Why Rome Killed Me

Words to Know

Crucifixion — a Roman execution used on slaves, rebels and provincials. Slow, public, and meant as a warning.

Sedition — stirring up rebellion against the government. It was the charge against me.

Prefect — the Roman officer who ran a small, difficult province. He commanded the troops, collected the revenue, and was the court. Pilate was one.

High priest — the head of the Temple. In my lifetime he was appointed, and removed, by Rome.

I was executed by the Roman government as a political offender.

There is no serious argument about this, and the method leaves little room for doubt.

You have been given a scene, with a crowd shouting, a governor troubled, and a bowl of water, and no machinery underneath it. So here is the machinery. Every part of it is ordinary Roman administration, and every part of it can be looked up.

One. Only Rome’s man was allowed to kill me.

In the year 6, Rome took the southern part of my country over directly, to be run by an officer sent out from Rome. Lesson 3 told you that. That officer held the power of execution over anybody who was not a Roman citizen.

There was no jury, no written criminal code, and no appeal. He heard the matter himself and decided it, and he was the investigator, the prosecutor and the judge in the same body. ¹ A Roman citizen could appeal over his head to the emperor. I was a provincial and a laborer. For me there was one man, one hearing, and nothing above it.

The men who ran the Temple could arrest a man and convene their council. They could not carry out a Roman execution, and John puts it in their own mouths: it is not lawful for us to put anyone to death (John 18:31). Whatever they wanted, they needed Rome to do it.

Go deeperArchelaus, Paul's appeal, and the Temple's limits

The officer sent to replace Herod's son Archelaus in the year 6 ran that process under a name of its own: the Romans called it simply the inquiry. Your own Bible shows a citizen using that right of appeal: Paul, arrested in Jerusalem about twenty-five years after I died, says I appeal to Caesar, and the governor is obliged to put him on a ship to Rome (Acts 25:11–12).

The Temple council's own powers stopped short of an execution. They could rule on a religious question, and they could put a man out of the synagogue. It is not a theological point. It is a jurisdiction point.

Two. Pilate was a soldier, not a philosopher.

In 1961, archaeologists digging the theatre at Caesarea on the coast turned up a block of limestone that names Pontius Pilatus and gives his title: prefect of Judaea. ² It is a military title. He was a soldier running an occupied district with troops, from about the year 26 to about the year 36.

Philo, a Jewish writer of the time, calls him inflexible, stubborn and cruel, and charges him with repeated executions of men who had never been tried. ³ Josephus records him taking money out of the Temple treasury for an aqueduct and having soldiers club the crowd that protested. And he records how Pilate fell: he sent troops against a crowd of Samaritans, killed a great many, and was sent to Rome to answer for it. ⁴

Your own Bible mentions, in passing, Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices (Luke 13:1). That is the man: an officer ten years into a hard posting, whose standard tool was troops in a crowd.

Go deeperPilate in the stone and in the sources

The stone itself corrects a small but telling detail. Your gospels call him governor or procurator, but procurator was a civilian revenue title Rome only began using for the post a decade after Pilate left; the inscription gives the title he actually held, and it is a military one.

Philo, writing in Alexandria within a few years of the events, did not stop at the executions. He listed what Pilate's rule consisted of: bribery, insults, robberies and outrages, on top of the killings of men never tried.

Josephus records three incidents, and the lesson only gave you two. Pilate also marched troops into Jerusalem at night carrying standards bearing the emperor's image, which the city took as an idol planted in a holy place. A crowd went down to Caesarea and lay in front of his residence for five days; he surrounded them with soldiers and threatened to kill them, and when they bared their necks rather than back down, he gave way. At the aqueduct protest, the soldiers who beat the crowd were in plain clothes, mixed into it, and struck on a signal; people were killed, and more were trampled. And the Samaritans he finally fell afoul of had gathered at their holy mountain expecting to be shown sacred objects they believed Moses had buried there; Pilate sent cavalry and infantry and executed their leaders, and it was the Samaritans' own complaint to the Roman legate in Syria that got him suspended and sent to Rome.

Three. The men who ran the Temple had a stake in this.

The high priest was appointed by the Roman prefect, and could be removed by him.

Caiaphas held the high priesthood from about the year 18 to about the year 36, an extraordinarily long run. Those dates overlap Pilate’s almost exactly, and they end together: when the legate of Syria removed Pilate, he removed Caiaphas too. Whatever else that is, it is a working partnership. ⁵

And the interest is stated plainly in your own Bible. Worried about a crowd gathering around me, those men say: if we let him go on like this, the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation. And Caiaphas answers: it is better for one man to die for the people (John 11:48–50). That is not theology. It is an administrator doing arithmetic.

And I will say the next part out loud, because of what has been done with this story. A handful of aristocratic families, appointed by an occupying power, are not a people. I was a Jew. Every one of my students was a Jew. The crowds who followed me, and the women who stayed at the cross, were Jews. What Christians later did with these few paragraphs, to my own people, for centuries, is Lesson 31, and it is the single worst thing in this book.

Go deeperThe high priest in Rome's gift

The office itself had changed shape. It had stopped being a lifetime post held by God's choice and become a position in Rome's gift: Rome handed it out and took it back, and in the thirty years before me it changed hands repeatedly, sometimes after only two or three years.

Rome kept a hold on it that was not a metaphor. The high priest's ceremonial robes were kept locked up by the Romans, in the fortress next to the Temple, under seal, handed out for the festivals and taken back afterward. The most sacred garment in my religion was held in a Roman storeroom and issued like equipment.⁶

Four. It happened at Passover, and that was no accident.

Think about what that festival is. It is the annual public commemoration of God breaking a people out of an empire and drowning its army. Lesson 4 gave you the story. Now put it in a city under occupation.

Every spring the city filled many times over with pilgrims, all retelling the story of the last empire that tried to hold them. The prefect lived at Caesarea, on the coast, and came up to Jerusalem for the festivals with soldiers. Troops were quartered in the Antonia, the fortress overlooking the Temple courts, and armed men stood on the porticoes above the crowd. ⁷ And it went wrong regularly: within a generation of my death, a Passover riot there ended with people crushed to death. ⁸

That is the calculation Pilate was making. The question was not whether this man was guilty. It was whether this man was going to start one of those. A Galilean with a following, who had just overturned tables in the Temple courtyard during that exact week, was a routine administrative problem with a standard solution.

Go deeperThe festival city under guard

Normal life did not continue underneath all that retelling. People slept in the streets and on the hillsides because the city could not hold them. The prefect's own home was Caesarea, a Roman port with a harbor, a theatre and a temple to the emperor, the very place where his name turned up on that stone. Coming up to Jerusalem with soldiers for the festivals was not an emergency measure on his part; it was standing practice.

The Antonia itself, the fortress overlooking the Temple courts, had been built by Herod at the corner of the platform. And that fortress existed for a real danger, not a theoretical one. Within a generation of my death, a soldier standing on its portico made an obscene gesture at the Passover crowd below; the crowd erupted, the prefect brought in troops, and people were crushed to death trying to get out through the narrow exits. Josephus gives a death toll that is almost certainly inflated, as his numbers usually are, but the riot itself is not in doubt.

Five. A cross was Rome’s punishment, and it was built for an audience.

Crucifixion was not a religious punishment, and the Temple authorities could not carry it out. It was Roman, and it was aimed at slaves, bandits, rebels, and provincials. Roman writers called it the slaves’ punishment. ⁹ Citizens were generally spared it. The punishment was not measured by the crime. It was measured by who you were.

It was done beside roads and at city gates, made to take a long time, and the body was normally left up. A Roman teacher of public speaking put the purpose in writing: the most crowded roads are chosen, so that the greatest number of people may see it and be frightened by it. ¹⁰ The point was everybody walking past.

In 1968, a burial cave in Jerusalem gave up the heel bone of a first-century man named Yehohanan with an iron nail still driven through it. And, honestly, he was in a family tomb, so a crucified man could sometimes be handed back for burial, which is what your gospels say happened to me. ¹¹

Go deeperCrucifixion: the class, the audience, the scale, the bone

Cicero, arguing a case in front of a Roman court, put the class distinction into words: to bind a Roman citizen was a crime, to flog him an abomination, to kill him very nearly murder, and for crucifying him there was no adequate word in the language at all.¹² The same act done to a citizen was unspeakable. Done to a slave or a provincial, it was ordinary.

The body left up afterward was worked on by birds, and burial was often refused, which in my culture was a second punishment laid on top of the first.

And Rome used it at scale. After one slave revolt, six thousand men were crucified along a single road between two Italian cities. In my own region, about two thousand were crucified in one suppression, a few years before I was born. During the siege of Jerusalem in the year 70, soldiers crucified so many men a day outside the walls that Josephus says they ran out of room for the crosses and of wood to build them.¹³

The bone itself has more detail than the lesson gave you. It turned up in 1968 in a burial cave at Giv'at ha-Mivtar, on the north side of Jerusalem, inside a bone-box naming a first-century man as Yehohanan. An iron nail about four and a half inches long, with a scrap of olive wood still on it, was driven through his right heel bone. He is the only crucified man from that time and place ever found; everything else about crucifixion comes to you through writing.

Six. The board over my head named a crime against Rome.

Roman practice was to display the charge at an execution, on a placard called the titulus, so the death was legible to everybody who saw it. ¹⁴ Mine said King of the Jews (Mark 15:26).

In my world, Rome decided who was a king. Herod the Great got that title by a vote of the Roman senate, in 40 BC. ¹⁵ So to claim it without Rome’s grant was not blasphemy. It was treason. They did not write heretic or blasphemer. They wrote a job title.

Go deeperThe board and the title of king

John adds a detail Mark does not: the charge was written out in three languages, which is what you do when you want the whole street to read it (John 19:19–20).

And Herod the Great is the proof of how that worked. He did not inherit his title, and no assembly of my own people gave it to him. Rome's senate did, which is exactly why my charge said nothing about God at all.

Now you are owed the strongest thing that can be said against all of this.

You will say: but the gospels tell it the other way. They say Pilate found no fault in me and gave in only under pressure. That is in there. So read the four trial scenes in the order the books were written, and watch Pilate change.

• Mark, the earliest: Pilate asks a question and hands me over to satisfy the crowd.
• Matthew, later: Pilate washes his hands and says he is innocent of this blood.
• Luke, later again: Pilate declares me innocent three separate times.
• John, latest: Pilate has a long private talk with me and comes out almost sympathetic.

In the order they were composed, the Roman officer gets steadily cleaner and the local religious leadership gets steadily more to blame. Those books were written inside the Roman empire, by congregations who had to explain why their founder had been executed for sedition by the government they still lived under. I am not telling you the men who wrote them were liars. I am telling you what pressure they were writing under.

And the custom that holds the scene together, a governor releasing a prisoner to the crowd every Passover, appears nowhere outside your Bible. I am not going to tell you it did not happen. But it is the one procedure that lets Pilate look reluctant, and it has no independent trace. ¹⁶

Go deeperWhat each trial scene adds beyond the summary

Look closer at each scene and you will find details the one-line summary leaves out. In Mark, Pilate is briefly surprised before handing me over to the crowd. In Matthew, it is Pilate's own wife who has a warning dream that unsettles him before he washes his hands. In Luke, Pilate does not just declare me innocent three times; he tries to offload the case onto Herod Antipas. In John, the private conversation runs specifically to truth and kingship.

Those books were also written in Greek, and the war of the year 70 had just made any association with a man executed for sedition a genuinely dangerous thing to carry.

As for the custom that holds the whole scene together, a governor releasing a prisoner to the crowd every Passover: no Roman source records it, no Jewish source records it, and there is no other example anywhere of a Roman governor doing any such thing.

Understand what all of that adds up to.

The Roman government looked at me and correctly identified a threat to the ownership of property and the order of the province. Rome read me more accurately than most of the churches later built with my name on the door.

And now the sentence this whole book turns on.

I expected to be killed. Everyone in the line I came from expected some version of it. I said so.

But I never said it was a payment.

I never explained my death as a transaction. I never said it was the purpose of my life. I never said anybody’s standing with God depends on their opinion about it. I did not found an organization or leave instructions for the year 400, because it had not occurred to me that there would be a year 400.

It was not a sacrament. It was a sentence. It was handed down by a career officer in a hearing that took a morning, and carried out on a working day by soldiers who divided up my clothes afterward because the clothes were worth something (Mark 15:24).

That is the end of my life. Everything from here on is what other people did with it.

And I want to be fair to them. Most of them were frightened. Some of them were brave. Almost none of them thought they were doing anything wrong.

Go deeperWhat I never said about my death

I did not start a doctrine about it, and I did not ask to be worshipped. I never said my death was arranged in advance to satisfy some requirement, and I never named anyone to take my place after I was gone.

That morning's hearing fell in a week when the officer already had troops stationed in the city for exactly this sort of thing. And the men who split my clothing between them afterward had two other prisoners to crucify that same morning besides me.

Check It Yourself

Look up: Mark 15:26.

You will find: the sign over my head. It names a crime against Rome, not a religious offense.

Then look up: Luke 13:1 — Pilate mentioned in passing, as the man who killed Galileans while they were sacrificing. Ask why that version of him never reaches a sermon.

Then do this with four Bibles open, or one Bible and a bookmark. Read Mark 15:1–15, then Matthew 27:11–26, then Luke 23:1–25, then John 18:28–19:16. Write down, for each one, how hard Pilate tries to stop it. You just read them in the order they were written.

The Short Version

• Only the Roman prefect, Pilate, could execute me, and the charge he posted, King of the Jews, meant treason.
• Crucifixion was Rome’s punishment for slaves, rebels and provincials, staged to frighten everyone passing.
• It was Passover, the week an occupied city celebrated an empire’s defeat, so the troops were already there.
• Read in the order they were written, the four gospels make Pilate steadily more innocent.
• I expected to die. I never once said my death was a payment for anything.

Think About It

1. Why does it matter that Rome — not a religious court — carried out the execution?
2. If I never explained my death as a payment, where did that idea come from? (Unit Three.)