There are
three aspects of Jesus's life that command virtually universal assent amongst scholars of antiquity: his baptism by John for remission of sin, his riotous disturbance in the Temple during
Pesach and his crucifixion under Pontius Pilate on the instigation of the High Priest Caiaphas.
If everything else about Jesus is at least contestable or doubtful, these three facts are not.
The reason these events are accorded such a high degree of historical credibility, quite apart from their unanimous attestation in different traditions including secular sources in the case of the cross, is that they fit what we know about the the social milieu of the time and caused grave embarrassment for the early church, such that New Testament authors endeavoured to gloss over them or make them 'fit' into theological doctrines.
Something
important to bear in mind about ancient Roman and Jewish understandings of death:
‘The condition of human life is chiefly determined by its first and last days, because it is of the greatest importance under what auspices it is begun and with what end it is terminated.’
- Valerius Maximus (Memorable Doings and Sayings (“On Deaths out of the Ordinary”) 9.12 praef. LCL 493, trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey)
A person’s birth and death were felt to be an indication of his or her true character.
On both accounts, his birth and death, Jesus '
failed' the test - and very badly - of true Roman manhood and heroism: he was born of peasants in Nazareth (a backwater derided even by Judean Jews "
Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” (John 1:43)) and died the most ignoble torture-death. Cicero described crucifixion as
‘the greatest punishment of slavery’ (
Verr. 2.5), while Josephus labelled it ‘
the most pitiable of deaths’ (
War 7.203).
Jesus's "
true" character, then, in the eyes of Romans would have been as a piteous '
slave' and insurrectionist against the empire, abandoned by even his closest followers and left to endure the mockery of the crowds as he hung there naked and asphyxiated with a mock crown of thorns on his head.
As
Professor Helen K. Bond, an expert on this period, has noted:
"Crucifixion was the most shameful, brutal and degrading form of capital punishment known to the ancient world, reserved for slaves, brigands and any who set themselves up against imperial rule. It was intended to be public, to act both as a deterrent to others and to provide spectacle, even entertainment, to onlookers.
It was a form of death in which the caprice and sadism of the executioners was allowed full reign, as they devised ever more gruesome ways to ridicule the condemned. Stripped naked, the victim was humiliated and shamed as he suffered extreme agony, perhaps for several days, until, overcome by suffocation and exhaustion, the merciful end would come.
So offensive was the cross that civilized people preferred not to talk about it, and few Roman writers ever dwelt on any of the details...
There is no getting away from the fact that Mark’s account, particularly in the crucifixion scene, is the very opposite of a “good death”: Jesus dies alone, in agonized torment, with no one to perform even the most basic rites. As Adela Collins puts it, Jesus’ death in Mark is “anguished, human, and realistic.”"
(see also, J. G. Cook, Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014).
It is mendacious in the extreme to imagine that
anyone in their right mind would make such a story up while living under the Romans. The gospels were written to 'defend' the legacy of Jesus and defiantly keep his memory alive, in spite of the Roman attempt to silence and discredit him through crucifixion. If I might quote Professor Bond again:
"...Jesus’ crucifixion was an attempt by the rulers of his day to consign not only his body but also his memory to oblivion. In many ways, Mark’s bios can be seen as an act of defiance, a refusal to accept the Roman sentence and an attempt to shape the way in which both his life and death should be remembered.
His work takes the place of a funeral ovation, outlining Jesus’ way of life and pointing to the family of believers who succeed him.
While men of higher class and greater worldly distinction might have had their epitaphs set in stone, Mark provides his hero with a written monument to a truly worthy life. Mark redeems Jesus’ death not by casting it as ‘noble’ or conventionally ‘honourable,’ but by showing that it conforms perfectly to his counter-cultural teaching..."
(Bond, H 2018, 'A fitting end? Self-denial and a slave’s death in Mark’s life of Jesus' New Testament Studies)
Given its deeply subversive nature as a symbol of resistance to Roman imperial rule, the 'cross' and the shameful slave death that it represents, was evidently
not a literary fiction of the early Christians. It's as historical an event as any from antiquity can be. The early Christians turned an unremitting tragedy into a literary triumph that has gone on to touch the lives of billions and in so doing defied Jesus's Roman executioners, by making his memory eternal.
We know Jesus and his death are historically accurate, because myths don't come baked in with such shoddy realism.
