live by the sword, die by the sword; live as a carpenter, die by nails & boards1

Looking for consistency in faith narratives, that way madness lies...

Woah, hold on there a minute. You mean to tell me the bible got something wrong?

Well this changes everything

Did you heard the one about Jesus going to the salon to have his nails done?

You have a picture of Jesus nailed and tied to the cross? Or have you seen drawings? (Sorry, had to!)

I could swear they did something on this years ago and found that nailing through the palms wouldn't support the weight of a human... You would have to nail through the wrists. Or through the palms and be tied.

This kind of smacks of wearing a belt and suspenders though... Not sure I could do that.

This is just arguing over dogma. Hell, there really isn't any proof in the historical record he ever existed. I was curious about this way back and did some digging. I earned there is no mention of him by any of the historical chroniclers of his supposed time. Nothing. He only shows up in religious documents approximately 200 years after he was supposed to have died. When you do some digging into the history of the Bible and the accepted image of Jesus you learn some interesting things.

...on the other hand, had the legend indicated that Jesus was stoned to death, those who genuflect would have to pummel themselves about the face and chest with closed fists.

~~ Disclaimer - can't take credit/fault for that one; not my original joke ~~

A stake is a phallic symbol. I think in light of Christian BS, a phallic symbol would be appropriate.

One thing paintings and depictions of a crucifixion seem to always get wrong is that persons who were crucified were stripped completely naked... no loin cloths were used.

I think you have a point with the "torture stake". The cross was probably adapted from earlier religious symbols from other religions, such as the Egyptian Ankh.

As for beign both tied and nailed, I think that is probably accurate, as they probably tied the limbs to be held in place, so they could drive nails into them. Also, if it was just a stake, then tying the hands at the wrists (tightly) to the stake would mean you could drive a nail through the hands without the body weight causing the nail to tear through them. If the hands (above the head) and feet were bound tightly to the stake, and then nails were driven into the hands and feet to limit movement, that would be very tortuous. The binding would also keep a person from pulling the hands and/or feet over the nail heads. If it were just nails a person may escape if they had a high enough pain tolerance by workggn their hands and feet past the nail heads.

Man, I have way too much time on my hands to think this through this far.

That is because actual scientific experiments (with cadavers) has established that nails alone would not support the body weight, they flesh would tear & cause the body to drop off. So they had to be through the wrists and/or ropes had to add support.

The symbolism of Protestant Christianity focuses on the cross whereas Catholic and Eastern Orthodox use the crucifix. Personally I don’t give any thought at all to any Christian symbolism, but the history of the use of crucifixion as a punishment by the Romans and others is quite a different matter, and would be an interesting subject to study.

Not too good on this subject but from around 40 CE Seneca the Younger gives this observation

"I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in many different ways: some have their victims with head down to the ground; some impale their private parts; others stretch out their arms on the gibbet."

Seneca, Dialogue "To Marcia on Consolation", in Moral Essays, 6.20.3, trans. John W. Basore, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946) 2:69

1. Crucification was more a public last torture than execution itself.
2. If you want to go to this kind of details of the narrative you need to look into the original text or someone that can explain the translation.
3. The gospels were written a lot of time by compiling the histories that people told and probably not by the guys who saw it (but by the followers of those guys). So it is natural that even if the original story was consistent (not necessarily true), after some times of spoken tradition of isolated groups, some differences arrise.

Howdy! I have done a bit of research on this and from what I found we simply do not know. We do know that it was a popular thing with the Romans. There was one foot found with a nail still in it otherwise it is all guess work.

Yes there’s controversy about that. But as far as I’m concerned there was no Jesus so it’s a moot point.

The Romans used to use the beam which formed your front door. They ripped that out so the family of the condemned was left without a house. I do not think they actually used cross beams, but tied (to prevent struggle) and then nailed hands above the head and legs below.
But my roman history is rusty . . .that is what I recall.

They tied them ... Christianity change it to nails but only to make his punishment more severe ... they like a good story to convert the population ..

How the Romans generally crucified people has long been a subject of speculation for historians. The best consensus at this time, seems to be that. The victim was hung from the cross by ropes around the arms, which caused extreme pain and difficulty breathing after a short while. So that nails were placed in as well, which meant that the victim could try to ease the discomfort of hanging by the arms, by putting some weight on to the nails and trying to move, which was in turn very painful of course. This kept the victim constantly squirming for as long as their strength lasted, and was seen therefore as part of the punishment. In any case it would not have been possible, simply to rope the victim to the cross, because the arms would have shrunk and slipped out as the blood drained from them. Later, it is thought it was common to puncture the victims side below the ribs, with say a spear, to let out the fluid which formed in the chest cavity. Which stopped the fluid choking the victim and therefore prolonged the suffering.

Some people have made the point that it was perhaps a stake and not a cross which was used, one explanation for this however is that it was both. The stake being a fixture, and the cross/cross bar being the part carried by the victim. This makes since since the crowd would not want to watch while holes were dug and stakes planted, but watching the victim being lifted or hoisted into place may well have been part of the entertainment.

There is of couse no certainy that it was always carried out in exactly the same way.

The cross as a symbol was used long before Christianity and as the early christians used many pagan symbols, feast days etc it is quite possible that they changed the stake for the cross.
I believe that JW's use the stake instead of the cross.

This was very important when I was a Jehovah's Witness. I think stake is correct (Greek stauros, if memory serves well). If so, I guess one hand had to be placed behind the other and a nail put hammered through the two of them. This would put more strain on the nail (poor nail!) than one nail per hand on a cross. Maybe that's why the hands were tied to the stake with a rope as well.

FWIW -- Yeshua (Jesus) was crucified Friday PM around 2 PM. He was then taken down for the Sabbath (guess what -- that was only 4 hours later). Sabbath (Saturday), or every day, begins at sun down -- the day begins in darkness. When they went to put him back on the cross (Sunday) -- remember Sat evening around 6 PM? -- he was gone. Not 3 whole days -- barely 30 hours. The whole story is predicated on magic number 3...

The word for hand in both Greek and Aramaic includes the wrist, but was translated simply as hand.
It was long since recognized that the hands were not capable of holding the weight of a body, so artist took to painting the wrists as ties and the hands pierced.
However in Latin the words are different and in the accounts of the followers of Spartacus and his followers it is clearly stated in the Roman history that they were nailed by the wrists and feet.
But of course in the minds of medieval theologians the Bible could not be "wrong" so hands it had to be.
Crucifixion was still being used as a method of execution as lates as the first world war and it was always wrists that were nailed.
Hence when the Shroud of Turin was faked during the renaissance the the image is shown as having been nailed through the wrists, because in the 15th and 16th century this was how people were still being crucified.

[en.wikipedia.org]

Never really noticed. It’s not of much interest to me.