Anti-marcionism in Jesus' answers to sinedrites

[Giuseppe]

Luke 23:66-71:

66 At daybreak the council of the elders of the people, both the chief priests and the teachers of the law, met together, and Jesus was led before them. 67 “If you are the Messiah,” they said, “tell us.” Jesus answered, “If I tell you, you will not believe me, 68 and if I asked you, you would not answer. 69 But from now on, the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the mighty God.”	No doubt, here: Jesus claims that he is the Jewish Messiah. Marcion is confuted.
70 They all asked, “Are you then the Son of God?” He replied, “You say that I am.” 71 Then they said, “Why do we need any more testimony? We have heard it from his own lips.”	Since Jesus himself raises the doubt by his dubitative answer, the 'heretics' should doubt about Jesus being only a spiritual divine being.

[Giuseppe]

Now, if the answer "you say that I am" is deliberately dubitative, why did it appear as answer of Jesus before the question raised by Pilate ?

Are you the king of the Jews?” asked Pilate.

“You have said so,” Jesus replied.

(Mark 15.2)

The answer before the Roman Pilate had to be dubitative, since what had to be put absolutely in doubt was the political nature of the claim that Jesus is the Messiah, but not the religious nature of the claim that Jesus is the Messiah.

Hence, we see that Jesus answers with absolute certainty that he is the Messiah before the sinedrites, and the same Jesus raises the doubt that he is the Messiah before Pilate. No contradiction at all, here.

As Chris Albert Wells writes,

An accusation of ‘deicide’, or imply of executing the Messiah held against an Imperial envoy would have alienated the hopes of Christianity throughout the Empire.

Hence, the insistence on sub Pontio Pilato is 100% theological: by the same proposition "Jesus was crucified under Pilate"

• they could reassure the Roman authorities (Jesus raises the doubt about his being 'king of Jews' precisely before Pilate)

• and they could confute the Gnostics (Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, afterall).

The first Gospel story had only a sinedrite trial, only after Bar-Kokhba a Roman trial was introduced.

[Giuseppe]

The beauty of Chris Albert Wells' reconstruction is that he uses the criterion of embarrassment — usually used by apologists (and by some mythicists) to claim that Pilate was genuine in the first gospel — precisely to explain why Pilate was introduced AFTER the need of claiming that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah against Marcion.

The proto-Catholics couldn't insist, against Marcion, that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, without before think to reassure the Roman authorities: hence a Roman ruler had to be introduced precisely to exonerate him from the potential accusation of having killed a Messiah.

It was not the antiquity of the Pilate story to justify an apology, but was the need of an apology to justify the introduction of Pilate.

[Giuseppe]

Il y a quelques années, le pasteur Etienne Trocmé, dans son étude sur La formation de l'Evangile selon Marc (1963), nous paraît avoir établi que les treize premiers chaitres de Marc ont paru avant les trois derniers (la passion et la résurrection), qui ont été rattachés aux premiers, pour constituer, dans l'ensemble, l'Evangile sous sa forme actuelle. C'est par cette seconde partie qu'a été créé le "genre littéraire" de l'Evangile (la premier n'étant guère encore qu'un recueil de paroles du Seigneur): c'est à elle pensons-nous que doit s'appliquer la date approximative de 115 pour sa publication.

(E. Weill-Raynall, la chronologie des Evangiles, p. 157, note 23, my bold)