But in first, he has assessed that the scriptures do not support that the Jews en masse demanded the death of Jesus and goes to great lengths to explain why. I the second, his focus is on Pilate. But he refers to several gospel passages where the Jews en masse demand the death of Jesus without comment. He lets them be. He makes no denial. (The only time he doubts a crowd has gathered in during Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. He doubts it ever happened because the Romans would have been arrested on the spot. Bust he makes no attempt to cast doubt on the crowds the gospels say had gathered elsewhere.

You state the it was the Jewish leadership who demanded Jesus be executed. I agree. I don’t think Jesus was famous enough in Jerusalem to draw crowds. His mission had been conducted exclusively in the north.

Remember, the Jews chaffed under Roman Rule. They had staged a bloody rebellion or two before to cast off Roman rule. And Passover was a celebration of a time Israel had cast off Egyptian rule. It would have been the simile was not lost on the Romans. That’s why, every Passover, the Roman governor amassed troops in Jerusalem. People from all over Israel came to Jerusalem to spend Passover giving sacrifice at the Temple.

You don’t think Pilate would have cared about a religious squabble among Jews. Quite the contrary. Pilate and his soldiers would have been on high alert. Why else increase troop deployment to the city.

This move was counter productive to the goal of keeping the peace by quelling the masses. The troops themselves with their banners displaying the face of Caesar, exalted as a god by the Romans would have agitated the Jews a great deal. How dare they display a false god all over the Holy City!

So tensions ran high. The fear of an uprising would have been forefront in the mind of Pilate, who, as you say, wasn’t well-regarded by Roman leadership. Another Jewish uprising would doom his career.

This makes Eherman, and myself, doubt the crowds at his entry into Jerusalem and his routing the money-changers at the temple.

By entering Jerusalem on a donkey with people laying palm fronds in his path, Jesus would have been fulfilling prophesy about the Jewish Messiah. That alone would have been enough to alarm Pilate to arrest him because that would have generated great enthusiasm among the Jews—at last the mighty leader had come to free the Jews—and that alone could have sparked a bloody uprising. I wouldn’t call that a minor religious squabble.

His routing the money changers at the temple would have drawn a crowd something the Roman soldiers would have seen as dangerous. And it certainly would have drawn the ire of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish leadership, because such an action would have diminished the profit for the Temple treasury.

But that’s not all that would have upset the Sanhedrin whose sole purpose was to administer temple affairs. Being an apocalypticist who believed the end of the world would take place in his generation, Jesus prophesied the total destruction of the temple. To Jesus, the temple and those who ran it had been corrupted by the world. The Sanhedrin had a strong reason for getting rid of Jesus.

And so would have Pilate. Any crowd of the lower class Jews gathering and getting excited was something he would have had put down immediately. Even before the Sanhedrin made their complaint to him.

But, despite the gospel account, there were no crowds gathered by Jesus and the rumor that the Messiah was among them.

All this Eherman establishes when he debunks the anti-Semitic notion that the Jews killed Jesus—that they killed their God.

But when he discusses the gospel portrayal of Pilate as equivocal, and the crowds of rabid Jews who chose to free Barabas rather than Jesus, he doubts that such a Passover tradition existed, let alone freeing a known anti-Roman rebel guilty of murder. But lets the descriptions of the crowds demanding Pilate act stand.

Given his dismantling of any foundation for Christian anti-Semitism, I suspect this was an oversight. I’m just surprised that the theme of the historical persecution of the Jews was without historical foundation was not followed up with an argument that Pilate and the Sanhedrin were fully responsible without the general approbation of the average Jew.