Where Did Jesus Die? — Page 234
? 234 And I was in the mouth of lions. And as for the plan that they devised about me to release their error and their sense- lessness, I did not succumb to them as they had planned. And I was not afflicted at all. Those who were there pun- ished me, yet I did not die in reality but in appearance, in order that I not be put to shame by them because these are my kinsfolk… I suffered merely according to their sight and thought so that no word might ever be found to speak about them. For my death, which they think happened, happened to them in their error and blindness, since they nailed their man unto their death. Their thoughts did not see me, for they were deaf and blind. But in doing these things, they condemn themselves. [The Second Treatise of the Great Seth] Some say the lord died first and then ascended. They are wrong. He rose first and then he died. … [The Gospel of Philip] A literal reading of some of the above references may give the impression that someone else was crucified instead of Jesus as, but in the deeply metaphoric idiom of Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac, this can simply mean that the Jews misled themselves into believ- ing that Christ died the accursed death they planned for him, and that misconception materialized into the man they crucified; whereas the man that God saved was someone quite different from their misperception: altogether exonerated and glorified from that shameful death. In other words, there were not two