Why Was Jesus killed? - The BAS Library

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“Daddy, why was Jesus killed?” my four year-old son asked me as we drove through the rain to pick up a visitor at the London airport some 20 years ago. His question was very different from “Why did Jesus die?” to which the most familiar answer is “He died for the sins of the world.” But I knew that answer wouldn’t work. It makes no historical sense to say, “Jesus was killed for the sins of the world.” The question has seemed significant to me ever since. It is very important for Jewish-Christian relations. It also enables us to […]

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Endnotes

See Gerald G. O’Collins, “Crucifixion” in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), vol. 1, pp. 1207–1210.

For a compact summary, see E.P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), pp. 294–318.

I owe the useful phrase “privy council” and this understanding of what happened in part to the very helpful popular book by the Jewish scholar Ellis Rivkin, What Crucified Jesus? (Nashville: Abingdon, 1984).

In the judgment of many scholars, this is probably right. See, for example, Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, pp. 301–304.

See John 11:47–53, where the high priest Caiaphas argues that it is better to put Jesus to death than to take a chance on a popular uprising. In this case, John’s Gospel (in general highly symbolic and not very historical) may be closer to what happened than are the accounts of a Jewish trial in the Synoptic Gospels.

See especially Walter Wink’s treatment of Jesus’ attack upon the domination system in his Engaging the Powers (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1992), pp. 109–137.