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I mean, it's marginally better that the Talmudic POV that Jesus is suffering in hell by being boiled in feces.
Also that Jesus's dad was a Roman soldier named Pantera who cuckolded Joseph.
I get the orthodox Jews of the day being extremely pissed-off about the association with yet another rabble-rousing itinerant preacher stirring up trouble among the masses after the Romans just finished stomping on the previous rabble-rouser, so they very much wanted to make it crystal clear to the Emperor that "these guys are nothing to do with us".
It's the liberal Christians I do not understand. Why not just say "We're too smart and modern to believe in the Virgin Birth, Mary was just some dumb broad" instead of torturing meaning into nonsense by "Now the reason people talked about the Virgin Mary was, and we all know virgins don't get pregnant without sex, is that she was a girl who was raped. That's how she got pregnant by a guy not her betrothed, without being a slut. And the villagers used to refer to her as "Mary the virgin who was raped", and eventually that just turned into "Mary the virgin" and then "the Virgin Mary". You see the simple explanation that doesn't require us to turn off our brains and believe in pregnancy without sex? Evidence for this? It, uh, came to me in a dream?"
I swear, this is a real liberal denomination example I read online years back. One of those "we cosplay by dressing up in the vestments and using the historical language, but we don't really believe all that stuff, except about niceness. We believe in niceness" mainline churches. I may mock Pastorette Babs in Talarico's Presbyterian church, but she is at least upfront and honest about what she does not believe.
The Romans would have loved to have a Hellenized version of Judaism develop which extolled political quietism, the dutiful paying of taxes, a comical level of non-violence and the acceptance of foreigners into the fold. To have the Son of God tell the powerful Roman military captain “you have more faith in God than any Jew”, to have John the Baptist tell the Roman soldier “you’re doing perfect, just be happy with your pay and don’t be corrupt”, paraphrasing, this would be the Roman dream.
We can be pretty sure why Jesus was killed because the Christian sources and the Jewish sources converge on a key point: He was a threat to the Pharisee’s power, ie the proto-rabbinical stranglehold over Jewish culture. And so we read in Rambam that he “cause[d] difficulty to the Jews and sway[ed] the people away from God” and thus deserved to die, and we read in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue from 150ad that the Jews had a curse on Christians in their synagogal prayers. This later developed into the Birkat ha-Minim still prayed daily by Orthodox Jews: “Let the Christians (notzrim) and the heretics perish as in a moment. Let them be wiped out of the book of life, and with the righteous let them not be written”. This term is what Paul is called the the Jews in Acts 24:5: a Nazarene stirring up dissension / trouble among Jews. Obviously this is embarrassing for Orthodox Jews, so they try to whitewash the term and claim a false etymology, because praying every day for Christians to immediately all die is insane. But the mass of evidence points to this and even today “notzrim” is a term used by Israelis for Christians.
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