The Pharisees wanted Jesus dead for the following reasons:
He had stood in effective opposition to their traditional hold over the people. The Pharisees were ultraconservative, and they felt a violent resentment against these supposedly fundamental attacks on their long-established prestige as religious educators.
They argued that Jesus violated the Law, that he had shown complete disregard for the Sabbath and many other ceremonial and legal requirements.
They accused him of blasphemy because he referred to God as his Father.
And now they were thoroughly incensed with him because of the latter part of the farewell sermon which he had delivered that morning in the temple, in which he had violently accused them. (UB 175:4.8-12)
When Jesus’ people rejected His spiritual outpouring and refused to receive the heavenly light that shone so mercifully upon them, they sealed their doom as an independent people with a special spiritual mission on earth. (UB 175:4.8).
The Spirit of Truth. This divine gift is not the letter or law of truth; nor is it designed to operate as the form or expression of truth. The new teacher is the conviction of truth, the consciousness and assurance of true meanings on truly spiritual levels. He is the spirit of living and growing truth, of truth in process of expansion, development, and adaptation. UB 180:5.1. Divine truth is a living reality discerned by the spirit. Truth exists only on the higher spiritual levels of divinity realization and the consciousness of communion with God. You can know truth and you can live truth; you can experience the growth of truth in the soul, and enjoy the freedom which its light brings to the mind; but you cannot imprison truth in formulas, codes, creeds, or in intellectual patterns of human conduct. If you undertake to formulate divine truth humanly, it soon dies. UB 179:5.10.
The mental peace of Jesus was founded on absolute human faith in the actuality of the wise and compassionate diligence of the divine Father. UB 181:1.8. The peace of Jesus is therefore the peace and assurance of a son who firmly believes that his career in time and eternity is entirely safe under the care and supervision of an infinitely wise, loving and powerful Father, Spirit. It is indeed a peace which transcends all comprehension of a human mind, but which a human heart can fully enjoy. P 1955.1.
During the second session of the tribunal, the Sanhedrists, believing that Jesus deserved death, presented him to Pilate, on Friday April 7 of the year 30, under three charges:
He perverted the Jewish nation; he deceived the people and incited them to rebellion.
He taught the people to refuse to pay tribute to Caesar.
By claiming that he was a king and the founder of a new kind of kingdom, he incited treason against the emperor. UB 150:8.6-8.
John was the only one of the eleven apostles to witness the crucifixion, and even he was not present the whole time, for he ran to Jerusalem to take his mother and his mother’s friends to Golgotha, shortly after having taken the mother of Jesus there. UB 187:2.7
When the Master finally breathed his last, there were at the foot of his cross John Zebedee, Jude the brother of Jesus, Ruth his sister, Mary Magdalene and Rebecca, formerly established in Sepphoris. UB 187:5.4
The thief said to Jesus, “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus then said, “Truly, truly, I say to you today, you will one day be with me in Paradise.” UB 187:4.1
It was just before three o’clock that Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “It is finished! Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” After saying this, he bowed his head and gave up the struggle for life. When the Roman centurion saw how Jesus had died, he struck his breast and said, “This was truly a righteous man; he must truly have been a Son of God.” And from that hour he began to believe in Jesus.
A crucified person could not be buried in a Jewish cemetery; a law strictly forbade it. Joseph and Nicodemus knew this law and, on their way to Golgotha, they had decided to bury Jesus in Joseph’s new family tomb, dug out of the rock and located nearby, to the north of Golgotha, on the other side of the road leading to Samaria. No one had ever been laid in this tomb, and they judged it appropriate that the Master should rest there. UB 188:1.2
Nor was the Master’s death on the cross a sacrifice to repay God a debt that the human race had contracted with him. Jesus did not give his life as a ransom to free men from the clutches of apostate leaders and fallen princes of the spheres. The Father in heaven never conceived the gross injustice of condemning a mortal soul because of the misdeeds of his ancestors. UB 188:4.3
Human salvation is real; it is based on two realities that creatures can grasp by faith and thus incorporate into individual human experience: the fact of God’s fatherhood and, the corollary truth, the brotherhood of men. After all, it is true that “you will be forgiven your debts as you forgive your debtors.” P 2017 — §8.
At the roll call of the dispensational resurrection the archangel circuit then operated for the first time from Urantia. Gabriel and the archangel hosts proceeded to the spirit pole of the planet, and when Gabriel gave the signal, his voice was transmitted like lightning over the first system mansion world. It said: “By the command of Michael, let the dead of a Urantia dispensation be resurrected!” Then all the survivors of the Urantia human races who had fallen asleep since the days of Adam and who had not yet stood in judgment appeared in the mansonia resurrection halls ready for morontia investiture. And in a split second the seraphim and their associates prepared to depart for the mansion worlds. Ordinarily these seraphic guardians once assigned to the collective care of these surviving mortals would have been present at the time of their awakening in the resurrection halls of mansonia, but they were now on Urantia because the presence of Gabriel was necessary there in connection with the morontia resurrection of Jesus. UB 189:3.2
The secondary midwayers of Urantia were instructed to remove the two stones which blocked the entrance to the tomb. The larger one was a huge circular block much like a millstone; it moved in a groove cut in the rock, so that it could be rolled forward or backward to open or close the tomb. UB 189:2.4
At his resurrection, Jesus first appeared to the five women who had come to embalm his body. Mary Magdalene and all the other women recognized that it was indeed the Master who stood before them in a glorified form, and they immediately knelt before him. P 2026 — §4. Their human eyes were enabled to see the morontia form of Jesus because of the special ministry of transformers and midwayers associated with certain morontia personalities who then accompanied Jesus. UB 189:4.11
David Zebedee dismissed his messengers and spoke thus: "I bid you farewell and send you to your respective missions with the following message that you will take to the believers: ‘Jesus is risen from the dead; the tomb is empty.’ UB 190:1.5. So, shortly before ten o’clock this Sunday morning, the twenty-six runners set out as the first announcers of this grandiose fact and this powerful truth of the resurrected Jesus. UB 190:1.6.
On Friday morning, April 21, about six o’clock, the morontia Master made his thirteenth appearance, the first in Galilee, to the ten apostles as their boat approached the shore near the usual landing place at Bethsaida. UB 192:1.1. This was the third time that Jesus had manifested himself to the apostles gathered together as a group. UB 192:1.9. Jesus conversed for more than an hour with the ten apostles and John Mark. UB 192:1.10.
Christianity was born and triumphed over all opposing religions for two main reasons:
The Greek mind was willing to borrow good new ideas, even from the Jews.
Paul and his successors were ready to compromise, but to compromise shrewdly and wisely; they were fine negotiators in matters of theology. UB 195:1.2-4.
The moral values of the universe become intellectual acquisitions through the exercise of the three judgments, or fundamental choices, of the mortal mind:
True religious worship is not a futile monologue in which one deceives oneself. Worship is a personal communion with that which is divinely real, with that which is the very source of reality. Through worship, man aspires to become better and, through it, he ends up reaching the best. UB 196:3.22