The Crucifixion of Jesus
On the eve of the Passover, when the lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple courts and the people made ready their unleavened bread, they brought the man called Yeshua of Nazareth to the place which is called…
Biblical Narrative
On the eve of the Passover, when the lambs were being slaughtered in the Temple courts and the people made ready their unleavened bread, they brought the man called Yeshua of Nazareth to the place which is called Golgotha — the Place of the Skull — outside the gate of the city, that he might be put to death by the Roman manner of execution, the cross of wood. He had been condemned in the night by the High Priest Caiaphas, before the council of the elders; and at dawn he had been delivered up to Pontius Pilate the prefect, who washed his hands of innocent blood, and gave him over to be crucified, with two robbers, one upon his right hand and the other upon his left.
And the soldiers cast lots for his garments, and a placard was nailed above his head bearing the charge in three tongues — Hebrew, Greek, and Latin: ״Yeshua of Nazareth, King of the Jews.״ And from the sixth hour until the ninth there was darkness over all the land. And he cried with a great voice, in the words of the twenty-second psalm: Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani — My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? And he gave up the ghost.
And there came at evening a man named Yosef of Ramatayim, a member of the council who had not consented to the verdict, and he begged the body from Pilate; and he wrapped it in fine linen, and laid it in his own new-cut tomb in the rock of the garden, and rolled a great stone against the door of the tomb, for the Sabbath was beginning, and the women who had come with him from Galilee saw where he was laid.
And on the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women came to the tomb with spices and ointments to anoint the body, and they found the stone rolled away, and the tomb empty; and the message went forth, ringing through the centuries: He is not here, but is risen. The followers of Yeshua of Nazareth proclaimed his rising; the priests and the Romans denied it; and from a wooden cross outside the wall of Jerusalem, on a Friday afternoon in the eighteenth year of Tiberius, came forth the seed of the world's largest religion.
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? — that is to say, My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?Mark 15:34 / Psalm 22:2
Archaeology · History · Genetics
The historicity of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth is, as Bart Ehrman has put it, ״one of the most secure facts in early Christian history.״ It is independently attested in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, John (composed c. 65–95 CE), the Pauline letters (1 Corinthians 15:3–5, c. 53 CE — earlier than any of the Gospels), the Roman historian Tacitus (Annals XV.44, c. 116 CE: ״Christus, the founder of the name, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus״), the Jewish historian Josephus (Antiquities XVIII.63–64, the contested but partially authentic Testimonium Flavianum), and rabbinic tradition (b. Sanhedrin 43a).
Crucifixion in the Roman imperial period was a Greek-Persian punishment systematised by the Romans for slaves, foreigners, brigands, and rebels. It is well attested in the cross-shaped scars on a heel-bone discovered in 1968 at Giv'at ha-Mivtar, north Jerusalem — the only physical remains of a crucified man ever recovered. The bone, belonging to one Yehohanan ben Hagqol who died around 7–66 CE, has the iron nail still embedded, bent at the tip — proof that an attempt to remove the nail had broken it within the wood, so that the family had to bury the man with the iron still in his bone.
The dating of the crucifixion to 30 or 33 CE is fixed by the convergence of three constraints: the Roman prefecture of Pontius Pilate (26–36 CE), the high-priesthood of Caiaphas (18–36 CE), and the Synoptic Gospels' anchoring of the Passion to a Friday Passover eve. Astronomical reconstruction by Humphreys and Waddington (1983, Nature 306) showed that 14 Nisan fell on a Friday only in 30 and 33 CE; most scholars favour 30 CE, though 33 remains a live alternative.
What was new about Jesus's crucifixion was not the act — Crassus had crucified six thousand Spartacist rebels along the Appian Way in 71 BCE, and the Romans crucified two thousand Galilean rebels in 4 BCE alone — but its theological reception. Within thirty years of the event, Paul of Tarsus was preaching across the Roman world that this particular crucified rabbi was the resurrected Lord of all creation. The cross, an instrument of Roman terror, became the central symbol of a new religion that would in three centuries conquer the empire that had crucified its founder.
Jesus's crucifixion is one of the most secure historical facts about him. The fact that the disciples insisted he had been raised from the dead, only weeks afterward, is also historically well-attested. The disagreement begins with what to make of those two facts.Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God (2014), paraphrased