Here is another modern Gospel forgery that has over the years won over readers who have thought it was authentic. It’s intriguing stuff: an eyewitness account of Jesus’ death!
Again, this is taken from my book Forged: Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (HarperOne, 2010).
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An equally interesting modern apocryphon, The Crucifixion of Jesus, by an Eye-Witness, deals not with the beginning of Jesus’ adult life, before his ministry, but with its ending and aftermath. [1] The account comes in the form of a letter written, in Latin, seven years after Jesus’ crucifixion, from a leader of the mysterious Jewish sect of the Essenes in Jerusalem to another Essene leader who lived in Alexandria, Egypt. All elements of the supernatural are completely stripped away from the account’s description of Jesus’ life and death. Jesus is shown to have led a completely human life and to have died a completely human death. But not on the cross. Jesus survived his own crucifixion and lived for another six months.
The account was first published in German, in Leipzig, in 1849. English editions, all claiming to be authentic, were published in 1907, 1919, and 1975. There were also translations into French and several into Swedish.
The Latin letter was allegedly discovered on a parchment scroll in an old Greek monastery in Alexandria by a missionary who thought that its message was dangerous, and so tried to destroy it. It was saved, however, by a learned Frenchman, who translated the account into German. The narrative was then brought to Germany by the Free Masons, understood to be modern-day descendants of the Essenes.
According to the account, Jesus himself was an Essene. When he was crucified, according to this “eyewitness,” he did not expire. He was taken from the cross and restored to life by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, fellow Essenes, who knew the secret arts of healing preserved by the sect. When the women visiting the tomb thought they saw angels, these were Essene monks wearing their white robes. The women misunderstood that Jesus had been raised, when in fact he had never died. He did die, however, six months later, from the wounds he had sustained.
It has not been difficult for scholars to expose this Gospel as another fraud. The “eyewitness,” allegedly an Essene, has no understanding of what the Essenes were really like. Today we know a good deal about this Jewish group, thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were unavailable to the forger since they were discovered nearly a century after he produced his account. Nothing in the story corresponds to the historical realities of the group. For one thing, there is no way an Essene in Jerusalem would write his account in Latin, of all things.
There are other considerable problems. The account indicates that it was written seven years after the crucifixion, yet it explicitly mentions, by name, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which were not written until forty to sixty years after Jesus’ death. Moreover, these books were not known as a group of writings (“the four Gospels”) until the end of the second century. Finally, the exclusion of everything supernatural in the account is a thoroughly modern, post-Enlightenment concern, not an ancient one.
And in fact a modern scholar has shown where this concern, and indeed, the entire story, came from. In 1936, a famous German scholar of the New Testament, Martin Dibelius, demonstrated that The Crucifixion of Jesus was virtually lifted, wholesale, from a now rather obscure work of historical fiction written by the German rationalist K. H. Venturini, The Natural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth (two volumes; 1800-02). Here too Jesus was an Essene, whose life had nothing supernatural about it, who did not actually die on the cross, but was revived by Joseph of Arimathea. The author of The Crucifixion of Jesus simply took Venturini’s two-volume work and condensed it into a readable booklet and tried to pass it off as a historical account, when in fact it was a modern fabrication.
- I have taken the translation from Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha, pp. 92-93.
I found this quote from Oct 12th 2012
Gerd Lüdemann’s, The Resurrection of Christ: A Historical Inquiry
o When Jesus was arrested and crucified his disciples fled. They did not go into hiding in Jerusalem – then went back home, to Galilee (where *else* would they go? They went home, to get out of Jerusalem!)
But in the Torah it is unlawful to travel that far on Shabbat. Was that law in effect in 1st century Judiaism?
“Behold, the Lord has given you the sabbath, therefore He gives you on the sixth day bread for two days; each man shall stay put, and not leave his place on the seventh day” (Exodus 16:29).
Would them fleeing not be on Friday affter dark therefore actually Saturday Shabbot?
My sense is that a lot of people who fear for their lives think that takes precedence over Shabbat. But in any event, if Jesus was executed in the morning, they would have had plenty of time to hit the road before the sun went down.
Thank you for another interesting post !
I’m wondering if Bart has a favourite analogy in relation to the gospel evidence for the supernatural events they describe? Equally credible evidence for other remarkable claims.
By way of example of the sort of thing I mean… The ‘Bisterne Dragon’ was killed c1430 in Hampshire, England. The earliest complete manuscript evidence we have was written just 185 years after the events it describes. No doubt oral traditions preceded it. The document also refers to real people and real places. But is it proof of dragons?
Good example! I really like the stories from antiquity with eyewitness reporting (Apollonius of Tyana; Julius Caesar), or, well Muhammad.
Dear Dr. Ehrman,
This question is related to Mark 14, and the discussion of Jesus claiming divinity verses 61- 62. Is there any discussion in the blog or elsewhere that you discuss why this is not necessarily a claim for divinity? Or if it is a claim for divinity as I heard in an excerpt from a debate on youtube, how does this passage fit into your interpretation of Mark’s claims about Jesus?
The big issue is WHAT the blasphemy may have been. When the High Priest asks Jesus if he is the messiah and he says “I am” — that’s not taking for himself the name of God (YHWH); it’s how someone simply says yes to a question of “are you x”. For example in John 9:9 it’s exactly what the formerly blind many says when asked if he is the once-blind man: “I am.” No one tries to stone him! It’s also not a blasphemy to claim to be the messiah, isnce that just meant you thought you’d be the great king in David’s line. And it wasn’t a blasphemy to say that hte Son of Man was coming soon. So what was the blasphemy? Seems like i have posted on that, but maybe I’ll do it again.
Dear Dr. Ehrman,
Thank you, sorry if I was out of the topic.
Monty
Nope! Anything you ask about early Christianity is completely ON topic!
It is near impossible to survive crucifixion!
It is also possible that there was much earlier copy of that gospel and venturini merely used it as his source. The same what happened to Dante’s book “inferno” that used the Gospel of Barnabas as his source. Many will conlude the author of Barnabas used Dante’s work as a source, but it could be the reverse.
Dr Ehrman,
Why and how the Hebrew Bible became Christian scripture?
VERY long story. Short answer: Christians understood themselves to be teh fulfillment of the plan of God from eternity past, and the Old Testament provided them with the earlier part of the story. Otherwise they would have just been a novel innovation with no roots. Equally significant: Jesus and his followers were Jews and their BIble was the Jewish Bible, so naturally *their* followers accepted it as well.
Dr Ehrman,
You usually mention in your talks and writings that Marcion used ” a version of our Gospel of Luke”.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that “version of Luke”? How was it different from our present Luke? Why Acts was not included in Marion’s Evangelikon?
There’s nothing to suggest that he knew the book of Acts; it appears to have cirulated separately from the Gospel of Luke, not as a set. Uncovering Marcion’s text of teh Gospel is one of the ost challenging tasks of Christian historical scholarship, with very erudite books written about it. It wsa shorter than our version of Luke, starting at what is now chapter 3. The Church Fathers said that Marcion excised all the parts that ran contrary to his views of the God of Jesus as different from the God of the Old Testamet. Our only access to his edition, though, is in the works of these very fathers who oppose and quote it, so there are enormous difficulties in reconstructing it exactly.
Dr Ehrman:
One question, if you had unlimited funds and time, is there one area you would focus on from an archeological perspective or research perspective that you think would provide the most benefit in unearthing potentially new information regarding the early christian church? I was Syriac Orthodox so historical narratives and evidence were always intriguing to me as while in Sunday school as this was often discussed and the lineage to the early Christian church in Antioch etc. Not that I intend to go off on an archeological expedition but just out of curiosity. What would be your “aha!” moment in a potential discovery that you may have been predicting or even something that would surprise you. Thank you for your work and teaching as I enjoy it tremendously. Best Jim
I dson’t really know. The world’s best archaeologists do pick already the most promising places. Since I’m not an archaeologist, one think I’ve often wondered is why archaeologists don’t target more trash dumps in Egypt as they did in the 1890s at Oxyrhynchus, leading to masses of document discoveries. I’m sure there’s an easy answer and I should find out!
This sounds like The Passover Plot by Hugh Schonfield. Do we know of any connection between his book and the faked eyewitness account? What do other scholars think of Schonfield?
Yup, except he is doing a study rather htan forging a Gospel. I imagine he know about these others. He was a brilliant scholar, but went way out of bounds on PP.
Bart;
not related to this text, but to the general question of whether the bodies of crucified criminals might be released by Roman magistrates for ‘standard’ burial; or otherwise thrown into “some sort of pit” as an invariable element of their death sentence?
You have previously proposed the latter as standard Roman practice – especially in the case of Jesus, as condemned for political opposition to Roman power. Is this still your view?
In your previous discussion you proposed, that even for non-political crimes, there is no ” evidence that Romans allowed criminals crucified for other reasons to be given decent burials”.
In which case, you might be interested in this recent report from ‘British Archaeology’ of a grave excavated in Fenstanton, Cambridgeshire in 2017; which was found to contain an apparently crucified man aged 25-35, nailed through his right heel and laid out on a funeral bier in a family burial plot.
https://www.archaeologyuk.org/resource/free-access-to-crucifixion-in-the-fens-life-and-death-in-roman-fenstanton.html
This burial is likely early 4th century, and we cannot know what crimes the man was accused of; but it confirms other such archaeological findings (in Jerusalem, Egypt and Italy), that crucified criminals might not always expect to be denied burial.
Yup, I”ve read the reports on it. The person was definitely crucified and buried. No one can possibly doubt that. BUT, there is no way to determine WHEN he was buried. That day? Five days after his death? Three weeks after his death?
Thanks Bart.
Nothing in the burial rules out the Fenstanton man having been left to hang on the cross for days after death; though I think the complete state of the skeleton is indicative of his having been laid out and buried immediately after being taken down .
But that was not my question; which was; ‘pit’ or ‘grave’? Assuming that archaeologists are equally as ready to excavate pits as graves; then (now that they know what to look for) we might expect to see accumulating reports of crucified remains in pits, or in graves, or both. But the score now stands as four-nil in favour of grave-burials; which is at least indicative of grave-burial being the preferred option for disposal. And the Lex puteoli inscription does confirm that the proper and prompt disposal of crucified remains was a formally defined matter.
There might have been a deterrent effect in keeping the body on the cross after death; but this would have come at considerable cost:
– in guarding the body,
– in occupying one of the fixed set of crucifixion uprights,
– in the hazards of pollution from contact with flesh freighted with occult power.
Pit/grave? I don’t really know. As to the costs: it’s the repeated claim of our sources that Romans didn’t mind the cost. It’s just what they did to victims, left them hanging. It may have been that they didn’t have to have someone closely guarded, since these were in public places and anyone would know full well what would happen to *them* if they tried to get someone down….
Which are these sources that claim that the Roman authorities “didn’t mind the cost” of crucifixion executions?
I am only aware of the Lex puteoli inscription as dealing explicitly with costs; from which I would draw the opposite conclusion. The magistrates specified in detail the personnel and equipment required to be provided for crucifxions, both private and public, and how these should be paid for. The purpose of the franchise being exactly to ensure that, in exchange for the guaranteed profits accessible from a funerary monopoly across the city, the contractor would also provide gratis – to the specified standard – costly services to dispose of the bodies of slaves and suicides; and to undertake the crucifixion of errant slaves and serious criminals, with the disposal of their cadavers.
One thing clear from the inscription, as in the plays of Plautus, is just how much of a public hazard crucified bodies represented; such that they must only be handled with hooks, and then only while ringing bells. Crucified flesh – especially if still attached to the nails – was much in demand from necromancers and sorcerers, hence the guards.
Yes, the lex puteoli is dealing with a locality hiring executioners and undertakers, and for that there is a cost involved. But this is dealing with private crucifixions of slaves, right? For crucifixions for treason against the state administered by a provincial governor — the executioners would be the soldiers, as would the guards and those who drag the bodies off by hooks to be thrown into pits. That’s just part of the soldiers’ job, not an additional expense. Or so I’ve always thought. Are you thinking of something elsee?
I’m not sure that crucified flesh was in huge demand, though obviously nails with a bit on it could be used sometimes for magical purposes (a lot?). But one didn’t need to get it from the guy still on the cross. We have nails like that still today; I assume they were sometimes just left lying around afterward, when not in use.
The text is here:
https://www.ostia-antica.org/dict/topics/laurentina/presentation/laurentina-9.htm
The inscription envisage two crucifixions in Puteoli ‘private’ execution of slaves by their master for domestic offences (for which the charge payable to the contractor is four sesterces per worker), and ‘public’ excution by the magistrate of those convicted of crimes against the state – for which the contractor provides equipment, labour and consumables free of charge. Both forms of crucifixion are undertaken by the specialist executioners, torturers and body-draggers supplied by the contractor. No doubt state prisoners would also be guarded by soldiers; but they are not the ones’ doing the crucifixion, or disposing of the corpse.
“The workers who will have been trained for this work … are not allowed to enter the city, except for carrying away or laying out in state a deceased person, and for inflicting punishment, provided that each of them, whenever he enters the city or is inside the city, does not go there without the multi-coloured cap on his head.”
For any Roman, contact with a crucified body renders them polluted, such that they cannot afterwards associate freely with anyone else. I cannot imagine any provincial governor would lightly expose their soldiery to such a state.
Yes, that’s more ore less my point. The Roman army did not need to contract the work out. They did it themselves. A local magistrate would have had to get someone else to do it.
Where are you getting hte idea that soldiers could not have contact with a crucified body or that a Roman governor would care about any such thing?
At the risk of belabouring the point;
Maybe Pliny’s remarks in Epistle 4:11 could be informative here (as Pliny was a Roman governor).
“.. when she was being let down into the dreadful pit and her dress caught as she was being lowered, she turned and readjusted it, and when the executioner offered her his hand she declined it and drew back, as though she put away from her with horror the idea of having her chaste and pure body defiled by his loathsome touch”.
Pliny is recounting the scandal of Domitian, as Pontifex Maximus, ordering the execution of the Vestal Virgin Cornelia on a trumped-up charge of incest. Pliny praises Cornelia’s Roman virtue in refusing polluted physical contact with an executioner, even at the extreme point of death.
Of course, the Fenstanton man was not a Vestal Virgin; but this does confirm to me that the death-pollution ingrained in executioners was something Pliny took very seriously indeed.
Though you may also be familiar with Hugh Lindsay’s article ‘Death-pollution and funerals in the city of Rome’; and his observation that deaths encountered in military operations appear never to have incurred pollution. He speculates that “iustum bellum” guarded against pollution.
“The Roman army did not need to contract the work out. They did it themselves”.
The army will have done the torturing and crucifying; but do we have any evidence of the army disposing of the dead body afterwards? The Fenstanton burial is no different from the others in the family plot; so in this case at least, the work was indeed ‘contracted out’; or at least passed over to local burial practitioners.
How much a Roman governor would have cared is difficult to assess; partly (as Cicero asserts) because crucifixion was so polluting an action, that even mentioning it was taboo in ‘polite’ higher status discourse. The only surviving writers who regularly did so, Josephus and Philo, were Jews. I think governors would have cared a lot; and indeed cared more as demonic powers (and protective magic against them) became ever more a pressing everyday reality from 3rd century onwards.
Soldiers too must have been inhibited. The Army was substantially a religious body; anyone ritually polluted would be unable to fulfil their duties. Few soldiers would have been native Romans, but the Army does seem successfully to have established ‘Romanised’ religious practice across all ranks.
“I’m not sure that crucified flesh was in huge demand, though obviously nails with a bit on it could be used sometimes for magical purposes (a lot?)”
Well we do have quite a number of contemporary references to the use of nails both in healing (and protection against the maleficent powers underlying illness); and in active witchcraft.
In sorcery and necromancy, there is the the witch Pamphile; Apuleius Metamophoses 3: 17, 4-5. (Pamphile’s nails had flesh still on them).
In healing, there is Pliny’s Natural History; 28: 11
And of course there is the very extensive Talmudic debate, as to whether a nail from the crucified one – if applied as a powerful healing token – could be carried on the Sabbath (Mishnah, Sabbat 6:10); or whether – as a device of ‘Amorite’ practice (i.e. pagan sorcery), contact with such tokens was altogether forbidden on any day of the week.
There is little doubt that the nails were prized, much sought after, and traded for high prices.
In the examination of artifacts found in the tomb of Joseph Caiaphas were found 2 cruxifixion nails. It’s been suggested that the high priest kept the nails that fixed X’s hands because they were imbued with power from the healer. He clearly didn’t believe in the Nazarene but had heard the stories of his wonder working.
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
by Albert Schweitzer, translated by William Montgomery
Chapter IV. The Earliest Fictitious Lives of Jesus
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Quest_of_the_Historical_Jesus/4
Things are never what they seem …