Three views of Jesus' Life, Death, and Resurrection

During the season of Easter, Christians tend to focus mainly on the death and resurrection of Jesus, but historical-Jesus scholar Stephen J. Patterson believes that Jesus’s life is what makes his death and resurrection important. In his book Beyond the Passion: Rethinking the Death and Life of Jesus (Fortress, 2004), Patterson explains his view.

“To celebrate his death apart from the cause for which he lived,” Patterson believes, “would be ridiculous and meaningless. Yet that is what we have done for the most part.” Jesus’s earliest followers were profoundly devoted to his way of life, and they used his death to call attention to his way of life. “They did not see his death or his resurrection as events significant in themselves. They were the fitting end of a life of extraordinary power and vision.” It was a life to be embraced and remembered as revealing God.

The ultimate weapon of terror 

Patterson finds that in order to see what Jesus’s death meant, we need to get clear on what crucifixion was like and on what role it played for people in the Roman Empire of Jesus’s time. The Romans didn’t invent crucifixion, but they perfected it as the ultimate weapon of terror and intimidation, Patterson tells us. It was Rome’s trademark means of executing slaves and peasants involved in treasonous activity against the Empire, especially in outlying districts. Sometimes rebel peasant leaders were crucified individually, and sometimes groups were crucified en masse. Crucifixions happened in plain sight, so that the gruesome display would demoralize observers and break their will. This way of killing peasant nobodies was used to warn others not to do what these nobodies had done.

We tend to picture Jesus and the two thieves on isolated crosses, but apparently that’s unrealistic. Evidently there were often hundreds or even thousands of crosses just outside cities’ entrances, to be seen constantly by the populace as a deterrent to rebellion and crime. “Crucifixion was highly organized, massive state terrorism, intended to intimidate the vast peasant and slave populations of the Empire into passivity,” Patterson explains.

A slow, agonizing, public way to die 

Crucifixion was a very slow, agonizing, public way to die. Loved ones and others could watch, but they couldn’t help the victim, and guards were posted to prevent rescue. By the time the victim’s body was removed, little of it was left. And what little remained would have been piled with other victims’ remains so that the dogs and ravens could finish the work already begun on the cross. “This, too, was the point of crucifixion,” Patterson explains. “The victim was not properly buried... This was, to ancient sensibilities, the curse of eternal shame.” (Doesn’t this information, along with other discoveries of recent decades, make literal interpretation of the gospels’ burial, resurrection, and ascension accounts unconvincing? For me, it does.)

The challenge for Jesus’s followers when he was killed, therefore, was to find meaning in what had happened. Because they kept experiencing what they felt was his presence, they believed that his spirit was not dead—that his death had not been the final word. They felt sure that this man whom the Empire had treated as a nobody was not a nobody.

Examining three ancient Christian ideas 

Followers of Jesus should focus on three separate but related early Christian understandings of Jesus’s death: Jesus as victim, Jesus as martyr, and Jesus as sacrifice. Patterson says that in examining these ancient Christian ideas, he finds a lot that unfortunately has been “long forgotten and lost under the great pile of medieval atonement theology with which most Christians are burdened today.”

Jesus as victim
Jesus was born into an age of peace and security such as the world had never known, led by the Roman Emperor Augustus. But instead of thriving in this age, Jesus ran afoul of it and became its victim. His talk of another empire—one for the beggars, the hungry, the depressed, and the persecuted—was a crime. He became the victim of the Roman Empire as an example to anyone else who might dare to imagine another empire under another God. “If we miss this harsh reality and rush immediately on to the resurrection,” says Patterson, “we risk eviscerating our faith before we ever really take to heart the challenge with which the Christian faith began. It began with the death of a victim.”

Jesus as martyr
The followers of Jesus, however, Stephen Patterson points out, “came very quickly also to understand that Jesus’s death was not merely that of a victim. It had a purpose.” Jesus came to be seen as a martyr. 

“To die nobly for a cause, to remain true to one’s principles to the very end,” Patterson explains, “was a time-honored ideal in Hellenistic culture... The martyr asks of his followers only that they live as he lived, that they embrace the values he embraced, even if it should mean death in the end.”

Seen like this, Patterson tells us, “death is not a disaster, an ending. It is salvation. In this tradition, death is changed from defeat into victory. In fact, a noble death may become the capstone to a well-led life, one that transforms that life and makes it ultimately more useful to others.” In Patterson’s opinion, this view of the noble death, for which Socrates was a model, influenced Jewish writers of the early Christian period. In early Christian writings, therefore, we find many of the ideas associated with martyrdom.

The martyr’s death is ultimately an act of freedom from fear. “Once one has learned to face death without fear,” Patterson explains, “then there really is nothing to be feared.”

“Jesus’s death, as a martyr’s death,” Patterson continues, “is one that frees one from fear—not only the fear of death, but all such fears that would dissuade one from embracing Jesus’s unusual way of thinking about human life and relationships. In this sense, the power of death, and of those who wield its instruments, is vanquished.”

For me, seeing this as the sense in which Jesus overcame death was an eye-opening and helpful result of reading Patterson’s book. The claim that I’ve always heard in church, that somehow Jesus’s death and resurrection overcame death for all those who merely say they believe in him, and guaranteed that they will go to heaven, has never been convincing for me. I can see, however, that really resolving to live in the way that Jesus lived and taught could overcome the fear and therefore the power of death.

In Patterson’s view, “This is the power of the martyr’s death. It enables one to live faithfully to God, free from fear of the consequences that might come from such an act of defiance. The martyr’s death is an act that conquers the power of death itself, by showing that death is not to be feared. The martyr frees one to live the martyr’s life ... ”

“The martyr’s death,” Patterson explains, “is only the final act in his or her life. ... Martyrdom is not, finally, about death. It is about living life meaningfully, fully devoted to the things one believes in most deeply, free from the various fears, both profound and petty, that would usually dissuade one from such a course.”

Jesus as sacrifice 

As Stephen Patterson reminds us, “sacrifice is not a ready metaphor in our cultural parlance,” and the very idea of sacrificing animals is repulsive to most of us. But sacrifice was everywhere in the ancient world in which Christianity arose. Virtually all red meat eaten in a Hellenistic city was sacrificial meat, and in later Roman times, too, the distribution of meat reflected the top-down system in which peasants were at the bottom. “A sacrifice,” Patterson observes, “expresses and reinscribes the ordering of a community through the most elemental of human necessities: food.”

Jewish practice, he finds, differed only in that the foundational sacrifice was a whole burnt offering consumed entirely by the altar fires as a fragrant gift to satisfy Yahweh. However, other frequent offerings were made from the sacrificial slaughter of animals and were designed to purge the community of the polluting effects of transgression or irregularity.

In ancient cultures, sometimes only a human sacrifice would do, Patterson tells us, and most ennobling was a person’s voluntary sacrifice on behalf of his or her people. Seen in this context, Patterson therefore observes, the martyr’s death not only bears witness to a cause. It can also be a sacrifice reconciling sinners with their God, and this is how followers of Jesus came to understand his death. However, “the saving aspect of the martyr’s death cannot be separated from the exemplary aspects of his life.” Paul speaks of the reconciling power of Jesus’s death, Patterson reminds us, but says it is by his life that his followers are saved.

Like sacrifices did in ancient societies for their gods’ followers, Stephen Patterson believes, Jesus’s death created of his followers a community who would be devoted to the same things to which Jesus devoted himself. But by choosing not to sacrifice, the earliest Christians refused to place themselves within the web of social, political, and hierarchical assumptions that bound imperial society together. Jesus’s death therefore became an anti-sacrifice for his followers. It inspired them, says Patterson, “to consider their place in the world and to question it.” 

Maybe that’s the main thing we need this Easter season to do for us.