The Crucifixion of Jesus

The case does not begin with a late legend but with a creed older than the documents that contain it. In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul says he “passed on” what he had “received,” the technical language of handing on fixed tradition, and then names what he received: Christ died for our sins, was buried, was raised, and appeared. Scholars across the spectrum date this formula to within a few years of the events, traced back to the Jerusalem apostles. Jesus’ death is not an optional later layer painted over a peaceful teacher; it stands at the very head of the oldest summary of the faith we possess.

That centrality runs through the earliest material. The hymn Paul quotes in Philippians presses all the way down to “death on a cross.” Far from concealing the execution, the first Christians made it the heart of the message, which is precisely what a fabricator would not do.

Crucifixion was a Roman spectacle, carried out in the open as a deterrent. The earliest preaching treats it exactly that way. In Acts, Peter stands up in Jerusalem, the very city where it happened, mere weeks after it happened, and tells the crowd that this same Jesus, attested by God among them “as you yourselves know,” was handed over and put to death by being nailed to the cross. He appeals to what his hearers already witnessed.

You cannot preach a fictional public execution to the population that supposedly saw it and expect to be believed. The setting itself functions as a kind of evidence: the claim was made early, locally, and to people in a position to falsify it.

Non-Christian witnesses cannot prove the resurrection, but they can show the execution was no in-house Christian invention.

• The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around 116 AD with open contempt for the Christian “superstition,” records that its founder was put to death under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius.
• The Jewish historian Josephus refers to Pilate condemning Jesus to the cross. His passage shows signs of later Christian editing, so it must be handled with care, but most scholars accept that the bare report of Pilate’s sentence belongs to the original.
• Later Jewish tradition in the Talmud preserves a hostile memory that a figure it calls Jesus the Nazarene was executed “on Passover eve,” charged with sorcery and leading Israel astray. No friend of the church wrote that; yet it still attests both the execution and its Passover setting.

None of these writers wished the Christian message well. That is exactly why their agreement on the fact of the execution carries weight.

Even thoroughly skeptical historians regard the crucifixion as among the most secure facts about Jesus. John Dominic Crossan, no defender of orthodoxy, has called it about as certain as anything in ancient history; Bart Ehrman, an agnostic, treats it as effectively beyond dispute. The reason is the criterion of embarrassment. A crucified messiah was a contradiction in terms to a first-century Jew. The law pronounced anyone hung on a tree to be under God’s curse, and “Christ crucified” struck the wider world as foolishness. No one courting converts invents a savior who dies the single most shameful death the empire could devise. The church proclaimed it because it happened.

Two denials run against this.

• Jesus never existed at all. A handful of writers argue the whole figure is myth. But this is rejected by the very non-Christian scholars best placed to judge, for the reasons above. The fuller reply is at Jesus never existed.
• Jesus was not the one crucified. A much later tradition held that it only appeared so, and that another was substituted on the cross. This claim arrives some six centuries after the event, with no historical witness behind it, and against the unanimous testimony of friend and foe from the first century. The respectful, detailed response is at Jesus was not crucified.

The crucifixion is the firm ground on which the next question stands: why the tomb was empty and what the witnesses claimed to see.