Jerusalem. The Biography

the legs. The body weight was then borne by the arms and the victim would asphyxiate within ten minutes.
    Hours passed; his enemies mocked him; passers-by jeered. His friend Mary of Magdala kept vigil alongside his mother Mary and the unnamed ‘disciple whom he loved’, possibly his brother James. His supporter Joseph of Arimathea visited him too. The heat of the day came and went. ‘I thirst,’ Jesus said. His female followers dipped a sponge into vinegar and hyssop, and raised it to his lips on a reed so that he could suck on it. Sometimes he seemed to despair: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ he called out, quoting the appropriate scripture, Psalm 22. Yet what did he mean by God forsaking him? Was Jesus expecting God to unleash the End of Days?
    As he weakened, he saw his mother. ‘Behold thy son,’ he said, asking the beloved disciple to care for her. If it was his brother, this made sense, for the disciple escorted Mary away to rest. The crowds must have dispersed. Night fell.
    Crucifixion was a slow death from heat stroke, hunger, suffocation, shock or thirst, and Jesus was probably bleeding from the flagellation. Suddenly he gave a sigh. ‘It is finished,’ he said, and lost consciousness. Given the tension in Jerusalem and the imminent Sabbath and Passover holiday, Pilate must have ordered his executioners to accelerate matters. The soldiers broke the legs of the two bandits or rebels, allowing them to suffocate, but when they came to Jesus he already seemed dead, so‘one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side and forthwith came blood and water’. It may have actually been the spear that had killed him.
    Joseph of Arimathea hurried to the Praetorium to ask Pilate for the body. Victims were usually left to rot on their crosses, the prey of vultures, but Jews believed in swift burial. Pilate agreed.
    Jewish dead were not buried in the earth during the first century but laid in a shroud in a rock tomb, which their family always checked, partly to ensure that the deceased were indeed dead and not merely comatose: it was rare but not unheard of to find that the ‘dead’ were awake the next morning. The bodies were then left for a year to desiccate, then the bones were placed in a bone-box, known as an ossuary, often with the name carved on the outside, in a rock-cut tomb.
    Joseph and Jesus’ family and followers brought down the body and quickly found an unused tomb in a nearby garden where they laid him. The body was sweetened by expensive spices and wrapped in a shroud – like the first-century shroud found in a tomb a little south of the city walls in the Field of Blood, still bearing clumps of human hair (but unlike the famous Turin Shroud, which has now been dated to between 1260 and 1390). It is likely that the present Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which encloses both the place of crucifixion and the tomb, is the genuine site since its tradition was kept alive by local Christians for the next three centuries. Pilate posted guards around Jesus’ tomb at Caiaphas’ request ‘lest his disciples come by night and steal him away and say unto the people, He is risen from the dead’.
    Up to this point, the story of Jesus’ Passion – from the Latin
patior
, to suffer – is based on our sole source, the Gospels, but no faith is required to believe in the life and death of a Jewish prophet and thaumaturge. However, three days after his crucifixion, on Sunday morning, according to Luke, some of Jesus’ female family and followers (including his mother and Joanna, the wife of Herod Antipas’ steward) visited the tomb: ‘They found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre and they entered in and found not the body of the Lord Jesus … As they were much perplexed, behold two men stood by them in shining garments and as they were afraid … they said unto them: Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here but is risen.’ The frightened disciples were in hiding on the Mount of Olives during the Passover week, but Jesus appeared several times to them and to his mother, saying to them, ‘Be not afraid.’ When Thomas doubted the Resurrection, Jesus showed him the wounds on his hands and in his side. After some days, he led them up to the Mount of Olives where he ascended to heaven. This Resurrection, which turned a sordid death into a transforming triumphof life over death, is the defining moment of Christian faith, celebrated on Easter Sunday.
    For those who do not