Something I find surprising in GPeter, is the continue insistence on the way Jesus is called in the third person: the
Kyrios.
United to his clues of
docetism, this remembers me a polemical passage of Ignatius:
If any one confesses Christ Jesus the Lord, but denies the God of the law and of the prophets, saying that the Father of Christ is not the Maker of heaven and earth, he has not continued in the truth any more than his father the devil, and is a disciple of Simon Magus, not of the Holy Spirit.
(
Phil. 6:49b-50a)
Already prof Robert M Price advanced the hypothesis that Luke merged GPeter (Herod killer of Jesus) with Mark (Pilate killer of Jesus) by his expedient of the ping pong.
But I wonder if the scene of Pilate
who sent someone to Herod was not an expedient of Luke to merge the different sources, but was original in GPeter.
For in GPeter we have Pilate who sent Joseph to Herod.
Joseph, not Jesus, being the latter
already in the hands of Herod.
And Pilate, having sent [Joseph] to Herod, requested his body. And Herod said: 'Brother Pilate, even if no one had requested him, we would have buried him, since indeed Sabbath is dawning. For in the Law it has been written: The sun is not to set on one put to death.'
And he gave him over to the people before the first day of their feast of the Unleavened Bread.
Until here, nothing of new.
But I would like to remember that in Mark we have a Pilate who sent someone, also. Not only Joseph (to take the corpse of Jesus). Pilate sent someone
living. He released
another Jesus:
"Jesus Bar-Abbas" (Son of Father).
Since in Mark, the episode of Barabbas is a parody against adorers of Jesus Son of Father (a Jesus Son of Father who, according to his adorers, was the true
victim on the cross), then the implication is that, before GMark, there was a gospel where Pilate sent a Jesus Son of Father (a Father who is not the creator) to death.
But did Pilate send Jesus
directly to death, or
via Herod?
Assuming that Pilate didn't know that Jesus was the "king of Jews" from his answer (after all, that was a judaizing interpolation) then,
if he had sent Jesus to Herod, it was a way to secure that Jesus was
not "king of Jews" but one subject to Herod, the
true "king of Jews" (in the eyes of Pilate).
Hence Jesus is called "Galilean" as a subtle way to say that he is
not the King of Jews, but a subject to Herod
true king of Jews.
My suspicion is that the Gnostics had euhemerized Jesus on earth as a victim
of Herod. They were interested in
Herod as killer just in the same measure as the Judaizers were interested in
Pilate as killer.