Book Excerpts

THE MOST WRETCHED OF DEATHS

If you were to ask a Christian to list the essentials of the Christian faith, the belief that Jesus was crucified and died would be at the top of that list. Not only is the crucifixion a pivotal part of all four Gospels, but the rest of the New Testament constantly refers back to it as the key event of the Christian faith. Paul writes, “For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). Peter writes, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24). Also, don’t forget the ancient hymn in Philippians: though Jesus “was in the form of God” and “born in the likeness of men,” he “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:5–9).

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Interestingly, what is possibly the first known visual depiction of Jesus of Nazareth doesn’t come from Christian hands. It’s a piece of ancient graffiti scratched into a wall in Rome. Historians call it the Alexamenos Graffito. It portrays a man looking up to another man, who is naked (his butt cheeks clearly illustrated) and hanging on a cross. The Greek reads, “Alexamenos worships God.” Though the crucified man has a human body, the graffiti artist gave him the head of a donkey, degrading both Alexamenos and the subject of his worship. So, it’s likely the earliest known artistic depiction of Jesus is actually a not-so-nice one.

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When studying history, what is called “enemy attestation” is considered the strongest sort of evidence. Enemy attestation is when a source of information from one group confirms information about another group they consider enemies or opponents. The idea is that all historical writings have the bias of the authors, so a historical record from a certain group about themselves will likely have a positive spin. On the other hand, historical writings about those same people by their enemies will likely have a negative spin. So, enemy attestation is valuable when it confirms the same information the other side reported. For instance, regardless of one’s opinion of Donald Trump, even someone who hates his guts would confirm he was elected the 45th president of the United States. Such harmony is of high value to the historian.

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The Alexamenos Graffito is a piece of enemy attestation that confirms that ancient Christians worshiped Jesus as deity. This is significant to Christians today because many skeptics explain away Christian beliefs about Jesus as legends that developed much later. The tired claim is that Jesus was deified some time after Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in AD 312 and—as the theory goes—mixed pagan beliefs with Christian beliefs. This simple piece of scratched slander on a Roman wall from about AD 200 disproves that theory alone. But, also, it gives us a glimpse into what the run-of-the-mill Roman thought of those in this strange new religion that worships a crucified God-man. 

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So, it’s worth taking some time to discuss the craziness of worshiping a crucified person, and I don’t just mean in the view of modern people. Yes, today plenty of people find Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection too incredible to believe, but to ancient Romans and Jews it would’ve been not just considered absurd, but scandalous. 

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One doesn’t have to contemplate crucifixion long to grasp the ultimate horror of it. With the Romans, torture preceded crucifixion in the form of being beaten by a leather whip with bits of metal or bone weaved into it to tear the flesh, even exposing muscle and bone. This type of beating—verberatio (sometimes translated as “scourging”)—was so severe some would die from this alone. If that happened, at least the condemned avoided the misery of the cross. 

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When we examine all four Gospels, we find that Jesus received two beatings before his crucifixion. At first, Pilate gave Jesus a lighter flogging (fustigatio) but a flogging nonetheless. Pilate, then, tried to release him, but when the crowds pressured Pilate to crucify him, Jesus received the more severe beating (verberatio)—scourging (John 19:1–16; Matthew 27:26; Mark 15:15; Luke 23:13–16). After the scourging, the Romans made the beaten and bloody carry their own cross to the crucifixion site, as we see with Jesus (John 19:16–17). Because of the brutality of scourging, it’s no wonder the Roman soldiers had to recruit Simon of Cyrene, an uninvolved onlooker, to carry the cross for Jesus (Luke 23:26). Afterwards, the condemned was laid out naked—his flayed back against the coarse wood—and metal spikes were driven through his ankles (or feet) and wrists (or forearms) into the cross.

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Despite common portrayals of Jesus on the cross with spikes through his hands, it’s more likely the spikes were through Jesus’ wrists. In English translations, we read that Jesus had wounds in his “hands” (Luke 24:39–40; John 20:20, 20:27), but no word for “wrists” in New Testament Greek existed, and the Greek word for hands (cheir) would include the wrists. For instance, in the Book of Acts, we’re told chains fell off of Peter’s cheir (Acts 12:7). The chains would undoubtedly have been around his wrists, not his actual hands. Spikes through the hands wouldn’t be able to hold the weight of a body on a cross; the hands would likely tear. So, all those artistic depictions of Jesus with wounds in his palms are probably inaccurate. 

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Not to scramble your eggs even more, but based on the New Testament alone, the exact shape of the object Jesus was crucified on isn’t entirely certain either. The Greek word translated “cross” (stauros) could mean a pole, stake, or an actual cross made of two intersecting beams. Further, a cross could’ve been a capital “T,” a lowercase “t,” or it could’ve even been an X shape. The Romans crucified people on all sorts of things. Jehovah’s Witnesses are absolutely certain Jesus was attached to a “torture stake” with his hands stretched above his head, claiming that the Christian t-shaped cross symbol was stolen from paganism by (you guessed it) Emperor Constantine. I’ve heard other accusations that it was stolen from the ancient Egyptian ankh, a well-known cross-shaped symbol with an oval shape at the top. 

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Such theories run into the same problems as other pagan copycat theories discussed in Chapter 3. As we’ve seen, historical evidence proves Jesus was, in fact, crucified and the Romans did, in fact, crucify people on t-shaped crosses. The Alexamenos Graffito shows Jesus on a t-shaped cross at least a hundred years before Constantine. We also know Pilate had a sign put on Jesus’ cross reading “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews” in Aramaic, Latin, and Greek. Above his head would be the most logical location to place this sign, so a lowercase “t” makes the most sense, rather than a uppercase “T” or “X”.

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Furthermore, the New Testament does give us a clue that Jesus’ arms were outstretched. The disciple Thomas, upon hearing that Jesus had resurrected, states, “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails, and place my finger into the mark of the nails… I will never believe” (John 20:25). You may have missed it (because I did until someone pointed it out), but when speaking about the wounds in Jesus’ hands, Thomas mentions “nails”—plural. If Jesus’ arms were stretched above his head on a torture stake, as Jehovah’s Witnesses insist, a single spike would’ve been driven through his overlapping hands; only one nail would’ve been needed.

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As interesting as it is to explore these finer details, when all is said and done, the big fact remains unchanged: Jesus was crucified. 

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Once the cross was placed upright, gravity would pull his bodyweight down on the spikes through his limbs. Then, the long wait of his slow death would begin. Under the heat of the sun, he died on display. The weight of his body made it hard to breathe. He would have to push up on the spikes piercing his feet and pull up on the spikes through his arms to raise his body enough to a position to do so. This is why the Romans would sometimes break the legs of the crucified to expedite death, as we see in John’s Gospel (John 19:31–33).

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The cause of death could be a mix of many things: shock, loss of blood, exhaustion, suffocation, exposure. Usually, the executed were left on the crosses as food for wild animals and as a horrifying warning to everyone else. To ancient people, the victim going unburied would have grim religious significance. It was all a brutal, public spectacle.

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Scholar John Dominic Crossan (who doesn’t hold to orthodox Christianity by any means) not only denies that Jesus rose from the dead, but even that he was buried in a tomb. He claims Jesus’ body would’ve been left on the cross to be eaten by buzzards, and then his remains would’ve been thrown into a shallow, public grave to be consumed further by dogs [2]. For the record, good historical evidence (outside of the New Testament) exists of exceptions. We know the Romans allowed concessions for the staunch religious beliefs of the Jews. Josephus testifies to this, writing, “[E]ven felons who have been crucified are taken down and buried before sunset” [3]. With this, in 1968, the remains of a crucifixion victim was found in a sealed family tomb outside of Jerusalem. Within the ossuary (bone box) of “Yehohanan, the son of Hahakol,” archaeologists found a heel bone with a four-and-a-half inch iron spike driven through it. 

The brutal and public (not to mention inexpensive) nature of it was an appealing tool in keeping the masses in line. To give you an idea, Roman historian Tacitus wrote, “Our ancestors always suspected the temper of their slaves… But now that we have in our households [slaves from] nations with different customs to our own, with a foreign worship or none at all, it is only by terror you can hold in such a motley rabble” [4]. In the Roman Empire, the elite inflicted crucifixion primarily on the lower classes, especially slaves and rebellious upstarts. The Romans held none of our modern ideas of human rights; any challenge to Roman authority wasn’t tolerated. 

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Crucifixion was the ultimate shame and humiliation to both Romans and Jews—both strong group-identity and honor-shame cultures. As one scholar put it, “Death on the cross was the penalty for slaves, as everyone knew; as such it symbolized extreme humiliation, shame and torture” [5]. It had such a stigma, the words “crucifixion” and “cross” weren’t used in polite company. Even writings mentioning this horrible practice avoided those terms. We saw this last chapter with Tacitus calling it “the extreme penalty.” Josephus called it “the most wretched of deaths” [6]. Telling someone to “go get crucified” was one of the crudest things you could say. In no uncertain terms, crucifixion was a source of offense, disgrace, and dread to both Romans and Jews. Even within the Jewish scripture it says to be hung on a “tree” is to be cursed: 

And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the LORD your God is giving you for an inheritance. (Deuteronomy 21:22–23)

As I was writing this, I struggled to think of an equivalent in modern times to help readers understand the horror and ugliness surrounding crucifixion in the ancient world. Lethal injection, the electric chair, and firing squad all fall short. Even beheadings and hangings—though terrible and often public—don’t carry the same inhumanity. Then, someone gave me an adequate comparison: lynching. 

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In the darkest moments of U.S. history, we find human bodies hanging from “the lynching tree.” After the emancipation of people of African descent from slavery, racist lynchings became the terror of African Americans from the late 1800s all the way to the 1960s. The victims of this mob violence would be tortured and murdered, their corpses left for public display. Often, the severely beaten victim was hung up alive and left to die. 

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The looming horror an African American person felt living under the threat of lynching in Mississippi in 1920 was similar to the dread the lower classes in the ancient Roman Empire felt about crucifixion. Though not a perfect comparison, the unabashed cruelty that surrounds lynching—the utter dehumanization; the publicness; the ability to inject terror into witnesses—all these make crucifixion and lynching close cousins with far more in common than any type of modern, government-sanctioned execution [7].

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So, here’s the big idea: if the first Christians had decided to invent a story so they could start a new religion (for whatever reason), creating a story about a crucified God-man wouldn’t be the way to do it. In fact, it would be a good way to ensure your new religion died a quick death. The idea of following the teachings of a crucified man would’ve been not just ridiculous, but offensive to the extreme. If Jewish and Roman families were scandalized by their own relatives being punished by crucifixion, why would anyone adamantly admit to the religious worship of a crucified criminal? Historian Tom Holland (who isn’t a Christian, by the way) writes, “That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque,” and the Jews would’ve found such a belief “stupefying,” “repellent,” and “[n]ot merely blasphemy, [but] madness” [8].

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The apostle Paul commented on this in the New Testament: “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God… [W]e preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” [9].

CHRISTIANITY WASN’T DONE IN A CORNER (A.K.A. THE HISTORICALLY TESTABLE TRIANGLE)

The execution of Jesus is an essential Christian belief because it’s closely tied to another essential: the belief that Jesus resurrected. In fact, if Jesus hadn’t risen from the dead, Christianity is a sham. And that’s not just my opinion. The apostle Paul writes, 

And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. (1 Corinthians 15:14)

He goes on to say if Jesus hadn’t returned to life, the Christian faith is pointless and Christians are pitiful (1 Corinthians 15:17–19). So, there you have it from one of Jesus’ hand-picked apostles, the greatest missionary of the church, and writer of 13 “books” of the New Testament. In short, if the resurrection ain’t true, Christianity ain’t true.

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In the Book of Acts, when Paul is testifying to the death and resurrection of Jesus before King Agrippa II, Agrippa’s sister Bernice of Cilicia, and Roman procurator Festus (whose campaign slogan was, “Festus for the Rest of Us!” [10]), Paul claims Agrippa has already heard of these things because they weren’t “done in a corner” (Acts 26:26). In other words, because these events happened in public, they haven’t gone unnoticed. People knew about them; people had witnessed them; and if Agrippa hadn’t heard of them, it would’ve been awfully gutsy of Paul to tell him that he had!

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So, let’s take some time to consider the uniqueness of Christianity. Despite efforts to write off Jesus as just another ancient myth, we find the story of Jesus utterly unique to anything in the ancient world. With this, when we compare Christianity’s origin to the origins of other religions, we notice something else unique: Christianity’s publicness.

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Most (perhaps even all) other religions started by someone having some sort of supernatural or spiritual experience. That person, then, spread what he or she learned. For example, Siddhartha Gautama was meditating under the Bodhi tree when he reached enlightenment, becoming the Buddha. Muhammad was in a cave near Mecca when he received the words of the Qur’an from an angelic messenger. Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, was in the woods near Manchester, New York when the angel Moroni (whose name does not rhyme with “pepperoni”) gave him the Book of Mormon. But all these share another similarity as well. All were personal, private experiences. They all were alone. No witnesses were present.

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On the other hand, Christianity’s origin was public. Jesus taught in public. Jesus performed miracles in public. Jesus died in public. After his execution, Jesus appeared alive in public. Because of this publicness, Christianity is founded on the eyewitness testimonies of multiple people. Because of this publicness, Christianity can be historically tested.

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Think of it as a triangle with arrows going back and forth from each of the three corners. In one corner is (1) Real Time and Place; in the other, (2) Public; and in the third, (3) Eyewitnesses. All three of these are interconnected; each is dependent on the others. Let’s call this the Historically Testable Triangle. 

First, allow me to be Captain Obvious and point out that in order for something to be historically testable it must take place in (1) a real time and place. But, also, it must be (2) public enough to have (3) multiple witnesses for us to know that it really took place. This Testable Triangle shows us that Christianity’s origin is unusual when compared to other religions.

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Muhammad was alone in a cave when he received the words of the Qur’an, so the Qur’an is based solely on the witness of one man. Similarly, Muslims are well-acquainted with the “Miraculous Night Journey” of Muhammad, where he flew from Mecca to Jerusalem on a mystical beast called a Buraq. Only one ambiguous passage in the Qur’an alludes to this event (Qur’an 17:1), and later Muslim writings, called hadith, expanded on it. The earliest, most trusted biographer of Muhammad, Ibn Ishaq, records that a family member of Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s successor, said that one of Muhammad’s more prominent wives, A’isha, testified that Muhammad’s “body remained” [10]. It’s unclear from the Muslim sources if this “Miraculous Night Journey” literally happened or if it was a vision or dream [11]. Regardless, it was a private event only experienced by Muhammad with no witnesses. In fact, the Qur’an itself says Muhammad performed no miracles (Qur’an 10:20, 13:7, 17:90–93, 21:5, 29:48–52).

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To boot, Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, was alone in a grove of trees when God the Father and Jesus Christ first appeared to him. He was also alone on the Hill Cumorah three years later when the angel Moroni (who I can’t help but imagine as an Italian stereotype behind a pizza counter) led him to the buried golden tablets of the Book of Mormon [13] written in “reformed Egyptian” [14]. Nevermind that “reformed Egyptian” is unfounded. Nevermind that Smith would shove his face into a hat containing a “seer stone” to translate it [15]. Nevermind that no one other than Smith has ever seen these golden tablets [16]. When all is said and done, Mormonism is based on the testimony of a lone person.

Now, compare all that to the earliest known Christian creed found in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7, the one that proclaims Jesus rose from the dead and names numerous eyewitnesses, as well as 500 unnamed witnesses, making sure to point out that most of them are still alive (just in case anyone wanted to talk to them). Compare that to Luke’s Gospel, which starts by speaking of eyewitnesses “from the beginning” who have written accounts about Jesus, and how Luke has taken it upon himself to write his own “orderly account” based on his own independent investigation (Luke 1:1–4). Compare that to when Peter proposes choosing a new “inner circle” disciple to replace the betraying (and dead) Judas, requiring the replacement to be someone who had witnessed the start of Jesus’ ministry all the way to Jesus’ ascension, so he could testify as a credible witness to Jesus’ resurrection (Acts 1:15–22).

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Compare that to the New Testament Gospels reporting at least six women, several who are named, as the first to find Jesus’ tomb empty (Matthew 28:1–7; Mark 16:1–8; Luke 24:1–11; John 20:1–10) and Jesus’ first post-crucifixion appearances to Mary Magdalene and other women (John 20:11–18; Matthew 28:8–10). Consider that in first-century Israel, women’s testimony wasn’t even accepted in a court of law. Josephus writes, “But let not a single witness be credited; but three, or two at the least; and those such whose testimony is confirmed by their good lives. But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex” [17]. Likewise, the Talmud, a commentary on Jewish oral law, puts the testimony of women on the same level as slaves and gamblers (“dice-players” and “pigeon-racers,” to be exact) [18]. In fact, when the women share about encountering the risen Jesus, the male disciples shrug it off in disbelief—certainly not a detail invented to make Jesus’ disciples look good (Luke 24:10–11)! So, why would all four Gospel writers claim that women were the first witnesses of Jesus’ resurrection when no one in their culture would take the testimony of women seriously? In the second century, Greek philosopher Celsus even mocked Christianity as a religion based on the testimony of a “half-frantic woman” [19].

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Finally, consider that the New Testament isn’t written by one person, but eight. Other religions’ scriptures are often just the teachings of their founder, but the New Testament is unique in that it contains eyewitness testimony and the Historically Testable Triangle. The writers were deeply committed to reporting not just what Jesus said, but also what he did—which included predicting his resurrection from the grave, then doing it. 

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The Gospel writers understood actions speak louder than words.

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NOTES:

[1]  What Does the Bible Really Teach? (New York, NY: Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, 2014), 205.

[2]  Yet, even he writes, “Jesus’ death by crucifixion under Pontius Pilate is as sure as anything historical can ever be.” John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1995), 145.

[3]  Paul L. Maier, Josephus: The Essential Writings, (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel, 1988), 319.

[4]  Tacitus, Annals, 14:44, Complete Works of Tacitus, ed. Alfred John Church and William Jackson Brodribb, (New York, NY: Random House, 1942).

[5]  Martin Hengel, Crucifixion: In the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross, (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1977), 62.

[6]  Hengel, Crucifixion, 8.

[7]  I first heard this comparison made on the podcast Three Chords and the Truth: The Apologetics Podcast. They named James Cone’s book The Cross and the Lynching Tree as the source for this idea.

[8]  Tom Holland, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, (New York, NY: Basic, 2019), 6.

[9]  1 Corinthians 1:18–22.

[10]  I kid, I kid!

[11]  Alfred Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 183.

[12]  Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad, 182.

[13]  Our Heritage: A Brief History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, (Salt Lake City, UT: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1996), 3–5.

[14]  The Book of Mormon, Mormon 9:32.

[15]  David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ by a Witness to the Divine Authenticity of The Book of Mormon, (Richmond, MO: 1887), 12, https://www.latterdaytruth.org/pdf/100023.pdf.  “Translation or Divination?,” Institute For Religious Research, July 6, 2011, https://mit.irr.org/translation-or-divination.

[16]  The Book of Mormon’s “Testimony of Three Witnesses” and “Testimony of Eight Witnesses” face all sorts of issues, including the original three all apostatizing from Mormonism; Mormon scripture stating there will be only three witnesses, no more (2 Nephi 27:1-13); and admissions by the witnesses that they didn’t see physical gold tablets but a vision of them. Anyhow, if someone had just presented the actual gold tablets to the public any questions about them would’ve been all cleared up. See Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Mormonism - Shadow or Reality? Fifth Edition, (Salt Lake City, UT: Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1987. Reformatted 2008), 50–63, 96B–96C.

[17]  Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 4:8:15, https://penelope.uchicago.edu/josephus/ant-4.html.

[18] Mishnah Rosh Hashanah, 1:8, Sefaria, https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Rosh_Hashanah.1.8?ven=William_Davidson_Edition_-_English&vhe=Torat_Emet_357&lang=bi.

[19] He was referring to Mary Magdalene. Origen, Against Celsus, 2:59, New Advent, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/04162.htm.

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