The Hanging Death of Jesus Christ—And Other New Testament Occurrences

The simple truth is that Jesus was hanged to death after he had been raised from the dead, that is, after he had been crucified. We know that because it is clearly stated in the New Testament. Peter, the rock on whom Jesus said that he would build his church, states in simple language that the official Jewish religious body, the Sanhedrin, killed Jesus by hanging him on a tree after Jesus had been raised from the dead. [Acts 5: 30, “The God of our fathers raised Jesus whom you murdered by hanging on a tree.”] In fact, there are five different statements in the New Testament that claim that Jesus was hanged to death. The hanging death is just one of the events surrounding Jesus that we want to take a look at here from a common sense point of view as well as from a former trial lawyer’s point of view. Another point concerns what Jesus believed his mission on earth to be, whether to save all of mankind or whether he had come only to minister to the Jews. And then there is the matter concerning the Apostle Paul, and whether he advanced the teachings of Jesus, or whether he preached something very different, something of his own making. We can examine these things as they are written in the New Testament. We don’t need outside sources to guide us. The question in part is: can one simply use one’s common sense when reading the New Testament? Well, why not? The language is fairly straight forward. I think that one can, just as one can use common sense when reading the Quran (Koran), or the Old Testament, or the Vedas of Hinduism, or reading about ancient Greek and Roman mythology. What follows has no pretensions to being purely a scholarly work. It is an analysis of portions of the New Testament made with a lawyer’s perspective and with a lawyer’s analytical tools. It is also a common sense discussion of things in the New Testament that appear to be plain on their face. So plain that one wonders how they could be ignored. The original disciples were not men of letters. They had virtually no formal schooling. One need not have a Ph.D. in religion in order to read and understand the contents of the New Testament. That would defeat its very purpose. Let’s be honest, if Jesus did in fact die by hanging this could very well challenge the very foundations of Christian belief. Therefore, it is a very serious issue. Most Christians believe that Jesus died on the cross by crucifixion and rose from the dead on the third day or after three days and later ascended into heaven. Virtually nothing is ever said about Jesus being hanged. The topic is avoided like the plague, even though the matter is clearly discussed in the New Testament. For those who desperately want to believe that there is life after death, that there is a heaven where one can enjoy life everlasting, this might be unsettling information. Or, perhaps not. It has the potential of destroying hopes and dreams based on the belief that Jesus ascended into heaven while he was alive, having come back to life after being killed on the cross. Clearly some people believe that if there is no heaven or hell, and that there is no purpose to life. However, there are tens of millions of people in the United States alone who have no belief in a hereafter but who live happy, fulfilled lives. Whether there is or isn’t a reason for being is not a topic for this discussion. Suffice it to say that many people, even when confronted with plain, simple, indisputable truth, will deny it. Those people have a belief that they want to maintain and will ignore evidence to the contrary, including contradictions contained in the New Testament itself.