The Collective Crucifixion at Golgotha: A Paradigm Shift in the Explanation of Jesus of Nazareth’s Death (and Life)

There is every indication that the crucified men were considered a unified group by the executioners, and that the Romans (presumably rightly) considered Jesus to be the leader of that group.

See also They Suffered under Pontius Pilate: Jewish Anti-Roman Resistance and the Crosses at Golgotha (Lexington Books / Fortress Academic, 2023).

By Fernando Bermejo-Rubio
Departamento de Historia Antigua
UNED, Madrid
August 2024 

          An indisputable outcome of critical scholarship on the Gospels is that they are largely fictional accounts of their main character, Yeshua bar Yosef. These writings were intended to create a picture of this Galilean teacher that enhances his figure, and they were accordingly composed as propaganda material following his unexpected and shameful death. This means that Jesus is somehow a fictional being, constructed as a kind of spiritual superhero.[1] By “fictional” I do not mean that he did not exist, but rather that to a great extent the Gospel representations of him are fabricated exaggerations, whose purpose is less to describe the past than to affect the present, since they served the vested interests of their authors and the communities they addressed. But the presence of mythologizing elements in an account, however pervasive, does not necessarily mean that a real story has been fully swallowed up by the myth.

          The starting point of my reflections is one of the many strange phenomena in the study of the first-century Galilean Jew Yeshua bar Yosef, better known as Jesus of Nazareth. With just a few exceptions, the overwhelming majority of authors tackling his death focuses exclusively on his figure, despite the unmistakable textual fact that all the Gospels assert that there were other men crucified together with him at Golgotha, and despite the very high likelihood that this datum deserves credibility. The Jesus-centrism of current scholarship betrays a confessionally-oriented approach which has devastating consequences for our knowledge from a historical and epistemological standpoint. The present article provides a brief overview of a different (and, by far, more plausible) approach to the evidence.

The Gospel Story: Individual versus Community

          Although the Gospels are undoubtedly focused on their main character, the object of Christian worship, making emphasis on his words and deeds, they tell a collective story, in which many people were actively involved. As it happens with virtually every human life, Jesus’ story was not of an isolated man. He was not a hermit living in seclusion, but addressed himself to other people and wanted to have an influence on them; besides, although sometimes he addressed only individuals, he usually interacted with whole communities: the Gospels repeatedly have him preaching, healing, and/or exorcizing in houses, assemblies, synagogues, fields, and villages (e.g., Mark 1:38–39; 2:1–12.23–28; 3:1–5; 6:6b; Luke 6:27–42; 11:2–4). It is accordingly essential to shift our view of him from the typical individualistic approaches, and to realize that, without the men and women who (materially, emotionally, and operationally, in various degrees) supported him and extended his message, Jesus could not have done anything, and his name would at most be a footnote in the pages of History.

          There are several very concrete senses in which Jesus’ story was articulated as a collective enterprise. First, he did not act alone, but gathered a whole group of disciples and coworkers (Mark 1:16–20). The earliest sources about Jesus report that he appointed a special group of twelve men “to be with him,” in the sense that they were not only his disciples but also formed an inner circle around him, whose task consisted in proclaiming the imminent inrush of the kingdom of God to a wider audience. The selection of a group of twelve men becomes intelligible within a Jewish context, since, according to Israel’s Scriptures, God formed for himself a people made up of twelve tribes. The idea of the past existence of the tribes and the belief that in the future God would gather all the scattered tribes back to a restored promised land became deeply embedded in the Jewish tradition. It is precisely within a context of restoration eschatology that the choice of twelve disciples must be understood: he aimed at the ingathering of the ideal Israel. In this way, the nationalistic outlook of the collective project is made plain: the number twelve is a people-centered symbol, in which all Israel is the focus of the mission and it clearly excludes the presence of Gentiles in the envisioned community.

          Second, what Jesus’ action ignited can and should be considered a millenarian movement. These kinds of movements emerge within a community permeated by the belief that the end of this world as it is known is at hand, and that in its wake will appear a new blissful and trouble-free age in which deprivation, injustice, and inequality will be redressed. In that Land without Evil, soil will be conspicuously fertile and social hierarchies will be turned upside down. Millenarianism represents a type of social phenomena that has been labeled “revitalization movements,” through which members of a society, in an organized way, aim at constructing a more satisfying culture, and expecting to create new human relationships in the future. Millenarian movements coalesce around a charismatic leader, but they are, by definition, collective movements: the main addressees are the more unfortunate members of a society, although the power of the utopian dream can incorporate in the movement people coming from all social levels; in fact, according to the Gospels, Jesus mainly addressed the most oppressed and destitute strands of the Jewish population, but links with rich persons were also established.

          Third, since Jesus had a message to convey and sought to orally persuade an audience to believe it or to believe it more profoundly, rhetoric must have played an important role in his discourse.[2] After all, rhetoric is the art of discourse, wherein a speaker strives to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations, and that is exactly what a preacher like the Galilean was bound to do. Several traces of this rhetorical dimension can be identified, like a recurrent dialogical device in the reported debates with adversaries (the use of replies that function as trick counter-questions); the use of parables, through which his message could be purveyed in charming and intelligible form, and appealing to the understanding of even the simplest of his hearers; and clear hyperbolic utterances (like those about the omnipotence of the faith in God: Mark 11:23; Matt 21:21-22), and so on. The initial presumption that a rhetorical dimension must have taken place in Jesus’ discourse is confirmed by the available evidence.

          Fourth, the heavy demands Jesus placed on his disciples prove not only the collective nature of the movement but also the fact that the millenarian project was threatening for the establishment. No lover of half-hearted compromises, the Galilean preacher seems to have pronounced the famous sentence: “No one can serve two masters” (Matt 6:24; Luke 16:13). The degree of commitment that is demanded becomes perceptible in another passage in which he makes plain that he wants complete loyalty to him: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:25-26); following the master must take priority over all family ties. Complete allegiance means that followers must subordinate themselves to the master, and that they must do whatever he tells them as their Lord (Luke 6:46). They must behave in this way, even at the expense of their own lives (Luke 12:4-5; Matt 10:28).

          Fifth, the Gospels witness a strained relationship between Jesus and the tetrarch Herod Antipas. What the sources preserve about the connection of Antipas and his subject are just a few passing references to a story that might have been more substantial, but they speak volumes. Several reports reflect Jesus’ quite negative view of Antipas (Mark 8:15, Matt 11:7-8; Luke 7:24-25), something understandable since John the Baptist, Jesus’ mentor, had been executed by the tetrarch. And, according to Luke 13:31-33, some Pharisees warned Jesus that Herod wanted to kill him. In fact, other reports portray Jesus as going away from Antipas after having been informed about the Baptist’s beheading; as several scholars have realized, from that moment on the Markan outline of Jesus’ career can be seen as a chase and flight.[3] Since it is hard to imagine why a convergent pattern of material witnessing a reciprocal hostility between the ruler and the subject would have been contrived by the Christian tradition, there is good reason to infer that it reflects a historical datum. In turn, that hostility becomes meaningful in the light of the collective nature of Jesus movement, which envisaged a reconstitution of Israel in which pro-Roman rulers deemed unjust tyrants by pious Jews would no longer play any role.

A Collective Crucifixion and its Historicity

          The Passion accounts are riddled with a whole string of incongruities and contradictions.[4] This fact compels us to be extremely wary when it comes to taking any Gospel report as a starting-point of historical research. The element that seems to be the most likely is precisely the crucifixion of Jesus at the hands of Roman soldiers, all the more so because it is framed within a collective execution and it is not reducible to a literary model.

          But since nothing can be simply taken for granted, I will set forth the main reasons supporting the historicity of the core of the crucifixion reports. To start with, crucifixion is reported in several independent sources, so the index of multiple attestation can be used here. We have at least Paul, Mark, Flavius Josephus, and Tacitus, and the belief is represented in the Alexamenos graffito. Although some ancient Greek and Roman works could depend on former Christian writings and could accordingly not be employed as independent witnesses, the fact that there are several sources and that some of them are not Christian increases the probability that they are not derivable from a single one. Among all the events regarding Jesus’ life, crucifixion is, by far, the best attested.

          A further, more compelling motive to endorse the reliability of these reports is that the index of “against the grain” (or counter-discursive material) can be applied.[5] In several aspects the crucifixion would have been disturbing news for Christian communities, which they would not have concocted. The early Nazorean preaching deemed Jesus to be Israel’s Messiah, and, despite the Jewish messianic expectations being varied, they always referred to a living person, not to a dead one. Moreover, several Jewish sources interpreted a statement contained in Deuteronomy 21:22–23 (“Anyone hung on a tree is under God’s curse”) as a reference to crucifixion; Jesus’ first followers being wholehearted Jews, they would not have invented such a kind of death. A further aspect has to do with the assessment of crucifixion in the ancient Mediterranean world: in the Roman Empire it was regularly reserved for slaves and humiliores; in the provincial realm, it was reserved for peregrini—people who were not Roman citizens—and for the most serious crimes, more specifically for those committed against the security of the Roman people (desertion, high treason, incitement to revolt), so the association between crucifixion and insurgence was very clear in the first century CE. In these circumstances, it is exceedingly unlikely that Christians invented a report that dangerously linked their hero to subversive activities.

          There is still another strong reason supporting the historicity of the point. The Gospels do not assert that Jesus was put to death alone. All of them assert that he was crucified along with other men (Mark 15:27.32; John 19:18). This claim deserves credibility for at least three reasons. First, it fits the index of contextual plausibility: crucifixion being the punishment envisaged for insurgents, it was generally applied to groups, not to single individuals, and in fact almost every crucifixion carried out in this region (those made under Varus and the prefects and procurators in Judaea) was a collective execution. Second, this kind of execution was a public display, which took place outside the walls of the city—to avoid contamination by the corpses—and in very visible locations—because of its deterrent purpose—crosses were put near busy roads or the gates of the cities; this being the case, it would have been hard to conceal or ignore the basic and too well-known fact that the Galilean had been executed within a collective crucifixion. Third, and more decisively, the scene depicting a group of executed men directly runs against the noticeable tendency of the Gospels to isolate Jesus, who is overall presented as a completely unique man who stands out from his contemporaries and whose death had a matchless salvific power. The free creation of the episode painting a collective crucifixion is not accordingly a plausible suggestion: it rather contradicts the evangelists’ deepest theological interests.

          The former remarks convergently support the contention that the reports about the crucifixion(s) at Golgotha are historically reliable. Although most details of those accounts are untrustworthy and the outcome of pious fantasy, the core of the scene remains true. There is every indication that several men were crucified at the hands of soldiers at the service of Rome under Pilate, and as a unified group. The fact that sources extremely interested in placing the responsibility for Jesus’ death on Jewish shoulders make plain that the ultimate decision corresponds to the Roman prefect, and that the actual executioners are his soldiers, is sobering and does not allow us to harbor any reasonable doubts about that.

          The conclusion that we have compelling reasons to trust the historicity of the core of the reports about the collective crucifixion is significant in a twofold sense. On the one hand, it unmistakably hints at the presence of a very serious conflict between Jesus and the Roman Empire. On the other hand, the fact that the best-attested piece of information about him puts him in relationship with other men suffering the same punishment, and within a unified group, has an extraordinary importance, since the collective nature of the execution gives the lie to the Gospel version concerning the alleged reluctance of Pilate in pronouncing a death sentence; far from it, the Roman prefect was so convinced of the Galilean’s guilt and political dangerousness that he executed him along several other men convicted of insurgency as an example.[6]

          Even delivering the remarkable piece of information regarding the collective nature of the crucifixion, the Gospels’ authors turn Jesus into the main focus of attention, giving hardly any weight to anything concerning the other men. This portrayal through which he is singled out goes on in modern scholarship, as if those men lacked any real historical interest. An approach, however, that aims at understanding the events that took place at Golgotha cannot arbitrarily make discriminations in favor of one single person, and it must account for the overall episode. The fact that the importance of the other crucified men has been systematically downplayed for centuries compels any thoughtful mind to rethink the whole matter.

Ecce homo versus Ecce homines

          If the kernel of the Gospel reports on a collective crucifixion is deemed reliable, identifying the other protagonists in the scene is crucial in order to gain more precise knowledge about the meaning of the episode. Strikingly, the identity of these men is left unspecified by the evangelists. We are not told whence they came, when (and by whom) they had been arrested, why they had been condemned, or why they had been crucified. This is at first glance discouraging and disappointing. Nevertheless, although our sources hardly contain any information about them, there are a few valuable traces left.

          The most important clue to the identity of those men is the fact that Mark 15:27 and Matthew 27:38 refer to them as lēstaí. Literally, the Greek substantive lēstēs means “robber,” “pirate,” “bandit” or “brigand.” It is essential, however, to grasp the semantic shift the term underwent. The negative connotation of a term meaning “brigand” often led to using it in a dismissive way to designate political adversaries and insurgents, thus branded as “lawless criminals.” In Roman Law, subjected people who rebelled were not designed as “enemies” (hostes) but as “brigands” (latrones). By applying these terms, the honorable motives that triggered the insurgents—courage, love of freedom, patriotism—were suppressed, implying falsely that they were no different from a gang of highway robbers. There are serious reasons to think that the characterization of the men crucified with Jesus as “brigands” (as well as Luke’s “evildoers”) is likewise unreliable and has only a polemical and derogatory goal. Just as there is often a perceptible bias in the use of lēstaí by Josephus, there is also a similar bias in its use by Mark. This bias is the clear interest to defuse any temptation to connect Jesus with people hostile to the Empire. Several convergent arguments allow us to infer that the men crucified along with Jesus were not bandits or brigands, but people committed to some kind of resistance to Roman rule.[7]

         The fact that the only piece of information provided by the evangelists on the identity of the crucified men is wrong makes us suspect the reliability of what they further say (and hide) about their relationship with Jesus. The Galilean was crucified along with other men, but the evangelists do not make further connections among them; in fact they want their readers to think that they had nothing to do with Jesus: they are indeed introduced into the narrative in a most abrupt way, and wholly unconnected to the main character.

          Such a widespread assumption is, to say the least, both astounding and suspect. On the one hand, it is a priori highly improbable that Rome crucified together a group of men without any connection among them; besides, political uprisings do not seem to have been sufficiently widespread during this period and in this geographical area to justify the lack of relatedness as a plausible surmise. On the other hand, the Gospel writers make a great effort to differentiate the Galilean as far as possible from those men, thereby incurring all sorts of incongruities and contradictions.[8]

          Moreover, there is an additional piece of information strengthening the suggestion that all of them were somehow connected. The Gospels not only recount that Jesus was crucified along with two other men, but also that he was crucified between them. He is crucified in the middle (Mark 15:27; John 19:18; see GPet 4:10). Elsewhere I have argued that this datum is historically reliable.[9] Now, a person occupying a middle (conspicuous) place within a group is usually its leader. And we should recall that there exists—as, in the wake of other scholars, I have argued elsewhere—a lot of evidence regarding Jesus’ claim to kingship,[10] something already indicated by the titulus crucis “king of the Jews”. In the light of this evidence, such an assessment of leadership would not have stemmed from the feverish imagination of the Romans, since it arose from a claim made by the Galilean himself, that was intrinsically insurrectionist: the claim to be “king of the Jews” amounted, according to Roman Law, to a crime of sedition in the specific mode of aspiration to the throne (adfectatio regni). Put otherwise, if Jesus was deemed a “king,” his central position within the group of the crucified at Golgotha would most naturally explain itself because of his social importance: just as he had been the center and focus of their followers’ interest during his life, the crucifixion—an essentially parodic exaltation, carried out for the sake of deterrence—would have reflected such a central position. There is every indication that the crucified men were considered a unified group by the executioners, and that the Romans (presumably rightly) considered Jesus to be the leader of that group.

          Be that as it may, all men crucified at Golgotha were executed as rebels to the Empire. In this sense the episode becomes meaningful. After all, the simplest and most probable reason why a group of men was crucified together by the Romans at the same time in the same place is that there was indeed an actual connection among them.

          Of course, this contention does not yet allow us to determine the precise nature of that relationship. Several scholars have considered it perfectly reasonable that, despite the Gospels’ claim that Jesus was the only member of his group who was seized, those men belonged to his own group. On a close survey, the following possibilities arise: those men were Jesus’ close disciples; they were his followers or sympathizers in a looser sense (Jesus’ followers were not restricted to an inner group of disciples, but also embraced a middle circle of auxiliaries and supporters); they were people belonging to a different group, although with an ideological link between them.[11]

          The critical point is that, whichever of these alternatives is chosen (and, given the scant evidence, one cannot be sure about which alternative is the correct one), some concrete link must have existed among the several men crucified at Golgotha: unlike those Jews who opted to accept the yoke of the Empire, all the victims of Golgotha actually shared an anti-Roman outlook and/or insurgent activities. Such a conclusion has obvious far-ranging corollaries.