Recently, I found myself in the company of several people. At one moment the discussion moved toward the question of crucifixes in schools and other public buildings. Should we allow crucifixes to be hung in public school classrooms or other public buildings? Is that a breach of secularism? Does that negate the separation of church and state? While they were at each other’s throats arguing for and against, I started thinking about the cross as a symbol. Today, the cross symbolizes Jesus, Christianity, and the victory of life over death. On the cross, according to Christian belief, the Son of God died so that others could live. However, all symbols gain meaning in context. In the pre-Christian era, the cross was understood in a completely different way. In this post, I would like to present the cross as a tool of unimaginable suffering and humiliation because, in the Roman world, it was precisely that!

CRUCIFIXION IN THE ROMAN WORLD: A PAINFUL AND HUMILIATING PUNISHMENT

The Appian Way was one of the first great Roman roads. If you were one of the thousands of people to walk this road in 73 BCE, you might have seen a truly horrific sight. Around 6 000 people were suspended from crosses lining either side of the road. The very public fate of these poor souls was a warning for everyone to see. The dead and dying were rebellious slaves from Spartacus’ revolt. As traitors, the Roman state elected to punish them with their harshest method of execution: crucifixion. The message was plain and simple: This is the faith that waits for all who would dare to defy Roman power. The horrendous spectacle would not end after their death. The bodies were left posted on the crosses until they fully decomposed or were entirely consumed by wild beasts. For months one of the busiest streets in the Roman Empire was a highway of death and suffering. The message that the death spoke at the Appian Way was evidently taken to heart as there was never another slave revolt anywhere near the scale of Spartacus’ rebellion. Rome had achieved peace through brutality. Romans didn’t invent the crucifixion. The practice came to them from Carthaginians, but its origins seemed to run back to the Assyrian Empire of the Bronze Age! Despite the antiquity of the practice, people today tend to associate it with Rome more than any other civilization because of how eagerly the Romans embraced the practice. Romans themselves were fully aware of the cultural power of crucifixion. When a young Julius Caesar was kidnapped and ransomed by Pirates, he told them that he would live to see them crucified. The source reports that the Pirates laughed at the audacity of this young man. However, Caesar wasn’t kidding. He did indeed live to see all of the Pirates killed. But they were not crucified. Why? After having spent so much time among them, they became too human in Caesar’s eyes and he couldn’t even accept the thought of them suspended from crosses for days and weeks with insects and birds picking away at their bodies. He opted for the relatively more “human” execution by slit throat. Caesar’s decision makes it clear that the Romans knew crucifixion really was that bad. Cicero was so afraid of the practice that he didn’t even want to think about it. So, he wrote in the 1st century BCE: Let the very word ‘cross’ be far removed from not only the bodies of Roman citizens, but even from their thoughts, their eyes, and their ears. Cicero’s words represent a notable pattern in Roman literature marked by the avoidance of the topic! The same people who would visit gladiator shows and dangerous chariot races avoided even speaking about the crucifixion. It was truly the worse phenomenon in the Roman world. And they knew it!

It is not surprising that our best sources about the practice come from non-Romans like Josephus and the authors of the Gospels. For the condemned crucifixion must have been agony. However, we have to bear in mind that the practice was not just about execution. After all, there are much quicker ways to kill somebody. Crucifixion was, first and foremost, a weapon of psychological warfare and a tool of propaganda. It was a means of enforcing the domination of Rome’s ruling class and their ideology. The crucifixion broadcasted the impunity of the Romans while reminding the subjects of their second-class status and perpetual vulnerability. In fact, Roman citizens were legally protected from crucifixion until the 2nd century CE! The practice of crucifixion was most widespread between the 1st century BCE and 1st CE – a period that notably includes the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Moreover, Romans embraced (like almost all ancient civilizations) the idea of collective punishment. In other words, they didn’t always try to establish the individual guilt of those who would be crucified. Indiscriminate execution of family, associates, friends, and even bystanders happened with some regularity. Josephus, for example, informs us that Romans crucified anyone who happened to live in a rebellious province. Consequently, crucifixion was an instrument of terror designed to cow a population into submission because for all they knew, even if they never picked up a weapon, they could be the next to die in agonizing fashion if anyone else did. In a nutshell, this was a broad overview of the social and political context of crucifixion. How did the actual process itself look? What did it include?

Crucifixion in Detail: What did the crucifixion process look like?

Crucifixion ended on a cross, but it sure didn’t begin there. First, on the morning of the execution, the condemned individual would be stripped naked and scourged. He would be whipped across the back and chest with a multi-ended leather whip called flagellum (see the picture below!).

Depending on the force used by the executioner, scourging could remove significant amounts of flesh and sometimes kill the individual even before the cross. After that, the condemned was driven naked through the city and forced to carry the heavy cross to the place of execution. Meanwhile, he would be whipped and pelted with stones from the cheering crowd! Romans wanted as many people as possible to see the dehumanized victim to maximize humiliation. Eventually, the condemned was led to a prominent public location. In Jerusalem, it was a hill outside of the city called Golgotha (Γολγοθᾶ). Finally, the condemned would be attached to the Cross by nails or rope. There are scholarly debates about how often nails were used because iron was expensive and few iron remains of crucifixion have been discovered by archaeologists. However, most evidence suggests that nails were used more often than you would think. One nail through the overlapping feet and a nail through each wrist between the bones of the forearm. Unlike the common depiction, a crucified person would not have typically had nails through the palms of the hands because the tissue and bones of the hands are too weak to support the weight of an adult. None of this could have been accomplished easily or quickly. Driving a nail through flesh and bones would have taken repeated swings of the hammer. The process would have been slow, clumsy, and agonizing. For the victim, of course. With the victim affixed to the cross, crucifixion entered its final stage when the victim would be left to die slowly over a period of several days. The physical pain during this process would have been unimaginable as the entire weight of the exhausted individual pulled on the nails or ropes that bound them to the cross causing excruciating pain in the arms, legs, and torso. Not only were they subjected to the elements such as the sun, rain, and wind, but each individual breath was sheer agony. To allow a full inhalation, victims had to raise themselves up against the beam of the cross increasing pressure against their ropes or nails thus scraping the bare flesh of their flayed back against the wood of the cross. By the time thirst and hunger set in, the victim had doubtlessly long been wishing for death. But that could still be days away. The process pushed the human body to the bring meaning that the causes of death among crucifixion victims could vary widely. Some died due to blood loss from the scourging. It was a common killer and may have been the ultimate cause of Jesus’ death as he died after only several hours on the cross. Others died of asphyxiation due to the difficulty of inhaling while suspended. Some even perished due to the buildup of carbon dioxide in the blood from an inability to properly exhale. The unimaginable stress that this process placed on the body was such that it could and at least once did prove fatal even to a person who’d been taken down from the cross alive. Josephus reports that he was once able to convince Emperor Titus to free three men who had been crucified, but two of them eventually died from their wounds. The crucifixion was designed to last for as long as possible, but if the Romans wanted to grant a degree of mercy, they would break the legs making it impossible for a victim to breathe. That would result in a much faster death. Despite the disdain of aristocrats like Cicero, there was never a social movement to abolish the practice. Romans believed that the crucifixion was indispensable because of its effectiveness as a tool for social control that served the interests of the ruling class. The crucifixion would ultimately be stamped out entirely by the first Christian emperor Constantine (4th century CE). He replaced it as a form of capital punishment with hanging by the neck.

In the end, the memory of one victim of crucifixion changed the moral arc of an entire Empire. Knowing all that know about the practice of crucifixion, I believe that Christianity, if it is true, is the most amazing religion in the history of mankind. The astonishing idea of a God who gave his Son to be crucified and killed in such a humiliating and painful way is, in my humble opinion, absolutely amazing. It is the ultimate expression of unconditional love. If, on the other hand, Christianity is not true, then the crucifixion of Jesus could be historically placed among thousands of other unfortunate victims who felt the cruelest element of the Roman civilization on their skin.