The Crucifixion

After Pilate’s sentence, Mark tells, the soldiers dressed Jesus in purple, crowned him with thorns and mocked him as “King of the Jews”. Then they led him out (Mark 15:16–20). A passer-by, Simon of Cyrene, was made to carry his cross (Mark 15:21). At Golgotha, “the place of a skull”, near the city of Jerusalem, they crucified him between two others and cast lots for his clothes (Mark 15:22–27; John 19:20). The charge written above him read “The King of the Jews” (Mark 15:26). John says that it stood in Hebrew, Latin and Greek, and that Pilate refused to alter it (John 19:19–22).

Passers-by and the chief priests mocked him (Mark 15:29–32). Luke records the prayer “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing”, a sentence that some ancient manuscripts lack, and a promise to one of the two crucified with him: “today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:34, 39–43). Women who had followed him from Galilee watched from a distance, among them Mary Magdalene (Mark 15:40–41). John places his mother Mary beside the cross with “the disciple whom he loved”, to whom Jesus entrusted her (John 19:25–27); Irenaeus, about AD 180, identifies that disciple as John (Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.1.1).

From the sixth hour, Mark says, there was darkness over the whole land. At the ninth hour Jesus cried out the first line of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, and then, with a loud cry, he died (Mark 15:33–37; Psalm 22:1). In Luke his last words are “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46), in John “It is finished” (John 19:30). Mark reports that the veil of the temple was torn in two and that the centurion said, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:38–39). Matthew adds an earthquake and the opening of tombs (Matthew 27:51–53). John reports that a soldier pierced Jesus’s side with a spear, and appeals to an eyewitness for it (John 19:33–35).

Two writers outside the New Testament mention the execution. Tacitus, a Roman senator writing about AD 115–120 and hostile to the Christians, says that “Christus” was put to death by Pontius Pilatus in the reign of Tiberius (Tacitus, Annals 15.44). He does not say where he learned it. A passage in Josephus, written in AD 93–94, says that Pilate condemned Jesus to the cross “at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us”. As the manuscripts give it, the passage also calls him the Christ and says that he appeared alive on the third day (Josephus, Antiquities 18.63–64). That wording is disputed, and how much of the passage Josephus himself wrote is debated; see Jewish Antiquities. So far as the passage is his, it is a second notice from outside the church. Neither writer gives the day or the place.

The death of Jesus stands at the centre of Christian preaching from the first. Paul hands on, as something he had himself received, “that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3), and he calls the message of “Christ crucified” a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks (1 Corinthians 1:23). The first Christians read the event through Israel’s Scriptures: the Passover lamb, of which no bone was to be broken (John 19:36; Exodus 12:46; 1 Corinthians 5:7), and Isaiah’s servant who “bore the sin of many” (Isaiah 53:12; Luke 22:37).