Shownotes Transcript
This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. It's the year 30 CE, on a mild yet sunny afternoon in Jerusalem. A great gathering is taking place. The city is filled from wall to wall with thousands of Jewish pilgrims.
They come from every land around: Galilee, Syria, Egypt, and Greece. It is spring, and one of the biggest events in the Jewish calendar, Passover, is soon to begin. But from between the crowds emerges a bloody and beaten man. Barely able to stand, he carries on his back a wooden stake.
The crowd, knowing very well what this means, stand back and watch as he passes. Roman soldiers walk behind him, whipping him to keep him moving. The news of who this man is passes through the crowd in whispers. A few wail at the sight, a few jeer and spit. To some, he is a messiah, to some, a fraud and a religious heretic.
For all to see, he is strung up and nailed onto a wooden cross. Naked to the elements, he is left to slowly and brutally die. To the thousands gathered, the message is clear: No one is to claim themselves king of the Jews when Caesar rules. This is the story of the crucifixion of Jesus as we know it. But did it really happen the way we've all come to think?
And can history tell us if it even happened at all? Archaeologically speaking, crucifixion might as well have not existed. The evidence is just...
tiny. It's perfectly possible that Jesus was not crucified on a cross structure as we understand it traditionally. The cross really is the most recognisable symbol connected to Christianity. If the concept of the cross was found to be inaccurate, it would really strike a blow at the very core of Christianity.
In this episode, through talking to expert historians and archaeologists, we'll untangle history from myth to discover the truth behind the legend of Jesus' crucifixion. You're listening to Forbidden History, the podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds light on the lives of intriguing individuals, and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies.
This is crucifixion, the real evidence. At the core of Christianity is the crucifixion, the story of Jesus being nailed to a cross and left to die. But how much do we really know about what happened on this fateful day?
To begin our investigation is author and historian Tony McMunn. The crucifixion of Christ is probably the most famous, the most portrayed event in human history. It is relayed to us in countless paintings, in movies, in books. I mean, we are told every last thing that happened on that terrible day. There are four gospels in the Bible: Matthew, Mark, Luke,
and John that recount this moment. They tell of a similar story of Jesus being brought to Pontius Pilate, the governor of Roman Judea, and being sentenced to death by crucifixion. He was strung up, and there he died within a day, before being laid to rest in a tomb. Considered barbaric by today's standards, crucifixion was part execution and part public spectacle.
Giving us context to this gruesome act is Dr. Andrew Boacce of the University of Manchester. Crucifixion is an ancient torture technique, most likely begun by the Persians, but it was perfected by the Romans and it is effectively an impaling technique which was used to torture, to punish, to humiliate,
and also to deter people from committing capital crimes. And it was a gross and disgusting and humiliating way to die. And that's precisely what the Romans wanted. And so you almost have to picture the scene, someone typically naked, battered, bruised and impaled to some kind of wooden construct.
gasping for breath over the course of hours, possibly days. Providing a medical insight into this awful death is archaeologist Dr. Karen Bellinger. So the body is attached to the cross. It's left there hanging. You can only imagine if your legs no longer could support you. Your body would have slumped forward and this would have caused the lungs to fill up with fluid. You would have suffocated.
From the University of Oxford, cultural historian Dr. Yanina Ramirez. When it comes to crucifixion, this was not just a way of getting rid of somebody. It was protracted. It was for the public to witness. Really, it was a circus of death. Crucifixion was a gruesome punishment to those that it befell. But did the death of Jesus in particular really happen this way?
Historians have been struggling for decades to distinguish fact from fiction within the crucifixion story. A lot of our understanding of crucifixion has been informed by Hollywood, by tradition. If you were to simply look at the Gospel texts, could you say for sure that Jesus was crucified in the way that a lot of traditional portrayals of the crucifixion depict?
While the Church supports all four Gospels as factual accounts of Jesus' life, many scholars are less convinced.
To tell us more is author and historian Dominic Selwood. The four Gospels just aren't history in the way we think of history today. They're not historical documents. They probably weren't written by the people whose names are on them. They were written by communities and teams over time. And they were written much later, generations later. We know that the Bible is not history. It's memory. It's narrative.
It's sort of the putting down of generations of oral tradition.
Journalist and author Peter Stanford delves further into this historic quandary. The official line of the churches is that each of the gospel writers had some connection to Jesus, that they knew him. The evidence for that is vanishingly slight. They were written between about 60 AD and 100+ AD. We have no conclusive evidence that the gospels were written by people who had actually stood in Jesus' presence.
Despite these concerns over the Bible's reliability as a historical document, there is fortunately external evidence that proves Jesus' death really happened. For example, in the first century, well-respected Roman historians Josephus and Tacitus both made reference to it. Scholars today widely agree on the existence of Jesus as a historical figure, as well as his death by the hands of the Romans.
Even with this evidence, however, there is still mystery about the true way in which Jesus was executed. Speaking from Stockholm, Sweden, is theologist Gunnar Samuelsson. Samuelsson has spent almost 10 years scouring the earliest records of crucifixion, hunting for the origin of Jesus' legend.
My research into the crucifixion, it began with reading a book, of course. I spent two and a half years searching for texts about crucifixions. It was a painstaking work. I was Indiana Jones. You never know what will be in the next text. Gunnar studied every ancient manuscript he could find referencing the execution technique, the oldest of which dates back to the 9th century BCE.
After searching through manuscripts in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic, to his shock, Gunnar discovered that these ancient texts didn't describe crucifixion as we understand it today. But then I started to realize that in these texts you have a problem. The problem was that none of the texts mentioned a cross, which today many consider the key implement of crucifixion.
of crucifixion. They only use this verb, stauron, which essentially means to suspend, a suspension, a general suspension. Today, the word "crucifixion" has become synonymous with the cross. Yet if Gunnar's research is correct, the word evolved from the Greek term stauron, which has no direct link to a shape.
Since the New Testament was first written in Greek, this finding could mean that the symbology at the very heart of the Christian church is not accurate. The Greek text of the New Testament said that Jesus was star-born. Only that, no details, no information on how it looked like. So the text of the New Testament said that Jesus was suspended. In my mind, it's not crucifixion, it's suspension of corpses. All words evolve over time.
Nowadays we see stour on as meaning crucifixion because of what's in the Bible, but actually originally it just meant to suspend and it meant to suspend in a vast variety of ways, possibly on a stake, on a pail, on a tree. In one text it's even used to describe a dog being spitted on a spear. It was a very broad word. The possibility that a key part of the crucifixion story is incorrect is unthinkable to many in the church.
But perhaps it helps explain one of the peculiarities of the modern Bible: why the cross is barely referenced. While it is proven fact that Jesus was crucified, the very nature of how that took place is not established. So there is no reference to a cross in the Gospels or in other sources of the time. Gunnar's research seems to cast doubt over the crucifixion narrative.
But today, Christian iconography is centered around the symbol of the cross, which is surprisingly not documented until centuries after the death of Jesus. The symbol of the cross appears to be of a little later date. The crucifixion actually doesn't appear in Christian art till about the fifth century. So that's four or five centuries after the event.
The story of the cross appears to have some roots in 4th century Jerusalem, where according to Roman legend, it was discovered where Christ was crucified. It's here where archaeologist Bena Mantel is hunting for answers.
So today we're seeing this beautiful church here, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. So the church is built in the 4th century by Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine. After converting to Christianity, Constantine wanted to seize holy relics to bring power to his empire. Legend has it he supported his mother Helena in about the year 326 CE to go and find the site of Jesus' crucifixion.
Once in the Holy Land, she was taken to the site where the locals claimed Jesus was crucified. What she found there was a Roman temple. They'd built a temple to Roman gods on the site. But because she was the emperor's mother, she could have it removed. So excavations were carried out there, and they found various fragments of a cross. Believers claim the wooden fragments were from the cross used to crucify Jesus, what we today call a Latin cross.
A long, tall stake with a shorter bar intersecting near the top. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built on the spot where it was supposedly found. Today, the site attracts thousands of tourists and pilgrims. Despite its fame and 1700 years of tradition, some question the church's authenticity. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre being the site of Jesus' crucifixion
is really based on speculation. There is no direct evidence that Jesus was crucified at that particular site. Disbelievers in the site's authenticity point to Jewish tradition, which considers corpses impure. This means that in ancient Jerusalem, crucifixions and burials took place outside the city limits. Yet some claim the Holy Sepulchre is inside the ancient city walls.
We know for a fact that Jews probably wouldn't be executed within the city and that they definitely would not be buried within the city. In other words, the church
could not have been inside the city if it is built on the location of the crucifixion. Part of the dilemma with the location of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is that its outer sections may have been within the walls of the city. Although the city boundaries from the biblical era are unclear, a surprising event revealed something unexpected. In 1808, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was ravaged by fire.
But the fire did reveal something. This hole here, the whole area was covered. And if we look inside, we can actually see that we're seeing a corner of a Jewish burial site. And based on the cutting techniques and based on the architectural style of this burial site,
we can date it back to the times of Christ. In other words, I cannot say for a fact that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the burial place of Jesus, but what I can say, without a shadow of doubt, is that 2,000 years ago, Jews are buried here. For this to have been a Jewish tomb at the time of Christ, it must have been outside the city walls, and therefore could have been the site of the crucifixion after all.
yet despite the evidence some scholars still have their doubts. For me the Holy Sepulchre has never quite rung true as the site for the crucifixion apart from anything else it's just all
all a bit too convenient. I think most people who visited the Holy Sepulchre have had this sneaking feeling that it isn't the site of the crucifixion. Down the centuries, many have argued that the Gospel texts have held the answer all alone. Jesus was crucified on a place called Golgotha in the Gospel records.
and Golgotha just means skull. Since the 19th century, some Protestants have claimed that a skull-shaped hill just outside the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem is a more credible site for the crucifixion of Jesus. And there are some compelling reasons for that. I mean, for one, the situation is ideal. It's definitely outside the city walls. Without solid evidence, the exact location of Jesus' death
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The claims made by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre may have been cast into doubt, but its founding almost 2,000 years ago changed the trajectory of Christianity forever. Before this moment, Christians rarely depicted Christ's death, as to be crucified was seen as hugely humiliating.
But when Constantine's mother, Helena, reportedly found parts of the true cross, Christians across the empire began to see it in a new light. From that point, we see this explosion of Christian art. It becomes imperial art, the art of power.
And then that is where this idea, the concept of a cross which has a central pole and then a cross beam, that version is then adapted and changed across time by different groups who are all emphasizing different aspects of Christianity. What's also really surprising is religion's ability to splinter into different sects with radically opposing views.
something as central as the cross is even in dispute. The standard Christian cross is called the Latin cross, but in the Eastern Church they have a square cross, which is called the Greek cross to this day. And then you have in Orthodox churches, it has not just a single bar, it's a three-barred cross. Although some Christian denominations disagree about the shape of the cross, others reject it completely. There are certain Christian sects who really take umbrage with the image of the cross.
I think particularly of the Jehovah's Witnesses, who argue very strongly that the cross was a symbol that was introduced when the devil took hold of ecclesial authority, and that they're very adamant that Jesus was nailed to a torture stake. Despite the disagreement, all these variations can be traced back to the Latin cross, the two planks of wood stuck together at right angles.
The origins of the Latin cross as a Christian symbol are myriad and complex, including roots in paganism and ancient Egypt. Today, we still can't say for certain if this was truly the way Jesus was crucified. A large point of contention stems from the huge lack of archaeological evidence of crucifixions as a whole. Introducing archaeologist Peggy Bernash.
Today we think of crucifixions as a very common execution during the Roman period. However, there's very little archaeological evidence we've ever uncovered. According to the Roman-era historian Josephus, in 70 CE, during the devastating siege of Jerusalem in the First Jewish-Roman War, Roman soldiers crucified up to 500 Jews every day.
But despite this high number, there's astonishingly very little evidence. Dominic Selwood and Dr. Andrew Boitje help explain why.
It may seem a bit strange that there's very little archaeological evidence of crucifixion, but actually when you think about it, it makes sense. Nails were expensive and were often reused. The wood would have perished, and we know that crucifixion victims weren't buried, they were simply discarded. You have to remember that crucifixion wasn't just meant to be a punishment, it was meant to be a deterrent and a humiliation as well.
And in the ancient world, to deny someone a decent burial was part of that humiliation. So allowing them to be eaten by wild dogs, then perhaps scrapping the rest of the body in the ground, was how crucifixion victims were generally handled. So it shouldn't come as a huge surprise to us that there aren't lots of archaeological finds of crucifixion.
Yet at Tel Aviv University, there lies a crucial clue to solving the mystery of this ancient execution technique. Anatomist professor Israel Hershkowitz has been studying the first archaeological evidence of crucifixion ever found. Whenever I pull out the box from the safe, I'm getting excited. It's one of the rare finds that I've ever encountered and probably most people
This is the only evidence that we have for crucifixion worldwide. Discovered in 1968, the remains of this heel still has the nail stuck in the bone. Crucially, like Jesus, its victim was Jewish. The bone has also been scientifically dated back to the same century in which Jesus died. What we see here actually is the heel bone.
It's almost a complete hill bone. And we see an iron nail actually running and penetrating from the side of the hill bone, coming out from the opposite side. Archaeologists really put these remains through the wringer and conclusively have decided that this is an example of crucifixion.
And it's stunningly important because it does prove that crucifixion was practiced during this time period in the Roman Empire. Since its discovery in 1968 in an ancient Jewish crypt, only a handful of remains from other suspected crucifixion victims have been found.
But none have stood up to the scrutiny of this heel bone. The extraordinary thing about the discovery was that it has a bone with a nail still going through it. This was the first time this had ever been discovered, and it proves at least that the Romans did crucify with nails.
Before this incredible find, historians were under the impression that most crucifixion victims weren't permitted a proper burial. It was thought their bodies were either left to rot where they hung or were buried in a shallow grave. If that were the case, it would contradict the Bible's claim that Jesus' body was placed in a tomb. Yet this bone was found in an ossuary in an ancient Jewish crypt.
We know that the name of the deceased, Yohanan, it was engraved, the name was engraved on the side of the ossuary in a Hebrew letter that we can even read today. Since Yohanan was granted funeral rites, it proves that a part of the Bible's crucifixion story could be true: that Jesus was placed in a tomb after his body was removed from the cross.
Johannan and his bones are unbelievably important for us because not only was he crucified by the Romans, but he was crucified by the Romans in the same place as Jesus, in the same century as Jesus.
This find in Jerusalem is critically important in our consideration of whether the story of Jesus that we read in the Bible could have been true. They're both prominent Jews. They were given proper burials. So it's not as if this case of Jesus is just an anomaly.
Analysis of the heel reveals another clue: the remains of a piece of wood. One particularly gruesome detail is that there appears to be a small piece of wood under the head of the nail. That would have stopped the person from wriggling free off the cross. The piece of the wood that was actually lying between the head of the nail and the surface of the heel
was made of an olive tree. It's interesting because according to Christian tradition, the cross was made of olive tree. Historical accounts of crucifixion offer no conclusive answer for the type of wood used. But when fragments of the cross supposedly found by Helena in the 4th century were tested, they were found to be olive wood, leading to modern-day theories that this wood was used for crucifixions.
While Yohanan's bone supports this theory, for Professor Herjkowitz, it strikes a blow to the possibility that Jesus died on a Latin cross. All of us, we all know
It doesn't have a full body of a tree. It's a trunk. It's all penetrated and distorted and so on. And you cannot create a long log from an olive tree. This is impossible. The Latin cross is made from huge wooden planks, the type that's nearly impossible to produce from olive wood. One thing that's really important to consider...
which is easy to forget, is that wood of a sufficient size to support a human body would have been in scarce supply in the region of the Holy Land. As well as lack of natural resources being a problem, Professor Herjkowitz believes that a victim's hands being nailed to the front
of the cross would not have supported the weight of their body for the entire crucifixion. I don't think that it was a T-shaped cross. I mean, it really doesn't make sense, not from the evidence that we have and not from simple anatomic logic. While many paintings depict Christ's hands nailed to the front of the cross, Professor Herjkowitz believes this would not have supported the weight of his body for the entire crucifixion.
He believes Jesus' arms must have been positioned behind the crossbar, but his studies show that the body is anatomically unable to bend the arms around the bar in this way, making the Latin cross an impossibility. Is this the final nail in the coffin for the Latin cross?
Perhaps another shape could unravel this enigma. I believe that the only cross that makes sense and follows the evidence, the hard evidence, is the X-shaped cross.
For many, the simplicity of the X-shaped cross makes it a viable solution for the crucifixion mystery. The X-shaped cross is perfectly credible. It may be that people were nailed to a tree in an X shape. I personally think that this theory that by using smaller pieces of wood affixed together in an X shape
rather than the big long pole that we imagine in all the iconography, actually makes a lot of sense. You know, the fact is you can't conjure natural resources out of thin air. Christian tradition states that one of Jesus' disciples, Andrew, the patron saint of Scotland, was crucified in this way. The X shape is remembered today on the country's flag.
The iconography for this seems to originate around 1,000 years after his supposed death. But astonishingly, historical records show that the X-shaped cross is likely to have been used in Roman crucifixions. If Jesus was crucified in this way, why is the most fundamental symbol of Christianity a Latin cross and not an X?
Maybe the oldest known depiction of the death of Christ, found in Rome, can help untangle the mystery. The earliest record of Jesus being crucified is most likely the Alex Samonas Graffito. Now this was an etching on the edge of the Palatine Hill and the etching depicts a crucifixion victim with the head of a donkey and a young worshipper at the bottom with the inscription "Alex worships his God".
Now this was clearly a kind of mockery. This graffiti dates back to 200 AD and at this point in time, Christianity was still not a religion to be respected in Rome. The graffiti is really important for two reasons.
The first is, it shows that at that date, there were many people who ridiculed Jesus. They didn't see him as this great and important figure. He was a source of fun. They were poking fun by putting a donkey's head on him. The second is that in Rome, where people really did know what crucifixions looked like,
They depict it with a T-shaped cross. This graffiti appears to show Jesus being crucified on a shape very close to the Latin cross. The graffiti from Italy provides pretty compelling evidence that Christ probably was hung on some form of cross.
Because this is an insult. This is a parody. Why include that detail if it's simply not true? This inscription may be able to lead us to the truth of the crucifixion narrative. Yet the fact that it's dated at over 200 years after Jesus' death raises some questions.
How come the early Christians ended up adopting this symbol of the T-shaped cross? Did it come from Jesus himself? Or could it have been informed by wider Roman culture and other crucifixion practices?
It seems we may never find the answers, but fortunately, history has not left us completely in the dark. Historically, there is very rarely smoke without fire. It is likely that in the early first century AD, a Jewish man called Jesus was crucified by the Romans. But why he was executed, the way in which he was executed, will probably forever be lost to us.
but the faithful still hold fast to their beliefs. So do I believe in the crucifixion? I do, because I'm still a priest. It doesn't matter exactly the way Jesus died. The important thing was that Jesus died. He gave his life for me. That's the message of the church. The truth behind Jesus' death may be forever lost to time, but it doesn't overshadow the legacy that it created.
As one of the most influential moments in history, no wonder even now we are still captivated by the events of that fateful day in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago.
How did the religion of Christianity go from being persecuted in the Roman Empire to becoming its state religion in less than 200 years? For a deep dive into the rise of Christianity within the Roman Empire, listen to our extra episode, Forbidden Fruit, available soon on all your favorite podcast platforms.
This is an audio production by Like A Shot Entertainment. Presented by Bridget Lappin. Executive Producers, Danny O'Brien and Henry Scott. Story Producer, Maddie Bowers. Assistant Producer, Alice Tudor. Thank you for listening.