I am not 'on the side' of the Islamic tradition when I say that I despise Christians who discount its claim that Jesus wasn't really crucified. It is these sorts of imbeciles who refuse to accept the authenticity of the Letter to Theodore. Why? Because it 'contradicts' what Mommy and Daddy told them about Jesus.
I for one find it suspicious that the Catholic tradition pays so much gory attention to God being crucified. There is something bizarre about the idea that the Creator set about to embark on a suicide mission while up in the clouds. Why provoke the Jews to crucify you, destroy their temple and banish them to eternal galut? It doesn't make sense.
Yet Irenaeus garbles the heretical traditions belief that:
Those, again, who separate Jesus from Christ, alleging that Christ remained impassible, but that it was Jesus who suffered, preferring the Gospel by Mark, if they read it with a love of truth, may have their errors rectified. [Irenaeus AH 3.11.7]
It should be clear to anyone that we are not only standing on the very ground upon which the Secret Gospel of Mark developed but moreover the tradition, reported by Al-Tabari, about a certain Wahab b. Munabih (c. 700 CE) that:
They brought him [Jesus] to the gibbet on which they intended to crucify him, but God raised him up to Himself and a simulacrum was crucified in his place. He remained there for seven hours, and then his mother and another woman whom He had cured of madness came to weep for him. But Jesus came to them and said, "God has raised me up to Himself, and this is a mere simulacrum. "
Another example of the growth of this legendary tradition is the view of Thalabi, who lived some 300 years after Munabih. "The shape of Jesus was put on Judas who had pointed him out, and they crucified him instead, supposing that he was Jesus. After three hours God took Jesus to himself and raised him up to heaven" .(Bruce, Jesus., p. 178, 179)
The same tradition is reported as early as R. Meir and these morons refuse to let themselves by 'tricked' by the facts:
Rabbi Meir used to say, What is the meaning of (Deut 21:23), “For a curse of God is he that is hung?” [It is like the case of ] two brothers, twins, who resembled each other. One ruled over the whole world, the other took to robbery. After a time the one who took to robbery was caught, and they crucified him on a cross. And everyone who passed to and fro said, “It seems that the king is crucified.” Therefore it is said, “A curse of God is he that is hung.” (Tosefta Sanhedrin 9.7)
Of course if you won't listen to anything which doesn't confirm your inherited presuppositions it is no wonder that these same people reject the Islamic apocryphal literature. Yet isn't it obvious to anyone but me what Secret Mark is all about? (see next post)
