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11. THE SUPREME PUNISHMENT

We know that the method Pilate used to execute Jesus was crucifixion; this is one of the few historical certainties regarding Jesus. At the beginning we must disabuse ourselves of the notion that crucifixion was an ordinary Roman punishment for common criminals. It was a punishment the Romans had probably adopted from their Carthaginian enemies, who probably derived it from the Phoenicians and Persians. The Romans were well aware of the unsavory associations that Mediterranean culture attached to this punishment. Herodotus' History (9.104-105) describes how the Persians crucified the Spartan general Leonidas after his heroic defeat at Thermopylae in 480 B.C. After the capture of the Persian commander responsible for the deed, it was suggested to the Greek general Pausanias that he visit Leonidas' fate on the Persian. Pausanias declined, replying that "such doings befit barbarians rather than Greeks."

In first-century Rome, crucifixion was legally regarded as a summa supplicia, or supreme punishment, the highest degree of capital punishment (as opposed to, say, mere beheading), a status it shared with immolation and the practice of throwing the condemned to beasts in the arena. It was a punishment reserved almost exclusively for the two classes of people the Romans most feared: Rebellious slaves and rebellious provincials -- the former because they threatened Rome's internal security, the latter because they threatened the Empire's security: In those cases the obscene barbarism of crucifixion was not only permissible; it provided a desirable object lesson.

The value of crucifixion as an object lesson was not principally in the slow, excruciating death -- the victim, forearms bound or nailed to the crossbeam (would-be stigmatics take note: those bleeding palms really should be bleeding forearms), heels nailed one on top of the other to the post, died over hours and even days from the effects of dehydration, shock, and pressure on the internal organs. Even more appalling to ancient sensibilities was the desecration of the unburied corpse. So important was this postmortem aspect of the punishment that soldiers were posted to prevent the removal of the body. In the Satyricon (111-112), the Roman satirist Petronius tells a gruesomely ribald tale of one such soldier, ordered to guard the bodies of some bandits crucified by a provincial governor. Hearing the cries of a widow at a nearby tomb, the soldier consoled her so successfully that he ended up spending several nights with her. Seeing that one of the bodies had been removed from its cross during his absence from his post, the soldier was "in terror of punishment" -- until the widow offered her late husband's corpse as a substitute.

For the Jews, the exposure of an unburied corpse was no laughing matter. The Jews abhorred "corpse uncleanness" and had elaborate legal statues to avoid contamination from corpses and graves; a piece of carrion the size of an olive could convey corpse-uncleanness, as could a mere spoonful of earth from a grave. The notion of carrion birds and dogs, jackals, and hyenas (all common scavengers in first-century Judea) scattering bones, scraps of flesh, and their own corpse-unclean defecations about was an insult not only to the corpse but to the entire community. The sensitivity to this issue was reflected in the Jewish punishment for idolatry and blasphemy called "hanging from a tree," which many scholars persistently confuse with crucifixion; in this practice the corpse of a man already stoned to death was hung from a pole almost like a carcass in a butcher's shop (Mishnah Sanhedrin 6.40). But even in these extreme cases, the corpse was always taken down at sunset, as God instructs in Deuteronomy 21.23. Among Jews, the unburied corpse was nothing less than a weapon of terror: During the 66 A.D. revolt, when the zealots wanted to discourage desertions to the Romans, they killed anyone leaving the city of Jerusalem, "and at the same time they outraged men with this wickedness, they polluted the Deity also, leaving the dead bodies to putrefy under the sun" (War 4.382-383).

Before we consider how the Romans used crucifixion as a weapon of terror, it is useful to consider some situations in which they spared religious dissidents. Chapters 21 through 26 of Acts, which detail the apostle Paul's various trials ( both literal and figurative) before the Roman and Jewish authorities in Judea, provide a catalogue of Roman due process. First Paul was rescued from a mob of homicidal Jews by the Roman tribune in command of Jerusalem and his entire cohort; eventually the tribune sent Paul to the procurator Felix in Caesarea. For two years Felix held Paul under house arrest, with no restrictions on his visitors; we are told that Felix was waiting for Paul to buy his way out. Paul didn't pay the expected bribe (perhaps this indicates his estrangement from the powerful Jerusalem church, which might have provided the funds) and was still confined when Felix was replaced by the procurator Festus in 60 A.D. Festus invited Paul to go to Jerusalem to have his case resolved by the Sanhedrin, but Paul insisted on appealing to Caesar, which was his right as a Roman citizen (a status Jesus did not enjoy). To this Festus agreed.

Paul was eventually executed in Rome, but he had good reason to gamble that Caesar would be kinder to him than the Sanhedrin. In about 51 A.D., the Jews of Corinth had allegedly dragged Paul before the Roman governor, L. Junius Gallio, claiming that Paul "persuaded men to worship God contrary to the law. And when Paul was now about to open his mouth, Gallio said unto the Jews, If it were a criminal matter, you Jews, [I would consider it]: But if it be a question of words and names, and of your law, you look to it; for I will be no judge of such matters" (Acts 18.13-15).

Josephus also provides us a similar picture of Roman due process. He tells the tale of Jesus, son of Ananus (not the High Priest Ananus), a poor farmer who came to the festival of Tabernacles in 62 A.D. and suddenly began to prophesy, in a loud voice and crude apocalyptic rhetoric, the demise of Jerusalem and its people. He went all about the city shouting his slogans day and night; finally "certain of the most eminent among the populace" gave him a whipping which did nothing to silence him. Here the Sanhedrin sent this Jesus to the procurator Albinus, "where he was whipped until his bones were laid bare" -- evidently to interrogate him. But Jesus son of Ananus only kept uttering "Woe to Jerusalem;" Albinus determined he was mad and let him go. So Jesus son of Ananus was permitted to continue doomsaying for seven years and five months, until on the eve of the Jerusalem's capture, he was struck dead by a stone launched from a Roman catapult (War 6.300-309).

The principle illustrated by the episodes above is important: Roman officials didn't take religious dissidents or aspiring prophets off the streets and hastily crucify them, even when the trouble-makers had caused considerable public disturbance and came before the Roman tribunal accused by "the most eminent" local leaders. That being said, the Romans did crucify thousands of Jews. And when we examine who those Jews were and why the were regarded as deserving summa supplicia, we will be able to better understand the circumstances that led Jesus to his cross.

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