Aired tonight on PBS, it was a total embarrassment for any credible work done on the historical Jesus. All the people involved should be criticized harshly for this over attributing of this imaginative historicity poorly guessed at.
Simcha was the idiot ring leader and a handful of scholars backed this fancy fable of their version of Jesus death with Tabor knee deep in the crap. It pisses me off I don't have the names of the useless scholars on the tip of my tongue to deliver my criticism directly. Despite how famous they think they are.
It centers around a rich Jesus funded by Antipas who conspired with Sejanus to upset Caiaphas power and the corrupt temple priestly class the Sadducees. All which failed with Sejanus being condemned by Tiberius. It was all fueled by Antipas greed to be the king of the Jews like his father, and his rejection by Tiberius. After his failure with Tiberius to be given the whole Kingdom Antipas went to Sejanus and conspired a power play.
The idiocy of this conspiracy theory to me is overwhelming. It reminds me of wearing a tinfoil hat and trying to sell this to students on a very short bus, and realizing your riding in the short bus for a reason.
Many things mirrored my views on a foundational level, but many were imagination based as the nicest way I can explain it.
They first try and tie in the whole Galilean socioeconomic divide debate that Jesus was rich and well trained based SOLELY on the findings of the first century Galilean Nazareth house the church is built over, but they act like this is now 100% settled in full. It is not. MY REBUTTAL and sharp criticism is that it was likely LIKE Christian authors building divinity and authority as they were trained by placing him in the nicest house in Nazareth long after the time period the same way the Via Dolorosa was named long after the fact and far from any historical event. It is idiocy to place the village of Nazareth wealth as a whole based on one single house. Then they go further and attribute Jesus wealth that he is now magically a business owner as well. All based on a house they admit they cannot tie to him, but then do it in full anyway.
They claim Jesus was well connected to Antipas as well as the Pharisees that he was well educated and literate.
Besides the tinfoil hat conspiracy, instead of just claiming it up to rhetorical prose and artistic freedom to use fiction to sell the Christian agenda, these blithering idiots try and reason out the text as if they were literally accurate. Example. The palm fronds as Jesus made entry into the temple, Simcha states that frons are harvested 6 months earlier and that they could not nor would they cut them down for this entry, so Jesus entered the city 6 months previous and was arrested, and remained in jail for 6 months, and when Sejanus was found to be guilty of murdering Tiberius sons the whole web of lies came tumbling down and Pilate was forced to follow Tiberius decree of letting the oppressed subjects have complete religious freedom. At that point He was crucified.
This is another idiotic point they tried to sell. The heel bone with a crucifixion nail stuck in it. Simcha stated the nail was so short that it only could go through one foot, and that the wood was small and thin, so thin the nail went through the wood and hit a hard stone under it, as the reason for the curled nail, and that NOW crosses from this period were all light quick and easy mass produced crosses. And of course Israel Hershkovitz did find olive wood on the nail, but was it the wooden washer? Many other reasons for a curled nail IMHO. Its just stupidity.
You give this idiot Simcha and inch and he imagines a literal mile. Well I'm off to tell Mr Tabor personally what I thought about his participation.
