Can Antiquities of the Jews be proof of Jesus existence and divinity

[Kingpoleon]

As is often the case when you post about this, there's a great point buried underneath your signature posting style. Historical-critical scholars are almost universally of the belief that Pilate was much more bent on executing Jesus than the Bible suggests and that the Gospels stressing the culpability of the Jewish leadership instead was a writerly choice with political and strategic dimensions to it.

The strongest evidence for this hypothesis is that in Mark, Pontius Pilate is not shown to be as hesitant as he is in the other, later Gospels.

[Kingpoleon]

The strongest evidence is that crucifixion was a punishment for rebellion against the Roman state. If the Jews had been involved in Jesus' execution then he would have been stoned according to Jewish law.

To the contrary - even the English did not allow their ecclesiastical courts to sentence people to death. The back and forth of court authority is itself, at least in part, probably accurate. The Roman priesthood had been merged with the Imperial authority only with Augustus, and it is unlikely that any consistent difference between ecclesiastical and administrative had by then been confirmed.

[Kingpoleon]

The point is that crucifixion was not a punishment for blasphemy or anything the Jewish priesthood would have cared about convicting Jesus for.

The point I was making was that the Gospels make clear that Roman law prohibited the Jewish priesthood from putting anyone to death. Furthermore, some commentaries have indicated that both the trials before the Sanhedrin and Pilate were outside Jewish and Roman law - an important point to note that under the laws of man, the crucifixion was not justified.

[Kingpoleon]

Of course, a non-Roman citizen had no right to appeal or anything under Roman law.

It's why St. Paul, who WAS a Roman citizen, had such a complicated execution story and survived way longer than he otherwise would have.

(Arrested in Jerusalem in ~57... I want to take my case to the Emperor! ... Finally sent to Rome in ~60... Nero's incredibly busy and Paul gets to spend literal years in Rome doing his thing before Nero gets around to hearing his appeal and having him killed in ~64)

Indeed, there was no possible appeal for Jesus outside of Pilate and the Sanhedrin, whose own condemnations of him violated their own law.

I quite like Lewis’s metaphysical take here:
“Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards.”