This Skeptic Strengthened My Belief In Jesus’s Crucifixion

Christianity is a fundamentally historical religion. The Apostles’ Creed reminds us that Jesus “suffered under Pontius Pilate.” In the middle of that doctrinal summary, we have witness to a particular Roman official whose existence anchors the Gospels in the timeline of verifiable human history. If the physical resurrection is the theological sine qua non of the Christian faith (1 Cor. 15:3–8), then Jesus’s public trial and execution is its historical keystone.

In Killing the Messiah: The Trial and Crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, Nathanael J. Andrade, professor of history at Binghamton University, argues that a man named Jesus was, in fact, tried by Pontius Pilate and crucified for sedition. On the one hand, Andrade’s book pushes against those who argue that Jesus of Nazareth is a mere myth. On the other hand, Andrade rejects many elements of the Gospel accounts, arguing that Pilate believed Jesus was a seditious rebel.

The main point of Killing the Messiah is that a religious zealot named Jesus was crucified around AD 33—but that he deserved it. The book offers an intriguing attempt at a historical reconstruction that can enrich Christians’ understanding of the Gospels, even if we reject Andrade’s skepticism about Jesus’s innocence.

General Historicity

Andrade’s account of the political situation in the Roman province of Judaea will be familiar to many Christians. We don’t know the exact boundaries of the territories mentioned in Scripture. We don’t know the precise dates the various rulers held office. However, Andrade offers ample historical evidence to confirm many basic facts of the Gospel accounts. For example, he shows that Herod, Pilate, Antipas, and Caiaphas existed at about the time the Gospels outline. Moreover, he supports these facts with extrabiblical evidence. What we have in Scripture isn’t legend or uninformed fiction.

Furthermore, the legal proceedings in the Gospels generally align with historical evidence. For example, Andrade notes that “parallels between Mark’s account and Josephus’ reports of actions taken by the chief priests or councils in the 50s–60s probably reflect practices that occurred at Jerusalem during Jesus’ lifetime” (138). And first-century legal documents support the existence of a council of local leaders (which Andrade is very concerned we call a synhedrion instead of the Sanhedrin). These leaders had the ear of Roman officials. They were committed to maintaining social stability by suppressing religious disturbances. Yet they couldn’t try capital crimes.

These may seem like minimal proofs, yet they’re valuable. We live in a world where conspiracy theorists argue that the Jesus of Scripture is a myth. The growth of the Jesus mythicist movement led agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman to write Did Jesus Exist? because “every week [he receives] two or three e-mails asking whether Jesus existed as a human being.” Andrade does Christians a favor by validating the Gospels’ basic historicity.

Dubious Motivation

We live in a world where conspiracy theorists argue that the Jesus of Scripture is a myth. Andrade does Christians a favor by validating the Gospels’ basic historicity.

However, according to Andrade, the Gospels are a mixed bag of historical fact and theological fiction. Andrade argues, “No doubt the basic gospel tradition was shaped by the partisan subjectivities of [Jesus’s] core followers. . . . But the tradition was also somewhat fixed and contains a basic historical outline for how Jesus affected his followers” (76). Furthermore, “[The Gospels’] goal of communicating a theological truth often compromises their historical accuracy” (77).

According to the reconstruction in Killing the Messiah, Pilate believed Jesus guilty of sedition and had him killed. But why did the Gospel writers invent a reluctant Pilate? Andrade provides no real answer, leaving a gaping hole in his theory.

The gospel doesn’t require a reluctant Roman governor; it simply requires an innocent Savior. No Christian need doubt that Jesus’s message and actions and the growth of his following threatened the status quo for both the Jewish religious leaders and Pilate. They had ample motivation to eliminate Jesus to preserve stability. The biblical claim that Jesus was innocent of sedition doesn’t require any official—religious or secular—believing him faultless.

Andrade’s motivation for trying to revise the Gospel narrative of a reluctant Pilate is plain. He mourns the “violent history of anti-Semitism the Gospel accounts have fed” (7). And he’s right to observe that anti-Semitism due to careless reading of the Gospels and Acts “has motivated any number of atrocities that [self-described] Christians have inflicted” (2). He provides a good reminder for pastors and teachers to speak carefully when discussing the religious leaders’ role in Jesus’s death. Yet his theory of the Gospel writers inventing an ahistorical narrative that has little obvious theological or social value seems like doing ancient history to solve contemporary problems.

Bolstered Confidence

Ironically, Andrade’s skepticism toward the Gospel accounts has strengthened my confidence in them.

Pilate’s doubts are hard to believe, and that’s a good reason to trust them. There’s little reason for a community of Jesus’s followers to invent a detailed historical fiction about Pilate’s reluctance to convict, his wife’s dream, and the tension between Pilate and the chief priests. Barring concrete evidence to the contrary, which Andrade doesn’t provide, there’s no reason for those surprising contours in the Gospels.

The gospel doesn’t require a reluctant Roman governor; it simply requires an innocent Savior.

Though Andrade seeks to cast doubt on the Gospels, he provides factual proofs I hadn’t previously encountered. When we put his work in conversation with Peter Williams’s Can We Trust the Gospels? and Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, the cumulative historical evidence threatens to overwhelm the most stubborn skepticism. Andrade’s contribution is more significant because he’s a hostile witness.

The chief benefit of this volume is to help pastors and scholars corroborate the legal culture in the first-century Roman Empire. Andrade’s research is well documented with detailed footnotes. As cultural theories about the mythical nature of Jesus spread, Killing the Messiah offers historical evidence that supports many key facts of the Gospel accounts.