Jewish rabbis who did not like Jesus or his followers accused him of being a magician and leading people astray,” he says, “but they never said he didn’t exist. The first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who according to Ehrman “is far and away our best source of information about first-century Palestine,” twice mentions Jesus in Jewish Antiquities, his massive 20-volume history of the Jewish people that was written around 93 A. More recent artistic and cinematic portrayals have also made an effort to characterize Jesus as an ancient Middle Eastern resident.

John publicly proclaims Jesus as the sacrificial Lamb of God, and some of John's followers become disciples of Jesus. In this respect, it is noteworthy that the Gospels devote about one third of their text to the last week of Jesus' life in Jerusalem, referred to as the Passion. It is a question of the deepest interest, how Christians have been able to maintain two parallel but entirely contradictory attitudes to Jews. which traced portrayals of Jesus back through time from the European Jesus of western art to Jesus himself.Pilate was effectively a dictator; so long as he kept Rome happy, he had absolute power, including power of life and death.

The soldiers, however, came not from Italy but from nearby Gentile cities, especially Caesarea and Sebaste; presumably, the officers were from Italy. The Gospel of Matthew emphasizes that Jesus is the fulfillment of God's will as revealed in the Old Testament, and the Lord of the Church. By the Middle Ages, a number of documents, generally of unknown or questionable origin, had been composed and were circulating with details of the appearance of Jesus. If the latter interpretation appears far-fetched, only consider the persistence of the moral and pictorial idea of the Jew as devil, if not Satan himself then certainly of Satan's tribe - wearing the horns of lechery and malice, and smelling of sulphur. There is almost universal agreement that Moses was of dark complexion by 6th-century Hijazi standards.

By the 20th century, some reports of miraculous images of Jesus began to receive a significant amount of attention, e. He was a known rebel and he was endangering public peace at a time when large and volatile crowds were thronging the city.