The Essay of Mark Twain About the Jews
1 - The Romans put Jesus to death because they saw him as treasonous--and part of that feeling was because Jesus was crowned “king” by some of his followers.
2 - It was later in the tradition that the Jesus people who were living side-by-side in the Roman world began to slowly slide the reason for Jesus’s death away from Rome and simply--regrettably--to “the Jews.”
3 - Pilate was brutal and violent and because of this he was removed from his power base by the officials in the Roman empire.
4 - This focus away from a violent Pilate can be seen in the gospels.
The idea that “Pilate washed his hands” of the matter and supposedly left the death penalty to be decided by the crowd is a fiction. His neutral behavior toward Jesus as told in the gospels makes no common sense.
1 - Hey, Aikido, I didn't know about that. I have never read in the NT that Jesus was crowned king by some of his followers! What I have is that the only crown Jesus was crowned with was the one the Romans made out of thorns.
2 - This is also new and there is no evidence anywhere neither in the NT nor anywhere else. The transfer of guilty from the Romans to the Jews was made in the high Roman echelon. Jews at that time were still in the very beginning of their ascendance in the Diaspora.
3 - Just as Josephus says about him.
4 - What could we do without some enlightened Christians like you?