The death and resurrection of Jesus is the most famous underdog story in history. A low-status artisan from Galilee challenged the authorities of his time and ended up dying a brutal and horrifying death. But only a few days later, the Bible says, he was vindicated and resurrected from the dead. The story inspires billions of Christians around the world, but how much hard evidence is there for the historical events that started a global religion?
From a historical perspective, the Easter story is tremendously well attested. And the fact of the crucifixion is one of the most well documented elements of the Jesus narrative. It is mentioned in the letters of the Apostle Paul (the first texts to be written down by followers of Jesus in 50-65 CE), described in some detail by all four canonical Gospels, and referenced by non-Christian writers in the second century. While early Christians didn’t like to depict Jesus on the cross, a second-century CE piece of graffiti—mocking a Roman who worships a donkey-headed man being crucified—has a good claim to being our earliest image of Jesus, albeit a satirical one.
But the specifics of the Easter story are more contested, especially as later generations extrapolated impossible details and expanded the legend.
Retracing the steps of Jesus
For centuries, Christian pilgrims have retraced Jesus’s path along the Via Dolorosa, or “Way of Sorrows,” the 600-meter route that tradition says Jesus travelled from his sentencing to his death. Yet while Jesus had to get to Calvary somehow, pilgrims are not walking in his actual footsteps.
In the Bible, Jesus is sentenced to die in a “praetorium” a Latin word for the general’s tent in a military encampment. Modern historians identify Herod’s Palace as the most likely location for this praetorium and, thus, the place from which Jesus was taken to his death. The foundation walls of the palace were unearthed in 2001 in an abandoned building next to the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem. The Via Dolorosa, on the other hand, begins in the Antonia Fortress in a completely different part of the city.
From the palace and Pilate’s praetorium, Jesus is said to have journeyed to Golgotha—the “place of the skull”—for crucifixion. If he was able to walk then it is likely that Jesus, like other ancient criminals, was forced to drag the crossbeam used in his execution. But he would not have carried an entire cross, as medieval art would have it. It was simply too heavy. An entire cross is likely to have weighed about 300 pounds while the crossbeam would have been approximately 75-90 pounds. When Roman authors refer to people carrying crosses, as the playwright Plautus did in his comedy The Charcoal Burner, they explicitly refer to the patibulum or crossbeam.
(What we know about Jesus of Nazareth)
Was this the site of the crucifixion?
The last stop on the Via Dolorosa is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in Jerusalem’s Old City, which is built on the traditional site of the crucifixion. Most victims of crucifixion were bound to their crosses with rope rather than nails, a detail that cast some scholarly doubt on the accuracy of the Gospel story. But in 1968, archaeologist Vassilos Tzageris excavated some tombs in the northeastern part of Jerusalem and discovered the remains of a crucified first-century man with a nail still lodged in his ankle. A second example from outside of Venice, published in 2019, offers our only other surviving piece of archeological evidence for crucifixion in practice. While we have numerous literary accounts of crucifixion, particularly the mass execution of the followers of Spartacus in 71 BCE, these are our only two pieces of archeological evidence for crucifixion. Nailing is unusual but not unparalleled.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is also believed by Christians to house Jesus’s tomb. The idea that Jesus was buried close to the place of his crucifixion comes from the Bible. The Gospel of John states that there was a garden “in the place where Jesus was crucified” (John 19:41) and that Jesus was buried in a new tomb there because it was nearby. Visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre today and you can see the specific locations associated with the place of crucifixion, the place Jesus was laid out and prepared for burial, and his tomb (enclosed in a shrine called the aedicule). The Church is a holy place for Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic, Syriac and Ethiopic Christians.
(How did Jesus’ final days unfold?)
For 19th-century Protestant biblical archeologists, however, the identification of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as the place of Jesus’s execution was less certain. The Church was built by the emperor Constantine in the fourth century, some three hundred years after the events. The crucial point for its authentication is whether it sat inside or outside the walls of the city during the life of Jesus. Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Jews viewed corpses as unclean and buried their dead outside of the city. It’s inconceivable, therefore, that Jesus was executed inside of the city walls. While in Jesus’ time the Church lay outside of Jerusalem, the expansion of the city over the following centuries meant that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was swallowed up by the metropolis.
Concerned about the relative position of the Church and the city walls and convinced that the biblical reference to Golgotha must refer to somewhere else, biblical archeologist and Christian war hero Charles Gordon identified a hill a mile to north of the Church as the place of the crucifixion. A nearby tomb, known as the Garden Tomb, was then identified as the place of burial. To this day, thousands of evangelical Christians celebrate Easter at the site.
There is, however, no way that the Garden Tomb is the tomb of Jesus. The Gospels suggest that Jesus was laid in a newly constructed tomb made for Joseph of Arimathea (Matt. 27:57-60). In 1986 archeologist Gabriel Barkay showed that the alleged Garden Tomb dates to the Iron Age, preceding the crucifixion by hundreds of years. As religion scholar and public educator Andrew Henry puts it, no critical scholar today thinks that the Garden Tomb is the authentic site of Jesus’s crucifixion and burial.
(How ‘Good Friday’ got its curious name)
Buried before sundown
For those who think that the location for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was more about convenience than accuracy, the most plausible alternative site for the crucifixion is the quarry located near the Gennath (Garden) Gate mentioned by the ancient historian Josephus. In an important article, New Testament scholar Joan Taylor argued that Golgotha does not refer to a skull-shaped rock or hill but to a quarry to the west of the city. She suggests that Jesus was executed here alongside a road. This location, she argues, would fit the usual Roman practice of crucifying criminals where they would be seen by others. That way their deaths could serve as a deterrent to passersby and potential rebels.
The Gospels tell us that once Jesus had died, shortly before sundown on Good Friday, he was taken down from the cross and buried. But not everyone agrees. New Testament scholars John Dominic Crossan and Bart Ehrman have disputed this detail and argued that Jesus was not buried at all. Their argument is rooted in Roman practice and the fact that Romans regularly denied criminals proper burials. Instead, they often left bodies on the cross as a warning to travelers. When the corpses were removed, Crossan and Ehrman argue, they were unceremoniously tossed into ditches or mass graves. The theory strikes at the heart of Christian beliefs: If Jesus was never properly buried then the subsequent stories about the empty tomb and resurrection must be a fiction.
Though Ehrman and Crossan present a compelling case, and some criminals were left to rot in full view of the public, the situation may well have been different in 1st-century Jerusalem. The historian Josephus writes that Jews were so careful about funeral rites that “even malefactors who have been sentenced to crucifixion are taken down and buried before sunset.” In the case of Jesus, who was executed at the start of Passover, Pilate may well have wanted to keep the people happy by removing the bodies before sundown.
(The High Priest behind Jesus’ rigged trial)
Searching for the empty tomb
Assuming Jesus was buried, where was he taken? The Gospels say that a follower of Jesus named Joseph of Arimathea requested Jesus’ body from Pilate and that he buried Jesus in his newly constructed family tomb. Though we cannot prove that this happened, noted archeologist and historian Jodi Magness concludes that this version of events “accord[s] well with archeological evidence and with Jewish law.” Tradition maintains that Jesus’s tomb was close to Calvary. Most scholars agree that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has as strong a claim as any to be the place of his execution and burial.
This brings us to the biggest question of all: what is the evidence for the resurrection? According to the Bible, Jesus was resurrected three days after his death and burial. The Gospels agree that the tomb was empty and told stories of supernatural appearances by angels (Mark 16:5) and the risen Jesus himself (John 20:14). As a story, the resurrection is less unbelievable in the 1st century than in the present. Stories of dying and rising gods—like Osiris, Dionysius, and Mithras—were well known in antiquity and most people in in the ancient world believed that the dead were in contact with the living after they passed away. As Meghan Henning, a professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at the University of Dayton, told National Geographic, “Today, if someone says they spoke to their dead mother we would be concerned, but in antiquity we would have asked ‘oh really, what did she say?’”
But what actually happened? Here history cannot help. When archeologists briefly opened the tomb of Jesus in the aedicule of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 2016 they found it empty, as one would expect. (One does not have to be particularly that cynical to think that 4th-century Christians would select an empty tomb as their pilgrimage site regardless of the truth of the matter). Some ancient critics of Christianity hypothesized that the body of Jesus had been stolen. Others speculated that Jesus disciples—and particularly Mary Magdalene, the first to see the risen Jesus—were hysterical. One modern scholar has more charitably claimed that the disciples were experiencing the kind of vision or hallucination people see after the death of a loved one. All we can say for certain about the resurrection is that from the very beginning, Christians believed it.
(Was this site actually Jesus’ tomb?)
