Did Jesus Suffer During His Crucifixion? (Depends Which Gospel You Read!)

Episode Outline:
0:00 Did Jesus actually want to suffer?
0:49 Bart on evangelical ideas of hardship and spiritual commitment
3:05 How the Gospels portray Jesus’ suffering on a sliding scale
5:07 Crucifixion in the Gospels: emotional agony vs calm acceptance
9:24 Did Jesus see suffering as spiritually necessary?
11:49 Jesus’ suffering and the coming Kingdom of God
15:29 Promo break: Megan’s Before the Bible course and the Biblical Studies Symposium
20:22 Did Jesus welcome his own suffering because of the end result?
21:19 Resistance in Gethsemane: did Jesus try to avoid his fate?
23:46 Apocalypticism and why suffering mattered in Jesus’ world
25:58 Can the Gospel portrayals of suffering go back to the historical Jesus?
28:52 Bart’s view: Jesus expected hardship, not his own crucifixion
31:18 Bart’s Books: The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church

Episode Description

Was Jesus a willing martyr who embraced suffering as part of God’s plan, or was his crucifixion an unexpected and catastrophic end to his mission? In this thought-provoking episode, Dr. Bart Ehrman and host Megan Lewis explore how the New Testament presents suffering, and why the answer changes depending on whether we read the Gospels as theological writings or try to reconstruct the historical Jesus.

The episode begins with a comparison to modern Christian attitudes toward suffering, where hardship for one’s faith can become a kind of spiritual badge of courage. Dr. Ehrman reflects on his evangelical past, where self-sacrifice for Christ inspired people to take on difficult tasks, including missionary work. This raises the central question: what was Jesus’s own attitude toward pain, suffering, and death?

Comparing the Gospel passion narratives reveals a striking “sliding scale” of suffering. The Gospels are often surprisingly restrained about Jesus’s physical pain. Unlike graphic modern portrayals such as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the biblical texts usually say little more than that Jesus was flogged or crucified. Their focus is less on gore and more on theology.
Luke takes this restraint even further. While Mark and Matthew show Jesus in deep distress in Gethsemane, praying for God to “remove this cup” and admitting that his soul is “troubled unto death,” Luke presents a calmer, more composed Jesus. On the cross, Luke’s Jesus forgives his executioners, speaks with a thief, and calmly commits his spirit to the Father. Scholars have described Luke’s account as a “passionless passion narrative,” emphasizing Jesus as a serene martyr who remains in control.
According to the Gospels, Jesus anticipated his death. In the “Passion Predictions,” he tells his disciples he must go to Jerusalem, suffer, be rejected, and be killed. His death is framed as redemptive, a “ransom for many,” and the Last Supper becomes a symbol of his body and blood given for salvation. He also teaches that his followers must be willing to suffer, telling them to “take up their cross” and follow him.

But Dr. Ehrman argues that the historical Jesus must be understood as a first-century Jewish apocalypticist. Jesus proclaimed that God would soon overthrow the powers of evil and establish a new kingdom on Earth. His miracles were not simply proofs of divinity, but previews of that coming kingdom, where suffering, disease, poverty, oppression, and death would be eliminated.

This leads to the key distinction of the episode: the Jesus of the Gospels versus the historical Jesus. Dr. Ehrman contends that while the Gospel writers present the crucifixion as the intended climax of Jesus’s mission, the historical Jesus likely did not go to Jerusalem intending to die. He went during Passover to proclaim his apocalyptic message to the largest possible audience. His arrest and execution by the Romans, on the charge of calling himself “King of the Jews,” was not the fulfillment of his plan, but its catastrophic failure.

Only after his followers came to believe he had been raised from the dead did they reinterpret his death as a purposeful, salvific sacrifice that had been part of God’s plan all along. That theological understanding was then written back into the story of Jesus’s life, shaping the Gospel narratives we have today.

Also watch these episodes:
Did Jesus Predict His Own Death?
Did Jesus Predict his Own Death?

Am I Going to Hell? What the New Testament Says About Death and the Afterlife
Am I Going to Hell? What the New Testament Says About Death and the Afterlife