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We preach a shameful message when we preach Jesus on the cross.
Being crucified was a degrading insult, and the idea of worshiping someone who had been crucified was unimaginable. Of course, we don’t see people being crucified now, as Paul did in the first century, so the impact is somewhat lost on us. But Paul knew what he was up against: “For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18); “Jews ask for signs and Greeks search for wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness” (vv. 22–23). The message of the cross is foolishness, mōria in Greek, from which we get the word moron.
Verses 22 and 23 tell us the Jews were looking for a sign. “You’re the Messiah,” they said to Jesus, “so give us a sign.” They were expecting some great, supernatural wonder that would identify and attract them to the promised Messiah. They wanted something flashy. Even though Jesus had given them miracle after miracle during His ministry, they wanted some sort of supermiracle they could all look at and say, “That’s the sign! That’s the proof that this is the Messiah at last!”
The Greeks, on the other hand, weren’t so much interested in the miraculous. They weren’t looking for a supernatural sign; they were looking for wisdom. They wanted to validate a true religion through some transcendental insight, some elevated idea, some esoteric knowledge, some sort of spiritual experience, maybe even an out-of-body experience or emotional event.
The Greeks wanted wisdom, and the Jews wanted a sign. God gave them exactly the opposite. The Jews received a skandalon, a crucified Messiah—scandalous, blasphemous, bizarre, offensive, unbelievable. And for the Greeks who were looking for esoteric knowledge, something high and noble and lofty, all this nonsense about the eternal Creator God being crucified was idiotic.
From both the Greek and Roman points of view, the stigma of crucifixion made the whole notion of Jesus being the Messiah an absolute absurdity.[1]I’m indebted to Don Green for much of the material here on crucifixion here. For more, see his superb article “The Folly of the Cross” in The Master’s Seminary Journal 15/1 (Spring 2004): 59–69.
A glance at the history of crucifixion in first-century Rome reveals what Paul’s contemporaries thought about it. It was a horrific form of capital punishment, originating, most likely, in the Persian Empire, but other barbarians used it as well. The condemned died an agonizingly slow death by suffocation, gradually becoming too exhausted and traumatized to pull himself up on the nails in his hands, or push himself up on the nail through his feet, enough to take a deep breath of air. King Darius crucified three thousand Babylonians. Alexander the Great crucified two thousand from the city of Tyre. Alexander Janius crucified eight hundred Pharisees, while they watched soldiers slaughter their wives and children at their feet.[2]Herodotus 1:128.2, in The History of Herodotus, ed. George Rawlinson (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1859) 2:442; Quintus Curtius Rufus, History of Alexander 4.4.17, trans. John C. Rolfe, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946) 1:205; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews in The Works of Flavius Josephus, trans, William Whiston (Hartford, CT: The S.S. Scranton Co., 1905), 13.14.2.
This sealed the horror of the crucifixion in the Jewish mind. Romans came to power in Israel in 63 BC and used crucifixion extensively. Some writers say authorities crucified as many as thirty thousand people around that time. Titus Vespasian crucified so many Jews in AD 70 that the soldiers had no room for the crosses and not enough crosses for the bodies.[3]Josephus, A History of the Jewish Wars in The Works of Flavius Josephus, trans, William Whiston (Hartford, CT: The S.S. Scranton Co., 1905), 5.11.1. It wasn’t until 337, when Constantine abolished crucifixion, that it disappeared after a millennium of cruelty in the world.[4]Salaminius Sozomen, “The Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen,” in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, eds. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 2d Ser., vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957) 245.
Crucifixion was a repugnant, demeaning form of execution for the rabble of society. The idea that someone who died on a cross could be an exceptional, noble, or important person was absurd. Roman citizens generally were exempt from crucifixion unless they committed treason. The authorities reserved the cross for rebellious slaves, captives, notorious robbers, and assassins. The Roman Empire’s policies on crucifixion led Romans to view any crucified person as absolutely contemptible. The Romans used it only for the scum—the lowest of the low.
Soldiers first flogged the victims, then forced them to carry their crossbeams, the instruments of their own deaths, to the crucifixion site. Signs around their necks indicated the crimes they had committed, and they were stark naked. Then the soldiers tied or nailed them to the crossbars, hoisted them into an upright post, and suspended them there. The executioners could hurry death by shattering their legs, because that left victims unable to push themselves up in order to fill their lungs with air. If no one broke the legs, the slow death could last for days. The final indignity was to leave the corpse hanging there until the scavengers ate it. Josephus described multiple tortures and positions of crucifixion during the siege of Jerusalem, pain suffered in every possible posture and through every possible part of the body, even unmentionable parts.
Gentiles also viewed anyone crucified with the utmost contempt. It was a virtual obscenity. Polite society simply didn’t discuss crucifixion. Cicero wrote, “This very word ‘cross’ should be removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen but from his thoughts, his eyes, his ears.”[5]Cicero, “The Speech In Defence of Gaius Rabirius,” sec. 16, in The Speeches of Cicero, trans. H. Grose Hodge, The Loeb Classical Library (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927), 467.
In the face of that, Paul came, and all he ever talked about was the cross! We can see something of the deep disrespect the Gentiles had for anybody crucified in some of the pagan statements people made about Christ. Graffiti scratched on a stone in a guardroom on Palatine Hill, near Circus Maximus in Rome, shows the figure of a man with the head of a donkey hanging on a cross. Below is a man in a gesture of adoration and the inscription says, “Alexamanos worships his God."[6]https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/gladiators/graffito.html Such a repulsive depiction of the Lord Jesus Christ vividly illustrates pagan disgust for anybody crucified, and particularly a crucified God. Justin’s first apology in AD 152 summarized the Gentile view: “They proclaim our madness to consist in this, that we give to a crucified man a place equal to the unchangeable eternal God.” [7]Justin Martyr, “The First Apology of Justin,” in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969) 1:167.In their mind, it was nonsense!
If the Gentile attitude was bad, the Jewish attitude was worse. They detested the practice of crucifixion and scorned it more than the Romans did. In their view, anybody who ended up on a cross fulfilled Deuteronomy 21:23, “His corpse shall not hang all night on the tree . . . for he who is hanged is accursed of God.” Does that mean the eternal God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Lord Himself was cursed? How could God curse God? It’s absolutely unthinkable. The Messiah cursed by God? To the Jews it was impossible to imagine.
So the stigma of the cross went beyond social disgrace, all the way to divine condemnation—a curse from God against the executed. The Mishnah, a second-century AD commentary on the law of the Pentateuch, indicated that blasphemers and idolaters alone were to be crucified; even so, the executioners hung their bodies on the cross only after they were already dead. How could the Messiah be a blasphemer? How could God be a blasphemer of God? The Jews gagged on the idea of a crucified Christ. It made the gospel unbelievable.
You think you’ve got problems getting the gospel across today? Imagine the early Christians. If they told the truth, they faced a massive obstacle: Their claims were insane, and even blasphemous.
God Himself, in the form of the crucified Christ, was the biggest obstacle to believing in God. And frankly, it doesn’t seem that God could have put a more formidable barrier to faith in the first century. I can’t think of a worse way to market the gospel than to preach that.
The Gentiles called the Christian gospel a perverse and extravagant superstition and a sick delusion. Martin Hengel, in his instructive book Crucifixion, says,
To believe that the one preexistent Son of the one true God, the mediator at creation and the redeemer of the world, had appeared in very recent times in out-of-the-way Galilee as a member of the obscure people of the Jews, and even worse, had died the death of a common criminal on the cross, could only be regarded as a sign of madness. The real gods of Greece and Rome could be distinguished from mortal men by the very fact that they were immortal—they had absolutely nothing in common with the cross as a sign of shame . . . and thus of the one who . . . was “bound in the most ignominious fashion” and “executed in a shameful way."[8]Martin Hengel, Crucifixion (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1997), 6–7; emphasis in original.
No wonder the Gentiles and Jews alike hated Paul’s teaching! It was beyond human belief. The gospel of Christ crucified was no seeker-friendly message; it was either an absurdity or an obscenity.
Is this absurd message really what we must believe and preach? Next time, we’ll see that Scripture calls us to do exactly that.
(Adapted from Hard to Believe)
