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“The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus
has made me free from the law of sin and death.”
(Romans
8:2)
Crucifixion
– Britannica
The following is the Article “Crucifixion” from
Encyclopedia Britannica:
crucifixion, an important method
of capital
punishment particularly among the Persians, Seleucids, Carthaginians,
and Romans from
about the 6th century BCE to
the 4th century CE. Constantine
the Great, the first Christian emperor, abolished it in
the Roman Empire in the early 4th century CE out of veneration for Jesus Christ, the most
famous victim of crucifixion.
Punishment
There were various methods of performing the
execution. Usually, the condemned man, after being whipped, or “scourged,”
dragged the crossbeam of his cross to
the place of punishment,
where the upright shaft was already fixed in the ground. Stripped of his
clothing either then or earlier at his scourging, he was bound fast with
outstretched arms to the crossbeam or nailed firmly to it through the wrists.
The crossbeam was then raised high against the upright shaft and made fast to
it about 9 to 12 feet (approximately 3 metres) from
the ground. Next, the feet were tightly bound or nailed to the upright shaft. A
ledge inserted about halfway up the upright shaft gave some support to the
body; evidence for a similar ledge for the feet is rare and late. Over the
criminal’s head was placed a notice stating his name and his crime. Death ultimately
occurred through a combination of constrained blood
circulation, organ failure, and asphyxiation as the
body strained under its own weight. It could be hastened by shattering the legs
(crurifragium) with an iron club, which prevented them from supporting
the body’s weight and made inhalation more difficult, accelerating both
asphyxiation and shock.
Crucifixion was most frequently used to
punish political or religious agitators, pirates, slaves, or those who had
no civil rights.
In 519 BCE Darius I, king
of Persia, crucified
3,000 political opponents in Babylon;
in 88 BCE Alexander Jannaeus, the Judaean king and high priest, crucified
800 Pharisaic opponents; and about 32 CE Pontius Pilate had
Jesus of Nazareth put to death by crucifixion.
The account of Jesus Christ’s
crucifixion in the Gospels begins
with his scourging.
The Roman soldiers then mocked him as the “King of the Jews” by clothing him in
a purple robe and a crown of thorns and led him slowly to Mount Calvary,
or Golgotha; one
Simon of Cyrene was allowed to aid him in carrying the cross. At the place of execution he was stripped and then nailed to the cross, at
least nailed by his hands, and above him at the top of the cross was placed the
condemnatory inscription stating his crime of professing to be King of the
Jews. (The Gospels differ slightly in the wording but agree that the
inscription was in “Hebrew,” or Aramaic, as well
as Latin and Greek.) On the cross
Jesus hung in agony. The soldiers divided his garments and cast lots for
his seamless robe.
Various onlookers taunted him. Crucified on either side of Jesus were two
convicted thieves, whom the soldiers dispatched at eventide by breaking their legs.
The soldiers found Jesus already dead, but, to be
certain, one of them drove a spear into his side, from which poured blood and
water. He was taken down before sunset (in deference to Jewish custom) and
buried in a rock-hewn tomb owned by Joseph of
Arimathea.
Crucifixion in art
Matthias
Grünewald: Crucifixion panel of the Isenheim AltarpieceThe Crucifixion, center panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece (closed view), by Matthias Grünewald, 1512–15; in the Musée d'Unterlinden, Colmar, France.(more)
The representation of Christ on the cross has been an
important subject of Western art since the early Middle Ages. Concerned
primarily with simple symbolic affirmations of salvation and eternal life, and
repelled by the ignominy of
the punishment, the early Christians did not represent the Crucifixion
realistically before the 5th century; instead, the event was symbolized first
by a lamb and, after the official recognition of Christianity by
the Roman state in the early 4th century, by a jewelled
cross. By the 6th century, however, representations of the Crucifixion became
numerous as a result of current church efforts to combat a heresy that Christ’s
nature was not dual—human and divine—but simply divine and therefore invulnerable.
These early Crucifixions were nevertheless triumphant images, showing Christ alive,
with open eyes and no trace of suffering, victorious over death. In the 9th
century, Byzantine
art began to show a dead Christ, with closed eyes, reflecting current
concern with the mystery of his death and the nature of the Incarnation.
This version was adopted in the West in the 13th century with an
ever-increasing emphasis on his suffering, in accordance with the mysticism of the
period.
Giunta
Pisano: CrucifixionCrucifixion,
painting by Giunta Pisano, c. 1250; in the Basilica of San Domenico, Bologna,
Italy.
Codex
of Saint George, Master of the: The CrucifixionThe Crucifixion, tempera and gold leaf on
wood panel by the Master of the Codex of Saint George, c. 1340–45;
in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.(more)
Parallel to this development in the representation of
Christ himself was the growth of an increasingly complex iconography involving
other elements traditionally included in the scene. The principal mourners, the Virgin Mary and St. John the
Apostle, are frequently the only other figures included in the composition.
In various expanded versions of the theme, however, there are several other
pairs of figures, both historical and symbolic, that traditionally appear to
the right and left of the cross: the two thieves, one repentant, who were
crucified with Christ; the centurion who
pierced Christ’s side with a lance (and afterward acknowledged him to be the
Son of God) and the soldier who offered him vinegar on a sponge; small
personifications of the Sun and Moon, which were eclipsed at the Crucifixion;
and allegorical figures of the church and the synagogue. Other figures might
include the soldiers who cast lots for Christ’s garments and St. Mary
Magdalene.
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Andrea
Mantegna: The CrucifixionThe Crucifixion, painting by Andrea Mantegna,
1456–59; in the Louvre, Paris.
With the growth of devotional art at the
end of the Middle Ages, depictions of the Crucifixion became vehicles for the
portrayal of Christ’s sufferings; calculated to inspire piety in the
viewer, this spectacle became the main concern of artists, who often depicted
the scene with gruesome realism and sometimes included the horror of a mass of
jeering spectators. Some of the Crucifixions from this period include the
figure of St. John the
Baptist, pointing to Christ and his sacrifice as he had earlier heralded
his coming. Renaissance
art restored a calm idealization to the scene, however, which was
preserved, with a more overt expression of emotion, in the Baroque
period. Like most of Christian religious art, the theme of the Crucifixion
suffered a decline after the 17th century; some contemporary artists, however,
created highly individual interpretations of the subject.
The
Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Melissa Petruzzello.
.