The Last Days of Jesus

Yet, for an event so momentous, the crucifixion of Jesus is even today the subject of much historical controversy-Prior to the 18th century, few Christian theologians challenged the historical accuracy of the Passion, as related in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But by the 18th century, skeptics and believers alike were examining the Scriptures and other records in a quest for "the historical Jesus." They found disappointingly little to corroborate the Gospel texts, a compendium of oral traditions written 20 to 60 years after the events and sometimes differing on important details of the story.

That has changed dramatically in recent years. Since shortly after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls some 40 years ago, theologians, Bible scholars, archaeologists and Cultural anthropologists have refocused their search, hoping to illuminate the theological meaning as well as the historical accuracy of the Gospel accounts of the final events in Jesus' life. We do that he changed history from B.C. to A.D. Does history fall if you take out Jesus Christ?

Where has it all led? Some scholars, frustrated in their pursuit of a purely "historical" Jesus, have come to reject the Passion as pure fiction. For others, the account of Jesus' death, burial and resurrection some 2,000 years ago remains a story worthy of faith, its truth protected through the centuries by the very hand of God. Still others have put forth intriguing evidence' that the truth lies somewhere in between: That the Gospel narratives are a mix of legend and fact that attempt to describe a historical and mystical human encounter with one who called himself the "Son of Man."

The Triumphal Entry

When they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their garments on it, and He sat on it. And many spread their garments on the road, and others cut down leafy branches from the trees and spread them on the road. Then those who went before and those who followed cried out, saying. - Hosanna! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!"... And Jesus went into Jerusalem and into the temple...and began to drive out those who bought and sold in the temple. (The Gospel According to Mark)

Now, however, modern scholars, examining the Scriptures and other more recently discovered documents that relate to first-century Judaism, take a more sympathetic view of the actions of the Jerusalem crowd. They find plenty of reason, to suspect widespread confusion about the political and theological importance of Jesus of Nazareth.

It is unlikely, some theologians now believe, that the Palm Sunday event was the spontaneous outpouring of acclaim that tradition has depicted. They note, for instance, that Luke's Gospel suggests Jesus sent messengers ahead to Jerusalemadvance men who presumably spread word of his purported miracles and his rebelliousness. Stories of run-ins with religious leaders in nearby towns would have played well with the common people of Jerusalem, who despised the Romans and were disenchanted with the Temple hierarchy. Even those who did not believe Jesus to be the Messiah, says Donald Senior, a New Testament scholar and president of the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago, "would have been willing to band around someone who was seen as an anti-establishment figure."

Though many of the Palm Sunday revelers no doubt thought they were cheering the Messiah, their understanding of "Messiah" was almost certainly different from that embraced by Christian orthodoxy today. Judaism in Jesus' time was wracked by sectarian rivalry. The Pharisees, a lay reform movement strong in the village synagogues but not in Jerusalem, were at odds with the Sadducees, the priests who dominated the Temple. In the countryside were the Essenes, a radical monastic sect that rejected the Temple establishment, and the insurrectionist Zealots, whose main objective was throwing off Roman rule. Each had different expectations for the Messiah: A military deliverer, a priestly king who would restore Israel's religious fervor, a mystical figure who would usher in a new age.

Whoever they thought Jesus was, it is likely that many in the Jerusalem crowd expected him to march into the city and lead an attack on the Roman garrison. Instead, he attacked the abuses of the Temple court, challenging the very power structure of Jerusalem.

In the traditional story, Jesus often is described as suddenly enraged when he enters the Temple and sees the rampant buying and selling. But some modern commentators contend that his actions were carefully premeditated. A passage in Mark suggests Jesus made a quick visit to the Temple on Sunday, then spent the night in Bethany considering what action he would take. When he returned the next day to drive out the money changers, it amounted to open defiance of the Temple authorities.

Why did he do it? Some scholars are convinced Jesus was merely purging the Temple of commercial corruption, while others believe he was challenging the Temple establishment itself as a first step toward a new religious order.

Whatever Jesus' motives, experts agree that his actions in the Temple made his execution quite predictable. The Temple was of enormous economic importance to the people of Jerusalem. It was being rebuilt at the time, and many were employed in the rebuilding. It was the religious, social and commercial center of the city. Historians note that the priests earlier had sent an army to destroy the Samaritan temple, because it had been perceived as a threat. "What Jesus did," says Jerome Nerey of the Weston School of Theology in Boston, "was like attacking the Bank of America, and they simply squished him."

The Arrest and Trial

When, having arrested Him, they led Him and brought Him to the high priest's house.... As soon as it was day, the elders of the people came together and led Him into their council, saying, "If you are the Christ, tell us." But he said to them, "If I tell you, you will not believe. "...Then the whole multitude of them arose and led Him to Pilate. And they began to accuse Him .... So Pilate asked Him, saying, "Are you the King of the Jews?" And He answered him and said, "It is as you say." Then Pilate said to the chief priests and crowd, I find nofault in this man." [One might find this out in the description of Christ in Isaiah chapter 53.]

Stripped to the essentials, the charges against Jesus were blasphemy and sedition. He was accused by religious leaders of claiming to be the Messiah and of threatening the Temple. And he was accused before Pontius Pilate, the Roman procurator, of claiming to be "King of the Jews"-a title that the ancient chronicler Josephus notes was commonly assumed by revolutionaries of that era. It is that charge, scholars believe, that accounts for Jesus' execution at the hands of the Romans. "The Romans," says Donald Senior of the Catholic Theological Union of Chicago, "would hardly become excited about any Jew's claims to be a Son of God or a Messiah, unless those claims implied political power, as Jesus' enemies suggested they did."

The extent to which Jewish authorities contributed to the death of Jesus is a complicated and sensitive issue, given the anti-semitic theologies that have used the New Testament accounts to promote their legitimacy. In fact, the Gospels suggest that opposition to Jesus among Jewish leaders was by no means unanimous. At least two members of the Jewish high court, or Sanhedrin-Joseph of Arimathea (who buried Jesus) and Nicodemus-are portrayed as sympathizers. Today, theologies that seek to use the Passion narratives to excuse antiSemitism are universally rejected.

Even so, Jesus did have plenty of enemies among Jewish leaders. He had accused the Pharisees of hypocrisy, challenged the Sadducees' theology and espoused unconventional interpretations of Mosaic law. Most important, his perceived threat to "destroy the Temple...and I will rebuild it in three days" was an affront the priests could not tolerate. They felt little choice but to move against Jesus.

Jesus' seeming indifference to the charges and the manner in which he testified in his own defense are left unexplained in the Gospel accounts. The narratives quote him responding differently when asked if he was the Messiah: "I am," in Mark; "That is what you say," in Matthew; "If I tell you, you will not believe," in Luke. In John's Gospel, Jesus spars verbally with Caiaphas, the high priest, and tells Pilate that his kingdom "is not of this world." While each of the portrayals may accurately reflect aspects of Jesus' character as understood by the Gospel writers, few modem scholars believe any of Jesus' followers were present at the proceedings. Thus, for many historians, Jesus' conduct at the trial remains a mystery.

Pilate, too, may have been long misunderstood. In each of the Gospel accounts, the apparently indecisive and weak-willed Roman procurator declares Jesus innocent, yet ultimately yields to the demands of the priests and the angry crowd to condemn him. But some historians believe Pilate's main concern was to prevent anti-Roman sentiments, which always ran high during Jewish feast days, from exploding in a city crowded with Passover pilgrims. He was justifiably concerned about offending the chief priests and Herod Antipas, the governor of Galilee. Pilate had been reprimanded by the emperor Tiberius for offending the Jewish leaders on two previous occasions. He could not afford another incident.

That, say scholars, is why in Luke's account, a frustrated Pilate sends Jesus to Herod. Rather than an act of indecision or of principled reluctance to condemn an innocent man, suggests Harold Hoehner, professor of New Testament at Dallas Theological Seminary, it was a "diplomatic courtesy" to improve relations with Herod by acknowledging his jurisdiction in Galilean affairs. The strategy worked. Pilate and Herod later became friends. An "incident" had been avoided. Now if the Temple priests wanted Jesus condemned, Pilate would oblige.

The Crucifixion

So he delivered Him to them to be crucified So they took Jesus and led Him away. And He, bearing His cross, went out to a place called the Place of the Skull...where...they crucified Him, and two others with Him. (The Gospel According to John)

But on the day of the crucifixion, the cross was an object of suffering and horror. According to the Gospels, Jesus was flogged and beaten and forced to carry a heavy wooden beam through the city to the place of his execution. There he was attached to the cross with iron nails driven through his feet and hands. He died within 6 hours, probably of asphyxiation. A spear was thrust into his side to assure his death.

While some of the details may be disputed, the fact that Jesus, a man in his late 20s or early 30s, was executed in Roman-occupied Palestine is one part of the Passion story that modem historians believe is well corroborated by extra-biblical sources. The Roman historian Tacitus, for example, writing in A.D. 110 of the persecution of Christians under the emperor Nero, refers to followers of "Christ, whom the procurator Pontius Pilate had executed in the reign of Tiberius." And the Talmud-a compendium of Jewish law, lore and commentary depicts Jesus as the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier who was hanged on the eve of Passover because "he seduced Israel, leading her astray."

Yet the mode of Jesus' execution, as graphically described in the Gospels, has long been a subject of historical inquiry and, until recently, some skepticism. During the 19th and early-20th centuries, some scholars questioned the crucifixion story on a number of counts. Some have argued, for instance, that it was more common in first-century Palestine for criminals to be executed by some other means-stoning, burning, beheading or strangling-and their bodies "hanged on a tree" as a warning to others. Other theologians have added that crucifixion was a Roman mode of execution and was not permitted in Jewish law. Consequently, it is unlikely that the Temple priests would call for Jesus to be crucified, as the Gospels report. Still other scholars have questioned the historicity of such details as the shape of the cross depicted in Christian tradition and the use of nails rather than bindings to attach the victim to the cross.

But archaeological discoveries and textual research in recent years have added considerable weight to the Gospel accounts. Found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, was a Temple document; scholars say the text suggests that the Law of Moses may have been understood in Jesus' time to prescribe crucifixion in certain cases. The German theologian Ernst Bammel has noted that execution by crucifixion had been used in Palestine since the second century B.C.even by Jewish courts. Because it was a particularly gruesome form of punishment, said Bammel, "it was used especially in political cases such as those branded by the Romans as rebellion."

Striking corroboration of the type of crucifixion that is described in the Gospels was discovered in 1968 at an excavation site near Mount Scopus, just northeast of Jerusalem. Three tombs were found at the site, one of them containing the remains of a man who had been crucified between A.D. 7 and 70. The man's feet had been nailed together at the heels, his forearms had nail wounds and the bones of his lower legs had been broken-wounds that are entirely consistent with the description in John's Gospel of the crucifixion of Jesus and the two thieves.

Another aspect of the crucifixion account that has been challenged is the description of midday darkness over the city as Jesus hung on the cross. Using computer models, astronomers have ruled out a solar eclipse in Palestine at that time. And while they say a lunar eclipse did occur on April 3 in A.D. 33, it could not have been seen in Jerusalem during the daylight hours. However, some scholars speculate that a spring sirocco-a high-altitude, dust-laden wind common to that part of the Middle East-could easily have darkened the midday sky just as the Gospel writers described.

The Burial

How when evening had come, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who himself had also become a disciple of Jesus. This man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus ... And when Joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his new tomb which he had hewn out of the rock, and he rolled a large stone against the door of the tomb and departed. (The Gospel According to Matthew)

With the confused and frightened disciples in hiding, by most accounts, a member of the Sanhedrin stepped forward to claim the body and give it a hasty but decent burial in a rock tomb. In the days that followed, the tomb would take on great significance as friends and foes of the crucified carpenter were confronted with one of the greatest paradoxes of history.

Although many questions concerning Jesus' fate would echo through the ages, his actual death was never widely disputed. There were many witnesses at Golgotha, including the Roman soldiers specifically charged with overseeing the execution. Additionally, Mark's narrative notes that Pilate personally confirmed Jesus' death. There was no reason to suspect that Jesus had survived the cross. Even later, when "counterpropaganda" challenged the Christian claim of resurrection, notes Reginald H. Fuller, professor emeritus at Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va., "it relied on the thesis of the theft of the body, not that Jesus had not died."

Despite general agreement that Jesus did indeed die on the cross, however, some details of the burial now being challenged by textual critics who see inconsistencies in some traditional interpretations. Why, for example, would Pontius Pilate have given the body of Jesus to a known disciple, as two of the Gospels describe Joseph of Arimathea-or, for that matter, to a member of the Sanhedrin who, according to Luke, had sided with Jesus during the trial? Doing either would have seemed to invite mischief. The narratives make clear that Pilate and the Jerusalem authorities were worried that Jesus' followers might steal the body in order to claim a miracle that would keep the movement alive. Matthew even relates that Pilate posted a guard at the tomb, although some modern scholars believe that that detail may have been added to the narrative later to refute the theft theory.

One current explanation is that Joseph was not a disciple at the time, but became one later. In that case, argues Raymond E. Brown of Union Theological Seminary, Matthew may be understood as mistakenly "reading Joseph's postresurrectional career into the burial account by describing him as a disciple."

Other critics of the text find it implausible that a "good and righteous" Jew like Joseph would willingly handle a corpse, let alone that of a crucified criminal; such an act would have rendered him unclean under Mosaic law. Yet Brown, in a 1988 article on "The Burial of Jesus," suggests that a "pious, law observant member of the Sanhedrin" would also have been aware of the law's requirement that a body not be left on the cross after sunset, a situation perhaps made even more urgent by the approach of the Sabbath. Burial, says Brown, "was seen as a necessary good that overshadowed the accompanying impurity."

Other evidence favoring Joseph's role in the burial is that he is one of just a handful of lesser characters in the Passion story whose names were remembered through the period of oral tradition. Another is Simon of Cyrene, whom the Gospels describe as having helped Jesus carry the cross and who, tradition says, also became a disciple sometime after the events of Easter.

Others question whether the "borrowed" tomb of Jesus actually belonged to Joseph, as only Matthew states. Some Bible scholars deem it unlikely that a wealthy member of the Sanhedrin would own a tomb so close to a crucifixion site, an area where criminals were buried. Others speculate that Joseph did not own the tomb at the time, but bought it later, after the Easter event would have transformed it into a site of reverence and awe.

The Resurrection

Very early in the morning, on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb when the sun had risen.... But when they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away.... And entering the tomb, they saw a young man clothed in a long white robe sitting on the right side,, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, "Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified He is risen! He is not here." (The Gospel According to Mark)

Yet despite its centrality, the resurrection has been, for believers and nonbelievers alike, one of the most problematic of Christian doctrines. The Gospel narratives contain no resurrection stories per se, no eyewitness accounts of Jesus rising from the tomb. For modern readers of the Gospels, as for the disciples on the first Easter, the resurrection is largely a deduction drawn from two pieces of data: The discovery of an empty tomb and reports of post-crucifixion appearances by Jesus in Jerusalem and Galilee.

Although some theologians are troubled by conflicting "testimony" on the details, the weight of evidence presents a strong case that the empty tomb was part of the earliest Gospel tradition. All four narratives relate the early-morning discovery by Mary Magdalene and others. Yet there are discrepancies in the accounts. Were there three women visitors (Mark), two (Matthew) or one (John)? Did they arrive before dawn (Matthew, John) or after (Mark)? Was the stone rolled away after (Matthew) or before they arrived (Mark, Luke, John)? Were angels present (Matthew, Mark and Luke, yes; John, no)? Such textual disagreements are widely viewed as the result of later embellishments of the original story. But few New Testament experts think they obscure the basic fact: It was an empty tomb that was discovered.

Archaeological evidence is sometimes cited as indirectly supporting the notion of an empty tomb. It was customary in Judaism at the time for relatives of the deceased to return to a grave a year later to put the remains into an ossuary, or bone box, so that at the final resurrection, God would have all the parts needed to reconstruct the body. Hence, the ideas of resurrection and an empty tomb were linked. Any claims that Jesus had been resurrected, says British theologian James D. G. Dunn, "would be unlikely to cut much ice" among Jesus' contemporaries "unless the tomb was empty."

While the Gospels are unclear on the chronology, some theologians point out that by the time some of the disciples received Mary's report, they already had had "sightings" of the resurrected Christ. In all, he appears 10 times to the disciples to reassure them and instruct them to continue his work. But as with the tomb accounts, Bible scholars have found confusion on the details. Matthew and John have Jesus appearing first at the tomb; Mark puts him elsewhere. And while Matthew, Mark and John describe appearances in Galilee, Luke seems to limit Jesus to Jerusalem.

The writers also differ in how they describe the risen Jesus. Luke and John depict him in concrete, physical terms: He eats; he invites a doubting disciple to touch his wounds. Paul's risen Christ, who appears later on the road to Damascus, is more spiritual than physical.

In some circles, the term "resurrection" itself has become a matter of debate. What does the Bible mean when it says God raised Jesus from the dead? Christian tradition says Jesus was physically resurrected, that his dead flesh and bones were miraculously reanimated. But some theologians have sought to reconcile the resurrection with a more rationalist view by describing it as a metaphor appropriated by early Christians who "thought mythically" and for whom a resurrection of their fallen leader had occurred "in their hearts and minds."

Yet even the most skeptical Biblical scholars concede that something extraordinary happened in Jerusalem after Good Friday to account for the radical change in the behavior of the disciples, who at Jesus' arrest had fled to their own homes in fear. Could Jesus' resurrection account for the fact that within a few weeks they were boldly preaching their message to the very people who had sought to crush them?

Along with the many other riddles in the last days of Jesus, it is a question that academic inquiry alone probably never will answer satisfactorily. Ultimately, the events of the "third day" in Jerusalem must remain, as they have for 2,000 years, in the realm of things unprovable-matters, like the very existence of God, to be grasped only by faith.