Still Rylands:
In
Toledoth Jeshu iv, 25, we read concerning the death of ben Pandera :—
When they had let him hang until the time of afternoon they took him down from the tree, for so it is written [Deut. xxi, 23]. Then they buried him.
With this may be compared Acts xiii, 29 :—
And when they had fulfilled all that was written of him, they took him down from the tree, and laid him in a sepulchre
—in conjunction with Acts x, 39, where it is said that Jesus was slain and hanged on a tree
by the Jews. The statement
that it was the Jews who, after killing Jesus, took him down from the tree points to some source independent of, and probably a good deal earlier than, the Gospel narrative —
a source which had nothing to tell either of Joseph of Arimathea or of Pilate—and it is by no means inconceivable that this source may have been the account of ben Pandora's death which has been included in
Toledoth Jeshu.
(
Beginnings, p. 157, original cursive, my bold)
Abot the
Gospel of Peter:
...in the original Gospel or its source there was no mention of Pilate. The proceedings at the trial are unfortunately not included in the surviving fragment, but at the close of it we are told that " Herod the King commanded the Lord to be taken, saying unto them, 'What things soever I commanded you to do unto him, do ye.'" Herod therefore had full authority to judge and to condemn. Luke was evidently acquainted with a source in which a trial by Herod was recorded and he endeavoured to reconcile the two accounts by saying that Pilate sent Jesus to Herod, who, he explains, happened to be in Jerusalem at the time—an impossible story ! If Jesus was crucified by order of Pilate the condemnation must have been on political grounds. But then Pilate would have kept the proceedings in his own hands and retained control of the body of Jesus until death supervened. In the Gospel of Peter Pilate sits with Herod for the trial —a greater absurdity than the story of Luke ! Too great, indeed, to have been perpetrated by the original writer, and explicable only by the determination of a redactor to ascribe to Pilate some participation in the proceedings. On the assumption upon which we are at present working the Herod in question was believed by the writer to have been Herod Antipas, though mistakenly styled King. The writer must at least have known that Pilate had no jurisdiction in Galilee, above all if he supposed Herod to have been king of that country. It is not conceivable that Herod, having jurisdiction in his own tetrarchy, would have invited the Roman procurator of Judaea to sit upon the bench with him. In this Gospel, again, it is said that when Joseph begged the body of Jesus for burial Pilate sent to Herod and begged his body." The disposal of the body of Jesus thus lay with Herod, which could not have been the case if he had been crucified by Pilate. And Joseph would have known that Herod was the proper person to whom to apply.
(p. 172-173, my bold)
And note this anomaly about Joseph of Arimathea:
A peculiarity of the Gospel is that Joseph begs the body of Jesus before the crucifixion. Herod, when the petition is presented to him, observes that he would in any case have had the body buried that day, " for it is written in the Law that the sun set not on one that hath died by violence." Hence in this version of the story Herod knows beforehand that Jesus would be dead the same day ; and yet it was most unlikely and not to be expected that death upon the cross would ensue within so short a time as is stated. Presumably the petition of Joseph, which in the first instance is so strangely addressed to Pilate, was taken from the current version and inadvertently inserted into an inappropriate context. The repetition later on of the words, " it is written that the sun set not, etc.," suggests that the Gospel had not always contained Pilate's request and Herod's reply. It is plain that Pilate has been imported into a narrative which originally knew nothing about him. The contrary assumption that Herod was foisted upon a narrative in which Pilate had been the principal actor is manifestly untenable. On no critical ground could it be sustained. Herod is woven into the very texture of the story. Pilate is not only completely superfluous and a mere supernumerary; he is actually an incongruous figure. In the canonical Gospels the substitution of Pilate for Herod, except in Luke, where traces of the earlier version peep through, has been thoroughly and consistently made; but the result is an account which is essentially incredible.
(
id., p. 174)
An anomaly about Herod as ''King'':
The other possible explanations of the title "King " are either that the writer confused Herod Agrippa with King Herod the Great, or that King Herod was actually intended. The latter supposition is not so unreasonable as may at first sight appear. In Mark's Gospel no date for the appearance of Jesus is fixed. If, as is likely, that was the case in the earliest form of the story, then, before the introduction of Pilate the death of Jesus could have been placed just as well in the time of Herod the Great as in that of Herod Agrippa. If either of the latter two possibilities be accepted, Pilate is excluded, since it is not conceivable that the writer would not
have known that there was no Roman governor in Judaea during the reign of Herod the King.
An anomaly regarding the Scourging story :
In the Gospel of Peter, Herod, after passing sentence upon Jesus, delivers him to the people, who enact the scene of crowning, mocking, and scourging, which in Matthew and Mark is enacted by the soldiers of Pilate. One may confidently assert that a prisoner formally condemned to Death would not have been spontaneously so treated by disciplined Roman soldiers. An officer would have been responsible for him. And the soldiers could have had no motive for so acting. Jesus to them must have been just a Condemned prisoner, like any other. They could not have connected with him all the ideas which Christians have about him. Leading modern critical theologians do not in fact believe that Jesus ever claimed to be the Messiah, the Son of God, or the King of the Jews, in which case there would have been no inducement for the soldiers to crown him and array him in a purple robe. It is well known that this scene is a close copy of an ancient rite practised in connection with the sacrifice of the mock king. Hence the statement in the Gospel of Peter that the actors in the scene were the people is by far the more likely to be primitive. Luke, who, as critics are aware, had access to some source or sources not used by the earlier Evangelists, presents us with an intermediate stage in the development of the story, stating that it was Herod and his soldiers, not the soldiers of Pilate, who enacted this scene. Here we have additional evidence of the fact that in Matthew and Mark Pilate has taken the place which Herod occupied in an earlier version. It may be suspected that Luke had some knowledge of the origin of the performance, for he suppressed its distinctive features.
(
ib., p. 175)
The pervasive role of the Jews in the
Gospel of Peter:
It is worth noting that, whereas in §§7-10 Scribes and Pharisees, elders and priests, are mentioned, in the other sections we read only of " the Jews." It is, moreover, extremely significant that only in §§ 7-10 does Pilate play any important part ; nor is there mention elsewhere of his soldiers. Outside of these sections Pilate is named in two contexts only—viz., in § 2, which, as was shown in Chapter VI, is in all probability an interpolation —and in the incredible statement that he sat with Herod at the trial. Throughout §§ 3-6 Jews are the actors ; it is they who set up the cross ; it is they who place on the cross the superscription, " This is the King of Israel," it is they who take the body down and deliver it to Joseph. Everything is done by the authority of Herod; but in § 8 we learn that the " elders " have to go to Pilate with the request that he would supply soldiers to guard the tomb. The two portions of the narrative do not cohere.
(
ib., p. 279)
