Passion Myths Dispelled

From The Triumph of Tradition:

"Just about everything the critics said about Gibson’s film was wrong. Starting with Fredriksen, the critics assumed the pose of objective historian, lecturing us ad nauseam that all scholars believe that the Romans alone were responsible for the Crucifixion; that Pilate was such a brutal tyrant that what the Gospels wrote about him was certainly false; that no one in first-century Jerusalem spoke Latin. But Raymond Brown, the late doyen of liberal biblical scholars, wrote in his Death of the Messiah that, 'When the Jewish, Christian, and pagan evidence is assembled, the involvement of Jews in the death of Jesus approaches certainty'; that Pilate 'was not a ferociously cruel governor' and the Gospels’ 'descriptions of Pilate with their variations are not inherently implausible'; and that Pilate’s cohorts included the Secunda Italica Civium Romanorum—troops who spoke Latin, not Greek."