Helen Bond

Yes, it's designed to be torture.

and humiliating and you're naked and you die in extreme agony.

You die eventually just of exhaustion and suffocation when your arms can't hold you up enough.

And generally speaking, there's no burial.

You're just pecked away by the wild animals.

It is designed to be

Absolutely horrendous.

And I mean, so horrible that Romans actually don't tend to talk about it very much.

They just talk about the extreme penalty or something like that.

The Gospels are actually our longest account of a crucifixion from antiquity.

Yeah, it's strange to think that.

And so, Roman citizens couldn't be crucified, although occasionally they were, but in theory, it had to be people lower than a citizen.

It was generally people like rebels, thieves, slaves.

It was thought of very much as the slave's death.

And I mean, in other places, a householder could just crucify his slaves if they didn't do what he wanted them to do.

See, that's the Romans that I know and love.

Yeah, exactly.

Human life is just very, very disregarded by these people who are higher up the pecking order.

So Jesus was probably crucified because he looked like he was going to threaten the peace.

He looked like he was some kind of rebel.