The Death of Scandal in the Death of Jesus

“Ultimately, it was Jesus’ public execution and not his public ministry that consummated the biblical revelation, inspired the New Testament, launched the Christian movement, and eventually led to the anthropological crisis in which we now find ourselves. As the first Christians moved beyond the Jewish cultural orbit into the wider Greco-Roman world, they found people bewildered by the idea that ht world had been saved by a young Jew condemned by his co-religionists and publicly executed as a political nuisance by the Roman authorities. There was an understandable tendency to make the gospel more intelligible to the Greek world by downplaying the crucifixion and stressing instead the teachings of Jesus” (Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 217).