Killing Jesus: A History

stands and walks away.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
    JESUS’S TOMB
SUNDAY, APRIL 9, A.D. 30
DAWN
    The morning is dark. Dawn will soon break over Jerusalem, marking the third day since Jesus’s death. Mary Magdalene now takes it upon herself to perform the traditional task of examining the dead body. She travels with another woman named Mary, though not the mother of Jesus. Just as on the day the Nazarene was executed, the streets of the Upper City are quiet as the two women pass through. They exit the city walls at the Gennath Gate and now travel in the Nazarene’s last footsteps as they walk toward Golgotha.
    The vertical pole on which Jesus was crucified still stands atop the hill, awaiting the next crucifixion. The two Marys look away from the gruesome image and walk around the hill to Jesus’s tomb.
    They have practical matters on their minds. Mary Magdalene has never forgotten the many kindnesses Jesus showed her during his lifetime. And just as she once anointed him with perfume and washed his feet with her tears, she now plans to anoint the body with spices. It is unconscionable to her that Jesus’s corpse might molder and emit a foul smell. Perhaps a year from now, when she returns for Passover and is among those who roll away the stone in front of Jesus’s tomb to collect his bones, the smell of sweet perfume will pour forth from the cave entrance instead of the stench of death.
    But this presents another immediate challenge: Mary is physically incapable of rolling away the tombstone; she will require help. Yet most of Jesus’s disciples are still in hiding. Since yesterday was the Sabbath, and she followed the mandate to do nothing but rest, she does not know about the Roman soldier ordered to stand guard outside the tomb.
    But there is no guard. As the two Marys approach the tomb, they are stunned. The tombstone has been rolled away. The crypt is empty.
    Mary Magdalene cautiously steps forward and looks inside. She smells the myrrh and aloe in which Jesus’s body was anointed. She clearly sees the linen shroud in which the body was wrapped. But there is nothing else there.
    To this day, the body of Jesus of Nazareth has never been found.

AFTERWORD
    What comes next is the very root of the Christian faith. The Gospels record that Jesus’s body was not stolen. Instead, Scripture puts forth that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. After his body was found missing, the Gospels state that Jesus appeared twelve times on earth over a forty-day period. These apparitions range from a single individual to groups of more than five hundred on a mountain in Galilee. Some in that large crowd would speak vividly of the event for years to come. A quarter century later, the disciple Paul included the mountain appearance in a letter to the Corinthians.
    Whether or not one believes that Jesus rose from the dead, the story of his life and message achieved much greater status after his crucifixion. He would go down in history not just as Jesus or Jesus of Nazareth, but as Jesus the Christ, the Messiah. Roman writers of the period referenced his name, often preferring to call him Christus , the Latinized version of Christ. Unlike all other self-proclaimed messianic figures, Jesus became a noted personage in the history of Jerusalem and beyond. Theudas, the Egyptian prophet, and others such as Judas of Gamala were almost instantly forgotten. Only Bar Kochba (c. A.D. 132–35) retained as much Jewish interest. Followers of Jesus within Judaism are attested to well beyond the first century; the elite did not welcome them, but archaeological evidence and outside sources show that they persisted.
    The Roman historians Pliny the Younger, Cornelius Tacitus, and Suetonius all mention Jesus in their writings. The secular Greek-speaking historians Thallus and Phlegon, the satirist Lucian of Samosata, and the eminent Jewish historian Flavius Josephus also mention Jesus. Not all the writers were kind. Lucian, for example, mocks the early Christians for putting their faith in a man who died such a lowly death. Indeed, for centuries, Christians were embarrassed by the cross, for it was considered a punishment best suited for slaves, murderers, and members of the lowest class. Those opposed to the new Christian faith mocked believers for worshipping “a criminal and his cross” 1 and parodied Christianity as a form of madness. However, Christians began crossing themselves on the forehead and chest (“the sign of the