Crucifixion
Crucifixion is a method of capital punishment in which the condemned is tied or nailed to a large wooden cross, beam or stake and left to hang until eventual death, which could take minutes to days. It was first used as a punishment by the Achaemenids, Carthaginians, and Romans, among others. Crucifixion has been used in some countries as recently as the 21st century.
The crucifixion of Jesus is central to Christianity and the cross is Christianity's preeminent religious symbol. His death is the most prominent example of crucifixion in history, which in turn has led many cultures in the modern world to associate the execution method closely with Jesus and with Christian spirituality. Other figures in Christianity are traditionally believed to have undergone crucifixion as well, including Saint Peter, who Church tradition says was crucified upside-down, and Saint Andrew, who Church tradition says was crucified on an X-shaped cross. Today, limited numbers of Christians voluntarily undergo non-lethal crucifixions [|as a devotional practice].
Terminology
has two verbs for crucify: , from and "crucify on a plank", together with . In earlier pre-Roman Greek texts usually means "impale".The Greek used in the Christian New Testament uses four verbs, three of them based upon , usually translated "cross". The most common term is , "to crucify", occurring 46 times; , "to crucify with" or "alongside" occurs five times, while , "to crucify again" occurs only once at the Epistle to the Hebrews 6:6. , "to fix or fasten to, impale, crucify" occurs only once, at the Acts of the Apostles 2:23.
The English term cross derives from the Latin word crux, which classically referred to a tree or any construction of wood used to hang criminals as a form of execution. The term later came to refer specifically to a cross. The related term crucifix derives from the Latin crucifixus or cruci fixus, past participle passive of crucifigere or cruci figere, meaning "to crucify" or "to fasten to a cross".
Detail
Cross shape
In the Roman Empire, the gibbet for crucifixions took on many shapes. Seneca the Younger states: "I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in many different ways: some have their victims with head down to the ground; some impale their private parts; others stretch out their arms on the gibbet." According to Josephus, during Emperor Titus's Siege of Jerusalem, Roman soldiers nailed innumerable Jewish captives to crosses in various ways.At times the gibbet was a simple vertical stake, called in Latin crux simplex. Frequently, however, there was a cross-piece attached either at the top to give the shape of a T or just below the top, as in the form most familiar in Christian symbolism. The most ancient image of a Roman crucifixion depicts an individual on a cross. It is a graffito found in a taberna in Puteoli, dating to the time of Trajan or Hadrian.
Writers in the 2nd century who speak of the execution cross describe the crucified person's arms as outstretched, not attached to a single stake: Lucian speaks of Prometheus as crucified "above the ravine with his hands outstretched". He also says that the shape of the letter Τ was that of the wooden instrument used for crucifying. Artemidorus, another writer of the same period, says that a cross is made of posts and nails and that the arms of the crucified are outstretched. Speaking of the generic execution cross, Irenaeus, a Christian writer, describes it as composed of an upright and a transverse beam, sometimes with a small projection in the upright.
New Testament writings about the crucifixion of Jesus do not specify the shape of that cross, but subsequent early writings liken it to the letter T. According to William Barclay, because tau is shaped exactly like the crux commissa and represented the number 300, "wherever the fathers came across the number 300 in the Old Testament they took it to be a mystical prefiguring of the cross of Christ". The earliest example, written around the late 1st century, is the Epistle of Barnabas, with another example being Clement of Alexandria.
Justin Martyr sees the cross of Christ represented in the crossed spits used to roast the Passover lamb.
Nail placement
In popular depictions of the crucifixion of Jesus, Jesus is shown with nails in his hands. But in Greek the word "χείρ", usually translated as "hand", could refer to the entire portion of the arm below the elbow, and to denote the hand as distinct from the arm some other word could be added, as "ἄκρην οὔτασε χεῖρα".A foot-rest attached to the cross, perhaps for the purpose of taking the person's weight off the wrists, is sometimes included in representations of the crucifixion of Jesus but is not discussed in ancient sources. Some scholars interpret the Alexamenos graffito, the earliest surviving depiction of the crucifixion, as including such a foot-rest. Ancient sources also mention the sedile, a small seat attached to the front of the cross, about halfway down, which could have served a similar purpose.
In 1968, archaeologists discovered at Giv'at ha-Mivtar in northeast Jerusalem the remains of one Jehohanan, who was crucified in the 1st century AD. The remains included a heel bone with a nail driven through it from the side. The tip of the nail was bent, perhaps because of striking a knot in the upright beam, which prevented it being extracted from the foot. A first inaccurate account of the length of the nail led some to believe that it had been driven through both heels, suggesting that the man had been placed in a sort of sidesaddle position, but the true length of the nail,, suggests instead that in this case of crucifixion the heels were nailed to opposite sides of the upright beam. As of 2011, the skeleton from Giv'at ha-Mivtar was the only confirmed example of ancient crucifixion in the archaeological record. A second set of skeletal remains with holes transverse through the calcaneum heel bones, found in 2007, could be a second archaeological record of crucifixion. The find in Cambridgeshire in November 2017 of the remains of the heel bone of a man with an iron nail through it, is believed by the archeologists to confirm the use of this method in ancient Rome.
Cause of death
The length of time required to reach death could range from hours to days depending on method, the victim's health, and the environment. If a nail severed an artery, death could occur within minutes. Some Roman crucifiers are reported to have taken bribes to sever an artery for a quick death.A theory attributed to Pierre Barbet held that, when the whole body weight was supported by the stretched arms, the typical cause of death was asphyxiation. He wrote that the condemned would have severe difficulty inhaling, due to hyper-expansion of the chest muscles and lungs. The condemned would therefore have to draw himself up by the arms, leading to exhaustion, or have his feet supported by tying or by a wood block. When no longer able to lift himself, the condemned would die within a few minutes. This theory has been supported by multiple scholars. Other scholars, including Frederick Zugibe, posit other causes of death. Zugibe suspended test subjects with their arms at 60° to 70° from the vertical. The test subjects had no difficulty breathing during experiments, but did suffer rapidly increasing pain, which is consistent with the Roman use of crucifixion to achieve a prolonged, agonizing death. However, Zugibe's positioning of the test subjects necessarily did not precisely replicate the conditions of historical crucifixion. In 2023, an analysis of medical literature concluded that asphyxiation is discredited as the primary cause of death from crucifixion.
There is scholarly support for several possible non-asphyxiation causes of death: heart failure or arrhythmia, hypovolemic shock, acidosis, dehydration, and pulmonary embolism. Death could result from any combination of those factors, or from other causes, including sepsis following infection due to the wounds caused by the nails or by the scourging that often preceded crucifixion, or from stabbing by the guards.
Survival
Since death does not follow immediately on crucifixion, survival after a short period of crucifixion is possible, as in the case of those who choose each year as a devotional practice to be non-lethally crucified.There is an ancient record of one person who survived a crucifixion that was intended to be lethal, but was interrupted. Josephus recounts:
I saw many captives crucified, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintances. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physician's hands, while the third recovered.Josephus gives no details of the method or duration of the crucifixion of his three friends.
History
Pre-Roman states
The earliest section of the Book of Deuteronomy is widely believed to have been composed in Jerusalem in the 7th century BCE. Beginning with Paul the Apostle, some authors have interpreted the text in Deuteronomy as an allusion to crucifixion. This reference is to hanging the corpse of an executed criminal on a tree, possibly as a form of deterrence.The earliest clear reference to crucifixion may be a post-mortem one mentioned by Herodotus in the third book of his Histories. Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos, was executed in 522 BCE by Oroetus, and his dead body was then crucified.
In his Histories, Herodotus describes the execution of a Persian general at the hands of the Athenians during the second Persian invasion of Greece in about 479 BC: "They nailed him to a plank and hung him up ... this Artayctes who suffered death by crucifixion." The Commentary on Herodotus by How and Wells remarks: "They crucified him with hands and feet stretched out and nailed to cross-pieces; cf. vii.33. This act, supposedly unusual on the part of Greeks, may be explained by the enormity of the outrage or by Athenian deference to local feeling."
In 332 BCE, Alexander the Great is reputed to have crucified 2,000 survivors from his siege of the Phoenician city of Tyre, as well as the doctor who unsuccessfully treated Alexander's lifelong friend Hephaestion. Some historians have also conjectured that Alexander crucified Callisthenes, his official historian and biographer, for objecting to Alexander's adoption of the Persian ceremony of royal adoration.
In Ancient Carthage, crucifixion was known to be imposed on generals for suffering a major defeat. In 238 BCE, during the Battle of the Saw, rebel leaders were crucified by the Carthaginians. In 202 BCE, the Carthaginian general Hannibal who had suffered defeat in several battles of the Second Punic War disembarked at the Roman-controlled city of Leptis Parva in hopes of avoiding crucifixion.
In 87 BCE, after the Judean Civil War, Alexander Jannaeus was reported to have crucified 800 rebels in Jerusalem.