Mark’s account darkens when Jesus walks toward Jerusalem, his disciples amazed and terrified. Jesus tells them that he expects betrayal, arrest, trial, condemnation, mockery, and death. Pagels notes that many scholars judge such detailed predictions to be posthumous additions, though Jesus, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Alexei Navalny, surely understood the danger he faced from opponents of his movement.

Jesus heightens that danger with public demonstrations during Passover. He enters Jerusalem to crowds proclaiming him “Son of David,” alerting Roman soldiers. The next morning, he disrupts the Temple, overturning tables, blocking commerce, and shouting prophetic words. When Temple authorities demand to know his authority, he refuses to answer. Shortly before these demonstrations, Mark reports, Jesus had promised that the kingdom would come within his disciples’ lifetime. Yet during his final Passover meal, he speaks of betrayal, offering bread and wine as his body and blood.

After dinner, Jesus leads his disciples to the Mount of Olives, a small mountain range in East Jerusalem, and warns that they will all run away from Roman persecution once it arrives, citing an image from the prophet Zechariah’s writing in which a shepherd is struck and the sheep scatter. In a garden in Gethsemane, at the foot of the Mount of Olives, he takes only Peter, James, and John farther. Deeply distressed, he throws himself on the ground, desperately praying to be spared while struggling to accept God’s will. Returning to find the disciples asleep, he rebukes them. Judas, one of Jesus’s own disciples, arrives leading an armed crowd of Jesus’s opponents, kisses Jesus as a sign to the Romans, and Jesus is seized by the crowd. One disciple draws a sword and injures the high priest’s servant. When the others see Jesus captured, they flee.

The mob delivers Jesus to the high priest’s residence for trial before the entire Jewish Council. Asked if he is the Messiah, Jesus publicly affirms it—Mark shows this admission as the reason for his death sentence for blasphemy. After a night of abuse, the chief priests hand Jesus to Pilate, accusing him of insurrection. In Mark’s account, Pilate seems unconvinced, recognizing the priests’ jealousy of Jesus. He tries three times to release Jesus before yielding to crowd pressure and ordering crucifixion.

Pagels points out that while Jesus’s crucifixion is certain, the gospel accounts are problematic. Historian S. G. F. Brandon argues that the most certain fact is that Jesus was crucified by Romans as a rebel. The embarrassing reality the gospels suppress is that Pontius Pilate judged Jesus guilty and sentenced him for treason. Both Tacitus and Josephus, writers and philosophers who were historical contemporaries of Jesus and Pilate, confirm that Pilate ordered the execution. Pagels describes the horror of Roman crucifixion, which was reserved for enslaved individuals and insurrectionists.

Mark’s challenge in writing his Gospel rests in explaining how God’s anointed king could be captured, tortured, and crucified as a common criminal. His solution frames the story within a cosmic war between good and evil, with the crucifixion as culmination of a struggle initiated at Jesus’s baptism. Satan plays a central, though often offstage, role. To avoid stating that Pilate ordered the death penalty, allowing Roman Christians to later blame Jewish interference for Jesus’s death, Mark offers the alternative “Trial Before the High Priest.” Matthew, Luke, and John go further in obscuring Pilate’s role, both to protect Jesus from the ignominy of death as a rebel and to keep from inadvertently accusing the Romans of fraudulent and unjust execution since that would have placed Christians in opposition to the empire.

Scholars like Paul Winter argue that Mark’s trial account likely did not happen, citing four impossibilities: The Jewish Council did not meet at night, as Mark claimed they did, claiming to be Messiah was not blasphemy according to Judaism, Jewish law required a 24-hour delay before issuing judgment and would not have immediately sentenced Jesus, and Jewish officials never crucified anyone, preferring death by stoning. Other historians suggest that John’s simpler story is more plausible: The Council had Jesus arrested and sent him to Pilate for judgment, and women followers, including Mary Magdalene, may have watched from afar and reported back to the disciples. They note also that after sudden, violent deaths, people typically tell stories to psychologically process the disaster—suggesting an early “Passion narrative,” or story detailing Jesus’s trial, execution, and resurrection circulated before Mark ever codified it in a Gospel. 

Pagels also contextualizes Jesus’s death within ongoing Jewish resistance to Rome. The revolutionary Judas the Galilean had been crucified around 4 CE. In 66 CE, Jewish leaders declared war; after four years, the Roman general Titus destroyed the Jerusalem Temple. Since Mark wrote around 68-70 CE, during or shortly after the war, the gospels are effectively wartime literature. Some followers found hope in these events, seeing fulfillment of Jesus’s prophecies in the wreckage, while still aware that many Jews despised them for championing another “failed messiah.”

The Greek philosopher Celsus reports Jewish critics mocking Christians for following a man who was betrayed, arrested, and executed in disgrace. In response, followers searched the Scriptures for deeper meaning, reading psalms, or Old Testament songs of praise, attributed to King David, as prophecies about their Messiah. Scholar Richard Hays notes that these psalms typically move from humiliation to praise of deliverance, creating a narrative that suggests that the desperate circumstances of Christians in the moment would soon be met by divine rescue. This narrative was bolstered by Jesus’s own teachings about the Heavenly Kingdom’s imminent arrival to help the most wretched and punish their oppressors. 

Matthew revises Mark to counter Jewish criticism, portraying Jesus as less vulnerable in the garden at Gethsemane and fully in charge during the arrest. Matthew also adds Judas’s remorse and death by suicide to the narrative, linking it to Old Testament prophecies. Following Mark, Matthew stages the trial before Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest, and intensifies Pilate’s reluctance, showing Pilate symbolically washing his hands of Jesus’s fate. Matthew has “the whole people,” meaning the Jewish people at the trial, shout, “His blood be upon us, and upon our children!” (Matthew 27:25).

Luke, meanwhile, revises Mark for a Gentile audience. Luke has chief priests and Temple police arrest Jesus, whom Jesus denounces as agents of Satan. Luke’s Pilate declares Jesus innocent three times but reluctantly gives in to Jewish leaders’ demands for Jesus’s execution. Luke’s wording implies that “they”—“the Jews,” not Romans—led Jesus away. Luke adds that one crucified man and the Roman centurion pronounce Jesus innocent.

Pagels summarizes that gospel writers invented a weak Pilate to exonerate Romans and indict Jewish leaders. Historical accounts describe a very different Pilate: cruel, inflexible, and violent, well-known for his love for execution as a political spectacle. The writers of the Gospels of Luke and Matthew chose to exonerate the Romans in their narratives in order to save themselves and their followers from execution for sedition. The narrative strategy evolved, with Pilate growing more sympathetic from gospel to gospel, as Paul Winter notes.

The Gospel of John, written last, presents the most extreme version, claiming that “the Jews” sought to kill Jesus from the start, escalating their charges against Jesus to “making himself equal with God” (John 5:18) John’s Jesus shows no fear but orchestrates his own arrest and execution as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. The second-century philosopher Celsus ridiculed these claims as nonsense.

Pagels reflects on the devastating consequence of these decisions made in the interest of Christian survival: the demonization of Jews, leading to centuries of antisemitism based on the charge of killing God. She notes the Palm Sunday practice of congregations playing the part of ancient Jewish people shouting, “Crucify him!”; Jews historically avoided entering Christian towns on Easter, fearing attacks. After Constantine’s conversion, Christian prejudices became legal liabilities for Jews.

Pagels introduces psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s work on finding meaning in suffering as a lens for understanding early Christians’ response to Jesus’s death. The earliest explicit interpretation comes from Paul’s letters. Paul interprets Jesus’s death as sacrifice for atonement, calling him the “Passover lamb,” providing a script for the Last Supper ritual. Mark, Matthew, and Luke later include this scene in their gospels. The Gospel of John escalates this theme, having John the Baptist introduce Jesus as the “Lamb of God,” and alters the chronology so that Jesus is sentenced exactly when Passover lambs were slaughtered.

Pagels mentions non-canonical gospels, discovered in Nag Hammadi in 1945, that offer alternative meanings. The Round Dance of the Cross describes a mystical ritual in which Jesus leads disciples in a circle dance, a tradition well-established in Middle Eastern cultures in that time period. The Gospel of Philip states that the Eucharist embodies Jesus. The Gospel of Truth, possibly by Valentinus, tells a mythical story in which Jesus descends to deliver humanity from fear and ignorance by revealing their divine origin. The cross becomes a new “tree of knowledge,” mirroring the tree in the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Pagels notes how followers transformed the crucifixion from damning evidence into worship’s centerpiece—a conclusion possible only because of the conviction that Jesus was resurrected from death.