Africa Growth Pilot/Online self-paced course/Module 3/Rewrite into neutrality 2

What about the second sentence? A different kind of neutrality issue:

"Pilate ordered his men to search for Jesus. Unfortunately, Jesus was betrayed by Judas Iscariot. He was caught and crucified and died for our sins."

What are the neutrality problems here, and how can we fix them? In the chat we see the word "unfortunately". Right. Unfortunately. Whether it's unfortunate that Jesus was betrayed is a matter of opinion. It may also be a matter of faith. But even from a Christian point of view, you might question whether it was *unfortunate*, because after all, the betrayal is what led to the crucifixion, which is what led to the salvation, to dying for humankind's sins, according to Christian dogma. So even from a Christian point of view, it's not clear that it's "unfortunate", the betrayal.

But anyway, the encyclopedia shouldn't tell us how to feel about Jesus being betrayed. What else? "Died for our sins". Again, a matter of opinion, or matter of faith. But faith is not fact, it's a kind of opinion. The encyclopedia shouldn't assert as a fact the metaphysical notion that Jesus died for our sins. Even if you personally believe it with all your heart, the encyclopedia shouldn't assert it.

Again, think of a non-Christian reader, who may be interested to learn about the story related in the Christian gospels, but is not willing to hear it asserted as fact, in Wikipedia's Voice, that Jesus died for their sins. Equally, if one is a devout Christian, one may not be willing to hear other religion's beliefs asserted as facts in Wikipedia's Voice. So that's certainly a neutrality problem. We shouldn't say "died for our sins". We shouldn't say "unfortunately".

There's another problem here, which is that this whole thing reads like a factual description of something that happened in history. But we don't know whether any of this happened. We do know there was a Pilate. The Roman procurator Pontius Pilatus is, in fact, a historical figure. There are physical remnants of his palace in modern-day Israel, in the ancient city of Caesarea. There is an actual inscription that says "this was Pilate's house". So he's a historical figure, but there is absolutely not a shred of physical evidence for the existence of Jesus or for his crucifixion. We have, of course, the Gospels and all the various accounts after that of historians, etc., who *report* about the worshiping of Jesus, the early Christians, the Jews who converted to Christianity, all of that.

But we don't know whether or not these events -- searching for Jesus, overturning the tables of the money-lenders, etc. etc. -- we don't know that they happened. We don't have any historical proof that they happened. So what do we need to put at the beginning of this description in order to to *continue* to tell this story? We should say something like: "according to the Christian Gospels...". Or: "according to the Bible", or "according to the Gospel according to Mark,..." -- whatever book we're citing, we can say, "according to" that book, Pilate ordered his men and Jesus was betrayed et cetera. That *contextualizes* it. Otherwise, if we imagine an atheist or someone of a different faith reading this, they might think that Wikipedia, with Wikipedia's Voice, is telling us historical things that happened, which may or may not be true. We just don't know. What we do know for a fact is that this is what the Christian Gospel says, so that's what we should commit to.