Well, had they used rope, they would have had to change the inscription on the cross. 
To add another tidbit to the mix.
We know from the last 150 years of documenting gunshot wounds and other severe trauma to the hand that driving a large spike through the palm or the wrist will severe or at least traumatize the median nerve. This leads to an acute and very severe form of neuralgia that manifests itself as an excruciating burning sensation radiating out from the hand towards the elbow. Some patients have said to feel the pain all the way up to the shoulder. A similar syndrome may be produced by inflicting trauma on the nerve bundle that passes through the arch of the foot. In some cases victims of such injury have been reported to experience far more pain from the nerve damage than the wound to flesh and bone.
It is of course pure speculation like anything else regarding the Roman traditions of crucifixion, but it’s not a farfetched idea that those glaive-toting campers knew this and were quite delighted to add that little extra spice to the suffering of their victim. Given the sheer numbers they hung up on beams I’d be surprised if they didn’t learn one or two things about the process in the process. If you want to be nice to them you could lump it in with the leg breaking stuff, since it probably shortened the endurance of the crucified and thereby speeded up asphyxia. In all cases I’d say that there’s a fair many better ways to pass a Friday afternoon. Golf anyone?
Here is an article describing early research into gunshot wounds by Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell (1829-1914) during the American Civil War (the faint of heart might want to abstain).
Here is an article that describes nerve trauma in a semi understandable way out of a more modern pathological viewpoint.
Sparc
Jesus was indeed not a forgettable criminal. If he had been, they wouldn’t have taken such great pains to make sure his body wasn’t moved. (Namely rolling a big huge stone in front of his grave and posting two guards on either side.)
Crucifixion was entertainment and was used for the “lowest” criminals. In that day it was illegal to crucify a Roman citizen, regardless of the crime, because they considered all Roman citizens to deserve better than that.
WV_Woman it is your blessed right to take the Bible literally, but this does not make it a good cite for historical proof since it is, if nothing else biased.
The New Testament sort of hinges on the fact that Mr. Josefson was everything but a forgettable criminal. And I think it would be fair to say that history has made sure that he was indeed not forgettable.
However, I think the issue here is not how much the Christians and Muslims who happen to follow him in retrospect care, but how much the Romans actually cared about Jesus. What stands out as remarkable is the lack of records referring to the man. Given that the Romans were quite notorious in their bureaucracy it is astonishing that he did not pass into the major annals of the time if it is to be believed that the Romans feared him as much as the Bible implies. On the other hand there is nothing that doesn’t say that the guards allegedly placed at his tomb weren’t there. It might be enough with a dozen or so rowdy mourners for a hastatus, princeps or pilus to dispatch two of his men to stand guard at the tomb of a newly executed ‘criminal’.
As for the stone this was fairly common practice in the region at the time.
Thereby nothing said nor implied about his holiness nor the accuracy of the bible. That one I leave up to each and everyone or for a more lengthy debate carried by others that have the energy.
As re crucifixion and Roman citizens you are mistaken. Crucifixion was generally reserved for the most base and loathsome and indeed considered a punishment worthy only for slaves and lowly criminals. There were however cases when the punishment was used on Romans and Roman law permitted this.
It is such a vile and painful way to kill someone that the debate on if it should even be allowed on the worst of the worst (in Roman view) raged more or less through the Roman period. It was the Roman equivalent of the death penalty debate in a way. Virgil amongst others made himself known as a pesky liberal anti-crucifixion advocate.
Sparc
<< Given that the Romans were quite notorious in their bureaucracy it is astonishing that he did not pass into the major annals of the time if it is to be believed that the Romans feared him as much as the Bible implies. >>
Well, actually, it’s not astonishing at all. As explained in the Staff Report on “Who killed Jesus?”, very few records have survived. Although the Romans kept detailed records, we don’t have many of them. Any records kept in Jerusalem were destroyed when the Romans destroyed the city in 70 AD; any records kept in Rome have long since disintegrated.
So we cannot draw any inferences from the absence of records.
Really? What circumstances? I had also thought it was restricted to non-Romans.
You’re right C K, but do note that I say annals, I am fully aware of the fate of the Jerusalem records as well as the archives in Rome. As you note in your Staff report the mention of him in the annals around and after his time are all more or less ambiguous and vague.
I’ll rephrase; given how little we see of him in the surviving Roman commentary of the time, it is hard to discern what importance the Romans attached to him, but there is little evidence to support that his importance was such that he was considered a major character of his time.
High treason by Roman officials for instance. There was no real restriction against crucifixion of Romans in the penal code, but it was viewed as such as vile form of punishment that it was used very rarely on Roman citizenry.
The misconception that it was illegal to crucify Romans probably stems from well known rhetoric like Cicero’s and that Paul was beheaded rather than crucified due to his citizenship. In fact it was not his citizenship alone that did it, but that the ‘crime’ didn’t warrant the punishment for a Roman in the Roman judicial tradition.
Read Martin Hengel, “Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross.” Chapter 6 deals with crucifixion and Roman citizenry.
Sparc
I don’t have a cite, but IIRC, YES (ick). They used cadavers. I thought I read this in a Cecil column.
What’s really ironic is that I have a book called The Case for Christ, which makes exactly this point about the palm being useless for this.
What’s on the cover? A faint picture of a hand with a nail print in the palm.
Stupid publishers.
ThreeGrumpy wrote:
Well, I’m no Christian, but I can field that one. The Bible specifically refers to the nail wounds in Jesus’s hands in the context of the story of “doubting Thomas.”
Jesus has arisen from the grave and appears to some of his followers. Thomas remains skeptical, saying that he will not believe it “unless I see the nail marks in his hands.”
Jesus later obliges by letting Thomas touch the wounds.
The whole story appears in John chapter 20. (Scroll down to verse 24.)
Uses the same evidence as Jimminy’s post to come to a totally different conclusion about how this Johannon was crucified.
Sparc: FWIW, thought I was not crucified, I did once drill a 5/16 bit into my left hand most of the way through. (Stupid accident.) It feels just as you describe. If I knew someone were going to do somrthing like that to me on purpose, they’d have to tie my arm down first. And BTW, it also makes one’s hand swell up like an inflated rubber glove: something for those who did corpse studies to think about.
IMHO, it’s best to consider that crucifixion was a nasty business and that it was not done in accordance with some Roman Army Field Manual. It was done with the object of displaying and somewhat slowly killing the victim in mind. Thus, when looking to see how Jesus might have been done in, it seems best to consider all the ways that it is physically possible to accomplish the goal and only then look to literary sources to see how it might have been done in this one case.
Also, I do believe Herodotus (misspelled, but I rush) has the first description in western literature of this punsihment. It’s at the very end of his book, when he discusses a guy being “nailed to a plank” by the Persians and having his son stoned to death before him.
I reckon this punishment originated somewhere in the east and them migrated to the Phonecians and then to the Carthiginians (Phonecian colony), and from then to the Romans. I am pretty sure it was not used in pre-Roman Greece.
Which brings me to ask:
Let’s say they dion’t nail a guy up, but rope him to a cross instead. What does he die of? Exposure? Boredom? That seems rather humane compared with other somewhat common Roman punishments like the Tunica Molesta (being tied to a post wearing a sort of tunic covered with flammable material that is then ignited), or being thrown to the beasts in the arena, etc.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe Josephus mentions that several people he knew were crucified and that an appeal by him to someone (Titus?) got them removed while they still lived. Only one recovered. To me, this suggests something more physically traumatic than being tied to a cross for a while.
Basically, when being crucified, you need to exert yourself (lifting your body with your legs) to breath. Eventually, exposure, hunger, and dehydration will weaken you to the point that this is no longer possible, and you die. In the ordinary course of affairs, this might take as much as a few days, so if you wanted someone to die more quickly (as we’re told was the case with Jesus, due to the Jews not wanting bodies up on the Sabbath) you would break his legs so he couldn’t lift himself.
Quoth C K Dexter Haven:
What, then (if anything), was remarkable about Peter’s crucifiction? Allegedly, he said that it would be too great an honor to die in the same manner as Jesus, so he requested of the Romans executing him that he be hung on the cross upside-down instead. As for the iconography, an inverted cross is, in fact, used as a symbol of Peter, although not as commonly (primarily because Jesus and his symbols are slightly more important).
To be fair - it is also only in John’s gospel that the spear in the side is mentioned.
I have often wondered why this is - it is common knowledge that each of the Gospel writers had his own agenda and emphasised different aspects of Jesus’ life, but these are details that I would have expected more to have been made of…
Grim