Crucifixion was practiced as early as the first millennium B.C. by Assyrians, Phoenicians and Persians; written accounts dating to 71 B.C. refer to crucifixions numbering in the thousands. Yet, only one victim of crucifixion has ever been discovered in an excavation. In 1968, Vassilios Tzaferis, an archaeologist with the Israel Department of Antiquities, examined a tomb near Jerusalem that had been accidentally opened by a construction crew. Tzaferis discovered the bones of two generations of a Jewish family that lived in Jerusalem about the first century A.D. A large nail piercing the heel bones of one skeleton led to […]