Crucifixion – The Bodily Support - Part 1.

UPDATE JANUARY 17, 2010: What I have found out since posting these four parts will require a major rewrite. Parts 2, 3 and 4 will be broken up. Videos showing where Christianity got The Crucifixion FROM will be presented. The series will rerun under a new title, "The Romans NEVER CRUCIFIED the Way We Think They Did."

Sources:

Perseus Digital Library - Crux
Crucifixion or 'Crucifiction' in Ancient Egypt?
Laucus Curtis - Crux
Crucifixion in Antiquity
BELIEVE Religious Info Source Website - Crucifixion

Introduction.

The Romans figured out early on that the crucified individual needed vertical support and horizontal restraint at his midsection, as made obvious in modern-day experiments and re-enactments. So what did the Romans do? Instead of providing just a short cantilever with an upright in front of the body, which is all that is needed to provide the necessary support and restraint, they designed the "sedile" (seat or support) aka “cornu” (horn) to provide the maximum amount of excruciating pain, degradation, shame and humiliation to the victim. In other words, they designed an impaler, making the cross a kind of erect (aroused) male.

This was the item that gave Seneca cause to in writing rebuke Maecenatis (who said he’d rather live at the expense of suffering, even if he had to sit on "the piercing cross," than die) and to call the standard Roman Imperial method of crucifixion, a secular “ritual of effeminizing turpitude.” Called a rhinocerous horn (unicorn) by Justin Martyr, a hook by Iraeneus, a protuberant seat, a rhinoceros horn, a stake and possibly a pale by Tertullian and a tree trunk by Pope Innocent III (how would he know?), this utterly obscene device, projecting from or offset on a cantilever from the vertical post, could very well have caused the crucified’s anus to be pierced, penetrated and dilated as deep and wide as can be whenever he needed to sit and rest. Furthermore, there is no indication in either the gospels, anyplace else in the New Testament, or on the Shroud of Turin that indicates that Jesus’ reported crucifixion was anything other than the Roman Empire's standard operating procedure.

A Short History.

Crucifixion evolved from three different practices that used to be common all over the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The Romans started out under the old Etruscan Kings with the punishment known as “arbor infelix” by which one was suspended by the neck from a Y-shaped yoke with a bar between the arms of the yoke, or from the fork of a dead tree, then scourged until death. The Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians all practiced some form of impalement where the condemned was impaled by a post or pole, either alive or dead. The Behistun Inscription makes it clear that Persians executed people by impaling them. The ancient Israelites had the practice of hanging someone from a tree after he was legally executed, per the Biblical passage of Deuteronomy 21:22-23. This could have been done by impalement. It was the Persians who were first known to practice crucifixion by means of nailing the condemned to a board and then suspending him, which is noted by the Historian Herodotus in the 5th Century BCE (Herodotus 9.120.4). Herodotus commonly used the verbs anaskolopizw and anastaurow, both of which meant, before the Roman method of crucifixion evolved to its standard form, “to impale.” But he used the term pros sanidas prospassaleusantes anekremasan, which meant “and there nailed him to boards and suspended him alive” (Herodotus 9.120.4). From the Persians the practice spread rapidly through the Mediterranean, with the practice adopted by the Greeks, the Phoenicians, and the Carthaginians. It is noted that Alexander the Great is said to have crucified 2,000 survivors of his siege of Tyre out on the beach close to the city.

It is from the Carthaginians that the Romans picked up the idea of crucifixion by means of nailing people to boards and suspending the boards. The Carthaginians were noted for their cruelty and reportedly utilized crucifixion only too frequently as a form of punishment. There was even a report out of Carthage that a father had his son crucified on the flimsiest of pretexts! After Hannibal had crucified an Italian Guide for unintentionally misleading him in 217 BCE, the Romans picked up on the practice and crucified some 25 slaves. And it was the Romans who then “improved” the practice into a ritual, that is, a standard operating procedure, that involved first, public nudity, scourging and other tortures, bearing the cross-timber through town, nailing to the cross-timber, racking, suspension, nailing to the main upright, exposure to the elements and the public, and provision of a bodily support in a humiliating manner, in order to provide the maximum amount of sustained torture in extreme pain, agony, anguish, degradation and utter public humiliation. Outside the ampitheatre where quick deaths and spectacle were popular, crucified persons typically had to suffer for two days or more; in one extreme case two such people, Christians and husband and wife, reportedly survived for nine days before they perished.

Part 2