Christianity
The Crucifixion 4
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: 28 October 1998, Thursday, 07 August 2003
Abstract
The Passion
The treatment of Jesus during the so-called Passion begins to look much like an apotropaeic ritual with Jesus as the pharmakos victim. It is presented as history, but has so many elements of the pharmakos ritual that it is hard to imagine that people at the time would not have seen it as one, or mythically symbolic of it. Jesus had a special meal, was dressed in finery, was scourged, was reviled, was led from the city to a place beyond its walls, and there killed. John Dominic Crossan claims the story has been deliberately influenced by the Jewish scapegoat ritual. Jesus is even selected from two identical victims, just like the goats, Jesus, the son of God, and Jesus Barabbas, which means Jesus, the son of God. Crossan thinks it appeared most completely in the Gospel of Peter which Mark and the other evangelists used as a source. The Epistle of Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Tertillian and Origen all draw the same parallel. Indeed, Origen in Contra Celsus, draws the parallel with the pharmakos victim in general:
Jesus, who had been recently crucified, voluntarily died for humanity, like those who died for their fatherland, to evert plague epidemics, famines and shipwreacks.
In Euripides’s Bacchae Dionysus says to Pentheus:
Alone you bear the burden of the city.
Later Pentheus is stoned to death and E R Dodds has suggested that he too was a pharmakos. Curiously, Gregory of Nazianus (329-389) says of Jesus:
Alone you bear the burden of human nature.A Tuilier, cited by McLean
S Paul is fond of using expressions that were best known in connexion with the pharmakoi, and in Galatians 3:13, he declares Christ to have been a pharmakos:
Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.
Paul justifies his conclusion that Christ was accursed because he was hung on a tree, and the law (Dt 21:22-23) declares a hanged man to be accursed. The Temple Scroll from Qumran is clear that such a man is hanged to death and not merely hanged after death, so it fits Jesus.
Justin Martyr takes this to be the correct interpretation:
The Father of the universe purposed that His own son Christ should receive on himself the curses of all, in the place of men of every race.
And nearly all modern Christian scholars accept it:
Jesus… died on the cross as a substitute for the sins of the many.J Jeremias
We went free while he was considered accursed.A T Robertson
Perhaps most important of all is what Caiaphas, the Jewish High Priest says, according to the New Testament:
If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation. And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not. And this spake he not of himself: but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation.John 11:48-51
There is no knowing whether this is historical or not, but it certainly expresses the author’s intention of showing that Jesus was meant to be a pharmakos of the Jews. It might be part of the intention of the author to smear the Jews, or Jesus could more readily have been a pharmakos for the Romans who had suffered a defeat and wanted to ensure any curse that had led to it had been lifted. An excellent way was to kill the man who caused the defeat. Since Pilate and Caiaphas had ruled together for some time and evidently got on together, both might have been true, each of the leaders calling for the apotropaeic death of a criminal to lift the curse he had brought down on to each of their constituents.
Crucifixion Parallels
Christians who see clearly enough the significance of the similarity of ritual details from other societies that look like details of the crucifixion story, have invented the word “parallelomania” to disparage it. No one should be deterred, especially when societies have plain points of contact when ceremonies could have been passed from one to the other.
Though human sacrifice was made illegal in the Roman republic in 97 BC, it seems to have continued till later, particularly associated with the military. In many places in Roman Britain for example human skulls or skeletons are found with the bones of sacrificed animals at the sites of temples or shrines. They might have been people who died naturally though it seems unlikely that a ready made corpse would be thought to propitiate the curse rather than a sacrificial victim. More probably they were criminals who had been sentenced to capital punishment and so were used to double up as a pharmakos.
Was the custom of the exchange of the criminal referred to in the gospel accounts a reference to the sacrifice of a condemned criminal at Passover by Jews or Romans alongside the traditional Jewish sacrifice of a lamb? In troubled times was a symbolic “bar Abbas” chosen from among the condemned, dressed as a king and sacrificed? Caiaphas said it was expedient for a man to be sacrificed for the good of the nation. This sounds like an apotropaeic purpose.
The mockery of Jesus by the Roman soldiers who dressed him in robes and crowned him with thorns prior to his crucifixion was plainly some such ritual—Jesus might have been a pharmakos victim in fact. The Roman legionaries cannot have been too pleased to have lost a battle, to have endured a forced march of 60 miles uphill with their heavy packs, then to have had to fight a band of religious fanatics to free Jerusalem of the rebels. Pilate turned over the leader of the gang of rebels to the soldiers for them to free their legions of the curse they must have had.
In the Roman Saturnalia, slaves are freed and are treated as Lords by their masters. Here the soldiers mock Jesus with this sort of treatment. He is elevated to the mock position of a king to ridicule what, to Roman eyes, seemed his pretentious claims. The Saturnalia probably involved some such ceremony (or play) because it is reminiscent of a similar ceremony from Babylonia called the Sacaea which might have entered Roman culture along with the eastern mystery religions. In the Babylonian Sacaea, the substitute was dressed in fine robes to represent the prince, a crown was put on his head, he was scourged and finally hanged or crucified—just as Jesus was!
Could the time of year have been Saturnalia when the soldiers mocked Jesus? The festival of Saturnalia began on December 19 and lasted a week. Since the events depicted in Mark take place in spring there seems no connexion. But the Roman new year originally fell in spring, and Saturnalia would then have been held at about the same time as the Jewish Passover. Some communities retained, at least partially, the earlier festival, and the period of celebration of Saturnalia eventually extended over the whole period from December to March. The modern day relic of the Saturnalia, Christmas aside, is the European tradition of the Carnival (Fasching in Germany) which begins at Epiphany and ends at Easter. Christianity, as was its wont, took over the extended Saturnalia and made it into Carnival. Thus, for the Roman soldiers the mockery of Jesus might have been their bit of Saturnalia fun, allowing them to get their own back on the man who had caused them some trouble. Alternatively they might have simply used Saturnalian practices to mock the man as a false king whether or not it was actually Saturnalia, as a pharmakos.
However, the scene as described in Mark and echoed in Matthew is a private scene. Jesus is turned over to the soldiers who lead him away to some part of the palace—probably meaning the Antonia fortress. There they abuse him but who would have seen it to report it. It is highly unlikely that the soldiers would have told Jews. They simply would not have been on good enough terms with the Jews—they treated them with contempt, as Josephus shows us on another occasion, describing one legionary as peeing onto the Jews below from the height of the temple portico. After a forced march and a battle they would certainly not have been friendly. Furthermore it is at least doubtful that the paraphernalia of the mocking—the thorns for the crown and the reed—would be readily at hand in a fortress in the centre of a city.
Much scholarly opinion is that the passage in Mark is an insertion and Luke choses to omit it, but it is hard to believe that Mark, who is careful to put Romans in a generally good light, will have a cohort of them mistreating a god—even if he felt soldiers were louts—unless it represented some sort of standard practice that no Roman would be surprised at. It seems it was! Exactly the same is recorded of the legionaries stationed at the frontier post of Durostorum in the Balkans who at Saturnalia treated another mock king to identical indignities. One has to conclude that it is genuine tradition which Mark could not leave out. And since the scourging and mockery recalls the treatment of the suffering servant in Isaiah, he had good reason to put it in. It could not therefore have been a private affair. There seems no reason why it should have been—the Romans were trying to make an example of Jesus and his followers and had every reason for mocking him publicly.
In John, Jesus is publicly paraded in his mock regal attire and Pilate, behaving in character, jeeringly declares: “Ecce homo!” “Behold the man!” If this is genuine Pilate had an unusual interest in Jewish beliefs because he is quoting Zechariah 6:12-13 where God’s message is:
Behold the man whose name is The Branch; and he shall grow up out of his place, and he shall build the temple of the Lord: Even he shall build the temple of the Lord; and he shall bear the glory, and shall sit and rule upon his throne; and he shall be a priest upon his throne: and the counsel of peace shall be between them both.
Possibly Pilate had been advised of this passage by the priests and was being appropriately sarcastic.
This bit of Roman fun seems to have become quickly well known because a few years later, in 40 AD, Philo reports the Jews of Alexandria, a town with a large expatriate Jewish population, mocking the Roman puppet Agrippa I who had just been appointed king of the Jews by the mad Emperor Caligula. They dressed up an old Jewish simpleton in mock finery, gave him a sceptre and a purple robe and hailed him as Karabbas and Maris, pretending to make obeisance to him as the king of the Jews. Maris signified a king.
Why though did they call the mock Agrippa, Karabbas? Was it a badly remembered version of Barabbas, or a deliberate pun on Barabbas. Was this another example of the old custom revived or was it a demonstration by orthodox Jews against the growing cult of the false god, Jesus Barabbas, The Christ? The Hebrew word gur, transliterated here as kar, pertains to a stranger or foreigner, with connotations of fear or dislike, but another word pronounced similarly means a fatted ram—probably the semitic word behind that used by John when he speaks of the lamb of God, a sacrificial lamb—and therefore means simply “fat”. It is easy to see how all of these could have been applied to Agrippa, a descendant of the hated Herod. They were saying:
Barabbas, Karabbas! Son of my father, fat foreigner of my father, more like.
Note that the number of troops mentioned in Mark is a cohort which is about 500. Whether this implies that the number of troops in Jerusalem was a cohort or whether this cohort guarded the Palace or whether this cohort was off-duty is anybody’s guess. More than a cohort will have come from Caesarea.
Finally, it seems unlikely that after the mockery they would have bothered clothing Jesus in his own clothes—such as they were—Essenes wore their clothes completely to rags. Part of the indignity of the punishment was to be hung up naked. Later in the story, when Jesus hangs on the cross, the soldiers divide his garments among themselves. They would surely have done so at the mockery when they stripped him to mock him showing that the scene is included to fulfil prophecy.
Even if the Romans did not intend the crucifixion as a human sacrifice, anyone who knew of the old custom must have seen it as just that. Thus, following ancient and largely superseded traditions, early Christians thought of Jesus’s crucifixion as sacrificial, or more correctly apotropaeic (1 Cor 15:3: “Christ died for our sins”). Paul’s teaching of Christ crucified was central to the success of the evangelist in the world of the gentiles. The followers of Jesus were able to convince themselves that their hero had died as a human victim, a sacrifice like the the paschal Lamb, and an atonement like the Levitical goat—it was God’s will. The dead Christ became more important than the live one almost as soon as the death occurred and certainly by the time Paul had taken it to the gentiles.
The piercing of Barabbas’s side by the lance of the soldier testing whether he was still alive also ties in with ancient sacrificial custom. Strabo records that the early Albanians offered a human sacrifice to the moon goddess by piercing his side with a sacred spear. Similarly the sacrifices at Salamis, Odin where the victim was hung on a tree before being pierced, and in the worship of Mithras where the bull as Mithras incarnate was pierced in the side by a spear or dagger.
Most of the eastern religions of the Roman Empire had an incarnate god who died as a divine sacrifice and returned to life. It was a sine qua non of a decent religion! But here was something really novel—this one actually happened! And similarly most gods of the time ascended into Heaven. Adonis, Dionysus, Hercules, Hyacinth, Krishna and Mithras were among those who so ascended usually in full view for the benefit of their followers. And so did the epitome of Old Testament prophets, Elijah. The Christian God could do no less!
Origin of the Easter Crucifixion of the Gods
The theme of a divine or semi-divine being sacrificed often against a tree, pole or cross, and then being resurrected, is common in pagan mythology. It was found in the mythologies of all western civilizations stretching from as far west as Ireland and as far east as India. It is certainly found in the mythologies of Osiris and Attis, both of whom were often identified with Tammuz. Osiris is depicted with his arms stretched out on a tree like Jesus on the cross. This tree was shown in the same shape as the Christian cross.
At the vernal equinox in spring, pagans in northern Israel celebrated the death and resurrection of Tammuz as even the bible confesses. In Asia Minor, where the earliest Christian churches were set up, a similar celebration was held for Attis. Attis was shown dying against a pine tree, being buried in a cave and then being resurrected on the third day. Is this where the Christian story of Jesus’s resurrection comes from?
The doctrine of salvation by crucifixion, like most ancient forms of religious faith, had an astronomical origin. People were saved by the sun’s crossing (crucifixion) of the equinoctial line into the season of spring, giving out its saving heat and light to the world and stimulating animal and vegetable life to grow. The ancients would carve or paint sexual organs on the walls of their holy temples with this regeneration in mind. The blood of the grape, which was ripened by the heat of the sun, as he was crucified, as he crossed over by resurrection into spring, was symbolically “the blood of the cross”, or “the blood of the Lamb”.
Passover occurs in the spring at the pagan Easter festivals because it had the same origin. Then to distinguish the Jewish festival from pagan festivals, the priests and sages returning from exile deliberately changed Pesach customs. Pagans believed that when their nature god, Tammuz, Osiris or Attis, died and was resurrected, his resurrection revivified nature to permit another cycle of vegetation. The plants would grow again. The bread made from the spring harvest was his new body and the wine from the grape harvest was his new blood, symbols of the hope for good harvests.
In Judaism, the bread of the cereal god was changed into the poor man’s bread which the Jews ate before leaving Egypt, a memorial of the nation’s plight. Instead of telling stories about Baal sacrificing his first born son to the god of death, the Jews told how the angel of death slew the first born sons of the Egyptians. The pagans ate eggs to represent the resurrection and rebirth of their nature god, but the egg on the seder plate represents the rebirth of the Jewish people escaping captivity in Egypt.
The Jewish changes, arguably a conceptual advance, were parallelled by changes in the worship of all the corn gods. Urban swellers were not interested in corn and all of the vegetative gods metamorphosed into spiritual gods. The mystery religions promised their initiates spritual life though they began promising good harvests. Jews were initiated by circumcision at eight days old and their customs became a ritual of national identity rather than a shamanistic and bloody fertility cult.
Christians however came full circle and returned to pagan interpretations. The last supper of Jesus, thought to have been a seder, was reinstituted to the last supper of Tammuz commemorated at the vernal equinox. The bread and wine once again became the body and blood of a god, now Jesus. Eggs were again eaten to commemorate the resurrection of a god and also the rebirth obtained by accepting the sacrifice of his life.
So, Jesus Barabbas was executed on the eve of Passover, the vernal equinox, considered important by astrologers as the crossing of the two celestial great circles, the celestial equator and the path of the sun, and this was symbolized by a cross. To die at the vernal equinox was metaphorically to die on the cross.
The centre of astrological superstition in the Roman Empire was the city of Tarsus in Cilicia—the home of the apostle Paul. Early Christians familiar with astrology will have thought the crucifixion was really the celestial event mythologised, as it was for most religions, and and added celestial allusions they thought had been omitted. An early Christian document, the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles or Didache, has the astronomical sign of a cross in the sky as a symbol of Jesus but no mention of an actual crucifixion. It seems the historic crucifixion of the Essene leader was given mythical attributes and forgotten. Either that or it was always mythical!
Conclusion
The Indian chief Red Jacket is reported to have replied to the Christian missionaries:
Brethren, if you white men murdered the son of the Great Spirit, we Indians have nothing to do with it, and it is none of our affair. If he had come among us, we would not have killed him. We would have treated him well. You must make amends for that crime yourselves.
This view of the crucifixion, from the viewpoint of a people regarded as savage, is more sensible and rational than that of Christians, who make it meritorious and a moral necessity. If the act were a moral necessity then Judas as well as Jesus was a saviour, because without him in the Christian story the act which saved the world could not have happened. If it was necessary for Christ to suffer death upon the cross as an atonement for sin, then the act of crucifixion was right, and a monument should be erected to the memory of Judas for bringing it about. Only Christian logic can find a flaw in this argument. They say that even though it was God’s fore-ordained plan, Judas could only have played his part because he was wicked! So the Christians finish up believing that the means justify the end, because their own Father would use a wicked man to achieve the salvation of the world. It is hardly any surprise that the Christian world remains so wicked despite being saved.
