Zealot - The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth

Pilate. The crucifixion and the burial. The resurrection three days later.
    This sequence of events did not actually contain a narrative, butwas designed strictly for liturgical purposes. It was a means for the early Christians
     to relive the last days of their messiah through ritual by, for instance, sharing
     the same meal he shared with his disciples, praying the same prayers he offered in
     Gethsemane, and so on. Mark’s contribution to the passion narratives was his transformation
     of this ritualized sequence of events into a cohesive story about the death of Jesus,
     which his redactors, Matthew and Luke, integrated into their gospels along with their
     own unique flourishes (John may have relied on a separate set of passion narratives
     for his gospel, since almost none of the details he provides about the last days of
     Jesus match what is found in the Synoptics).
    As with everything else in the gospels, the story of Jesus’s arrest, trial, and execution
     was written for one reason and one reason only: to prove that he was the promised
     messiah. Factual accuracy was irrelevant. What mattered was Christology, not history.
     The gospel writers obviously recognized how integral Jesus’s death was to the nascent
     community, but the story of that death needed elaborating. It needed to be slowed
     down and refocused. It required certain details and embellishments on the part of
     the evangelists. As a result, this final, most significant episode in the story of
     Jesus of Nazareth is also the one most clouded by theological enhancements and flat-out
     fabrications. The only means the modern reader has at his or her disposal to try to
     retrieve some semblance of historical accuracy in the passion narratives is to slowly
     strip away the theological overlay imposed by the evangelists on Jesus’s final days
     and return to the most primitive version of the story that can be excavated from the
     gospels. And the only way to do that is to start at the end of the story, with Jesus
     nailed to a cross.
    Crucifixion was a widespread and exceedingly common form of execution in antiquity,
     one used by Persians, Indians, Assyrians, Scythians, Romans, and Greeks. Even the
     Jews practiced crucifixion; the punishment is mentioned numerous times in rabbinic
     sources. The reason crucifixion was so common is because it was so cheap. It could
     be carried out almost anywhere; all one neededwas a tree. The torture could last for days without the need for an actual torturer.
     The procedure of the crucifixion—how the victim was hanged—was left completely to
     the executioner. Some were nailed with their heads downward. Some had their private
     parts impaled. Some were hooded. Most were stripped naked.
    It was Rome that conventionalized crucifixion as a form of state punishment, creating
     a sense of uniformity in the process, particularly when it came to the nailing of
     the hands and feet to a crossbeam. So commonplace was crucifixion in the Roman Empire
     that Cicero referred to it as “that plague.” Among the citizenry, the word “cross”
     (
crux
) became a popular and particularly vulgar taunt, akin to “go hang yourself.”
    Yet it would be inaccurate to refer to crucifixion as a death penalty, for it was
     often the case that the victim was first executed, then nailed to a cross. The purpose
     of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal as it was to serve as a deterrent
     to others who might defy the state. For that reason, crucifixions were always carried
     out in public—at crossroads, in theaters, on hills, or on high ground—anywhere where
     the population had no choice but to bear witness to the gruesome scene. The criminal
     was always left hanging long after he had died; the crucified were almost never buried.
     Because the entire point of the crucifixion was to humiliate the victim and frighten
     the witnesses, the corpse would be left where it hung to be eaten by dogs and picked
     clean by the birds of prey. The bones would then be thrown onto a heap of trash, which
     is how Golgotha, the place of Jesus’s crucifixion, earned its name:
the place of skulls
. Simply put, crucifixion was more than a capital punishment for Rome; it was a public
     reminder of what happens when one challenges the empire. That is why it was reserved
     solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, banditry.
    If one knew nothing else about Jesus of Nazareth save that he was