Jesus of Nazareth Is Crucified Under Pontius Pilate
The single best-documented fact of his life is also the one a Roman governor ordered
Quick facts
- Traditional date
- c. 30-33 CE
- Roman official who ordered execution
- Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea
- Earliest surviving Christian writing
- Paul's letters, from c. 49 CE onward
- Non-Christian corroboration
- Tacitus, Annals, Book 15 (c. 116 CE)
What happened
No writing survives from Jesus's own lifetime. The Yale historian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza's observation, that one can glimpse only the historical shadow of Jesus and that the picture depends on the lens used, sums up a real limit in the evidence: the earliest sources are Paul's letters, written roughly two decades after the events they describe, and the Gospels, composed later still. Non-Christian writers of the following century, including the Roman historian Tacitus, treated Jesus's execution as a settled historical fact rather than a live question, recording that Christus was put to death by the procurator Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. Historians broadly accept that a Jewish teacher named Jesus was executed by Roman authority in Judea in this period; the theological claims made about him and many biographical details are separate questions the historical method cannot settle.
Why it matters
The gap between the thin first-century record and the fuller portrait that later Christian writing built matters because it shapes how historians, as opposed to theologians, can talk about Christian origins. Successive generations of scholars, from nineteenth-century rationalists through Albert Schweitzer's critique of them to the mid-twentieth-century revival of the question, have each reconstructed a different Jesus, a pattern that is itself part of the historical record.
How we know
The execution is independently attested by the non-Christian historian Tacitus writing around 116 CE and by the Christian sources Paul's letters and the Gospels, none of which are eyewitness documents written at the time.
Sources
- Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University. Cornelius Tacitus, The Annals, Book XV, Chapter 44 · Primary source (author-declared)perseus.tufts.edu · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
- Reflections, Yale Divinity School. The Historical Jesus: Then and Now · Reputable sourcereflections.yale.edu · The domain "reflections.yale.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Part of a timelineHistory of Christianity28 events · A crucified Jewish teacher, a persecuted sect that became an empire's official religion, and two thousand years of councils, schisms, and missions that carried it to every continentView all →