Crucifixion

 Roman punishment for rebellious slaves, violent criminals (esp. murderers), robbers, rebels, people guilty of sedition.  Crucifixion is a very humiliating and public form of execution. People were crucified at major cross roads and outside the gates of a city. Crosses functioned something like modern- day billboards. Their basic message was: “Rome is in control; keep the peace.” By crucifying Jesus, Pilate made an example out of him. His crucifixion was a message to anyone who hoped in him as messiah or in his message about God’s kingdom. The specific message is “You wish” and “This could be you.” The inscription “King of the Jews” was probably intended to be ironic and insulting.  The normal procedure was to have the condemned person flogged first. Sometimes the violence of this torture killed the person, and he would then be crucified dead. But the Romans preferred a victim who lived a few days, because moving victims were more effective, just as animated billboards are more effective. I imagine that a man who has been lashed would wriggle more with the wood of the cross against his back, so onlookers would see the horrible sight of a person suffering.  The depiction of Jesus’ crucifixion in Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ is accurate in some respects. There is a scene where Jesus is whipped with a whip that has metal balls on the end that rip into the skin. The Romans did do this to people before crucifying them. However, Gibson’s film depicts Jesus being beaten constantly from the time of his arrest. He is whipped and beaten for half an hour and then beaten every step of the way to Golgotha. The gospels don’t describe that happening. Gibson apparently believes that Jesus’ execution was more brutal than any other execution in history because, in Gibson’s view, Jesus paid for every sin ever committed. I think Gibson’s justification for this is in Isaiah, where the symbolic figure of the suffering servant is described as beaten beyond recognition (= Israel). But historians cannot use Isaiah as evidence for what happened to Jesus. If you just start with the gospels, you don’t get the impression that Jesus’ crucifixion was far more brutal than usual, although it probably was very brutal.  Two details in the crucifixion accounts indicate that Jesus probably was whipped severely. The first is the detail that Jesus did not carry the crossbeam all the way to the site of the crucifixion. Normally, the condemned man was forced to do this, so we can infer that Jesus was already extremely weak at this point. I think we can trust this detail because Mark identified the man who carried the crossbeam for Jesus as “Simon of Cyrene, . . . the father of Alexander and Rufus.” Apparently Mark believed that his audience knew the sons of this man personally. If so, then there were two people known to Mark’s audience who could be consulted on this matter. The second detail which suggests that Jesus was whipped severely is the short period that he is on the cross. He dies in a matter of hours rather than days. Still, I think Mel Gibson went way overboard in the flogging scene.  Crosses themselves came in different varieties. The word we translate cross could be translated stake. Some crosses were simply stakes without cross beams. A cross like this better suits the phrase “nailed to a tree,” which is found sometimes in the New Testament. But Simon of Cyrene is said to have carried Jesus’ cross, and that probably referred to the crossbeam, because the stake was usually left in place. Moreover, people who were hung by their arms from the top of the vertical beam (the stake) tended to die much faster than the gospels say Jesus did, so Jesus’ cross probably had a cross beam. The crosses that had a crossbeam took the shape either of an elongated plus sign or a T; Matthew refers to the inscription being placed above Jesus’ head, so Matthew probably imagined a plus-shaped cross.  Crucifixion kills a person slowly. We don’t know what the physiological cause of death was for Jesus. The possibilities include heart failure; asphyxia; shock brought on by dehydration and loss of blood; and hypovolemic shock, wherein “reduced blood flow to the cells and tissues…leads to irreversible cell and organ injury and eventually death” (James Tabor).