Crucifixion

It’s uncertain exactly where the practice of crucifixion originated. It was sometimes used in ancient Phoenicia, Carthage, and Egypt; but it was the Romans who perfected this barbarous art. Guy Woods observed, “Surely diabolical human ingenuity never devised a crueler scheme for putting men to death.”

Roman citizens could not be crucified. This most cruel and humiliating form of execution was reserved for the dregs of society. In all the regions of the empire, murderers, rebels, thieves, and other such criminals were regularly condemned to the cross. “In Palestine during Jesus’ day, the shameful spectacle of a victim carrying a cross to the place of execution was so familiar to his hearers that Jesus three times in his teaching spoke of the road of discipleship as that of cross-bearing (Matt. 10:38; Mark 8:34; Luke 14:27)” (Dan King, Truth Commentaries: John, 400).

As in Jesus’ case, one condemned to be crucified was often scourged first. “Under the Roman method of scourging, the victim was stripped and tied in a bending posture to a pillar, or stretched upon some sort of frame. The ‘scourge’ (Latin flagellum) was constructed from leather thongs attached to a wooden handle, weighted at the ends with sharp butterfly-shaped pieces of bone or lead, which upon contact ripped apart the flesh of the back or breast.…It was an extremely severe form of punishment, often causing death for those who were frail or in ill health, and thus sparing them the terrible agony of the cross” (King 385).

The crucifixion itself was made as public as possible. The condemned individual was typically forced to carry part or all of his cross through the city streets to the place of execution outside the walls. At the appointed site, often by the side of a public highway, a squad of four soldiers stripped the victim naked, laid him on the cross with arms outstretched, and fastened him to it with ropes and/or nails driven through the wrists and ankles. The cross was then raised and its base dropped into a hole — the jolt of which sometimes dislocated the victim’s joints. A seat of sorts was often fastened to the vertical post to help support the body, not to ease the suffering, but to prolong it.

The condemned person died a slow and agonizing death from a combination of blood loss, exposure, hunger and thirst, and suffocation. F. W. Farrar described it this way:

A death by crucifixion seems to include all that pain and death can have of the
horrible and ghastly — dizziness, cramp, thirst, starvation, sleeplessness,
traumatic fever, tetanus, publicity of shame, long continuance of torment,
horror of anticipation, mortification of untended wounds, all intensified just
up to the point at which they can be endured at all, but all stopping just short
of the point which would give the sufferer the relief of unconsciousness. The
unnatural position made every movement painful; the lacerated veins and crushed
tendons throbbed with incessant anguish; the wounds, inflamed by exposure,
gradually gangrene; the arteries, especially of the head and stomach, became
swollen and oppressed with surcharged blood; and, while each variety of misery
went on gradually increasing, there was added to them the intolerable pang of a
burning and raging thirst (Life of Christ, 497-499).

Many victims lingered for days — which is why Pilate was surprised to hear that Jesus had died after only a few hours (Mark 15:44). In order to hasten death, the soldiers might break the victim’s legs with a club (see John 19:31-33). This made him unable to raise his body to breathe, thus bringing on death from lack of oxygen. The usual Roman practice was then to leave the body to be devoured by birds. The Jews, however, would take the dead man down and bury him in keeping with the Mosaic Law (Deuteronomy 21:22-23).

All these things Jesus endured. All these things God watched His Son suffer. Why?

“By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has send His only begotten Son into the world, so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:9-10).

“For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, that they who live should no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf” (2 Corinthians 5:14-15).