Introduction

Why Did Jesus Die?

Wherever you find Christians, you find crosses. There are huge crosses towering in the Alps and Andes. There are little crosses that hang around people’s necks. They are found on spires and gravestones, at roadsides, on dashboards and shelves. There are Celtic crosses, Crusader crosses, crosses of St Anne, and Coptic crosses. They are made of gold, silver, bronze, plastic, wood and stone. Churches have traditionally been built in the form of a cross. And, of course, there is no counting the frescos, mosaics, icons, and oil paintings that have the crucifixion scene for their subject. The only corporate ceremony that Jesus commanded his followers to observe, the Lord’s Supper, celebrated every Sunday in thousands of churches, focuses on the cross with its central symbols, bread and wine, portraying his body broken and his blood shed. The ceremony he gave us for initiation into the Christian faith, baptism, symbolises our dying and rising with Christ.

Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in The Observer on 26 March 1967:

One thing at least can be said with certainty about the crucifixion of Christ: It was manifestly the most famous death in history. No other death has aroused 100th part of the interest, or been remembered with 100th part of the intensity and concern. . .

For eighteen hundred years the cross has been the major symbol of Christianity. It has not always been so. The earliest Christian motifs seem to have been a peacock (symbolising immortality), a dove, the athlete’s victory palm, or in particular, a fish (the letters of the Greek word for “fish” being an acronym for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour). However, it seems certain that, at least from the second century onwards, Christians not only drew, painted and engraved the cross as a pictorial symbol of their faith, but also made the sign of the cross on themselves or others. From then it increasingly dominated all other symbols of Christianity.

When one considers the horror with which crucifixion was regarded in the ancient world, the adoption of such a symbol seems very odd indeed. Crucifixion was possibly invented by the Persians and was taken over from them by the Greeks and Romans. It is probably the cruellest method of execution ever practised because it deliberately delayed death until maximum torture had been inflicted. Victims could suffer for days before dying. The modern hangman’s rope or electric chair are tame by comparison. Cicero, in his defence of the elderly senator Gaius Rabirius in 63 B.C., declared:

The very word “cross” should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts, his eyes and his ears. For it is not only the actual occurrence of these things [sc. the procedures of crucifixion] or the endurance of them, but the liability to them, the expectation, indeed the mere mention of them, that is unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man.

To the Jews it was equally abhorrent, but for a different reason. They made no distinction between a “tree” and a “cross”, and so applied to crucified criminals the terrible statement of the law that “anyone who is hung on a pole [or "tree"] is under God’s curse” (Deuteronomy 21:23).

Why then have Christians chosen this as the central symbol of their faith? One of the reasons is because of who they believe the person dying on that cross really was. In my booklet Was Jesus Really God? I spell out some of those beliefs. It is because they believe he is all that he personally claimed to be that New Testament scholar Tom Wright can say, in his recent book Simply Christian:[1]

The death of Jesus of Nazareth as the King of the Jews, the bearer of Israel's destiny, the fulfilment of God's promises to his people of old, is either the most stupid, senseless waste and misunderstanding the world has ever seen, or it is the fulcrum around which world history turns.