Justified True Belief

(P1) Psalm 22 describes a public death unlike anything Israel practiced. + Psalm 22 runs thirty-one verses, and a man speaks the first twenty-one of them while he dies in the open with a crowd watching. What he describes is not how Israel put anyone to death. (1) The psalm opens on an abandonment it never explains. - "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest." (22:1-2) - He is not wondering whether God is there. He is a man who trusted and has been left standing, which is by some distance the worse place to be, and the psalm sits in it for twenty verses without moving. - A lament, which is the Bible's word for a poem of complaint addressed to God, normally tells you what went wrong. An illness, an army at the gate, a charge the man says is false: something. This one hands you the scene and keeps the reason to itself. (2) The crowd's taunt is aimed past him at God. - "All who see me mock me; they make mouths at me; they wag their heads; He trusts in the LORD; let him deliver him; let him rescue him, for he delights in him" (22:7-8) - Mockery of a dying man is ordinary enough. What these people say is not. They never tell him he had it coming. They turn away from him and speak to God about him, over his head, daring God to come down for a favorite. - There is a whole theology folded into that taunt, and it draws blood only on a man whose one claim was that God was on his side. (3) The dying goes on long enough for the body to give out. - "I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint; my heart is like wax; it is melted within my breast; my strength is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death." (22:14-15) - Joints pulling apart, a mouth too dry to work, the strength going out of him, and time enough to feel every stage of it. - Whatever is happening here takes hours. Nobody dries out like a piece of broken pottery in the few minutes an execution by stoning takes. (4) No court in Israel ever killed a man this way. - Israel executed by stoning, and in a few cases by burning (Leviticus 20:14). Either way it was finished in minutes. • Deuteronomy 21:22-23 does put a man on a tree, but it puts him there already dead: executed first, hung up as a public warning, and taken down before sundown. A corpse on display is not a living man on a beam for the afternoon. - The empires around Israel did string living men up, so the idea existed somewhere in the world. Assyrian reliefs show captives impaled outside a captured city, and a Persian decree quoted at Ezra 6:11 threatens to pull a beam out of a man's house and impale him on it. A stake driven through the body kills quickly, though, and it leaves no wounds in the hands or the feet. - Killing a man slowly, in front of a town, reached Judea late. The first mass crucifixion under a Jewish ruler is Alexander Jannaeus putting eight hundred of his opponents on crosses around 88 BC, which Josephus, a Jewish commander who surrendered to Rome and spent his later years writing his nation's history for Roman readers, records as an atrocity. - Dates proposed for Psalm 22 run from David's lifetime down to the years after the exile, and it is the latest of them that matters here, because even that one leaves the psalm more than two hundred years older than the morning Jannaeus raised his crosses. No proposed author of it had ever seen such a death at home. (5) Verse 16 puts the wounds at the hands and the feet. - "For dogs encompass me; a company of evildoers encircles me; they have pierced my hands and feet." (22:16) - One word in that line is disputed, and the whole quarrel comes down to its final letter. • The Masoretic Text, which is the Hebrew Bible as fixed by Jewish scribes in the early Middle Ages and the base of every modern Hebrew edition, ends the word in yod and reads ka'ari, "like a lion." That leaves "like a lion my hands and my feet," a clause with no verb in it at all. • End the same word in waw and it becomes ka'aru, "they dug" or "they pierced," which supplies the verb the clause is missing. Those two letters are the smallest in the Hebrew alphabet, each a short stroke with a little head on it, told apart by how far down the line the stroke runs. - Three ancient witnesses in three languages have the verb rather than the lion. • The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures made by Jews before the Christian era, reads oryxan, "they dug." • The Peshitta, the old Syriac Bible of the Aramaic-speaking churches to the east, has the piercing. • A Hebrew Psalms scroll found at Nahal Hever, in a cave above the Dead Sea, ends the word in waw. - That scroll was copied around AD 50 to 68, so it is no use as evidence from before Jesus and nobody should sell it as such. What it is, is a Jewish scribe's copy with no Christian interest anywhere in it, siding with the Greek and the Syriac against the medieval Hebrew. (6) Two lines about the clothing describe a single act. - "They divide my garments among them, and for my clothing they cast lots." (22:18) - Hebrew poetry runs in paired lines, a habit called parallelism: the second line says the first one over again in other words, often sharpening it as it goes. "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork." (Psalm 19:1) The heavens and their expanse are the same sky, named twice. One thought, two lines. - Verse 18 works that way. The garments and the clothing are the same clothes, and the dividing and the lot are the same moment of plunder, when the clothes come off him and are shared out among the men who took them. Nothing in the Hebrew asks for two transactions with two objects. Therefore, the psalm describes a man dying slowly in public, wounded in his hands and his feet, with his clothing shared out, in a country whose own executions looked nothing like it.

(P2) The prophets name a beating, a price, a struck shepherd, and a piercing. + Four passages fill in what the psalm leaves out. Each was fixed in writing centuries before Jesus, and each names something a general description would not bother with. (1) Isaiah's servant takes the beating without turning away. - "I gave my back to those who strike, and my cheeks to those who pull out the beard; I hid not my face from disgrace and spitting." (Isaiah 50:6) - The line just before it sets the posture: "The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious." (50:5) He is not overpowered. He stays. - Isaiah 50 belongs to a run of chapters about a servant of the LORD. The traditional dating puts it in the eighth century BC, while the critical dating, favored by scholars who assign chapters 40 onward to a later writer, puts it at the end of the Babylonian exile around 540 BC. Either way more than five hundred years stand between the text and the crucifixion, which is roughly twenty generations. - The whole book survives complete in a leather scroll copied around 125 BC and sealed in a cave above the Dead Sea until 1947. (2) Zechariah's shepherd is paid off with thirty pieces of silver. - Prophets in Israel sometimes acted a message out in the street rather than only saying it, so that a crowd could watch it instead of listening to it. Ezekiel lay on his side to play out a siege. Jeremiah smashed a clay jar in front of the elders. The name for that habit is a sign-act, and Zechariah 11 is one. - Zechariah takes the part of a shepherd, works for owners who despise him, and then asks to be paid off. "Then I said to them, If it seems good to you, give me my wages; but if not, keep them. And they weighed out as my wages." (Zechariah 11:12) - What comes next is the strange part. "Then the LORD said to me, Throw it to the potter—the lordly price at which I was priced by them. So I took the thirty pieces of silver and threw them into the house of the LORD." (11:13) - A sum, a place, and what becomes of the money: thirty shekels, the house of the LORD, thrown to the potter. All three are specified, and the price is named sarcastically as the worth of the LORD Himself. • One word here is contested. The Hebrew reads "potter"; some modern translations follow the Syriac and read a nearly identical word meaning "treasury," which sits more comfortably in a temple. (3) God orders His own shepherd struck. - "O sword, against my shepherd, against the man who stands next to me, declares the LORD of hosts. Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered; I will turn my hand against the little ones" (Zechariah 13:7) - "My Associate" is a word for somebody standing beside God rather than under Him. God says it about this shepherd, and in the same breath orders him struck and his flock scattered. - Jewish readers were working on this verse before there were any Christians around to influence them. The Damascus Document, the rule book of a Jewish group that had broken with the temple leadership, was copied at Qumran, the settlement above the Dead Sea where the scrolls were found, in the century before Jesus, and it quotes this verse in a passage about a coming visitation. • The column carrying that quotation survives only in a medieval copy recovered from a Cairo synagogue storeroom, not among the desert fragments, so its earlier wording is inferred rather than physically attested. (4) God speaks of a piercing done to Himself. - "And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of grace and pleas for mercy, so that, when they look on me, on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn." (Zechariah 12:10) - The setting is a siege. Chapter 12 has the nations gathered against Jerusalem and the LORD defending the city, and the mourning comes only after the rescue. Who was pierced, the chapter never says. - Follow the pronouns and the sentence comes apart in your hands. God is the speaker. God is the one pierced. Then, inside that same Hebrew sentence, the mourning is for a third-person Him. - Nobody has ever made that verse comfortable, Jewish or Christian. The Talmud, the rabbis' great collection of law and debate, preserves an argument about what the mourning is for, and one of the two answers on offer is the killing of Messiah son of Joseph (Sukkah 52a), a second and suffering Messiah who dies before the reigning one comes, a figure drawn partly out of this verse. - The dating of Zechariah's second half is genuinely disputed, with proposals running from the eighth century down to the second century BC, and the latest date anyone argues for is still well over a century before Jesus. Copies of the Twelve Prophets, the single scroll that carried Zechariah alongside eleven other short prophetic books, survive from about 150 BC, and the pre-Christian Greek translation of the Twelve carries chapters 9 through 14 exactly where they stand now. Therefore, texts written centuries apart, and centuries early, specify a beating, a price, a disposal of the money, a struck shepherd, and a piercing God speaks of as His own.

(P3) The matching details were settled by Jesus' enemies and by Roman soldiers. + Anyone can act out a scene he has read. What nobody can do is make his enemies act it out with him, so for every one of these details the question is whose decision it was. (1) Two groups, hours apart, did the beating and the spitting. - "Then they spit in his face and struck him. And some slapped him, saying, Prophesy to us, you Christ! Who is it that struck you" (Matthew 26:67-68) That is the night hearing, in front of the high priest. - Then the soldiers, the next morning, after Pilate had "scourged Jesus" (27:26): "And they spit on him and took the reed and struck him on the head." (27:30) - Between them, one Jewish group and one Roman, they produce most of Isaiah 50:6: the blows to the back, the blows to the face, the insults, the spitting. Neither group was taking direction from the prisoner. (2) The price was set by the men doing the buying. - "Then one of the twelve, whose name was Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, What will you give me if I deliver him over to you? And they paid him thirty pieces of silver." (Matthew 26:14-15) The question was left open, and the figure that came back was theirs. - Then the money's end. Judas "threw the pieces of silver into the temple sanctuary," the priests refused to bank what they called the price of blood, "and bought with them the potter’s field as a burial place for strangers." (27:5-7) - Thrown down in the temple, and spent on a potter's field. Zechariah's three details, filled in by a traitor and by a committee of his opponents. (3) The manner of execution belonged to Rome alone. - Crucifixion was a Roman penalty imposed by a Roman governor, and no Jewish court could hand it down. Whatever the council wanted, the shape of the death was Pilate's to choose, and a condemned man chooses nothing. - In 1968 a construction crew north of Jerusalem broke into a first-century tomb at Giv'at ha-Mivtar. Inside a bone box marked Jehohanan son of Hagkol lay the heel of a man in his twenties with four inches of iron nail still through it. The tip had bent against a knot in the wood and could not be drawn back out, which is why nobody salvaged it. That heel is still the only crucified skeleton from Judea, and until a second was reported in 2021 from a Roman cemetery at Fenstanton in England, it was the only one from anywhere. - The bone attests a nail through a foot and nothing more, and the honest reading of it is narrower than the popular one. A reappraisal published in 1985 judged that this man's arms had more likely been tied than nailed, so the skeleton says nothing about hands, and whether Roman nails went through the palm or the wrist is argued over still. What it settles is that men were fastened to the wood with iron rather than rope, and the proof came out of the ground a few minutes' walk from where Jesus died. - Nailed hands are not a Christian embellishment either. A comedy by the Roman playwright Plautus, staged before Rome ever governed Judea, jokes about a slave offered a reward if his feet and his arms were nailed twice over, and Josephus says the soldiers besieging Jerusalem nailed their prisoners up in one posture after another for sport. - For Jesus in particular, the hands come from the accounts themselves: "Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe." (John 20:25) (4) Three details were settled by the men on duty that afternoon. - The clothes: "When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his garments and divided them into four parts, one part for each soldier; also his tunic. But the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from top to bottom, so they said to one another, Let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be" (John 19:23-24) Psalm 22:18 reads most naturally as one act (P1). A seam produced two. - The legs: the bodies had to be down before the Sabbath, so an order went out to break the legs and hasten death. "So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first, and of the other who had been crucified with him. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs." (19:32-33) • John names the rule he sees kept: "Not one of his bones will be broken." (19:36) It is the Passover instruction, "you shall not break any of its bones" (Exodus 12:46), and it echoes the promise over the righteous man, "He keeps all his bones; not one of them is broken." (Psalm 34:20) • Two men beside him had their legs broken that afternoon. He was passed over because a soldier looked at him and judged him already dead. - The spear: "But one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water." (19:34) John attaches Zechariah to it in the next breath: "They will look on him whom they have pierced." (19:37) (5) Three of the details came out of his own mouth. - The cry from the cross is Psalm 22:1 in his own voice: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46) He said it, so it shows nothing about foresight, and counting it as a match would be padding. - The thirst goes the same way, because John states the motive outright: Jesus, "knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfill the Scripture), 'I thirst.'" (John 19:28) - So does his quoting of Zechariah's struck shepherd, which he named on the road to Gethsemane, hours before anyone laid a hand on him (Mark 14:27). Announcing a text and then walking into the arrest is not foreseeing anything. • Bringing the verse about was another matter. The striking was the council's and Rome's, and the scattering was eleven other men's, done inside the hour by men who had just told him to his face that they would die first (Mark 14:29-31, 50). - The rest was never his to arrange. Whether he was flogged, what the priests paid, how Rome chose to kill him, what a work detail did with his coat, whether his legs were broken, whether anyone put a spear in him: not one of those was his call to make. Therefore, the details that make the description specific were decided by a council that wanted him dead and by soldiers who did not know his name.

(C1) Therefore, a detailed description was in circulation for centuries before the death that matches it. + A detailed description of one man's death was in circulation for centuries, and then a death occurred that answers to it. Those are two separate facts, and either one can be checked without the other. The description sits in texts whose age is fixed by surviving copies, and fixed at that by the scholars who date them latest. The death sits in four first-century accounts, and in one fact granted right across the spectrum of historians: a Galilean teacher was crucified under Pontius Pilate. Tacitus, a Roman senator writing some eighty years afterward for readers who found the whole movement contemptible, mentions it in passing, the way a man mentions something nobody disputes (Annals 15.44). That much is the evidence. What accounts for it is a further question, and answering that one takes a different kind of work than a proof does. Think of a fire investigator standing in a burned-out kitchen the morning after. He has a scorch pattern climbing one wall, a melted extension cord, a window left open, and a neighbor who saw nobody come or go. He cannot settle the matter the way a mathematician settles a theorem, and he knows it. What he can do is lay the possible accounts side by side and ask which one leaves the least lying unexplained. Faulty wiring, a dropped cigarette, a fire set on purpose: each of those is a real candidate, and the right answer is the one that covers the scorch marks and the cord and the open window all at once, without extra pieces invented along the way to make it work. Philosophers call that inference to the best explanation, and outside of mathematics it is how nearly every question actually gets settled.

(P4) No ordinary explanation accounts for the description and the death together. + Four ordinary explanations are on offer, and serious people hold every one of them. (1) "That is simply what a Roman crucifixion looked like." - This is the strongest of the four and it should be granted a long way. Rome crucified thousands of men. Stripping the condemned was routine, soldiers keeping the clothes was routine, and thirst and dislocated joints and jeering were routine, so a poem about a man dying in public will match any of them. - Grant all of that and something is still lying on the floor. The routine features are what this death shares with every crucifixion. These are not routine: • a price of thirty, thrown down in a temple and spent on a potter's field; • legs deliberately not broken, when the two men alongside had theirs broken; • a coat divided four ways and a second garment gambled for whole. - The chronology runs backwards, too. Why the details of a first-century execution look like a first-century execution needs no explaining at all. Why they were written down before Rome ruled anywhere near Judea, in a country whose own courts killed with stones, does. An explanation is judged partly by scope, meaning how much of the evidence it manages to cover, and this one covers the common features and leaves every uncommon one exactly where it was. (2) "The Gospel writers wrote the scene out of the texts." - Stated at full strength this is the serious academic position, argued in detail by capable scholars, and it is not a slur. On it, the church knew that Jesus had been crucified and knew little else, went looking in the Scriptures for what such a death must have involved, and wrote the answers up as narrative. The proposal even has a name: prophecy historicized. - Any honest account has to concede that the evangelists knew these texts and wrote with them open. John quotes them at the reader's elbow, which is not how a man behaves when he is covering his tracks. - It is strongest on the money. The sum, the coins thrown down in the temple and the potter's field are Matthew's alone, and they turn up in the same chapter where he quotes the prophecy, while Mark and Luke report only that money changed hands. It is also where the proposal has the most to answer for, because Matthew's two-step story does not track Zechariah's one-step verse. - Elsewhere the story and the text will not line up. Psalm 22:18 gives one action; John reports two, and to get there he has to bring in a seamless tunic that the psalm never mentions and never required. Inventing an extra object in order to depart from your source is not how composition works. - And composition cannot reach what was never on anybody's page. Rome's monopoly on crucifixion is a fact of Roman administration, and the heel bone from Giv'at ha-Mivtar came out of the ground in 1968. (3) "Jesus arranged the parts he could." - He did arrange some of it, and none of that is hidden (P3): the psalm quoted from the cross, the words about thirst with John's motive attached, and Zechariah's struck shepherd named hours before his followers scattered. - A man can also get himself killed on purpose. Going up to Jerusalem at Passover and provoking the authorities is not difficult, and several men did exactly that in the same century and were killed by Rome for it. - What nobody arranges from inside a trial is the other side's decisions. He did not set the price the priests paid, choose the manner of his own execution, tell four soldiers how to split a coat, or arrange to be dead before the two men beside him. - Intention is doing all the work in this account, and it runs out precisely where other people's choices begin. The plan explains the effort and never explains the outcome. (4) "With enough texts and enough details, something was bound to match." - The instinct here is sound and deserves to be taken seriously. A large enough body of ancient poetry, read by people who are hunting for a match, will produce matches, and the history of prophecy interpretation is littered with them. - The test is whether the same method finds anything else. If hits of this quality are cheap, they ought to cluster around the other messianic claimants of the period as well. Bar Kokhba led a revolt against Rome in AD 132 with a leading rabbi hailing him as Messiah and a nation behind him, and nothing of the kind ever formed around him. - Coincidence has a further weakness that is easy to miss: it permits the match without ever expecting it. Nothing in the coincidence account would lead anyone to look for thirty pieces of silver in a potter's field, and an explanation that would have sat just as comfortably with any other outcome has not explained this one. Therefore, each of the four covers part of the evidence and leaves a different part lying where it was: the details that are not routine, the evidence that was never on anybody's page, the decisions taken by other people, and a match that nothing in the account led anyone to expect.

(C2) Therefore, the best explanation is that the description came from God. + The best explanation of these texts is that they came from God. Men writing in Jerusalem and in exile, in a country whose own courts killed people with stones, described a man dying in public with wounds in his hands and his feet. They set a price on him, said what would become of the money, and put into God's own mouth a sentence about a people looking on the one they had pierced. Centuries later a man died that way, and the decisions that made it fit were taken by the people who wanted him dead. Set that beside the four ordinary accounts and it does two things they cannot. For one thing, it covers all of the evidence at once instead of a slice: the early dates, the details that are not routine, and the choices made by other people. For another, it expects what happened rather than merely allowing it. Nothing convenient has to be invented along the way, and no manuscript, no date, and no fact about how Rome ran its provinces has to be bent to make it fit. Swapping the word God for some unnamed source of foreknowledge is not a cheaper account either, since it keeps everything the account was meant to be paying for and drops only the name. What it costs is not hidden. It asks a reader to accept that God exists and that He speaks, and a reader who starts out thinking that very unlikely will want a good deal more before he moves. That instinct is sound, and nobody should try to talk him out of it. A low starting estimate raises the bar. It does not close the question. What clears a raised bar is evidence of exactly this kind, the kind one account expects and the other merely tolerates. A reader who already has reasons of his own for thinking there is a God is not standing where a committed naturalist stands, and the same texts will carry him further. In any case, nobody should settle a question this large on one cluster of texts, and evidence of this kind belongs inside a larger case. This is an inference to the best explanation rather than a proof, so a better account may yet turn up. Three findings would overturn it, and anyone willing to do the work can go looking for them: - a later date for these texts than the surviving copies allow, which is a question of manuscripts and dates and nothing else; - evidence that the Gospel writers invented the details that are not routine, together with an account of the evidence lying outside their narratives; - an ordinary mechanism that explains the description rather than the death. The limits are just as plain: - The cry from the cross and the words about thirst are his own and carry no weight, and his quoting of the struck shepherd goes with them. - Psalm 22:16 is contested in the Hebrew, and a reader unpersuaded by the ancient versions should set the verse aside. The hands and the feet are not what the case runs on. - Isaiah 50:6 names a beard pulled out that no Gospel reports. - None of this shows that Jesus rose from the dead, which is a separate question answered by separate evidence. What is left after all of that is not small. A man can arrange his own last words. He cannot arrange what his enemies are willing to pay for him, or what a foreign army does with his clothes, or which of three condemned men has his legs broken. See also: • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Were the Messianic Prophecies Written Before Jesus? • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Who Is the Servant of Isaiah 53? • CE / Prophecy Fulfillment: Does the New Testament Quote the Old Testament Out of Context? • CE / Resurrection: Minimal Facts Argument (Habermas)