Crucifixion
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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 modernday 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
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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).