The Crucifixion of Jesus

Crucifixion was a Roman method of execution normally reserved for slaves, rebels and provincials who held no Roman citizenship, carried out publicly and designed to prolong suffering and to warn onlookers rather than simply to kill. Two writers outside the Christian tradition mention Jesus's death by this method within about a century of the event. Tacitus, a Roman senator writing around 116 CE, records in his Annals that Christus was executed under the procurator Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius, mentioned only because Tacitus is explaining the origin of the Christians he elsewhere describes as a troublesome sect.

Josephus, a Jewish historian writing in the 90s CE, includes a passage on Jesus in his Antiquities of the Jews known as the Testimonium Flavianum; most specialists judge that a later Christian scribe expanded an original, more restrained notice, but hold that a core reference to Jesus's condemnation under Pilate is authentic to Josephus.

Taken together with the Gospel accounts, modern historians of every stripe, believing and skeptical alike, count crucifixion under Pilate among the most secure facts available about Jesus, in contrast to material about him that is more contested. The Gospels themselves disagree on points of dating and sequence, including whether the crucifixion fell on Passover itself or the day before it, a discrepancy this entry records without resolving.

Christian communities built an entire architecture of practice and doctrine around this single execution. Holy Week retraces its final days, Good Friday marks the crucifixion itself with services that in many traditions are the starkest of the liturgical year, and the cross, once a Roman instrument of terror, became Christianity's central and most recognizable symbol, worn and displayed in forms ranging from the bare Latin cross to the crucifix bearing Christ's body.

Traditions differ on what the death accomplished theologically. Some read it chiefly as a substitutionary payment for sin, others as a victory over death and evil powers, others as a demonstration of divine love meant to transform the believer, and historic churches have never required agreement on which framework is correct, only that the event itself is central.

The Stations of the Cross, walked physically in many churches and pilgrimage sites including the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, turn the narrative into a devotional practice rather than only a doctrine. However a tradition explains its meaning, the crucifixion functions as the hinge the rest of the Christian story turns on, the event the resurrection is said to answer.