The crucifixion of Jesus

The evidence explained

Of everything claimed about Jesus, his death by crucifixion is the item historians treat as most secure. That is not because Christians assert it loudly, but because of how the evidence behaves. The claim appears in every layer of the early material we possess — the letters of Paul (written within roughly twenty-five years of the event), the narrative gospels, the summaries of preaching in Acts, and hostile or indifferent non-Christian writers such as Tacitus, who mentions that 'Christus' suffered the extreme penalty under Tiberius at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilatus.

Historians also weigh what a claim costs the person making it. In the first-century Mediterranean world, crucifixion was a slave's death and a public humiliation designed to advertise the powerlessness of the victim. A movement inventing a founder-figure had every incentive to invent a different ending. Paul concedes the point directly when he calls the crucified Messiah a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. Embarrassing details of this kind are not proof, but they are evidence: they are the sort of thing a group tends to explain rather than fabricate.

The methodological point worth internalizing is that 'the crucifixion is historically secure' is a modest claim. It says a man died in a particular way at a particular time. It does not by itself say anything about who he was, what he taught, or what happened afterwards. Apologetics goes wrong when it smuggles the strength of a secure fact into a much larger conclusion. Establish this fact, then argue separately about what explains the events that follow.