Theology: Did Christ Die on the Cross?

The linchpin truth proclaimed by the Christian Gospels—”the central fact of all history,” as 17th century Bishop Jacques Bossuet put it—is that Christ was crucified in Jerusalem, that he died on the cross, was buried, and on the third day rose from the dead.

If this supernaturalistic event did not take place, as unbelievers hold, it requires a natural explanation, and many have been offered. The Gospel According to Matthew says that on learning of the empty tomb, Jewish leaders spread the story that the disciples had stolen Christ’s body. Celsus, a 2nd century anti-Christian polemicist, suggested that the Resurrection was a figment of Mary Magdalene’s unbalanced mind. Sir James Frazer depicted the Resurrection as a variation of the Osiris, Attis and Adonis legends, symbolizing the death and rebirth of nature. French Author Pierre Nahor wrote that Jesus did not die on the cross but only feigned death by putting himself into a cataleptic trance.

A Careful Plot. Now, British Writer Hugh J. Schonfield, who was born in London to Orthodox Jewish parents, offers his theories in a book called The Passover Plot, published in England and currently causing a flurry there. He argues that while on the cross, Jesus took a drug that rendered him unconscious and made him appear dead when he was taken down, so that later he could be-removed from the tomb by friends intent on restoring him to a long and healthy life.

Schonfield, 64, became interested in Christianity at 17, when he was a student of New Testament Scholar R. H. Strachan at the University of Glasgow. In a career of publishing and writing, he has increasingly concentrated on Christ. In Passover Plot his thesis is that Jesus believed himself to be the “expected Messiah of Israel” and that he set out deliberately to fulfill the Old Testament prophecies of the rejection of the Messiah, his suffering as expiation of the sins of the world and his ultimate triumph over death. Jesus, says Schonfield, “carefully plotted” every step of his brief public ministry so that the prophecies concerning the Messiah would be fulfilled.

From his knowledge of scriptures, Jesus believed that the “messianic drama must be acted out” in Jerusalem, the spiritual and political capital of the Jewish people. Several months before Passover, says the Gospel According to John, Jesus went to Jerusalem “not openly, but as it were in secret.”÷ The purpose of this journey was, Schonfield guesses, to set the stage “for the drama to be enacted at the Passover” by enlisting the secret support of Lazarus, Joseph of Arimathea (“one of the great mysteries of the Gospels, a wealthy man and a member of the Sanhedrin”) and others.

Careful Timing. Then, on Palm Sunday, Jesus made his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, went to the temple, drove out the money-changers, denounced the religious leaders. This alarmed the priesthood, and sealed his fate. The high priest Caiaphas had already said to the Sanhedrin: “It is in your interest that one man should die for the people, rather than the whole nation perish.”

Jesus, sensing Judas’ cupidity, chose him as the instrument of betrayal in order to fulfill the prophecy of Psalms: “Mine own familiar friend in whom I trusted . . . hath lifted up his heel against me.” Jesus’ “stratagem,” says Schonfield, was “designed to pile on the pressure at the crucial moment and induce the traitor to act.” When Mary washed his feet with precious ointment, Jesus let “fall the words about his body being anointed for burial.” Like “an inspiration it came to” Judas “that money was to be made by doing what Jesus plainly wanted. The tempter came in the guise of his Master,” says Schonfield.

Jesus chose “the day of his death” by allowing himself to be arrested the night before the start of Passover; he pronounced his own death sentence when answering Caiaphas’ question, “Are you the Messiah?” He bluntly said, “Yes, I am.” Such careful timing assured Jesus that his body would be taken down before the start of the Sabbath, in accordance with Jewish law. Thus, he was on the cross only three hours, though ordinarily it took days for a man to die from agony and exhaustion in that form of execution.

Mandrake Wine. According to plan, Schonfield suggests, Jesus’ body was turned over to Joseph of Arimathea. Jesus’ legs were not broken with mallets as were those of the robbers crucified with him; vinegar supplied to him by an unnamed onlooker, which in the Gospels preceded his “giving up the ghost,” was probably a drug. University of California Anthropologist Michael J. Harner, corroborating Schonfield, said last week that wine made from the mandrake plant was used in Palestine to induce a deathlike state in persons who were being crucified.

Some of the plotters, Schonfield conjectures, got Jesus from the tomb during the second night, but he probably died soon thereafter from the unforeseen wound inflicted by the thrust of the Roman soldier’s spear into his side. The body was then buried in another place. All of this was done in utmost secrecy because it was a capital offense under Roman law to desecrate the tombs of the dead.

The historical problem of the life of Jesus, as tackled by scholars from David Friedrich Strauss in 1835 to Albert Schweitzer and De-Mythologizer Rudolf Bultmann, is that the evidence for the empty tomb and the Resurrection comes from divergent Gospel accounts. Bultmann asserted that the Resurrection is not a historical event and is “nothing other than faith in the cross as the salvation event.” Schweitzer rejected both the empty tomb and the Resurrection as legendary, stressing that they were unnecessary to the truths proclaimed by Jesus in his teachings. Schonfield claims that as a Jew he has no need to torture the no-Resurrection theory into some form of support for Christianity, but he does not discredit Christ. Instead, he argues that Christ was indeed the Messiah—the Son of Man, as he thought of himself, but not the Son of God—who had been foretold by the Jewish prophets of old, and that this is glory enough.

÷ Schonfield frequently uses his own translation of the New Testament.