"Jesus is Lord" (After Crucifixion?) - "Christ Crucified" (and Other Mad Ramblings) - Part 2
How the Idea of a Crucified Messiah Was Madness to the Ancient World
In the previous article (part 1), I started to unpack the deeper significance of “Lordship” in the first century, and the Jewish context under Roman dominion, in which Jesus was crucified.
We discussed how crucifixion, although a slow, torturous death, was so much more than that. It was a from of humiliation and degradation, and although indeed intended to kill you and remove you as a potential threat, it was also a way to defeat everything you stood for, and reduce you to nothing. To total non-entity. And in the process to buttress the power and authority of those who subjected you to it.
Honor/Shame Societies
This was the way of things in honor/shame societies, of which we moderns have completely lost touch with.
So whatever you did or said, no matter how remarkable… if you managed to get crucified, you were defeated and invalidated. Everything you stood for was reduced… to ash.
This was the view of the Romans and many other cultures. But it was particularly the view of the Jews, whose Torah clearly said:
“Cursed [of God] is anyone who is hung on a tree.”
The Jews took this very seriously. If you got crucified (literally, for any reason at all, even if it was an accident of wrong identity or being unfairly framed for a crime), you were cursed.
No ifs, ands, or buts.
When they pressured the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, to have Jesus crucified, they weren’t just demanding his death. They were demanding his humiliation and invalidation.
And in the Jews viewpoint, if they could manage to do this, they would have proven to Gods and men for all time, that Jesus was illegitimate. He was no great figure, no great man, no hero or saint or prophet.
And most importantly, it would be proven that he was no Messiah (contrary to his and his followers pretensions).
Essentially, Jesus had claimed to be the “Son of Man” from the book of Daniel, when he stood before the Pharisees in their midnight show-trial. And the Jews would have been very familiar with the imagery that he used to apply to himself, and that absolutely outraged them, and so they then sought his death and humiliation:
“Are you the Son of God?”
To which he replied:
“I am. And you will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven at the right hand of the Power in Heaven.”
There was no choice. He must be crucified (humiliated).
And if they could achieve this humiliation, in their minds, they would also have completely “slapped down” his heinous blasphemy, proving him wrong, and then putting ALL the nails in the coffin of NOT JUST his physical body, but also of everything he said, and everything he claimed to be.
If Christ was crucified, the Pharisees were validated, and Jesus invalidated.
And this view was also shared by the Romans, the Greeks, and many others. Crucifixion… this horrible death of humiliation and torture, where you died slowly and publicly in plain view of everyone… where birds would pick out your eyes and genitals… such grand humiliation people could barely stand to look at… and usually would want to just turn away from and pull a veil over such degradation and suffering.
So for the Jews, crucifixion meant being cursed of God.
And for the Romans and almost everyone else, it similarly meant being “cursed”, that is, humiliated and degraded.
There were many differences between the monotheist Jews and their polytheist overlords. But on this point, they were all in complete agreement. Crucifixion was not just the end of your physical body, but rather, also the end of everything you stood for, and the end of your legacy. The end of your memory.
There is a wonderful erudite article right here by John Squires, which explains the shame of crucifixion.
A Messiah Crucified…? Have You Gone Mad?
As mentioned, the Jews lived under Roman dominance. And the Jews knew their Torah well, and remembered a time when Israel was an independent, free nation.
And many of these subjected Jews had an expectation for a “Messiah”, that is, a liberator. Someone who would lift the nation of Israel up from under Roman subjugation, and restore it to it’s original greatness.
In modern parlance, many of the Jews were waiting for someone who would “Make Israel Great Again”.
The idea of “Christ” or “liberator” or “Messiah” was, in the thinking of most Jews, inextricably caught up with political liberation. If you were to speak to a random Jew among this subjected people about their expectation of “Messiah”, politics and sovereignty would undoubtedly come to mind.
This was their expectation for “Messiah” or “Christ”.
And so then, you can start to appreciate how weird it would be if some Jewish people, in this context with these political expectations, were to come along and start talking about “Christ crucified” or “Messiah crucified”, that their was a savior/liberator for all of mankind, to save them from their personal sinfulness, rather than save them from their political oppressors.
Weird indeed.
And not just weird… madness.
No matter how great this Jesus was… no matter how many supposed miracles he performed…
If he was crucified…
He was over.
And if you were to be among those promoting this idea of a crucified Messiah, or as St Paul is famous for saying, “Christ Crucified”, you would be considered mad. Your mind was gone, you’ve lost your marbles, you deserve the madhouse.
As historian Tom Holland has so brilliantly explained:
“The idea that someone might rise from a place of death into heaven was not weird for the Romans, or the Greeks. The idea that someone who was mortal, has become divine, and has risen up into heaven, and has triumphed over death, although not common, was known by the ancients to have happened from time to time.
But the idea that someone who has suffered this most humiliating of deaths (crucifixion), could then afterwards [rise from the dead], that [for the ancients] was so peculiar and weird… and St Paul knew that [virtually everyone, Jew/Greek/Roman etc] would consider it mad.”
If you championed a crucified Messiah, you weren’t just mad.
Even worse, you were a masochist… someone who hated themselves, and who hated others.
It was not for no reason (when the context is properly considered) that the Christians spreading this message were eventually by labeled by some as “the enemies of mankind”.
Are You a Masochist?
You see, in our day, everyone focuses on the question of if Jesus literally rose from the dead. Believers and skeptics battle it out on the question of a literal miracle of a man coming back from the dead actually happened.
And don’t get me wrong, it’s not that that particular issue isn’t important.
But we are far past due to realize our sort of historical amnesia…
That the ancients were not caught up in such questions of if the miraculous ever happened from time to time. Whether we like it or not, the miracle of resurrection was inextricably tied up with honor and glory, and the ancients would not have been so amazed that a miracle happened, but rather that someone had been risen to glory and honor after a shameful death.
That was the real issue.
And if you were crazy enough to go around telling people about how “Jesus was Lord” after he had been crucified, that he had been risen from death to a place of honor and glory in heaven (after this crucifixion), you would basically be seen to be a fool who was contradicting yourself.
A madman. A masochist.
For crucifixion, in the thinking of almost all the ancients, was not just death. It was proof that you could never then rise from death to a place of glory and honor.
Crucifixion was the final nail in the coffin OF YOUR OWN HONOR, and signified the impossibility of your honor ever being restored.
Honor was more significant to the ancients than the occurrence of a literal miracle.
But lo and behold, this idea of a crucified Messiah… this idea that this Jesus of Nazareth had ascended to heaven to the place of glory and honor, and that he did this after crucifixion… amazingly, had taken hold.
Not only did it take hold, it took over the entire world.
And by so doing, upended the values that peoples everywhere once considered to be “common sense” and “obvious”.
And here we are, almost exactly 2,000 years later, still living in the shadow of this massive values upheaval.
And maybe seeing it for the first time?
Not “Apologetics”
The point of this article is not to persuade anyone to faith in Jesus and in his literal resurrection (or otherwise). I have little interest in convincing you either way.
I just strongly believe that we are long past due to understand crucifixion in it’s historical context. The historical amnesia that has taken hold all over the world is a severe problem, and needs to be examined.
And I hope these articles have helped the reader to just begin that journey.
Join me and continue the journey here:
I particularly appreciated this article.
Reading this article makes me more determined than ever to tell the world about the death, burial, n resurrection.
JESUS IS ALIVE!!!