I am surprised...

[Cow Poke]

No. I don't need to try again. When John was writing he was transforming mostly everything about Jesus.... no mundane castings, much more amazing miracles, no mention of his more amazing own experiences... the 'son of man' was becoming the 'son of the Father', the enemy who was plotting, planning, scheming against Jesus was 'The Jews'. It's there for anybody to read for themselves.

I think I've explained this to to you before now. Try again.

It wasn't "the Jews", it was the Jewish religious system and its corrupt leaders.

[rogue06]

Interesting - I've always known "errant" to be like somebody who lost their way, or was on a bad path.

First time I heard of it was when I came across the term knight-errant as a kid. That's basically some knight out adventuring.

[tabibito]

It wasn't "the Jews", it was the Jewish religious system and its corrupt leaders.

It is something like blaming the Chinese for an event without going to all the bother of saying "the upper levels of the Chinese political and military hierarchy." The speaker will usually expect the audience to use a bit of nous and not interpret the comment as referring to every last person in China - especially when the speaker is himself Chinese.
And that is before taking into account the fact that, internally, "Jews" were a subset of Hebrews - and excluded Samaria and the Galilee into the bargain. The majority of the Jews were of Saduccean bent.

I have a sneaking suspicion, based on the gleanings that are available, that a problem arises with translating the concepts from Hebrew (which made the appropriate distinctions) to Greek (where appropriate equivalent words didn't exist.)

[rogue06]

It is something like blaming the Chinese for an event without going to all the bother of saying "the upper levels of the Chinese political and military hierarchy." The speaker will usually expect the audience to use a bit of nous and not interpret the comment as referring to every last person in China - especially when the speaker is himself Chinese.

The reason that I call Covid the Chicom coronavirus is because there are a significant number of lunkheads that think referring to it as the Wuhan virus or China virus is racist in spite of diseases being commonly named after where they were thought to have first broke out.

[eider]

Oh yes. I had forgotten that you subscribed to that claptrap.

It's written down in the Gospel of John for all to read.
You really should just read what's in front of you, in the gospels.
I know you certainly have not attended to G-Mark because when asked you could not tell me what Jesus and his did on the first day of that last week in Jerusalem and Temple.

[eider]

You know, you and I have interacted before, without it getting nasty.

The "railroad tunnel" is part of.....

"Just when I was beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel, it turned out to be an oncoming freight train".

Humor.

Indeed we have. I was being humorous as well.

[tabibito]

It's written down in the Gospel of John for all to read.
You really should just read what's in front of you, in the gospels.
I know you certainly have not attended to G-Mark because when asked you could not tell me what Jesus and his did on the first day of that last week in Jerusalem and Temple.

Your self delusion is showing

[eider]

It wasn't "the Jews", it was the Jewish religious system and its corrupt leaders.

Unfortunately Apostle John wrote that it was 'the Jews'. Again and again.
John 5:10, 5:16, 5:18, 6:41, 6:52, 7:1, 8:52, 11:7............It goes on, and on........

When, as you say, it was not 'the Jews' but 'the Priesthood' that Jesus and Baptist stood against, but 'the Jews' have taken the blame for two millenia.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

It's a bastardization of the NT texts. Taking them WELL beyond the intent of the author.

The history of Christian anti-Judaism/anti-Semitism is long and complex. There was certainly distinct animosity among late first century Christians towards Judaism. The Jews had rejected the Christ and for some Christians that rejection seemed incomprehensible. The people who should have been the first to acknowledge the Christian claims proved the most intransigent and while there is distinct hostility to the Jews in the NT texts it remains under restraint. However, Justin Martyr [100-165 CE] stands at the point of establishing the rabid anti-Judaism that would quickly become part of Christian culture.

In his Dialogue with Trypho Justin Marty’s view of the passion narratives expunges the memory of Roman involvement. It is the Jews alone who are the crucifiers and their motives are premised on their depraved and satanic natures [echoing John 8.44]. His vitriolic stance against the Jews is founded on the simple fact that the Jews will not accept Christianity. Justin had lived through the Bar Kochba rebellion and saw this further attempt for Jewish independence [which was far more bloody than the First Jewish War] as yet more divine retribution for the Jews’ stubbornness. Furthermore for Justin the crucifixion of Jesus was not a one time offence. It was something the Jews did continually “For still, of a truth, is your hand high to do evil, because though ye have slain Christ even so ye do not repent, but you ... hate and murder us all” [Dial. I33:6]

Justin gloats over the destruction of Jerusalem and the defeat of the Jewish freedom fighters. He taunts Trypho “All this has happened to you rightly and well. For ye slew the Just One and His prophets before Him, and now ye reject, and, as far as in you lies, dishonour those that set their hopes on Him, and God Almighty and Maker of the universe who sent Him “ [Dial. 16:3-4].

Robert Michael in his 2006 work Holy Hatred:Christianity, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust makes the following observation in his Introduction [p.16]:

The profound antisemitism that we know of today began not with the pagans but with the Christian Scriptures. The foundation of the Christian faith was the New Testament, whose writers and later interpreters chose to express an anti-Jewish invective not in their own name but as if antagonism to the Jews was part of the mission of Jesus of Nazareth. It was this antiJewish “message” that the Church Fathers seized upon, elaborated, and communicated to future generations of Christians. To love Christ came to mean eternal hatred of his alleged murderers and their kin. The Jews had lost their place, their Chosenness to the believers in Christ. The “historical” proof of this theology was evidenced by the fall of Israel: the overthrow of the Jewish king, the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, and the Diaspora of the Jewish people. How could any Christian have ever learned to love the Jewish people, asked Pierre Pierrard, when favorable religious ideas about Jews “were lost in the blood of Calvary”? It is a sad fact that those Christians most immersed in their own Scriptures have often become the most thoroughly bigoted against the Jews.


Jeremy Cohen in his 2007 book Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen notes [p.4]
Within forty or fifty years of the crucifixion, Christians held the Jews and their leaders responsible for the death of their saviour. [...] Thus told and retold, the story of the Jewish Christ killer has never ceased to affect the lives of real men and women. [...]Growing up in New York City during the 1930s my mother was sandbagged on Halloween by youths seeking to punish the Christ killers. During the same year in Peoria, Illinois, my mother-in-law had to plead her innocence before her schoolmates; how could she have killed Jesus if she had never known him?

In his 1996 book Who Killed Jesus? John Dominic Crossan notes [p.54]
[The] passion-resurrection stories are different because they have been the seedbed for Christian anti-Judaism. And without that Christian anti-Judaism, lethal and genocidal European anti-Semitism would have been either impossible or at least not widely successful. What was at stake in those passion stories, in the long haul of history, was the Jewish Holocaust.

In their 2002 work Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present, Marvin Perry and Frederick M Schweitzer note [p.18]
Christianity’s understanding of its origins centres on the New Testament, particularly the poetic rendering in the gospels of the arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus, which is traditionally known as the Passion.5 In the gospels’ rendition and as interpreted for centuries, the Jews are perceived as “the Christ killers,” a people condemned forever to suffer exile and degradation. This arch-crime of “deicide,” of murdering God, turned the Jews into the embodiment of evil, a “criminal people” cursed by God and doomed to wander and suffer tribulation to the end of time. No other religious tradition has condemned a people as the murderers of its god, a unique accusation that has resulted in a unique history of hatred, fear, and persecution.

[Cow Poke]

Unfortunately Apostle John wrote that it was 'the Jews'. Again and again.
John 5:10, 5:16, 5:18, 6:41, 6:52, 7:1, 8:52, 11:7............It goes on, and on........

When, as you say, it was not 'the Jews' but 'the Priesthood' that Jesus and Baptist stood against, but 'the Jews' have taken the blame for two millenia.

Your very first example was "Jewish leaders", just like I said.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

So when you have a bunch of experts just stating something so boldly

None of the people you have mentioned are experts in this period of history and none of them are archaeologists. Simon “Si” Sheppard is a graduate in Political Science. Dean Smith is an amateur enthusiast who has written two pieces for an online magazine [one on the Sicarii and one on the 1982 British/Argentine Falklands War] Lon Abbot is an expert in his own field but has stepped outside his own discipline to comment on something upon which he is not qualified – he is neither an archaeologist nor a historian of this period. Nor do vague references to an article by someone with a Masters help.

Yadin alleges that the ramp was built by Silva’s soldiers “with the help of thousands of Jewish prisoners of war” without a shred of any archaeological evidence to support that statement.

In her 2019 book Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth Jodi Magness [a student of Yadin] notes [p.22] that Yadin’s “ excavations focused on the remains on Masada’s summit and largely ignored the Roman siege works. These remained virtually untouched until summer 1995, when I co-directed excavations in the siege works with three Israeli colleagues”. So Yadin was making a unfounded statement about the ramp when he had never fully excavated the Roman siege works.

On p.26 she notes that “at Masada the Romans sought to bring the siege to a swift resolution. To accomplish this, they had to move their troops and siege machinery up the steep, rocky slopes of the mountain and break through Herod’s fortification wall at the top. There were two paths to the top of Masada: the Snake Path on the east and another path on the west (today buried under the Roman ramp). Using these paths would have required the soldiers to climb up in single file while carrying their personal equipment as well as the battering ram, which had to be erected at the top to break through the Herodian casemate wall—all the while leaving the soldiers vulnerable to stones, boulders, and other projectiles thrown or fired by the defenders above. To solve this problem, Silva ordered his men to construct an assault ramp of dirt and stones, which ascended to the summit from a low white hill (called the Leuke by Josephus) at the foot of the western side of the mountain”. She then quotes Josephus’ War 7.306-7.

Once again if we look at Trajan’s Column [depicting a campaign only a mere forty years or so later] we see the legionaries doing the digging and building. No slaves are being used in military building operations despite the fact that local populations had been enslaved in the course of the campaign and so a ready supply was available..

Magness also notes at p. 241 that Yadin was inclined to leap to unfounded conclusions. “Two rooms in the western palace contained hearths with large numbers of iron arrowheads and shafts. According to the transcripts, Yadin decided immediately that these must be stockpiles of weapons destroyed by the Jewish rebels to prevent them from falling into Roman hands, following Josephus’s account. However, Ben-Tor, the area supervisor, correctly interpreted these rooms as iron arrowhead workshops dating to the time of the revolt”. She continues that he was also somewhat precipitate regarding the remains of the “family” he discovered.

“Yadin’s moving account shows that he interpreted these remains in light of Josephus’s testimony. However, in recent years some scholars have questioned Josephus’s account of the mass suicide at Masada on both archaeological and literary grounds. For example, Joe Zias claims that the remains on the lower terrace of the northern palace do not belong to one family but instead are random bones brought to this spot by hyenas”

She concurs with Nachman Ben-Yehuda and notes “Yadin’s interpretation of the archaeological remains at Masada may have been impacted by his Zionist-nationalistic perspective” . She also cites Josephus "For not only were supplies conveyed from a distance, entailing hard labor for the Jews told off for this duty, but even water had to be brought into the camp, there being no spring in the neighborhood” (War 7.278). As Josephus indicates, Jewish slaves hauled the food and water." [p.24].

That is her only reference to slaves at Masada although she refers to Josephus later [p.164] “According to Josephus, the price of slaves in the Roman Empire dropped dramatically due to the glut created in the aftermath of the revolt."

In his 1995 book The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel the sociologist Nachman Ben-Yehuda notes the conditions that Yadin and his archaeological team encountered:

All sources about the excavations point out that the logistics of the operation were immense indeed, involving, among other things, taking care of food, water, housing, and equipment—all at a time when not even half-decent roads to Masada existed

Yet Yadin [your goodself and various others] are contending that nearly two thousand years earlier and facing that same hostile terrain but without modern transport and modern field communications, the Roman army decided to retain thousands of Jewish slaves to do the work of building the ramp. I ask again, is it likely?

In our very initial exchange I cited the archaeologist Gywn Davies who noted that “It is also likely that Silva drafted Jewish corvée laborers to act as porters manning his supply lines. Even indirect participants in the operation such as these, however, would have increased the logistical demands on the besieging force, so they would have been kept to a necessary minimum. So while no one is disputing that Jewish prisoners were used for carrying water and food to the camp the idea that thousands of prisoners/slaves were kept to build the ramp is arrant nonsense and is not supported by any archaeological or contemporary literary evidence.

As the Marxist archaeologist and historian Neil Faulkner notes in his 2002 book Apocalypse: The Great Jewish Revolt Against Rome AD 66-73 “Though there has been some doubt cast on the truth of Josephus account [...] there seems little reason to doubt the basic factual record. At the very least the archaeology can do nothing to refute the written testimony, and there is no reason to assume the latter to be a concoction. Josephus had access to reliable contemporary sources, the Hellenist tradition of historical writing did not sanction wholesale fabrication, and the event described, while it may be exceptional, is certainly not incredible. [p.275]

Then there is the significance of The Masada Myth [again from Ben-Yehuda]

"At the time of the revolt, several ideological-political groups existed among the Jews. Two of these groups were the Zealots and the Sicarii. The Sicarii’s distinct feature was their use of political assassinations against both Romans and Jews. The Sicarii were disliked and were driven out of Jerusalem not by Romans but by other Jews a long time before the Roman army put the city under siege and destroyed it. The Sicarii fled to Masada. Thus, the group on top of Masada was a group of assassins, not Zealots. During their stay on Masada, the Sicarii raided nearby (Jewish) villages, killed the inhabitants, and took their food to Masada. They were responsible for a terrible massacre of presumably innocent women and children at Ein Gedi. [p.9]"

Later in the book he discusses the influence of the Hatzofim (Israeli Scouts) who regularly took youth groups to Masada and produced various booklets and pamphlets about the fortress [p.109-110]

"An another stenciled document (not dated, but probably from 19651966 or 1967), distributed by the national headquarters of Hatzofim in Tel Aviv, the following information is provided to the traveler to Masada and Ein Gedi:


“At the beginning of the Great Revolt (66 A.D.) Masada was conquered by the deceit of Menachem Ben Yehuda from the Galilee. This conquest was, de facto, the signal for the general uprising. After the conquest the victors left to Jerusalem, where they became involved in inner feuds, in which Menachem was killed, and his relative, Elazar Ben-Yair, took command of Masada. [...]After two years, the first two fell, and the Romans went to Masada. They did not charge the fortress but, rather,systematically isolated it from the external world and in this way starved its defenders. Within four months the Romans built eight military camps from all sides of Masada. They built a siege ramp on the western side . . . and placed siege machines on top, with which they finally broke through the wall. And so a regular army of 8000 men [took over] a fortress that was held by 960 starving men, women, and children. . . . Legend has it that after all hope was lost, Elazar Ben-Yair made a momentous speech, after which they all committed suicide, the last one setting fire to all the buildings. Masada has remained until this day a symbol of Jewish heroism without compromise or retreat; and to this day we proclaim, as a symbol for our hopes for the stability and continued existence of our state, that ‘Masada shall not fall again!’ ”


He then notes:

This passage contains some interesting fabrications, two of which are glaring. The first concerns the “starvation” of the rebels on top of Masada. This is simply contrary to what Josephus Flavius tells us. The second is the transformation of Elazar Ben-Yair’s two speeches into one. [...] The usual omission of the massacre at Ein Gedi and a failure to admit the lack of a “Masada battle” is also found here, along with a total disregard of the fact that the Sicarii were on Masada.


Again, citing Neil Faulkner, where in his Introduction he writes, “ Zionists of Israel will be disconcerted to discover that the Jewish rebels of the first century bear more similarity to the Palestinian fighters of Hamas than they do soldiers of the Israeli Defence Force. In particular [...]those seeking a contribution to some specifically “Jewish history” for in truth there has never been a single “Jewish people”, nor an unchanging “Jewish tradition” and only nationalist myths can link Simon bar-Giora and Ariel Sharon across two thousand years.” [p. 8.]

Bearing in mind Yadin's former background in the Haganah [terrorists or freedom fighters take your pick] it is hardly surprising that, as Neil Silberman noted in his 1993 biography of Yadin "the drama of the Masada excavations and the virtuoso brilliance with which Yadin conveyed the discoveries to the public made the project as much an exercise in patriotic inspiration as in scientific research”[p.288]

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

["built by Jewish slaves." Sound familiar? [CENTER]

I therefore retract my earlier remark about the site. It is also making nonsensical claims.

On what historical evidence is it premising that statement?

And more to the point, why do you believe it?

Tour guide sites are about making money out of tourists. Of course these sites are not going to make flagrant historical gaffes [e.g. the Coliseum was built during the Principate of Augustus, or the Brandenburg Gate was built by Kaiser Wilhelm II] but something as incidental as that little blunder would probably go unnoticed by the average punter.

And once again, do explain how you consider a group of Jewish slaves just happened to have among its ranks not only trained artists but artists with experience of depicting the human form.

I have no doubt slaves were used in the basic construction of that monument but the ethnic background of those slaves remains entirely unknown.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

And your people went absolutely psycho crazy falling in line with the slaughter, and you try to pretend it was "Christian nations"

It was Christian nations, France, Poland, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands etc. Do you really imagine the Gestapo in occupied Europe could have identified the Jews and others without help?

pointing to Poland, which was under German occupation.

Not in 1946.

[Cow Poke]

It was Christian nations...

You'll do just about anything to deny it was your people who drove this.

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

It wasn't "the Jews", it was the Jewish religious system and its corrupt leaders.

Regrettably Matthew 27.25 uses the Greek λαὸς - the people - tribe, nation, those of the same stock/language. They are the ones who call for his blood to be upon them and their children.

What was this "Jewish religious system"?