That Jesus died could be surmised without too much difficulty; but the fact that he was crucified is one of the most secure pieces of historical data that we have about him. In the canonical Gospels, Jesus is presented as having explained to his disciples beforehand that he would die (by crucifixion) and rise on the third day. That he could have known with certainty not only that he would die but the means of execution is obviously treated with a great deal of skepticism by historians. And so the specific references to crucifixion may be treated as Christians reflecting light from their post-Easter perspective back into the lifetime of the historical Jesus. But apart from this, we must not be too hasty to assume that Jesus could not have foreseen that he would meet with a violent fate. In Mark, our earliest Gospel, Jesus’ first explanation of the fact that he would be rejected and put to death is placed soon after the beheading of John the Baptist (Mark 6:17-29; 8:31-38). Of course, the former mention of John’s beheading is indicated in Mark to have taken place at an indefinite time prior to this point in the narrative. But Matthew’s Gospel strengthens the parallelism between Jesus and John, and has Jesus come proclaiming the same message as John the Baptist after John is thrown in prison (Matthew 4:12-17). At any rate, it is certainly not impossible that Jesus, who started his ministry following in the footsteps of John the Baptist, could have expected to meet an end similar to that which John himself had met.
The question is the extent to which Jesus actually made his death part of his understanding of his own mission. N. T. Wright argues that this is precisely what Jesus did. And so we must seek to keep an open mind, and to explore a few possibilities, any of which could theoretically be true, but only one of which is likely to make the best sense of the available evidence:
1) Jesus’ death took him completely by surprise.
2) Jesus went to Jerusalem expecting that he might be arrested and killed.
3) Jesus went to Jerusalem intending to provoke the authorities, knowing that this would lead to his death.
In the case of option #1, it will be necessary to emphasize the resurrection experiences of the early Christians in order to explain why Christianity continued to exist. In the case of options #2 and #3, it will be at least possible that some things Jesus himself said primed them for the outcome that followed, and so their beliefs could handle what happened and their theologies could find ways to deal with whatever cognitive dissonance their may have been.
It is clear that the earliest Christians, before Paul or any of the Gospel authors wrote, quickly began to reflect on what it might mean for Jesus to be the anointed one (i.e. ‘Messiah’ or ‘Christ’) and yet have been crucified. I will assume here that Jesus was understood to be a messianic figure prior to Easter, since it seems impossible that anyone would conclude that a figure who had been crucified was God’s anointed one when they had not previously had any inkling that this might be the case. A ‘crucified Messiah’ was an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. It is difficult to imagine how any first century Jews could have turned a crucified figure into a Messiah, whereas it is possible to imagine how a group of people already convinced that he was the Messiah could have made sense of the Messiah being crucified. It is clear that they made use of ideas like that of sacrifice, which had apparently already been taken up within Judaism to make sense of the deaths of other martyrs. The big question is whether Jesus himself made use of such ideas.
Once again, we cannot hope to know what was in Jesus’ mind, but only what evidence there is regarding what he said. A type of saying attributed to Jesus that is often immediately dismissed as a product of the early Church is that which says that he explained how “the son of man must suffer many things, be rejected by the chief priests and the scribes, and be put to death, and after three days rise again.” One also has the reference (clearly a Matthean creation) to Jesus being ‘in the belly of the earth for three days and three nights.’ The interesting thing to note is the idea of three days. The traditions which have ‘on the third day’ would fit with ancient reckoning, including partial days in the equation. But there is no reckoning whereby the period from late Friday to early morning on Sunday would have been thought of as ‘three days and three nights’, and so it is clear not only that chronology was not a major concern, but that Matthew was willing to make a parallelism where none existed and which fit extremely poorly with the amount of time Jesus was actually believed to be in the tomb!
Yet this should not necessarily lead us to regard all these points as simply ‘pseudo-prophecies’ created after the event. Note the references as early as Paul’s time to Jesus having risen on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. The idea of the third day could easily be a result of the empty tomb, but Paul does not explicitly mention the tomb being empty and so we should not jump to conclusions just yet. Perhaps more striking and perplexing is the reference to ‘according to the Scriptures’. This suggests, as does Luke 24:25-27,44-47, that after Easter the followers of Jesus turned to the Scriptures and there found things that helped them to make sense of what had happened to Jesus. For the crucifixion they could conceivably have found an explanation in Isaiah 53 (although this passage is not used in this way in the New Testament to the extent that it is in modern Christianity), but what about the resurrection? The only serious contender is probably Hosea 6:2, which says that “…after two days he will revive us, on the third day he will raise us up and we shall live in his presence” Did Jesus ever quote this verse? We do not know. If he did, in any context, but particularly if he did so in the context of discussion of the end times and God’s restoration of Israel, it is easy to see how with hindsight they would have understood this to have been a veiled prediction of his own resurrection. But since we have no way of knowing for certain whether Jesus quoted this passage, and if so in what context, we likewise have no way of knowing whether this is the way belief that Jesus rose ‘according to the Scriptures’ developed. No passage is ever quoted to demonstrate precisely where the Scriptures supposedly predicted this. And so this fact may point to Jesus himself having mentioned that God would raise and vindicate him ‘according to the Scriptures’, and his followers would have reiterated this even though they were not certain where and how the Scriptures were supposed to have predicted this. On the other hand, it is equally possible that they felt the answer to this question was obvious, and for this reason they do not bother spelling out the details of their understanding of what it means to be ‘raised according to the Scriptures’, since the claim of the early Church is that their eyes were opened after Easter, and they understood these things from Scripture. Then again, maybe they were bluffing… J
The cross and resurrection of Jesus were central to Paul’s understanding of what Jesus had accomplished for humankind, and these two linked events have remained similarly important for Christians down the ages, even if not for precisely the same reasons and in precisely the same ways. But what can one say from a historian’s perspective about these events? Ironically, the crucifixion is perhaps the most certain and easily verifiable historical datum of the whole story of Jesus, while the resurrection essentially by definition lies beyond the reach of a historian’s tools. But this should not deter us from going as far as we can with a historical investigation of these events, to which we now turn.
The brute fact that Jesus was executed by crucifixion is essentially beyond doubt. There were those within early Christianity who found the offense of the cross too much to bear and sought to deny it, along with the real humanity of Jesus. Such Christian beliefs (which mainstream Christianity branded heretical) probably influenced the view expressed in Islam that Jesus was not crucified. But the very fact that Christians proclaimed their oxymoronic message about a ‘crucified Messiah’ pretty much speaks for itself. It is simply not something that anyone would make up! In addition, the Roman historian Tacitus records that Jesus was executed in the time of Pontius Pilate. So the fact that Jesus was crucified is a secure and reliable piece of historical data.
See further:
Joe Zias, "Crucifixion in Antiquity" http://www.religiousstudies.uncc.edu/jdtabor/crucifixion.html (also here)
A Closer Look at the Crucifixion http://www.wcg.org/lit/booklets/risen/risen3.htm
K. C. Hanson and Douglas E. Oakman, "Elite Force in Action" http://www.kchanson.com/PTJ/ptjexcerpt2.html
Richard P. Bucher, "Crucifixion in the Ancient World" http://users.rcn.com/tlclcms/crucify.htm (also here)
Ralph F. Wilson, "What Crucifixion was like in Jesus' Day" http://www.jesuswalk.com/lessons/crucifixion.htm
Truman Davis, A Medical Perspective on Crucifixion http://www.thechurchofchrist.org/evidence/ev02.pdf or http://www.webedelic.com/church/crucif.pdf
Bruce Nolan, "CSI Jerusalem: Death on an Old Rugged Cross" http://www.biblicalrecorder.org/content/news/2005/3_25_2005/ne250305csi.shtml
Wikipedia article "Crucifixion" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion
Links relating to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ http://blue.butler.edu/~jfmcgrat/jesus/passion.htm
Our earliest account of Jesus’ burial, the Gospel of Mark, records a fundamental truth that later Christian authors tried to obscure: Jesus’ disciples were not in a position to provide Jesus with an honorable burial. Mark tells us that a pious Jewish leader named Joseph of Arimathea made sure that Jewish law was observed and, learning that Jesus had died, he got permission to take the body and bury it. Jewish law forbade that the body should stay exposed on the cross overnight. However, in Mark’s Gospel Joseph has not yet been turned into a Christian disciple as he has in other Gospels. Rather, he is simply a pious Jew, one who like many others was eagerly expecting the Kingdom of God. May he have had some sympathy for Jesus? That is not impossible. But he certainly was in no sense a disciple of Jesus as far as any observable external facts could ascertain, and he did not collaborate even with the women who followed Jesus and would gladly have helped give Jesus an honorable burial to whatever extent this was possible. But Joseph does only the absolute bare minimum required: he wraps the body in a cloth, with no mention of even washing the body, much less anointing it. This explains why Mark included the story in Mark 14:3-9: Jesus was anointed beforehand for burial, and this made up for the fact that the disciples were not given the opportunity to do so later (contra John 19:39-40). Acts 13:29 confirms what we have conjectured thus far: it attributes the burial of Jesus to his enemies, to those who crucified him.
Leaving to one side the apologetic statements of the later Gospels, who assert that Jesus was placed in a tomb that emphatically had never been used before, wrapped in a clean linen sheet, we are only told in Mark’s Gospel that Jesus was placed in ‘a tomb’. We may surmise that this was a tomb near the execution site, used for the burial of criminals. It would have been a ‘mass grave’ – whether anyone was pious enough to become ritually unclean in order to take the bones of these people and bury them after their bodies had decomposed is uncertain, but relatively unlikely. Joseph of Arimathea himself probably did not touch the body, and so he buried Jesus the same way ‘Solomon built the temple’ – by arranging for others to do it. This is presumably why the Gospels refer to the place where ‘they’ laid him. One may suppose that the disciples of Jesus were interested to note where he was buried and to come back to the tomb after the Sabbath to give him the decency of the minimal elements of a Jewish funeral: to mourn him, perhaps to anoint the body (although whether they would have attempted this after the body had had an opportunity to begin to decompose is uncertain), and presumably to note where in the tomb his body was so that they could collect the bones later and give them a respectful burial or place them in an ossuary in something other than the mass grave of criminals. That the disciples should have been suspected of stealing the body is not simply an attempt to disprove the resurrection: his followers probably would have been expected to take his body (while the Jewish leaders turned a blind eye) and give an honorable burial to their master.
The following elements strike a historian as being attempts to make the burial of Jesus more honorable than it actually was, and they are details that either contradict earlier sources, or at the very least are not found in the earliest passion narrative, that in Mark:
1) The tomb as unused
2) The tomb as Joseph of Arimathea’s own
3) The anointing of the body by Joseph and Nicodemus
4) The guards at the tomb
This last point deserves further attention, since apologists like Josh McDowell make much of it.
Problems:
The Jewish authorities are apparently well versed in and understand the meaning of Jesus rising on the third day, while the Gospels are pretty unanimous in agreeing that even Jesus’ own disciples did not understand this except with hindsight.
The attempt to counter a rumor circulating in Matthew’s own time makes us wary: he may have had apologetic reasons for creating this story.
The women supposedly went to a guarded tomb, and yet no one except Matthew mentions this fact! And according to Matthew, rather than finding the stone already rolled away, an angel did it as they arrived, thus dealing with the guards as well! The fact that Matthew is the only one to mention this implausible detail thus makes his testimony suspect.
Conclusion: If Josh McDowell wants to claim that the resurrection is proven beyond doubt, he had better pay closer attention to Matthew’s Gospel. On the one hand, he quotes a narrative only Matthew has, and one person’s testimony written down decades later does not put the matter ‘beyond doubt’. On the other hand, Matthew himself says that some of those who were there when the risen Jesus appeared doubted (Matthew 28:17). And so to claim to prove the resurrection ‘beyond doubt’ is to claim to be able to do what even the disciples who were there could not. Perhaps Josh McDowell should spend less time writing books and more time reading his Bible! J
On the burial of Jesus see further:
Byron R. McCane, "Where No One Had Yet Been Laid" http://members.tripod.com/enoch2112/ByronBurial.htm
Richard Carrier, "Jewish Law, the Burial of Jesus, and the Third Day" http://www.secweb.org/asset.asp?AssetID=125
The Burial http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/burial.html
Brown, Raymond E., The Death of the Messiah [2 volumes], New York: Doubleday, 1994.
Crossan, John Dominic, Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Death of Jesus, San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1995.
Hengel, Martin, The Cross of the Son of God [also published separately as Crucifixion and The Atonement], London: SCM, 1986.
Knox, John, The Death of Christ: The Cross in New Testament History and Faith, Nashville: Abingdon, 1958.
Rivkin, Ellis, What Crucified Jesus?, Nashville: Abingdon, 1994.
Sloyan, Gerald S., The Crucifixion of Jesus: History, Myth, Faith, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995.