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                                                                                         Ellis Rivkin, What Crucified Jesus?

1. With Rivkin's thesis that "what emerges with great clarity both from Josephus and from the Gospels is that the culprit is not the Jews but the Roman imperial system" (95) I am entirely sympathetic, whatever reservations I may have about the detailed meaning he takes this to have. Thus I take him to have shown more than adequately that "from perceived threat till final judgment, political factors alone weighed in the balance. Whatever linkage there may have been between the Scribes-Pharisees and the political authorities, it was a linkage that derived from the doctrine of the two realms and not a linkage that derived from Jesus' 'heretical' teachings" (101).

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