The Resurrection of Jesus Fact #2: The Crucifixion of Jesus

Did Jesus even exist?

To my very limited awareness, there being an actual, historical Jesus of any kind isn't really common knowledge among your lay person in the secular world. If this is so, it's not for a good reason. That Jesus was crucified is, well, as "highly critical" New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan put it, "as certain as anything historical can ever be." (1)

Who would invent a crucifixion?

If you've been following my blog, you've surely run into the fact that crucifixion was a highly embarrassing event. As I cited in part of my argument for the Gospel of Mark:

"Crucifixion was the worst punishment imaginable -- for a CRIMINAL. A first century B.C. writer named Cicero calls it 'that most cruel and disgusting penalty' and says that '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.'" (2)

But that's not all. Not by a long shot. 

Have you ever heard the claim that all the Jews were expecting a powerful messiah, and so no one was ever expecting a crucified one and therefore Jesus would never have been invented? I don't remember when I first learned this, but it became common knowledge to me at some point, even before I became a teenager. (And I definitely was told this from a believer.)

Perhaps you're not a Christian and suspect that this isn't actually true. But I did some investigation and am confident that it is. Turns out, such a claim isn't only Christian. In many of his books, Bart Ehrman reports the same. My favorite one to refer to is Did Jesus Exist?, where he presents the crucifixion in a chapter called "Two Key Data for the Historicity of Jesus."

Ancient Jews during the time of Jesus had a number of various expectations for what the messiah would be like, some examples being an earthly human king to overthrow the enemies of the Jews, an angelic cosmic being who would overthrow the enemy, or a powerful priest with another messiah. What all the Jewish expectations had in common was that the christ would be a powerful conquerer(3). So, "A crucified criminal? That's worse than crazy. It's an offense against God, blaspehmous." (4)

Elsewhere, Ehrman gives more detail: "This was not someone who had conquered God's enemies; he was a gnat that the enemy had swatted. Saying that he was God's chosen one was tantamount to saying that God himself was weak and powerless in this world dominated by Rome--blasphemous!" (5)

Ehrman invented an analogy to use with his students:

"What would you think if I tried to convince you that David Koresh was God's chosen one through whom he is going to rule the earth? David Koresh? The leader of the Branch Davidians at Waco, who stockpiled guns and abused children, who was killed by the FBI? He's God's chosen one? Yes, he is the Lord of all. What are you, completely nuts?" (4)

He pointed to two verses from Paul which fit first-century Mediterranean religious views(6). One reason crucifixion is so appalling to Jews is because of Deuteronomy 21:23, which Paul quotes in Galatians 3:13, "Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole." Therefore, the crucifixion is a "stumbling block to Jews"; furthermore, it is also "foolishness to Gentiles." (1 Corinthians 1:23)

Ancient Judaism took an intrinsically embarrassing claim and completely blew it up into a huge proportion. No one would ever invent this.

Was Jesus ever mentioned outside the early church?

A second strong piece of evidence (yet it would be hard to parallel the crucifixion) is when Jesus was mentioned by a non-Christian author in the early second century. That's right, Jesus is mentioned by non-Christian authors. As a matter of fact, Ehrman observes:

"The reality is that every single author who mentions Jesus--pagan, Christian, or Jewish-- was fully convinced that he at least lived. Even the enemies of the Jesus movement thought so; among their many slurs against the religion, his nonexistence is never one of them."(7)

Tacitus, generally known as one of the best Roman historians, referred to Jesus in his Annals 15.44. He wrote as follows:

"Therefore, to squelch the rumor, Nero created scapegoats and subjected to the most refined tortures those whom the common people called 'Christians,' hated for their abominable crimes. Their names comes from Christ, who, during the reign of Tiberius, had been executed by the procurator Pontius Pilate. Suppressed for the moment, the deadly superstition broke out again, not only in Judea, the land which originated this evil, but also in the city of Rome, where all sorts of horrendous and shameful practices from every part of the world converge and are fervently cultivated." (8)

So much evidence speaks to the authenticity of this passage(9). To begin with, the death of Christ is only a tiny bump in the narrative. Contrast this to Josephus's Testimonium Flavianum, which contains three explicit Christian interpolations! (But not all of it was invented. I shall say more about this when we get to James's martyrdom.) Tacitus's narrative starts with being about a Roman emperor, and he is trying to shed a little background light on this supposedly "evil" race. There is much more subject matter on how Christians are "abominable" then there is of Jesus! Such unflattering (to say the least) description of Christians doesn't fit an inventor's style (at the very minimum they would tone it down), although it does fit the heavily biased pagan Tacitus. Historians have to sift through his highly opinionated accounts to come across the historical truths actually reported(10). Therefore, one obvious certainty from him is that Jesus lived. No way would a historian who hated Christianity rely on hearsay -- that is, valuing a Christian report over the line of unbeliever tradition which otherwise should deny His existence. 

Something I thought of myself (so it may not be of real historical worth, but it makes sense) is that crucifixion isn't even mentioned in the text. Even if a forger wanted to stress the significance of Jesus's sufferings, they could have just said something like "suffered the extreme penalty on a cross by the order of Pontius Pilate." (Because, as you probably know, the cross is a symbol of power in the Christian church.)

One objection is that only a Christian would refer to Jesus as "Christ." But the Christians' term for their Lord and Savior apparently melted into outside culture as well(11). I came across something like this in William Ramsay's St. Paul the Traveler and Roman Citizen. The term "Chrestians," a slang for "Christians," devolved from "Christos," and has inscriptional authority(12).

There have been those that have tried to bypass Tacitus. But ignoring his authority and suggesting the passage was a forgery clearly is unreasonable. Jesus certainly was put on a cross 2,000 years ago. I can't wait to get to why I think afterward He reversed its effects. 

Citations:

1. John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 145; see also 154, 196, 201. Cited in Gary R. Habermas and Micheal R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Kregel Publications: Grand Rapids, MI. 2004), 49.

2. https://onechristianthought.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-true-lost-gospel-of-peter-updated.html

3. Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (HarperOne: 2012), 160-163.

4. Ibid., 163.

5. Bart Ehrman, Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend (Oxford University Press: Oxford, NY. 2006), 110.

6. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?, 166, 170.

7. Ibid., 171-72.

8. Quote from John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, vol. 1. Anchor Yale Bible Reference Library (Doubleday: New York, 1991), 89-90. Cited in Josh McDowell and Sean McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-changing Truth for a Skeptical World (Thomas Nelson: Nashville, TN. 2017), 150. 

9. For a thorough analysis, see McDowell, Evidence, 150-53.

10. Gary R. Habermas and Micheal R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Kregel Publications: Grand Rapids, MI. 2004), 45-46; Gary Habermas and J.P. Moreland, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Wipf and Stock: Eugene, OR. 1998), 139. They both cite Moses Hadas, ed., "Introduction," The Complete Works of Tacitus, trans. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb (New York: Random House, 1942), xvii-xviii. 

11. Paul R. Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd, The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Traditions (Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, MI. 2007), 182. Cited in McDowell, Evidence, 151.

12. William M. Ramsay, St. Paul the Traveler and Roman Citizen (Hodder & Stoughton: London. 1925), reprinted 2001 Kregel Publications by Mark Wilson, 54-55.