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The Glorious Dying of the Son
The Gospel of Luke & Jesus’ Noble Death
Ancient Greco-Roman society enjoyed death, as seen in the Romans’ relish for the gore and spectacle of death in the gladiatorial arena and in their turning execution into a spectator sport called crucifixion. But at its best, as seen in some of its greatest philosophers, it shed light on the art of dying well and nobly, as the final test for one who had been trained in the arts of virtue.
As Isocrates put it in his first oration, “Death is the sentence which fate has passed on all humankind, but to die nobly is the special honor which nature has preserved for the noble.” In funeral speeches, biographies, and rhetorical exercises, stories of noble death were passed down through the generations to engender courage and encourage emulation. Stories of noble death so much filled the air that in one of his Epistles, Seneca had to respond to a student who complained that “those stories have been droned to death in all the schools.”
But Jesus did not appear to this mind to have died nobly. Christians were presented with the dilemma of how best to present and explain the apparently shameful and ignoble death of Jesus, a death that seemed to violate all the tenets of the ideal of the noble death. To the pagan world, to worship such a man was, as Justin Martyr wrote in his Apology, simply “madness.”
This was an especially pressing problem for Luke, as one of his goals was to take the gospel into the Greco-Roman world and to place Christianity on the world stage. Thus, he opens Luke-Acts with a distinctively Hellenistic literary preface, and ends his work with Paul in Rome. Further, Luke uses the tradition of the “noble death” to construct a Passion Narrative that would appeal to the Greco-Roman world. Distinctively among the Gospels, his account presents Jesus’ passion as a type of martyrdom, so that his hearers would come to see the death of Jesus as an object of both admiration and emulation.
Luke writes in a way that will draw the crowds to the beauty of Jesus’ death. (In this regard, the Lucan Passion parallels his birth story, which so beautifully portrays the Nativity, as opposed to the darker story of Matthew).
A Noble Tradition
The noble death tradition can be traced back to the Homeric battlefield. Heroic warriors were expected to exhibit all the martial and manly virtues necessary for victory in war: virtues such as courage, selflessness, and duty. Though their religion gave them only dim and shadowy hopes for the afterlife, they knew that a heroic battlefield death could win them eternal fame. As Achilles declares in the Illiad, “If I stay here and fight beside the city of the Trojans, my return home is gone, but my glory is everlasting.”
For the Athenians, a noble death was understood as a type of public event, a theater for the display of virtue. It was both a final test of virtue (an agon) and a means of teaching others how to die. A noble death merited praise and admiration, and was marked by courage in facing death unflinchingly and willingly, by giving one’s life in obedience to the laws of the state, and by dying victoriously, serenely, altruistically (bringing salvation to others), and piously.
Athenian eulogists offered special praise for those who died courageously and willingly. Lysias wrote, “Therefore it is fitting to consider those most happy who have closed their lives in risking them for the greatest and noblest ends; not committing their career to chance, nor awaiting the death that comes of itself, but selecting the fairest one of all.”
The ancients also recognized that for a death to be considered noble, it must be met in obedience to the laws of one’s country. Even when wrongly accused of crime, Socrates maintained in the Crito, “The Law must be obeyed.” He thus refused to escape his own execution, considering such disobedience socially destructive and thus ignoble.
Peter J. Scaer is assistant professor of exegetical theology at Concordia Theological Seminary (www.ctsfw.edu) and is finishing a book titled The Lucan Passion and the Praiseworthy Death. ?The Glorious Dying of the Son? is adapted from a paper presented at the Concordia Exegetical Symposium held at Concordia Seminary in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, in January 2003.
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