Andrew L. Urban
“If it’s not actually true, if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead in his body, I’d rather be at the races,” wrote one national columnist and devout Christian on Easter Saturday. That sentiment prompted this post.
The thing connecting that comment and our Easter story about Dr Barbara Thiering’s lifelong research of the Dead Sea Scrolls is Easter itself. I’m sure there are many Christians who sympathise with the columnist’s view, who cling to the miracles and the mysteries of the Jesus story. Dr Thiering calls them “the babes in Christ”; believers who do not or cannot separate the mystical from the religion.
Where I respectfully take issue with that sentiment is that it obliterates the entire essence of what Jesus the man was preaching. Only the crucifixion holds our columnist tethered to his faith…surely not. The notion reduces all that he stood for to the single (supernatural) idea of resurrection. Urging love, forgiveness and treating others as you wish to be treated are suddenly removed as the supporting pillars of faith in Christ. (Incidentally, I am an atheist, while perfectly comfortable with the Jesus doctrines.)
But it isn’t the resurrection that is the foundation of Christian faith: it is the suffering of the crucifixion. As we report in Easter story, the wrongful conviction that changed the world, “It’s worth noting that Paul did not put the weight of his case on the resurrection as Dr Thiering pointed out: “Rather, the central event was the crucifixion. For Paul, the suffering of Christ was the means of atoning for sin…” In Catholic churches the world over, the obligatory 12 stations of the cross bear this notion out. That makes sense, since a resurrection is not an act of atonement.
Thiering writes: “Mark’s gospel, in its original version, ended at Chapter 16, verse 8, with the women running away from the empty tomb. It contained no appearances of Jesus, resurrected or not. These were added in a later appendix.
The New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in his book, Believe, “argues the historical authenticity of the gospels and other New Testament writings. He also persuasively advances the sheer, irrefutable, witness quality of the gospel accounts,” writes our columnist. However, the only account of Jesus post-crucifixion is him among his apostles, in human form. There are no witness reports of the body of Jesus rising into the clouds toward heaven …
Instead of going to the races, our columnist might consider why he would not accept Jesus escaping death, perhaps as Dr Thiering outlines through her pesher reading of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Cheating a death the Romans meant to impose on him is just as powerful a story for his followers … if less wrapped in mysticism. It is the story, not the spin … but for some, like our columnist, the resurrection is a divine intervention not cheating death but defeating it. To the accompaniment of sacred trumpets.
Er ah, why are we departing from the good old courtroom, parliamentary floor of unsound convictions and patently clear injustices ?
At Easter, we shouldn’t ignore the wrongful conviction that changed the world.
This is an evidence analysis. To be precise my evidence analysis.
The historical record leaves no serious doubt: a first-century Jewish man named Jesus of Nazareth lived, preached, gathered followers and was executed by crucifixion under the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate around 30–33 CE. That execution was a miscarriage of justice—a wrongful conviction that changed the world. Yet every Easter the public conversation drifts back to the resurrection as if the entire story stands or falls on whether a dead body physically rose. It does not. The evidence for the man and the injustice done to him is solid and independent. The case against his very existence, by contrast, rests on circumstantial silence and selective scepticism that would be laughed out of any courtroom.
Consider the sources the way a prosecutor or defence counsel would. Within twenty years of the crucifixion the former Pharisee Paul is writing letters that treat Jesus as a recent, flesh-and-blood figure. Paul met Jesus’ brother James and the disciples Peter and John. He reports the crucifixion as an undisputed fact. These are not later legends; they are contemporary correspondence from someone who knew the inner circle. The earliest Gospel, Mark, written about forty years after the events, draws on oral traditions that circulated among eyewitnesses. Even if one discounts the miraculous elements as later theological overlay, the bare historical skeleton, baptism by John, Galilean preaching, temple confrontation, arrest, trial and Roman execution remains intact.
Non-Christian witnesses reinforce the picture. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around 116 CE, records without sympathy that “Christus” was executed under Pilate during Tiberius’ reign and that the movement he sparked persisted. The Jewish historian Josephus, in a passage whose core is accepted by the great majority of scholars, refers to Jesus’ crucifixion by Pilate and to his brother James, who was stoned to death in 62 CE. These are hostile or neutral observers with no stake in promoting a new religion.
Ancient opponents of Christianity, pagan and Jewish, attacked the claims made about Jesus; none denied that he had lived and been executed.
That absence of contemporary denial is telling.
Set against this direct and multiple attestation, the “Jesus never existed” argument collapses into special pleading. Mythicists point to the lack of contemporary Roman administrative paperwork or the fact that the Gospels were written decades later. Yet the same gaps exist for dozens of other accepted first-century figures whose existence no one questions. Pontius Pilate himself is known to us from only a handful of inscriptions and passing references; we do not therefore declare him mythical.
The rapid emergence of a distinct Jewish sect in Jerusalem—the very city of the execution—centred on a crucified man is far harder to explain if the whole story was invented from whole cloth. A fabricated messiah would have been presented as triumphant, not humiliated on a Roman cross. The “scandal of the cross” was an embarrassment the early preachers had to overcome, not a detail they would have chosen.
Dr Barbara Thiering’s controversial reading of the Dead Sea Scrolls offers one provocative, naturalistic alternative. She argued that the Gospels contain a coded “pesher” layer revealing Jesus survived the crucifixion through a drug-induced coma, was revived in the tomb and continued his work.
Mainstream Scrolls scholars have rejected her method as forced and her redating of documents as untenable. Yet even if her specific reconstruction does not hold, her broader point survives scrutiny: the crucifixion itself was the pivotal, atoning event. Paul placed the weight of his theology on Christ’s suffering, not on a later appendix of resurrection appearances. The original ending of Mark stops at the empty tomb with the women fleeing in fear; the post-crucifixion sightings were added later. The twelve Stations of the Cross that still line Catholic churches worldwide testify to the same emphasis: the suffering, not the supernatural escape, is what Christians have always contemplated.
None of this diminishes the ethical force of the teachings attributed to Jesus, love your neighbour, forgive your enemies, treat others as you would be treated. Those doctrines stand whether one accepts the resurrection as literal history or as the powerful metaphor early believers used to express their experience of his continuing influence.
The columnist who declared he would rather be at the races if the resurrection did not happen is, with respect, missing the point. The foundation of the faith is not a divine party trick but a wrongful conviction and the response it provoked.
The evidence analysis is straightforward. Jesus existed. He was unjustly condemned and executed. That miscarriage of justice, not the later debate over what happened three days later, is what altered the course of history. To insist otherwise is to let theology obscure the historical record. The man lived. The conviction was wrongful. The rest; however one interprets the empty tomb, is commentary.