Originally posted by Doug Shaver
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That's the warrior messiah. Yes, I know it was a prevalent meme in early-first-century Judea. The issue is whether it was so prevalent as to have become a kind of default meaning of the word "messiah." I don't think that has been demonstrated.
If the priests wanted to frame Jesus as a seditionist, they needed credible evidence that he was saying or doing things constituting a credible threat to the Roman empire. The mere assertion "I am God's anointed one," elicited during a third-degree interrogation, was no such threat. Pilate was not going to take that seriously, and the priests would have known he was not.
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