Word: schonfield
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Careful Plot. Now, British Writer Hugh J. Schonfield, who was born in London to Orthodox Jewish parents, offers his theories in a book called The Passover Plot, published in England and currently causing a flurry there. He argues that while on the cross, Jesus took a drug that rendered him unconscious and made him appear dead when he was taken down, so that later he could be-removed from the tomb by friends intent on restoring him to a long and healthy life...
...Schonfield, 64, became interested in Christianity at 17, when he was a student of New Testament Scholar R. H. Strachan at the University of Glasgow. In a career of publishing and writing, he has increasingly concentrated on Christ. In Passover Plot his thesis is that Jesus believed himself to be the "expected Messiah of Israel" and that he set out deliberately to fulfill the Old Testament prophecies of the rejection of the Messiah, his suffering as expiation of the sins of the world and his ultimate triumph over death. Jesus, says Schonfield, "carefully plotted" every step of his brief public...
...believed that the "messianic drama must be acted out" in Jerusalem, the spiritual and political capital of the Jewish people. Several months before Passover, says the Gospel According to John, Jesus went to Jerusalem "not openly, but as it were in secret."÷ The purpose of this journey was, Schonfield guesses, to set the stage "for the drama to be enacted at the Passover" by enlisting the secret support of Lazarus, Joseph of Arimathea ("one of the great mysteries of the Gospels, a wealthy man and a member of the Sanhedrin") and others...
Jesus, sensing Judas' cupidity, chose him as the instrument of betrayal in order to fulfill the prophecy of Psalms: "Mine own familiar friend in whom I trusted . . . hath lifted up his heel against me." Jesus' "stratagem," says Schonfield, was "designed to pile on the pressure at the crucial moment and induce the traitor to act." When Mary washed his feet with precious ointment, Jesus let "fall the words about his body being anointed for burial." Like "an inspiration it came to" Judas "that money was to be made by doing what Jesus plainly wanted. The tempter came...
...Hugh Schonfield complained that the new Bible is "too gentlemanly . . . The translators have been so well brought up that their good manners are often in evidence...