ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE TRIAL AND CRUCIFIXION OF JESUS

My new book The Stones Cry Out: Biblical Archaeology, Prophecy and the Last Days, is out October 13 from Charisma Books. But preorder it now. This actually gets you the book right on the day of publication, and it also helps boost the reach of the book, because Amazon decides how many copies to stock based on preorders.

So do it now, OK? And here’s a taste of what’s you’ll get in this book. My topic for today is the archaeology of the trial and crucifixion of Jesus.

The power of biblical archaeology is that it proves the historicity of the Bible. It also confirms the presence of the Jews in their ancestral homeland. And it supports the founding pillars of America—such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—and also of Western civilization.

The philosopher Leo Strauss said the West was built on two pillars, Athens and Jerusalem. Athens represents classical reason, free speech and democracy. Jerusalem represents the idea of divine creation and a divine source for rights, the Exodus as a model of liberation from tyranny, and the Ten Commandments and the teachings of the prophets as a code and recipe for the good life.

Athens, in a sense, needs to defense, but Jerusalem does. And yet the West is no less dependent on Jerusalem than on Athens. To consider just America, where would this nation be without Jefferson’s tracing of our fundamental rights to our Creator? Why, if not for their divine source, are our rights “unalienable”?

How immeasurable is the impact of the Exodus narrative on black slaves anticipating their freedom. How much inspiration and knowledge have we gained from the great figures of the Bible, such as Abraham and Moses, from the Hebrew prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah, and from the Jewish messiah named Jesus. And how much more chaotic our society would be without the guiding influence of the Ten Commandments, the Psalms and the wisdom literature of the Bible.

Since the Enlightenment, and even more since the nineteenth century, the Bible has come under fierce attack. Skeptics insist the Bible was written long after the events it describes, and that much of it is based on myth and fable. Biblical archaeology refutes that attack by confirming the historicity of the Bible. Biblical archaeology is not concerned with the miracles or the theology, but if the people, places and events of the Bible are shown to be true, that increases the credibility of the narrative as a whole.

My new book The Stones Cry Out covers the entire sweep of biblical history, from the patriarchs who lived around 2000 B.C. to Moses who lived around 1500 B.C. to the Hebrew prophets who lived from the eighth to the fourth centuries B.C. to the life, ministry and death of Jesus and also the first-century A.D. movement of early Jewish and Christian followers of Jesus the messiah.

In this article, I focus on what biblical archaeology has to say about the trial, conviction and crucifixion of Jesus. Those events are 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.

The 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’s theological masquerade. Jesus is a populist teacher with a big following. Caiaphas fears an erosion of the power of the priests if Jesus’s 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,” he says, “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 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 a Jewish messiah or not?

Pilate is not interested in philosophical inquiry. When Jesus states he has come “to bear witness to the truth” Pilate retorts, “What is truth?” His point is not that truth does not exist but that it is not his job to adjudicate what it is. Pilate’s only concern is with maintaining order among the Jews, so that 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 just 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 Jewish people. He was the head of a particular priestly caste. He represents an aristocratic family line associated with the Sadducees. The Sadducees were themselves opposed by the Pharisees. Neither represented the people; indeed, Caiaphas’ greatest concern is that Jesus would win over the affections of the people.

So the Jews did not kill Jesus; indeed, it would be more accurate to say that “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 literary fiction of a high order or whether it’s real. Were Pilate and Caiaphas historical figures, and can we know that for sure? Where exactly was Jesus crucified and where is his burial tomb? These are questions for modern archeology to try and answer.

Prior to 1961, there was virtually no firm non-biblical confirmation of the existence of Pontius Pilate. One might say he lived in the Bible, but almost exclusively 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 the Rome’s “prefect” in Judaea 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 Pilate’s role in Judaea. This is a consistent theme with skeptics going back to the nineteenth century: the books of the Bible were written much later than the events they describe, and the Bible is therefore an unreliable chronicler of history.

Then in 1961, an Italian archeological expedition in the region of Caesarea Maritima uncovered a limestone stab with a four-line Latin inscription. Now on display in the Israel Museum, the inscription reads, “Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judaea.” 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 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.

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 then 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, “Yehosef bar Qayafa” which is “Joseph, son of Caiaphas.” The ossuary is dated to the first century A.D. and the bones are those of a 60 year old man.

It’s Caiaphas. Who else? And the remarkable thing is that we don’t just have his burial box; we even have his bones.

Finally let’s look at what archaeology has to say about Jesus’s crucifixion and burial. We’ll focus on the Roman practice of crucifixion and also the precise site where Jesus was crucified and buried.

The site of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial was for a long time unknown, or at least disputed, but is now known with a high degree of certainty. According to the gospels, Jesus was crucified, an especially gruesome form of death known to have been practiced by a number of ancient civilizations. The Romans did not invent the practice.

In 1968, archeologists 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 archeological 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’s tomb was the location of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This was the location identified in the fourth century by Constantine’s mother Helena.

Helena located the spot where a number of Christian sources said Christ had been crucified and buried. How did she know where to look? Here, as it turns out, the Roman emperor Hadrian comes to the rescue.

Hadrian ruled in the second century, from 117 A.D. to 138 A.D. He sought to stamp out Christianity, and one way to do this was to get rid of the Christian holy sites. These sites were known by the early Christians, who began to venerate them, and make pilgrimages to them, after Christ’s crucifixion.

Hadrian sought to eliminate these sites by building pagan shrines and monuments on top of them. Little did Hadrian realize, however, that in doing so he was marking those sites for later identification. Helena knew about Hadrian’s project, and so her task of finding the place which the early Christians believed to be Christ’s burial site was quite easy.

Helena pulled down the pagan monument and built a church on the revered 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 we can see underground the outlines of rock-cut tombs.

These tombs are dated precisely to Jesus’s time and match the biblical description of Jesus being buried in a new tomb offered by a rich man Joseph of Arimathea. Debbie and I have now been twice to the site, and I’m ready to go again, because there is so much there to see and reflect upon.

There is ongoing excavation in the area but Francesca Romana Stasolla. She is quoted in a recent article in the Daily Mail saying, “We have found evidence of a funerary landscape, alongside small areas planted with vines and olive trees.”

For decades, there was one big problem with identifying this site as the precise location of Jesus’s 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 archeologists realized 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 expanded over the centuries. Consequently today there is widespread though not universal agreement that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is where Jesus died and was buried.