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The moral laws of the Jewish religion were not abolished by the establishment of Christianity, for Christ came not to destroy these laws, but to make them more perfect. Its ceremonial laws were abolished when the Temple of Jerusalem ceased to be the House of God. By "moral" laws we mean laws regarding good and evil.
By "ceremonial" laws we mean laws regulating the manner of worshipping God in Temple or Church. Mount Calvary was the place of execution, not far from Jerusalem; and the name signifies the "place of skulls. Our Lord was crucified between thieves that His enemies might thus add to His disgrace by making Him equal to the worst criminals. Our Lord's body was wrapped in a clean linen cloth and laid in a new sepulchre or tomb cut in a rock, by Joseph of Arimathea and other pious persons who believed in Our Divine Lord. From the sufferings and death of Christ we learn the great evil of sin, the hatred God bears to it, and the necessity of satisfying for it.
The hell into which Christ's soul descended was not the hell of the dammed, but a place or state of rest called Limbo, where the souls of the just were waiting for Him. Christ descended into Limbo to preach to the souls who were in prison -- that is, to announce to them the joyful tidings of their redemption. Christ rose from the dead, glorious and immortal, on Easter Sunday, the third day after His death.
The Resurrection is the greatest of Christ's miracles because all He taught and did is confirmed by it and depends upon it. He promised to rise from the dead and without the fulfillment of that promise we could not believe in Him. Unbelievers in Christ have tried to disprove the miracle of the resurrection as they have tried to disprove all His other miracles; but the explanations they give to prove Christ's miracles false are far more unlikely and harder to believe than the miracles themselves. When we say Christ rose "glorious" from the dead we mean that His body was in a glorified state; that is, gifted with the qualities of a glorified body.
Christ stayed on earth forty days after His resurrection, to show that He was truly risen from the dead, and to instruct His apostles. Was Christ visible to all and at all times during the forty days He remained on earth after His resurrection? Christ was not visible to all nor at all times during the forty days He remained on earth after His resurrection. We know that He appeared to His apostles and others at least nine times, though He may have appeared oftener. Christ showed that He was truly risen from the dead by eating and conversing with His Apostles and others to whom He appeared.
He showed the wounds in His hands, feet and side, and it was after His resurrection that He gave to His Apostles the power to forgive sins. After forty days Christ ascended into heaven, and the day on which be ascended into heaven is calledAscension Day.
Christ ascended into heaven from Mount Olivet, the place made sacred by His agony on the night before His death. From various parts of Scripture we may conclude there were about persons -- though traditions tell us there was a greater number -- present at the Ascension.
The souls of the just who were waiting in Limbo for the redemption ascended with Christ. They then divided his garments among themselves and cast lots for his seamless robe, according to the Gospel of John. According to the Gospel of John after Jesus' death, one soldier pierced his side with a spear to be certain that he had died.
The Bible describes seven statements that Jesus made while he was on the cross, as well as several supernatural events that occurred. Collectively referred to as the Passion , Jesus' suffering and redemptive death by crucifixion are the central aspects of Christian theology concerning the doctrines of salvation and atonement.
The baptism of Jesus and his crucifixion are considered to be two historically certain facts about Jesus. Tuckett states that, although the exact reasons for the death of Jesus are hard to determine, one of the indisputable facts about him is that he was crucified. While scholars agree on the historicity of the crucifixion, they differ on the reason and context for it.
For example, both E. Sanders and Paula Fredriksen support the historicity of the crucifixion but contend that Jesus did not foretell his own crucifixion and that his prediction of the crucifixion is a "church creation" p. Meier views the crucifixion of Jesus as historical fact and states that, based on the criterion of embarrassment , Christians would not have invented the painful death of their leader.
Although almost all ancient sources relating to crucifixion are literary, the archeological discovery just northeast of Jerusalem of the body of a crucified man dated to the 1st century provided good confirmatory evidence that crucifixions occurred during the Roman period roughly according to the manner in which the crucifixion of Jesus is described in the gospels.
The analyses at the Hadassah Medical School estimated that he died in his late 20s. Another relevant archaeological find, which also dates to the 1st century AD, is an unidentified heel bone with a spike discovered in a Jerusalem gravesite, now held by the Israel Antiquities Authority and displayed in the Israel Museum. The earliest detailed accounts of the death of Jesus are contained in the four canonical gospels.
There are other, more implicit references in the New Testament epistles. In the synoptic gospels, Jesus predicts his death in three separate places. His death is described as a sacrifice in the Gospels and other books of the New Testament. Scholars note that the reader receives an almost hour-by-hour account of what is happening. After arriving at Golgotha , Jesus was offered wine mixed with myrrh or gall to drink. Matthew's and Mark's Gospels record that he refused this.
He was then crucified and hung between two convicted thieves. According to some translations of the original Greek, the thieves may have been bandits or Jewish rebels. According to the Gospel of John, the Roman soldiers did not break Jesus' legs, as they did to the two crucified thieves breaking the legs hastened the onset of death , as Jesus was dead already. Each gospel has its own account of Jesus' last words, seven statements altogether. Following Jesus' death, his body was removed from the cross by Joseph of Arimathea and buried in a rock-hewn tomb , with Nicodemus assisting.
According to all four gospels, Jesus was brought to the " Place of a Skull " [28] and crucified with two thieves, [29] with the charge of claiming to be " King of the Jews ", [30] and the soldiers divided his clothes [31] before he bowed his head and died. Luke is the only gospel writer to omit the detail of sour wine mix that was offered to Jesus on a reed, [43] while only Mark and John describe Joseph actually taking the body down off the cross.
There are several details that are only found in one of the gospel accounts. According to the First Epistle to the Corinthians 1 Cor. Luke also wrote the Acts of the Apostles as a follow-up volume to his Gospel account, and the two works must be considered as a whole. In Mark, Jesus is crucified along with two rebels, and the sun goes dark or is obscured for three hours. An early non-Christian reference to the crucifixion of Jesus is likely to be Mara Bar-Serapion's letter to his son, written some time after AD 73 but before the 3rd century AD.
Socrates , Pythagoras , and "the wise king" of the Jews. Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross Most modern scholars agree that while this Josephus passage called the Testimonium Flavianum includes some later interpolations , it originally consisted of an authentic nucleus with a reference to the execution of Jesus by Pilate.
Early in the second century another reference to the crucifixion of Jesus was made by Tacitus , generally considered one of the greatest Roman historians. Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.
Scholars generally consider the Tacitus reference to the execution of Jesus by Pilate to be genuine, and of historical value as an independent Roman source. Another possible reference to the crucifixion "hanging" cf. On the eve of the Passover Yeshu was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald went forth and cried, 'He is going forth to be stoned because he has practised sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy.
Anyone who can say anything in his favour, let him come forward and plead on his behalf. Muslims maintain that Jesus was not crucified and that those who thought they had killed him had mistakenly killed Judas Iscariot , Simon of Cyrene , or someone else in his place. Nay, Allah raised him up unto Himself". Some early Christian Gnostic sects, believing Jesus did not have a physical substance, denied that he was crucified. There is no consensus regarding the exact date of the crucifixion of Jesus, although it is generally agreed by biblical scholars that it was on a Friday on or near Passover Nisan 15 , during the governorship of Pontius Pilate who ruled AD 26— Since an observational calendar was used during the time of Jesus, including an ascertainment of the new moon and ripening barley harvest, the exact day or even month for Passover in a given year is subject to speculation.
Various approaches have been used to estimate the year of the crucifixion, including the canonical Gospels, the chronology of the life of Paul, as well as different astronomical models. The consensus of scholarship is that the New Testament accounts represent a crucifixion occurring on a Friday, but a Thursday or Wednesday crucifixion have also been proposed. Others have countered by saying that this ignores the Jewish idiom by which a "day and night" may refer to any part of a hour period, that the expression in Matthew is idiomatic, not a statement that Jesus was 72 hours in the tomb, and that the many references to a resurrection on the third day do not require three literal nights.
The three Synoptic Gospels refer to a man called Simon of Cyrene whom the Roman soldiers order to carry the cross after Jesus initially carries it but then collapses, [98] while the Gospel of John just says that Jesus "bears" his own cross. Luke's gospel also describes an interaction between Jesus and the women among the crowd of mourners following him, quoting Jesus as saying "Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children.
For behold, the days are coming when they will say, 'Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed! The Gospel of Luke has Jesus address these women as "daughters of Jerusalem", thus distinguishing them from the women whom the same gospel describes as "the women who had followed him from Galilee" and who were present at his crucifixion. It is marked by nine of the fourteen Stations of the Cross. There is no reference to a woman named Veronica [] in the Gospels, but sources such as Acta Sanctorum describe her as a pious woman of Jerusalem who, moved with pity as Jesus carried his cross to Golgotha , gave him her veil that he might wipe his forehead.
The precise location of the crucifixion remains a matter of conjecture, but the biblical accounts indicate that it was outside the city walls of Jerusalem, [Jn. One is that as a place of public execution, Calvary may have been strewn with the skulls of abandoned victims which would be contrary to Jewish burial traditions, but not Roman. Another is that Calvary is named after a nearby cemetery which is consistent with both of the proposed modern sites. A third is that the name was derived from the physical contour, which would be more consistent with the singular use of the word, i.
While often referred to as "Mount Calvary", it was more likely a small hill or rocky knoll. The traditional site, inside what is now occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Christian Quarter of the Old City , has been attested since the 4th century.
A second site commonly referred to as Gordon's Calvary [] , located further north of the Old City near a place popularly called the Garden Tomb , has been promoted since the 19th century. The Gospel of Matthew describes many women at the crucifixion, some of whom are named in the Gospels. Aside from these women, the three Synoptic Gospels speak of the presence of others: The Gospel of John also speaks of women present, but only mentions the soldiers [] and "the disciple whom Jesus loved ".
The Gospels also tell of the arrival, after the death of Jesus, of Joseph of Arimathea [] and of Nicodemus. Whereas most Christians believe the gibbet on which Jesus was executed was the traditional two-beamed cross, the Jehovah's Witnesses hold the view that a single upright stake was used.
The Greek and Latin words used in the earliest Christian writings are ambiguous. The latter means wood a live tree, timber or an object constructed of wood ; in earlier forms of Greek, the former term meant an upright stake or pole, but in Koine Greek it was used also to mean a cross. However, early Christian writers who speak of the shape of the particular gibbet on which Jesus died invariably describe it as having a cross-beam.
For instance, the Epistle of Barnabas , which was certainly earlier than , [] and may have been of the 1st century AD, [] the time when the gospel accounts of the death of Jesus were written, likened it to the letter T the Greek letter tau , which had the numeric value of , [] and to the position assumed by Moses in Exodus For the lamb, which is roasted, is roasted and dressed up in the form of the cross.
For one spit is transfixed right through from the lower parts up to the head, and one across the back, to which are attached the legs of the lamb. The assumption of the use of a two-beamed cross does not determine the number of nails used in the crucifixion and some theories suggest three nails while others suggest four nails. After the Renaissance most depictions use three nails, with one foot placed on the other. The placing of the nails in the hands, or the wrists is also uncertain.
Another issue of debate has been the use of a hypopodium as a standing platform to support the feet, given that the hands may not have been able to support the weight.
In the 17th century Rasmus Bartholin considered a number of analytical scenarios of that topic. The Gospels describe various "last words" that Jesus said while on the cross, [] as follows:. The only words of Jesus on the cross mentioned in the Mark and Matthew accounts, this is a quotation of Psalm Since other verses of the same Psalm are cited in the crucifixion accounts, some commentators consider it a literary and theological creation; however, Geza Vermes points out that the verse is cited in Aramaic rather than the Hebrew in which it usually would have been recited, and suggests that by the time of Jesus, this phrase had become a proverbial saying in common usage.
The Gospel of Luke does not include the aforementioned exclamation of Jesus mentioned in Matthew and Mark. The words of Jesus on the cross, especially his last words , have been the subject of a wide range of Christian teachings and sermons, and a number of authors have written books specifically devoted to the last sayings of Christ. The synoptics report various miraculous events during the crucifixion. In the synoptic narrative, while Jesus is hanging on the cross, the sky over Judea or the whole world is "darkened for three hours," from the sixth to the ninth hour noon to mid-afternoon.
There is no reference to darkness in the Gospel of John account, in which the crucifixion does not take place until after noon. Some Christian writers considered the possibility that pagan commentators may have mentioned this event, mistaking it for a solar eclipse - although this would have been impossible during the Passover, which takes place at the full moon. Christian traveller and historian Sextus Julius Africanus and Christian theologian Origen refer to Greek historian Phlegon , who lived in the 2nd century AD, as having written "with regard to the eclipse in the time of Tiberius Caesar, in whose reign Jesus appears to have been crucified, and the great earthquakes which then took place" [].
Sextus Julius Africanus further refers to the writings of historian Thallus: For the Hebrews celebrate the passover on the 14th day according to the moon, and the passion of our Saviour falls on the day before the passover; but an eclipse of the sun takes place only when the moon comes under the sun. Colin Humphreys and W. Waddington of Oxford University considered the possibility that a lunar, rather than solar, eclipse might have taken place.
Historian David Henige dismisses this explanation as 'indefensible' [] and astronomer Bradley Schaefer points out that the lunar eclipse would not have been visible during daylight hours.
Modern biblical scholarship treats the account in the synoptic gospels as a literary creation by the author of the Mark Gospel, amended in the Luke and Matthew accounts, intended to heighten the importance of what they saw as a theologically significant event, and not intended to be taken literally. The synoptic gospels state that the veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom. The Gospel of Matthew mentions an account of earthquakes, rocks splitting, and the opening of the graves of dead saints and describes how these resurrected saints went into the holy city and appeared to many people.
In the Mark and Matthew accounts, the centurion in charge comments on the events: If the last possibility is true, this would mean that the report of an earthquake in the Gospel of Matthew is a type of allegory. A number of theories to explain the circumstances of the death of Jesus on the cross have been proposed by physicians and Biblical scholars.
In , Matthew W Maslen and Piers D Mitchell reviewed over 40 publications on the subject with theories ranging from cardiac rupture to pulmonary embolism. In , based on the reference in the Gospel of John John The cardiovascular collapse theory is a prevalent modern explanation and suggests that Jesus died of profound shock. According to this theory, the scourging, the beatings, and the fixing to the cross would have left Jesus dehydrated, weak, and critically ill and that this would have led to cardiovascular collapse. Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association , physician William Edwards and his colleagues supported the combined cardiovascular collapse via hypovolemic shock and exhaustion asphyxia theories, assuming that the flow of water from the side of Jesus described in the Gospel of John [ In his book The Crucifixion of Jesus , physician and forensic pathologist Frederick Zugibe studied the likely circumstances of the death of Jesus in great detail.
In these cases the amount of pull and the corresponding pain was found to be significant. Pierre Barbet , a French physician, and the chief surgeon at Saint Joseph's Hospital in Paris , [] hypothesized that Jesus would have had to relax his muscles to obtain enough air to utter his last words, in the face of exhaustion asphyxia.
God saves you by His grace. There have also been a number of films telling the passion story , with a prominent example being Mel Gibson 's The Passion of the Christ. From the sufferings and death of Christ we learn the great evil of sin, the hatred God bears to it, and the necessity of satisfying for it. Jesus had to experience that in our place. A soldier pierces his side with a spear.
Orthopedic surgeon Keith Maxwell not only analyzed the medical aspects of the crucifixion, but also looked back at how Jesus could have carried the cross all the way along Via Dolorosa. In an article for the Catholic Medical Association , Phillip Bishop and physiologist Brian Church suggested a new theory based on suspension trauma.
In , historians FP Retief and L Cilliers reviewed the history and pathology of crucifixion as performed by the Romans and suggested that the cause of death was often a combination of factors. They also state that Roman guards were prohibited from leaving the scene until death had occurred.
The accounts of the crucifixion and subsequent resurrection of Jesus provide a rich background for Christological analysis, from the canonical Gospels to the Pauline epistles. In Johannine "agent Christology" the submission of Jesus to crucifixion is a sacrifice made as an agent of God or servant of God, for the sake of eventual victory. A central element in the Christology presented in the Acts of the Apostles is the affirmation of the belief that the death of Jesus by crucifixion happened "with the foreknowledge of God, according to a definite plan".
Paul's Christology has a specific focus on the death and resurrection of Jesus. For Paul, the crucifixion of Jesus is directly related to his resurrection and the term "the cross of Christ" used in Galatians 6: However, the belief in the redemptive nature of Jesus' death predates the Pauline letters and goes back to the earliest days of Christianity and the Jerusalem church. John Calvin supported the "agent of God" Christology and argued that in his trial in Pilate's Court Jesus could have successfully argued for his innocence, but instead submitted to crucifixion in obedience to the Father.
The Day. Jesus the Christ Died. The Biblical Truth About His. Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection by Fred R. Coulter. York Publishing Company. Post Office. The date of Jesus Christ's birth has been a topic of controversy for centuries. Christ Died. The Biblical Truth About His Passion, Crucifixion and Resurrection.
In the Eastern Church Sergei Bulgakov argued that the crucifixion of Jesus was " pre-eternally " determined by the Father before the creation of the world, to redeem humanity from the disgrace caused by the fall of Adam. Jesus' death and resurrection underpin a variety of theological interpretations as to how salvation is granted to humanity. These interpretations vary widely in how much emphasis they place on the death of Jesus as compared to his words. Evangelical Protestants typically hold a substitutionary view and in particular hold to the theory of penal substitution.