Someone said that there is no better witness of the spirit of the times than the forger, since the forger invents what is necessary but
missing in the real History. This holds true especially for the judaizing forgers.
If, as reaction against the increasing
"anti-Christs", the Judaizers insisted to point out that Jesus was the Christ, and, as Christ, he had to be lived
"in the last times", then why did they place the Christ just
sub Pontio Pilato ?
After all,
Josephus secures us that, according an
"obscure oracle", the Christ was expected especially during the war of 66-70 CE. Why then didn't they place the invented Christ about that period?
The answer to that question is an indirect strong confirmation of my reconstruction above.
- The Judaizers placed the Christ under Pilate because Pilate was contemporary of Paul, and Paul (with his sect of provenance: the Pillars) was the first to preach that the pre-christian Joshua had to be identified with the Christ (and with the crucified Christ). The introduction of Pilate is therefore an implicit confession, by the same Judaizers, that before Paul (and the Pillars), there was no Christian who identified Joshua with the Christ.
As corollary, another question has to be raised: why didn't the Judaizers interpolate a historical Jesus
in the same genuine Paul's epistles? After all, if they introduced Pilate in the story only because Pilate was contemporary of Paul, then they could do even better their work of historical revisionism by making directly Paul a clear "historicist"
ante litteram, and not merely only a his contemporary named Pilate.
- Partially they did so: "brother of Lord", "Brothers of Lors, "Born by woman, born under the Law", are recognizable anti-marcionite interpolations.
But a more true answer is relatively easy: a Paul made "historicist" (i.e. a Paul supporting his own claims on a historical Jesus diffusely interpolated in the his epistles), could run the risk of being manipolated by the same Christian rivals who had already the logo "Paul" in their hands. The conflict between Paul and the Pillars, though embarrassing, had to be preserved as evidence of the fact that the first was
without a historical Jesus,
differently from the second, who arrived before him. Hence, the "miracle" happened that the division between Paul and the Pillars, historically focused on mere Torah questions, was preserved in the our epistles to make it a fictitious but extremely useful division along the line:
knowledge of a historical Jesus
versus ignorance about a historical Jesus.
