Christ plus the 2 crucified

Factual Questions
21

Why would you need the rope?

My understanding is that the victim is tied to the cross beam. He then carries the beam to Golgotha, is nailed or otherwise fastened to the beam, then the beam is hoisted up and over the upright, so that the upright slides into a hole in the cross beam. Thus the two pieces of the cross are locked together, and the feet are nailed into place.

Death by crucifixion occurs by suffocation. As Christ was suspended by His wrists (the nails were never put in the palms), His arms were stretched so that He could not exhale. Thus He was forced to push down on the nail in His feet, pushing Himself upwards and relieving the stretch. The awkward position of the feet (which were nailed with a single spike, and the soles of the feet flat against the upright) caused the legs to rapidly tire and cramp up. As His legs gave out, Christ would then sink slowly down until He was suspended by His wrists again. Repeat until death supervenes.

This is why they broke the legs of the two thieves on either side of Jesus. With their legs broken, they could no longer push themselves up to breathe, and would suffocate in a few minutes (if they had not already died of shock, exposure, blood loss, and dehydration). Jesus had already died by that time, as He was apparently in much worse shape before crucifixion. He had not slept since Wednesday, not eaten or drunk since Thursday and the Last Supper, and had been beaten up by the soldiers, flogged, and walked all over the city to Herod, and back again. No wonder He was unable to carry His cross to Golgotha, and had to be helped by Simon of Cyrene. Even so, Pilate was surprised that Jesus had died so quickly, when Joseph of Arimathea asked for the body.

Crucifying someone upside down would involve building a new upright, so that the cross beam could slide down far enough to allow the feet to be nailed in place over the head. Unless, as has been mentioned, it was an X-shaped cross, although I don’t know how that would be made to stand upright.

I have seen speculation that sometimes the cross used was a single upright. You would then lie the victim on the upright, nail his wrists to it, then place it upright and nail the feet in place. This might work for upside-down crucifixion, but it would be more trouble to nail both wrists and feet in place before putting the beam upright into the ground.

As I said, it is hard for me to believe that the soldiers would go to the trouble of anything besides SOP unless they were ordered to do so by their commanding officer. If the legend about Peter is true, he would have had to get his request for upside-down crucifixion approved by the condemning magistrate, who would then order the soldiers to give Peter a special crucifixion.

Regards,
Shodan

22

Remember, too, that even though a place would often be set aside for crucifixion, with the upright part of the cross already there not all crosses were permanent. Crosses could be constructed on the spot. The most famous example of this was after the rebellion of the Sparticii. After Crassus defeated Sparticus’s army, he crucified the survivors on crosses he built for the occassion.

23

[nitpick]

JC’s feet were most likely sideways against the cross, not sole-down, nailed with a single spike though the ankles.

[/nitpick]

24

St. Andrew was crucified on an X cross (hence the X on Scotland’s Flag (the saltire) being the St. Andrews Cross (Patron saint of scotland aswell).

although I do seem to remember someone telling me Peter was crucified on an X also, but he chose upside down for the reason mentioned above.

25

The way I’d heard of it, was that Peter didn’t choose to be crucified upsidedown. It was more like Peter says “I’m not worthy to die like Christ” and the soldiers say “No problem, we’ll sort something else out for you” and put him upsidedown. So it was more like a rough joke from their point of view. I’ve no idea where I got that impression from though; just the way I always thought of it.

26

A couple of “artist’s concept” renderings of Peter’s crucifixion:

Caravaggio (Cerasi Chapel)

Filipinno Lippi (Brancacci Chapel)

Of course, neither artist had ever seen a real crucifixion, so you’d have to take them with a grain of salt.

dylan_73, I’ve always thought it sounded like a Roman joke, too.

27

Taking the victim down wasn’t an issue. The Romans virtually never took victims down from the cross. They left the corpses up until they were eaten by carrion birds or untill they rotted away. Displaying the corpses on crosses was intended to serve a deterrent purpose. In the case of Jews, it also had an antagonistic purpose in that it denied the families the ability to bury the bodies as per Jewish law.

Taking victims down from the cross was so rare, in fact, that of the hundreds of thousands people who were crucified, the remains of only one victim have ever been recovered (he had been nailed through the wrists, btw).

Because of the rarity of victims being taken down from the cross, John Crossan has posited that Jesus himself was never taken down but simply left up to rot. It is his contention that the Romans would never have given in to request to take Jesus down, and that the whole thing about Joseph of Aramathea was a fiction designed to cover the embarrassment of an unburied Messiah.

Personally, humans being what they are, I’m not positive that a little jing may not have persuaded some Roman guards to reconsider their position on removing victims from crosses. I’m pretty sure if some rich, connected guy came along and told them that “Tiberius Caesar would like the body taken down” [wink wink, holding up some coinage] that those who had the mundane duty of watching corpses rot on sticks would probably not have been paragons of unbribable virtue.