Christian Texts and History • Re: Isaac M. Wise on Jesus

The revisionist view that Jews put forward, largely based on
jewish and Christian scholarship in Germany, stressed that Jesus
was born a Jew and remained one throughout his life. He was,
Isaac Mayer Wise insisted in 1888, "an enthusiastic and thoroughly
Jewish patriot, who fully understood the questions of his age and
the problems of his people, and felt the invincible desire to solve
them." Wise had by then discarded his earlier doubts as to whether
Jesus existed and had determined that Christianity's founder was
actually a "Pharisean doctor of the Hillel School."

https://www.brandeis.edu/hornstein/sarn ... merica.pdf

The Free Review

Edited by John M. Robertson
Vol. II
April to September 1894.

There is one more probable historical basis for a
detail in the Jesus myth . It is not credible that Paul's
Jesus , or any other , had been crucified as “ The King
of the Jews ” ; but we know from Dio Cassius that a
Jewish king, Antigonus, was scourged , crucified , and
afterwards put to death by the order of Mark Antony ,
before the Christian era . Such an act must needs have
made a profound impression on the Jewish people ;
even if it was not memorised for them by such a drama
as was spontaneously set up and preserved among the
Peruvians to commemorate the execution of the last
Inca ; and there is every reason to surmise that the
historic fact in regard to King Antigonus was woven
into the Jesuist myth .

^ Josephus merely says that Marc Antony beheaded King Antigonus. Antiquities, XV 1:2 (8-9). Roman historian Dio Cassius says scouraged, crucified then put to death. See The University Magazine and Free Review, Volume 2 edited by John Mackinnon Robertson and G. Astor Singer (Nabu Press, 2010) at page 13. Merging the material from Josephus and Dio Cassius leads to the conclusion that Antigonus was scourged, crucified, and beheaded.

The scourging and crucifixion of Antigonus, again, must have made a profound impression on the Jews; 2 and it is a historic fact that the similar slaying of the last of the Incas was kept in memory for the Peruvians by a drama annually acted. 3 It may be that the superscription "This is the King of the Jews," and even the detail of scourging, 4 came proximately from the story of Antigonus; though on the other hand it is not unlikely that Antony should have executed Antigonus on the lines of the sacrifice of the mock-king. But it is noteworthy that where the existing mystery-drama, which was doubtless a Gentile development from a much simpler form, introduces historical characters, it does so on the clear lines of sacrificial principle set forth in the ritual of the Khonds, where already the symbol of the cross is prominent in the fashion of slaying the victim. Though the Gentile hostility to the Jews 5 would dictate the special implication of the Jewish priests and people, and of King Herod as in the third gospel, the total effect is to make it clear that the guilt of the sacrifice rests on no one official, but is finally taken by the whole people upon them. Even the quotation put in the mouth of the dying God-Man, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" 6 has the effect of implying that he had hitherto suffered voluntarily. Thus does the ritual which was to grow into a world religion preserve in its consummated quasi-historical form the primeval principle that "one man should die for the people" by the people's will; and, as we have seen, not even in extending the benefit of the sacrifice to "all mankind" does the great historic religion outgo the religious psychology of the ancient Dravidians.

https://sacred-texts.com/bib/cv/pch/pch41.htm