Fathers, we come to you on such a glorious day outside. It reminds us that you are the father who created the universe that is around us, and that we as your humble creation, deserving very little, especially in light of our sinful state, have been so cherished by the Creator that he stepped down and gave us his only son to die in the cross for our sins and to be resurrected that we would have the promise of new life. And in all these things, we give you great joy and great thanksgiving in the midst of our joy. We would ask that all that we do in all of our lives would be to your worship and to your glory, and we ask that you would use this class together in some small way to that end as well. And your wonderful name we pray, amen. Where we ended last time, we were talking about crucifixion. And I should warn you, though I'm going to try and curtail the discussion here in many ways, that I wrote my doctoral dissertation on crucifixion. It's one of the reasons why I have to do it with you, but more than that, I think it's very important that we understand the historical context of crucifixion. My doctoral dissertation was actually on how crucifixion was perceived by Jewish people around the time of Jesus. So we're going to look at some of that material here shortly. But it's crucial not to just understand how Jewish people perceived it, but how the Greeks and Romans perceived of crucifixion, too. Because one of the questions that we would have is what would it have been like in the first century to walk up to somebody and to say, you know, I've met the Lord of the universe. And he walked in the form of human being and he was crucified and resurrected. It's just so out of the mainstream, if you would, that it would be a real shock to people. And that's part of what I want to drill home today. Those of you who were in covenant theology, I did some of this in there, and I warned the people who were in there that you'll get to see it twice. Because I think it's very important that both students who are going through the various MA degrees that we have and also the various options in the MDiv degree have some contact with this material before they graduate. So that's a bit of the context there. When we finished the other day, I had noted that there was a penalty that was widespread in the ancient Near East, both as a formal legal penalty and also as the kind of thing that you would do in war after you've conquered a city. And that is namely, you would suspend somebody. The fairly graphic drawing that you saw, the relief from La Keish, well, about La Keish, the stage of La Keish, has people being impaled. And if you were to ask me in the ancient Near East, what did that penalty probably look like? It was probably something like that, throwing somebody on top of a real spiky stick. By the way, I also would readily admit, this has fairly grew some topic and I apologize for that. When I went to defend my topic after a year of study in Cambridge, they had this little time when you meet with somebody who's other than your supervisor and defend that this is a viable thesis topic, I was already with all, you know, why I thought nobody had ever studied the way I was going to study it before and all these materials that would be very important and interesting. The first question from the examiner's mouth was, are you sure you have the stomach for this? Because spending three years reading accounts of how people put other people to death in a very gruesome fashion is quite shocking. So I do recognize that into things and I don't want to offend you. I've tried to tame things down so it's not too horrible. But probably people in the ancient areas were impaled and that looks very different from you know, outstretched arms, prolonged exposure as a means of execution. However, in the ancient world, the same vocabulary was used to describe all of these events. So we tend to think of crucifixion as being something that's just, you know, again on a cross-shaped object like this and a means of death and if it doesn't meet those criteria, it's not crucifixion for us. Well in the ancient world, there were a variety of penalties that had to do with suspending people before or after their death, either there's a means to death or there's a consequence of their death, that we're all associating group together. And if you view it in those terms, then you recognize that this ancient Near East penalty that looked perhaps quite different from what we anticipate, Jesus underwent, is still part of the whole picture. Recognizing that, then we come to a text such as the Genesis text here and we realize that the person, you know, it says he will lift your head up from upon you, and he will hang you in the tree and the birds will eat your flesh from upon you. There's decapitation, so the person is dead before they're suspended. But to the ancient Jewish mind, this was still part of crucifixion and you want evidence for that, one little piece of evidence, is that both Josephus and Philo, Philo's a first century Jewish philosopher, and Josephus is a first century Jewish historian, take this very passage, retell it, and mention this event as if it was a crucifixion. They use crucifixion words. So for those of you who know Greeks, Darra'o and Honest Darra'o for Josephus and then Philo uses Honest Darra'o. And so the result is that you have this text is understood as a crucifixion text by at least some people in the first century. And when we look at the next few texts of the Old Testament, we'll recognize that the same theme is going on. So the next text that we looked at, and we did also have this last time, was Deuteronomy 21, and I'm going to read this again because we went through it very quickly before, and I'm going to mention that there are several very important interpretive issues here. This is a very literal, really literalistic translation of the Hebrew from the Old Testament and the way I translated it was in such a way as to make clear some of the difficult interpretive decisions. And when there is an a man, a sin-bearing a judgment of death, well, let me ask you, what is a sin-bearing a judgment of death? It's a very interesting term, actually it's a series of words in the Hebrew. And part of the discussion in Judaism in our period is what kinds of sin merit this punishment that he's going to mention, okay? So and when there is an a man, a sin-bearing a judgment of death, and he is executed and you hang him on a tree, notice the way that I've translated it there, you have a series of clauses, sin-bearing a judgment of death, executed, hanging him on a tree. All of those are assumed as part of the wind clause. It's just assumed that you're going to have people that you do this to, that you're going to hang people on the tree. The rest of the passage in Deuteronomy limits the practice. So what I would envision the Lord doing here is he is accepting a widespread ancient near Eastern practice of hanging people after their dead, but he is curtailing it in terms of how long you leave them hanging up there on the tree as the literal term. So he assumes that they have a judgment of death and that they're executed and you hang him on a tree. And by the way, before we leave, verse 22, notice the three clauses are in a particular order. There's the judgment of death. There's the execution and the hanging on the tree. Now the natural way to read that order would be to understand the execution as being prior to the hanging on a tree. Do you see? Comes first and then a hanging on a tree, which would indicate that the hanging on a tree was post-mortem, it was after the person's dead. That's the natural way to read Deuteronomy, and I would have sent to that. However, it is the case that in Hebrew, the series of ants may not convey the necessary progression in terms of the punishment, it could just be this kind of batch of, these are the things you do. So it was possible for Jewish people to, in antiquity, understand this is just a package deal, which would make the possibility that the suspension is the means of execution. But I would certainly acknowledge that the natural way to read this is that execution proceeds the suspension. Okay. Next, verse 23, his corpse shall not spend the night on the tree. There's the limitation. Notice, verse 22 is the kind of the condition. If there is an man, when there is a man, a centenary of judgment death, you execute him, hanging on a tree. The then clause, the main point is to curtail the practice by saying, you're not going to leave his corpse on the body overnight, but you shall surely bury him in that day. For a curse of God is the one who is hung, and you shall not defile your land, which the Lord your God gives to you as inheritance. So you've got to bury him in the course of the day, right? Now, one of the other major interpretive issues here is this phrase, for a curse of God, is the one who is hung. Now I'm going to walk over this board here, and point out something that is true about English. It's true about Hebrew, and it's actually true about Greek as well, that this word of or what it entails in its corresponding syntactical form in Greek or Hebrew is quite ambiguous at times. Kurt had me for Greek. Remember this, Kurt? Yeah. Okay. Love of God. All right. What does that mean? So for instance, in the Corinthian literature, when Paul says, the love of God compels me. Well, what's compelling here? It's a nice God's love. So this is the love that God has for Paul, right? So we would say God's love, okay? Can you see that any other way? My love for God. This is what's known as a subjective and objective genitive problem. And the question is the directional arrow. Is the love of God, does that mean that the love is coming from God? So from God to us, God's love for me. Where does the love of God go the other direction? It's our love, and we are loving God, you see? Someone ambiguous in that regard. God could be loving us, or we could be loving God, and that the issue all revolves around this word of, okay? By the way, if you ever compare, say, a new American standard translation to the NIV translation, the NIV translation often tries to unpack what is meant by the word of. Whereas the new American standard translation often just leaves the oven there, and makes you have to make the decision, it's this one or this one, okay? So if you're ever comparing translations and you're in a Bible study, you know, and somebody says, well, mine says love of God, but somebody else says, but mine says, you know, God's love. And you start finding over what's the best translation, probably, that's the issue, okay? Anyway, here, if we come here, then the same issue has to do with curse of God, okay? Is the curse of God a curse that God performs, or is it a cursing of, is it the person curses God? In other words, they're blaspheming God. The issue then is, is this person who is hung aloft cursed by God while they're hanging, or is there some sense in which they have blaspheme God, and therefore they are hung, or by being hung, it almost is like there's a blasphemy going on of God in whose image they are created. That's an interpretive issue in the text, okay? Now I can say that the Septuagint, which is the Greek, remember we did this the other day, right? It's the Septuagint. It's the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the earliest one, the one that was supposedly done by 70 people in different groups, right? The Septuagint translates this basically as this is a curse by God. So God's the one who's doing the cursing there. But there was a lot of discussion in 1st century Judaism as to who this was and what this was about. The reason I point that out is, is that we'll return to this text later when we look at some Jewish texts and we'll see that that's one of the major issues that comes up. To summarize this passage then, okay? This passage primarily limits a widespread ancient Near East practice. It's assumed that people are going to be hung, you got a barium within the day. The text seems to imply that the execution precedes the hanging and there is an issue as to why you bury the person right away. It has to do with this idea of the person being a curse of God. And we're not sure whether that's necessarily being cursed by God or they've cursed God. Okay? That's a quick summary of the Deuteronomy passage. Do you want any clarity on that before I move on? Yes. It could be that. It was a great question. I'm sorry, I cut you off. The curse of God, if the person is cursing God, then the question is, is this then the sin that bears a judgment of death? So in short, if the cursing of God is blasphemy, then blasphemy would merit this kind of death, including the suspension. And that's right. That's one possible way of understanding it. And of course, the import of that is what I'm just trying to remember. What did the Sanhedrin accuse Jesus of before they took him to Pilate? Blasphemy. Okay? So they might, even though they're not actually conducting the crucifixion, the hanging if you would, they might have felt somewhat warranted in seeking that penalty because they viewed him as a blasphemer, one who had cursed God. That's where I'm ultimately going with it. Okay. A couple other Old Testament passages they have to do with people being hung in the Old Testament. In Joshua 8, and also again in Joshua 10, mind you, but in Joshua 8, Joshua has one of his opponents hung as he's conquering the Promised Land. But he hung the King of I on the tree until the evening time. And as the sun was going, Joshua commanded, and they took down his corpse from the tree, and they flung it into the opening of the gate of the city, and they erected over him a great heap of stones, which stands until this day. Now, this action of Joshua looks very similar to the action that we saw a couple of days ago on the lips of Tigloff Palazzo III. He takes the city, he takes the leaders out, he hangs them up. So Joshua does basically the same thing with the King of I. The difference is he takes them down, and this seems to be in keeping with Deuteronomy. Even though Deuteronomy seems to be doing with a legal context, Joshua applied that to a military context, and therefore they took down his corpse from the tree. Now by the way, as we're going through these things, one of the questions you can ask yourself is, if I was a Jewish person in antiquity, and I was thinking of biblical examples of people who went to trees who were suspended, who would come to mind? If you're talking about Jesus the Messiah who was suspended, can you think of any positive examples from the Old Testament, or that examples going to be like this, the King of I, the very person who opposed the people coming into the Promised Land, or the person in the Genesis narrative with the cut bearer and the baker, who was put to death by the Pharaoh? Perhaps the most important text in that regard comes from the book of Esther. And there in the book of Esther, there are several mentions of people being hung on a tree, which is this phrase that we have in the Old Testament, for suspending people. And here's one example, Esther 7.9-10, in Harbona, one of the unix before the King said, even the whole of the tree, which Haman made for Mordecai, who spoke well on account of the King. Mordecai spoke well on account of the King. That tree stands in the house of Haman 50, Cuba, it's tall, it's a tall tree. And the King said, hang him on it. And they hung Haman on the tree, which he prepared for Mordecai, and the anger of the King was a piece. The context, hopefully you've read Book of Esther lately, or maybe you've seen the Veggie Tales film, you know? What Mordecai is this godly Jewish person who is a relative of Esther, and Esther, of course, ultimately makes it to the court of the King. Mordecai effectively saves the King's life early in the book, but does not get fully rewarded for that. And Haman is in charge of the court, and he hates Mordecai. And his hatred for Mordecai is so extreme that he looks for the worst penalty he can come up for Mordecai, and he wants to put to death Mordecai's entire race, namely the entire Jewish people. And what happens in the course of the book is that through Esther and Mordecai himself, the whole trajectory of the book changes, and the penalty that Haman had planned for Mordecai comes on Haman. And this is that switch right here. So Haman had planned on hanging Mordecai, and instead Haman is hung. Now again, the striking thing about this is that there are a number of first-century texts, including Josephus, and also including some Greek manuscripts in the Septuagint tradition, the old Greek tradition, that used crucifixion vocabulary to refer to this event. As if Haman was planning a crucifixion for Mordecai, but instead was crucified himself. So this would have been well perceived in the first century as a kind of precursor of crucifixion. So, let's go back to our question. If I came to you and said that Jesus, the Messiah was crucified, and you are Jewish, and you're thinking through Old Testament parallels to crucifixion. Perhaps the one that would come most to mind is the crucifixion of Haman who deserved it, and who, by the way, tried to kill the whole Jewish race. This is such an important event in Jewish life that there is a festival named Purim which celebrates the victory of Mordecai and the Jewish people over Haman. Also, by the way, this comes largely from some Christian authors in the 4th and 5th century AD. The context has to be born in mind. But the Christian emperor at that point in time felt the need to legislate against Jewish practice of Purim in this period. You probably haven't ever read the Mordecais on Purim. It is this festival of revelry. You're supposed to be so excited that God reversed this penalty on Haman. That you engage in great revelry, and the rabbis debate just how drunk you're supposed to get. And it has to do with whether you are able to recognize your own face in the mirror. This is a great feast of revelry according to the rabbis. In part of this feast, the perspective of the Christians is, Haman is being hung in effigy on the cross and the Christians thought that they were making fun of Jesus. And they might have been. So the emperor Theodotian, who was a Christian, legislated against the practice of hanging Haman in effigy during the festival of Purim. So this connection may not have been lost on early Jewish people when they thought of Jesus the supposed Messiah who has been crucified. Some summary statements. By the way, you'll know, I hope you know, that packet of handouts that we did earlier on New Testament backgrounds and such. This whole lecture is numbered lecture number six and is in that handout. So a lot of these texts are available for you to peruse and to study and to get to know. So this summary is also found there. Three points. Suspension penalties were well known in Mesopotamian and Mediterranean history. Going back to our discussion of ancient Near Eastern texts and reliefs. So there were suspension penalties known. This can also be seen in the Old Testament. The Old Testament limited the practice of penal suspension and associated the suspended person with the curse of God. If you have those major points, you've got a lot of what I'm interested in here. Basically, that's what I want you to have by this point. Moving away from the ancient Near Eastern context and some of these Old Testament texts, I'm interested in looking at how crucifixion would have been perceived by Greeks and Romans, by pagans, if you would, in the Mediterranean world. And I will note that our primary concern here is how crucifixion was perceived in the world of Jesus. So I'm not as interested in how it was practiced. I'll have some comments to go with that. You know what it looked like. I'm not as concerned about that. I'm mostly concerned with what did you think of if somebody came up and said, you know, Bob was crucified. So a few texts and again, these are in your handout. Plutarch says that every criminal who goes to execution that's carrying his own cross on his back. This is indicative of a couple of things. One is that a person who's going to be crucified is responsible for bearing their own cross to the place of crucifixion. And of course, we see this in the Gospels. Jesus carries his cross to his place of execution. More importantly, in terms of this text, it refers to the people who go to the cross as criminals. In particular, the main kind of criminal in the Roman world who was put to crucifixion was what I would deem a brigand. This is a thief, but it's a particular kind of thief. It's a thief that uses violence. You know, if you think of the story of the Good Samaritan, although the technical term is not used here, when the man is walking along before the Good Samaritan comes to him and he's besieged by thieves, by brigands, if you would, they come on him and they beat him until he's near death and they take everything from him. This was a great fear in the ancient world because there are times when you were going from city to city, when you were in a city, I mean, there was decent amount of army and military control, etc. But when you were going from city to city, there was always the danger of highway robbery and bandits. And these people weren't gentle. They didn't just kind of have a, you know, stick their hand in their pocket, pretend they had a gun and say, you know, you have, they knocked you over the head and they took everything you had. That's what brigandage was like. It was greatly feared in antiquity. One of the things that made the Romans so popular in antiquity is they put an end to this because their military presence was so significant that they would go after these brigands. And the punishment that they had for the brigands was so extreme as to keep people from doing it. And that's why they crucified brigands or thieves. And by the way, when Jesus is crucified between two people, what are they? Thieves. The word thief is extremely weak. The Greek word there is they were a lace-dace. They were a brigand. These are probably violent criminals that he's being put to death in between. And therefore, when Jesus says to the people who come to him to arrest him, why do you come to me as one who is a brigand? Because he could already see what they were up to and the desire to crucify him. So undoubtedly, Jesus would have been perceived as such a criminal. If I just simply said Jesus was crucified immediately, you think, oh, he must have been a criminal. Cicero says to bind a Roman citizen as a crime to flog him as an abomination, to slay him as almost an act of murder, to crucify him is what? There is no fitting word that can possibly describe so horrible indeed. Now, what's going on here is this is Cicero who was acting as kind of the prosecuting attorney. Cicero was one of the great legal minds of his day, trying varies who was a Roman governor. And he comes up with all the heinous things that Varys did as a Roman governor in the midst of the trial. And one of the most important examples of just how awful Varys was was that he crucified, and that's not a problem, but that he crucified a Roman citizen. That's the issue. Remember, there's this issue of whether you were a citizen in the ancient world or whether you were not. Well, citizens in the ancient world, if they even if they did something terrible, would not go to the cross. It was just viewed as too horrible punishment. But if you were not a citizen, and it was OK, depending on how horrible the crime was, Varys broke with that protocol. And so Cicero states this as just this horrible deed. That shows you that, you know, it's the lower echelons of society that were expected to go to the cross. Next. Seneca, who's a stoic philosopher, right, you guys have met the stoics now. One of the things that the stoics believed is, you know, again, you live your life in a course with reason. Remember this, with the log-offs with reason, and you don't fight against fate, but you go with it. And if you get to a point in your life where your life is just horrible, then the most reasonable thing to do is to commit suicide. So there were a number of stoic writings about committing suicide. And this, I think, is perhaps why a stoicist has been viewed with some allure by people throughout Western history, possibly goes back to the stoics. Even though we would recognize that it's a horrible thing to do. Seneca, in making this case, says comes up with this extreme example of under what circumstance you would be foolish not to commit suicide. And here's his example. It has to do with crucifixion. And in a process, he describes how crucifixion-wise. So pardon me, this is about as vivid as our crucifixion things get. So this is too painful, close your ears, if you can do that, and then we'll go on. Can anyone be found who would prefer wasting away in pain, dying limb by limb, or letting out his life drop by drop rather than expiring once for all? Can any man be found willing to be fastened to the accursed tree, long sickly, already deformed, this is his body, long sickly, already deformed, swelling with ugly tumors on chest and shoulders, and draw the breath of life amid long, strong, out agony? I think he would have many excuses for dying, even before mounting the cross. That is the kind of penalty that our Lord endured. And it's also the degree of pain that was associated with the cross. So it would be such an incredible shock to then think that this kind of person would have been crucified, or that this kind of person would be the Messiah. Moving to Lucian, Lucian is this second century AD philosopher who writes very sarcastic dialogues. And in this case he is making fun of the traditional religion, pagan pantheon of religion. And one of the things he does is he points out that Zeus had this major anger management problem. So much so that when Zeus heard that Prometheus had created mankind, and it also created fire, he got so hacked off with Prometheus that he hung him up on the caucuses for an eagle to come and peck out his innards every day. He is a god, he can't die, but this is what happened. This is an ancient myth, an ancient ancient story. Lucian just shows how incredibly foolish this is because for one thing, the fact that they are human beings and that they have fire means that they can make offerings to the gods, which is what feeds the gods. So Zeus is hacked off because he is getting fed. It is just incredibly weird. In the course of this, you have basically three characters, Hermes and Hephaestus, who are two other deities and Prometheus himself, and they interact about this while Prometheus is being suspended to the caucuses. And Lucian takes the whole thing and turns it into an act of crucifixion, as if Prometheus is going to be permanently crucified and the birds are going to keep coming after. So here's the context. Hermes and Hephaestus are talking about nailing up Prometheus. Well Hephaestus, here's the caucuses, that's the mountain range, where this poor Titan that's referring to Prometheus will have to be nailed up. That's a typical crucifixion word. Now then, let us look about for a suitable rock if there is a place anywhere that has no snow on it so that the irons may be riveted in more firmly and he may be in full sight of everyone as he hangs there. We learned from this both the use of nails and the sense that crucifixion was a public penalty. It was something that you wanted people to see. Hephaestus says, yes, let's look about Hermes. We must crucify him glow and close to the ground for fear that men, his own handy work, may come to his aid so you don't want him too close to the ground because he created mankind. They might have pity on him and release him. Nor do you want to crucify him up on the summit either for he would be out of sight from below and you want this to be public. Suppose we crucify him halfway up, somewhere here about over the ravine, with his hands outstretched from this rock to that rock. A few things. Notice that crucifixion in this context is not pinning somebody to a cross per se. It is pinning them to a mountain and rocks. Also, the greek reads from this rock to that rock indicating outspread arms. The reason I emphasize that is, there are some people including, this is an odd mix, Vine's expository dictionary of New Testament words which is an old, not terribly academically informed, treatment of New Testament vocabulary. He argues that crucifixion, the word Stauros, the word for cross indicated a pointy object instead of a cross-shaped object. Interestingly, his view is joined by the Jehovah's Witnesses. Vine's was definitely not wanting to decide with the Jehovah's Witnesses but they agree on this. It is probably because of their opposition to the Catholic crucifix that they want to say the Catholics got it wrong. Interestingly, the Jehovah's Witnesses in some of their literature, some of their more academic, sort of semi, well they don't have academic literature but some of their literature indicates that Prometheus, this very dialogue indicates that this is a pointy object. And they stop actually a few lines before they get to here. If they just kept reading, they would see you've got outstretched arms going on. Now I don't think that's the only way people were crucified in antiquity but I do think it must have been common enough in Lucian's day that he expected outstretched arms for crucifixion.
A summary. Crucifixion was reserved primarily for these slaves and rebels, not for Roman citizens. Scourging immutilation often preceded crucifixion and crucifixion could employ nails and outstretched arms. These things help verify the gospel accounts of Jesus' death. I've only given you a few of hundreds of texts of crucifixion from antiquity that could support this. Again, very often the case that you expect somebody to be scourged before they go to the cross as happened with Jesus. Crucifixion was a long and very painful way to die which was designed to produce shame. Now I didn't bring out some of the shame imagery that you have in some of the other passages but that's true. And again, part of that is true because a person who was crucified typically was crucified naked. So our Lord would have been crucified naked. Alright, now we'll move on. Point here is this. Let me pick some by John. I hope you don't mind me picking on you. John, you're a pagan. First century pagan. I don't mean that in any drogative fashion. It's just, you know, you're a typical Greco-Roman kind of guy. And I come to you and I say, I know the person who is the Lord of the universe. And he was crucified. Well, what is John thinking if he knows all this about crucifixion? Well, I mean, he's probably thinking, what did he do to deserve it? He must not have been a Roman citizen and if you're a Roman citizen, I mean that's not going to sound so great. He must have been thinking what a painful way to die, what a shameful way to die, which is really bad in a Roman context. I mean, is this the kind of person you want to follow, John? That's the scenario that we're in in the first century. Alright, crucifixion of Palestine. The first point I want to make is there were a lot of people crucified in the ancient world and a lot of people were crucified in Judea. So, again, you think of the cross and you think of Jesus. That's all you know. Somebody in antiquity thinking of the cross probably thought of seeing several, maybe dozens, maybe hundreds of people crucified in his lifetime. So here, this is from Josephus and he's describing the early stages. Well, this is actually even before the Jewish war. Although it's in his book about the Jewish war, this is kind of deep background. Varas, who was a Roman governor of Syria, now detached part of his army to scour the country in search of the authors of the insurrection, many of whom were brought in. These, this would have included Jewish people. Those who appeared to be the less turbulent individuals he imprisoned, the most culpable and number about, about how many? 2000? He crucified? Now, I will quickly admit that 2000 is a very round number. Right? And people have often suggested that Josephus tends to inflate his figures a bit. So, we'll take 2000 with the grain of salt. I guess you take things with grain of salt, don't you? Okay. Anyway, we'll be a little dubious about the number 2000, but we're probably not thinking two or three. Are we? I think a lot of people were crucified when, when Varas put down this insurrection. And by the way, that's another thing that the Romans would do. The slave revolts that happened in and around Rome were such concern that they used the most horrible penalties possible to put them down. Anybody ever seen that the old movie Spartacus? It was Kirk Douglas, right, wasn't it? Yeah. At the end of it, the way into Rome, the whole road into Rome is lined with cross after cross after cross after cross of these slaves who had tried to rebel so that they wouldn't have to be possessed by their masters anymore. The reason is if slavery stops, you undermine the whole economic system of the Roman world. So you can't let them rebel. And the other reason, by the way, is if you've got a slave, and he's thinking about rebelling, and he's the one who fixes your food and takes care of your kids, and maybe gives you a haircut with a little knife in his hand. I mean, you don't want that person rebelling because he might, you know, kill you among other things. So that's one thing. This is not referring to that. This is referring to an insurrection, which was also horrible in the ancient world for the Romans, because if one province went into rebellion, they might all go that way. So you use the greatest possible force to suppress the insurrection, and you make sure that people understand the consequences should they try and rebel again. And that's what happened here. Now, this is a very long passage from the Jewish War, and it has to do with Titus. And remember, Titus ultimately became emperor. He was the son of the Spacian, both of whom were generals during the Jewish War, and the Spacian and Titus were the people who provided financially for Josephus to write his history of the Jewish War. So we recognize the possibility of bias here on the part of Josephus. The context is Jerusalem is besieged by the Romans. There is no food getting in and out. They are running out of food inside, and I think I might have shared in an earlier class that Josephus indicates a mother ate her own child. It's getting that bad. And as people try to escape just to get a little bit of food, the Romans capture them, and here's the scenario. When caught, those people who had escaped out of Jerusalem, out of the siege, were driven to resist, and after a conflict it seemed too late for mercy, they were accordingly scourged, so they were whipped, and subjected to torture of every description before being killed and then crucified opposite the walls. Titus indeed commiserated their fate. He felt bad for these people. Of course, Titus, again, is Josephus' sponsor. 500 or sometimes more being captured daily, hundreds daily. On the other hand, he recognized, so here's the calculating side of Titus, and here's Josephus excusing his action really. He recognized the risks of dismissing prisoners of war, if you dismiss them, they might fight you again, and that the custody of such numbers would amount to the imprisonment of the custodians, if I as the general, say, put some of my troops to look after these people and imprison them, while then my army no longer can participate in the siege. But his main reason for not stopping the crucifixions was the hope that the spectacle might perhaps induce the Jews to surrender. You're at the walls of Jerusalem and you're looking out and you're seeing hundreds of your comrades crucified, and you're thinking, this could happen to me. Maybe I should give up. That's what Titus is after. By the way, it's not the first time that Josephus recorded such an action was attempted in the Jewish war. Other people did the same thing. It seemed to be a common military practice, at least in the conduct of the Jewish war. So he's open to spectacle. We'll cause them to surrender. Prefer the continued resistance would involve them in a similar fate. Now, this is even more amazing. The soldiers out of rage and hatred amuse themselves by nailing their prisoners in different postures. I mean, you can imagine, I mean, you're crucifying hundreds a day. You know, it's after a while you just get kind of tired of it. Well, let's play around a little bit. Try out some new postures. I've got an idea. Let's try this way. That's the kind of thing the Roman soldiers are thinking. By the way, a quick aside on that, people often ask me what did crucifixion look like in the first century? Well, part of my answer is it probably varied in its practice in the first century. There might have been a general way that you did it, but this text shows that the Roman soldiers had a little bit of latitude in terms of how they would conduct crucifixion. So to say that there was one standard, this is the only way we ever do it. It's probably not accurate. So they nail prisoners in different postures and then just say if it's ends by saying, and so great was their number that space could not be found on the cross for the crosses, no crosses for the bodies. They run out of space and they run out of wood. And that's how many people were crucified right around 8070, just a few years after the crucifixion of our Lord. It's not wholly clear in this text. Principally, you would expect legal punishments to be executed mostly against men, but there's a few texts that may indicate that women were hung as well at different points in time. We actually have evidence of crucifixion archaeological evidence of crucifixion in Palestine in the first century, or in or around the first century. It comes in a, in the form of a body that was discovered in an osuere. I don't know if you know what an osuere is. The term became very popular a couple of years ago because of the discovery of the so-called James the Brother of Jesus osuere. An osuere is a bone box. What would happen is burial space was not extremely available, especially around Jerusalem in and around the first century. In order to bury somebody in and around Jerusalem, typically what you would do is you will have dug a cave in the side of a hill somewhere, usually into limestone, which is the main material around there. And then you would dig out a platform like a bed that would look something like this. And then you would lie the body out on the bed. You may have seen images that look like that in various Christian books and such. That's what you would do. Well, after that person had decayed, that's a lot of space that you're taking up. So people would take the bones and they would then re-bury them in these small limestone osuere that were about, you know, yay big. And you would have maybe two or possibly three bodies, depending on how big the osuere was in these. And there was an osuere that was discovered outside of Jerusalem about 30 years ago or so. In a place known as Givot Abnatar, that's the name down there. And it had an inscription you can see on the side. That's that's Hebrew or Armaic for Yulkhanen, Jonathan. And then the rest of the inscription is debated in terms of exactly what it says. In that bone box, if you would, the evidence of crucifixion was the calcaneum, which is the heel bone, had a nail through it. So you can see on the left hand side of the picture, that's a standard calcaneum, that's a standard heel bone. On the right is the one that was discovered there and you can see the nail sticking through it. And this is a drawing of that calcaneum again with the nail there. And on either side of it, there was found wood, a wooden plaque on the outside of the nail probably used to help make sure that the bone didn't fall off of. And then also wood at the tip of the nail, probably where it was drilled into the cross that was found there. Now, three different possible postures that come out of this discovery. And the whole issue has to do with whether on that one nail, there was actually just one calcaneum or two. In other words, whether both heel bones were there or just one was there. The initial study of this indicated the idea that there were two, a later study, has suggested that in fact there was just one. And so the difference would be between whether the two were nailed up with a single nail, which is drawings A and B, in two different suggested positions. Or drawing C has the person's legs straddling the cross and two different nails into the heel bone. The other issue there has to do with whether a scratch that was found on the forearm of the body right around in the wrist area represents a nail or whether it was a scratch that came about in the rebaring of the bones. For those who say that it was a nail, then the top two drawings would have the wrist nailed. The bottom drawing would have the arm just simply tied there. So based on archaeological study, those are our main options, and probably C is the best of the three drawings at this stage. So if you want to know what crucifixion looked like, there's an example. Now, again, we can't say that every crucifixion looked that way. This is just what this crucifixion looked like. Let me stop there and see if I see questions. Why would you re-bury things? Why would you maintain the bones? Is that the correct answer? A couple of answers to that. The follow-up question was, would they be higher ups, et cetera, more wealthy? Family, it was a good Jewish responsibility in this time period for people to take care of the bones of the deceased. It was a very important thing, and I would think families of every economic stripe would try and take care of this. However, it was expensive to own a tomb, and the purchase of a limestone osseware could also be somewhat expensive, and we see a whole variety of qualities of them. The one that I just showed you is a very low-quality osseware, where as I have pictures of like the chiafus osseware, quite possibly the high-prize chiafus, they found a bone box for him, and it's beautiful. Very ornate, inscribed, perfectly designed. It's really something. So there were probably a variety of economic situations in life that people had that had these. But you probably had to have at least some means to own such a tomb, and then to have an osseware. Yes. I'm sorry, the question was, is from the side correct, and I said, yes. The question is, or the statement in real a comment, is that it would seem more reasonable that if you're going to nail the hand of the wrist, you would put the nail through this wrist area here, because there would be more support in the bone from that. There have been some recent medical studies done on this, one that was released in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and those are the kind of conclusions that they come to as well. I am, you're a nurse, Carol, I'm not sufficiently adept at understanding the complexities of the human anatomy to know for sure about that, but you're certainly correct that other people have suggested the wrist is better. The issue is that they indicate that Jesus's hands were nailed, okay? Well, the issue in Greek there is that the hand doesn't stop necessarily at the wrist, it can continue up your forearm. So it's certainly possible in Greek that a nail happened here as opposed to here. We just simply can't tell based on the textual evidence. Just a few last texts. A few kind of rabbinic texts and Jewish texts to show what Jewish people in antiquity then thought of crucifixion. We already supported the idea that they saw a whole lot of them, so it's not surprising then that crucifixion became a metaphor that could be used even in parables. So here we have a parable that is told by a rabbi, and rabbi is told parables, by the way, so there's some connection there with Jesus's form of teaching. When will you, it says the Lord shall reign, this is a text from Exodus, this is an ancient rabbinic commentary, the Makilta, an ancient rabbinic commentary on Exodus, and the phrase in Exodus is the Lord shall reign, and the understanding is that this refers to the rebuilding of the temple, okay? Now remember that this is a text that's happened after the destruction of Jerusalem in 1870 with most rabbinic texts. So the question is when will the Lord reign, and he says when Val the Lord will again build it that is the temple with both our hands to give a parable to what is this to be compared to the following. Roberts entered the palace of the king, dispoiled his property, killed the royal household, and destroyed the palace of the king. So we've got robbers coming into the king's palace, killing everything, and destroying the palace. Now what's the palace possibly in the parable? The temple, okay? And the people are being pictured as robbers, right? And again, of course robbers, this is the same here, a Hebrew term that equals the Greek term Leistai. So these are brigands, and you expect brigands to be crucify. So he comes into the household, destroys everything of the king, including the palace, which is the temple. After some time, however, the king sat in judgment over them. Who's the king? God Almighty. Some of them he imprisoned, some of them he killed, some of them he crucified, which is what you would expect the king to do with brigands, especially under such a situation. He then again dwelt in his palace, and thereafter his reign was recognized in the world, in this sense it is said, the sanctuary, the temple, O Lord which thy hands have established the Lord shall reign forever and ever. Now what's fascinating about this passage is that in a parable, first of all, the rabbis simply assume that brigands are crucified, which shows that Jewish people continued this Greco-Roman notion that if you were a brigand, you'd be crucified. Secondly, they are able to use the image of crucifixion as an image of the kind of eschatological recompense God will have against the Romans. It's very shocking that basically in this parable, God is crucifying. Right by my ear, tries to understand that passage in Deuteronomy that we were talking about, that curse of God thing, and he uses this image. What scripture teaches, because curse of God is the one who's hung, that's the Deuteronomy passage, right? Is like two brothers who were twin-like, the one was like the other, so you got identical twins. One was king over all the world, but the other went out to the robbers, so we got another brigand going on here. One's a king, the other's a brigand. After time, this one who went out to the robbers was arrested, so the thief is captured, and they crucified him on a cross. That's what you do with brigands, and everyone who passed to and fro would tell the rumor that the king was crucified. Therefore, it is said because the curse of God is the one who's hung. This is a very interesting rabbinic interpretation of the curse of God, because it applies the image of God to a human being, who's hung up on a tree, and people look up and they say, that looks like God Himself in some respects, and therefore they think God Himself in some senses being so shamed and cursed, and thus it looks like a curse of God. It's very interesting kind of rabbinic parable, but it just shows you that the rabbis, and there's a lot of these examples too, were willing to use crucifixion in their parable parables. However, when they got to legal pronouncements of the Deuteronomy text, they distanced it from the crucifixion practices of the Romans. So in the seafray on Deuteronomy, which is a legal commentary on the book of Deuteronomy, roughly, it's after the time of the missionists, so we're talking third to fifth century AD somewhere in there. One might think that they, that is the Jewish judges, will hang him alive, referring to Deuteronomy, as in the manner which the Roman government does, in other words via crucifixion. So scripture says, and he was put to death, and you hung them on a tree. So there you see the rabbis arguing that the order of verbs and Deuteronomy, the person's dead, then their hung, cannot refer to crucifixion. So there were at least some people who thought that this Deuteronomy cannot refer to crucifixion. On the other hand, Philo applies the Deuteronomy passage to people who are crucified. And I think you have the full text, don't you, in your handout. So for sake of time, I'm not going to read all of that. Just simply say that God Himself commands those who took human life to be crucified, that's right before 152 there. And after ordering this, he hastens again to his love of mankind, his philanthropy, being subdued toward those who had worked savage acts and he says, do not let the sun set upon those who have been crucified. So Philo thought Deuteronomy applied to the crucifix, even if some of the rabbis did not. And then this final example is from a Dead Sea scroll, antidating the time of Jesus by probably a couple hundred years. It seeks to understand Deuteronomy. The stuff that is not underlined comes directly from Deuteronomy 21. The stuff that is underlined is their addition, and there's basically two key parts here. The bulk of the additions have to do with spelling out what constitutes a sin bearing a judgment of death. And here it's primarily somebody who betrays God's people to a foreign nation. The second thing that's of interest here is that the people at the very bottom who have been hung on the tree have been cursed of God and men, implying most likely that God and men are bringing a curse on those persons. So these people are cursed by God and men. Now, some summary statements about crucifixion in Palestine. There is extra biblical testimony to crucifixion in Palestine. There's a lot of it. A lot of people were crucified in Palestine in around the first century. Jewish people shared similar views about crucifixion as other people in the Greco-Roman world. In particular, they thought people who went to the cross were brigands, robbers thieves. Additionally, Jewish people connected crucifixion with scriptural examples. So they would connect it with Deuteronomy, and then I argued earlier that they connected it with Esther. And then there was some debate about whether it was legal for Jewish leaders to crucify. The debate on the one hand against it, we found in the seafrey on Deuteronomy, but Philo and the temple scroll indicate that crucifixion was what the Lord was requiring in Deuteronomy. Or something similar to it. And then that's it. Now, let me go back for half a second before I get there. Back to John. John, you're no longer a pagan. You're a Jewish person. You're a good Jewish person. And I come up to you, and I say, I've met Jesus. He's in Messiah, and he's been crucified. Now what are you thinking? I mean, some of the things John might be thinking would be a brigand. How could this person undergo the curse of God? Were they a blasphemer? Or were they being cursed by God? How could they look like Haman, the very person who tried to put to death, God's people? At the same time, John might also know some rebels, some of which he kind of thought were doing the right thing and rebelling against Rome, who were crucified. And so he might think favorably of Jesus as a rebel. And so I have to clarify those problems of what he might believe as well. Those are at least some of the things you might think. Do you see how hard it would have been for first century Christians to proclaim and crucify Jesus? Little wonder it is then that Paul, in 1 Corinthians, says this, for since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not come to no God, God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believed. For indeed Jews asked for signs and Greeks searched for wisdom but we preached Christ crucified to Jews, a stumbling walk, and to Gentiles foolishness. But to those who are called both Jews and Greeks Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God because the foolishness of God is wiser than man and the weakness of God is stronger than man. Paul did not shirk from preaching Christ crucified, not just dead but crucified, even though he recognized to the Gentiles it would be foolishness. A brigand, a rebel, a lower member of society, how could this person be anybody that we would listen to? And to Jews, a stumbling block, for in addition to all those kind of brigand rebel issues, how could he be cursed of God and how could he be like him? That's some of the situation there. Okay, we have a few minutes for questions and likely what's going on there, especially if it were triumph, when a great general had just won a victory. And they would get to lead the capture of people who were in captive in procession and they would carry also some of the captured stuff from the temples and from the palaces and all the gold and stuff and they get to walk through Rome. So that's the triumph that's there and that's the public spectacle that's there. And yet what's interesting is that Paul associates that with the public viewing undoubtedly of the crucifixion of Jesus. So yeah, that's a very good point. Good. Anything else? One more? Yeah. Absolute being hung by his hair, would that have come to mind? There is some evidence that this was equated with crucifixion that not a lot in terms of ancient Judaism. I actually spent a couple of weeks looking into that when I was doing my doctoral research. So there's some connections there. I'm not sure exactly how much I would make of that. Now at the same time, about 3rd, 4th century Christianity became aware of that Absalom passage. They were a little uncomfortable with it because Absalom is not the greatest guy in the world, so they didn't want to quote Jesus with Absalom. But there was some awareness, at least, in early Christianity of the passage. That's a good question. Let me tell you where we are. Author conveys to an audience in light of a cultural context, right? Greco-Roman, Jewish context. We have sought to understand the context in which the New Testament was written, at least in some respects. We did it broadly by talking about the Greco-Roman world at ancient Judaism. We've now done it more specifically, taking one aspect of the context, especially that of crucifixion, and see the context in which that was working when Paul's conveying to the Corinthians about the foolishness of the Greeks and the stumbling block for the Jewish people. That's where we are there. Where we need to go next week is this. While they are writing in the midst of this cultural context, that's not the primary source for their material. The primary sources are Jesus and the Old Testament. Next week we need to talk about how New Testament authors understood the Old Testament and then eventually we need to talk about Jesus and the historical reality of Jesus and how that influenced New Testament authors, both the authors of the gospels and Paul himself and James and any other author that we want to talk about. That's where we are going next week, Old Testament and then Jesus. Thank you for your attention. I hope you guys have a good weekend.