This paper applies Systemic Verification Engineering (SVE) — a Bayesian-forensic framework for diagnosing institutional behaviour under conditions of epistemic opacity — to the trial and execution of Jesus of Nazareth. We propose the High Priests Axiom: when a religious institution bypasses its own internal jurisdiction and appeals to an external executive power to eliminate an individual charged with blasphemy, this procedural action constitutes a formal marker of political, not religious, threat perception. By modelling the Sanhedrin proceedings as a state-transition system with the initial state UNKNOWN, we demonstrate that at least four procedural anomalies — the nocturnal Passover-eve session, shifting charges, appeal to Roman imperium, and crowd manipulation — collectively trigger an irreversible transition to FALSE for the hypothesis that religious conviction was the primary motivating cause. A corollary corrects the presumption of innocence itself: the sole epistemically honest verdict available to the Sanhedrin was not "guilty" or "not guilty" but UNKNOWN — a verdict it refused to render, converting ignorance into a death sentence. The method introduced here is novel; the conclusion is not. We offer no new theology but a formally auditable diagnostic protocol applicable to any analogous institutional action. Full preprint including appendices: CGS state-transition analysis with systematic rebuttal of 10 counter-arguments, sensitivity analysis, the "First Trolley Problem" (Caiaphas as utilitarian), Gödel incompleteness remark, Bayesian Silence, and author's experiential testimony. A shortened version is in preparation for journal submission. Notes: Draft v0.8 — Work in progress, feedback welcome. Prepared for submission to TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology. This preprint contains the full version, including appendices; a shortened, anonymised version will be submitted for peer review. Acknowledgement: The author thanks Prof. Eli Lizorkin-Eyzenberg (Israel Institute of Biblical Studies / Israel Bible Center) for theological feedback and critical discussion that sharpened several arguments in this paper. Acknowledgement does NOT imply endorsement of the paper's conclusions and/or content.
Artiom Kovnatsky (Sun,) studied this question.