Why Pilate? Because of ''the Jews''.

[Secret Alias]

So let me get this straight. Your argument from the Gospel of Peter comes down to - because Pilate is one step removed from details of the crucifixion THEREFORE Pilate never existed in the gospel before the Gospel of Peter. Is that your argument?

[Secret Alias]

Don't forget also that the gospel of the original author of Against Marcion has differing details about Pilate too:

So when they had led him to Pilate they began
to accuse him of saying he was Christ a King, meaning no doubt
the Son of God, who was to sit at God's right hand. Surely they
would have arraigned him under some other charge, being in
doubt whether he had said he was the Son of God, if he had not
by the statement Ye say it, indicated that he was what they said.
Also when Pilate asked, Art thou the Christ?1 he answered again
Thou sayest it, so that he might not seem, through fear of the au-
thority, to have refused to answer. So the Lord is set in judgement,
and has set in judgement his own people. The Lord himself is come
into judgement with the ancients and the princes of his people,a as Isaiah
has it. From then onwards he fulfilled all that is written of his
passion. The heathen thereupon raged, and the peoples imagined vain
things: the kings of the earth stood up, and their rulers gathered together
into one, against the Lord and against his Christ.b The heathen, the
Romans who were with Pilate; the peoples, the tribes of Israel:
the kings, in Herod: the rulers, in the high priests. Also when he
was sent by Pilate as a gift to Herod he proved the truth of
Hosea's words: for it was of Christ that he prophesied, And they
shall bring him in bonds as a present to the king.c So Herod was exceed-
ing glad to see Jesus, yet he heard from him not a word: for as
a lamb before the shearer he opened not his mouth,d because the Lord
had given him the tongue of discipline, that he might know in
what manner he ought to bring forth speech:e that tongue in
fact which in the psalm clove to his throat,f he now proved the
truth of by not speaking.

So what's the relationship between the Gospel of Peter, the gospel of the author of Against Marcion, and the synoptics?

[Giuseppe]

But again the case for no Pilate and Herod on proto-GPeter is basically the impossibility of imagining a role of judge or conspirator for Pilate (or for Herod, for that matter) in presence of a Jewish crucifixion. Where would be the presumed need for an apology of Pilate, when the reader doesn't even see the causal link between the his mere presence and the Jewish crucifixion of Jesus?

The answer is relatively easy: you have need of that apology for Pilate only when Pilate is REALLY introduced in that narrative. So the absence of an apology for Pilate's presumed crime in GPeter is evidence that he was introduced in GPeter only after that that apology was already found in the our later Gospels.

[Secret Alias]

But again the case for no Pilate and Herod on proto-GPeter is basically the impossibility of imagining a role of judge or conspirator for Pilate (or for Herod, for that matter) in presence of a Jewish crucifixion.

I don't have that difficulty. I think the Gospel of Peter is later than the source for the canonical gospels.

[Giuseppe]

But again the case for no Pilate and Herod on proto-GPeter is basically the impossibility of imagining a role of judge or conspirator for Pilate (or for Herod, for that matter) in presence of a Jewish crucifixion.

I don't have that difficulty. I think the Gospel of Peter is later than the source for the canonical gospels.

I also. But the source of GPeter (basically, GPeter without Pilate) is earlier than our canonical Gospels.

[Secret Alias]

You realize that as an advocate for the gospels being fiction YOU DON'T NEED SOURCES FOR FICTION. You can't just take assumption traditionally associated with the gospels because they were assumed to be historical documents and apply them to fictitious texts. Comic book don't all go back to older source material.

[Giuseppe]

there are only two possibilities:

1) Pilate was introduced before the circulation of a story where only the Jews crucify Jesus

2) Pilate was introduced after the circulation of the story where only the Jews crucify Jews.

Secret Alias seems to assume the possibility of a third possibility:

3) Pilate was introduced in the same story where only the Jews crucify Jesus.


I exclude a priori the possibility 3 as the less probable than all: the author couldn't introduce Pilate of passage, en passant, without the slightest apology for the his presence there: unless he was already aware of that apology, so well given in the our canonical Gospels.


Further reason to exclude the possibility 3 is given in John 19:16-37 :

16 Finally Pilate handed him over to them [the Jews] to be crucified.

So the soldiers took charge of Jesus.

There is a evident conflict of sources: ''John'' (author) is both aware that :
1) Pilate gives Jesus to the Jews
2) but the Romans crucify Jesus.

So GPeter is evidence only of the fact that an only-Jewish crucifixion [without Pilate] was thought by early Christians.


So which hypothesis is more probable, between 1 and 2, given the evidence of GPeter ?

The answer is still relatively simple and easy : it is more probable that Pilate was a late addition than vice versa, because it makes simply more sense that the titulum crucis was put by the Jews and not by the Romans, since Pilate himself recognizes in Mark 15:12 the simple and banal fact that the Jews are the people who call Jesus ''king of Jews'', not himself.

“What shall I do, then, with the one you call the king of the Jews?” Pilate asked them.

(Note en passant that if the Romans were the people who recognized the identity of king of Jews for Jesus, then this is not surely a marcionite thing to say).

So I think that the titulum crucis here is the smoking gun: if a story had it put by the Jews, then that story has to be older than a story where it was put by the Romans.

[Giuseppe]

addendum: The irony behind the titulum crucis put by the Jews is clearly the fact that the Jews kill their own messiah. It is all an intra-Jewish question regarding only them: the Jews and their Messiah.

The irony behind the titulum crucis put by the Romans is not more an irony: it becomes an anti-marcionite apology insofar the gentiles recognize implicitly (viz., not knowing it) that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah.

[Giuseppe]

Again and again I think that Herod and Pilate were introduced only to propagate the typical proto-Catholic universalism. So Tertullian:

The Lord himself is come
into judgement with the ancients and the princes of his people,a as Isaiah
has it. From then onwards he fulfilled all that is written of his
passion. The heathen thereupon raged, and the peoples imagined vain
things: the kings of the earth stood up, and their rulers gathered together
into one, against the Lord and against his Christ. The heathen, the
Romans who were with Pilate; the peoples, the tribes of Israel:
the kings, in Herod: the rulers, in the high priests.

[Secret Alias]

This is so dumb.