Assuming Jesus Christ existed, I find it unlikely that he died on the cross.
In those days many societies were able to perform surgery. There is a root(the name of which escapes me at the moment ) that if you were to cut a small piece from it and eat it, you would die. The ancients would cut this root up and boil it in a vat of vinegar. They would dip a sponge in the new concoction and have a patient drink from the sponge. It acted as an anesthetic, and patients would be rendered immobile and be passed out for anywhere from 2-5 days.
As the Bible tells us, as Jesus is on the cross he states that he is thirsty. A Roman soldier dips a sponge/rag in a vat of vinegar and has Jesus drink from it. Many people take this as yet another example of the insults that Jesus endured through his suffering. I think there is something more to this however. Perhaps an arranged method of escape
What are everyone else's opinions
Conjecture. Your premise has value in an entertainment sense, tho.
I am inclined towards taking Jesus stories as myths.
I highly recommend this book. Lots of insite into the person of Jesus. Does a good job of explaining why we still talk about him today.
Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth is a book by Iranian-American writer and scholar Reza Aslan. Wikipedia
As far as Jesus being condemned to death and hung on a cross to die, I am confident that that was the Roman method of execution at the time. A very slow and painful death. My understating is once they put you up on the cross they didn’t allow the corpse to be taken down. It was to set an example. [en.wikipedia.org]
On the other hand, there have been articles about Jesus asking for water and had been slipped him a Micky. This supposedly render him unconscious, so he appeared to be dead and they paid the guards to take his body down. This is speculation, but it sounds good to me. The rest of the story is that he escaped to India where he is buried with a famous monk.
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that Jesus was hung on a stake rather than a cross. After I got out I did quite a bit of research on this subject and it became apparent that the Romans used crucifixion as a punishment for treason and most scholars believe that he was crucified. I’m however, one of those folks that really doubts that he ever existed. So my opinion is that if he existed and was killed by the Romans it was probably by crucifixion but otherwise it’s all myth.
the roman tax rolls show no mention of jo, mary or little j. horus on the other hand.....
This is an area of Roman history and a lot is known. Romans had several methods of executions and 3 were used for those that were considered a threat to the empire. Those were burning, throwing to wild animals and crucifixion. They were meant to send a message of fear that dismemberment of the body would keep one from an afterlife. In 75 ACE the number of Jews crucified stretched to the horizon. One was to left on the cross for the animals to pick their bodies clean. An aside, nails were not put in the hands (like comes up in stigmata or on crucifixes) but through the wrists. Bodies were not taken and certainly the very few who had crypts would not give away their final resting place to a rabble rouser.
I have studied theology for 30+ years and have never met a serious theologian who would argue about the crucifixion, only the details. Christianity is full of so many blaring contradictions, that looking for new ones without evidence is self defeating. The biggest problem for the ministers are how do they tell their flocks what they were taught. That there was No Moses, No Exodus, No King Solomon or David.
Crucifixion was a political statement. Warning others what will happen if you seek to raise someone to Caesar's exalted position of a God.
The bodies were left on the cross so the birds could feed on them for weeks. The horror show was on going. There are controversies surrounding the taking down of the body and the empty tomb by scriptural critics alone as the details are contradicted in major details as laid out by Bart Ehrman, a leading theologian & New Testament critic/atheist. Serious theologians have criticized the narrative of his last words, the sponge of vinegar . . . And Christians having allowed the faith to blind them to theology and how it has updated the picture big time in just the last 50 years.
Jesus was nailed, as opposed to tied onto the cross, a specific form of execution reserved by the Roman's for political prisoners, specifically prisoners who opposed the authority of Rome. This is unambiguous to historians why have studied the Roman Empire, it is also evidence that the stuff in the New Testament about Jesus having nothing against Rome was pure political propaganda, aimed at placating the Roman's, propaganda which took around two hundred years before the Roman's would buy into it incidentally.