Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Sanhedrin comes across as a ridiculously contrived attempt to show the injustice of
     those who made accusations against Jesus, regardless of whether those accusations
     were true, which in this case they most certainly were.
    Raymond Brown lists twenty-seven discrepancies between the trial of Jesus before the
     Sanhedrin and later rabbinic procedure;
Death of the Messiah
, 358–59. D. R. Catchpole examines the argument against the historicity of the trial
     in “The Historicity of the Sanhedrin Trial,”
Trial of Jesus
, 47–65. That nocturnaltrials were, at the very least, unusual is demonstrated by Acts 4:3–5, in which Peter
     and John are arrested at night but must wait until daylight to be judged before the
     Sanhedrin. Luke, who wrote that passage in Acts, tries to fix his fellow evangelists’
     blunder by arguing for two Sanhedrin meetings: one on the night Jesus was arrested
     and another “when day came.” In Acts 12:1–4, Peter is arrested during Passover but
     not brought before the people for judgment until after the feast is over, though Solomon
     Zeitlin takes exception to the idea that the Sanhedrin could not meet on the eve of
     the Sabbath; Zeitlin,
Who Crucified Jesus?
(New York: Bloch, 1964). One could argue here for John’s sequence of events, wherein
     the Sanhedrin met days before arresting Jesus, but considering that in John, Jesus’s
     triumphal entry into Jerusalem and his cleansing of the Temple, which all scholars
     agree was the impetus for his arrest, were among the first acts of his ministry, John’s
     logic falls apart.
    On the argument about whether the Jews had the right under Roman occupation to put
     criminals to death, see Raymond Brown,
Death of the Messiah
, vol. 1, 331–48. Catchpole’s conclusion on this issue is, in my opinion, the correct
     one: “The Jews could try [a death penalty case], but they could not execute.” See
     “The Historicity of the Sanhedrin trial,”
The Trial of Jesus
, 63. G.W.H. Lampe suggests that an official record of Jesus’s “trial” before Pilate
     could have been preserved, considering the preservation of similar
acta
of Christian martyrs. Apparently several Christian writers mention an
Acta Pilati
existing in the second and third centuries. But even if that were true (and it very
     likely is not), there is no reason to believe that such a document would represent
     anything other than a Christological polemic. See G.W.H. Lampe, “The Trial of Jesus
     in the
Acta Pilati,” Jesus and the Politics of His Day
, 173–82.
    Plutarch writes that “every wrongdoer who goes to execution carries his own cross.”
PART III PROLOGUE: GOD MADE FLESH
    The evidence that Stephen was a Diaspora Jew comes from the fact that he is designated
     as the leader of the Seven, the “Hellenists” who fell into conflict with the “Hebrews,”
     as recounted in Acts 6 (see below for more on the Hellenists). Stephen’s stoners were
     freedmen, themselves Hellenists, but recent émigrés to Jerusalem theologically aligned
     with the Jewish leadership in Jerusalem. See Marie-Éloise Rosenblatt,
Paul the Accused
(Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1995), 24.
    The earliest sources we have for belief in the resurrection of the dead can be found
     in the Ugaritic and Iranian traditions. Zoroastrian scriptures, primarily the Gathas,
     present the earliest and perhaps most well-developed concept of theresurrection of the individual when it speaks of the dead “rising in their bodies”
     at the end of time (Yasna 54). Egyptians believed that the Pharaoh would be resurrected,
     but they did not accept the resurrection of the masses.
    Stanley Porter finds examples of bodily resurrection in Greek and Roman religions
     but claims there is little evidence of the notion of physical resurrection of the
     dead in Jewish thought. See Stanley E. Porter, Michael A. Hayes, and David Tombs,
Resurrection
(Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999). Jon Douglas Levenson disagrees
     with Porter, arguing that belief in the resurrection of the body is rooted in the
     Hebrew Bible and is not, as some have argued, merely part of the Second Temple period
     or the apocalyptic literature written after 70 C.E .;
Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Levenson argues that after the destruction
     of Jerusalem there was a growing belief among the rabbinate that the redemption of
     Israel required the flesh-and-blood