I mentioned in an earlier post that one of the most accepted facts by scholars is that Jesus died by crucifixion. Today I want to see why this is the case and I will do so by looking in more detail at the grid I built based on historical guidelines in this post.
| |
MIS |
EA |
Emb |
Eye |
Early |
| Jesus |
X |
X |
X |
X |
X |
Where MIS stands for Multiple, Independent Sources for Jesus’ death, we can enumerate those sources here:
- Gospel of Matthew*
- Gospel of Mark*
- Gospel of Luke*
- Gospel of John*
- Acts*
- 1 Corinthians (specifically the creedal statement in 15:3-7)
- Tacitus
- Suetonius
- The Talmud
- Josephus
- Lucian of Samosata
- Mara bar-Serapion
- Acts of Pilate
- Thallus
So there are fourteen independent and multiple sources that record Jesus died by crucifixion. This is quite a lot of corroboration. Typically, historians are thrilled when they can get two to three ancient, multiple, independent sources backing up a particular fact, but in this case, there is an overwhelming amount of documentation.
This amount of support led someone like the skeptical scholar John Dominic Crossan to say that Jesus’ crucifixion is as “sure as anything historical can ever be.”[1] It also caused the atheist New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann to say “Jesus’ death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable.”[2]
- John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperCollings, 1991), 145.
- Gerd Lüdemann. The Resurrection of Christ (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2004), 50.
* Critical scholar’s tend not to accept the four Gospels or Acts. However, they are each independent documents and each independently mention the death of Jesus and so I included them in this list. Even if we remove those from the list, there is still an overwhelming amount of sources that confirm Jesus’ death.