The cross: history, brutality and the gospel

Crucifixion was not a Roman invention. The earliest clear accounts come from the Assyrians and Persians in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, where enemies were impaled or hung on stakes and left in the open. Herodotus records the Persian king Darius crucifying three thousand Babylonians after taking the city. The point was never simply to kill — a sword does that faster and cheaper. The point was to display a body.

The practice travelled west through the Phoenicians to Carthage, and Rome learned it from the Carthaginians during the Punic Wars. By the late Republic it had become Rome's standard punishment for rebels, pirates, runaway slaves and the conquered. Roman citizens were legally protected from it except in cases of high treason; the citizen Paul was beheaded, while the non-citizen Peter, by tradition, was crucified.

Rome used it at a scale that is difficult to take in. After the slave revolt led by Spartacus was crushed in 71 BC, six thousand survivors were crucified along the Appian Way, one body every thirty-five metres or so for the hundred and ninety kilometres from Capua to Rome. In AD 4, following unrest after the death of Herod the Great, the governor Varus crucified two thousand Jews around Jerusalem. During the siege of Jerusalem in AD 70, Josephus says Titus's soldiers crucified up to five hundred captives a day until, in his words, there was no room left for the crosses and no crosses left for the bodies.

Crucifixion was a political instrument. Executions took place beside busy roads and at city gates, at eye level, where the maximum number of people would pass. Victims were usually stripped naked. A titulus — a board naming the crime — was carried before the condemned or fixed above them, so that the watching crowd learned exactly which behaviour produced this result.

Ancient writers understood the logic perfectly. Quintilian advised that crucifixions be staged on the busiest roads so that many could see and be moved by fear. Cicero called it 'the most cruel and disgusting penalty' — crudelissimum taeterrimumque supplicium — and insisted the word itself should be kept away from Roman ears. Seneca, Tacitus, Plautus and Josephus all treat it as the ultimate degradation rather than merely the ultimate pain.

That shame was the heart of it. The victim died slowly, naked, in public, unable to control their own body, mocked by passers-by, and was usually denied burial — left for carrion birds and dogs, which in the ancient mind was a final annihilation of a person's memory. This is why crucifixion almost never appears in ancient art, and why early Christians did not depict the cross for roughly three centuries. To announce a crucified saviour was, as Paul admitted, a stumbling-block to Jews and sheer stupidity to Greeks (1 Corinthians 1:23).

For a punishment inflicted on tens of thousands of people, direct archaeological evidence is astonishingly rare — victims were usually left unburied, and iron nails were valuable and routinely recovered and reused.

The most important find came in 1968 at Giv'at ha-Mivtar, north of Jerusalem. In an ossuary inscribed 'Yehohanan ben Hagkol' was a right heel bone with an iron nail, roughly 11.5 cm long, still driven through it. The nail's tip had bent against a knot in the olive wood, which is why it could not be pulled free and why the bone was buried with it still in place. Fragments of wood remained at both ends. Yehohanan was a man in his twenties who died in the first century AD — a contemporary of Jesus, executed the same way.

A second, less complete case was published from Fenstanton in Cambridgeshire, England, in 2021: a Roman-period skeleton with an iron nail through the heel bone, showing that the practice was applied across the empire.

The Yehohanan find also corrected earlier guesses. It suggests the legs may have been nailed sideways through the heels on either side of the upright, rather than both feet placed flat in front — evidence that there was no single fixed method. Roman soldiers improvised, and Josephus reports executioners at Jerusalem nailing bodies 'in different postures' out of boredom and cruelty.

The sentence normally began with scourging. The Roman flagrum was a short whip of several leather thongs weighted with lead balls and fragments of sheep bone. Jewish law limited lashes to thirty-nine; Roman practice had no fixed limit and stopped when the soldiers or the officer decided. The weighted tips tore skin, then subcutaneous tissue, then muscle, producing severe blood loss and shock. Some victims died on the post before reaching the cross. Eusebius, writing of martyrs, describes veins and inner organs laid open.

The condemned then carried the patibulum — the crossbeam, weighing perhaps 30 to 50 kilograms — to the execution site, where the upright post (the stipes) usually stood permanently. Wood was scarce around Jerusalem and posts were reused. The crossbeam was lifted onto the upright to form a T-shape or a cross shape, and the titulus was fixed above.

Nails were tapered iron spikes roughly 13 to 18 cm long. They were driven not through the palm, which cannot hold a body's weight, but through the wrist, between the bones of the carpus — a region called Destot's space — crushing or severing the median nerve. The pain from median nerve injury is documented in modern medicine as causalgia: a searing, unrelenting burn. Every shift of the body dragged the nerve against the iron.

Death typically took hours and could take days. The mechanism is disputed and probably varied: hypovolaemic shock from blood loss, asphyxiation as the outstretched arms fixed the chest in an inhaled position so that exhaling required pushing up on the nailed feet, exhaustion, dehydration, cardiac failure, or pulmonary embolism. Muscle cramps and tetany set in. To hasten death the soldiers performed crurifragium — shattering the shin bones with an iron club — after which the victim could no longer push up to breathe and suffocated within minutes.

Crucifixion remained ordinary Roman practice for centuries. It was the emperor Constantine who abolished it in the empire in the early fourth century, according to the historians Aurelius Victor and Sozomen, out of reverence for the one who had died on a cross.

The reversal is worth pausing over. Within three hundred years the most degrading object in the Roman world had become the emblem worn around the necks of the powerful. No one in the first century could have predicted that, and it is one of the historical oddities that any explanation of Christianity's origins has to account for.

After the Passover meal, Jesus went with his disciples across the Kidron valley to an olive grove called Gethsemane, which means 'oil press'. There he prayed, three times, that the cup would pass from him — and each time added, 'yet not what I will, but what you will' (Mark 14:36). This is not a man walking calmly to martyrdom. Mark says he began to be 'greatly distressed and troubled', and Luke, whose account carries the detail of sweat 'like great drops of blood falling down to the ground' (Luke 22:44), describes something close to collapse.

He was arrested there by an armed party sent from the chief priests, betrayed by Judas with a kiss. The disciples ran. Within a few hours he had been abandoned by everyone in his inner circle, and Peter, the most confident of them, denied knowing him three times in a courtyard while warming himself at a fire.

Jesus faced roughly six hearings between midnight and nine in the morning: before Annas, the former high priest; before Caiaphas and a hastily gathered council; before the full Sanhedrin at dawn; before Pilate; before Herod Antipas; and before Pilate again.

The Jewish proceedings violated their own legal norms at multiple points — capital trials were not to be held at night, not on the eve of a festival, not concluded on the same day as the verdict, and the practice of seeking witnesses for the prosecution first was reversed. The witnesses that were produced contradicted each other. The charge that finally stuck was blasphemy: asked directly whether he was the Christ, the Son of the Blessed, Jesus answered 'I am' (Mark 14:62).

But the Sanhedrin under Roman occupation could not carry out an execution, so the charge was translated into something Rome would act on: sedition. Before Pilate the accusation became that Jesus forbade paying tribute to Caesar and claimed to be a king (Luke 23:2). Pilate — a governor already on thin ice with Rome for previous provocations — examined him and said three times that he found no guilt in him. He then had him flogged anyway, offered the crowd Barabbas, an actual insurrectionist and murderer, and when they chose Barabbas, handed Jesus over. John records the sentence that decided it: 'If you release this man, you are not Caesar's friend' (John 19:12).

This is not a story its own community would invent. It has a Roman governor declaring the defendant innocent and killing him anyway, the movement's own leaders fleeing, and its most prominent apostle denying he ever knew the man.

The Gospels report the scourging in four words — 'having scourged Jesus' — and move on. Ancient readers did not need it explained. As described above, the flagrum stripped flesh from the back, shoulders and legs, causing haemorrhage and shock.

Then came the mockery, and it was pointed. A whole cohort was called together. They put a purple or scarlet robe on him — the colour of royalty — pressed a crown twisted from thorns onto his head, put a reed in his right hand as a sceptre, knelt in front of him and said, 'Hail, King of the Jews!' They spat on him, struck his head with the reed, and blindfolded him and demanded he prophesy who had hit him (Matthew 27:27-31; Luke 22:63-65).

The cruelty was not random. Every element parodied the specific claim he was being executed for. Rome was not just killing a man; it was making a joke of a kingdom.

He carried the crossbeam until he could not, and the soldiers conscripted a passer-by, Simon of Cyrene, to carry it for him — a detail Mark anchors by naming Simon's sons, Alexander and Rufus, evidently men his first readers could ask. The site was called Golgotha, 'the place of a skull', outside the city wall and beside a road.

He was offered wine mixed with myrrh, a crude analgesic, and refused it. They crucified him between two criminals at about nine in the morning. Pilate had the charge written in Aramaic, Latin and Greek: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews. The chief priests objected to the wording; Pilate, who had lost the argument that mattered, refused to change it. The soldiers divided his clothes and cast lots for the seamless tunic.

From noon until three, the accounts record darkness over the land. At the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani' — the opening line of Psalm 22, a psalm that goes on to describe pierced hands and feet and the dividing of garments — and then died. The centurion in charge, a man who had presumably supervised many of these, said: 'Truly this man was the Son of God' (Mark 15:39).

Because the Sabbath was beginning, the soldiers came to break the victims' legs. Finding Jesus already dead, they did not break his legs but drove a spear into his side, and John reports that blood and water came out — consistent with pleural and pericardial fluid separating after death, and a detail an ancient forger would have had no reason to invent.

'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do' (Luke 23:34) — spoken over the men driving in the nails.

'Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise' (Luke 23:43) — to the criminal beside him who asked to be remembered.

'Woman, behold your son... behold your mother' (John 19:26-27) — placing his mother into John's care, a dying man arranging his family's welfare.

'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Matthew 27:46) — the cry of dereliction, and the first line of Psalm 22.

'I thirst' (John 19:28) — after massive blood loss, the plainest human sentence in the account.

'It is finished' — tetelestai (John 19:30), a word used on receipts to mean 'paid in full'. Not 'I am finished'.

'Father, into your hands I commit my spirit' (Luke 23:46) — from Psalm 31:5, the bedtime prayer of a Jewish child.

Crucifixion victims were normally left on the cross or thrown into a common grave. Jesus was not. Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy member of the very council that had condemned him, asked Pilate for the body. Pilate checked with the centurion that Jesus was already dead — a professional confirmation — and released it.

Joseph, with Nicodemus, wrapped the body in linen with around seventy-five pounds of myrrh and aloes and laid it in a new rock-cut tomb, closed with a rolling stone. The women from Galilee watched where he was laid. Matthew adds that the chief priests, remembering Jesus' talk of rising, asked for the tomb to be sealed and guarded.

Two details in the burial account tell against invention. Joseph is a named member of the Sanhedrin, checkable by anyone in Jerusalem. And the first witnesses to the empty tomb are women, whose testimony carried little weight in first-century courts. No one constructing a persuasive legend in that culture chooses those witnesses.

The Christian account begins with a good creation and human beings made to know God. Sin, in Scripture, is not primarily rule-breaking; it is the fracture of that relationship — turning inward, treating ourselves as the centre, and then treating other people accordingly. Its effects are visible in every human society, and honestly, in every human day.

The Bible refuses two comfortable options. It will not say that sin does not matter, because a God who shrugged at cruelty would not be good. And it will not say that people are beyond hope, because it insists God loves the world he made. The cross is where those two refusals meet.

Substitution: 'He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree' (1 Peter 2:24). Isaiah 53, written centuries before, describes a servant wounded for our transgressions, on whom the Lord laid the iniquity of us all. What we had earned, he took.

Sacrifice: the whole temple system pointed forwards. Hebrews argues that the repeated animal sacrifices could never finally deal with sin, and that Christ offered himself 'once for all' (Hebrews 9:26-28). The tearing of the temple curtain at the moment of his death is the image: the way in is open.

Victory — Christus Victor: the cross is a battlefield on which the powers of sin, death and the devil are disarmed (Colossians 2:15). The early church often told it this way, as a rescue rather than a transaction.

Reconciliation: 'God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself' (2 Corinthians 5:19). The problem is a broken relationship, and the solution is a restored one.

Example and moral transformation: 'Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example' (1 Peter 2:21). Real, though thin on its own — an example cannot forgive anyone.

Christians disagree about which picture is central. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions weight them differently, and within Protestantism there is live debate about penal substitution in particular. What all historic Christian traditions agree on is that the death of Jesus deals decisively with sin and that it was God's own initiative, not a reluctant father punishing an innocent third party. The Trinity means God was not a spectator at the cross. He was on it.

On the first day of the week the women went to finish the burial rites and found the stone rolled away and the tomb empty. Over the following weeks the followers of Jesus claimed he appeared to them — to Mary Magdalene, to Peter, to two on the Emmaus road, to the eleven, to more than five hundred at once, to his sceptical brother James, and last to Paul, who had been arresting Christians (1 Corinthians 15:3-8).

Paul is blunt about the stakes: 'If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins... we are of all people most to be pitied' (1 Corinthians 15:17-19). Christianity is not a philosophy that survives the falsification of its central claim. It stakes everything on a historical event.

Four facts are conceded by the large majority of historians of the period, believing or not: Jesus was crucified and died; his followers sincerely believed they saw him alive afterwards; Paul, an enemy, converted on the basis of what he believed was an appearance; and James, his sceptical brother, became a leader of the Jerusalem church and died for it. Explanations differ. But something happened that turned terrified deserters into people who preached in the city where it happened, weeks later, to the faces of the men who had ordered the execution — and did not stop under threat of death.

God made you and the world, and it was good. Human beings turned away, and the damage is everywhere — including in us. God did not leave it there. He came himself, in Jesus: fully God and fully human, who lived the life we failed to live, was executed on a Roman cross, and rose from the dead three days later, defeating sin and death from the inside.

Because of that, forgiveness is not something you earn by being good enough. It is a gift, offered now, received by turning towards him and trusting him — what the Bible calls repentance and faith. 'For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast' (Ephesians 2:8-9).

And it is not only a transaction about the past. Those who come to Christ are given his Spirit, adopted into a family, put to work, and promised that the world will one day be set right — every wrong addressed, every tear wiped away, death itself undone.

'Gospel' translates euangelion: news of a decisive event, the kind a herald ran to announce after a battle. Not advice about how to live. News about something that has already happened.

If you find yourself believing this is true, you do not need a ritual, a qualification or a clean record. You need honesty. Tell God plainly: that you have gone your own way, that you want to be forgiven, that you are trusting what Jesus did rather than what you have managed. 'If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved' (Romans 10:9).

Then find other Christians — a church — because this was never designed to be done alone. Start reading one of the Gospels; Mark is short and fast, John goes deepest. And keep asking questions. Nobody here started out understanding it.

If you are not there yet, that is genuinely fine. Read the accounts for yourself before deciding what you think of them. The claim is public, dated and specific, and it invites examination.