-mass spectrometry results from the sample area coupled with microscopic and microchemical observations prove that the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin.
The radiocarbon date was thus not valid for determining the true age of the Shroud."

** you do not have permission to see this link **
30. Raymond N. Rogers, "Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin," _Thermochimica Acta_ Vol. 425, Issues 1-2, 20 January 2005, Pages 189-194
PDF:
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So my next question about a movement that might possibly value secret followers (like Nicodemus),  "the secrets of the kingdom of heaven," and even conscious obscuring to the public with Jesus' "the Parables are made to conceal, not to reveal" explanation is this —

why do we think that there are not organized groups of people that believe themselves to be the inheritors of this in the modern day?

Some people say that the modern religion are things like rock stars, Star Wars, Star Trek. Until you've had Mark Hamill  walk you into a room then surprise you by quickly closing the door without turning on the lights, with just the light of a crescent moon that happens to be in frame of one small, narrow trailer window, then stare into your eyes wordlessly for what might have been an entire minute, hearing your own heart beat it is thumping so loud, and then having him declare with this profound theatricality and import that you *are* [royal title], I am still thinking about it, yes.

But that isn't the end of these experiences. 

Then I started researching this, then I noticed that in an early interview, Lucas credits a very obscure spiritual society for giving him this idea and turning him on to Joseph Campbell's monomyth. But because Joseph Campbell is that much more public, it is Joseph Campbell that then receives the credit by journos as the inspiration.

Then I found out that the Grammy-nommed musician that I also had the same kind of experience with was also linked thru his touring partner with the same society. She recently wrote a clear dedication song to the founder that all her fans, who never clocked her before as associated with something like this, have now pivoted to accepting that she wrote this plain, unencoded biographical song about the society's 19th C founder because duh, she also bought and lives in the founder's mansion.

And the way more important question is, is revealing the move (because they believe in Christian incarnation, and may be looking for someone with inherent knowledge to be an example of that) or is showing them that I can honor the um not revealing the right way to make friends?

I just think that Josephus, the First Century historian's books are so stuffed with accounts of real-life identity switcheroos and set-ups that I began wondering.  

I also know that couching events that cannot be safely discussed publically in a spiritual or literary context has been the human standard for forever.

I also know that the founder of Rabbinical Judaism, Rabban ben Zakkai: ** you do not have permission to see this link **  is lauded in-depth in the Babylonian Talmud for faking his demise to escape his fellow Jews and partner with Roman Vespasian - why can't this type of secret collaboration be explored  for Pontius and Jesus?

What absolute nobody gets a private one-on-one audience with the governor? And two priceless robes that could get bloody — just for laughs? 

Does anyone have a link to an academic source that refutes the possibility with high-quality logic?

** you do not have permission to see this link **his is the book co-written by a top Mesopotamian scholar that I haven't read bc it costs $10 on Kindle:

This short book resolves the mystery of why Jesus chose to call himself Son of Man. Far earlier, the first Son of Man--the prophet Ezekiel--had met death as a Babylonian substitute king. Professor Simo Parpola's expert exposition about Assyrian substitutes prepares readers for the sacrifice first of Ezekiel and then, far later in time, of Jesus. Ezekiel was the Suffering Servant of Isaiah chapter 53, and had perished as a substitute to redeem the lives of his rebellious countrymen. Understanding Ezekiel's fate, Jesus chose the Son of Man title to exemplify his own redemptive mission. The authors of Mark, Luke, and Matthew subsequently framed their passion accounts so as to describe the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus as a latter-day substitute king. Most of this will come as news to students of both testaments of Scripture.

There's also the Mandaean claim of Jesus as deceiver, which I just chalk up to the Mandaeans following more of the original Sumerian lore where Enki is a plain wisdom god, and not his later form as Ea, where he uses that wisdom to become a wholesome tricky god.

There's a book I haven't read yet where a prominent Mesopotamian scholar, Simo Porpola, claims that Jesus himself is the substitute for someone else, because the Crucifixion events mirror the Sar Puhi ritual, the Ritual of the Substitute King.

I haven't read this book. So I'm asking AI to comb sentence by sentence and it's pulled up cool things like Simon being "Of The Farm" when the title for the Substitute is the Farmer/Gardener. And how the swap is sealed by the passing on of clothes, which coincides with Jesus being returned to his original clothes that proceeds Simon of Cyrene's narrative entrance. There's also the find of the alt translation of the judgment seat (throne) that I didn't know about.

So there's no precedent for putting priceless robes (two of them) on a nobody, but there is precedence in that virtually every one of Jesus' claimed ancestor's feigns an identity.