Robert M. Price on the Gospel rewriting of the Samaritan Incident experienced by Pilate

[Giuseppe]

What seems unaccountably strange is that Pilate should have been heedless of such factors later on, in the case of the Samaritan Taheb, if he had already learned prudential caution in the earlier case of Jesus the King of the Jews. This makes one start to wonder whether perhaps the Samaritan incident is factual and the Jesus incident a fictive rewriting of it by Christians who were casting about for any likely-sounding historical details to fill in the spare outlines of their earlier, more abstract, salvation myth.

https://books.google.it/books?id=C9_hDw ... &q&f=false

So until now I have discovered two sound reasons to explain the introduction of Pilate in the Gospel story:

• the Samaritan Incident reported by Josephus explained where the inventors had derived the idea of a Roman governor who surrendered to an angry Jewish mob;

• the Samaritan incident reported by Josephus explained where the inventors had derived the name of the best candidate for the role of the material killer of the "Son of Joseph" (the Samaritans being notoriously the 'sons of Joseph', Pilate having slaughtered them en masse and the Jew Josephus having approved the extermination).

This proves also that the inventors had the works of Josephus under the eyes, from the first moment they connected Jesus with Pilate.

[Secret Alias]

The explicit reference to "the Taheb" appear in parts of the Tibat Marqe which are universally recognized to be of a later date. This doesn't mean that the Moses "coming back" idea is late. But the specific terminology doesn't appear in what are understood to be the earliest layers of Mark(qe)'s writings.