Why crucified jesus

Attridge Professor, Yale Divinity School. John is a story that introduces Jesus as a prophet in the tradition of Jeremiah. Jesus is presented in the Gospels as a person of extraordinary significance for faith, religion, and history. In their first-century setting, Jesus's message, activity, and execution were not simply religious but political. A Jewish historian from the first century C. His works document the Jewish rebellions against Rome, giving background for early Jewish and Christian practices.

Another name often used for the area of Israel and Judah, derived from the Latin term for the Roman province of Palaestina; ultimately, the name derives from the name of the Philistine people. Relating to the priests, the people responsible for overseeing the system of religious observance, especially temple sacrifice, depicted in the Hebrew Bible. Site HarperCollins Dictionary. There are several answers to why Jesus was crucified, from those involving practical, human, and political concerns to the divine.

First, Jesus was crucified—nailed to a cross to die—because that was the way the Roman government typically handled public executions of non-Romans. As Jesus was a non-Roman who brought considerable civil unrest to Jerusalem and whose leaders specifically petitioned the Roman leaders to execute him, this was not a surprising manner of execution Jesus was condemned to receive. As for why the Roman government agreed to crucify—or otherwise execute—Jesus, that seems rooted in politics and popularity.

After Jesus' arrest, the religious leaders led him to the governor, Pilate, who questioned him. I have examined him in your presence and have found no basis for your charges against him. Neither has Herod, for he sent him back to us; as you can see, he has done nothing to deserve death. There are various reasons why he ordered the crucifixion. Whether because of political pressure or crowd control, Pilate did what the people wanted.

Did He really need to be crucified, or executed at all? Another aspect to consider is that Jesus had to die in order to be resurrected. And indeed, the resurrection is everything. There they offered Jesus wine to drink, mixed with gall; but after tasting it, he refused to drink it. When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots.

And sitting down, they kept watch over him there. He was crucified with two criminals, the accounts detail, one on his right and the other on his left, and people mocked and insulted him all afternoon. The people thought Jesus was calling for Elijah. They fetched wine vinegar on a sponge and offered it to Jesus on a long stick.

At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. Increasingly, there were Christians who, rather than keeping the brute horror of crucifixion from their gaze, yearned instead to fix their eyes fully upon it. Why could you not bear to see the nails violate the hands and feet of your Creator?

Its author, a brilliant scholar from northern Italy by the name of Anselm, was a man of noble birth: a correspondent of countesses, an associate of kings. No matter how high in the affairs of the world he rose, he never forgot that it was in lowliness, and nakedness, and persecution that his Savior had redeemed him. In his prayer to the crucified Christ, copied as it was and read across the whole of the Latin West, Anselm articulated a new and momentous understanding of the Christian God: one in which the emphasis was laid not upon his triumph, but upon his suffering humanity.

The Jesus portrayed by medieval artists, twisted, bloody, dying, was a victim of crucifixion such as his original executioners would have recognized: no longer serene and victorious, but racked by agony, just as any tortured slave would have been. The response to the spectacle, however, was far removed from the mingled revulsion and disdain that had typified that of the ancients to crucifixion. Men and women, when they looked upon an image of their Lord fixed to the cross, upon the nails smashed through the tendons and bone of his feet, upon the arms stretched so tightly as to appear torn from their sockets, upon the slump of his thorn-crowned head onto his chest, did not feel contempt, but rather compassion, and pity, and fear.

There was certainly no lack of Christians, in medieval Europe, to identify with the sufferings of their God. Rich still trampled down poor. Gibbets stood on hills.

The Church itself, thanks in large part to the exertions of men like Anselm, was able to lay claim to the ancient primacy of Rome—and uphold it, what was more. And yet, for all that, something fundamental had indeed changed. That the Son of God, born of a woman, and sentenced to the death of a slave, had perished unrecognized by his judges, was a reflection fit to give pause to even the haughtiest monarch. This awareness, enshrined as it was in the very heart of medieval Christianity, could not help but lodge in its consciousness a visceral and momentous suspicion: that God was closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich.

Any beggar, any criminal, might be Christ. To the Roman aristocrats of the decades before the birth of Jesus, such a sentiment would have seemed grotesque. And yet it had come to pass.

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