As millions of people prepare to celebrate Easter this weekend, professing faith in the resurrection of Jesus on the holiest day on the Christian calendar, they will also embrace the engine of his death.
The cross has long been the definitive symbol of Christianity and victory over death. But the nature of crucifixion, considered one of the most gruesome forms of capital punishment in the ancient world, has long been a mystery to archaeologists and historians because of the scant evidence it has left behind.
Ancient Roman historians, the Gospels, and classical literature document the use of crucifixion by the Romans, but only four possible instances of crucifixion have been identified worldwide. The latest discovery was fairly recent: the skeleton of a man with a nail through his heel, unearthed on a Cambridgeshire, England, estate in 2017.
The find represented the first known archaeological evidence of a crucifixion in the British Isles, according to David Ingham, project manager at Albion Archeology, and Corinne Duhig, a professor at the University of Cambridge, who described their findings in the journal British Archeology.
“I think it shows that crucifixion was used throughout the Roman Empire,” said John Granger Cook, a professor of religion at LaGrange College and author of “Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World.” “The only other archaeological evidence – if you want to call it archaeological – is the graffiti.”
Ingham and Duhig said the remains were almost exactly the same as those found half a century earlier near Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives in 1968. In both cases, the nail was found still embedded in the calcaneus, the largest bone. of the foot and forms the heel. The findings clash with the way religious writings and iconography have long depicted this practice, and offer new evidence of how it seems to have worked, from how victims were nailed to the cross to how they ultimately died.
According to Cook, it appears that the Romans borrowed the crucifixion from the Carthaginians, which was likely based on earlier brutal punishments used by the Assyrians and other Near Eastern peoples. Josephus, the ancient Jewish historian, related that Roman troops crucified up to 500 Jews a day during the Jewish revolts of the first century AD.
The objective of the crucifixion was to prolong the fight for the death and the agony of the victim, for which it became the most feared and shameful of execution methods, applied only to criminals, slaves and those accused of treason. The condemned were beaten and taken in a procession through the streets to the place of execution, as described with Jesus in the Gospels, while the mobs jeered and hurled insults. The victims were then fixed to the crossbar and raised to the vertical beam, which was usually fixed in a permanent location for subsequent executions.
“When people work with the historical Jesus, (his crucifixion is) the one fact that nobody doubts, because it’s unbelievably embarrassing,” Cook said. “So we know that for sure. We know that he lived and that he was executed.”
Death occurred in a matter of days, but was sometimes hastened by beating the victim in the chest with a club, driving a spear into the victim, or breaking the legs so that the victims could no longer push themselves to breathe. Sometimes the cross was placed low to the ground, within reach of dogs and other roaming animals, and ancient graffiti suggests it often resembled a capital T. A small seat, known as a sedecula, was sometimes added to keep the person alive longer.
whatHow exactly did Jesus die??
Some scholars, published by forensic pathologists, suggest that he died relatively quickly of pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrest, or shock induced by blood loss, although the consensus in all crucifixion cases has been for asphyxia, as the lungs collapse. under the weight of the suspended body of the victim.
The find of Jerusalem, the first remains of a crucifixion victim found in modern times, helped complete the picture.
The find was a stroke of luck. The Romans tied people to the cross with ropes more often than with nails, which were so prized that the Romans are believed to have torn them out and reused them. But in 1968, archaeologists examining burial caves on a construction site in East Jerusalem came across a stone ossuary bearing the name “Yehohanan ben Hagqol” and containing the remains of a man, between the ages of 24 and 28. years old, whose heel had a rusty nail driven into it.
That placement immediately drew attention. The iconography of Jesus’ crucifixion often shows his wrists or hands nailed to the cross – which, according to scholars, would hardly have supported his weight – or a single nail driven into the top of both feet.
Nicu Haas, a professor at the Hebrew University’s department of anthropology, examined the Jerusalem remains somewhat hastily, due to restrictions by religious authorities on reburying the remains. In a paper published in 1970, Haas reported finding two heel bones joined by the nail. A wooden plate had been placed over the foot before the nail was driven in, to further ensure that the victim could not free the leg. Thus, Haas theorized that the victim had been pinned by both heels to the front of the vertical beam, either with her legs spread, in a frog-like fashion, or with her knees bent and turned to the side.
Two other scholars – Joseph Zias, a curator at the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums, and Eliezer Sekeles, a professor at the Hebrew University and Hadassah School of Medicine in Jerusalem – reassessed the crucifixion a decade later. According to them, Haas was wrong in key aspects: There was only one heel bone in the right foot, not two fused together by the nail and time; the leg did not appear to have been broken prior to death; and the approximately 4.5-inch nail was shorter than Haas believed and incapable of having pierced two heel bones and the wood plate.
Taken together, Zias and Sekeles offered a different theory of the shape of the crucifixion, suggesting that each foot might have been separately nailed to the side of the upright beam. His theory also fit with an ancient graffiti found in Puteoli, Italy, which depicted a crucified individual, with the name of a woman, Alkimila, on one shoulder.
The most recent discovery in Britain further clarifies the understanding of this practice. The remains, labeled Skeleton 4926, had been buried face up, hands folded in front, in a graveyard at a roadside settlement in an ancient Roman province that is now Fenstanton, Cambridgeshire. Around it were a dozen nails. A thirteenth was discovered in the laboratory in the heel bone.
The skeleton, which was nearly complete, dated to between about AD 130 and 360. Duhig and Ingham explained that the spine and ribs were crushed and that the arms and legs showed signs of having been bound or shackled. British archaeologists noted that the nail had been driven into the outer part of the right heel bone, where there was also the imprint of a hammer or other nailing instrument that had missed the target, a sign of the almost casual manner in which suffering could be inflicted.
Cook, whose father was a Presbyterian minister, said the details and reality of the crucifixion throw him on his head as he reflects on Jesus’ death at this time of year.
“I think a lot about the nature of human suffering and what the state can inflict on a human being. And the pain of the crucifixion is, I suppose, one of the deepest that a human being can experience,” he said. “And frankly, sometimes it’s too much.”
And then there is the strange mystery of the cross itself: the most gruesome punishment ever invented, now enshrined as an emblem of spiritual renewal.
“It’s one of the ironies of history,” says Cook.
