The Stones Cry Out: Episode 12—Death of Jesus

The stones cry out. Death of Jesus. The trial, conviction, and crucifixion of Jesus is presented in the Gospels as high drama. The drama revolves around three key figures. Jesus himself, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and the Jewish high priest Caiaphas. King Herod is also involved, but he chooses not to be. He allows the matter of Jesus to be settled between Pilate and the high priest. dramatic tension is increased by the fact that the three men involved have very different personalities, and even more, that their personalities are indicative of the larger movements they represent. Pilate is the Roman governor, typically stoical and above the fray. He cannot understand what these Jews are squabbling about. He would rather, in his own words, wash his hands off the matter. Jesus is one of the strangest of accused men. He refuses to make any defense of his innocence. He says virtually nothing, and when he speaks, it is in cryptic terms. The high priest asks him, are you the Messiah? Jesus replies, you have said so. This is the equivalent of saying, your words, not mine. It is an evasion. Jesus neither denies nor admits the charge. Yet Caiaphas takes it as an admission. His reason for wanting Jesus to die is that Jesus is a blasphemer. He pretends to be the Son of God, the Messiah sent by God to deliver the Jews. But Caiaphas does not merely object to Jesus' theological masquerade. Jesus is a populist teacher with a big following. Caiaphas fears an erosion of the power of the priests if Jesus' claims are widely believed by the Jewish people. In presenting the case against Jesus to the Sanhedrin, the priestly council, Caiaphas unwittingly makes a prophetic statement. You do not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people and that the whole nation should not perish. At one level, this is disingenuous. Caiaphas is acting like the interests of the priestly class are identical with those of the Jewish nation. Yet for Christians, Caiaphas spoke truly without knowing it because Jesus was sent by God to die for all people so that they could live forever with God rather than perish. Jesus was, in this theological sense, a divine scapegoat. The problem for Caiaphas is that in order to have Jesus put to death, he needs the permission of Rome. That means Pilate. But why would Pilate, who is, as a good Roman himself, a polytheist, care about whether Jesus claims to be the Messiah or not? Pilate is not interested in philosophical inquiry. When Jesus states he has come to bear witness to the truth, Pilate retorts, His point is not that truth does not exist, but that it's not his job to adjudicate what it is. Pilate's only concern is with maintaining order among the Jews, so his superiors in Rome don't have to worry about a Jewish revolt or insurrection that would require them to send Roman legions to crush it. So Caiaphas ingeniously switches the charge against Jesus. He steers it away from his real concerns and toward Pilate's secret concerns. He accuses Jesus of being a seditionist, of seeking to turn the Jews against Caesar. Backed up by his priestly council, the Sanhedrin, Caiaphas intimidates Pilate, and Pilate relents. Pilate is unconvinced, but he gives in on a note of indifference. Do it yourselves. In subsequent centuries, right to this day, there are those who would say the Jews killed Jesus. This is as incoherent as saying the Romans killed Caesar, or the Americans killed Lincoln, or the Indians killed Gandhi. In each case, a controversial populist figure is killed by a rival faction of his own countrymen that fears his influence. Caiaphas did not represent the Jews or the Jewish people. He was the head of a particular priestly caste. He represents an aristocratic family line associated with the Sadducees. Sadducees were themselves opposed by the Pharisees. Neither represented the people. Indeed, Caiaphas' great concern is that Jesus would win over the affections of the people. So the Jews did not kill Jesus. It would be more accurate to say some powerful Jews advocated for the killing of a renegade Jewish teacher named Jesus to prevent him from winning more acclaim from his Jewish countrymen. I'm not even getting here into the Christian teaching that Jesus came to die, that his death was part of a divinely appointed mission from the outset. However vividly the Bible portrays the trial, passion, and death of Jesus, the question remains whether this is a literary fiction of a high order or whether it's real. Were Pilate and Caiaphas historical figures? And can we know for sure? Where exactly was Jesus crucified? And where is his burial tomb? These are questions for modern archaeology to try and answer. Prior to 1961, there was virtually no firm, non-biblical confirmation of the existence of Pontius Pilate. One may say he lived in the Bible, but only in the Bible. Admittedly, there were one or two references to him by other writers, but the sources were not entirely reliable, so one group of skeptics doubted that Pilate even existed. A second group conceded that Pilate existed, but insisted the biblical writers got his title wrong. The Bible refers to Pilate as Rome's prefect in Palestine, the Roman name for Israel. But later Roman sources list the title for that post as procurator. These titles are different. A prefect is a governor, a procurator is a sort of financial administrator. The critics said the erroneous title meant the biblical text was written much later and without a close familiarity with the events it described. Then in 1961, an Italian archaeological expedition in the region of Caesarea Maritima uncovered a limestone slab with a four-line Latin inscription. Now on display in the Israel Museum, the inscription reads, Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea. It also has a dedication to the Emperor Tiberius, although part of that inscription is missing. With this single discovery, Pontius Pilate makes his debut as an undisputed historical figure. Not only that, but the Pilate Stone shows that the Bible got his title right. It was in fact prefect, not procurator. Possibly the Romans later changed the title of that position to procurator, but in Pilate's own day, he was prefect. And what about Caiaphas, the high priest? He too lived a shady historical existence until 1990. The Bible gives him only a single name, Caiaphas. The Jewish historian Josephus refers to him in one of his writings as Joseph Caiaphas. So Joseph was evidently his first name and Caiaphas the family name. In 1990, Caiaphas in a sense came back to life with the discovery of an ossuary near the old city of Jerusalem. Now an ossuary is a stone box used to store the bones of the dead. It was customary in first century Judaism to bury people and when they had decayed down to their bones to move the bones into an ossuary bearing the name of the deceased. A number of these ossuaries were found and one especially ornate one had an Aramaic inscription, Yehoshuah bar Caiaphas, which is Joseph son of Caiaphas. The ossuary is dated to the first century AD and the bones are those of a 60 year old man. It's Caiaphas. Who else? And the remarkable thing is we don't have his burial box, we have his bones. Finally, let's look for the site of Jesus' crucifixion and burial, which for a long time was unknown, or at least disputed, but is now known with a high degree of certainty. According to the Gospels, Jesus was crucified in a specially gruesome form of death, known to have been practiced by a number of ancient civilizations. The Romans did not invent the practice. In 1968, archaeologists found the bones of a man named Yehonanan, who had obviously been crucified because there was a large nail stuck in his heel bone. Yehonanan's bones were found in an ossuary, which means he had been buried in a tomb, and his bones later transferred to the box. This strange and important archaeological find showed how the Romans crucified people, And it also supported the gospel account that Jesus was buried in a tomb. But where exactly? Until fairly recently, we could not say for sure. There were two main contenders, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the so-called Garden Tomb. For many centuries, the traditional location of Jesus' tomb was the location of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This was the location identified in the 4th century by Constantine's mother, Helena. Helena located the spot where a number of Christian sources said Christ had been crucified and buried. Sure enough, she found there a monument to pagan deities that had been erected in the 2nd century by Hadrian. Once again, the Romans, who sought to stamp out the Christian holy sites, ended up unwittingly marking them for later identification. Helena built a church on that location. It was later replaced by another church built in the Crusader period. Today, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre occupies the site. And remarkably, one can see underground the outlines of rock-cut tombs. Constantine had one of these tombs marked to designate that it was the one in which Jesus lay. These tombs are dated precisely to Jesus' time and match the biblical description of Jesus being buried in a new tomb offered by a rich man, Joseph of Arimathea. There was one problem with identifying this site as the precise location of Jesus' death and burial. It was inside the old city of Jerusalem, while the Bible is clear that Jesus was buried outside the city. We also know that it was customary for crucifixions to occur outside the city so as not to contaminate or defile the city. But in recent years, archaeologists realize that this objection is invalid. In Jesus' time, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was outside the boundaries of the Old City. The confusion arose from the fact that the boundaries of the Old City had shifted over the centuries. Jerusalem itself had moved. Consequently, today, there is widespread, though not universal, agreement that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is where Jesus died and was buried.