Chapter 4 Summary

Most scholars, including the ancient writers, Josephus, a Jewish historian, and Tacitus, the Roman, agree that Jesus Christ was crucified by Pontius Pilate. This was doing a tenuous time of Roman/Jewish relations. Not long after his death, a Roman soldier, expressing contempt for the Jews by exposing himself in the Temple courtyard during a Passover feast, triggered a riot, killing 30,000 people. Although not many doubt the basic history of Jesus and the Jews' relationship to the Romans, the meaning of the actual crucifixion itself has created great controversy among scholars and in the world.

In Nag Hammadi's Apocalypse of Peter, Peter sees Jesus "glad and laughing above the cross," a depiction that would infuriate the orthodox, who see the crucifixion as a matter demanding extreme suffering. Furthermore, Peter, in this work, distinguishes between the fleshly, suffering Christ and the living Christ, casting...