Helen Bond

He was...

possibly inciting people to violence.

From the Jewish side of things, they might have thought he was setting himself up as some kind of a false prophet, you know, leading the people astray.

There are plenty of things like that in the Jewish scriptures that would lead to death as well.

Yeah, and the gospel suggests that Jesus was flogged beforehand, and that does seem to have been a common thing either beforehand or actually sometimes on the cross itself.

There's horrible stories about Roman soldiers who are just having their fun with victims.

They're crucifying them in strange ways.

If the idea that there was a sign saying the King of the Jews

It's true then again, it's kind of mockery.

It's making fun of him.

This is the only king the Jews are going to have.

And it can take several days often.

So the whole point is that bodies are up there and it's a deterrent.

So the idea is, look what happens to enemies of Rome.

You don't want to be one of them.

Yeah, that does seem, not the whole cross, but the cross beam because the stakes seem to have been sort of already there and the upright bits because that's the bit that's going to take the longest to, you know, to make it stable.

It does seem as though people carried the cross beam and then just got attached to it and then it would be hoisted up.

And there were different ways, you know, sometimes it was more like a T, sometimes it was more like a cross, but essentially it's the same thing.

You're just hung up to die.

Well, in John's gospel, they're supposedly going to break the legs of the people on the crosses to speed up the death.