The Stories Behind the Bones of the Crucified
The unfathomable horror of crucifixion and the astonishing expansion of the church
Christians worship a God who was crucified.
It is difficult to fathom how shocking such a claim seemed to ancient Romans.
Crucifixion was a death reserved for traitors, rebels, and slaves. Cognates of “crucified” functioned as vulgarities in the first century, spoken sparingly in polite company. “The very word ‘cross’ should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts, his eyes and his ears,” according to Cicero (“Pro Rabirio perduellionis reo ad quirites oratio,” 16). The Jewish historian Josephus referred to the cross as “that most wretched of deaths” (Bellum Judaicum, 7.203).
Still, Christians persisted in loving and praising a crucified God. Perhaps most embarrassing from the perspective of their neighbors, this cross-shamed deity had not left his body behind and ascended to the realm of the gods after he died, which is what any self-respecting deity would surely have chosen as his fate. Instead, according to the Christians, the same body that was crucified was raised to life and transformed into the first sign of God’s new creation.
Searching for the Bones of the Crucified
Despite the widespread practice of crucifixion in the Roman Empire, few skeletons have been unearthed that can be reliably identified as the remains of crucified persons.
That’s probably partly because these bodies were frequently abandoned in shallow graves where their bones would have been ravaged by scavenging beasts. Additionally, spikes seem to have been removed from many crucified corpses before they were buried, which means their remains might not always exhibit clear signs of crucifixion. In some cases, victims were tied to the crossbeams instead of being nailed, which would leave less skeletal evidence of their crucifixion.
But there are at least a couple of skeletons that can be reliably identified as the remains of individuals crucified by the Romans.
My youngest daughter and I went to the British Museum this week to study one of these skeletons—Skeleton 4926—at the exhibition “Legion: Life in the Roman Army.” The iron nail that remains in the man’s right heel reveals the manner of his death in the late third or early fourth century A.D.
The victim was crucified near Fenstanton, Cambridgeshire, in England, revealing that this brutal practice extended even to the edges of the Roman Empire. A smaller indentation can be observed in his right heel where an executioner seems to have attempted unsuccessfully to drive a nail. His skeleton was found surrounded by twelve iron nails in addition to the one driven through his heel. The victim’s shin bones are somewhat thinned, suggesting that he had perhaps been shackled as a slave. This skeleton was exhumed in 2017.
Skeleton 4926 is not, however, the only set of bones from a crucified victim that have persisted to the present time. Another set of skeletal fragments with a spike lodged in the heel was unearthed decades ago in a Jewish burial cave north of Jerusalem. In this instance, the man’s name is etched in Hebrew on the outside of his ossuary, the stone box where his bones were stored after his body decomposed. Yehohanan was his name. Another phrase—“ben Hagqol” or perhaps “ben Hezqil”—is inscribed after this name. The Romans probably crucified Yehohanan sometime in the first century A.D. His arms may have been tied to the crossbeam instead of being nailed, which was a common practice. Unlike many crucified corpses, the bodies of this individual as well as the victim discovered in Cambridgeshire were buried rather than being abandoned, suggesting that friends or family valued their lives enough to honor them in death despite the dishonor of their executions.
Two more skeletons have been unearthed with holes through their heels, one in Mendes, Egypt, and the Gavello Skeleton in northern Italy. Although it is less certain that these two individuals were crucified, this horrific means of execution seems to be the most plausible explanation for these lesions.
Crucifixion as Dehumanization and Humiliation
When contemplating the fates of these individuals, it is important to remember that the agony of crucifixion was far from the sole reason for its horror. Crucifixion was meant not only to execute the victim but also to humiliate him, to strip away every shred of honor and dignity from the victim and his family, and to poison the community’s memories of him through public mockery. Some sources suggest victims may have been sexually violated as well.
The Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger penned these words about a decade after the death of Jesus:
I see instruments of torture over there, not of a single kind, but differently contrived by different peoples; some hang their victims with head toward the ground, some impale their private parts, others stretch out their arms on a fork-shaped gibbet. (De consolatione ad Marciam, 20.3.)
“Soldiers… nailed them to crosses in a variety of positions to ridicule them,” Josephus wrote as he recalled events that preceded the fall of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 (Bellum Judaicum, 5.449–451).
I was recently reading an essay attributed to the second-century humorist Lucian of Samosata, and I ran across an example of how the cross could function as a locus of literary mockery as well. The address satirically depicts the Greek letters sigma (Σ) and tau (Τ) taking each other to court, and the author’s “mic-drop” moment at the end of his comedy routine revolves around the punishment deserved by Tau:
Humans wail and shed tears about their luck, and they curse Cadmus many times, because he made Tau a genus of the elementary principles [i.e., put the Tau into the alphabet]; for they say that tyrants, following and imitating his structure, fashioned timbers in the same shape to suspend humans on them and that the evil structure derives its evil title from Tau. Therefore, for all this, is not Tau over and over worthy to be condemned? For I hold that justly we can only punish Tau by making a T of him [i.e., by crucifying him]. (“Δικη συμφώνων του σίγμα προς το ταυ ύπο τοις έπτα φωνηεσιν,” 12).
The Astonishing Growth of Allegiance to a Crucified God Requires the More Astonishing Miracle of the Resurrection
And yet, the church grew.
Despite making the distasteful claim that a crucified Jew was also the risen Lord of all creation, the Christian movement multiplied.
By the end of the first century, the claim that a crucified Jew had returned to life had spanned the Roman Empire from Syria to Spain, and four written retellings of his life were circulating in the empire’s largest cities.
The more I consider the expansion of Christianity during the years that the eyewitnesses were still alive, the more I find that the only plausible explanation for this growth is that the first witnesses experienced something so real and so unexpected that it emboldened them to persist in the claim that Jesus was alive.
The bones of Jesus were not scavenged by beasts or abandoned in the earth. Instead, these bones became part of a renewed body in which death itself was reversed into the first evidence of a new creation that is yet to come. The first witnesses saw this reality firsthand, and it moved them so deeply that they were willing to die rather than deny what they had seen.
Unless those first witnesses actually saw death reversed, it seems almost impossible that they would have persisted in their proclamation about a crucified man. After all, as Tim Keller once pointed out, “The founders of the other great world religions died peacefully, surrounded by their followers and the knowledge that their movement was growing. In contrast, Jesus died in disgrace, betrayed, denied, and abandoned by everyone.” Unlike Confucius and Siddhartha Gautama who spent many years training their disciples, the teaching ministry of Jesus only lasted three years or so. Unlike Muhammad, Jesus died in humiliation, with no armies, no wealth, and no heirs. Yet the message of his death and resurrection eventually conquered an empire.
Jesus is amazing