The Crucifixion of Jesus: A Six-Day Meditation on Christ’s Ultimate Sacrificeনমুনা

We cannot comprehend the public humiliation of this sort of death. Golgotha is a well-trafficked area, close to the city, perhaps even at an intersection or crossroads, and each cross serves as a warning and a deterrent against disobedience and uprising at this Passover feast. Moreover, the naked victims are disfigured, bloody, looking inhuman enough to treat with contempt despite their sorry state. No wonder they called it the slave’s death. We cannot imagine the level of PTSD and psychological torture the average Jerusalemite endured at the regular sight of dying bodies twisting in pain, lungs gasping, throats howling. No wonder they never spoke of crucifixion in public.

Rome massacred millions upon millions during its centuries-long reign of terror; it is impossible to know exactly how many victims met their end by crucifixion. General Varus crucified two thousand Jews in 4 BC. The Spartacus revolt of 73 BC saw upwards of six thousand crucified along the Appian Way in a single day. Adult male political “terrorists” weren’t the only ones murdered in this horrific fashion. In 66 AD, the Roman governor Florus whipped and crucified 3,600 victims, including women, children, and infants. Four years later, during the Siege of 70 AD, the starving poor who tried to escape Jerusalem were crucified at a rate of five hundred per day until the Romans ran out of wood.

Crucifixion was nothing short of state terrorism. The Romans crucified tens if not hundreds of thousands of victims over more than half a millennia. Guess how many crucified skeletons we have recovered in the Middle East to date?

One. The first-century specimen was found in 1968 in northeast Jerusalem. The burial site contains the bones of thirty-five people in all, including three children who starved to death, a mother and infant who died in childbirth, a teenager roasted alive on a rack, and a preschooler pierced with an arrow. The crucified man was found in a wealthy family tomb, and the name on the ossuary identifies the victim as Yehohanan ben Hagkol—John son of Hagkol. He is no older than age twenty-eight, stands just under five-feet-six (average height at the time), and there is a 7.5-inch spike through the heel bone. The spike was driven into the olive wood so hard that it bent and could not be removed, thus leaving us with proof of crucifixion at the same time and place as Jesus. Young John’s crucifixion varies from the image we have of Jesus’s. John’s ankles were hammered into the sides of the wooden pole, and his hands and elbows were draped over the beam and tied instead of nailed.

Why only one skeleton out of potentially hundreds of thousands? Perhaps because it was rare to bury the body of a crucifixion victim. Normally, victims were denied even this last dignity, instead being thrown in rivers or trash heaps or shallow graves, serving as carrion for birds and meat for dogs and worms. In other words, there was almost never a body left to bury. Very rarely, a family member or relative would petition the court to retrieve the corpse, but it was dangerous to do so as it would immediately identify you as a friend of the criminal. Normally only people in positions of power made such requests. For example, Josephus manages to save the life of an old acquaintance who is in the middle of being crucified during the Siege of Jerusalem.

As readers, we can envision many serene Jesus statues we have seen carved on church walls, but what does the crucified Jesus look like? He is completely naked, genitals exposed, on a high-traffic thoroughfare filled with the sounds of mockery from Jews and Romans alike. He is presumably cursed by God, sunburned and parched by Middle Eastern heat and the afternoon sun, wounded and bruised from head to foot, his head and back bleeding from countless festering mud-caked cuts, his eyes and ears plagued by flies he cannot swat away. If he is the average victim of the time, he hangs on a T-shaped crossbeam that is just a few inches above eye level. He is wracked with pain. He rocks his cross to heave out every breath, the whip wounds scraping open against the cross’s grain with each inhalation. At the foot of the cross is a slowly expanding pool of blood, sweat, urine, and feces. Vultures circle above and wild dogs linger nearby, ready to strip the meat from his bones when the crowd goes home.

May we forever shudder at the sight of a cross.