True frames — conspiracies to frame an innocent person for a crime they didn’t commit — are much rarer than most people realize. One would think that powerful unethical people would engage in such activity, but the evidence I see is that it is not that common.
The evidence I’m thinking of are the stories in the Bible. Unscrupulous people hated Jesus and later hated the apostles. Yet, when those people moved in on their victims through a trial process, their plans always failed at a particular point. Their false accusers couldn’t agree on their testimony against Jesus, Stephen, or others.
But why not? If you are willing to make false accusations, why not be careful to make sure that your false accusations cohere?
I think this misses the point that, as much as people want to destroy their enemies, they want to do so in a way, if possible, that sustains to themselves the delusion that they are acting in a righteous manner. The Sanhedrin, as a body, never orchestrated false testimony. Otherwise, the falsehoods would have lined up. Rather, they became willing to believe any lie they heard about their victims. And others, when they realized they could please the Sanhedrin by making accusations, came forward with fals stories. But these different people were summoned to appear in court on the naive belief that they were reporting true information. No one in the Sanhedrin was going to go coach the different witnesses to make up a coherent story. They were naive based on their predisposition.
In reality, the predisposition was the evidence of guilt. Every evil report was believed. Every defense was treated as obvious evidence of hard-hearted depravity. The fix was in, in the minds of the attackers. Actually telling people to lie would have required less hate-induced delusion.
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