Today I uploaded a new page on the circumstances surrounding the execution of Jesus, trying to answer the questions of who was primarily responsible for the decision and what their motivations were. In the course of writing it I carefully re-read and compared the relevant passages of the four canonical Christian gospels and re-read a 2022 book by a Jewish scholar that I originally read sometime in the last couple of years.
I surprised myself with the some of the conclusions I arrived at, particularly that Jesus actually may have seen himself as a Messiah who suffered to atone for the sins of others. This was not the dominant Jewish conception of the Messiah at the time, but it was one mentioned in the famous Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947. I also decided that the relevant passages in the gospels were based on a widely disseminated oral narrative that developed very soon after the death of Jesus.
In addition to publishing the new page, I revised and added to the page on whether Jesus was a real person, and slightly revised the home page.
Next up: the resurrection.
–Alan
Jesus Reconstructed 