Conclusion
Conclusion
Ancient schools and biographers naturally preserved information about prominent persons’ deaths, particularly when those persons died significant deaths like martyrdoms. A number of features in the passion narrative meet the criterion of embarrassment, that is, are elements that early Christians would have been embarrassed to invent, such as the abandonment of Jesus’ disciples, denial by his chief disciple Peter, and especially betrayal to death by one of his leading disciples after a shared meal.
The passion narrative’s portrayal of the political machinations behind Jesus’ execution also fits what we know of ancient politics in a province like Judea. Ancient Jewish sources reveal the extent to which other Jewish groups experienced much of the priestly aristocracy as corrupt; Herod had installed many of the aristocratic families dominating the Sanhedrin, and Rome currently installed the high priests. Local elites often repressed potential threats to public order and to their own power. To execute someone, however, they would first need to accuse the troublemaker to the Roman governor, who depended on local accusers for most cases. The chief priests may have viewed their own role more favorably, but the current high priest Caiaphas probably would not have maintained his office for such a long period without a significant measure of political acumen and efficiency in maintaining order.
That local leaders would have handed Jesus over to Pilate fits analogous accounts in our other first-century source, Josephus. Jewish sources portray Pilate as uncooperative and insensitive to local concerns, yet sometimes giving way under pressure. Pilate could well have viewed Jesus as merely a harmless sage of the sort familiar from Greek and Roman cities, but political considerations would likely have favored Jesus ultimately being executed. As in the Gospels, scourging was standard before an execution. The charge on which Jesus was executed, “king of the Jews,” represented high treason against the majesty of the emperor, and is almost certainly the charge on which Jesus was executed. The passion tradition that preserves the name of Simon of Cyrene undoubtedly also preserves accurately his role. Plausible eyewitnesses can be suggested for many elements of the tradition; moreover, sources outside the Gospels attest the basic outline and various elements of the tradition.
In short, elements of the passion tradition so frequently match what is historically probable (with many others being plausible) that the general outlines of this source should be embraced with a great degree of confidence. Even the site of Jesus’ burial was very likely preserved from within fourteen years of his execution; that being the case, the lack of alternative to the resurrection message in early Christianity suggests an at least equally early tradition of the empty tomb.