Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey, I've been teaching this topic for long enough in the classroom to know that I should probably start this episode with a bit of a warning. We're talking about crucifixion and it's pretty physically brutal, some of the descriptions that are coming. So, you know, just fair warning. For something as central to the Christian faith as the crucifixion,
The writers of the Gospels, those first century biographies of Jesus, are conspicuously silent about the physical details of Jesus' death. They would have been very familiar with those details because, sadly, crucifixion was just a part of life, a brutal part of ancient life.
But their silence is mirrored by other ancient Greek and Roman sources. Crucifixion is mentioned in passing in loads of places, but no writer actually, I know of just one I'll mention later, stops to describe the details of this kind of death. The Roman statesman Cicero named crucifixion the summum supplicium, ultimate punishment.
Josephus calls it Thonatos Oictistos, the most miserable of deaths. And Origen in the 3rd century calls it Mors Tipissima Crucis, the utterly vile death of a cross. Historian and friend of the podcast Tom Holland writes that everything about the practice of nailing a man to a cross was repellent.
Some deaths were so vile, so squalid, that it was best to draw a veil across them entirely. The surprise then is less that we should have so few detailed descriptions in ancient literature of what a crucifixion might actually involve than that we should have any at all.
The fact is tens of thousands of people were crucified in the ancient world. I mean, we have records of mass crucifixions. It's estimated that something like 6,000 slaves were crucified along the Appian Way after the failed rebellion of Spartacus, 71 BC. Around the same time, Alexander Jenaeus, the high priest and king in Jerusalem,
crucified 800 Pharisees in one go and he made their wives and children watch. I won't tell you what happened then, but it's not good.
The literary and historical references to crucifixion are many, but physical archaeological evidence of crucifixion is extremely rare. In fact, there are just two bits of evidence, and one of them was found very recently, like just last week, in history terms anyway. And later we're going to talk to the archaeologist in charge of that find.
The paucity of physical evidence is mainly due to the fact that most crucifixion victims weren't given a proper burial. The whole practice was meant to dehumanize. It was designed to erase the memory of its victims as though they had never existed. And as our other guest writes, and I can't wait to introduce you to her.
There were many thousands of crucifixions in Roman times, but only the crucifixion of Jesus is remembered as having any significance at all, let alone world-transforming significance. There are so many whys about the crucifixion of Jesus, and we're going to get into some of the really big ones in today's episode. Why did Jesus have to die, for one thing? Why did it have to be such a violent death?
And what on earth does it have to do with us all these years later? I'm John Dixon with a special Easter edition of Undeceptions. Undeceptions
This season of Undeceptions is sponsored by Zondervan Academic. Get discounts on master lectures, video courses and exclusive samples of their books at zondervanacademic.com forward slash Undeceptions. Don't forget to write Undeceptions. Each episode here at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, philosophy, history, science, culture or ethics that
that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. And with the help of people who know what they're talking about, we're trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth...
This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today. He's a
And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.
Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith. He's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.
You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions. Very early in the morning, the chief priests with the elders, the teachers of the law, and the whole Sanhedrin made their plans. So they bound Jesus, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate.
"Are you the King of the Jews?" asked Pilate. "You have said so," Jesus replied. The chief priests accused him of many things. So again Pilate asked him, "Aren't you going to answer? See how many things they are accusing you of." But Jesus still made no reply, and Pilate was amazed. Now it was the custom at the festival to release a prisoner whom the people requested. A man called Barabbas was imprisoned with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising.
Alright, I've arrived at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
And if there is a holy site in Christianity, which I think is questionable, this is it. This was remembered by the first Christians as the site of the tomb. And because the crucifixion spot is said in the Gospels to be very near the tomb itself, they did find a little rocky outcrop here in the complex. And so they've built a church that covers what the early Christians remembered as the tomb.
and just kept on building and building and building right over the rocky outcrop, which they called Golgotha. The history for the tomb is pretty good. Good evidence for the tomb being a remembered first century tomb. But this is also, within the building complex, is, as I say, Golgotha, or what people remember as Golgotha. And that's just to my right. And that's the end, obviously, of the Stations of the Cross, where people from the Catholic and Orthodox faith...
go and kiss a certain stone and remember Jesus' death.
I was in Jerusalem just the other day and stopped by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in what is now the Christian quarter of the Old City. In Jesus' day, this spot was just beyond the city walls. We've actually found the ruins of the wall from Jesus' day, in case you're wondering. Anyway, this amazing rabbit warren of a church was built by friends of the podcast, the Byzantines, way back in the 330s AD.
One day, we're going to have to do a whole episode on this church because there's a very good reason they chose this spot for the church. It's not mere religious tradition or speculation as so much else is in Israel. There's some half-decent history taking us all the way back to the first century.
Anyway, Producer Kayleigh, I'm hoping you've just marked down in your notebook for, you know, the future, an episode just titled Holy Sepulchre. Is that cool? That's cool. That list just keeps getting longer. All right. Well, I'm not planning to give up anytime soon.
Anyway, now this church is the final stop on the Via Dolorosa, the sorrowful or anguished road. It's a procession through the ancient streets of the old city of Jerusalem, which according to tradition, not firm history, was the route taken by Jesus on the day of his execution. There are 14 stations of the cross on the Via Dolorosa, based on 14 events in the lead up to Jesus' death.
Just passing station three which is where... Gotta be careful around here. He falls for the first time. Station four is where he meets his mother and the point of these different stations is that there are set prayers. It's a way of devotion so there are set prayers along the way. I'm now at station five.
which commemorates Simon of Cyrene in the Gospels. And Mark's Gospel says, Father of Rufus and Alexander, which is really interesting because when Mark wrote his Gospel, Rufus and Alexander must have been known. There's no point in mentioning it to his readers unless Rufus and Alexander were members maybe of the Christian community. Anyway, I'm passing my favourite antiquities dealer off.
And he's right by station six. Boom. And station six. Okay. I got carried away there.
Hang on, who wrote that line? That was perfectly ordinary and normal. Anyway, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is the climax of the walk, said to be built over the place where Jesus was stripped of his clothes, nailed to the cross, died, and eventually laid to rest in a nearby tomb over the other side of the church, about 50 or so meters away.
On Good Friday, thousands of people will file down the Via Dolorosa, singing hymns and carrying wooden crosses, walking in the way of Jesus. It's a spectacle, to be sure. But theologian and author Fleming Rutledge, our first guest today, says Good Friday is much more than a religious spectacle. It seems to me there's a shrinking of attention being given to Good Friday.
And to me, that's alarming because this is the very heart and center of the gospel proclamation. The Reverend Fleming Rutledge is a celebrated American author and theologian and the author of one of the most important books ever written on Jesus' death. It's just called The Crucifixion, Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. Rush out and get it.
Rutledge is a bit of a trailblazer. In January 1977, she became one of the first women to be ordained in the Episcopal or Anglican Church in the United States.
I know that's a bit of a red flag to some and a wonderful sign of progressivism to others. But the truth is, Fleming is someone who happily sits in the, some would say, liberal mainline church, but who has maintained a fiery passion, as you'll hear, for the timeless, immovable teachings of historic Christianity.
She told me that it took her 20 years to write this book, and it shows it's now considered a seminal work on the crucifixion. It was published in 2015 when she was 77 years old. She's now 85. Now, I was raised never to mention the age of a lady, but Fleming says, nah, that's fine. So there you go.
She is now just as devoted to helping people move beyond mere religious tradition towards a better understanding of why the death of Jesus is unlike anything that happened before or since. There's a verse, of course, in Lamentations, Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Behold and see, is there any sorrow like unto his sorrow?
I remember hearing that in Handel's Messiah as a 13-year-old and thinking, indeed, it's nothing to most people. How could that be? How can it be nothing to most people? And I've been sort of focused on that all my life. Now, I don't mean that you have to go to church on Good Friday to be aware of the center of the Christian proclamation. But I do think that certainly for those of us who are liturgically minded, that the
Good Friday is surpassingly important, and to partake in Easter and all of its joy and surprise and extraordinary hope, to partake of that without any recognition, any serious and probing recognition of what it cost God, what it cost Jesus, the Son of God. That seems to me to be a very weak, insufficient understanding of who Christ was and what the Christian faith was.
and what it proclaims. You have said that the cross is not only the foundation of Christianity, but that it calls into question every other religion
religious claim as well. Can you perhaps unpack that for me? This massive book that I managed to write, I'm still amazed that it's almost as if somebody else wrote it. I can't believe I did. And it took me well over, I would say well over 20 years. But in any case, the reason that I spent
a great deal of my life working on this, is that I believe there isn't anything else like this, remotely like this even, in religion. One must respect the world's religions and one respects people's attempts to find meaning and transcendent meaning in life. But it's perplexing to me still why
The crucifixion itself is not more arresting for people. Is it nothing to you all, you who pass by? There isn't anything like this ever in the human story, that God should give himself up not only to be incarnate in the mess of human existence, but why he should submit, offer himself up
to this most degrading, dehumanizing form of death publicly. Why? Why? I'm amazed that people don't ask that question more, more intensely, more searchingly, more focused, because it is unique in human religion. And to me, it just insists on interpretation. Why? What does this mean? Does this have universal significance?
Does it have significance for me? People go to art galleries and see pictures depicting Christ's death, most of them very sanitized, of course, and they look at them and say, oh yes, that's Jesus on the cross, and then they pass on to the next picture. It's just astonishing to me that more people are not asking, what is happening here? Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilate released Barabbas to them.
He had Jesus flogged and handed him over to be crucified. The soldiers led Jesus away into the palace, that is, the praetorium, and called together the whole company of soldiers. They put a purple robe on him, then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on him. And they began to call out to him, Hail, King of the Jews! Again and again they struck him on the head with a staff and spit on him. Falling on their knees, they paid homage to him.
And when they had mocked him, they took off the purple robe and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him. Mark chapter 15, 15 to 20. In her book, Fleming writes that the cross is by a very long way the most irreligious object ever to find its way into the heart of faith.
Christianity is the only religion, the only philosophy that at its core focuses on the suffering and degradation of God. The cross is such a common image these days that it's almost impossible to communicate just how weird this image of God really is.
Do you think it matters how Jesus died? Isn't it enough that he died? Is there anything in the violence of the act that is meaningful? I would say that, in a sense, the overarching theme of the book is why crucifixion, specifically.
And in one way or another, in these 600 pages, I focus on this question, I think, I hope, from first one angle and then another. Why this particular method of being executed? Is this just an accident? Is it an accident that Jesus was incarnate in the time of the Romans? Or was that actually part of God's foreseen plan?
that he would be crucified, a Roman method, a method of doing away with a person that dehumanized him and cast him out of the human race altogether. I'm fond of saying, and I keep thinking someone will contradict me, that if Jesus had not been raised from the dead, we would never have heard of him.
The principal reason being that we've never heard of anybody else who was crucified prior to Jesus himself. Prior to Jesus, the whole purpose of crucifixion was to erase the person's being from the human record and throw them to the dogs. Execute them publicly in the most public place possible. Expose them to the most contempt possible. Invite dehumanizing curses and actions everywhere.
from the part of the passing crowds, and then take him down from the cross and throw him on the dump heap. It was a very common sight to see people crucified, but their names are lost. Their identities are lost. Jesus is remembered. And I would argue he is remembered because God raised him from the dead. I'll leave it at that. I think that's
A staggering thing to say, and it's not something to say lightly. God raised a crucified man from the dead and thereby came into being a whole body of people who were willing to go out in public and proclaim that they worshipped as Lord and God a man who had been crucified.
And we just say that as if it's nothing, because we don't know crucifixes. We haven't seen any. We don't understand what it was. We don't understand how dehumanizing it was. We don't understand that this was a way of eliminating a person's being and name and remembrance from the human record permanently. And when you think about that and think about how
we are 2,000 years later worshiping this victim of crucifixion, it ought to stagger our imagination.
People worshipping someone who'd been crucified is really strange and downright laughable in the ancient world. You may remember we touched on the famous Alexamenos graffito last season. That's a piece of early graffiti dated to about the year 200, unearthed in Rome. And it depicts a donkey-headed Jesus hanging on a cross. And it's a piece of early graffiti dated to about the year 200, unearthed in Rome.
And there's a man next to the cross with arm raised in worship, and it says Aleximenos worships his God.
It's a good example of the mockery the early Christians got for their beliefs in the crucified Lord. Despite its ubiquity, the cross is still bizarre for many. Indeed, your Muslim friends and neighbors will tell you that Jesus never died on a cross. God would never allow such an ignominious death to befall such a great prophet. Here's what the Quran says.
and for their saying, "We have killed the Messiah, Jesus the Son of Mary, the messenger of God." In fact, they did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but it appeared to them as if they did. Indeed, those who differ about him are in doubt about it. They have no knowledge of it, except the following of assumptions: Certainly, they did not kill him; rather, God raised him up to himself.
God is mighty and wise. Quran, Surah 4:157 The famed mid-10th century Islamic polymath and Quran exegete, al-Tabari, went further. He suggested that actually one of the disciples was subjected to this inhumane punishment. It wasn't Jesus himself. Jesus went into a house together with 17 of his companions. The Jews surrounded them.
But when they burst in, God made all the disciples look like Jesus. The pursuers, supposing that they had bewitched them, threatened to kill them all if they did not expose him. Then Jesus asked his companions which of them would purchase paradise for himself that day.
One man volunteered and went out saying that he was Jesus. And as God had made him look like Jesus, they took him, killed him, and crucified him. Thereupon a semblance was made to them, and they thought that they had killed Jesus. The Christians likewise thought that it was Jesus who had been killed. And God raised Jesus right away.
Needless to say, there can't be any historical value in this text written more than 800 years after Jesus, especially when we have loads of texts from the first century after his death mentioning the crucifixion.
But there's still a kind of philosophical value here. The crucifixion is so shocking and shameful, it just seems illogical to Muslims that God would ever have allowed such a holy prophet to end up on a cross. But the earliest sources are clear. Jesus was crucified by Pontius Pilate, the fifth governor of Judea. And the first Christian sources were adamant
As scandalous as it sounds, God became a man in Jesus and suffered the summum supplicium, the ultimate punishment. This claim that a crucified man is Lord and God, creator of the universe, who will come again at the end to judge the living and the dead,
If we weren't so used to hearing it, we would find it ludicrous. But Paul said, memorably at the beginning of the epistle to the Romans, he said, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. And we should stop and think, why would he say that? Why would he be ashamed of the gospel? It's pretty shameful to worship a crucified man. In Roman society, if you were part of the upper class, you didn't mention crucifixion. It was...
not something proper to talk about in polite society. That's a true saying. I didn't make that up. I've read that in any number of sources, that it was not really a subject to discuss because it was so revolting. So Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. As we said, this film is rated R because of the startling violence. It's very violent, and if you don't like it, don't go. Why so much of it? I wanted it to be shocking.
And I also wanted it to be extreme. I wanted it to push the viewer over the edge. And it does that. I think it pushes one over the edge so that they see the enormity, the enormity of that sacrifice, to see that someone could endure that and still come back with love and forgiveness, even through extreme pain and suffering and ridicule.
That's Hollywood actor and director Mel Gibson chatting with American TV journalist Diane Sawyer about his controversial 2004 film, The Passion of the Christ, which focused on Jesus' final 12 hours leading up to and including the crucifixion. It got mixed reviews. David Edelstein of The Slate magazine said,
described the film as a, quote, two-hour, six-minute snuff movie. He dubbed it the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre.
I'm thinking he didn't like it. It's easy to have a somewhat diluted idea of crucifixion today. Between beautiful stained glass windows, paintings, drawings, triptychs, jewelry, and even tattoos, there's certainly no shortage of aesthetically pleasing depictions of the cross in our culture.
And that's why the passion of the Christ is actually pretty good, because it ran counter to this sanitization. Even if I can't go along with everything in the film, there's one thing I really appreciate. Gibson zeroed in on the grisly, humiliating nature of crucifixion.
And if you don't do well with that kind of grisly stuff, you might want to press fast forward a minute or two or three. The Romans didn't invent the torture of crucifixion. They probably got it from the Carthaginians, who in turn got it from the Persians. The Romans were great absorbers of the brilliant and brutal crucifixion.
Whoever invented it, the Romans certainly perfected it and used it to great effect in all manner of serious criminal cases. Military deserters, imperial traitors and bandits.
The main reason for the widespread use of crucifixion in the Roman world anyway was, according to the German historian Martin Hengel, its supreme efficacy as a deterrent. Death was slow, public, excruciating. It sent a powerful message.
Although there was no correct method of crucifixion, victims were frequently scourged beforehand using a whip with metal and pottery embedded into the ends. This is where much of the bloodiness of crucifixion comes from. It's the bloody preface to the crucifixion itself. After being stripped naked, victims were often paraded through the streets on their way to the site of the crucifixion.
It would be in a visible place, often a hill outside of town. The victim was forced to carry the patibulum, the crossbar of the cross, which would be tied across their shoulders. It weighed in excess of 50 kilograms. They would walk or stumble to the place of their own execution. Victims could be tied with ropes to the cross, but nails were the preference, especially in a formal execution setting.
Mockery and jest of the victim were commonplace. In one particularly heinous account, Josephus reports that soldiers under the command of Antiochus IV Epiphanes see episode 54 for that madman.
had a victim's strangled child hung around their neck as they hung on the cross. The first century Roman philosopher Seneca also says that soldiers sometimes amused themselves by impaling people through the genitals as they crucified them. In another place, he describes crucifixion, and it's one of the only detailed accounts we have. Here it is.
"Can any man be found willing to be fastened to the accursed tree, long sickly, already deformed, swelling with ugly welts on shoulders and chest, and drawing the breath of life amid long drawn-out agony? He would have many excuses for dying, even before mounting the cross." Seneca to Lucilius, Epistle 101
Mark chapter 15, 22-25
Once reaching the place of execution, people, often women, would offer the victim a pain-relieving drink, a mix of wine and myrrh, before the crossbeam was lifted and affixed to an upright post, forming a cross.
The condemned's feet and wrists would then be tied or nailed to the beam, causing further blood loss, severe nerve damage, and sometimes severing the dorsal pedal artery in the foot. From there, the condemned person would simply hang, with their body weight pulling their torso downward. This began the process of a slow, agonizing asphyxiation.
The time it would take for the victim to die varied wildly from three to four hours to three to four days. The primary cause of death was suffocation. It would just become impossible to breathe out. The weight of a body hanging by its wrists depressed the muscles required to exhale.
To do so would require pushing up from the legs and feet, which would be agony. To speed up the process, soldiers would sometimes break the legs of prisoners so they'd no longer be able to hoist themselves up in order to breathe. The English word excruciating, meaning severe, drawn-out pain, has its roots, of course, in the Latin term crux, the cross.
Marcus Tullius Cicero, the acclaimed Roman statesman and lawyer writing in the first century BC, had this to say about the practice: "Wretched is the loss of one's good name in the public courts. Wretched too, a monetary fine exacted from one's property. And wretched is exile. But still, in each calamity there is retained some trace of liberty.
Even if death is set before us, we may die in freedom, but the executioner
the veiling of heads, and the very word "cross" let them all be far removed from not only the bodies of Roman citizens, but even from their thoughts, their eyes, and their ears. The results and suffering from these doings, as well as the situation, even anticipation of their enablement, and in the end, the mere mention of them, are unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man,
Or is that, while the kindness of their masters frees our slaves from the fear of all these punishments with one stroke of the staff of manumission, neither our exploits, nor the lives we have lived, nor honors you have bestowed, will liberate us from scourging, from the hook, and finally, from the terror of the cross?
I'm exhausted after all that. I'm sure you are too.
68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.
It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.
There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Tarat.
My attorney, Lionel Hutz, calls your attention to Municipal Code 147C, protection of antiquities and fossils. That's right.
There aren't any fossils here little girl museum folks dug them all up years ago, but what if they miss something you have to allow an archaeological survey Who's gonna make us you? Now hold on sit hold on maybe we should let the kid dig could be good publicity. Oh
Okay, you wanna dig? Be my guest. Fine, we'll see you in court. Mr. Hutz, we won. We...
Yep, that's an audio clip from The Simpsons. It's Lisa dipping her toe into archaeology. It's hard not to have a romanticised Indiana Jonesian idea of being an archaeologist, but this clip sums it up well. Instead of booby traps and dark curses, the most likely obstacle for an archaeologist is bureaucracy, town planning and boring red tape.
And when you do finally get to excavate an ancient tomb, you'll be spending hours on your knees in the dirt. And then you'll have to write an academic paper about all the stuff you found and didn't. However, sometimes these historical labourers, much like our next guest, stumble upon a find that makes it all worth it.
Well I came into archaeology in the first place through a classics degree. I went on a few sort of big Roman excavations when I was at university, so I got involved with the dig at Vindolanda, a Roman fort up on Adrian's Wall. One of my tutors was running a five-week dig in Rome as well on, I think it's the largest water mill known in antiquity or the second largest or something like that. So I was used to massive stone structures and so on.
And then I thought I'd get a job in it. And you're out in a muddy field playing around in dirt and ditches and puddles and so on. That's archaeologist David Ingham, an Oxford alumnus, secretary of the Council of British Archaeology in the south and east midlands of England and veteran of hundreds of digs across the world.
So we go out there first, we put in a few trenches, we do some geophysical surveys to give us an idea of what might be under the ground before we can even start digging. And then you get an idea from that way. I'll go out and talk to farmers who are trying to sell off some of their land for housing, for example, and they'll say, oh, there's nothing here. My family's been farming this land for 200 years. Just that weird hill there. Well, exactly. But the trouble is, most of the time when you go out into the countryside, there's no clue above ground as to what might be there.
I love this. Archaeology is a different beast in Europe, in a way that many of my Australian and American listeners might not understand. Of course, that's not to take away from the remarkable cultures that have flourished in those places, but the sheer volume of different Neolithic groups that have occupied Britain over the millennia,
means there's every chance your plot of land might have once been the site of a bustling Viking market, an ancient Celtic temple, or even a Roman burial ground for executed criminals, as David and his team discovered during a routine dig near the village of Fensterton, 90 minutes north of London. So I need to ask you then, tell me the story of this particular find. Well...
We went out there in 2017. We opened up the whole area in about three or four different stages. But it was all coming through as good Roman archaeology. So you start finding the remains of people. We do. You've found a cemetery or a few cemeteries, in fact, yes? A few little cemeteries.
A cemetery is morbidly a jackpot in the world of archaeology. Graves and skeletons can help paint a detailed picture of how people lived, what kind of lifestyle they led, and importantly, how they died.
It was while studying skeleton 4926, the remains of an ancient Brit excavated at the site, that David and his team suddenly realised they'd stumbled upon just the second ever confirmed physical remains of a crucifixion victim. So when was our fellow found and when was it discovered that he was a crucifixion victim? Well, this was after we'd already dug a few other graves and it was in the cemetery, as I say, with six other people as well.
And there was just nothing to indicate anything special about that cemetery at all. We thought, OK, great, we've got some graves here. And we got a phone call a couple of days later saying, did you know that this person here, skeleton 4926, had a nail through his heel? No. It's just, when you see the photos of the skeleton... I have seen the photo. The nail looks like I would have noticed it.
Once it's all been cleaned up, you would. Ah, okay. Oh yeah, okay. Show, show, show. When you look at the photograph of the grave as it had been excavated and cleaned, for a start, if you're trying to play around too much with cleaning up the hands and the feet, then all the bones just get dislodged. But the nail itself, the tip had been broken off. Originally, it was probably about seven, maybe eight centimetres long. Mm-hmm.
Well, a call came through, yeah, and well, we found out that we had someone with a nail through his heel. So what on earth does that mean? So we started wondering, okay, what is this? Maybe we've got a crucifixion. And we were sort of almost joking about it, partly because we didn't really know what it was, but also crucifixion so embedded in popular culture and religion that...
I think most of us just assumed there must be quite a lot of archaeological evidence for it. And then we went on to Dr. Google and had a look on what he had to say about it. And there was someone found in Israel in 1968 and, oh hang on, this appears to be the second person ever in the world who's been found buried with signs of crucifixion. And then it started to get serious, as it were.
We started thinking, what have we got here? Is this really someone who's been crucified? So then we sort of sat on it for a while and then we sent all the bones off to Corinne Duig at the University of Cambridge who is our tame osteologist and looks at the skeleton and alanises them all. And we asked her, do you think this could be someone who's crucified? And she ummed and aahed a bit and didn't give a definite answer at first.
But she has a background doing forensic archaeology that she has done in the past. So standing up in court to say whether or not she believes there's something the case. Part of the reason why it's taken this story so long to get out into the public, it's what four years since we actually excavated this person, is that she spent, it must have been about 18 months, going through all the possible scenarios. How could this nail have ended up through this bone?
Was it accidental? Were they building a coffin around him or something like that and a careless carpenter just hammered the nail through? Well, no, it can't have been. The feet weren't tight against anything. They'd have moved around if he'd hit a nail against them. And she was going through and increasingly saying, well, I'm up to about 50% confident and then up to about 55, 60. I think she ended up about 70% confident with her forensic archaeology hat on that this is someone who was crucified.
The only physical evidence of crucifixion prior to this British discovery is the 2,000-year-old remains of the unfortunate Yehoah Nun. We actually know his name because it's written on the burial box in which he was found. He's a Jewish crucifixion victim from the first century who was unearthed in Jerusalem by the archaeologist Vassilios Tsapharis way back in 1968.
While first-hand sources from the ancient world confirm that crucifixion was dished out with nauseating regularity, it was generally reserved for the lowliest members of society. Think slaves, prisoners of wars, and rebels. And crucifixion victims were rarely afforded a proper burial. Most corpses were disposed of in either unmarked communal graves or thrown into rubbish dumps.
It was somewhat different in Jewish society. We do have evidence from Josephus and another first century Jew, Philo of Alexandria, that the Romans did actually allow Jews to bury crucifixion victims because Jews are so particular about funeral rites, Josephus says. But generally in the ancient world, crucifixion victims were thrown to the dogs, as it were.
Put simply, this was a form of punishment meted out to those who were considered the scum of society, often reserved for slaves and political rebels. To be crucified was to be obliterated. You were nobody and you left no mark. Generally speaking, if you were crucified, you'd done something pretty serious to warrant that punishment.
especially at the time that we think he was crucified. We got the skeleton radiocarbon dated. I was about to ask you, how do we know the date? Well, it came back, there's 95% confidence that it was someone between 130 and 360 AD, I think something like that, which doesn't really help us because that covers most of Roman Britain. Yes. If you're going down to 68% confidence in the results, that puts it between 210 AD and 340. Okay.
Now, we can knock a few years off the end of that because... Constantine banned crucifixion. Constantine banned crucifixion in 337 after the empire converted to Christianity. So we know that's a definite end date. He probably died, therefore, somewhere in the third century. By the way, that's Emperor Constantine from the fourth century. We've got a whole episode on him, episode 61. So go back and have a listen to that.
Now, this got a lot of media and certainly piqued our interest over in Australia. Can you just finally summarize what you see as the significance of this find? Well, as I said before, we...
At Albion Archaeology we excavated it. We assumed at the time there must be quite a lot of archaeological evidence for crucifixion, but there isn't. But it's something that we know so much about through culture and religion. It goes far beyond archaeology. This is a find that's not just relevant to Cambridgeshire. In some respects the international media have made more of this than the local media.
The Roman settlement that we found there is really important locally, but the crucified person, it has global significance because we all know the stories from biblical times, from the Roman period, we know the texts and so on then, but that's all we can go by. Unless we've got the physical evidence to back that up and see what was actually happening,
And now that we can say, yes, it's clear that people actually did crucify people. So it's just a real insight, a tangible physical insight into what they were doing back then. The written notice of the charge against him read, "The King of the Jews. They crucified two rebels with him, one on his right and one on his left."
Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, So, you who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, come down from the cross and save yourself. In the same way, the chief priests and the teachers of the law mocked him among themselves. He saved others, they said, but he can't save himself. Let this Messiah, this King of Israel, come down from the cross, that we may see and believe. Those crucified with him also heaped insults on him.
Mark chapter 15, 26 to 32. Skeleton 4926 offers us a tangible physical insight into the practice of ancient crucifixion. So we know that crucifixions happened, both from written sources and archaeological finds. We know that Jesus died by crucifixion.
But people like Richard Dawkins, the famous biologist and atheist, often jump up at this point and say, "Okay, so maybe if he lived, he died by crucifixion." But why? If God is so powerful, surely he would have come up with a better way to forgive people's sins than to crush his own child. That is sadistic. I have described atonement
Primrose Everdeen.
Where are you? Well, come on. I volunteer as tribute. I believe we have a volunteer. I need to get out of here. You need to get out of here. Go find mom. No. Go find mom right now. No. So sorry. No. That's a clip from the hugely popular 2012 movie adaptation of Suzanne Collins' book The Hunger Games.
And this is a movie I've seen, actually, and loved. Anyway, in that scene, Katniss, played by Jennifer Lawrence, volunteers to enter the deadly Hunger Games in the place of her 12-year-old sister, Prim, who had had the bad luck of having her name drawn in the lottery, which dictates who enters the contest.
It's an example of something we see from time to time in pop culture, a hero sacrificing their life to save someone they love. So is that what the meaning of Jesus' death is? Was he a hero? What are the themes attached to Jesus' sacrifice?
I argue that there are two overarching themes under which all the other themes can be grouped. The first one is known as Christus Victor, the theme that Jesus on the cross was the conqueror, the one who passes through death into victorious eternal life and brings us with him. That's Christus Victor.
If you've never heard of the Christus Victor theme, it's just worth knowing that it's a huge idea in the early church, and it comes straight out of the New Testament. The first Christians, weirdly, saw Jesus' crucifixion by the Romans as a victory.
The Apostle Paul himself in Colossians 2 wrote, And here it is.
Having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. It's an amazing idea. The cross was a triumph, a great liberation. It was an exodus from Egypt. The whole thing about the exodus from bondage in Egypt, crossing the Red Sea into Egypt,
not just freedom, but a new life as the people of God, the people whom God has chosen. From the very beginning of the Christian faith, after the resurrection, the church, the gathered communities began to see, began to think of Jesus' passage from death into life as the new exodus, the completion and the perfection of the exodus for all people, not just the Jews this time, but all people.
What about the theme of substitution? Jesus dying in our place. Atonement. Now, substitution, there's a sense in which I came to write this book because of the idea of substitution. When I was a young adult, I started being very active in the church and I went to a lot of conferences and hung around with a lot of clergy. I noticed that there was this refrain that
that we didn't really believe in substitution. We don't really believe in atonement. This is passe. I heard a great deal of that as a young adult, and it really bothered me, and I thought it was a mistake. So I spent the rest of my life working on it, and I can speak from deep personal conviction, first of all, that I always felt that I knew that
and could depend on the idea that Jesus had died for me personally. And he also had died for every other human being personally. And I didn't really see any contradiction there. If he died for all, as Paul said, then he died for me. Well, what is it that he did for me? The thought that he substituted himself for me
did not then and does not now seem to me like such a strange thing to say. But I guess we have to ask ourselves at that point, why would I have been subject to a gruesome death? Why would Jesus need to step into my place in such a horrific way? That question cannot be answered without reference to sin, and that's one of the reasons that
Some parties in the church don't want to face up to it because they don't like to talk about sin. But that's because of a misunderstanding about what sin is. Sin is not a bunch of individual misdeeds here and there. Sin is a great power. Capital S, sin. Capital P, power. And this idea is largely false.
at its clearest in the writings of the Apostle Paul. But it's also very clear in the Gospels if you're looking for it and nowhere to see it, nowhere to identify it. Jesus is going into battle. He's in battle all his life. And the first sign of that battle is the temptation. In the temptation, Jesus is doing hand-to-hand, so to speak, battle with the devil. The devil is the lord of sin and death.
The power of Satan, the power of sin, the power of death, everything capitalized to signify its great and overarching rule over the fallen world. But I'm not sure that we can understand what sin is if we don't have some idea of who God is. To know God's perfections, to know God's infinite greatness and mercy is
to know God's creative power, to know the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament, is to know God's righteousness. In Corinthians, Paul says, God made him, Jesus, to be sin, who knew no sin, in order that in him we,
might become the righteousness of God. Now that is an absolutely staggering verse that I hardly ever have heard taught or preached. Most people just, I've heard it read as part of a lesson and it just, the reader just skipped over it as if it was the laundry list. God made Jesus to be sin. That's an odd phrase.
How can you be sin? Well, I don't know the answer to that. But the way that he phrases it clearly means that he means something. Paul means something ultimate here. He means that the entire force, power, the entire incarnate reality of sin has been absorbed into Jesus. And that's linked, I think.
to the cry of dereliction, when Jesus says, "My God, why have you forsaken me?" So that's a way in which Jesus substituted himself for us. He, the one who is truly righteous, the only one who is truly righteous, put himself in our place, becoming sin, becoming the personification of sin and absorbing sin into himself so that we,
might become righteous as he is righteous. And if that's not substitution, I don't know what it is. But the trouble is that during the 19th century, some very fine Christian preachers and teachers, mostly Calvinists like me, I'm a Calvinist, but they got hold of this substitution idea and made it into this academic theory. And that's what preachers, a lot of preachers learned this in the 19th century and
beat it to death, systematized it, made it into a kind of believe this or you don't understand anything way of preaching Jesus' offering of himself, without any attempt to incorporate it into the whole picture of Jesus' death, which we have in Scripture, which includes the
the imagery of sacrifice, which includes the crossing of the Red Sea, which includes the imagery of being let out of prison, which includes the imagery of Jesus dying as a ransom for us in our place. What's more substitutionary than that? But all of those complex and wonderful pictures, and I'm leaving a lot of it out, were not really recognized or
allowed to shine in the preaching of penal substitutionary atonement, which became something called PSA. To turn this lavish imagery of the New Testament, the Old Testament, to turn it into a PSA, a theory, was a terrible mistake. Can we leave the theologians aside for a moment and think about
skeptical people listening to our conversation who might hear you talking about Jesus as a substitute and think that just turns God into an ogre. He had to look for a third party to deal a blow to in order to let us off the hook. That just doesn't seem right.
Nice. How would you respond? Who is the third party you're speaking of? Well, the skeptical complaint will be Jesus is the third party who has dealt this blow by God in order to let us off the hook. All right. Well, there again, that was just a gigantic mistake, which is actually quite easy to correct, but people don't correct it because they don't know. It's just...
really pathetically sad that we ever got into this way of thinking. Jesus is not some victim being sacrificed by a sadistic father. Jesus is the second person of the blessed Trinity. The Trinity is acting all as one. God is dying there. The Holy Spirit is part of this. There are three persons here.
Jesus is dying as part of the Godhead. He and the Father and the Spirit are doing this together from the beginning of all creation and before. This is something that God is. God is three in himself, three-person. God is love within himself. There are three persons sharing love within themselves, and these three persons together are
Whoa. Just pause there. I had to. God sacrificing himself for us. Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?
which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" When some of those standing near heard this, they said, "Listen, he's calling Elijah." Someone ran, filled a sponge with wine vinegar, put it on a staff and offered it to Jesus to drink. "Now leave him alone. Let's see if Elijah comes to take him down," he said. With a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last. The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.
And when the centurion, who stood there in front of Jesus, saw how he died, he said, Surely this man was the Son of God. At the end of our long interview, and boy, undeceivers should get their hands on the full interview.
I asked Fleming Rutledge why she still finds the cross so compelling after all these years and what she might say to my listeners who aren't quite sure what to make of Christianity. My grandmother introduced me to Jesus. My grandmother said, Jesus is with you. Jesus is here. Jesus loves you. Jesus cares about you. Jesus loves
will never leave you. Jesus will always take care of you and love you. Jesus forgives you. To me, these are the words of life. Life itself is in Jesus Christ. He was a unique person. There's never been anyone else like him. There's never been anyone else who saw immediately into every single person he ever met.
and invited them into the eternal life of God with Him. There is nothing that we need to do to earn this. There are no prayers we can say, no spiritual disciplines we can embrace, no exercises we can go through, no good deeds. There is nothing we can do to earn this grace and favor.
of Almighty God in Jesus Christ. Why would anyone not want this? I wish I had had a greater ability, especially with my grandchildren, to show them Jesus, to give them Jesus the way my grandmother gave him to me. I yearn with every fiber of my being to encourage anyone who might be listening
to come into Jesus' presence because He is already there and know Him as the living Son of God. A man, yes, a man like other men, but at the same time with the power and the will and the purpose of defeating any evil that afflicts you in your life, conquering any bad habit,
expanding your horizons, making you into a person that you cannot be by yourself. You can't choose to be everything you want to be. But Jesus has already chosen for you a life of flourishing with Him, with His people. A life in which He has called you to some special task, some special role, some special vocation.
vocation means to be called by Him, to be called by His Holy Spirit into a life in which you know you will be free of condemnation, any condemnation from anyone or from anywhere, because He has already been condemned and died a death of condemnation and risen victorious for your sake and in your place and in my place.
and in the place of the whole human race groaning under the bondage of sin and death. That is what Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of the Living God, has done for you, anyone who may be listening. Is it nothing to you all you pass by? Behold and see if any sorrow like unto his sorrow. His sorrow is for the sin which holds us in bondage.
His sorrow is the death which has a grip upon us. His death and his resurrection were for our deliverance, our forgiveness, yes, but more important, for our justification, for our creation in a new righteousness, a righteousness that can never be taken away, lived into eternal life in his company and in the company of all those whom he loves. And that means you.
Thank you.
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Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by Kayleigh Payne and directed by Mark Hadley. Sophie Hawkshaw is on socials and membership. Alistair Belling is our writer and researcher. Siobhan McGuinness is our online librarian. And Lindy Leveson remains my wonderful assistant. Editing by Richard Humwe and special thanks to our series sponsor, Zondervan Academic, for making this Undeception possible. Undeceptions is the flagship podcast of Undeceptions.com, letting the truth out.
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