It’s not hard even for atheists like me to understand Christianity better than most Christians, including you. All we need to do is to study the matter historically, thus discarding the theological presumption of biblical inerrancy. If you construe the New Testament as a record of literal truths, and you somehow bypass all the contradictions, you may arrive at the traditional view of things you just stated. But that’s not what historians do. That’s theology posing as history.
The New Testament’s portrayal of Jesus’s death is best explained as the early Church’s scapegoating of the Jews, after the Jewish-Roman wars, and as an attempt to avoid further wrath from Rome. That’s the historical context in which the canonical gospels must be read. Your theology abstracts from that context and thus is dispensable.
No, for instance, Jewish elders didn’t lead the Romans around by the nose. No, the Romans weren’t afraid of riots. And no, Jews did practice stoning as capital punishment up to the early Christian era, so they didn’t need the Romans to kill Jesus (see the link below and see Acts 7:58). The fact that Jesus was crucified by Romans shows that he was killed for political reasons that mattered to Rome, not to Jewish leaders. The ahistorical narrative in the New Testament is a major source of racial animosity towards Jews that led ultimately to the Nazi holocaust.
Historians simply ask which scenario is more likely, and they side with the higher natural probability, dismissing miracle claims as inherently improbable. Thus, is the inerrantist’s scenario that you stated more likely than the historical consensus, the latter being that the early Church exaggerated Jewish responsibility for Jesus’s death in reaction to the outcomes of the Jewish-Roman wars (the destruction of the Jewish Temple, and the slaughter and scattering of Jews far and wide)?
So, the New Testament doesn’t repeat much of what Jesus might have said against Rome because the early Christians wanted to ingratiate themselves with the empire that had just finished destroying Temple-based Judaism, that being the main root of Christianity. Still, Jesus’s message is implicitly opposed to anything as functionally secular, corrupt, and chauvinistic as the Rome Empire.
And yeah, Jesus was a pacifist. Love your enemies, he said, and turn the other cheek when they strike you. Why? Because worldly affairs are of no consequence, compared to our outcome in the afterlife.
Jesus is supposed to have said his kingdom’s not of this world, and that it’s already among you or is spread upon the earth and people don’t see it. Take your pick. No one knows exactly what the historical Jesus might have said or done because the New Testament isn’t so trustworthy a historical source of information.
https://www.oursundayvisitor.com/why-did-the-jews-stone-stephen-but-not-jesus/
