Santa Clara University

Reconstructing Jesus’ Death: A Historical Context

By Cynthia Baker, assistant professor, Department of Religious Studies, Santa Clara University

The following remarks are offered to provide a bit of historical context for judging claims of authenticity and accuracy of depictions of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.

I. The nature of the sources for reconstructing Jesus’ death

We have no historical evidence from the time of Jesus that documents his crucifixion or any of the other hundreds of crucifixions attributed to Pontius Pilate when he was Prefect over Judea. There are no court records, execution orders, eyewitness descriptions, archives, or images; nothing but the Gospel stories. So it is important to understand the nature of these sources and the distance— with regard to time, culture, language, theology, and politics—between Jesus and the earliest surviving stories about him.

The man we call Jesus would most likely not have even recognized the name "Jesus" as his own. He would have answered to Yeshu or Yeshua in his native Galilee where he lived among fellow Jews who spoke Aramaic and read their scriptures in the original Hebrew. When he was executed in Jerusalem in the ’30s or ’40s of the first century, Yeshu left behind no writings.

By contrast, the writers of the Gospels were anonymous preachers who did not sign their work (names were assigned to the four canonical Gospels only much later). They lived among Gentiles in the Diaspora, hundreds of miles from Galilee and Judea, they spoke and wrote in Greek and read their scriptures, the Septuagint, in Greek. None of them ever met Yeshu and none claim to have witnessed any of the events they narrate. They wrote one to two generations after Jesus’ death (c. 70 to 120 CE), and they were part of a movement explicitly engaged in missionary outreach to non-Jews. The Gospel labeled "Mark" is the earliest of the four and was used by the writers of "Matthew" and "Luke" in creating their narratives (which accounts for the many obvious parallels among these three). From the perspective of modern historical studies, this is not much to go on. More to the point, these ancient writers themselves were not historians or even biographers, but evangelical missionaries, and their sources were not "historical" or biographical accounts but rather collections of sayings, anecdotes, miracle stories, and the fact of a life ended by state execution on charges of sedition.

What the evangelists did have, however, was the conviction that Jesus’ life and death were part of an unfolding plan of salvation that fit a particular interpretation of the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the "Old Testament"—the only Bible at the time). Thus, the evangelists constructed their stories about Jesus around a framework provided by the Hebrew Bible, especially the Hebrew Prophets, and many details are drawn directly from those Scriptures and not from any other source. A selection of some "details" from the passion stories provide a good example of this:

• "Triumphal entry" Riding on an ass [and] the colt of an ass: Zechariah 9:9
• "Hosanna": Psalm 118:25-26
• "Cleansing the Temple" ("trigger event" in synoptic Gospels, unremarkable in Gospel of John): Isaiah 56:7; Jer. 7:11
• Thirty pieces of silver : Zech. 11:12 (cf. Exodus 21:32)
• Fortelling betrayal: Psalm 41:9
• False witnesses at trial: Psalms 35, 109
• Jesus’ silence before accusers: Psalms 35, 38; Isaiah 53, 56
• Spitting and slapping by attackers and others: [Missing Ref?]
• Wine mingled with myrrh (Mark): Proverbs 31
• Wine mingled with gall (Matthew): Psalm 69
• Dividing garments: Psalm 22
• "His blood be on our heads and on the heads of our children": II Samuel 1:16 (King David (Matthew 27:25) kills a man saying: "Your blood be on your head for your own mouth has testified against you saying ‘I have killed the Lord’s messiah’ (anointed king)."
• "Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani?" (Matt. and Mark): Psalm 22:1ff
• Jeering crowds, "Let God save him!" [missing ref?]
• Vinegar to drink: Psalm 69:21
• "Into your hands I commend my spirit" (Luke): Psalm 31:5
• piercing of side and no braking of bones (John): Psalm 34, Zech. 12
• like a Paschal (Passover) lamb: Exodus 12:10, Num. 9:12
• like a lamb to the slaughter: Isaiah 53:7

This is a tiny sample of the many passages drawn from the Hebrew Bible to create the narrative of Jesus’ life and death. For the evangelists, it did not matter that they had nothing that modern folks would recognize as "evidence" that these things "actually happened this way." Rather, because they began with the conviction that Jesus was a manifestation of God’s salvation, they "knew" that his life and death "must have" fulfilled what they held to be divinely inspired prophecies. This pattern of creating events around "prophecies" becomes particularly evident when one examines Matthew and Luke’s different nativity accounts. Their respective timelines of events cannot be reconciled with each other but both "fulfill" a variety of "biblical prophecies."

II. Some specific, problematic elements of the passion stories in the Gospels

The evangelists assert that the claim to be a "messiah" or "Son of God" would be understood as "blasphemy" by Jewish religious authorities in Jesus’ day and that blasphemy of this sort would be a capital crime. There is no evidence to support such an assertion and a good deal of evidence that militates against it. "Son of God" was not only a widely used and commonly accepted term for all Jews, it was also a specific title used in relation to Israelite kings (King Solomon, in particular, was called "Son of God"). The claim to be a "Son of God" would have been either unremarkable or an assertion of kingly status, but in neither case would it have been construed as blasphemy. The same is true for claims of messianic identity. We have accounts of a number of other messianic claimants from Roman Judea (Theudas, "The Egyptian," Bar Kokhba): and while we have no indications that any of these men were targeted by Jewish authorities on any kind of charge (in fact, Bar Kokhba was supported by the great Rabbi Akiba) all three were pursued and their movements wiped out by the Romans.

A particularly troubling feature of the Gospels, and one that gets extreme embellishment in Gibson’s passion play is the vilification of the temple priesthood and the whitewashing of Pontius Pilate. Gibson goes well beyond the Gospels in portraying the priests, and especially the High Priest Joseph Caiaphas, as evil incarnate and a threat to both common Jews and the civilized Roman order represented by Pilate. While, as noted above, we have no non-Christian evidence regarding Jesus or his career, we do have external accounts of both these other men that paint a very different picture from the one presented by the evangelists. Joseph Caiaphas, like all high priests in Roman-occupied Judea, was appointed by the Roman prefect. He wielded no power over the prefect and had no political recourse beyond him. (Thus, when Gibson’s Pilate confides his fear that Caiaphas will get him in trouble with Rome or will start a riot if his blood lust is not satisfied, historians find ourselves gasping at the perversity or marveling at the audacity of this imagined turning of tables!) We know little about Caiaphas other than that he remained in office for 17 years: a long but otherwise undistinguished term.

Pontius Pilate is another story altogether. We have historical records from two different sources regarding Pilate and his style of justice. Philo of Alexandria, an Egyptian contemporary of Jesus and Pilate, was part of a delegation that made a formal appeal to the Roman emperor for relief from "the briberies, insults, robberies, outrages, and wanton injuries, the executions without trial constantly repeated, the ceaseless and supremely grievous cruelty" that marked Pilate’s rule. According to Flavius Josephus, a historian writing from the imperial archives in Rome at the end of the first century, Pilate was ultimately dismissed from office and recalled to Rome to answer for a series of large-scale and ill-judged executions he had ordered and carried out. Hardly the morally conflicted, deeply deliberative, and unwilling pawn imagined by ancient and modern evangelists, this Pilate never gave crucifixion a second thought. (And if the level of gut-wrenching brutality that Gibson depicts bears any resemblance to what took place historically, then we need to envision it repeated over and over and over again, its victims many hundreds of Jewish souls like Jesus and its perpetrators despotic Roman bureaucrats and their enforcers.)

III. Historical hypotheses and plausibility (drawn largely from work by Prof. Paula Fredriksen)

Crucifixion is a very public, very theatrical form of execution designed to send a message. Who would want to send such a message and for whom would it be intended? The most historically plausible explanation is that, in the case of Jesus as in countless others, the Roman authorities (not some imagined Jewish evildoers) used crucifixion to send a brutal message to potential insurrectionists.

Why would Jesus have been crucified under a placard reading "King of the Jews?" This is Roman mockery of widespread Jewish desire for an anointed king, a liberator. Again, this is not a gesture that is likely to have come from Jews under Roman occupation; rather it "fits" the Roman mode of dispatching and disrespecting populist yearnings or potential leaders.

In all other cases on record, the followers of those who claimed to be messiahs were targeted along with their leaders. Why, in the case of Jesus, were none of his immediate followers killed? Because well-informed officials knew that he and his disciples were not engaged in sedition.

So who was a threat? And who was the target audience for the spectacle of crucifixion? The large crowds who set their hopes and aspirations for liberation on a man who was rumored to be promising a new kingdom and freedom from oppression. The uninformed but enthusiastic "mob" was the Romans’ greatest concern, and they were the target audience for public executions.

IV. Theological "Truth" and historical "facts"

Historians cannot speak to "theological Truths," but we can note that there is very little historical knowledge to be had about events surrounding Jesus’ execution and the little we do have often runs counter to the Gospel narratives’ claims. As a historian, I cannot speak to individuals’ faith relationships to Christ—these are not matters of historical inquiry. But as a historian and a theologian, I might suggest that faith placed in the historical accuracy of passion narratives, whether ancient or modern, is a faith needlessly and dangerously misplaced.