The Crucifixion of Jesus Christ
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: 28 October 1998, Thursday, 07 August 2003
Abstract
Crucifixions
Herodotus, writing about 450 BC, mentions crucifixion three times in his histories, including the death by crucifixion after torture, of the tyrant of Samos, Polycrates, around 522 BC at the hands of Oroetes, the Persian satrap of Lydia. Curtius Rufus says Alexander the Great had 2,000 survivors from the siege of Tyre crucified on the shores of the Mediterranean, Sanhedrin 6.5 says Simeon B Shetah had 70 or 80 witches hung in the city of Ashkelon, and Josephus mentions it several times in his different works. He introduces it when telling how Antiochus, around 165 BC, robbed the temple of its treasure supplied in the previous century by the Ptolemies. He had wanted to try to conquer Egypt but had been warned off by the Romans, and, piqued, decided to take it out on the temple the Egyptians had favoured. He imposed stringent conditions on the Jewish population and many refused to obey them. His punishment was crucifixion.
Many Jews there were who complied with the king’s commands, either voluntarily, or out of fear of the penalty that was denounced. But the best men, and those of the noblest souls, did not regard him, but did pay a greater respect to the customs of their country than concern as to the punishment which he threatened to the disobedient; on which account they every day underwent great miseries and bitter torments; for they were whipped with rods, and their bodies were torn to pieces, and were crucified, while they were still alive, and breathed. They also strangled those women and their sons whom they had circumcised, as the king had appointed, hanging their sons about their necks as they were upon the crosses.Josephus (Whiston), Antiquities 12:5:4
Then he relates how Alexander Jannaeaus crucified 800 Pharisees.
As he was feasting with his concubines, in the sight of all the city, he ordered about eight hundred of them to be crucified; and while they were living, he ordered the throats of their children and wives to be cut before their eyes.Antiquities 13:14:2
He describes how Varus, the Roman legate of Syria, after the revolution following the death of Herod in 4 AD, took two of the three Syrian legions to pacify the country.
Varus sent a part of his army into the country, to seek out those that had been the authors of the revolt; and when they were discovered, he punished some of them that were most guilty, and some he dismissed: now the number of those that were crucified on this account were two thousand.Antiquities 17:10:10
The crucifixion of Jesus is mentioned in a disputed passage in Antiquities 18:3:3. He uses the expression “condemned him to the cross” whereas elsewhere he simply says “crucified.” In the next section he describes the priests of Isis crucified in Rome for raping a virtuous woman.
Tiberius inquired into the matter thoroughly by examining the priests about it, and ordered them to be crucified.Antiquities 18:3:4
The sons of Judas the Galilean, who had led a revolt in 6 AD over the Roman taxation census, were crucified by the Roman procurator Tiberius Alexander (46-48 AD), the nephew of Philo of Alexandria. These might have been literally his sons or more probably simply his followers in a brotherhood, but either way the party of Judas was still active 40 years after he founded it. These were the Galilaeans that Jesus was a member of. Jesus was therefore a “son” of Judas. Notice that the names were those of brothers of Jesus mentioned in the gospels.
The sons of Judas of Galilee were now slain; I mean of that Judas who caused the people to revolt, when Cyrenius came to take an account of the estates of the Jews, as we have showed in a foregoing book. The names of those sons were James and Simon, whom Alexander commanded to be crucified.Antiquities 20:5:2
The Torah commandment is to forbid Jews to allow a corpse to stay on a tree overnight:
And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree: His body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day; (for he that is hanged is accursed of God;) that thy land be not defiled, which the Lord thy God giveth thee for an inheritance.Dt 21:22-23
Since it presumes the punishment of crucifixion, and crucifixion was introduced by the Persians, this passage is best explained as having been written after the Persian conquest, not by Moses or even in the time of Josiah. But the Jews took it seriously, fearful of yet more of God’s curses, and Josephus confirms it:
They proceeded to that degree of impiety, as to cast away their dead bodies without burial, although the Jews used to take so much care of the burial of men, that they took down those that were condemned and crucified, and buried them before the going down of the sun.War 4:5:2
In the seige of Jerusalem, Titus took to crucifying people publicly before the walls to terrorize the defenders:
A certain Jew was taken alive, who, by Titus’s order, was crucified before the wall, to see whether the rest of them would be afrighted, and abate of their obstinacy.War 5:6:5
They were first whipped, and then tormented with all sorts of tortures, before they died, and were then crucified before the wall of the city. This miserable procedure made Titus greatly to pity them, while they caught every day five hundred Jews; nay, some days they caught more: yet it did not appear to be safe for him to let those that were taken by force go their way, and to set a guard over so many he saw would be to make such as great deal them useless to him. The main reason why he did not forbid that cruelty was this, that he hoped the Jews might perhaps yield at that sight, out of fear lest they might themselves afterwards be liable to the same cruel treatment. So the soldiers, out of the wrath and hatred they bore the Jews, nailed those they caught, one after one way, and another after another, to the crosses, by way of jest, when their multitude was so great, that room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses wanting for the bodies.War 5:11:1
Finally, Josephus pleaded with Titus for the reprieving of three of his friends he saw being crucified after he had been captured and changed sides.
I saw many captives crucified, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintance. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physician’s hands, while the third recovered.Life 75
Although crucifixions were routine, not one contemporary picture has come down to show how they took place. Christian artistic convention grew up two centuries after crucifixion had been abolished and, for anatomical reaaons, must be incorrect. The illustration here by Charles Pickard was tested by the artist, who put himself into this position—the pain lasted for days afterwards.
Zias and Seketes in 1985 examined the heelbone of a crucified man found in the Jerusalem suburb of Givat ha Mivtar in 1968. The nail was less than 5 inches (11.5 cm) long and could not have penetrated both feet. Plainly the nail had entered sideways not front on as conventional Christian iconography depicts. Death would have been quick—possibly minutes when the arms were tied almost vertical, and otherwise not more than hours if the body were unsupported. Giving support to the feet by nailing them, would have added to the agony as well as the time needed to die. Providing the small seat or sedile also helped to prolong life but without adding to the agony the pain and pressure on the broken heel. Both would not have been used as shown here simply for illustration. Crucifixions occurred on busy roads and popular places so that they could be seen and inspire fear. Quintillian in the first century AD says they were meant to be an exemplary punishment. The victim was usually left on the cross to be picked by birds and wild animals.
First the victim was beaten with cudgels. Then he was tied with ropes or nailed, or both, to a wooden spar. The most secure method of fixing him was by twisting his arms behind the spar. Finally, the spar was attached to an upright post already planted in the ground. The shape was either the familiar + or T the latter being more convenient and so more likely to have been used. When the feet were not nailed the peg was knocked in to give support between the legs, prolonging the agony.
The position was intended to be agonising, every breath requiring intense effort. Even so, some victims took as long as three days to die. Jesus, according to the gospels, lasted the unusually short period of three hours. With his feet nailed, he should have lived longer even despite the excrutiating pain. Was he a man of weak physique? Or had the beating been too severe? To hang up a man in public and leave him to die was the most contemptuous form of execution it is possible to devise.
How was the trial that sent Jesus to the Cross conducted? Here is the view of A N Sherwin-White, a Roman historian who was Reader in Ancient History at Oxford and a fellow of St John’s College. He made a special study of the trial of Jesus in the light of the latest research into Roman administrative and legal procedures.
Although Pilate would not have been bound by the strict forms of Roman law in trying a non-Roman, it is to be expected that as a matter of custom he would keep close to normal procedures. Custom required that trials should be open to the public (not in the open, note), with the governor sitting on his bench, or “tribunal”, that charges should be made formally by interested parties, who acted as private prosecutors (since there were no public prosecution in the Roman world), and that accused persons should have the opportunity to defend themselves. There were no juries, but a governor normally took the advice of a committee of assessors (consilium). He gave his verdict, if he found the charge proved, in the form of a sentence to a particular punishment.
The interesting thing about the gospel accounts is that, whereas the description of the Sanhedrin procedures may be difficult to understand, the account of the trial before Pilate is credible. The basic elements of a Roman provincial trial are all present. It takes place in public before Pilate sitting on his tribunal. There are the necessary private accusers, the Jewish clergy, who duly conduct the case against Christ. There is apparently within the building an interested crowd, shouting advice, which was not unusual. The charges are specific—Christ claims to be a “king”—and it is left to the Roman judge to take what view he will.
A peculiarlty of this particular trial was that the accused made no attempt to defend himself. This was rare in Roman courts but in cases where it did arise there was a usage by which, to prevent miscarriage of justice, the direct question was put three times to the defendant before he was condemned by default. Hence it is a correct technicality in Mark, Matthew, and John, when Pilate repeats his question to the silent Christ.
In Matthew and Mark the sentence is given in technical language. Pilate had Christ scourged and handed him over to be crucified. The severe beating, or flagellatio, was regularly given before an execution. Luke adds another and credible point when Pilate says:
I have found no fault in this man… I will therefore chastise him and set him free.
This refers to the custom that Roman governors had, when faced by tiresome delinquents whom they did not take seriously, of dismissing them with a light beating, not the ferocious scouring with cudgels, but the less fearful caning with rods.
The three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, contain the elements of the correct procedure in a Roman provincial trial The writers have not written with the set intention of painting a great court scene in all its professional detail. But they have retained the basic elements of some first hand account, doubtless the least the authors could attempt to do to persuade contemporary Romans.
Golgotha
- It was a capital offence to act against the Empire or Caesar
- It was a capital offence to assume the actions of an official without authority
- It was a capital offence to join an armed body in capturing a public place—indeed simply to carry arms.
The gospels are clear that Jesus was guilty of each of these offences. Pilate had no discretion in the matter of sentencing. Under the laws of Rome Jesus was guilty of treason. Simply being acclaimed a king without an insurrection was sufficient for the Roman authorities to find him guilty. There is no argument about this! The punishment for these crimes could only be crucifixion. Jesus is crucified at the third hour—about 9 o’clock in the morning—a curious detail to find in Mark when the other synoptists omit it, suggesting it is an addition, but not an unreasonable one.
Mark’s connecting paragraph is peculiar (Mk 15:21):
And they compel one Simon a Cyrenian, who passed by, coming out of the country, the father of Alexander and Rufus, to bear his cross.
Why is this man Simon, a Cyrenian, introduced? Why indeed would the Romans compel a man to carry the cross for Jesus, making him miss part of his punishment? Simon’s Christian purpose seems to be to act as a witness, and his sons are mentioned to prove it, implying that they were known in Christian circles, though the other gospels omit them. But does Cyrenian really mean of Cyrene, a place in Libya? There must surely be an Aramaic word behind it, which Mark has not explained, and it has been rendered as something the Romans could understand.
Some say it means a man who works with lime, or in the cornfields, or is a fowler, or comes from the city. Perhaps the reference is not to words meaning lime or grain but to the root qara yielding a word meaning a planned encounter, deliberate and arranged for a purpose. It is used of an intentional meeting with God. The Cyrenian was a man who had to make a prearranged rendezvous with Jesus as he carried the cross—but if the encounter with this Simon was planned, what was its purpose and who planned it? It begins to look as though Jesus was indeed substituted before his crucifixion—by the Essenes?
Mark does translate an Aramaic word. Golgotha is interpreted as “the place of the skull”—the word, properly golgoltha, simply means skull or head. Christians have always believed it meant a rock or hillock shaped like a skull as Gordon of Khartoum did but golgoltha is used of counting heads, as in a census or poll-tax. There would have been a census in 20-21 AD—when the Acta Pilati say that Jesus died—if the Augustan cycle of censuses was followed. Perhaps all those pious pilgrims who imagined it to refer to a feature of the landscape were quite wrong—it was a place near the tax office.
More probably the heads counted would have been those of the dead in the recent counter attack. The Romans might have used decapitated heads to count dead Jews giving us the precise meaning of golgoltha, and perhaps they left the pile of them as a warning. Christians usually discount this argument—after 2000 years the evangelists’ aim of whitewashing the Romans still carries clout—because the considerate Romans could not possibly have done such an offensive thing to the Jews. Hacked up corpses lying about for days on end was against Jewish law so the kindly Romans tidied them up. It is true that the Romans normally did bend over backwards to defer to Jewish demands—but not when faced with rebellion! Even the gospel accounts declare there had been an insurrection, so the arguments that golgoltha cannot have had anything to do with actual skulls is nonsense. The place of the skull was where a pile of skulls had been made when the insurrection was put down. As an admonition it would have been near the site of the recent battle between the Nazarenes and the Jerusalem garrison described in the story of the Gadarene swine—overlooking the Kidron valley to the southeast of the city.
The rest of the crucifixion tradition is buttressed with scriptural fulfilments. The drink offered in Mark 15:23 fulfils Proverbs 31:6; parting his garments in Mark 15:24 was inserted to fulfil Psalms 22:18; Mark 15:27, as Mark 15:28 explains, fulfils Isaiah 53:12; the beginning of Mark 15:29 fulfils Psalms 22:7. Mark composes these prophecies for the informed reader to note, but in Mark 15:28 he expressly points out the scriptural reference:
And he was numbered with the transgressors,
namely the crucified rebels alongside him. He does so because it was the only one of these “prophecies” that had really been fulfilled. But some copyists thought it said too honestly that Jesus was a transgressor, effectively labelling him as the rebel he was, and omitted it. Hence it is missing in some early manuscripts.
Mithras was associated with festivals at the equinoxes, when the sun's path crossed the heavenly equator, whence the figures of the torchbearers with their crossed legs. The uplifted torch with right leg over left is the rising bright summer sun, therefore representing the vernal equinox, while the downturned torch with left over right is the dark winter sun, representing the autumnal equinox. In this crucifixion picture, Jesus is made to represent the vernal equinox, while the transgressor to his right is the autumnal equinox. what of the other man? His right leg passes behind his left leg then his foot passes in front of it again. He stands for the full solar year. He is therefore God, Yehouah or Iao being the God of the full year. The proper symmetry would have the father in the center with his two sons on either side, but Jesus, the good son has to be central in Christian imagery, and, of course, there is only one crucifixion myth remaining. Jesus is identified with the sun behind him. The painting also plainly equates the cross with the trees that the transgressors are hung on. At one time the imagery would have been common knowledge, but the Christians lost it. The transgressors, two thieves—the Greek word is again lestai meaning insurrectionists—defenders of the city against the Romans, were crucified with Jesus, one on either side and they reviled him. It is quite unlike Essenes to break under torture, as we know from Josephus, so we can be sure that these men are not lifelong Essenes but either Jesus’s converts, accepted into the movement on the basis of repentance and baptism, or bystanders who undertook to help the Nazarenes against the legionaries. Luke 23:39-43 gives us their conversation in detail. One man demands that Jesus save them to prove his claims but “the other” tells him off, saying:
Dost thou not fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation? And we indeed justly; for we receive the due reward of our deeds. But this man hath done nothing amiss.
“The other” who answers is Jesus himself not the other anonymous man—it was Jesus who was addressed, and he it should be who answers. The implication is that the third of the trio, “this man”, was an onlooker arrested and condemned in error. Luke’s ambiguity suggests it is Jesus but allows that it was the third man.
If the purpose of the dialogue is to distinguish Jesus from the rebels, Luke fails miserably when he tells us the rebuked bandit and Jesus were in the same condemnation. He is evidently not raising the question of whether Jesus was in the same condemnation or not, but simply whether it was just or not—for one of them, “this man”, it was unjust. If this were not genuine tradition, it would never have been included. Jesus was named as an insurrectionist like the others. The denouement is that one of the two men, again it is not clear whether it is the rebuked man suitably chastened or the defended one suitably grateful, asks to be remembered in the kingdom and Jesus responds favourably. Since Jesus no longer expected the kingdom to be coming, these last verses are added, implying as they do that the kingdom would follow the suffering of the servant—a later idea.
Jesus’s attendants on the cross had their legs broken to shorten their lives (Jn 19:31-32) but Jesus was already dead. The object of crucifixion was to provide a slow death. Once the legs were broken, the strain on the heart and lungs would soon lead to death. Since Jesus was already dead without any broken bones and, according to John, on the eve of the Passover, he became the perfect sacrifice. The paschal lamb had to be perfect—it could have none of its bones broken! It also had to be sacrificed on 14 Nisan and this became the early Christian tradition of the actual date of the crucifixion.
The Finish
After six hours on the cross Jesus cries:
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Mark records it in Aramaic and translates it for his gentile audience. That this is the first line of Psalms 22 leads one to think it is a false but pious conclusion to Jesus’s life. Psalms 22 is really two psalms, one a cry of despair and one a messianic response. Commentators say that the cry of despair invites the response, and perhaps that is so, but a cry of despair is a strange choice for the gospel writer given that Psalms 22 was unfamiliar to gentiles without access to the Septuagint. The other gospel writers omit it as inappropriate for a God.
Yet a hundred years ago, it was pointed out that the earliest Christians would never have accepted a cry of despair from their God, even if it was a quotation from scripture, unless it was unequivocally vouchsafed by history. That must be true, and a clue that it is genuine is the next line in which some of the observers think he is saying “Elias” when he is saying “Eloi”. This is almost like a sick joke and it is difficult to believe it is other than genuine. Verse 36 is a fulfilment of prophecy and completion of the joke.
Jesus was steeped in interpretations of the scriptures and his final appeal to God in his agony might well have been couched in a scriptural quotation. He did not have to rack his brain to come up with it—it was simply the way he thought. Many pious Jews, perhaps most, would have been similarly conditioned but none more so than the Essenes. He was in agony and despair. Inadvertently his cry to God is Psalms 22. Now once this is accepted it becomes clear why so much more of the psalm is then added to the account of Jesus’s suffering. Much of the detail of the passion is taken directly from Psalms 22 because it provided Jesus’s last words and so seemed particularly holy.
After only a short time on the cross Jesus is offered a sponge of vinegar whereupon he cries out and dies. A Roman soldier, not a Jew, first recognizes Jesus as the Son of God. Mark is sucking up to the Romans again—a gentile first recognizes Jesus as the messiah. Mark concludes this section by pointing out that many women followers look on from afar, a sop to the early membership of the gentile church—women. Gentile women were much more ready to become Jewish proselytes than men because they did not have to undergo the painful and dangerous operation for adults of circumcision. Christianity found a ready basis for recruiting in the Roman Empire in the women who had already adopted Judaism. The relationships given in verse 40 are not clear.
When Jesus died, John gives no miracles. Mark and Luke mention the darkness of the sky for three hours and the tearing of the veil in the temple. The grosser effects—the earthquake, the bursting open of graves and the dead (described as “saints” meaning Essenes) walking—are the product of the fervid imagination of Matthew. If any one of these spectacular events really happened, on an occasion as memorable anyway as the death of a god, surely they would have been widely remembered and would have appeared in the other accounts. Besides their inconsistent use in the gospels, Seneca and Pliny who compiled records of such events had never heard of them.
The Darkness at the Crucifixion
And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.
Mark 15:33 tells us and Matthew elaborates (Mt 27:31) that when Christ was crucified, there was darkness all over the land for three hours, and the earth did quake, and the rocks were rent, and many of the saints came out of their graves. Here we have a series of events so strange, so unusual and so extraordinary that they must have attracted the attention of the whole world.
Scriptural prophecy says that God would darken the sky (Isa 50:3; Amos 8:9) and so, you see, it happened. The sun ceased to shine, causing an almost total darkness near the middle of the day. Really? No writer anywhere or anytime in history who has not depended on Matthew mentions it. Not one of the numerous historians of that age makes the slightest allusion to such astounding events.
Even Seneca and the elder Pliny, who minutely chronicle the events of those times, are silent about the greatest event in history. Each of these philosophers, in a detailed work, recorded all the phenomena of nature’s earthquakes, meteors and eclipses, he could collect. And, although Mark incidentally alludes to the darkness, in their gospels neither Luke nor John, know of any of these wonderful events. Christians tell us that God deliberately came to earth to die because he wanted to save wicked mankind—then he forgot to make sure everyone knew about it!
Similar incidents are related in the legendary histories of other heathen demigods and great men. A cloud surrounded the moon, the sun was darkened at noonday and the sky rained fire and ashes during the crucifixion of the Indian God Krishna. The birth of Osiris had been accompanied by an eclipse of the sun and his death was attended by a still greater darkness. At the crucifixion of Prometheus, the whole frame of nature become convulsed, the earth shook, the rocks were rent, the graves opened, and in a storm which threatened the dissolution of the universe, the scene closed. According to Livy, the last hours of the mortal demise of Romulus were marked by a storm and by a solar eclipse.
Similar stories are told of Caesar and Alexander the Great. After six hours of darkness Alexander’s soul was seen to fly away in the form of a dove. A host of respectable classical authorities, according to Gibbon, vouched for a fable, the darkness which followed Caesar’s murder. Pliny speaks of a darkness attending Caesar’s death, but omits to mention such a scene as attending the crucifixion of Christ. Virgil repeats the story.
These historical precedents leads one to conclude that these events of the death of Christ were borrowed from pagan legend.
Naturally, solar eclipses had been observed for millennia and the Babylonian priests were adepts at predicting them and associated them with acts of God. If a solar eclipse occurred near the death of a famous man, it would be considered an act of God marking the death of the great man. Then it would have been written into accounts of their lives. Since an ancient god, whether, Jesus or his predecessors, is a man writ large, it was necessarily applied to gods too.
Matthew (Mt 27:52) says the bodies of the dead saints arose and came out of their tombs. Can anyone seriously believe this? If Matthew is taken at face value then lots of questions arise. The story of the graves opening and the dead rising was told of the final exit of several heathen gods and great men long before it was applied to Christ. Shakespeare, following Virgil, writes in Hamlet :
In the most high and palmy days of Rome,
A little ere the mighty Julius fell—
The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.
How could “many saints” come out of their graves when Christianity only began with the death of Jesus? If his Nazarene followers were already called “saints”, how many of them could have died in the short period of his ministry? At the beginning of Acts there were only 120 Christians all together. If the story of Jesus is as innocent as Christians believe, “many” could not have risen but if “many saints” did rise, then Jesus was not as innocent as he is made out.
If “many saints” had arisen, then a lot of Nazarenes must have died. They had either been in existence for a long time and therefore before Jesus, or a lot of them had died in the short time of Jesus’s ministry. In fact, both were true. This quotation proves that “the Saints” were the Holy or Righteous Ones, the Essenes of whom Jesus was one.
How long had the saints been in their graves? Had they decomposed and been consumed by worms? To resurrect the saints did God have to kill a lot of worms and bacteria and their descendants that had lived on the decomposing flesh, to recover for the saints the materials of their bodies? Were their shrouds also resurrected or did the saints leave their graves nude?
Why did God revive them? How long did they live the second time? What business did they engage in? And why did Matthew not give us the names and testimony of these people as evidence of such a singular event? A legion of reanimated dead men with their families and friends touring with them as proof of their previous death would surely have turned Christianity into a mass movement in the Roman Empire much earlier than a few earnest preachers. Why have we not some account of what they said and did? And what finally became of them? Did they die again, or did they ascend to heaven with their new made bodies?
Until these questions are rationally answered, the story must be regarded as too incredible and too ludicrous to merit serious notice as fact. But it can easily be understood as Matthew’s indication of his belief that the general resurrection of the dead (Hosea 6:2) had begun with the resurrection of Jesus. Matthew is trying to say that though Jesus was the first fruit of the dead, others had already followed him back to life. It is a pious lie but its origin and purpose is plain.
Similarly, the motive for introducing the story of the darkness into the death of Jesus was to explain references to the Nazarene victory in the Qidron Valley prophesied by Joel. Many Jews must have known about the victory and told of it when they were dispersed after 70 AD as a fulfilment of prophesy. The prophesy is quite clear but expressed poetically. Joel’s prophecy begins:
And I will show wonders in the heavens, and in the earth, flood and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord come.Joel 2:30
Plainly the climax of the prophesy is not simply that physical wonders appear, on earth and in heaven but the great and terrible day of the Lord. Reading on we find that this is when the nations of the earth would be defeated by the children of Israel in the Valley of Jehoshephat. The physical wonders merely signalled this great victory (Joel 3:12-13).
Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about. Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, get you down; for the press is full, the fats overflow; for their wickedness is great.
By reducing the fulfilment to a literal fulfilment of only a poetic part of the prophecy, the bishops deflected the criticisms of expatriat Jews. They simply claimed the Jews were confused. Any military victory could not possibly have had anything to do with the pacific Jesus.The only prophecy fulfilled was that the sky was darkened.
Simply reading the surrounding scripture will satisfy any unprejudiced mind that this poetic rhapsody did not allude to the death of Christ. “That the prophecy might be fulfilled” they incorporated scriptural allusions into their accounts and thus deflected criticisms.
Matthew’s gospel is a polemical work. He is trying to answer criticisms. If an appropriate text was found but its context did not fit, he did not care. He, and others, in typically Essene fashion happily misquoted, tortured or distorted texts into messianic prophecies, when the context shows they have no reference to Christ whatever.
In Matthew and Mark, the drink of wine mingled with myrrh is offered to Jesus before he is crucified and also another bitter drink on the cross. Proverbs 31:6 forbids strong drink to princes and wine to kings but Mosaic law allows a man about to perish a drink “that he remember his misery no more”. The wine and myrrh mixture was offered to Jesus to dull the pain of the crucifixion, but he was priest, prophet and prince and refused to break his Nazarite vow even to ease his pain on the cross.
Mark 15:31 says that the Chief Priests, meaning the Sadducees, mocked him, then “with the scribes” was added for Mark’s usual reason of tarring the Pharisees with the Saducaean brush. The direct speech is a Marcan summary of what they said and must be true in essence—the Sadducees were glad to be rid of him.
Pilate did not imagine that Jesus was innocent as the gospels make out. He insisted that the inscription on the cross should read “the king of the Jews” rather than “He said: I am king of the Jews” (Jn 19:21). Some Christians take it that Pilate actually believed in Jesus as the king of the Jews—he was a secret Christian—and the Coptic Church has canonised him. In fact, Pilate intended the execution and the inscription to serve as a lesson to all Jews never to harbour nationalistic ideas. Crucifixion would be the fate, not only of false kings, but also of genuine kings should they emerge—Caesar alone had power. It did not have the desired effect. After Pilate’s disgrace in 36 AD, Roman prefects came and went until Agrippa, the grandson of Herod the Great, was instated for a few years until 44 AD when Roman rule resumed under the procurators. Immediately there was an uprising under a messiah called Theudas who was slain. A High Priest was murdered by the sicarii. Simon Magus assembled a crowd at the Mount of Olives to see a miracle. The revolt of Eleazar continued for twenty years until he was captured by the procurator Felix and sent to Rome. James the Just, brother of Jesus, was stoned to death in 62 AD, instigating the war, Josephus implies.
The Jewish War began in 66 AD with astonishing successes. The leader of the Zealots, Menehem, a “son” of Judas the Galilean, and Eleazar, the captain of the Temple Guard, revolted at the same time. The Zealots captured the fortress of Masada and murdered the Roman garrison. The captain of the Temple Guard refused to allow a daily sacrifice for the Emperor, a blatant outrage to the Romans. The Roman garrison in Jerusalem surrendered and was butchered. The Legate of Syria had to send an army of twenty thousand men which the rebels promptly defeated. It all proves that Jews were more than capable of defeating the legions unless they came in overpowering might.
But, as Jesus realized decades before, the Jews lacked unity—the rebels began to quarrel among themselves. Menehem declared himself king only to be murdered by the Sadducees. John of Gischala, another Galilean, leader of the Zealots, then murdered the High Priest, Annas, and overthrew the Sadducees.
It took a large force from Rome under the generalship of Vespasian, soon to be Emperor, and his son Titus to put down the rising, taking advantage of the disunity of the Jewish factions. With the fall of Jerusalem after a siege of five months, the Jewish state was crushed. The temple was shattered and with it the party of the Sadducees. Jews were taken captive to Rome. Jewish wealth was plundered. The Sanhedrin was disbanded. The Rabbis and the Pharisees were scattered to re-establish Judaism centred on the synagogue. Most important of all from the viewpoint of Christianity, the Jewish followers of Jesus in Jerusalem were also dispersed, a few remnants taking to the desert, traditionally via Pella. Even after Jerusalem and the temple had been razed, Jewish spirit was not destroyed. There were to be further messianic uprisings in 116 AD and 136 AD when, with the slaying of Bar Kosiba, the flame of revolt was finally extinguished.
The Year of the Crucifixion
When exactly did the crucifixion occur? Surprisingly no one knows and it is impossible to deduce with certainty. We know it occurred near the time of the Passover in spring in the prefecture of Pilate and the reign of Tiberius, 14 AD to 37 AD. By the time the gospels were written, no one could remember for sure on what day or even in what year the crucifixion occurred. It was not considered important because judgement day was still expected. Nevertheless the gospels record the earliest tradition—the tomb was found empty on the day after the sabbath, the first day of the week, a Sunday. If Jesus’s body had been left unattended because of the sabbath then he had been placed there before sunset on the preceding Friday, a period of three days if the days were counted inclusively. The disappearance of the body and the apparent agreement with Hosea’s prophecy led the Nazarenes converts of the simple of Ephraim into believing that the general resurrection had started—the failed warrior messiah had turned out to be the suffering servant, the kingdom had come, at least in embryo, and would be introduced fully fledged when the messiah returned in glory—Christianity in principle if not yet in name had been born.
In Josephus’s Antiquities, although Pilate does not start his term as prefect of Judaea until 26 AD, the sense of chapter 18:3, which narrates tumults, demands that the third of the tumults occurring under Pilate was that of Jesus the messiah, and an association of it with events in Rome datable from other sources seems to place these around 18 or 19 AD, near the crucifixion date of 21 AD given in the allegedly forged Acta Pilati of 311 AD. Pilate’s inaugural act of sneaking the standards into Jerusalem, to the Jews fulfilled Daniel’s prophecy of the “Abomination of Desolation” which heralded the final days. Origen in the third century considered it so. Such an offensive incident would be more likely to trigger a rebellion than merely invite the petitions for their removal recorded.
The event of the standards was probably that which stimulated Jesus to begin his mission to invest God’s kingdom on earth. Pilate therefore began his term in 18 AD not in 26 AD. This ties in with the number twelve in the miracles of Jairus’s daughter and the woman with a haemorrhage, it being the twelfth year of Roman rule, the twelfth year since Judas the Galilaean rebelled against the numbering of the people. If Jesus began his ministry in 18 AD it was 21 years after John the Baptist began his according to Mandaean tradition in 4 BC agreeing with the idea that the Baptist was Jesus’s predecessor as the “nasi”. They were not exact contemporaries as Luke makes out unless Jesus also was much older in which case he could have been Judas the Galilaean! Christians must have altered Josephus to make Pilate’s rule seem shorter than it really was. They wanted to discredit the Acta Pilati which were not forged but the genuine Acts of Pilate.
The synoptic gospels have Jesus crucified on the morning of 15 Nisan, the day after the Passover on 14 Nisan when the passover meal, the seder, is eaten in the evening. John’s gospel makes it on the morning of 14 Nisan. The Talmud agrees with accepted Christian tradition that Jesus was crucified on a Friday and rose on a Sunday. It says the crucifixion was on the day before the Passover which that year fell on a sabbath. The Talmud however will be recording Nazarene tradition and not be an independent record.
As a rule of thumb Passover occurs at the first full moon in the Jewish year, but in theory it is more complicated. The first month in the year is Nisan and the start of it is declared when a new moon is first observed. That day is therefore 1 Nisan and fourteen days later is Passover, on the evening of 14 Nisan, which is really 15 Nisan since the Jewish day begins at sunset. The trouble is that the new moon might not be visible for up to three days after it is astronomically new, depending upon alignments and circulations of the planetary orbs, so it is impossible to say when the priests will have declared 1 Nisan in the feasible years of the crucixion.
Worse still, the new year notionally began near the spring equinox and the paschal full moon was therefore the first after the equinox, but confusingly the Jewish equinox seems not to have matched the astronomical one but came earlier. Third century clergymen protested that Jews sometimes declared Nisan such that the paschal full moon fell before the equinox. In seeking suitable dates, if the expected paschal full moon falls late in April, it is likely that the previous full moon in March should be considered as marking Passover that year even if it falls before the equinox.
In the year 21 AD astronomically Passover should have been Wednesday 16 April, but this is late and it could have fallen Monday 17-18 March. That year 15 Nisan was therefore Tuesday 18 March and that was the day that Jesus was crucified. Now according to Epiphanius, the Acta Pilati gives the date of the crucifixion as 18 March but in all later copies it had been altered to 25 March, and that date became traditional in the early imperial church. The change was made for several reasons. First 18 March was before the equinox which the clergy considered must have been an error. Second many pagan festivals—most notably the date of the conception of the sun god whose birth was 25 December—fell on 25 March and it was convenient for the church to emulate popular pagan festivals. Third, when 25 December was also adopted as Christmas, then the day of the annunciation of the blessed virgin, the day of Jesus’s conception by God, also fell on 25 March. If that was the day he was conceived it was also the day a perfect being should die.
Jesus was crucified on 15 Nisan, Tuesday 18 March, 21 AD.
What then of the gospels, which say that Jesus entered the tomb on a Friday and had left it by Sunday morning? The simple explanation is that Jesus did not die on the cross within six hours but hung on it for three days! Three days is much more like the normal time it takes a man to die when crucified, unless his legs are broken. Jesus did not have his legs broken according to John 19:32. We have seen that from Deuteronomy 21:23 a man hung on a tree, though accursed of God, should not be left hanging there all night. The Romans were normally very patient about Jewish sensitivities and the gospels depict Pilate as happy to defer to the Jews’ desire that the malefactors should be taken down. Not only did Jews not want them hanging overnight, but traditionally the next day was the sabbath and that is the reason for their request to remove the bodies given in John. The gospels, keen to depict Pilate as a good man, say he readily agreed.
Pilate was not a nice man at all—he hated the Jews and would certainly have not been lenient to a seditionist of any sort. Furthermore the Romans were not so kindly disposed to Jews that they still honoured their customs in times of war. The Nazarenes had just fought two battles with the legionaries and the latter would not have felt well-disposed towards Jews. For these reasons Pilate would have been happy to leave Jesus hanging on the cross as the exemplary punishment that he was intended to be. In John, the element of tradition is that, after the bodies had been hanging for three days, the Jews came in supplication to Pilate on the Friday asking for them to be cut down so as not to desecrate the sabbath. Satisfied that order had been restored and the malefactors were now dead, Pilate concurred with this request and sent out soldiers to despatch any that were still lingering before cutting them down. John says that Jesus was stabbed with a spear to make sure, and then handed to Joseph of Arimathea. Interestingly, Codex Sinaiticus, backed up by several other famous manuscripts of the fourth and fifth centuries, records the spear thrust in Matthew 27:49, before Jesus died.
Why then did the gospels pretend that Jesus was dead after only six hours? The object of the gospel writers was to show the Jews as the villains and the Romans as kindly but crucifixion was a Roman punishment. There was no gainsaying that, but the evangelists wanted it to seem that the Son of God had not suffered unduly from this cruel Roman punishment. So they argued that the Son was crucified only a few hours before he died and was laid to rest in a rock tomb.
Finally why was the early Christian tradition, beginning with Paul, that Jesus had been crucified on 14 Nisan not 15 Nisan? And why is it confirmed by the Jewish Talmud? The three synoptic gospels put the crucifixion on 15 Nisan and only John’s gospels plumps for 14 Nisan. Paul (1 Cor 5:7) chooses 14 Nisan and he implies (1 Cor 15:20) 14 Nisan in his reference to his resurrection as the “first fruits” meaning it happened on 16 Nisan, when the sheaf of barleycorn was being offered in the temple. Early Christians honoured the date 14 Nisan, later translated as 25 March, as the date of the crucifixion irrespective of what day it fell on—there was no Good Friday in those days.
The answer must be that the myth of the paschal lamb was one of the first Christian myths—Nazarenes directly saw Jesus as the perfect sacrifice. Still expecting judgement they remembered the image of Jesus as the paschal lamb not precise dates. A paschal lamb could only be sacrificed on the 14 Nisan and so the image conditioned the memory of the event. The Nazarene memory entered the Jewish tradition partly because the Nazarenes were a Jewish sect before they became gentile and partly through transference from Christianity. However the synoptic tradition came from Peter who had a first hand experience of the events and transmitted it through Mark.
The accepted year of the crucifixion is 33 AD but Paul the apostle visited Jerusalem for the Apostolic Council of 49 AD and he tells us that 17 years had elapsed since his conversion, which must therefore have been in 32 AD. Paul converted before the official year of the crucifixion! The previous accepted date of 29 AD gives Paul time to be converted but both of these dates are wrong simply because scholars have erroneously accepted that Jesus was crucified on a Friday. Once this assumption is discarded the tradition of the Acta Pilati is found to be true.
Crucifixion: a Pagan Rite
The details of the crucifixion of Jesus is that it re-enacts ancient pagan rites in which an animal or human was sacrificed. The sacrifice of a lamb or a kid at the Passover was a symbolic human sacrifice. The God, Baal, who was at one time worshipped by the Israelites, cheated the god of death, Mot, at the spring equinox by pretending to be dead. Leaving his only son to die in his place, he disappeared but later appeared again alive! Plainly the legend justified a human sacrifice and, despite the wholesale forging of the scriptures by the post-Exilic priests, the Israelites in Canaan worshipped Baal (which merely means “Lord”). The substitution of a ram for Isaac in the story of Abraham represents the change over from human to animal sacrifice and provides the authority for it. The Laws of Moses make the change explicit.
Eusebius tells us, quoting Philo of Byblus, the Jewish king traditionally gave his beloved son as a sacrificial offering for the nation as a ransom to avenging devils. Besides Abraham:
- David attempted to stop a famine by sacrificing seven royal princes, sons of Saul, hanging them before the Lord, at the beginning of the barley harvest, about the time of the Passover
- Mesha of Moab sacrificed his eldest son
- king Hiel sacrificed his sons when Jericho was founded
- Kings Ahaz and Manassah burnt their children in sacrifice
- Ishmael was nearly sacrificed by his father, like Isaac, according to Arab legend.
The king personified the tribal god and as such was the father of the people. The son therefore represented the people themselves. Thus the actual son of the king was sacrificed as the symbolic Son of the Father (bar Abbas) representing the unworthy tribe. The two others hanged with Jesus would, on this hypothesis, be the king’s attendants, one being on his right hand and one on his left.
The victims of the sacrifices were normally hanged on a tree until dusk as the Old Testament repeatedly indicates and in the Greek language hanging from a tree and crucifixion are synonymous. With time this rite became more symbolic, a condemned criminal being substituted for the prince. Jesus ben Pandira in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus (105-76 BC) was stoned and hanged from a tree on the eve of the Passover, an indication perhaps that the people in cruel mockery sometimes sacrificed a human even as late this.
Is sacrifice quite the right description, though?
Further Reading
- More on Jesus crucified as a scapegoat victim
- More on the resurrection
- More on secular Christianity
Moses and Exodus
