the Gospel as Mirror: Inversion, Substitution, and Suppressed History of Passion

THE GOSPEL AS MIRROR Inversion, Substitution, and the Suppressed History of the PassionWhy does nobody recognize Jesus after the resurrection? Mary Magdalene takes him for the gardener. Two disciples walk seven miles with him to Emmaus and do not know him. On the shore of Galilee, none of the disciples dares to ask who he is. Theology answers that the risen body was transformed. The Gospel as Mirror proposes a historical answer: they were meeting a different man. The contradictions in the Gospels are well known. They include: - two birth stories a decade apart- two genealogies of Jesus that meet only once after David- one Jesus who teaches that the kingdom is within, and another who promises it will come with power- a teacher tolerated in the Temple for years, and a claimant dead within a week of attacking itScholars have explained each contradiction on its own. This book shows that they fall along a single line, and that on each side of it stands a coherent figure. The first is a young Galilean teacher, born in the year of Luke's census, whose sayings stand at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount and the Gospel of John. The second is Herod, son of Herod the Great and Cleopatra of Jerusalem. Josephus names him once and never mentions him again. The Gospels remember him under two names, Jesus Barabbas and Judas Iscariot. In the garden of Gethsemane, the teacher asked the arresting party, "Whom are you looking for?" The man who answered "I am he" was taken, tried as King of the Jews, and crucified under the placard "Jesus of Nazareth." The teacher left his linen cloth in the soldiers' hands and escaped. Inside the book: - The Hebrew pequddah, the office a man holds and answers for, and how it could pass from one man to another before witnesses- The suppressed reading "Jesus Barabbas" in Matthew, and why Origen was glad the scribes removed it- Why "King of the Jews" was the title Rome gave Herod the Great and refused to his sons- The disciple whom Jesus loved, known to the high priest and never named, and why the Gospel of John could not print his name- The Gospel of Judas and its strange line: "you will sacrifice the man that clothes me"Written for readers who have tried for years to make the Gospels agree and have come to suspect that the contradictions are the evidence, this book separates source, inference and reconstruction throughout. It states the strongest objections to its own argument, including the Synoptic kiss, the wounds of the risen Jesus, and the silence of Acts, where they arise. The Gospel as Mirror is the first volume of Unmerging Origins, a four-volume series on the composite figures at the beginning of Christianity.