Customer Reviews

The Passover Plot: A New Interpretation of the Life and Death of Jesus

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Did Jesus orchestrate his public life and subsequent crucifixion and disappearance from the tomb? Hugh Schonfield, a renowned scholar and former Pulitzer Prize nominee, feels that is a possibility. And in his book "The Passover Plot," he presents his scholary arguments as to how and why Jesus could have pulled off such a feat.

If you are a Christian this book could well destroy your faith, or else strengthen it. The author does not attempt to debunk Christian beliefs, but instead he gives us the "historical" Jesus as he sets down his arguments in the context of the times in which Jesus lived. He takes into consideration the political climate of the area, as well as the feelings and beliefs of contemporary Jews of which Jesus was one.

For whatever reason you read this book, I suggest you do it with an open mind. If you can do so, you will surely agree that "The Passover Plot" is indeed an interesting and exciting read. Schonfield's ideas are revolutionarhy at the very least, and whether you agree with his treatise or not, you must laud his painstaking, scholarly sincerity and careful scrutiny of the available references.

To reach his version of the truth, Schonfield tries to dispel the myths through which Christ looms larger than life in the Gospels of the New Testament. He sifts and probes the Gospels and other authoritative works, including those of the contemporary Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, to arrive at the facts which have not been previously represented. He attempts to show that it was the personality of Jesus which enabled him to embark on a program calculated to fulfill what he believed the prophecies demanded of the Messiah.

The plot of Jesus was unique in that it called for intense messianic faith, acute perceptiveness, an iron will and extreme intelligence. To accomplish his goals, Jesus had to produce certain calculated reactions.

The Galilean, the first-born of a Jewish carpenter Joseph and his wife Miriam (Mary), was to prove to be no ordinary boy, for he was destined to play a unique part in history. Very little information is available regarding the early life of Jesus. The Gospels pass over completely his entire life prior to his public ministry. It is fairly certain, however that Jesus having grown up under the influence of the Essene sect, their teachings influenced the shaping of his beliefs. The Gospels suggest that Jesus was imbibed by notions presented by the Nazarenes, and his younger brother James had somewhat embraced the ascetic way of life. Early in his life, Jesus put into operation a program which was the outcome of his prior messianic investigations in the years before his baptism by John the Baptist.

That Jesus believed he was the Messiah of the Jews is divulged in the Gospels, the author feels. Following his baptism by John, Jesus put into motion his plot to fulfill the scriptures as to his ministry and subsequent crucifixion. Jesus was fully aware that the only future that mattered depended upon what he said and did in his life and finally upon his death. He knew exactly what he was doing, and every word and action was well planned and thought out.

Schonfield weaves an intricate tapestry of Jesus' public life, taking into consideration the political climate of the times and the belief by many Jews that the end was at hand, as well as strong messianic fervor. Jesus calculated his entry into Jerusalem and subsequent ministry to coincide with the scriptures.s Because of the harsh political climate in the city, he had to carefully orchestrate his public life so as to not prematurely infuriate either the Roman rulers or the Jewish hierarchy.

The author delves deeply into the brief ministry of Jesus, his agony on the cross, his burial and subsequent disappearance from the tomb. Although the written information of these events is sparse, Schonfield offers his take on a very intriguing chain of events in the life and death of Jesus. He tries to explain details of the resurrection using the resources at hand and a very fertile, educatiod mind. I think he has succeeded beyond what could have been expected.

In conclusion, Schoenfield points out that Jesus exerted a powerful influence on those who came in contact with him. If you wish to know the real Jesus, he concludes, we have to be acutely aware of all that was going on at the time, the highly charged atmosphere and political tension. We must think of Jesus not as a divine being or teacher of ethics,but as a son of his country, a man with the blood of kings in his veins, exercising authority, because he truely believed it to be his messianic destiny. The Jesus of history can only be correctly known by those who are willing to see him as a Jewish Messiah.

Finally, the author tries to lay out the origins of Christianity, completely interlaced with synoptic and paganic influences. His premise is that Christianity was in origin a messianic movement, and that it's development as a new religion was conditional by its subsequent non-Jewish environment.

Schoenfield has indeed portrayed the historical Jesus as a real person of his time, rather than as a theological figure of Cbhristian faith. The figure that evolves is a person of dynamic character, with one perpose and one goal in mind.

I strongly encourage you to read "The Passover Plot." It will either shake your Christian faith or greatly reinforce it. But surely, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

It was Schoenfeld's speculation that Jesus faked his crucifixion that made this a hot best-seller in its day, but the virtues of the book lie in the meticulous and persuasive scholarship that underlie the sensational element. Schoenfeld is particulary good at explaining what it means to understand Jesus as a Jew, a fact given lip service but rarely understood by Christians. Also outstanding is his analysis of the differing theological conceptions and aims of the four gospel authors, and how their religious views shaped their versions of the story. His idea that Jesus deliberately set out to fulfill the Old Testament prophecies and become the Messiah is interesting and plausible. One needn't accept his highly speculative passover plot theory of just what happened on that first Easter to get quite a lot out of this excellent work.

As a Roman Catholic, Schonfield's idea of a Passover plot is intriguing and does not in the least threaten my Christian beliefs. Why should it? He doesn't suggest that Christianity is bad or evil, just that its beginnings are not exactly the way they were portrayed by the reporters of a later time. It's a theory, and a pretty good one at that! In his sequel THE PENTECOST REVOLUTION, Schonfield sheds even more light on this very touchy subject.

An interesting analysis of the Passion story, this book is most valuable for the background information it gives about the state of the world where and when Jesus lived. The faked death by crucifixion notion seems a trifle far-fetched, but not nearly so outlandish as the story in the Gospels of the return from death and the invention of the notion of the Second Coming to cover up the historical fact that the Romans crushed the Jewish Messiah like a grape, and he did not save his people. Anything that pokes a few more holes in fundamentalism is worth the price of admission.

In 1971, I was a public high school senior who had dropped out of the Catholic School system after ten years of Catholic indoctrination and an excellent high school education under the Sistine Jesuits. I took an English elective entitled, "The Bible as Literature." Our first reading was "The Passover Plot."

I found the book to be highly interesting in its presentation of the historical facts of the time (history has always been my passion), and its subjective interpretation of the life of Jesus. Keep in mind that my background had been the religous indoctrination of the Catholic Church, which had been the preeminet spiritual and temporal leader of Europe until Martin Luther happened along. Also, keep in mind that Protestants are considered to be heretics of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.

Anyway, my take on the whole matter is quite simple. I am sure most of us remember the old school game where you wisper a message in someones ear and have that person pass it to ten people. At the end of the line you ask the last person to reveal the message, and your original message has been totally twisted around. The same with history. Here we are two thousand years later after Jesus' presumable death at the
"brutal" hands of the Romans whose empire is also dead, and, more importantly, still waiting for his "SECOND COMING" as Christian believers, and no one can really say with sound accuracy if he lived or if he was just a myth.

The bottom line really is quite simple. Regardless of his existence, a religion was started, and our modern world is now caught up in the grips of a terrorist inspired JIHAD. The crusades revisited. Jews against Moslems, and Moslems against Christians---an age old story. Yet, all three religions claim to be descended from Abraham, but are killing each other against the precept of "Thou shallt not kill thy neighbor." The more lethal the weapon, the better.

Oh, and now we have a movie, "The Passion," which is exploiting the violent side of our souls in order to get a message out or is it the old Hollywood story--to make a bigger buck and be the all-time money grosser.

When will we as so-called educated, enlightened humans ever learn that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Sorry, if this was not an exact review of the book, and more like a polemical takeoff of my feelings on the book...but,...

In conclusion, the book does make an interesting read for someone who is open-minded enough to accept or reject the authors precepts. It should be read along with other books on the subject. Like the Constitution and the Bible, it is a matter of one's own interpretation. For historical research, I give it four stars, and for his "subjective" analysis and conclusion, I give the book three stars.

write this book in 1965, and to try and provide the thesis with scholarly support. Schonfield does exactly that. I'm not sure I can buy into all of what he is saying, but there certainly exists an aura of plausibility. Indeed, if one reads the Koran and some of the Indian texts that exist, Schonfield's book isn't so revolutionary. Specifically, Indians to this day claim that Jesus is buried in their country. Is it true? who knows, but we do know that contemporaneous writings from immediately after the crucifixtion refer to Jesus in India. Who knows, maybe it is all bunk. I think one thing is for certain--that Gospels as published today, don't match up with their original Greek manuscripts. I suspect that perhaps the truth is somewhere in between the Gospels and Schonfield's view.

This book is funny in the way it takes fiction, analyzes the guts out of it, deconstructs its plot and characters, then furnishes its own new plot twist. In the present publishing market, it is clever to market fiction as nonfiction, because the latter usually sells better. That said, I give it 3 stars.

My take on the whole Jesus thing is that it was always pure fiction. As George Moore points out in his 1916 novel The Brook Kerith, 3 hours on the cross isn't enough to kill a man, the usual time it took being 3 days. (Marketed as fiction, his book flopped commercially). As Earl Doherty points out in The Jesus Puzzle, the earliest Christians, including Paul and Peter seem to have never heard of a real person called Jesus of Nazareth, or his elaborate story. Instead, they seem to have all personally "seen" a "Jesus Christ" in their visions, and find him backed up in the ancient Hebrew scriptures, which is all they had. Paul's mission was self-appointed, and he seems to think he's the first one to really preach a Jesus Christ. The first time Mary and Joseph are mentioned is by Ignatius at the end of the first century. The gospels in the form we have them were written after the destruction of Israel by the Romans, when there were no witnesses left, Paul included. It would be easy at that late date to back-fit a story to the combined work of the previous Christ-preachers. Maybe John Allegro is right in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, when he says that many if not most of the underground religious movements in the Middle East back then were really amanita muscaria-eating psychedelic mushroom cults, the dropout hippies of their day. Being totally zonked, the suffering of death in the arena wouldn't have been all that hard. In any case Christianity was originally the religion of the slaves and other outcasts in a world seemingly to be run by Rome forever. The Christianity we know today is the result of centuries of evolution and political power struggles. The simple-simon founding myth of a barefoot hero in a lost world is unknowable by real history.

When _The Passover Plot_ first came out back around 1965, it hit like a bombshell. Right away Schonfield tells his readers that the book is "the outcome of an endeavor which has extended over 40 years to discover who the 'man' (quotes mine) really was. However, rather than publishing this in a scholarly book, Schonfield aims his writing toward the general public in a commercial enterprise. What this means is that the author gets to make unsubstantiated assertions and does not have to field points of view contrary to his own.

So for Schonfield, Jesus became a Galilean who was caught up by his times. There was a great deal of messianic expectancy in Galilee and the Scriptures were reinterpreted to pertain to current events. One can find this same technique in the Dead Sea Scroll pesharim. For the pious in Israel, Rome was the archenemy,
the Fourth Kingdom foretold by Daniel 7. Jesus came to believe that he was the Messiah endowed with the spirit of wisdom. According to the Scriptures, he would die on the cross and then be resurrected. This would save Israel from the Romans.

With meticulous detail Jesus plans his own execution and resurrection. Yes, there would be torture, but that was predicted by Scripture. But crucifixion was not always fatal. Josephus records an interesting story about some who were saved after being crucified. Jesus planned to stay on the cross for only a few hours. He would try to appear dead. The vinegar on the sponge was supposed to be a drug. Then he would try to get into the hands of some close, trusted friends who would resuscitate him. The plan would have worked had not Jesus been thrust in the side with a lance. For a short period of time on Saturday night Jesus regained consciousness and then succumbed.

I have a few objections to Schonfield's book. For the moment I will grant that he was writing as a historian and not as a theologian. Among other things, this allows him to not consider anything which might be known as miraculous.

My first objection is that Schonfield has to account for the formation of the early church. He does this by quickly sketching in a few post-resurrectional stories. The angel at the tomb is really the young man who gave Jesus the vinegar at the cross. The man encountered by Mary in the garden is a Jesus imperson-ator as are the man encountered by the two disciples on the road to Emmaus.

All of this was supposed to have been planned by Jesus at least some of which was planned on Saturday night when Jesus regained consciousness for a short period of time. Proposing these posthumous manipulation of events stretches credulity. Moreover the whole theory proposes that there were the Twelve Disciples and then there was an inner circle closer to Jesus. One would think that later traditions would know something more about them than an obscure comment.

My second objection is that Schonfield writes that the Romans were the enemy of the pious of Israel. But on page 143 Jesus manipulates the situation so that the Chief Priests were forced to move against him. Then on page 145 the Chief Priests have bring "strong pressure" on Pilate so they pack his courtyard with their own henchmen. This sounds like Jesus had another opponent than Rome.

Now I will get back to the idea that Schonfield was writing as a historian rather than a theologian. Schonfield is a Jewish Nazorean. He starts out his book with a question that he asked of his "Christian friends" if it would not be enough if they believed in One God and believed in Jesus as his messianic messenger. On page 141 he points out that early Nazoreans knew nothing of Trinitarianism. He concludes Part 1 of his book with a short homily about "the young Jew, there was the Man." So on the contrary, Schonfield permeates his book with his theology.

This book should never have made the explosion that it did.

Ted Albasini says Schonfield was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. I think he means the Nobel Peace prize . Schonfield got this nomination for his World Citizenship peace work, not his writing. He is not apparently much regarded as an authoritative scholar by academics, none of whom refer to him in their books. Geza Vermes is the real thing, not Schonfield who was a publisher with Michael Joseph, and whose speciality was modern Egypt. In the preface of his book Politics of God he describes a vision which inspired him to try and unite Christianity and Judaism for world peace. He saw lights etc. I think he was sincere but not academically highly qualified as a biblical scholar, nor would I think him altogether sane. The Passover Plot happened to hit the right time for the fashion for reading "debunking books". He knows how to speak to fundamentalist evangelicals and has enraged so many American evangelicals more than better books because Schonfield was himself an evangelical at Waltham New Town Mission, London, in the early 1920's. All his understanding of Christians seems to be aimed at his old aquaintances.

In this book Hugh Schonfield delivers a theory that portrays Jesus as a deceiver who bent the rules in order to fulfill prophecy. According to Schonfield's story, Jesus planned His own resurrection, which was apparently foiled when He was accidentally pierced on the cross by a soldier. However, the disciples--what would a dead Jesus look like anyway? Schonfield asks--wanted so badly to believe in the resurrection that they mistakenly thought they saw Jesus and began what we today call Christianity.

Pity the poor Christians today, Schonfield seems to be saying. Here they are, believing in a nonhistorical fairy tale. If his story is correct, then the Christian is truly the most pitied of all people, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15:1ff. But if he is wrong, there is a terrible price to pay. Yet I believe that history shows the swoon theory, the wrong tomb theory, or even the spiritual resurrection theory as much more likely possibilities than what Schonfield has to offer.

In effect, Schonfield is calling into question the integrity of both Jesus and his disciples. Was Jesus really a deceiver? Was He looking for popularity? If so, then why did He not accept the accolades of the people that He received on Palm Sunday and just become their political ruler? Certainly it could have ended no more tragically than what really took place. Jesus' popularity would have given Him an edge in trying to overthrow the Roman government in the Judean region, and perhaps He could have been more successful than the many other "messiahs" who, for the most part, were all unsuccessful and eventually lost their lives. But to claim that Jesus was in this for the power or because He Himself was under dillusional thoughts is not very historical at all.

Another problem with Schonfield's theory is that there were many events not under Jesus' control for this theory to take place. Here is a man whose very birth was predicted in scripture (Isaiah 7:14; Micah 5:2). What He would say on the cross and other circumstances of His death were also very clearly predicted (Psalm 22, Isaiah 53). His life fulfilled these things. Despite His death and the "plot" wallowing in shambles, everything is supposed to work out just right? Are we to believe that Thomas really touches Jesus, but this really wasn't Jesus? (John 20:26ff) So why does Thomas take the gospel message to India and die a martyr's death? To make everything work, Thomas and the other disciples must have been complete dolts, which is the only possible way it would have worked. With Jesus out of the picture, there is no way in the world this could have fooled so many different people, including the more than 500 who saw Jesus at one time (1 Cor. 15:1-7).

All in all, I believe that a person will have to own a lot of faith in order to believe The Passover Plot. If the author was not serious about his research, it would almost be a fun theory. But Schonfield shows how far off a person can get by reading into history and creating one's own "what if" theory. To me, believing in the many eyewitness accounts of Jesus' resurrection appearances, the evidence of the power of changed lives because of this resurrection, and a tomb where no body could be found is a much better risk of faith than believing anything Schonfield has to offer. Unless you're curious to see how Schonfield explains his theory, I just don't recommend this book.