Tag: Crucifixion
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Unconditional Love (ii)
I wrote in a previous post that, for me, the symbolic image of Jesus with his arms outstretched on the cross, is a movingly powerful symbol of ‘unconditional love’, which I see as the ‘beating heart’ of Christianity, and its greatest gift to the world. I also noted that my own journey towards this persuasion…
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Questions about Jesus (iii)
In this series of blogs, I’ve been asking firstly why Jesus was crucified, and secondly why not his followers who, instead, were allowed to publicly proclaim him, in the very city in which he’d recently been arrested and crucified – the punishment reserved for insurrectionists against the Roman Empire. Jesus was, arguably, the wrong person,…
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Questions about Jesus (ii)
In this series of blogs, I’m asking firstly why Jesus was crucified, and secondly why not his followers who, instead, were allowed to publicly proclaim him, in the very city in which he’d recently been arrested and crucified – the punishment reserved for insurrectionists against the Roman Empire. The first Gospel, called Mark, appeared around…
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Questions about Jesus (i)
It’s more or less certain that in Jerusalem, in 30 CE, at the time of the Jewish Passover Festival, a man called Jesus of Nazareth, by order of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, was executed by the excruciatingly painful and deliberately humiliating technique of crucifixion. Evidence supporting this is found in the writings of the…
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What a Tangled Web …
Around the year 30, in a provincial backwater in the Roman Empire called Judea, on the banks of the Jordan, a young man appeared. He came under the spell of the fiery preaching of John the Baptiser, threw in his lot with him, and was immersed in the river. It wasn’t long before he became…
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Rethinking Jesus (02) The Sources
At the time of Jesus, it’s been estimated that at least 90% of Palestine’s population was more or less illiterate. In the beginning, therefore, stories about what Jesus said and did, would have been oral, not written. They’d have been carried (and translated), by word of mouth, from Aramaic Palestine to Greek speaking cities in…
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Not so good ‘Good Friday’
Good Friday, in the Gospel accounts, is the day on which Jesus of Nazareth died. What many people don’t know, or don’t care to know, is that in John’s Gospel, he died on the Thursday. Confusingly for the rest of us, the Jewish day runs from sunset to sunset, so Friday begins on what you…
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Two Curious Mysteries …
Most likely in 30 CE, Jesus of Nazareth, we’re told, staged a potentially politically and religiously provocative entry into Jerusalem, accompanied by a band of zealous, loud-voiced followers. He followed that up with an outrageous, table toppling, money scattering ‘demo’ in the Temple, and upped the ante with daily disputes with the religious intelligentsia in…
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