How could the criminal on the cross be promised paradise with hours to live?

The question

In Luke 23, one of the two men crucified alongside Jesus speaks to him. He gets a direct answer: “Assuredly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” He is a convicted criminal. He has, at most, a few hours left. Nothing he says is long. How does that work, and what does it mean for everyone else?

The answer

A word about method first, because it matters more here than on almost any other page on this site.

This passage attracts arguments from silence more than any other in the New Testament. People reason from what the man on the cross did not receive, did not do, and did not have time for, and then draw large conclusions about what is and is not necessary for anyone. Arguments from silence are the weakest kind of argument there is, and every major Christian tradition has an account of this man that it holds carefully and defends at length. This page is not going to summarise anyone’s, because a three-sentence summary of someone else’s position is where misrepresentation happens. What follows is what Luke puts on the page.

What is actually there, in order.

Luke 23:39. One of the two criminals “insulted him, saying, ‘If you are the Christ, save yourself and us!’”

Luke 23:40. The other answers, “rebuking him”: “Don’t you even fear God, seeing you are under the same condemnation?”

Luke 23:41. “And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.”

Luke 23:42. “Lord, remember me when you come into your Kingdom.”

Luke 23:43. “Assuredly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

Set against the objection’s summary — a man says one thing and is let in — that is not what the text contains. He does four distinct things, and they are not small ones.

He rebukes someone, and the ground he gives is the fear of God. He states that his own sentence is deserved, in public, using the word justly. He delivers a verdict on Jesus: this man has done nothing wrong. And he asks for something, which is not acquittal, not rescue, and not even inclusion. It is to be remembered.

Now look at the room he says it in. Luke has just described the scene in detail. Verse 35: “The rulers with them also scoffed at him.” Verse 36: “The soldiers also mocked him.” Verse 39: the other criminal insults him. Above his head, verse 38, a notice in three languages announcing the charge.

In that room, this man’s line is the only statement anyone makes in Jesus’ favour. He is not agreeing with a consensus. He is contradicting one, under sentence of death, from a cross, with soldiers standing there. Whatever you think a costly public statement looks like, that is one. The idea that it cost him nothing because he was going to die anyway assumes that a dying man has nothing left to lose, and anyone who has watched people die knows that is not how it works. Dignity is still a currency at the end. He spent his.

On the timing. Luke 23:44–46 puts darkness over the land from about the sixth hour to the ninth, and Jesus dies at the end of it. Roughly three hours is what the timestamps give, and roughly is the honest word: Luke writes “about the sixth hour,” and ancient hour reckoning is approximate. It is a short window. It is not zero.

On the word “today”. Whatever the promise means, Jesus attaches a time to it. Not eventually. Not at the end of all things. Today. That is the feature of the sentence that has made it remarkable to readers for two thousand years, and it is the one thing about it that is not disputed by anyone.

On the two Gospels not agreeing. Matthew 27:44 says: “The robbers also who were crucified with him cast on him the same reproach.” Plural. In Matthew both of them mock. In Luke one of them turns. That should be said out loud rather than quietly blended, which is what happens in most retellings. Whether Matthew is summarising and Luke is giving the detail, whether one man changed during the hours, or whether the accounts simply differ, is not settled by either text. This page does not settle it either.

Now the ethical objection, which is the real one.

Two things can be said, and the second is stronger.

First: the story does not say conduct is irrelevant, and reading it that way makes Luke contradict himself across twenty-two chapters. This is the Gospel with the rich fool who builds bigger barns, the Samaritan who stops on the road, the ruler who cannot part with what he owns, and a long sequence of teaching about money, mercy and what people do. A reader who concludes from 23:43 that behaviour does not matter has to explain why the author who wrote that also wrote all the rest of it, in the same scroll, for the same audience.

Second, and more directly: the objection is in the book. Luke 15, the parable most people know as the prodigal son, ends with the older brother outside the party. “Behold, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed a commandment of yours, but you never gave me a goat.” That is exactly the complaint — I did the decent thing for decades and the latecomer got the celebration. It is put in the mouth of a character who is not a villain and whose point is not answered by ridicule. And Jesus, notably, does not tell us whether the older brother goes in.

So the “this is unfair to the lifelong decent person” objection is not an outside criticism that Christianity failed to anticipate. It is raised inside the same Gospel, by a sympathetic figure, and left standing. That is not a proof that the objection is wrong. It is evidence that the tradition knows the objection is strong.

What Luke does and does not claim. He reports that this happened. He does not present it as a rule, a template, or a procedure, and he attaches no commentary. The conclusions people draw from it — in every direction — are conclusions, and the traditions that draw them have long arguments behind them that a page like this one cannot fairly compress.

The scripture, in full

Where Christians disagree

What the text does not tell us

His name. The Gospels do not give one. Later Christian writing outside the Bible supplied a name for him; Luke did not.

What he was convicted of. Luke calls the two men criminals. Matthew calls them robbers. Neither says what either man did, and neither says whether the two crimes were the same.

Whether he had ever heard Jesus before. Nothing in the text says he had, and nothing says he had not. He addresses Jesus as “Lord” and speaks of his Kingdom, which some readers take as evidence of prior knowledge. It is an inference, not a statement.

What happened between Matthew’s account and Luke’s. In Matthew both mock. In Luke one turns. The Gospels do not narrate a change and do not comment on the difference.

What Paradise is. Luke uses the word and moves on.

Why him. The text records the exchange. It offers no explanation of it at all, and every explanation on offer comes from somewhere else.

In one paragraph

Luke gives this five verses. One condemned man mocks; the other rebukes him, says their own sentences are deserved, states publicly that Jesus has done nothing wrong, and asks only to be remembered — and he does it in a scene where the rulers are scoffing, the soldiers are mocking, and nobody else has said a word in Jesus’ favour. The answer he gets has a date on it: today. Matthew, honestly, has both criminals mocking, and neither Gospel explains the difference. The objection that this is unfair to people who spent decades doing the right thing is a serious one, and it is worth knowing that Luke himself puts almost exactly that complaint in the mouth of the older brother in chapter 15 and leaves it hanging. What this episode establishes beyond itself is answered differently by every Christian tradition, and this page states what Luke contains rather than arguing from what he leaves out.