Did Jesus Die for Sins?

History and Theology, Again

That Jesus of Nazareth was crucified by the Romans on the order of the prefect Pontius Pilate, who had the role from 26 to 36 CE, is the most secure fact we can establish about his life. That this happened is even more secure than when: historians tend to range anywhere from the year 30 to the year 36 as a plausible date for Jesus’s death, because we lack other corroborating evidence that might help us establish it with certainty. Yet there are many relevant and interesting questions Jesus’s crucifixion raises for historians of Jesus’s life—the most salient being that, given that the standing Roman policy was to use crucifixion as a punishment for social rebels, and given that Jesus began his public career as a Galilean apocalyptic prophet and Wisdom preacher, what led his life to end this way? And what led his earliest followers to seek to understand his death not as some historical disappointment or cosmic accident but as, fundamentally, an expiatory sacrifice—one that is, in some sense, a death “for sins”?