ABSTRACT
To the Romans, Jews were a known quantity; Christians were not, and their emergence on the scene in Palestine was a complication the Romans didn’t need. Here was a strange and possibly seditious sect that refused to participate in Roman life, held secret meetings, inflamed the Jewish leadership, and refused to serve in the army. The death of the Christians’ leader had done nothing to quell their spirit, and the subsequent execution of key disciples, beginning with Stephen, merely made matters worse. The obstinate Christians turned the other cheek and continued their preaching and proselytizing, confident they would inherit the kingdom of God. The first full-fledged assault on Christians occurred under the emperor Nero in 67 CE. It was during this persecution that astute Romans began to appreciate the magnetic power of martyrdom, but the lesson did not take. The story of the Passion, the suffering and death of Jesus
of Nazareth, was crucial to the evolving idea of martyrdom. Could its authors have anticipated that thousands of Christians-rich and poor, masters and servants, male and female, young and old-would embrace martyrdom in imitation of the
Passion? The four evangelists-Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John-described the event sparsely and wrote their gospels sometime between 55 and 110 CE. They relied on a mixture of eyewitness accounts, oral tradition, and Judaism. They were Jews themselves, of course, as was Jesus. Today, believers in the God of Abraham-Jews, Christians,
and Muslims-have different ideas about who, or what, Jesus really was, although they agree that he lived in the service of God. Jews say Jesus was a prophet, not God; they also do not believe that Jesus was resurrected three days after death. Muslims also believe that Jesus was a prophet, but they say God would have raised him to heaven before he could be crucified if he was the biblical Messiah; they also believe that the revelations recited by the Prophet Muhammad in the seventh century supersede those of earlier prophets, including Jesus. Christians revere Jesus as the Messiah, the anointed one, the son of God, and God himself, whose coming, suffering, and resurrection fulfilled Old Testament prediction. These different beliefs about Jesus have haunted the three religions for centuries and have strained relations among the “Peoples of the Book” to the point of war, massacre, and genocide. Whether a prophet or the Messiah, Jesus made decisions
that virtually ensured his execution. Arguably the most critical among these was his decision to leave Galilee, where his teachings had mostly fallen on deaf ears, to preach in Jerusalem, the center of Jewish life. Though this decision was hardly suicidal in itself, other actions by Jesus helped make it so. He arrived in Jerusalem with a crowd of enthusiastic followers proclaiming him the Messiah; he openly challenged the council that governed Jewish affairs-the Sanhedrin, supported by Rome-by forcefully running the merchants and moneylenders out of the Temple and threatening their livelihoods; he claimed the power to forgive sin, which according to the Jews only Yahweh could do, and thus he blasphemed; worse, he refused to deny that he was the son of God. Less than a week after entering Jerusalem, Jesus was arrested, flogged, and crucified. Crucifixion was a cruel and humiliating death. Victims were
nailed to the cross through their palms or wrists and usually died of slow suffocation, a result of their inability to breathe properly. They were often left on the cross after death to be
eaten by wild beasts or birds of prey. Crucifixion was used mainly as punishment for runaway slaves and common criminals. It was a cheap public execution that nevertheless could be spectacular, as when six thousand followers of Spartacus were crucified along the Appian Way as part of a Roman victory celebration in 71 BCE. By the time it was banned by Roman emperor Constantine in the fourth century CE, crucifixion had probably claimed more than a million lives during its eight-hundred-year Greco-Roman history. Jesus did nothing to save himself from this painful and pub-
lic humiliation. When arrested and interrogated he did not flee, as he certainly could have with help from his followers. Nor did he make any attempt to appease his Jewish interrogators, their high priest Caiaphas, or the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, whose initial reluctance to order Jesus’s execution was quickly put aside in favor of stability and the status quo. Jesus broke the law, and Jesus would be punished. But Jesus had long before told his followers how to interpret these events: “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,” Jesus says in John 10:11. And to make sure they understood that his death would be voluntary, he said, “No one takes it [life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:18). In John 12:27, Jesus predicts his death and says that he would not ask to be saved because “it was for this very reason I came to this hour.” In the recently released translation of the long-lost “Gospel
of Judas,”1 Jesus in effect asks his friend and apostle Judas to betray him and promises that he will be rewarded in heaven for doing so. This anonymous text, written in the third or fourth century CE in the language of the Egyptian Coptic Christians, is believed to be a copy of an earlier Greek text in the tradition of the Gnostics. The Gnostics were an early Christian sect whose members believed that the path to salvation lay in secret knowledge that Jesus relayed to his inner circle. Their texts were often at odds with the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and were later declared heretical by orthodox Christian leaders. Controversial in its portrait of the relationship between Jesus and Judas, the Gospel of Judas nevertheless shows again that Jesus actively participated in his martyrdom. This is consistent with the active submission typical of martyrdom in antiquity.
