Crucifixion Story’s Distortions Have Been Basis of Many Sins : Good Friday: Although Christians have confessed guilt for the death of Jesus, Jews have usually borne the brunt of hostility.

Christians on Good Friday marked the crucifixion of Jesus, whom they regard as manifesting God on Earth. Through twists of history, his death has been blamed variously on fellow Jews, Romans and a combination of both.

A noted professor of ancient history, Paul L. Maier, says it is “beyond debate” that the Roman governor Pilate delivered the execution verdict and bears the final legal responsibility.

Theologically, however, Christians themselves, in recalling that event, acknowledge that their own sinful failings brought about the crucifixion, necessitating it to redeem humanity.

They were involved. They “were there,” a hymn for the day’s services goes. Only through that confessed participation in the wrong do they find forgiveness for it through Jesus’ suffering on the cross.

It’s regarded as the “atonement,” the laying down of a sinless life to make amends for universal offenses against that goodness. In that purpose, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,” Scripture says.

The day is called “Good Friday” because the crucifixion is seen as absorbing the results of human wrongs in God himself, thus providing His pardon from them, His grace.

It is the great saving act in the belief of Christians, the essential key to their ultimate salvation. For them, it is a topmost good.

Despite that basic theology, however, various slants, contentions and distortions about Jesus’ death have sometimes made it a bitter legacy.

“Probably no issue in the history of religion has elicited more blind partisanship, misinterpretation, faulty logic, hostility or fad following,” Maier writes.

The “pendulum has swung from one illogical--indeed, ridiculous--concept to another, from assuming Jewish generic involvement to arguing for no involvement at all,” he writes in the April 9 issue of the evangelical fortnightly, Christianity Today.

Maier, who teaches ancient history at Western Michigan University and who has written several books about 1st-Century Judaism, of which Jesus was a part, says the early church often bent Scripture to blame Jesus’ fellow Jews.

That notion of “Jewish collective responsibility” for the crucifixion had “horrifying results” through the centuries--ghettoization, pogroms, the Inquisition, centuries of anti-Semitism, the Nazi Holocaust, Maier says.

Past labeling of Jews as “Christ killers” was “illogical, unethical and misinterprets the gospels,” Maier says. That falsehood has been repudiated by almost all churches, including the World Council of Churches and Roman Catholicism’s Second Vatican Council.

However, he says that in trying to atone for the past, it’s become “high theological fashion to argue that no Jews were involved on Good Friday in the manner set forth” in the Gospels.

These arguments blame only Pilate, but to deny any Jewish participation “flies in the face of historical fact,” including traditions in the ancient non-biblical Jewish sources, Maier writes.

He says opposition to Jesus of the Jewish religious rulers, led by the high priest, is confirmed by the ancient Jewish historian Josephus’ account of their later plotting the death of Jesus’ kinsman, James.

“Certainly Jesus had his Jewish opponents,” Maier says, and doubtlessly there was a group shouting “Crucify,” but that “claque seems to have been primarily a throng from the temple--a group perfectly orchestrated by Jesus’ priestly adversaries. “But Jesus also had his Jewish friends and supporters on Good Friday and not just the timid 12 disciples,” Maier says, citing the massive adulation he received on Palm Sunday and other occasions.

“Thousands of Jewish Passover pilgrims must also have remained loyal to him,” Maier says, but most of the pro-Jesus Jews “failed to learn of his arrest, hearings and trial until it was too late.

“He was arrested after many had retired for the night on Thursday, and he stood trial at dawn the next morning,” Maier says. That early morning camouflage was arranged by Pilate apparently to avoid an uprising.

However, Maier contends that past misinterpretations should not justify “tampering with the scriptural sources. Secular historical records of the 1st Century support the New Testament records,” he says.

However, he says Christians should always identify generalizing of “the Jews” in John’s Gospel as meaning Jesus’ Jewish opponents, never Jews in general.

But that doesn’t mean John’s Gospel is anti-Semitic, Maier says, noting that Josephus also often refers to his opponents simply as “the Jews” without intending to generalize.