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Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 23.3 (2005) 79-85



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Crucifixion in Rabbinic Context:

Juridical or Theological?

Bard College

1. A Secular, Juridical, versus a Sacred, Theological Reading of the Passion Narratives: What Is the Difference?

How people view the death penalty governs their reading of the Passion narratives. The prevailing picture is simple and secular. Execution after trial and conviction represents a legal punishment after an unjust trial—pure and simple. Jesus was tried for a crime, found guilty, and executed. Reading the execution as penalty for a crime does not accommodate the next chapter in the [End Page 79] story. The resurrection disrupts that narrative rather than completing it and forming its climax. Within that framework, Good Friday alone —the trial, conviction, sentence, and execution—registers. Within the teleology of the juridical narrative there is no accounting for Easter Sunday. That destroys the juridical transaction.

That juridical perspective on the Passion narratives, secular at its heart, governs in the prevailing culture and stresses a secular reading of the matter. It draws attention away from those components of the narratives that underscore an other-than-punitive evaluation, an other-than-juridical approach to the story. There is no compelling logic, from that perspective, that requires the climactic chapter of resurrection.

Accordingly, the culture in which we live affords no space for an other-than-secular perspective, accords short shrift to a final chapter of resurrection and eternal life. So the representation of the Passion Narratives is truncated, with its emphasis on trial and execution, and it is unable to explain the resurrection except as a contradiction. That is why the culture, defying the continuity and logic of the narrative as a whole, dwells on Good Friday, not on Easter Sunday, to speak liturgically: the death of Jesus the man, not the resurrection of Christ, atoning for humanity's sins. That secular reading of the Passion with its emphasis on the horror of the trial and the gruesome penalty inflicted necessarily rather than on the sublime conception realized in the narrative treats as an epilogue what is and theologically is meant to be the climax.

And it is not how the Gospels present the matter. But how else, and in what context if not the juridical one, are we to read the Passion Narratives? A perspective on the death penalty formed within the theology of monotheism restores the correct emphasis of the Passion Narrative, that is, within monotheism we see the climactic place of the resurrection and the realization of eternal life. What I wish to show is how the model of the rabbinic framing of the monotheist narrative allows us to read the Passion narratives in all their proper proportion and perspective: how the crucifixion fits in to the salvific narrative. And that, we shall see, not only accommodates all of the details in a governing theory of the transaction, but imposes the focus on the Passion narratives that the punitive, juridical model distorts.

2. The Monotheist Narrative

To understand the centrality of resurrection in monotheism, and therefore the trial and punishment of the felon as an act of mercy, we have to stand back and ask, why is resurrection, whether of Christ on Easter Sunday or of holy Israel [End Page 80] at the end of days, critical to the monotheist system, whether that system is expressed in philosophical or mythic categories?

Monotheism resolves the problem of evil, which so troubled Ecclesiastes and Job, by a narrative. Specifically, God ultimately will restore that perfection that embodied his plan for creation. In the work of restoration death that comes about by reason of sin will die, the dead will be raised and judged for their deeds in this life, and most of them, having been justified, will go on to eternal life in the world to come. The paradigm of man restored to Eden is realized in Israel's return to the Land of Israel. In that world or age to come, however, that sector of humanity that through the Torah knows...

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