What would the Romans have done with the cross?

Every depiction of the cross I have seen shows a beam with 4 sides so I guess at leat 4 times.

The disembowelling table?

I remember there being a myth surrounding the soldier that did the spearing.

I hope you all had a nice easter.

This is completely contradicted by historical scholarship, and is actually one of the more egregious fictions of the Gospels. According to Reza Aslan, far from being fair-minded or weak-willed, Pilate was known for his extreme depravity and his aversion to Jews and the Jewish nation. During his tenure in Jerusalem he crucified so many thousands of Jews that the people of Jerusalem lodged a formal complaint with the Roman emperor. To imagine that such a man would hesitate to send Jesus to the cross and to blame it all on the Jewish high priests is incredible and is actually an astounding example of the Gospels’ revisionist history.

Jesus at the time, as I stated myself earlier, wasn’t all that important a figure, and only became so retroactively, but he was certainly important enough to the Romans to be considered a real threat to the state. Pilate crucified countless other Jews for far less.

The book Last Temptation of Christ (not sure about the film) has Jesus the Carpenter making crosses for the local Galilean Romans in his pre-rabble rousing days.

Remember too that the gospels were “fine tuned” by the surviving church - mostly Paul’s followers, catering to gentiles. They were edited to make a messiah freeing the Jews a saviour to all mankind. In the process, it was important to push the blame away from the empire of potential converts and onto a group already vilified and oppressed and dispersed following two failed uprisings. Hence, Pilate only reluctantly orders the crucifixion which would have to be a Roman decision - but only because the temple authorities insisted.

This is a much gorier turn than I’d expected. :frowning:

It seems more economical for the Roman workers who fashioned the immense cross beam not to use nails as we perceive them to be. It’s much more economical to bore a hole just the size of a very large nail clear through the beam. ( Which I’ve always envisioned as a 6x6x8 feet wide beam ).

This means you line up the hole with the wrist bone juncture and drive the long nail through the person and into the existing hole that goes clear through. A 10" long nail drive through a 6" square beam would allow an inch of protrusion to lashes to be wound around. Lashing the wrists and ankles insure that the wrists and ankles could not be pulled free, and allowed the cross beam to be used for a very long time.

This is a violent and bloody process, but it seems prudent to remind all that it was a violent and bloody process that emerged in a time when just about ALL OF LIFE was much more coarse, bloody and violent. This article discusses what the lifespan for humans was 2,000 years ago and seems to debunk some myths. Note that it mentions the lifespans of Romans. One suspects that the local peasantry did not enjoy the nutrition and medicine commonly associated with Roman culture. 45 years was pushing it back then. Life for almost everyone sucked to some degree. For the deeply impoverished, it was barely existing.

Point being that in the context of a much more brutal and coarse existence, finding ways to brutally kill ones enemies is not surprising. ( As a philosophical side-note, this article from 2010 on Lethal Injection Execution goes into just how brutal or not brutal a method that is.

I think that people struggle with this. With the idea that re-useable hardware ( wooden beams ) were of value and the act was so astonishingly amoral and immoral that it seems an added offense that the wood used were not somehow revered or at least re-used, or taken apart. Logic says this was business. A business model involving a rare material ( very thick study wooden beams made of [likely] imported wood ) would demand economy of use of material. Clear holes through makes sense, grotesque and gross as it may seem.

Who said anything about his being fair-minded or weak-willed? He crucified Jesus just to avoid trouble.

I hadn’t heard about this - do you have a contemporary cite?

Actually Flavius Josephus says much the same thing -

Note that Josephus says the same thing as the Gospels - Pilate condemned Jesus because of the accusations of the Jewish leadership.

Regards,
Shodan

It’s not exactly contemporary, and not exactly accurate (it’s not about crucifixions), but a complaint to Tiberius is mentioned in Philo’s “Embassy to Gaius”, which is his account of an embassy of Alexandrine Jews to Caligula, asking for the Emperor’s protection.

This is the section where he’s warning Caligula that Caligula’s plan to set up a statue of himself in the Temple of Jerusalem will cause trouble there, and talking about a time that Pilate tried to dedicate shields to Tiberius, the response of the population of Judea, and Tiberius’s response. From here: Philo: On the Embassy to Gaius

The other account that might relate on this would be the incident that got Pilate removed, where Pilate had slaughtered a group of Samaritan pilgrims, leading the Samaritans to complain to the Governor of Syria, who arrested him. This is from Josephus:

Also, there’s some debate how authentic some of the word of Josephus are concerning Jesus, and how much is writer embellishment by later transcribers who wanted to put Jesus in a good light. OTOH, some of his more off-hand and less than respectful remarks are probably authentic.

Josephus mentions captives during the Jewish rebellion being nailed up. The quote makes it sound like this is not typical and is an extra cruelty due to the savage nature of the war.

I like the idea of a multi-use crossbeam, but I do have to think that a 6x6 beam would not be light. Something that size would at least be of cedar and fairly pricey. Like I said, I imagine a rough pole about the size of a 2x4 would be more than adequate if it were disposable. Wiki says the nails were about 3/8" thick, so the wood just has to no split with that size of nail.

The Romans? Oh, I thought you meant The Ramones Nevermind…

Not to mention according to author David Farley, “Depending on what you read, there were eight, twelve, fourteen, or even 18 different holy foreskins in various European towns during the Middle Ages.” Talk about “supply and demand”! :smiley:

While I don’t think we know exactly how crucifixion persons were affixed to the cross, I was under the impression when archaeologists studied the remains of a crucified man back in the 80s they found that his heel was nailed to the main beam but his arms were not nailed at all. That does seem a bit counterintuitive, the main beam is the large piece of wood and you’d assume if possible you’d want to avoid nailing into it as that could only be done so many times before it had to be replaced. But the recovered skeleton clearly has its heels nailed and its arms not, suggested the arms were tied to the cross beam. It was projected they were actually tied sort of “straddling” the crossbeam, so imagine the arms actually “behind” the crossbeam as if the man was trying to put his arms behind the crossbeam. This would have kept the man’s upper torso much further up on the cross. Tying or nailing the hands or wrists would allow the condemned to sag down the length of their arms.

A pre-drilled hole would also make some degree of sense as Cartooniverse suggests, but at least in the case of the man’s skeleton recovered in the 80s there was evidence of the nail hitting a hard knot in the wood and then most likely bending (based on the nail itself), so in his case at least they were nailing a new hole into the main beam.

Pontius Pilate died in AD 39, and the first great Jewish revolt started in AD 66, so I don’t think you can blame that on Pilate.

And thanks, Captain Amazing.

Regards,
Shodan

It is widely believed by scholars that this particular cite in Josephus contains later additions to the text (inserted by Christians). The consensus appears to be that it was originally a genuine reference to Jesus, but Christian copyists at an early date simply could not resist guilding the lilly.

If this is the case, it is not valuable as support for the literal historical truth of these events.

Here’s an article on the find:

http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-a-stone-box-a-rare-trace-of-crucifixion/

Allegedly, it is so far the only one of its kind.

Here is some interesting scholarly speculation on the exact issue of whether the cross was reused:

Well, not really. He was another itinerant preacher and/or rabblerouser at a time when itinerant preachers and/or rabblerousers were a fine a dozen. His band of followers knew of him; some other folks may have heard of him or seen him preach and/or rouse the rabble, and that’s about it. All indications are that absolutely nobody at the time had any idea that Christianity was going to become a bit of a big deal in a couple hundred years.

Luckily, as someone else mentioned, it’s pretty easy to manufacture relics to order, so it’s not like anybody lost out on the potential souvenir market when it developed.

ETA: Whoops. Didn’t see this thread had a second page and this had already been dealt with. Never mind. :slight_smile:

I read an interesting theory a while back that proposed that Jesus was crucified on an actual tree. The writer pointed out the number of times different NT writers used the word “tree” to refer to the cross. But his main bit of evidence was the part of the crucifixion story that described the soldiers breaking the thieves’ legs.

Early in the story, Jesus is specifically described as being crucified between two thieves. But then, later, during the leg-breaking, the soldiers are described as breaking first one thief’s legs, then the second thief’s legs, and then discovering that Jesus was already dead.

So, why would the soldiers break the first thief’s legs, walk past Jesus to break the second thief’s legs, and then turn back to Jesus?

Explanation: All three of them were nailed to the same “upright”, i.e. a large tree. So when the soldiers set out to break legs, they just made a circle around the tree, from one guy to the next, and Jesus just happened to be last.

Obviously, there’s no way to prove the theory, but I thought it was an interesting idea.

This theory seems unlikely, given the historical shortage of wood in Jerusalem.

This appears, from historical and acheological evidence, to have always been true - see the post above, where it is noted that there was likely no local wood, even for a crossbar on the cross (assuming it was made that way):

Source: Israel Exploration Journal, Vol. 35 (1985)

The notion of huge trees, big enough around to accomodate three side-by-side crucifictions, and straight and tall enough to make an impressive hanging, in the immediate vicinity of Jerusalem is simply not persuasive … the only really large trees I know of that grow there are olive trees, which are certainly big enough around, but would make very bad “crucifiction trees” because of their shape (the big ones are incredibly low, twisty and gnarled, with many low branches). It would be hard to find an olive that had a straight, tall section suitable for crucifiction on.