Did Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple stand at the foot of the cross?
(Originally published at What's Wrong With the World. Link to original post at 'permalink' below.)
A guest post by Timothy McGrew
In this post, I continue my critical examination of three points in V. J. Torley’s lengthy review essay, wherein Torley summarizes Michael Alter’s even more lengthy book on the resurrection. The previous post is here.
When I asked Torley to select three test cases for examination, the second of his choices was the question of whether Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple stood at the foot of the cross, a description (allowing for some latitude in expression) drawn from the narrative of John 19. Torley finds this detail highly doubtful. Here is his objection, in his own words:
John’s Gospel records the presence of Jesus’ mother at the foot of the Cross, along with the beloved disciple (who is generally presumed to have been the apostle John, although about 20 other individuals have been proposed as candidates), but this, too, is probably fictional: Jesus was crucified as an enemy of the State (“King of the Jews”), and as such, the Romans would have shown him no quarter -- and they certainly would not have allowed him to enjoy a final conversation with his mother. To quote the words of the late Dr. Maurice Casey (1942-2014), author of Is John’s Gospel True? (1996, London: Routledge, p. 188) and a former Professor of New Testament Languages and Literature at the Department of Theology at the University of Nottingham: “The fourth Gospel’s group of people beside the Cross includes Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple. It is most unlikely that these people would have been allowed this close to a Roman crucifixion.” As Dr. Bart Ehrman, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has pointed out in an online essay titled, Why Romans crucified people, the whole aim of crucifixion was to humiliate the victim as much as possible. And when political criminals like Jesus were crucified, the warning to the public was unmistakably clear: this is what happens to you if you mess with Rome. No niceties were observed and no courtesies allowed.
Here is Maurice Casey’s comment in a fuller context:
The fourth Gospel’s group of people beside the cross includes Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple. It is most unlikely that these people would be allowed this close to a Roman crucifixion. If they had been, and they included people central to Jesus’ life and ministry, it is most unlikely that Mark would merely have women watching from a distance. If a major male disciple had approached this close, it is likely that he would have been arrested.
Torley objects for the following reasons, which are not really independent of one another:
1. Jesus would not have been allowed “a final conversation with his mother,” since he was crucified as an “enemy of the state.”
2. It is unlikely that the Romans would have allowed Jesus’ mother and one of his disciples to get this close to a Roman crucifixion, since Jesus was crucified as “a political criminal.”
Casey, in the portion not quoted by Torley, adds a third argument:
3. Mark would not have failed to mention the presence of one of Jesus' disciples and his mother close to the cross if they had actually been there.
The first and most important thing to notice about these objections is that Torley presents them with no evidence whatsoever. He hands off the evidential burden to Casey and Ehrman. And neither Casey nor Ehrman substantiates these claims with a single reference to the primary sources, either Christian or non-Christian.
Let’s look into this problem in detail, starting with the claim that Jesus was crucified as an “enemy of the state.”
Individual Romans regarded particular people at certain times as enemies of the state, but that did not mean that these people were crucified or even brought to trial. (Cicero thought Mark Antony was an enemy of the state. It didn’t get him very far.) Those who were charged with majestas -- high crimes against the Roman state or the person of the Emperor -- could, if convicted, be punished by death, though that was by no means always the sentence handed down. Sometimes they lost their property but not their lives; sometimes they merely had to petition for clemency in order to suffer no long-term penalty at all.
The more specific charge of treason (perduellio) covered a cluster of particular offenses: stirring up an enemy against the state (as in the case of Vitruvius Vaccus), surrendering a citizen to the enemy (as Popilius Laenas), or (as in the case of Fulvius) losing a Roman army through what was considered to be criminal negligence in the defense of the state. None of these offenses is even close to anything ever asserted about Jesus of Nazareth.
Suppose, for a moment, that Jesus had indeed been crucified as an enemy of the state, in the sense of majestas. What would this have to do with the question of whether some of Jesus’ family or followers would have been allowed close enough to the cross to speak with him?
Not much. Neither Casey nor Ehrman produces a single case where people not themselves criminals were forbidden to come close to a crucifixion. There are no legal protocols for where people may stand to watch a crucifixion, much less special protocols for special classes of crucifixions. As far as common practice, crucifixion was in general a public spectacle designed to horrify the onlookers. A Roman governor had, to say the least, no obvious motive for restraining people from seeing up close what happened to those who fell under the condemnation of Roman law. Casey’s description of the situation -- that allowing Mary to stand near enough to her son to speak with him would be allowing him to “enjoy a final conversation with his mother” -- is risible on its face. Jesus was being brutally tortured to death in one of the most humiliating, terrifying ways ever devised by man. There is nothing enjoyable for either mother or son here.
But was Jesus crucified “as an enemy of the state”? The only reason anyone might have for characterizing Jesus as an “enemy of the state” or a “political criminal” is the accusation, reported in the Gospels themselves, that Jesus made himself to be “Christ, a king.” But according to those same narratives (Luke 23, John 18), Pilate questioned Jesus particularly on this very point and decided that the charge was spurious -- so much so that he repeatedly attempted to induce the Jewish rulers to relent on their demand for crucifixion and be content with a flogging. Mark 15:10 specifically states that Pilate knew the charges were trumped up and that Jesus was being delivered to him, not because he was really a political enemy of Rome, but “out of envy” (διὰ φθόνον).
Since it is Pilate’s judgment, as provincial governor, that matters in such a case, the picture afforded by the narratives is consistent with his allowing the crucifixion to take place but not insisting on any specially harsh circumstances in its being carried out. The Jewish rulers did not really believe that Jesus was an enemy of the Roman state, and Pilate did not believe it either. That was merely the pretense by which they induced him, under threat of a complaint to Caesar, to carry out the execution. So far as our first-century sources tell us, not a single person involved believed that Jesus was guilty of majestas -- not Pilate, not the Jewish leaders, not even the thieves crucified on either side of him.
Pilate was doing a delicate balancing act. On the one hand, the Jewish rulers were insistent that Jesus be crucified, and they were implicitly threatening to complain to Caesar -- something they did with regard to some of Pilate’s other actions. On the other, even a rather calloused Roman governor might naturally scruple at crucifying a man he himself believed to be innocent and harmless simply to pacify the locals. The Gospel narratives give us an account of how events unfolded that is consistent with what we know of human nature. If we start picking and choosing which bits of the narrative we will take seriously with no better ground than our desire to make the facts fit a particular theory, we have abandoned all proper historical methodology. By such means, one can “prove” virtually anything from any texts whatsoever.
What of the second objection? The claim appears to be that there was a more general practice of keeping people far away from the crucifixion of political criminals. But this objection, too, is fabricated out of whole cloth. There is not one historical source named as evidence that people who were not themselves considered to be criminals were always or even commonly kept at a distance from a Roman crucifixion outside the context of a military campaign. There is no reference -- in Torley’s piece, in Ehrman’s blog post, or in Casey’s entire book -- to even one occasion where anyone not already in trouble with the law is arrested, turned away, or even verbally warned for standing too near to the foot of a cross at a public crucifixion in a time of peace. Again, one might even argue to the contrary that the Romans were all too willing to let the public see the agony of crucifixion up close as a deterrent. Crucifixion was supposed to be terrifying to the public.
It is no objection to point out that John 19 records two brief sentences (totaling nine words in Greek) that Jesus spoke to Mary and the beloved disciple. Ordinary conversations of much greater length take place at a distance of four or five yards constantly. There is no reason to suppose that the presence of a few unarmed peasants within that radius, able to hear a few words that Jesus said, would pose any difficulties for the quaternion of armed soldiers carrying out their duties.
Casey's argument from silence (point 3) is as bad as such arguments generally are. Those who would like more examples of the argument's general weakness in historical work are welcome to search through the references in my paper “The Argument from Silence,” Acta Analytica 29 (2014), 215-28.
In short, the objection to the presence of Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple near the cross during the crucifixion is entirely bereft of evidential support. When the supposed exclusion of non-crimnial bystanders from the scene of crucifixion, even very close up, is advanced as if it were an established fact by those who should know better, it is nothing more than a scholarly bluff.
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