From Joseph Smith to Jesus: A Historical Reckoning
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Part Four: Christ Crucified: Jesus Politics and Rome’s Response
Rome crucified Jesus because it correctly identified the political freight behind his prophetic sign-acts and his program. Examining those political contours is necessary foundation for understanding everything that followed.
I. Preamble to
Politics
II. The Vocabulary of Empire: Euangelion
III. The Vocabulary of Resistance: Ekklesia
IV. Basileia: Whose Kingdom?
V. The De-Politicization of Jesus
VI. The Messianic Charge and the Passion Preface
VII. The Trial Narrative: History, Theology, and the Transfer of Blame
VIII. The Mechanics and Meaning of Crucifixion
IX. Why Only Jesus: The Logic of Targeted Execution
X. The Fate of the Crucified: Roman Practice and the Disposal of the Dead
Continued from Part 3.
I. Preamble to Politics
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To answer that question requires a preliminary analysis that may seem on cursory viewing like a detour into semantics. The political vocabulary of the first-century Mediterranean world – the specific Greek terms that the earliest Christian communities used to describe what they believed about Jesus and about themselves – is itself the most direct evidence we have for how the movement understood its relationship to Roman imperial power. Some of these terms were probably used by Jesus himself during his ministry. Others were adopted by his followers in the decades after his death to articulate what they believed his life and movement meant. In every case we review in the coming sections, the vocabulary was borrowed directly from the lexicon of Roman imperial ideology, and the borrowing was intentional. This language was used as counter-proclamation: a systematic appropriation of Caesar’s titles, Caesar’s claims, and Caesar’s language applied instead to a crucified Jewish peasant from Galilee. Understanding this vocabulary is the necessary foundation for understanding why crucifixion as specific mode of execution was neither incidental or misunderstanding on Rome’s part. The imported vernacular of Roman imperial theology both before and after Jesus’s death also points to the inevitability of Pilate’s response that fateful Passover weekend.
II. The Vocabulary of Empire: Euangelion
Before the word "gospel" meant anything Christian, it meant something Roman.
The Greek word is euangelion – literally "good news" – and it had a well-established life in the vocabulary of first-century Roman imperial theology before any of Jesus's followers put it to work. When a Roman emperor won a military victory, when an heir was born to the imperial house, when Augustus Caesar consolidated his power after the civil wars and brought the Roman world its celebrated peace, heralds went out into the provinces and inscribed on public arches and monuments the announcement of the euangelion: the good news of the emperor's triumph. More than simple public service announcements, they were imperial propaganda. They were theological-political proclamations, and they came with a full complement of titles that the imperial cult had developed to describe the person of Caesar.
We have the inscriptions. The Priene Calendar Inscription from 9 BCE (pictured) is perhaps the most famous example. Craig Evans, writing in the Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism (2000), offers this translation:
“It seemed good to the Greeks of Asia, in the opinion of the high priest Apollonius of Menophilus Azanitus: ‘Since Providence, which has ordered all things and is deeply interested in our life, has set in most perfect order by giving us Augustus, whom she filled with virtue that he might benefit humankind, sending him as a savior, both for us and for our descendants, that he might end war and arrange all things, and since he, Caesar, by his appearance (excelled even our anticipations), surpassing all previous benefactors, and not even leaving to posterity any hope of surpassing what he has done, and since the birthday of the god Augustus was the beginning of the good tidings [εὐαγγέλιον] for the world that came by reason of him,’ which Asia resolved in Smyrna.”
Celebrating the birth of Augustus, the inscription describes him as a savior who has brought peace, whose birthday marks the beginning of good news for the world. This and other such inscribed proclamations call Caesar Soter – Savior. He is called Kyrios – Lord. He is called the Son of God, divine by adoption into the Julian line and by acclamation of the Senate. He is, in the vocabulary of the imperial cult, the one through whom the gods have blessed humanity and through whom the world has been set right. He was celebrated as the Princeps Pacis – Prince of Peace – for his violent establishment of the Pax Romana (Roman Peace). By the first century CE, the Roman Empire had thoroughly constructed an elaborate theological framework around the person of its ruler with a full cadre of propaganda titles. And it was to this exact framework and vocabulary that the earliest followers of Jesus would reach for when they tried to describe what they believed about their own executed and risen teacher.
This co-opting of language is critical for our understanding of the primitive Jesus movement and their reception of Jesus’s ministry and death. When Mark opens his Gospel with the words "The beginning of the good news [gospel] of Jesus Christ, the Son of God," every literate person in the Roman world would have heard the propagandistic political freight those words carried. Gospel. Son of God. These were Caesar's terms. Applying them to an executed Jewish peasant from Galilee was a counter-proclamation. In combination with the Jewish title of Messiah (Anointed One/Davidic King), Jesus’s followers were using the imperial cult’s propaganda language to make a clear declaration of allegiance to another King, and that his kingdom stood in direct opposition to the one currently administering the world by violent force.
Understanding this is the necessary beginning of understanding the crucifixion. Because if the early followers of the Anointed understood Jesus's significance in terms drawn directly from imperial theology (and the evidence is overwhelming that they did), then what Jesus was proclaiming during his ministry was not merely spiritual enlightenment available to individual souls willing to believe the right things. It was a public political claim about who held legitimate authority over Israel and the world. And so Rome, which had extensive experience dealing with political claimants in their occupied states, recognized it as such.
III. The Vocabulary of Resistance: Ekklesia
The political counter-claim ran deeper than the vocabulary used to describe Jesus. It extended to the vernacular used to describe the communities that eventually gathered in his name.
The Greek word ekklesia – translated in English Bibles as "church" – was not a religious term before the early Jesus movement adopted it. In the first-century Roman world, the ekklesia was a civic and political institution. An assembly of free citizens convened to discuss public affairs, vote on matters of policy, and conduct the business of the city. In its classical Athenian form, the ekklesia had been the sovereign legislative body of the democratic polis – the assembly in which citizens exercised their collective political authority. Under Roman rule, these local assemblies continued to exist in diminished form, their independent political power constrained by Roman governance, but the word retained its civic and public connotations. When you called a gathering an ekklesia, you were naming it as a public assembly with civic dimensions.
It is worth noting that Jesus himself almost certainly never used this term. The word ekklesia does not appear in Mark, Luke, John, or the double-tradition material. It appears only twice in Matthew (16:18; 18:17), both in passages widely regarded by critical scholars as reflecting the vocabulary and concerns of Matthew’s community rather than the historical speech of Jesus. The historical Jesus did not organize formal assemblies; he gathered followers, shared tables, and enacted the Kingdom in the ad hoc, itinerant, village-based practice that Part Three of this series described. The adoption of ekklesia as the movement’s self-designation belongs to the period decades after his death, when his followers – increasingly operating in the Greco-Roman urban world of the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean rather than in the villages of rural Galilee – reached for a term from their surrounding civic culture to name what they were becoming. The word they chose carried the political weight this section is arguing.
To call your gathering an ekklesia was to make an implicit claim: that this assembly constituted an alternative civic body, gathered under a different authority and organized around a different set of values than those that governed the Roman civic order. The ekklesia of God was in this vocabulary a counter-polity. The assembled citizens of the Kingdom of God, convened not to ratify Caesar's arrangements but to enact a different social order. The contrast with the Qumran community examined in Part Three is instructive here – where Qumran withdrew from the world to preserve its purity, at least some of the first-century Jesus communities named themselves in the vocabulary of public political life, claiming a place in the world rather than a retreat from it.
IV. Basileia: Whose Kingdom?
The content of Jesus's preaching makes the same point more directly. The central theme of Jesus's public ministry is the previously discussed phrase that appears earlier, more frequently, and across more independent sources than any other in the Gospel tradition: the Kingdom of God. The Greek word at the center of that phrase is basileia.
Basileia means empire, reign, dominion: the sphere of a king's rule – Kingdom. In the first century Mediterranean world, the basileia that most immediately pressed on the consciousness of everyone living in the Roman provinces was the basileia of Caesar. Rome's kingdom was no mere abstraction. It was present in the form of soldiers, tax collectors, client kings installed and deposed at Rome's pleasure, and the standing threat of the kind of violent reprisal that had destroyed Jerusalem within a generation of Jesus's death. When Jesus stood up in Galilee and announced with an equivalent Aramaic word that the basileia of God was at hand – that it was arriving, that it was near, that those with ears to hear should repent and prepare themselves for its coming – he was making a claim that had a necessary and obvious political implication. If God's kingdom is coming, Caesar's kingdom is ending.
The content of the Kingdom proclamation made the political implication even more explicit. Whatever else the Kingdom of God meant in Jesus's teaching, and it clearly meant multiple things which is part of why scholars have argued about it for two centuries, it consistently involved a reversal of the existing social order. The poor are blessed. The rich are sent away empty. The hungry are filled and the full are sent hungry. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. The mighty are brought down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up. These are public proclamations about the coming reordering of power, status, and resources in the world.
Jesus's practice enacted what his preaching proclaimed. The table fellowship he kept involved eating with tax collectors, sinners, prostitutes, the ritually impure, the socially marginal. In the honor-shame culture of first-century Galilee and the wider Mediterranean world, table fellowship was a precise social instrument. Whom you ate with declared your social status and designated who counts as fully human and fully included in the community of the blessed. By the social logic of his world, Jesus’s table was a scandal with political edge, because the boundaries it violated were the same boundaries that the existing social and religious order depended on for its legitimacy.
To whatever extent Rome saw this Kingdom practice, it was right to see it as a threat. The genius of Roman imperial power, Crossan argues, was its theology of peace through victory – the claim that the order Rome imposed, however violent its establishment, was the necessary condition of civilization, stability, and flourishing. The Pax Romana was real to those who were beneficiaries of it. But it rested on a foundation of controlled violence: the crucifixion of rebels, the suppression of alternative claims to authority in its provinces, the constant demonstration that Rome's power was total and absolute. A Galilean prophet announcing that an alternate colonial Kingdom was arriving is exactly the kind of person that the machinery of Roman order was designed to eliminate.
V. The De-Politicization of Jesus
The preceding sections have traced a vocabulary – euangelion, ekklesia, basileia – that was unmistakably political in the world that produced it. The proclamation of a rival gospel, the assembly of a rival civic body, the announcement of a rival kingdom: in the ancient Mediterranean, where religion and politics were dimensions of a single integrated social reality, these were acts with immediate and obvious political consequences. In its earliest recoverable form, the Jesus movement was a political program; grounded in a religious vision but expressed in the public vocabulary of competing sovereignty and enacted in practices that directly challenged the domination system’s arrangements of power, status, and inclusion.
The subsequent tradition has worked so persistently to obscure this point – Jesus’s movement was inherently political. And the push to de-politicize Jesus, to make his message of public and national social reordering about private, internal spiritual re-orientation, to locate his kingdom safely in individual hearts and eternal futures rather than in the present arrangements of power and wealth and justice, has been one of the most consequential distortions the tradition has imposed on its origins. This de-politicization is what ultimately allowed the movement to domesticate the radical message so that it would be compatible with the very empire it originally resisted.
A Jesus who was killed because he challenged Caesar’s authority over the world, in effect as a result of his proclamation of the coming order in which the hungry would be filled and the rich sent away empty, is a considerably more demanding figure than the legendary Jesus who came primarily to provide individual sinners with the promise of Eternal Life. The first version has political implications that institutions with wealth, power, and a stake in existing arrangements have consistently found inconvenient. The second version is much easier to accommodate to the ongoing logic of empire and the normalcy of civilization. This is precisely why, from Constantine's legalization of the faith in 313 CE through Theodosius's establishment of it as the empire's official religion in 380 CE, the second version achieved its long ascendancy.
The reader who carries this awareness into the sections that follow will read the passion narrative differently. Rome did not misunderstand Jesus. Rome understood the political claim his movement was making. The messianic charge, the trial, and the crucifixion that the following sections examine were Rome’s response to precisely the political reality that the preceding sections have established. What the tradition subsequently de-politicized, Rome recognized and eliminated with the exclusive instrument it reserved for threats to its sovereign order.
VI. The Messianic Charge and the Passion Preface
Part Three of this series examined the messianic question at length – the Davidic covenant tradition, the range of first-century expectations, the Messianic Secret in Mark, the triumphal entry as a deliberate redefinition of the messianic category through the Zechariah citation, and the scholarly debate over whether Jesus claimed or subverted; or both claimed and subverted the title. What matters for the crucifixion argument is what the messianic question looked like from Rome’s side of the equation.
Rome did not care about the theological subtleties of how Jesus inhabited the messianic category. It cared about the political implications. A figure entering Jerusalem at Passover on a donkey, with crowds acclaiming the coming kingdom of David, was performing a royal claim in the most politically volatile vocabulary available. The crowd’s possible acclamation, viz. hosanna, blessed is the coming kingdom of our father David, was the language of precisely the expectation that Rome was in Jerusalem to suppress. Regardless of whether Jesus intended a redefined, non-violent messiahship or a straightforward political bid was from Rome’s perspective a distinction without a difference: the claim was stirring attraction, the timing was incendiary, and so the Roman response was predictable.
What is historically beyond serious dispute is attested by the evidence accounting the execution itself. Rome understood Jesus in messianic-royal terms. According to Mark 15:26: “The inscription of the charge against him read, “The King of the Jews.” This titulus crucis, or “cross title”, was a criminal charge. Rome crucified Jesus for claiming, or being credibly understood to claim, royal authority over the Jewish people in a province Rome administered. The sign’s declaration was also the reason for the specific mode of execution to which we will turn shortly.
First, we examine the Gospel’s theological preamble to the crucifixion. Mark inserts two episodes between the arrest in Gethsemane and the trial narrative that function as theological hinges – scenes whose primary work is not historical reportage but the projection of post-Easter conviction and early liturgical practice backward onto Jesus's final hours. Here we apply the same methodological framework we apply throughout our reconstruction by distinguishing the historical kernel from the communal elaboration that has grown around it, starting with the Last Supper.
That Jesus shared a final meal with his disciples before his arrest is historically uncontroversial – the open table was his most consistent embodied proclamation, and there is no reason to doubt that the night before his arrest he did what he had always done. The question isn't whether the meal happened; the question is what kind of meal it was and how much of the theological content the Gospel accounts attribute to it actually belongs to Jesus's last night rather than to the communities that remembered him afterward. The chronological disagreement between the Gospels is the first signal.
Mark, Matthew, and Luke present the Last Supper as a Passover Seder on Nisan 15. John places the crucifixion on Nisan 14 – the day of Preparation, when the Passover lambs were slaughtered – making the final meal occur before Passover rather than as the Passover itself. The two chronologies are irreconcilable. John's relocation is transparently theological: his is the only Gospel that identifies Jesus explicitly as the Lamb of God (John 1:29), and having Jesus die at the precise moment the Temple lambs are sacrificed is John's Christological signature, not an independent historical recollection. The Synoptic Passover framing is equally shaped by theological concerns: the covenant and exodus imagery of Passover suits their presentation of Jesus's death as a new covenant sealed in blood. Raymond Brown, in The Death of the Messiah (1994), acknowledges that neither tradition offers unmediated historical access to what night it actually ocurred.
There is a further historical difficulty that the tradition's theological weight tends to obscure. The temple action, with its overturning of tables and prophetic disruption of the Rome-temple nexus of economic power, was the kind of politically incendiary provocation that makes the historical plausibility of Rome and the temple authorities waiting several days before acting difficult to find plausible. A figure who had staged a public messianic demonstration on his entry into the city and then disrupted the temple's commercial operations would have invited immediate intervention, not after several days of further public teaching. The tradition's compressed passion week chronology may preserve the sequence of events generally but expanded their timing for narrative purposes. If the arrest followed the temple action more quickly than the Synoptic chronology suggests, the elaborate Passover Seder of the Last Supper becomes historically difficult to sustain.
What the Last Supper narrative most plausibly represents is something Crossan argues with directness in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994): in narrative form it crystallizes the open table practice that had defined Jesus's entire ministry, now reframed in light of his death and the post-Easter meals at which his followers experienced his continuing presence. The words of institution – "This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me ... Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." – appear in their earliest form not in Mark but in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians (11:23–26). Where Paul introduces them with the formula paralambanein/paradidomi – "I received... I handed on" – he uses the standard technical vocabulary of oral tradition transmission. Paul is passing on a received tradition. He states the last supper institution was established "the night he was betrayed." But Paul is writing in the early 50s CE, roughly twenty years after the crucifixion, and the tradition he is transmitting has already been shaped by the loose liturgical practice of those communities that celebrated the Lord's Supper regularly in Jesus's memory. The specific interpretive words, "do this in remembrance of me" are probably a crystallized version of the early community's eucharistic practice retrojected onto the last night rather than a historical memory of Jesus’s final meal.
The covenant language, the sacrificial framing, the explicit anticipation of death as salvific strongly suggests this pre-passion episode reflects the post-Easter community's meaning-making project more than it reflects what Jesus understood himself to be doing that evening. In this series' reconstruction, the historical Jesus did not understand his death as the predetermined mechanism of salvation. His pistis as enacted allegiance to the arriving Kingdom was oriented toward divine vindication, toward the Son of Man's imminent arrival to complete what he had begun. Schweitzer's insight remains the most historically honest: Jesus expected God to intervene. He threw himself against the wheel of history expecting it to stop. It did not. The last supper’s theological freight – the sacrificial body, the covenant blood, the atoning death – is several communities’ retrospective interpretation of what his death meant, encoded in the liturgical practice they developed to remember him, and read back onto the final evening with the narrative authority that only hindsight provides. In this reading, this final meal is less a window onto what Jesus said on a specific night than a compressed image of everything his table fellowship had meant throughout his ministry, now reframed by the cross. It is the open table at its most concentrated and most loaded; a meal that absorbs the meaning of all the meals before it and all the meals that will follow in his name. As a piece of communal theology, it is extraordinarily powerful. But it is more theological meaning-making than historical reportage.
Moving on to Gethsemane, this narrative presents a witness problem in the same way the trial narrative does as we will examine in the next section. Jesus enters the garden with his disciples, withdraws to pray, and returns three times to find them sleeping. According to the Gospels’ own narrative, no one heard what Jesus prayed because the disciples were sleeping. The anguished petition – " Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me, yet not what I want but what you want." (Mark 14:36) – is the community's theological construction, drawing on the vocabulary of the Psalms and the prophets, designed to show Jesus facing death with full awareness and voluntary acceptance rather than a historical memory of something Jesus said. At first glance, the criterion of embarrassment cuts in an interesting direction here. A community constructing a theology of Jesus as divine and impassible would’ve had no motivation to invent a scene in which he sweats in agony and begs God to find another way. Mark’s most human account might preserve something historically real: a moment of profound mortal distress experienced in anticipation of possible imperial punishment.
But the specific content of the prayer – the framing of death as a cup to be accepted in obedience to the Father's will – fails the criterion of dissimilarity against the historical Jesus's own consistent salvific orientation. Throughout his ministry, Jesus's proclamation centered on God's imminent vindication of the Kingdom, not on his own death as its predetermined mechanism. A Jesus who speaks in Gethsemane of accepting the cup of death in willing submission to the Father's will is a Jesus already shaped by the post-Easter atonement theology that we will explore thoroughly in forthcoming installments. That theology made the death itself the redemptive event, whereas the historical Jesus's apocalyptic framework made divine intervention the redemptive event. The prayer's content coheres with the former, not the latter, and signals it as almost certainly dramatization by later communities that developed the theology of voluntary atoning sacrifice to make sense of what eventually happened. The Gethsemane prayer is the passion theology in miniature: suffering as willing submission, death as obedience, the anticipated cross as God’s plan rather than Rome's sentence.
In this historical reconstruction, the theological content represents post-hoc meaning making by Jesus’s earliest followers. The historical Jesus did not go to Jerusalem intending to die. He went to Jerusalem to confront the worldly powers where they intersected with the Holy Land. In so doing, Jesus intended to provoke the crisis that would bring God's Kingdom. His pistis in the Kingdom was undoubtedly such that he would willingly die for the cause; yet he did not believe that God required his death. Rather, Jesus believed that God would vindicate his proclamation, certifying the Kingdom’s inauguration by the arrival of the Son of Man coming on the clouds, rendering the domination systems end. In Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (1999), Ehrman puts the point directly: Jesus's apocalyptic expectation was that God would act, not that he himself would die as the mechanism of that action. Gethsemane's theology of willing self-offering belongs to the community that survived the cross and spent the following decades constructing a framework in which the execution could be understood as salvific rather than catastrophic. It is an early and powerful exhibit of the developmental process this series is tracing in the tradition – the transformation of a political execution into a cosmic transaction, of Rome's verdict into God's plan.
The arrest itself is the final episode we will consider as preamble to the trial narrative. With the arrival in the garden of a crowd with swords and clubs, the betrayal with a kiss, the brief resistance, the flight of the disciples – herein lies a historical kernel that the tradition's own testimony embeds even as it elaborates and minimizes certain details. All four Gospels record it. The flight of the disciples is among the most embarrassing details in the tradition, and therefore among the most historically reliable. Beyond this, we know Jesus was arrested and Rome executed him. The broad outline is secure. The identifying gesture by an insider is where the tradition possibly becomes theologically loaded. Mark's account has an associate betray Jesus's location to the authorities with the gesture of a kiss; the greeting of a friend used as the signal to an enemy. In Mark the betrayer is named: Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve.
Paul, writing twenty years before Mark, is the earliest witness to the tradition of betrayal. In 1 Corinthians 11:23, he dates the Last Supper to "the night when he was betrayed". Paul is using the Greek paradidomi, which can mean both "betray" and "hand over" or "deliver up," an ambiguity that allows the agency of the betrayal to remain with human actors (i.e. Judas handed him over) or shift toward divine purpose (i.e. God allowed a transfer of custody). Some scholars have argued that Paul doesn’t necessarily reflect direct awareness of a betrayal based on this ambiguity. Interestingly, Paul also never names the betrayer. Notwithstanding, it is possible the tradition he received included the betrayal but not the name. Either way, we cannot make too much of this as an argument from silence alone is inherently weak. And so, the name Judas Iscariot appears first in Mark and is carried forward by Matthew, Luke, and John with progressively elaborated details – the thirty pieces of silver in Matthew, the conflicting accounts of the field of blood and Judas's demise that diverge between Matthew and Luke-Acts, and the replaced apostle in Acts. The escalating specificity follows the same pattern this series has documented in other dimensions of the passion tradition: later sources know more, not less, and that reflects the nature of the Gospels as bioi compositions. They flesh out the details to address gaps and inject theological meaning.
The name itself invites scrutiny. Judas is the Greek form of Judah, the name of the patriarch from whom the Jewish people take their identity. Iscariot most likely derives from ish-Kerioth, meaning "man of Kerioth," a town in Judea (though other derivations have been proposed). The symbolic resonance is difficult to dismiss: the betrayer of Jesus is named Judah, and his treacherous act delivers Jesus into the hands of Rome. William Klassen, in Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus? (1996), argues that the Gospel tradition has been systematically shaped by anti-Jewish polemical pressure, and that the figure of Judas has been elaborated – possibly even invented as a named individual – to carry the symbolic burden of Jewish rejection of Jesus. The name chosen for that burden is likely not incidental: it is the name of the Jewish people themselves.
Ehrman is more cautious, noting that the tradition of betrayal by an insider passes the criterion of embarrassment strongly: communities don’t typically invent stories of betrayal from within their own founding circle. The more defensible position is that a historical kernel of insider betrayal probably underlies the tradition, but that the specific figure of Judas Iscariot as a named, individuated character has been shaped – and his name possibly chosen – to bear the symbolic and increasingly anti-Jewish freight that the tradition required as it moved into the late first-century. Paul's silence on the name is possibly telling, yet inconclusive on its own. What is not inconclusive is the trajectory. The appearance first in Mark’s post-70 CE context suggests the name may have entered the tradition at the point where the community's polemical needs gave it a specific symbolic function to perform – a function the trial narrative's escalating transfer of culpability, examined in the next section, will make fully explicit.
VII. The Trial Narrative: History, Theology, and the Transfer of Blame
The messianic charge that the titulus crucis records – King of the Jews – presupposes some process by which Jesus was brought before Roman authority and the charge was formalized. Subsequent to the arrest the flight of the disciples, the Gospels provide that process in the form of a trial narrative: an appearance before the Jewish Sanhedrin, followed by a hearing before Pontius Pilate, culminating in the sentence of crucifixion. The trial narrative is theologically consequential for the Christian tradition, but it is also among the most historically problematic for reasons we will enumerate here.
We can begin with the most fundamental difficulty – the witness problem. The Gospels’ own account of the events surrounding Jesus’s arrest establishes that no follower of Jesus was present at any legal proceeding. The disciples fled at Gethsemane. Mark is blunt about this: everyone abandoned him and ran. Peter followed at a distance but remained outside in the courtyard, where his contribution to the historical record consisted of three denials that he knew Jesus at all. No disciple, no follower, no sympathizer was inside the chamber where the Sanhedrin is said to have convened, or inside the praetorium where Pilate is said to have questioned Jesus. By the tradition’s own testimony, the tradition is unwitnessed by anyone who would subsequently have transmitted it to the communities that produced the written Gospels.
Of course, this doesn’t mean nothing happened. Some kind of proceeding, however informal, almost certainly preceded the crucifixion, because Roman administration was procedural even when it was callously brutal. Pilate needed a charge and the titulus crucis records one. But the detailed dramatic narrative that the Gospels provide – the nighttime Sanhedrin hearing, the parade of false witnesses, the high priest’s question and Jesus’s response, the transfer to Pilate, the interrogation, the Barabbas episode, the hand-washing, the crowd’s cry – these cannot be historical reportage in any straightforward sense, because no one who could have reported it was there to witness it. More certainly, it was the community’s theological interpretation of a process whose actual details were unknown. The trial narrative was a literary construction to make sense of the outcome (crucifixion on a messianic-royal charge) using the interpretive resources the community had available: the Hebrew scriptures, the prophetic tradition of the righteous sufferer, and the specific theological and political needs of the communities’ writing decades after the event.
Raymond Brown, in The Death of the Messiah (1994), acknowledges this difficulty with characteristic honesty even while defending a historical kernel beneath the theological elaboration. Brown’s position – that some kind of Jewish proceeding occurred and that the Gospels preserve its general shape if not its specific dialogue – represents the most conservative responsible reading. The more radical position, argued forcibly by Crossan in Who Killed Jesus? (1995), is that the trial narrative is essentially a Markan composition, constructed from scriptural sources rather than from historical memory. As is so often the case with the passion tradition, the truth almost certainly lies in the territory Brown and Crossan stake out between them: something happened, but what the Gospels describe is theological narrative, not courtroom transcript.
Mark’s account is earliest, and presents a nighttime session of the Sanhedrin at which false witnesses are brought forward, their testimony does not agree, and finally the high priest asks directly: “Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?” Jesus’s response in Mark’s telling is the most direct messianic affirmation in the Synoptic tradition: “I am; and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven” (Mark 14:62). The response is theologically precise in a way that resists simple messianic affirmation. Ego eimi – "I am" – carries deliberate double valence: readable as a plain affirmation of the high priest's question, but also as an echo of the divine name in Exodus 3:14, where God identifies himself to Moses with the same formula. Mark's Jesus does not simply say "yes" to the messianic question; he answers it with language that simultaneously exceeds and transforms it, claiming something larger than the title offered. That the high priest responds by tearing his robes and charging blasphemy is itself revealing: a straightforward messianic affirmation would not technically constitute blasphemy under Jewish law, but an implicit invocation of the divine name would.
Both Matthew and Luke replace Mark's ego eimi with su eipas – "you have said so" – the same equivocating formula Jesus uses with Pilate. Instead of being a theological retreat from Mark's charged phrase, Mark’s redactors offer a rhetorical redistribution of responsibility: Matthew's Jesus places the act of identification on his accusers rather than his own lips. The Sanhedrin names him what he is, and then condemns him for it. The guilt of the declaration sits with them; a move entirely consistent with Matthew's broader trajectory of transferring culpability from Rome to the Jewish leadership, visible in the hand-washing scene and the crowd's cry that follows shortly after. The high priest tears his robes. The Matthean verdict is unanimous: Jesus deserves death.
The procedural problems with this account are substantial. A nighttime session of the Sanhedrin on the eve of Passover violates multiple provisions of Jewish legal procedure as later codified in the Mishnah; capital trials could not be held at night, could not be held on festival days, and required a second hearing on a following day before a death sentence could be confirmed. Defenders of the narrative’s historicity have argued that the Mishnaic rules, compiled in the early third century, may not reflect first-century practice. This is a fair point, as far as it goes. But even setting aside the procedural question, the witness problem remains dispositive: the community that produced Mark’s Gospel had no access to what was said inside the chamber, because no one who carried the tradition forward was present to hear it. And as we have established in Part 3 of this series, the historical Jesus Kingdom-focused ministry did not center on his divine self-identity – the ego eimi dialogue reflects post-Easter Christological development.
The hearing before Pilate raises similar questions, including messianic ambiguity. In all four Gospels, Pilate’s question is direct: “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus’s response in Mark is su legeis – “you say so.” The phrase is maddeningly ambiguous, and the ambiguity is almost certainly the point. It is neither confirmation or denial. It is a deflection that places the identification back on the questioner – you are the one using that title, not me. Scholars have debated for generations whether su legeis functions as a reluctant affirmation, a qualified acceptance, or an outright evasion. What it is not, by any reasonable reading, is the straightforward claim of royal authority that would be required to justify the charge on the titulus. And yet the charge was made, and the execution was carried out, which tells us something the narrative itself may not intend to communicate: that the legal niceties mattered less to Pilate than the political calculation. A prophetic figure generating messianic excitement among Passover crowds was reason enough. The charge needed plausibility, not confirmation.
The su legeis exchange, if it preserves any historical memory at all, coheres powerfully with the portrait this series maintains. That of a Jesus who rode a donkey into Jerusalem – deliberately evoking the peaceful messianic king of Zechariah while refusing the warrior-king expectations of the Davidic tradition – which is exactly the kind of figure who would respond to “Are you the King of the Jews?” with “you say so.” The title is simultaneously applicable and wrong. It names something real about what Jesus was doing while completely misunderstanding the terms on which he was doing it. The ambiguity of su legeis is the verbal equivalent of the donkey: yes, a king – but not the kind you mean.
Then there is Barabbas, and the this particular episode offers perhaps the most instructive exhibit of the theological nature of the trial narrative’s composition. It requires careful scrutiny because its historical implausibility is matched only by its theological transparency. The Gospels present a custom – the privilegium paschale – in which the Roman governor released one prisoner of the crowd’s choosing at Passover. Pilate offers the crowd a choice between Jesus and Barabbas, a man described in Mark as someone who had committed murder during “the insurrection.” The crowd chooses Barabbas. Jesus is sent to the cross.
There is no independent evidence in any Roman source for a custom of releasing prisoners at Passover or at any other Jewish festival. The practice appears nowhere in Josephus, who documented Roman administrative procedures in Judea with exhaustive thoroughness, and who would’ve had every reason to mention such a concession if it existed. It appears nowhere in Roman legal or administrative literature. And the notion that a Roman governor would offer to release a prisoner convicted of insurrection during the most politically explosive festival of the Jewish calendar – the festival that commemorated Israel’s liberation from an empire, in a city swelling with nationalist fervor, under the watchful eye of a Roman garrison on high alert for exactly the kind of messianic disturbance that Passover reliably generated – strains credulity past the breaking point. Pilate, whose character this series has documented at length, was not in the business of releasing insurrectionists to satisfy festival crowds. He was in the business of crucifying them.
Similar to our investigation of Judas as betrayer, suspicion is warranted given the name used by the Evangelist here. In Aramaic, bar-Abbas means “son of the father.” Some early manuscripts of Matthew actually give his full name as Jesus Bar-Abbas – Jesus, son of the father. The crowd is thus offered a choice between two figures named Jesus: one the son of the father in the ordinary sense, the other the one whom the tradition would come to call the Son of the Father in the theological sense. One is a violent revolutionary. The other is a peaceful prophet. The crowd chooses the violent one.
For Mark’s community, writing after 70 CE – after the catastrophe of the Jewish revolt against Rome, after the Zealot movement had led the nation into a war that ended with the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the Temple – the parabolic meaning of this scene would have been transparent and devastating. Israel had been offered a choice between two paths: the path of violent resistance to Rome (Bar-Abbas, the insurrectionist) and the path that Jesus had embodied (non-violent prophetic confrontation, the Kingdom enacted through justice rather than force). Israel chose Bar-Abbas – violent insurrection. And the result, visible in the smoldering ruins of the Temple that Mark’s readers could envision or remember, was exactly what Jesus’s ministry had implicitly predicted: that the way of the sword leads to destruction by the sword. The Barabbas episode is not a historical account of a Roman legal custom. It is a parable: composed by a community processing what they understood to be the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history, using the passion narrative as the vehicle for a theological argument about what went wrong for Israel and why. They blamed it on Israel’s rejection of Jesus as Messiah.
The broader trajectory of the trial narrative across the four Gospels confirms this reading, because it follows the same escalatory pattern we have elsewhere documented, and the direction of the escalation is toward a specific theological conclusion: Roman innocence and Jewish guilt. Mark’s Pilate is reluctant but ultimately compliant. Matthew’s Pilate washes his hands in a public performance of absolution: “I am innocent of this man’s blood; see to it yourselves” (27:24). Simultaneously, the crowd responded with a line that echoed catastrophically through two millennia of Christian anti-Judaism: “His blood be on us and on our children!” Matthew even inserts a detail of Pilate’s wife sending him a message while he sat in judgment of Jesus: “Have nothing to do with that innocent man, for today I have suffered a great deal because of a dream about him” (27:19). Similarly, Luke’s Pilate declares Jesus innocent not once but three times before yielding (23:4; 23:14-15; 23:22). John’s Pilate is practically a defense attorney, repeatedly attempting to release Jesus and finally yielding only when the crowd invokes the ultimate political threat: “If you release this man, you are no friend of Caesar. Everyone who claims to be a king sets himself against Caesar” (John 19:12). John’s Jewish crowd is now lecturing Pilate on Roman administrative policy.
The direction of travel is unmistakable: with each successive Gospel, Pilate becomes more sympathetic and the Jewish authorities and crowd become more culpable. The trajectory is no accident. This trend reflects developing political anxieties of communities that were, by the time these texts were composed, increasingly Gentile in composition, increasingly operating within the Roman civic world rather than against it, and increasingly in need of a narrative that presented the Jesus movement as compatible with Roman order rather than as the kind of anti-imperial provocation that led to the catastrophe of 70 CE. At the same time, these communities were motivated to progressively distance themselves from Jewish identity since the Jews would become persona non grata after the war. The transfer of responsibility for the crucifixion from Rome (which carried it out) to the Jewish authorities (who are depicted as demanding it) was both political and theological accommodation. The unfortunate effects of the tradition’s transferal of guilt have resulted in a devastating legacy of Christian anti-Judaism which more or less continues to canker the Jewish people to this day.
The historian’s obligation is to review the discernable facts, apply the criteria of historical authenticity, and interpret them in light of the historical matrix. Jesus was executed by Rome, on a Roman charge, by a Roman method of execution, under the authority of a Roman governor. The titulus crucis is determinative evidence. Crucifixion as method of execution confirms it. The political logic of the entire proceeding undergirds the historical conclusion. Whatever role the Jewish Temple authorities may have played in facilitating the arrest – and the collaboration between the Temple establishment and the Roman administration was real, as this series has documented – the execution was a Roman act, carried out for Roman reasons, by Roman soldiers, on a Roman cross. The progressive transfer of that responsibility to “the Jews” across the developing Gospel tradition is a clear and morally consequential example of the editorial trajectory we are tracing: the tradition massaging or outright manufacturing the evidence to serve the theological and political needs of the community producing it, at the cost of historical accuracy. And in this case, at a human cost as well.
VIII. The Mechanics and Meaning of Crucifixion
Roman crucifixion was a very specific instrument of imperial political communication – a state-sponsored terrorism in the most literal sense of that phrase. It was systematically and selectively deployed violence used to produce terror in a population, for the purpose of suppressing political resistance and demonstrating the consequences of challenging established authority.
Rome reserved crucifixion for a particular class of offenders: slaves who rebelled against their masters, non-citizens who committed capital crimes, and most relevantly here, political insurgents who challenged Roman authority. It was a method of public humiliation and social annihilation. The condemned was stripped, beaten severely, displayed naked in a posture of maximum degradation, and left to die slowly and publicly in a location where the maximum number of people would witness the spectacle and draw the intended conclusion – this is what happens to those who challenge Rome. The body was customarily left to rot or be disposed of without burial, denying the condemned even the dignity of a proper death rite.
The ancient sources are surprisingly scant about the actual process of crucifixion, likely because the process was so well known throughout the Roman empire as to not require elaboration. But it typically entailed a process of scourging, shameful cross-bearing to the destination of execution, and the painful binding, nailing, or impaling on a fixed beam. Here are a few ancient witnesses that speak with directness about some of the process:
· “He was whipped until his bones showed.” Josephus (37-100 CE), The Jewish War (6.5.3) [Example of Roman scourging/flagellation]
· “Some hang their victims upside down. Some impale them through the private parts. Others stretch out their arms onto forked poles.” Seneca (about 4 BCE-65 CE), To Marcia on Consolation (20.3)
· “Is there such a thing as a person who would actually prefer wasting away in pain on a cross–dying limb by limb one drop of blood at a time–rather than dying quickly? Would any human being willingly choose to be fastened to that cursed tree, especially after the beating that left him deathly weak, deformed, swelling with vicious welts on shoulders and chest, and struggling to draw every last, agonizing breath? Anyone facing such a death would plead to die rather than mount the cross.” Seneca, (about 4 BCE-65 BCE), Epistulae morales (Moral Letters) (101.14)
· “Every day Roman soldiers caught 500 Jews or more… The soldiers driven by their hatred of the Jews nailed them to crosses. They nailed them in many different positions, to entertain themselves and to horrify the Jews watching this spectacle from inside the walled city of Jerusalem. In time, the soldiers ran out of wood for crosses, and room for crosses even if they had found more wood.” Josephus (37-100 CE), The Jewish War (5.11.1)
· “Sixteen men … were paraded out, chained together by the foot and neck, each carrying his own cross. The executioners added this grim public spectacle to the punishment as an extra deterrent to anyone thinking about committing the same crime.” Chariton (about 25 BCE-50 CE), Chaereas and Callirhoe (4.2.7) [Note: this is from a Greek romance, not a historical account; it nevertheless demonstrates the known cultural image of cross-bearing]
· “To bind a Roman citizen is a crime, to flog him is an abomination, to slay him is almost an act of murder: to crucify him is–what? There is no fitting word that can possibly describe so horrible a deed.” Cicero (106 BCE-43 BCE), In Verrem (2.5.165)
· “The very word ‘cross’ should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts, his eyes, and his ears.” Cicero (106 BCE-43 BCE), Pro Rabirio Perduellionis Reo (16)
Roman citizens were exempt from crucifixion by law. This didn’t betray squeamishness as Rome had many brutal methods of execution for its own citizens. But crucifixion was reserved for those who were, in Roman eyes, beneath the dignity of a citizen's death. It was a punishment meant to designate the absolutely powerless, administered by the absolutely powerful, for the purpose of demonstrating that their power was absolute to everyone watching. In the social calculus of the Roman world, a crucified man was the opposite of a king. He was the lowest thing imaginable. He was proof that his cause was lost, his claims were false, and his pretensions to authority deserved exactly the contempt that this form of death was designed to express.
This is why the crucifixion was, for Jesus's earliest followers, specifically devastating in a way that requires some effort of historical imagination to appreciate. It wasn’t simple tragedy that their teacher had died. It was that he had died in the manner specifically designed to declare that everything he stood for was wrong, everything he had proclaimed was false, and the powers he had challenged were firmly in control with finality. In the logic of first-century Jewish messianic expectation, a crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms. He was a failed Messiah. The Messiah was supposed to defeat the Romans, not be executed by them. He was supposed to restore David's kingdom, not die like a insurrectionist slave on a Roman cross. Whatever his followers had hoped he was and what he was going to do – it did not happen as expected. Rome snuffed out their one messianic hope in the most unambiguous terms available to it.
Paul acknowledges this frankly in his first letter to the Corinthians, where he describes the message of a crucified Messiah as "a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1:23). That’s no mere rhetorical flourish; he is accurately reporting the first-century reception. To Jewish ears, a crucified Messiah was a failed Messiah – the Roman cross was the proof of failure, not the instrument of redemption. To Gentile ears, it was simply absurd: why would anyone worship a man whom the most powerful government in the world had put to death as a criminal? The early Christian proclamation did not succeed because it was an easy sell. As we will see in Part Five of this series, it succeeded by imaginative theological reinterpretation of the cross’s meaning despite being, by every conventional measure of its day, a spectacular liability.
Understanding this and really sitting with what the crucifixion meant before anyone had developed a theology to reframe it is the necessary precondition for understanding what happened next. Because what happened after the cross is one of the most historically fascinating and deeply human things that ever happened in the history of Western religion: in desperate earnest, a shattered community went looking for a way to make sense of the senseless.
IX. Why Only Jesus: The Logic of Targeted Execution
There is a detail in the passion narratives that tends to pass unremarked in theological readings of the crucifixion, but that carries significant historical weight once you notice it. Rome killed Jesus on the charge of political insurrection. If they considered Jesus’s movement significant enough to warrant his execution, why didn’t they immediately pursue and kill his followers?
Rome typically did just that when it moved against a movement it regarded as a genuine threat to imperial order. The crucifixion of Spartacus's slave army in 71 BCE resulted in six thousand crosses lining the Appian Way from Capua to Rome, and that was no anomaly. It was Rome's standard response to organized armed resistance: total, demonstrative, and designed to make the very landscape a monument to the cost of rebellion. When the Sicarii emerged in Jerusalem in the 50s CE, Rome and its proxies hunted them systematically, not merely decapitating the leadership but vigorously pursuing the network. When the great revolt of 66 to 70 CE was finally crushed, the response was the destruction of Jerusalem, the slaughter and enslavement of the bulk of the population, and the dispersal of its few fortunate survivors. When Rome felt genuinely threatened by organized violence, it bypassed surgical strikes in favor of overwhelming, exemplary, total force.
As we have already noted, by every account we have, Jesus’s followers fled. The earliest Gospel, Mark's, is blunt about this: when Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, his disciples abandoned him and ran. In a curious passage that follows immediately afterward, the arresting crowd attempts to seize upon only one of Jesus’s disciples, the unnamed young man: “A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.” (14:51-52). Rather than suggesting a serious attempt by the Romans to arrest the disciple, Mark uses the passage to exemplify the shame of the disciples’ flight with the young man’s disrobing. Mark later notes that Peter followed at a distance, denied knowing Jesus three times before the cock crowed, and wept. The women who had followed Jesus from Galilee stood at a distance from the cross. And then after the crucifixion, it is reported that the disciples who had fled Jerusalem hid behind locked doors, afraid. This is the historical memory of people who were coming to grips with the danger and expected to be next. And yet, they were not. The question of why Rome stopped at Jesus points directly at how Rome had read the movement he led.
Part Three has already documented the pattern of logic in detail. Josephus records it with striking consistency across the prophetic movements of the first century: Theudas beheaded, his followers dispersed, not hunted. The Egyptian Prophet's movement crushed, the prophet himself escaping into the crowd, his followers scattered but not pursued. And most notably, the case of Jesus’s mentor John the baptizer. In each of these examples, the leaders were eliminated; the movements were decapitated and left to collapse. Rome had developed a precise institutional understanding of what a prophetic symbolic movement was to those organizing military organization. If it did not have weapons caches, tactical command structures, or the capacity to hold territory, it was dangerous in a different register. The prophetic symbolic movements generated the kind of mass expectation and apocalyptic excitement that could, under the wrong conditions, provide the emotional and ideological fuel for an armed uprising led by someone else entirely. The prophets were themselves the kindling. Rome's response was to remove the kindling before it could be lit by someone with a torch.
The evidence demonstrates this is precisely how Rome read Jesus. A Galilean prophet with a popular following, entering Jerusalem in the volatility of Passover, staging symbolic demonstrations, attracting crowds, making implicit claims about God's sovereignty over a land Caesar administered. He had no weapons. His followers had no military organization. But he was kindling of the most combustible kind, and Passover was the torch. Rome removed him in a calibrated response.
In this reading, the Gospels preserve a tradition that requires careful interpretation. Per the arrest narrative, one of Jesus's companions draws a sword and cuts off the ear of the high priest's servant. The story appears in the Synoptics, and independently in John, and in each account Jesus's response is immediate and unambiguous: he rebukes the act. In Luke's version, he even reaches out to heal the wound he did not inflict (22:51). Only John, writing latest and at greatest distance, names the sword-bearer as Peter. The historical implausibility of the incident as reported is the first signal that its primary function is symbolic rather than documentary. Roman soldiers conducting an arrest in which one of their number had just been wounded by a member of the group would not have allowed the rest of the group to flee. They would have seized everyone present.
The flight of the disciples, which this series has argued as among the most historically reliable details in the passion tradition – passing the criterion of embarrassment as strongly as anything in the Gospels – is only intelligible if the arresting party did not regard them as dangerous combatants. An armed assault on a member of the arresting party would have settled that question immediately. But like so many other parabolic inventions we have identified in the Evangelist narratives thus far, it would make perfect sense as a symbolic act crystallizing Jesus's modus operandi with his rejection of the gesture. Matthew's account gives him the most direct formulation: "Put your sword back into its place, for all who take the sword will die by the sword" (26:52).
The scene operates as parable rather than reportage: the path of violent resistance is presented and Jesus repudiates it. Even as a tactical concession to overwhelming force, he refused violence on principle, as he had enacted throughout his ministry. As we will see in the trial narrative, this is a theme the passion tradition returns to with deliberateness. Even if the event did actually occur – and it would have been an understandable response by any disciple who refused to believe Rome could apprehend their one Messianic hope – the tradition's preservation of Jesus's rebuke is what matters historically: his condemnation of violence was no circumstantial posture. It was his program.
The decision to kill only Jesus, and to do so through the specific instrument of crucifixion rather than quiet assassination, appears to have been a calculated message addressed simultaneously to the crowd that had accompanied him into Jerusalem and to the Jewish population of the province more broadly. The message was delivered in the vocabulary of Roman political communication I have been laboring to establish in this post: crucifixion was public, humiliating, agonizing, and prolonged precisely because it was meant to be a display. The titulus crucis nailed above his head – The King of the Jews – was both charge and mockery in a single phrase. This is what happens to Jewish royal claimants. More specifically to Jesus’s followers: this is what the Kingdom of God looks like when Rome is done with it. Go home. It is over.
That his followers fled in terror strongly suggests the message was received. Whatever they had hoped the arrival in Jerusalem would produce, this was not it. The man who healed a demoniac by symbolically exorcizing Legion and sending it into the sea, who staged a counter-procession against Pilate's own warhorse parade, who overturned the tables that connected Caesar's economy to God's Temple – that man was now on a Roman cross, dying in the most politically definitive and humanly torturous manner possible. The Kingdom was announced and inaugurated, but left incapacitated.
It is remarkable then that the disciples did not stay away, that something happened in the days, weeks, or months that followed to reverse the rout and reconstitute the movement. That is the historical puzzle that the Part Five of this series will address. Before we pivot in that direction, there is one more dimension of the crucifixion that must be addressed. One that bears directly on everything the next installment will argue about the burial tradition and the empty tomb. We have established what crucifixion meant as a political act. We must now establish what it meant as a physical one – the aftermath of crucifixion for the victims themselves.
X. The Fate of the Crucified: Roman Practice and the Disposal of the Dead
To understand what probably happened to the body of Jesus of Nazareth as a consequence of crucifixion, we must first understand what normally happened to the bodies of the crucified. And what normally happened was precisely what Rome intended: total indignity.
We have already established that crucifixion was not a generic or convenient method of execution. It was a comprehensive program of damnatio – a total erasure of personhood that extended well beyond the moment of death. The naked and tortured victim was publicly displayed in agony, and in the overwhelming majority of cases across the Roman Empire, denied the fundamental human rite of burial. Martin Hengel, in his landmark study Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross (1977), documents this with unsparing clarity: crucifixion was regarded as the servile supplicium, the slave’s punishment, and the denial of burial was integral to its logic of degradation. The point was to annihilate the subject, to make an example so visceral that the memory of it would discipline an entire population. Crucifixion was intended to reduce a human being to carrion, viz. dead and putrefying flesh that served as a food source to scavengers like wild dogs and vultures.
The Roman sources are consistent on this point, and many speak with the casual indifference of a culture that considered the practice unremarkable for criminals sentenced to such disgrace. Horace, writing in the first century BCE, references the crux as the destination of slaves, and in his Epistles (1.16.48) assures his correspondent that they would not suffer being food for crows as do the crucified: “non pasces in cruce corvos” – “you will not feed the crows on the cross.” The line is revealing precisely because it treats the image as proverbial, a common cultural reference point rather than an exceptional horror. Everybody knew what happened to bodies left on crosses.
Juvenal is equally matter-of-fact. In his fourteenth Satire (77–78), he refers to the vulture that hurries from dead cattle and dogs and crosses to bring some of the carrion to her offspring. The crucified body is grouped without comment with animal carcasses – all of it simply meat for scavengers. Petronius, in the Satyricon (111–112), tells the famous story of the Widow of Ephesus, in which a soldier is assigned to guard crucified bodies specifically to prevent their families from taking them down for burial. The narrative detail is significant: the soldier’s duty exists because Rome’s default policy was that the bodies stayed up, and any removal required either official permission or successful subversion of the guard.
As previously cited and for emphasis here, Seneca provides perhaps the most harrowing window into the practice. In his Dialogue “To Marcia on Consolation” (6.20.3), he catalogs the varieties of crucifixion with some victims impaled head-down, some with their genitals mounted on a stake, and describes the slow process of bodily dissolution on the cross. The passage makes clear that the exposure was prolonged, the decomposition public, and the entire spectacle intentional. Elsewhere, in Epistle 101.14, Seneca describes the crucified as “evil-looking” figures, their bodies swollen and deformed, becoming less recognizable as human over time. Death was not the endpoint of the punishment; it was merely a transition to a new phase of public degradation.
The jurist Ulpian, writing in the early third-century but codifying longstanding practice, records in the Digest of Justinian (48.24.1–3) the legal framework governing Roman burial of the executed in general. The bodies of those condemned to death were not to be refused to their relatives, Ulpian writes. But this applied to ordinary execution, not necessarily to crucifixion, and even where permission was theoretically available, it required a specific petition to the magistrate. The operative word is petition. Burial was not a right; it was a favor to be requested and granted at the discretion of Roman authority. And in practice, for crucified criminals – especially those executed for sedition, banditry (latrocinium), or insurrection – that favor was rarely extended. The whole point of the punishment was the public spectacle of an unburied body. To grant burial was to undercut the message.
When crucified bodies were eventually removed from their crosses, whether after days of exposure and decomposition or when the wood was needed for another victim, the standard disposal method was a common grave. A puticuli (from puteus, “pit”), which was essentially a mass dumping ground for the bodies of the executed and the indigent. These were not burial sites in any meaningful sense. They functioned more like waste disposal. No marker, no memorial, no identification. The body simply disappeared in a mass grave. John Dominic Crossan has pressed this point with particular force in Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994) and Who Killed Jesus? (1995). Crossan argues that the normal Roman practice of crucifixion was specifically designed to leave no body to bury and no tomb to visit. Crossan contends the answer to what happened to Jesus’s corpse is that the body was most likely left on the cross until it was consumed by scavengers, or taken down and thrown into a shallow common grave where it would have been further scavenged by dogs. Either way, there would have been no identifiable remains and no known burial location. Sadly, this is not a sensationalist claim; it is simply the application of well-documented Roman practice to a specific case.
Raymond Brown, whose magisterial The Death of the Messiah (1994) remains the most comprehensive treatment of the passion narratives, acknowledges the force of this evidence even while ultimately defending a version of the burial tradition. Brown concedes that in the Roman world there was no consistent practice of burying the crucified and that normally the Romans left the crucified body on the cross as food for the birds. But he argues that Palestine, and specifically Jewish territory under Roman governance, may have been an exception. The argument for exceptional treatment in Jewish Palestine rests on two pillars: the Torah’s burial commandment and the testimony of Josephus.
Deuteronomy 21:22–23 commands that a body hung on a tree “must not remain all night upon the tree; you must bury him that same day, for anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse. You must not defile the land that the Lord your God is giving you for possession.” The passage originally referred to the post-mortem display of an already-executed criminal, but by the Second Temple period it was applied to crucifixion as well as the Temple Scroll from Qumran (11QT 64:6–13) confirms. The theological motivation was not compassion for the victim but fear of land pollution because an exposed corpse rendered the land ritually impure. Josephus affirms that Jews took this commandment seriously. In The Jewish War (4.317), he writes that the Jews are so careful about burial rites that even those who are condemned and crucified are taken down and buried before sunset. This is a striking claim, and it comes from a writer who was simultaneously trying to present Judaism as reasonable and law-abiding to a Roman audience. The question is whether Josephus is describing actual Roman policy in Judea or an ideal Jewish practice that may or may not have been consistently honored by the occupying power.
Craig Evans, in his important essay “Jewish Burial Traditions and the Resurrection of Jesus” (2005), has argued vigorously for the historical plausibility of Jesus receiving burial, pointing to Josephus and to the Deuteronomic command as evidence that Roman governors in Judea typically accommodated Jewish burial sensitivities. Evans cites multiple instances in which Josephus reports Roman authorities permitting Jewish customs, and argues that the burial of Jesus by Joseph of Arimathea fits comfortably within this pattern. But there is an important counterpoint. Here I recapitulate that previous citation in which Josephus also records in The Jewish War (5.11.1), that during the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Romans crucified up to five hundred Jews per day and explicitly denied them burial. Titus’s soldiers nailed victims in various positions as a form of grotesque entertainment, and the bodies were left to rot. This was a wartime extremity, but it demonstrates that Roman accommodation of Jewish burial customs was conditional and could be revoked at will. The possible peacetime concession was exactly that – a concession, not a right – and it was extended at the governor’s discretion.
The critical question then is this: would Pontius Pilate have granted that concession in the case of a man he had just executed for the politically charged crime of claiming to be King of the Jews? This series has already documented Pilate’s character at length in the provocations with the imperial standards, the massacre of protesters over the aqueduct, and the reputed pattern that Josephus records of calculated brutality alternating with tactical retreat. Philo, in his Embassy to Gaius (302), offers the most unsparing portrait. Pilate was characterized by “corruption, violence, robberies, ill-treatment of the people, grievances, continuous executions without even the form of a trial, endless and intolerable cruelties.” This is not the portrait of a governor inclined to do favors for the associates of a man he had just crucified as a royal pretender. Caution is required in our reconstruction here.
In 1968, construction workers in the Giv’at ha-Mivtar neighborhood of Jerusalem uncovered an ossuary – a limestone bone box used in Jewish secondary burial – containing the remains of a man named Yehohanan ben Hagkol. The right heel bone still had a large iron nail driven through it, bent at the tip where it had struck a knot in the olive wood crossbeam. To this day, this remains the only direct archaeological evidence of crucifixion ever recovered from the ancient world. The significance of this discovery has two implications. On the one hand, it proves that at least one crucified individual in first-century Jerusalem received proper Jewish burial; his bones were collected, placed in an ossuary, and interred in a family tomb. Someone retrieved what was left of his body from the cross and gave him the full two-stage Jewish burial rite. This demonstrates that the Palestinian exception was real, at least in some cases.
On the other hand, the extraordinary rarity of this find is itself the most pressing testimony to what usually happened. Thousands upon thousands of people were crucified across the Roman Empire over the roughly four centuries in which it was practiced. In Palestine alone, Josephus records mass crucifixions: Alexander Jannaeus crucified eight hundred Pharisees; Varus crucified two thousand after the revolts following Herod’s death; the siege of Jerusalem saw many hundreds per day. And yet from this entire history of industrial-scale crucifixion, we have exactly one skeleton with a nail in it. The rest have vanished without a trace, their bones scattered by scavengers, dissolved in common graves, or simply lost to the anonymity that Rome intended for them. The silence of the archaeological record is not an argument from silence in the conventional sense. It is precisely the evidence we would expect if the literary sources are correct: if crucified bodies were routinely left for scavengers or dumped in mass graves, then we should expect to find almost no identifiable remains. And that is exactly what we find.
By itself, none of this proves what happened to the body of Jesus. What it does is establish in concert is the probability – the default expectation against which any specific burial claim must be measured. When we turn to the gospel accounts of Joseph of Arimathea requesting the body from Pilate and placing it in a rock-hewn tomb, we are evaluating that tradition against a historical baseline in which the crucified were overwhelmingly denied individual burial, in which their bodies were consumed by animals or discarded in common graves, and in which the single archaeological exception only underscores the rule.
The question is not whether an exception was possible. Yehohanan proves it apparently was in at least sparing cases. The question is how probable that exception is in this specific case: a man executed on the most politically inflammatory charge available, by a governor whose brutality is demonstrable and reputedly pervasive, during the volatile Passover festival with Jerusalem swelling with pilgrims and the threat of political unrest at its annual peak. That is the question the burial tradition must answer. And it is one that the tradition’s progressive elaboration across the gospel texts, which we will trace in the next installment in detail, makes challenging to dissect.
The next part of the series will turn to the question that the tradition itself has always insisted is the decisive one: what happened after the crucifixion? Having reconstructed what Jesus was doing in Galilee and Jerusalem, having established what Rome’s execution of him actually meant, and having documented the historical baseline for what Rome did with the bodies of those it crucified, we are now in a position to engage the resurrection question – including the burial tradition and the empty tomb – with the full historical seriousness it merits.
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Recommended Reading
Craig Evans. "The Starting Point for the Priene Calendar Inscription and the Roman Imperial Cult." Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism (2000).
Raymond Brown. The Death of the Messiah (1994). Doubleday.
John Dominic Crossan. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994). HarperSanFrancisco.
Bart Ehrman. Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (1999). Oxford University Press.
William Klassen. Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus? (1996). Westminster John Knox Press.
John Dominic Crossan. Who Killed Jesus? (1995). HarperSanFrancisco.
Martin Hengel. Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross (1977). Fortress Press.
Craig Evans. "Jewish Burial Traditions and the Resurrection of Jesus." Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus (2005).
Teresa Morgan. Roman Faith and Christian Faith (2015). Oxford University Press.
This is Part Four of a seven-part series. Part Three – Reconstructing the Man and the Mission – examined what serious scholarship recovers about Jesus’s Galilean ministry and the beginning of his final week in Jerusalem. Part Five – Resurrection and Atonement: The Persistence of the Vision of Jesus – will take up the resurrection, the burial tradition, the empty tomb, and the question of how the tradition transformed the meaning of Jesus’s death into a new soteriology altogether.
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