…seems much more plausible today.
I’m not a Christian, or even a theist, but people who think we’ve evolved much in two thousand years are fooling themselves, as we can see on a daily basis in the “modern” Middle East. Civilization can have a very thin veneer, particularly when people don’t understand the basis for it, and reject it.
So this morning I was reading a review of a new book about Ravensbruck, the Nazi “concentration camp for women.” There was the usual list of horrors, casually enacted human experiments, killings, plus additional bonuses on forced abortions and infanticides. Much of it done by people who before the Nazi era (or at least before the war) were considered moral, respectable people.
A “doctor” took up his human experiments in Ravensbruck as the Red Army approached Auschwitz, as if nothing had changed outside. And there was the commandant of Auschwitz, who was ordered to Ravensbruck towards the end. The point, reinforced by the latter’s (admittedly self-serving) diary written on death row after the war, was that the killing _had to go on_. Because killing was a habit, and at the heart of the Nazi ‘ethos’ and they just couldn’t stop.
Without constant vigilance killing can easily become others’ habits as well, as we’ve seen numerous times since The War and are seeing with ISIS, al Shabab, in Yemen, etc.
The possibility will never be eradicated so long as humans remain human.
Yes, killing can become a habit, but it was in those days a habit blamed on the Romans, as a means of suppressing insurrection and as a source of entertainment.
Whereas the Gospel account does not portray Romans in general or Pilate in particular in a positive light, it ascribes the impetus to execute Jesus to the High Priest, with Pilate washing his hands and going, “yeah, whatever” to the mob, a mob incited by the religious authorities under Roman occupation, with Herod maintaining a kind of detached amusement about the whole deadly affair.
You would think that based on the historic record about Roman rule, that Pilate would not have though twice about executing Jesus, simply for the habit of killing described in a previous response. But that does not seem to be the case. Pilate appears to be a “beta male” in all of this, weak, vacillating, eager that the matter would “just go away” that he, Pilate, is not burdened with a decision of life or death. Doesn’t seem to be much like how we remember the Romans or even the historical Pilate.
He sends Jesus to be “scourged”, which I was told in Sunday school meant “beaten to within an inch of one’s life”, which the account suggests Pilate’s soldiers performed with enthusiasm as Roman soldiers would do. But that too was an effort by Pilate to “punt on this”, with the suggestion that if he “roughed up” this man they called “King of the Jews”, the crowd incited by their religious leaders would regard him as an object of pity rather than as a king threatening the established order.
Why did the religious authorities feel threatened enough to want Jesus dead? Scholars point to the “driving the money changers out of the Temple” event as a motivation. This connection is never made in Sunday School, but given the centrality of the Temple to the legitimacy of the religious leaders, one could see how Jesus ended up on the wrong side of a factional dispute among the occupied people, with Pilate being clueless as to the dispute, the factions, and who they were, apart from him wanting to keep order in this backwater to which he was assigned lest some “accountability” be applied to his own neck.
I guess my thinking about the best analogy is not ISIS beheading everyone from Western aid workers to indiginous Christians and those of other faiths. I am thinking Green Zone and American occupation of post Invasion Iraq, with different figures and factions having at each other and our people trying to keep the reprisal and counter-reprisal down to a “dull roar.” To think that our military people were never manipulated into conducting a raid or a strike on behalf of our erstwhile Iraqi allies to settle a factional score is perhaps an optimistic hope.
Perhaps the best reason for not reengaging the fight in Iraq to take out ISIS is we really don’t know all the players, and we don’t have access to a game program to tell us who they are. We want to avoid the fate of clueless Pilate in meting out punishment to restore order.
You’re trying to work your way around the historical record. Pilate was one mean and nasty SOB, who was eventually removed by the emperor for multiple types of incompetence and theft.
Respectfully, the Gospel writers and even moreso the later editors had an interest in portraying the Roman authorities less badly than otherwise, having developed a theology that – certainly by the Bar Kohchba revolt – set them at odds with the Jewish community.
“Scourging” basically used a “cat’o’nine tails” with iron barbs at the end of each “tail.”