Did Jesus Really Die? The Crucifixion, Burial, and Empty Tomb

Apologetics · Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? · Part 2

Key passages: 1 Corinthians 15:3–5; Mark 15:37–16:8; John 19:30–20:18

Part 1 established that resurrection belief appears at the beginning of Christianity, not centuries later. But an early claim is not necessarily a true one. Before asking what best explains the resurrection proclamation, we first need to establish what happened to Jesus: Did He actually die, was He buried, and is there historical reason to believe the tomb was empty?

Previous study: What Did the Earliest Christians Actually Claim About the Resurrection? examines how early the resurrection proclamation can be traced and whether it developed as a later Christian legend.

Jesus Was Executed by Rome

All four Gospels describe Jesus’ crucifixion under Pontius Pilate, and Paul’s earlier testimony begins simply:

“Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.”
1 Corinthians 15:3 NIV

The evidence does not depend entirely on Christian writings.

Writing around AD 116, the Roman historian Tacitus explains the origins of Christianity while describing Nero’s persecution of Christians in Rome. Tacitus reports that Christus, from whom the movement received its name, suffered the death penalty during the reign of Tiberius under Pontius Pilate.

Tacitus was openly hostile toward Christianity, which makes his account useful as non-Christian corroboration of the central historical claim: Jesus was executed under Roman authority.

The precise physiological mechanism of death by crucifixion remains medically debated, but its purpose does not. Crucifixion was a Roman method of execution.

For readers who want a detailed medical examination, William D. Edwards, MD, Wesley J. Gabel, and Floyd E. Hosmer’s “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ,” published in JAMA in 1986, examines Roman scourging, crucifixion, and the medical evidence surrounding Jesus’ death. The authors conclude that Jesus was dead when removed from the cross. A later review in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine surveys the different proposed physiological mechanisms of death, reminding us not to make the historical case depend upon one particular medical reconstruction.

This also makes the theory that Jesus simply survived the crucifixion extremely difficult to sustain. Even if a severely injured Jesus had somehow survived, His reappearance would have demonstrated survival, not resurrection.

Related reading: How Can a Righteous God Bring Unrighteous People to Himself? moves from the historical fact of Christ’s death to its theological significance, including His sacrificial death, righteousness, justification, and the way sinners are brought to God through Christ.

Was Jesus Buried?

The early tradition quoted by Paul does not move directly from Jesus’ death to His resurrection:

“that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day.”
1 Corinthians 15:4 NIV

Burial was already part of the tradition Paul had received.

The Gospel accounts identify Joseph of Arimathea as the man who requested Jesus’ body from Pilate and placed it in a tomb. Mark describes Joseph as a prominent member of the Jewish council.

Roman authorities sometimes left crucified bodies exposed or disposed of them without individual burial, which has led some historians to question whether Jesus received the kind of burial described in the Gospels.

Archaeology, however, demonstrates that burial of a crucified Jewish man in first-century Jerusalem was possible.

In 1968, archaeologists excavating a tomb at Giv’at ha-Mivtar near Jerusalem discovered the remains of a first-century Jewish man commonly called Yehohanan. An iron nail remained embedded through his heel, providing direct archaeological evidence that he had been crucified. His remains had nevertheless been placed in a Jewish tomb and later gathered into an ossuary.

The precise reconstruction of how he was positioned on the cross has been revised and debated, but the central archaeological fact remains: a crucified Jewish man received burial in a tomb.

Yehohanan does not prove that Jesus was buried in Joseph’s tomb. He does establish that such a burial fits known first-century Jewish practice under Roman rule and cannot simply be dismissed as historically implausible.

Was the Tomb Empty?

Here it is helpful to distinguish the strength of the evidence.

Jesus’ crucifixion and death rest on exceptionally strong historical ground. His burial also has substantial support. The empty tomb is less firmly established than the crucifixion itself, but several features of the evidence support taking the tradition seriously.

First, the Gospel accounts consistently place women, especially Mary Magdalene, at the discovery of the tomb. It is sometimes claimed that women’s testimony was universally inadmissible in antiquity. That goes too far. Yet women could carry less public evidentiary and social weight than men in many ancient settings. Their prominence as the first discoverers is therefore noteworthy rather than the obvious choice for a fabricated apologetic story.

Second, the earliest Christian sources locate the resurrection proclamation in Jerusalem, where Jesus had recently been executed. The message was not simply that Jesus’ influence continued or that His spirit lived on. It claimed that the man who had died and been buried had been raised.

Third, Matthew preserves a competing explanation that the disciples removed Jesus’ body. Because Matthew is itself a Christian source, this cannot serve as independent confirmation of an empty tomb. Still, the controversy it preserves is noteworthy because it attempts to explain an absent body rather than deny one.

None of these considerations needs to carry the argument alone. Taken together, they give the empty-tomb tradition meaningful historical support and make what happened to Jesus’ body a question that requires explanation.

Related reading: Can We Trust the Text of the Bible? examines the manuscript evidence behind the New Testament texts being considered here and explains why modern scholars can critically evaluate their wording rather than relying on a chain of repeated translations.

An Empty Tomb Is Not a Resurrection

Even if we conclude that Jesus died, was buried, and His tomb was later found empty, we have not yet demonstrated that God raised Him from the dead.

A missing body could, in principle, have other explanations.

Christianity, however, did not begin merely with people saying:

“The tomb is empty.”

They said something much more specific:

“We have seen Him alive.”

That changes the historical question.

Jesus had been executed. His followers knew He had died. Yet shortly afterward, individuals and groups became convinced that they had encountered Him alive again.

The next step in the investigation is therefore not simply to keep examining the tomb.

It is to examine the witnesses.

Sources & Further Study

Primary ancient sources

• 1 Corinthians 15:3–5. Paul’s early summary of Jesus’ death, burial, resurrection, and appearances.
• Mark 15:37–16:8; Matthew 27:50–28:15; Luke 23:46–24:12; John 19:30–20:18. The Gospel accounts of Jesus’ death, burial, and the discovery of the empty tomb.
• Tacitus, Annals 15.44. A non-Christian Roman account identifying Christus as having suffered the death penalty under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius.

Medical and archaeological studies

• William D. Edwards, MD, Wesley J. Gabel, MDiv, and Floyd E. Hosmer, MS, “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ,” Journal of the American Medical Association 255, no. 11 (1986): 1455–1463. A detailed medical reconstruction of scourging, crucifixion, and Jesus’ death.
• Matthew W. Maslen and Piers D. Mitchell, “Medical Theories on the Cause of Death in Crucifixion,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99, no. 4 (2006): 185–188. A useful review of the competing medical explanations for how crucifixion caused death.
• Joseph Zias and Eliezer Sekeles, “The Crucified Man from Giv’at ha-Mivtar: A Reappraisal,” Israel Exploration Journal 35 (1985): 22–27. A scholarly reexamination of the archaeological remains of Yehohanan, a crucified first-century Jewish man who received burial.

Further historical study

• Dale C. Allison Jr., The Resurrection of Jesus: Apologetics, Polemics, History. Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2021. A detailed historical treatment that carefully weighs both the evidence for the resurrection traditions and competing interpretations.
• N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press, 2003. A major study of resurrection within ancient Jewish, Greco-Roman, and early Christian thought.

These sources do not all approach the resurrection from the same theological perspective. They are included to allow readers to examine the historical, archaeological, and medical evidence more fully.

Next in the series: Why Did Jesus’ Followers Believe They Had Seen Him Alive?