According to the Gospels, Jesus came into Jerusalem on a donkey, being greeted with joy. There are proclamations that Jesus is the Messiah. Five days later, however, Jesus is arrested and suddenly the Jews hate him. There was supposedly a tradition of releasing one criminal that day, and the Jews chose a highwayman over Jesusa man whose only crimes were being nasty to some rabbis and lawyers. Pontius Pilate, who from historical records is a cruel man, tries to get Jesus released, and is even portrayed as washing his hands of his blood. When he asks what his punishment should be, the Jews shouted that he be crucified.
What's going on? These are the people that greeted Jesus as their Messiah? Something is very wrong.
Is it possible that the account of the Crucifixion might be altered?
I doubt that anything of significance in the gospel stories of Jesus' arrival in Jerusalem, capture, trial, and execution has any historical factuality to it.
For one thing, Jesus is depicted as arriving in Jerusalem with everyone waving palm branches and shouting "hosanna" (a Greek or Latin corruption of the Hebrew
hosha na, "Please rescue us," part of a liturgy of psalms sung on the pilgrimage holidays, but especially on Sukkot): the only time of year when Jews sing
hosha na and wave palm branches is the holiday of Sukkot, which falls in Autumn, at the Autumn harvest. Yet all of a sudden, the Last Supper is apparently a Passover seder, which falls in Spring, five weeks before the Spring harvest. Clearly, the narrative is a pastiche of victorious entry stories.
Second of all, it is likely that all the people of the city didn't greet Jesus because most of them had probably never heard of him. There were hundreds of guys running around in those days claiming to be the messiah, and thousands of itinerant popular charismatic preachers. Jesus' popularity, if indeed he really had much among Jews, seems to have been rural, in the Galilee, and not urban, in Jerusalem.
Also, the story of Jesus capture is clearly cut from whole cloth: the High Priest had no power to convene a Great Sanhedrin, and during that era, no sanhedrin was handing out the death penalty for heresy or blasphemy, much less doing so by handing anyone over to the Romans. Aside from the fact that it is strictly forbidden for Jews to hand over a fellow Jew-- any fellow Jew, even a heretic-- to oppressive non-Jewish authorities, we are not permitted excessive torture, or capital punishment by any means save the four dictated in Torah (stoning, burning-- not at the stake, but by molten lead, which kills instantly-- beheading, and garrote), and prisoners must be rendered insensible, and killed as quickly as possible to prevent undue suffering. And no one can be executed by a Jewish court save on the independently verified eyewitness testimony of two people who warned the perpitrator not to commit their crime, and heard the perpitrator reject the warning before committing the act. If any court convicted Jesus of anything, it was clearly an illegitimate kangaroo court assembled by the Romans or the Herodians (who were the puppets of the Romans, which amounts to the same thing), nothing sanctioned by Jewish Law.
Even if there were Jews who wished Jesus dead, no one would demand that a Jew be crucified, nor encourage the Romans to kill other Jews, nor choose one life over another. It goes against everything we hold about justice, everything we hold about relating to an oppressive non-Jewish regime, and everything we hold about doing what God wants.
Whatever the facts of Jesus' demise may be, I am fairly certain they don't much resemble the stories in the gospels, which are most likely polemicized narratives written after the facts with specific agendas in mind.
