Crucifixion was a painful, ignoble way to die. Its agony marred the body, and its image and memory still have the power to mar and madden the mind. Mel Gibson's movie about the Passion of Jesus Christ is only the latest echo.
Crucifixion, as a form of execution, was invented by the Persians, the ancestors of modern-day Iranians. It was picked up by the Greeks under Alexander the Great when they reached Asia. Alexander himself ordered 2,000 men of military age crucified after he captured Tyre in 332 B.C. The Romans adopted it and used it most spectacularly in 71 B.C., when 6,000 slaves who had rebelled under Spartacus were crucified along the Via Appia.
The punishment of crucifixion was meant to be shameful, lingering and exemplary: a public warning not to break the law. It was a horrible punishment, and by law Roman citizens were exempted from crucifixion.
"It was the Roman Empire's way of executing criminals. The Romans crucified Christ, not the Jews," FAU scholar Alan L. Berger pointed out. "The traditional Jewish method of execution was death by stoning, not crucifixion. People seem to forget that Christ was crucified between two thieves, who were ordinary lawbreakers."
The criminal was hung up in public view, for all to see, and expired slowly, either by suffocation (the effort of breathing forced the condemned man to raise himself up on his arms to inhale, boosting himself with his legs, until the limbs gave out and he suffocated); or by thirst, exposure or loss of blood, through nail wounds in the feet.
The arms were usually roped to the cross, not nailed. Nails were expensive. Wood, too, was scarce in Judea, so crosses were usually reused.
In a refinement of cruelty, a small wooden crossbar seat or "sedile" was sometimes supplied for the condemned man to rest on, thus prolonging his life and agony.
A coup de grâce was sometimes given, by breaking the condemned man's legs, which prevented him from struggling up and breathing further. The evangelist John says in John 19:32-33 that the legs of the two thieves crucified with Christ were broken, but Christ's legs were not, because he was already dead after three hours on the cross.
Startling archeological evidence of the actual method of crucifixion came to light in 1968, when Israeli archeologists found a limestone box, an ossuary, in a cave north of Jerusalem, containing the bones of an executed Jew whose name was inscribed on the rock box: "Yehohanan Son of Hagkol."
Yehohanan had been crucified. A rusty nail, together with a bit of the olive-wood cross on which he hung, was found in the ossuary, driven through the dead man's heel bone. Jewish burial customs compelled the body to be taken down and buried hastily, for the flesh to decompose and the bones to be interred in the ossuary. Yehohanan's pierced bone was put on display in 2000 at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, in an exhibition titled "Cradle of Christianity."
Crucifixion was abolished around 320 A.D. by the emperor Constantine, after his conversion to Christianity. No longer a judicial reality from the fourth century A.D. onward, the crucifix and Christ crucified moved into a Golgotha of the mind. It is still with us today.
In the 1930s, a French physician named Pierre Barbet became so obsessed with the mechanics of the crucifixion that he nailed up cadavers to crosses, to see exactly where the nails must have pierced Christ's hands and feet. He published his findings in 1935 in a book titled Les Cinq Plaies du Christ: Etude Anatomique et Experimentale, (The Five Wounds of Christ: An Anatomical and Experimental Study).
Among Barbet's conclusions was that Jesus must have been pierced through the wrists, not the palms of the hands. The tissue and bone and muscle of the human hand are too frail to support the weight of a vertical body. Barbet noted that nailed hands tore when required to support a weight of more than 88 pounds. [more]