The crucifixion of Jesus

You do not need to accept the New Testament as Scripture to use it as historical evidence. Its earliest documents are the letters of Paul, written in the AD 50s. In one of them Paul quotes a short statement of belief he says he had “received” and then “passed on” (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). Those were the ordinary words for handing on fixed teaching. The statement says Christ died, was buried, was raised, and appeared to named people. Scholars across the spectrum, including those who reject its claims, date the formula to within a few years of the events and trace it to the leaders of the movement in Jerusalem.

Jesus’ death comes first in that summary. Another early passage Paul quotes, often thought to be a hymn, says he became obedient to death, “even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). Far from being a detail added late to the story of a peaceful teacher, the crucifixion heads the oldest summary of Christian belief that survives.

Crucifixion was a Roman punishment carried out in public, meant to be seen as a warning. The movement that followed Jesus’ death began in Jerusalem, where he was executed, and not in some distant place where no one could check its story. Paul’s own letters confirm that by the mid 30s there was a community there that included Peter and James, Jesus’ brother.

The book of Acts, written later and in a style historians read with care, portrays Peter speaking to a Jerusalem crowd about Jesus “as you yourselves know,” and saying that he was put to death on a cross (Acts 2:22-23). Historians debate how closely such speeches record what was said. The setting itself is not in serious doubt. The first followers were talking about a recent, public execution to people who lived where it happened.

Of all the things a movement might invent, a public Roman execution in its own city, within living memory, is among the hardest to keep believed.

Non-Christian writers cannot tell you whether Jesus rose from the dead. They can tell you whether the execution was something only Christians claimed.

• The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around AD 116, calls Christianity a superstition and records that its founder, Christus, was executed under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius.
• The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the 90s AD, refers to Pilate condemning Jesus to the cross. His passage was edited by later Christian copyists, so it needs care, but most scholars accept that the report of Pilate’s sentence belongs to what Josephus wrote.
• The Babylonian Talmud, compiled centuries later, preserves a hostile Jewish tradition about a man it calls Jesus the Nazarene, executed “on Passover eve” on charges of sorcery and leading Israel astray. Scholars debate how much independent memory it contains. Still, a tradition with every reason to reject Jesus remembered his execution and its Passover setting.

None of these writers wished the Christian movement well. Their agreement on the execution is evidence that it was a public fact rather than a story the church told about itself.

Historians who doubt much of the New Testament still regard the crucifixion as among the firmest facts about Jesus. John Dominic Crossan, a co-founder of the Jesus Seminar and no defender of traditional Christianity, writes that it is “as sure as anything historical can ever be.” Bart Ehrman, an agnostic, treats it as beyond serious dispute.

Part of the reason is what historians call the criterion of embarrassment: details that hurt the writer’s own cause are unlikely to be invented. The first Christians called Jesus the Messiah, the king many Jews hoped God would send. Crucifixion was the death Rome gave to slaves and rebels, and Jewish law pronounced anyone hung on a tree to be under God’s curse, a verse Paul himself quotes (Galatians 3:13). Paul admits that “Christ crucified” was “a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). No one looking for followers invents a savior who dies that way. The early Christians kept explaining the crucifixion because they could not deny it.

Two views run against this. One holds that Jesus never existed at all; the reasons historians reject it are set out in Jesus never existed. The other, found in the Qur’an about six centuries later, holds that Jesus only appeared to be crucified. No first-century source, friendly or hostile, supports that account.

The crucifixion does not settle what happened next. It does raise the next question: why his followers, soon after his death, were saying he had been raised.