Jesus was crucified

Jesus’s crucifixion is presented not as an abstract emblem of redemption but as a public death witnessed by a crowd and by Judas, whose expectation of a miracle gives way to the recognition that Jesus is dead. The scene’s focus on Jesus calling for his mother, the women gathered at the cross, and Judas’s departure makes the execution both a human catastrophe and the turning point of Judas’s story.

Setting and Witnesses

The episode unfolds on the eve of the Sabbath and Passover. In the hours before the festival, an immense crowd gathers around three crucified men. Onlookers speak among themselves, press forward to see, and argue over which man will die first. Some pity the condemned; others take pleasure in their suffering. Vendors move through the crowd selling food and drink, while people who have seen enough begin to leave as the day wears on.

The central man’s suffering occupies the scene, but the other two crucified men remain part of its stark setting. They cry out at intervals, and after Jesus dies they continue to live for at least another hour. The difference matters to Judas: the death at the center of the crowd does not end the spectacle, and the other condemned men do not share the same immediate release.

Jesus and the Women at the Cross

A small group of grieving women stands at the foot of the central cross. One older woman watches without taking her eyes away; a younger woman weeps silently, her gaze fixed on the man above her. Their closeness offers no public interruption of the execution. The younger woman’s unwavering attention makes looking itself seem like an act of attachment, while the older woman’s stillness registers grief without display.

Throughout the ordeal, Jesus calls repeatedly for his mother. The narrative gives this appeal sustained emphasis: for hours he calls to her, and only at the end does he cry out to God. The movement from the repeated maternal call to the final appeal frames his death through human dependence and abandonment rather than through a triumphant display of power.

Judas’s Expectation and Recognition

Judas watches from the edge of the crowd. Drawn toward the women, he stops beside the broken timbers of an old cross and believes that a miracle is about to happen: that God’s name will be sanctified and a kingdom not of this world will arrive. The expectation is explicit, but the scene does not fulfill it. Jesus dies, and Judas understands that the lives of both men have ended: Jesus’s life in the immediate sense, and the life Judas has organized around him in a deeper one.

The death therefore overturns Judas’s faith in a sudden deliverance. Rather than staying to see the bodies removed, he turns away as soon as the last of the three men has died. His departure is immediate and purposeful, but it does not amount to a return to ordinary life: he walks on emptied of thought and desire, as though relieved of a weight and stripped of what had sustained him.

Departure and Aftermath

On the way from the execution site, a sickly stray dog follows Judas. He gives it a piece of cheese, then, at the entrance to a roadside inn on the route toward his home in Cariot, tells it to go. The dog retreats, changes its mind, and eventually lies beneath his table, resting its head against his sandal. The small exchange follows the public violence without undoing it; it leaves Judas accompanied, but not restored.

At the inn, the narrative returns to the time just before closing, with the Sabbath and Passover about to begin. Food and wine have been set before Judas, but he does not touch them. He imagines the abandonment of a pregnant young woman who has served him, while the cries from the execution continue to haunt his awareness. The contrast between the meal awaiting him and his inability to eat carries the consequences of the crucifixion beyond the place of execution: the spectacle is over, but its emotional force has not passed.

Interpretations of Jesus and His Death

The novel places this narrated death against a history of contested accounts. Josephus’s description of Jesus in Jewish Antiquities appears to affirm his messiahship and resurrection, but the text notes the view that Christian hands later altered the passage; another account attributed to Agapius presents Josephus as describing the beliefs of Jesus’s followers rather than endorsing them. Elsewhere, some Talmudic passages portray Jesus as a misleading pupil or sorcerer, but, according to the narrative, they disappeared from nearly all printed versions because Jews feared Christian reprisals.

Jewish responses were not uniform. Medieval writers could reject insulting accounts of Jesus while disputing Christian doctrine, and Rabbi Yehuda Arie of Modena argued that Jesus was a Pharisaic Jew who did not claim divinity. The discussion of Judas is marked by a different pattern: Shmuel’s research observes that Jewish polemicists who challenged Christian accounts of Jesus generally avoided writing about Judas, a figure burdened by generations of Christian contempt. The crucifixion scene gives Judas a central place not as a settled symbol of betrayal but as the witness whose faith in Jesus’s death and expected miracle collapses into grief and departure.