On Ash Wednesday 2004, the eagerly-awaited movie The Passion of the Christ hit movie screens—but hit its viewers much harder. With ashen foreheads, Catholics across America cringed in their theater seats as they watched the portrayal of the intense whipping, beating, and stabbing of their Savior. Many in the audience openly wept as they peered at the screen and saw teams of Roman soldiers thrash Jesus’ body with whips with metal hooks. The scene was violent, portraying the Roman soldiers covered in Jesus’ blood, with only the physical exhaustion of the Roman soldiers finally slowing the assault. Most moviegoers had never seen any sort of brutality—real or imagined—like this. The two-hour depiction of Jesus’ passion and death proved emotionally exhausting for the audience. A movie reviewer for the Evening Standard accounted that the cinematic “assault was so sustained and voyeuristic that most of the audience I saw the film with covered their eyes.” Another reviewer referred to it as a “primitive and pornographic bloodbath.”
As difficult as it was for the viewers to sit through these scenes, there is a reality that most audiences and reviewers missed: in comparison to the cinematic portrayal of the event, the actual crucifixion of Jesus was far worse. Some disbelievers may simply dismiss the account of Jesus’ passion and crucifixion on the grounds that no human could survive such a physical assault. Yet, first-person accounts, ancient historians, and archaeology confirm that many thousands of men survived wanton scourging and lived—sometimes for days—on crosses before they succumbed to death. Even modern medical science confirms how that could occur. But the objectors are indeed correct on one essential point: crucifixion was almost indescribably violent and heartless. This is important to appreciate because within the sheer violence of the crucifixion lies much of the mystery behind the stigmata of the saints. Thus, in our quest to understand the how and why of the stigmata and stigmatists, we must begin by focusing on the general nature and history of crucifixion itself and, specifically, the wounds of Christ.
Roman Crucifixion
Contemporary eyewitnesses, authors, and ancient and modern historians broadly confirm that crucifixion was a common practice before Constantine abolished it in the Roman Empire in the fourth century. In addition to the Romans, crucifixion was practiced by the Persians, Carthaginians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, Germanic peoples, Assyrians, British peoples, and others. Considering its barbaric brutality, it is not observed lightly that crucifixion—in particular times and places—was a routine punishment. Several books have been written within the past few decades that have accumulated the historical findings illustrating widespread crucifixion, but our focus here is on Roman crucifixion—for that is what Jesus suffered. At first, that might seem overly exacting; after all, one might wonder, isn’t there one basic method of crucifixion? But the answer is in the negative. As Martin Hengel notes in his book Crucifixion, “A particular problem is posed by the fact that the form of crucifixion varied considerably.” The Roman method proved particularly dehumanizing, unjust, and widespread.
A study of crucifixion is such an analysis of violence and savagery that it is easy to lose sight of a central aspect of crucifixion: its intentional degradation. Under some Roman emperors, crucifixion was a common punishment for slaves. Cicero even refers to it as the servitutis extremum summumque supplicium (the highest and most extreme penalty for slaves).
Not only was a trial unnecessary to crucify a slave, no evidence was necessary; in fact, no underlying crime was necessary. Horace provides the example of a slave who was crucified for tasting the soup of his master, but slaves were crucified for less. Crucifixion was designed to illustrate ignobility; it was deemed the proper way to dispose of a slave. Simply put, slaves were treated as subhuman, and public crucifixion was designed to remind them—and all others who witnessed their deaths—of their sub-humanity.
This anti-human view of slaves by the Romans is magnified by looking at the sheer volume of slaves who were crucified. The generational crucifixion of slaves was a reality alluded to around 205 B.C. in the play Miles Gloriosus written by Titus Maccius Plautus. The character Sceledrus states, “I know the cross will be my grave: that is where my ancestors are, my father, grandfathers, great-grandfathers, great-great-grandfathers.” That’s an even more sobering thought when considering how large the slave class was in the Roman Empire. Slavery was not the unhappy circumstance of only a handful of people. On the contrary, Strauss estimates the number of slaves in Italy at the time of Spartacus’s uprising (73 B.C.) was between one and one-and-a-half million. After that uprising, six thousand slaves were crucified, which was not an isolated event. Strauss notes that one of the mass crucifixions involved “2000 rebels crucified in Judaea by the Roman official Quintilius Varus in 4 B.C.” But it was not just slave uprisings that led to crucifixions; Hengel notes that Caligula and Domitian “crucified imperial slaves . . . at their whim.” Seneca stated that slaves broadly lived “under the certain threat of crucifixion.”
As to the method of Roman crucifixion, the procedure generally occurred in three distinct stages: scourging at a pillar, the forced carrying of the cross, and nailing the victim to the cross where he would eventually die. Each stage consisted of a tortured madness in which human misery was viewed as entertaining theater.
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