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Home > Magazines > BAR > January/February 1985

Crucifixion—The Archaeological Evidence

By Vassilios Tzaferis

From ancient literary sources we know that tens of thousands of people were crucified in the Roman Empire. In Palestine alone, the figure ran into the thousands. Yet until 1968 not a single victim of this horrifying method of execution had been uncovered archaeologically. In that year I excavated the only victim of crucifixion ever discovered. He was a Jew, of a good family, who may have been convicted of a political crime. He lived in Jerusalem shortly after the turn of the era and sometime before the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. In the period following the […]

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Footnotes

1.

A spindle bottle resembles a cylinder that bulges at its midsection.

2.

A medical team from the Department of Anatomy at the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School, headed by Dr. Nico Haas, made an intensive, if brief, study of the bones.

3.

Early Christian artists, although frequently representing events from the life of Jesus, refrained from drawing scenes of the crucifixion during the first 500 years of Christian history. The earliest Christian representation of the crucifixion dates to the late fifth or early sixth centuries A.D., i.e., about 200 years after crucifixion was legally abolished by the emperor Constantine the Great.

4.

In John 19:34, a lance is plunged into Jesus’ heart. This was not intended as the death blow but as a post mortem blow inflicted in order to testify to the victim’s death. Only after this testimonial was obtained was the body removed from the cross and handed over to the victim’s relatives for burial. The blow to the heart proved beyond doubt that the victim was indeed dead.

Endnotes

1.

Diodorus Siculus XIV:53.

2.

Josephus, Antiquities XIV:380–381.

3.

Appian, B. Civ. I, 120.