It takes a tremendous stretch of the imagination for a 21st century human being to be able to fully understand what it meant to be crucified 2,000 years ago. I am not referring to the physical aspects of the procedure, although they are of course very important. I speak, first of all, of the symbolic elements behind the act of killing a person in precisely that way. The millennia of Christian culture, which made the cross an icon or even an adornment, have dulled our sensitivity in this regard almost irremediably.
Discoveries made by archaeologists, however, sometimes have the ability to vividly resurrect the past when analyzed with due care. Direct archaeological evidence of the practice of crucifixion is extremely rare — an apparent paradox when one considers that ancient sources mention occasions when the torture was applied to thousands of victims at the same time. Despite this, only two skeletons of people whose death on the cross can be fully demonstrated have survived. And the similarities between these cases help to reveal some of the true horror behind this form of execution.
We know the name of one of these crucified: Yehohanan ben Hagkol (John, son of Agcol), a man of Jewish origin who died sometime in the 1st century AD An ossuary (box used to house human bones in graves) containing his name and his remains mortals was found in Jerusalem in 1968. The second victim, this time anonymous, was identified in late 2021 in an excavation near Cambridge, UK. Also male, the victim died between the 3rd and 4th centuries AD
The key clue in both cases was the presence of nails in the men’s foot bones. The exact position of the nails, however, is even more revealing. In both victims, the nails go through the heel bone horizontally.
This means that, most likely, the right thing is to imagine them with their legs spread, with one foot attached to each side of the vertical bar of the cross, and not with one foot resting on top of the other, as in the usual representation of crucifixes and art. western sacred.
Now, consider that the convicts were naked — the loincloth or cloth sash we see in the images of Christ crucified is just a concession to the modesty of the faithful. The intention was to expose the crucified body as much as possible, both to public scorn and to birds of prey (which, according to reports at the time, came to peck both the genitals and the eyes).
To this must also be added the terror of a slow death, provoked by shock, blood loss and progressive asphyxia, and the fact that, often, the body was not buried, but left on the cross to rot. This explains, in part, why we find so few crucified (plus there’s the fact that most nails appear to have been ripped out of the body and reused later).
And there is, of course, the social stigma. The Romans called crucifixion a “servile torture”: destined for slaves, roadside thieves, rebels with no foot. Few ideas are more radical, from this point of view, than the divinization of Jesus crucified. It turns upside down the vision of the place and people with whom God identifies, a challenge to the forms of power that allow this kind of cruelty to exist as something natural.
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