Why was Jesus executed?

Tacitus, writing around 116 and explaining where a despised superstition came from, says Christus "suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus".

He has no interest in commending any of this. That is what makes the sentence useful: the execution is background information in a hostile account, which is the least likely kind of detail to have been invented by the people it is about.

Mark has Pilate open with "Are you the King of the Jews?" and the inscription of the charge read "THE KING OF THE JEWS". John says it was written in Hebrew, Latin and Greek, which is a notice to passers-by rather than a verdict for a file.

Whatever the hearing was about, the sentence was carried out under a title that names a rival to Caesar. That is the charge all four Gospels put over the cross, and it is a political one.

Mark names Barabbas as bound "with his fellow insurgents, men who in the insurrection had committed murder". The scene sets one prisoner against another, and both are in custody at Passover, in a city full of pilgrims.

The setting is a crowded occupied capital at its most combustible week. That is the situation a governor is managing.

Josephus, describing the siege of Jerusalem in 70, about forty years later, says those caught leaving the city to look for food were whipped, tortured and "crucified before the wall of the city", five hundred a day and on some days more, and that the reason the commander did not stop it was the hope that the sight would make the city yield.

He is describing a siege and not a trial, and that is the point. The instrument was chosen for what watching it did to everybody else.

The candidate with the most text behind it is the temple. Mark puts an action there: tables overturned, "a den of robbers", and chief priests and scribes who "sought how they might destroy him" and feared him, because the crowd was astonished at his teaching.

An incident in the temple courts at Passover is both a religious act and a public order problem, and the high priests who ran the temple were appointed and removed by the Roman governor.

Most scholars take the act itself to be authentic. Paula Fredriksen doubts both the act and Mark’s link between it and the arrest: he was executed without his followers, which suggests Pilate did not think them dangerous.

John has Jesus tell Pilate, on the morning of the execution, "my Kingdom is not of this world", and has his accusers answer Pilate with "we have no king but Caesar" and with a law about making himself the Son of God. Read one way that is a theological charge translated into a political one for a governor who would not care about the first.

Read another way it is a later writer explaining why a Roman court, not a Jewish one, did the killing. The text is doing both at once and cannot be made to do only one.

Each Gospel after Mark is kinder to Pilate than Mark is, and a reader can check it. In Mark he simply gives way: “wishing to please the multitude, released Barabbas to them, and handed over Jesus”. In Matthew he washes his hands in front of the crowd and says “I am innocent of the blood of this righteous person”, and the crowd, “all the people” in Matthew’s words, answers “May his blood be on us and on our children!” In Luke he states three times that he finds no basis for a charge, and in John he says it and keeps trying to release him. The weight taken off Pilate falls on the chief priests and the crowd. They were written in the decades when a movement with a crucified founder had to explain itself to the empire that had done the crucifying, and a number of scholars read the shift as shaped by that. Matthew’s line about the blood has also been read as the polemic of a community at odds with the synagogues after 70.

Josephus describes a different governor: the man who brought the emperor’s images into Jerusalem by night, knowing the law forbade them, and who took them away only when the protesters bared their necks rather than disperse. When a crowd objected to temple money being spent on an aqueduct, he sent soldiers among them dressed as civilians, with daggers under their clothes, and a great number were killed. That is not the hand-washing magistrate of the Gospels.

There is no transcript, and Tacitus, the Roman historian who records the execution, says nothing about the hearing. The accounts we have were written decades later. They put Peter, and in John another disciple, in the high priest’s courtyard, and none of them puts anyone from his side in the room with Pilate.

The Gospels do not agree on the Jewish hearing. Mark and Matthew have the council sit at night and condemn him; Luke has it meet at daybreak and pass no sentence; John has no hearing before the council at all, only a questioning by Annas, and places the council’s decision earlier, without him present. Whether there was a formal trial before the Jewish council, what procedure it followed, what he was asked and what he answered: none of that is recoverable. The dialogue in the Gospels is the earliest Christian understanding of the hearing, which is a real historical thing, and it is not a record of it.

A man can go to a capital at festival, act in the temple, and be understood as a king by his followers, by the authorities, or by neither. Which of those he intended is the question under all the others, and the sources are not the kind that answer it.

Christianity does not treat the execution only as a miscarriage of justice. It treats it as the centre of the account, freely undergone and, in the words of the creed of 381, “crucified also for us”.

None of that is visible to a historian. What a historian can say is that a movement built around an executed man put the instrument of the execution at the centre of its preaching, which is an odd thing to do with an embarrassment and was noticed as odd at the time.

Who is responsible for this death has been answered, for many centuries, by pointing at a people. A paper commended by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in 1987 says it was the church’s teaching to label Jews “Christ-killers” and a “deicide race”. The evidence does not support that reading and the history of what was done with it is its own subject, treated in the question about the parting of the ways.

The Catholic Church rejected it at the Second Vatican Council in 1965. The council granted that “the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ”, and said that what happened “cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today”.

What the sources show is a Roman sentence, carried out by Roman soldiers, on a charge Rome recognised, after the chief priests and the council, in the Gospels’ telling, had handed him over.