Crucifixion

#Introduction

I’m going to talk about the phenomenon of crucifixion, and I want to tell you how I first got started with this some three or four years ago.

A physician living in the eastern United States wrote an article on crucifixion and submitted it to an organization at BYU called FARMS. FARMS didn’t have anyone on staff with a medical background, but I was friends with a couple of people there, so they asked me to review the article. That review turned out to be a very important experience for me — a chance to really learn about crucifixion. The article was well researched, thorough, and thoughtfully written, and I want to bring that learning to you today, because I hope to give you an insight into the crucifixion that you will never forget. I want you to be forevermore horrified by the act of crucifixion.

Let me say in advance: we have no idea what Christ was suffering on the cross. We tend to think that all of the agony of Gethsemane simply carried over onto the cross — that He wasn’t “just” suffering physically. What I’m going to describe is the physical suffering that crucifixion itself produces, but we have no real idea what Christ experienced. It would be almost sacrilegious of me to claim I could tell you exactly what He went through, because He experienced what I’ll describe here — and then, inexplicably, much, much more than I could ever convey. But what I can tell you about is something worth understanding fully, and that’s what I want to walk through with you.

#The Cruelty of Crucifixion

The philosopher Cicero called crucifixion “the most cruel and atrocious of punishments.” We tend to imagine that when a person was crucified, some terrible things were done to them — nails driven in, hung up on a cross — and that they simply sat there and died of dehydration or exposure. That’s the common notion, but it doesn’t reflect the reality, because we don’t truly understand crucifixion. Cicero did understand it, and it’s telling that he described it in those terms.

The practice was first developed by the Persians, who were noted for their mastery of torture, but it was the Romans who perfected it and turned it into a true art. They refined it to the point that everyone crucified by Rome suffered a consistently cruel torture and death. Crucifixion was reserved only for the vilest of criminals — Roman citizens condemned to capital punishment were not subjected to it. Only the worst offenders received crucifixion.

#The Cross Itself

The cross always consisted of two separate pieces. Some secular Christian art depicts Christ carrying a single, complete cross on His back, but that never happened — the cross was always in two parts.

The first piece was called the stipes crucis (from the Latin stipes, meaning stake, and crucis, of the cross) — the vertical piece. This was a substantial beam of wood, something we might picture as an eight-by-eight or twelve-by-twelve post, set permanently into the ground at the site of execution. It stayed there. The beam extended above ground either eight or twelve feet. The standard crucifixion cross stood eight feet high, which let the Romans work at eye level. When they wanted to make a particular public spectacle of an individual, they used a twelve-foot cross instead, raising the victim higher so everyone could see. We don’t actually know which height was used for Christ’s crucifixion, but the stipes crucis was always the fixed, vertical beam that remained at the site.

The second piece was called the patibulum — the horizontal crossbeam.

#Flogging and Preparation

Before crucifixion, the Romans virtually always subjected the condemned to a weakening process: flogging. This was carried out by a team of five Roman soldiers. The leader of the group was a centurion — a Roman officer — but in this specific role he was called the exactor mortis, roughly “the exactor of death.” With him were four infantrymen called the quaternion. All five were responsible for carrying out a crucifixion and were required to remain at the site until the victim died.

Two of the five acted as lictors, the ones who carried out the flogging. The whip was typically made of leather but fitted with sharp objects at the tips — bone fragments, metal — to tear the flesh. Jewish law forbade more than forty lashes, so in practice the count was kept to thirty-nine to be safe; Roman law, by contrast, sometimes permitted up to one hundred. We don’t know exactly how many lashes Christ received, but it was most likely thirty-nine, given the Jewish context of His trial.

After the flogging, the victim’s arms were strapped to the patibulum — a heavy beam roughly six feet long — and he was forced to carry this crossbeam to the site of execution. On arrival, the patibulum was laid on the ground, the victim placed on top of it with arms outstretched, and nails driven through the wrists at the base of the hand. The Romans almost always used nails rather than rope or straps, and used them on both hands and feet.

Once nailed to the patibulum, the victim was lifted to standing, and two of the soldiers raised the crossbeam and set it in place — usually resting in a notch atop the vertical stipes crucis. Because of this, most crosses were not true crosses in shape but T-shaped. In some cases, a groove cut into the stipes crucis allowed the patibulum to slot in, producing a true cross shape, but most executions used the notch-and-rest method, producing the T form.

The victim now hung by the arms. The feet were then nailed to the vertical beam, a large nail driven through the top of each foot (the dorsum), with the feet turned back on themselves.

#The Physiology of Breathing

To understand why crucifixion killed as it did, it helps to understand basic respiratory physiology.

There are two mechanisms by which we inhale. The first involves the diaphragm — a thin sheet of muscle that sits horizontally in the chest, attached around the lower ribs, forming a partition between chest and abdomen. At rest it bulges upward; when it contracts, it flattens, creating a vacuum above it that draws air into the lungs. The second mechanism is the expansion of the rib cage itself: muscles pull the ribs outward, expanding the chest cavity. A deep breath uses both — the chest expands and the diaphragm flattens simultaneously.

Exhaling, by contrast, is largely a passive process. The muscles simply relax: the chest returns to its resting position, the diaphragm relaxes back into its upward bulge (helped by the abdominal muscles pushing it back), and the lungs have some natural elastic recoil. Breathing out, in other words, requires no active effort — you simply relax.

#Suffocation on the Cross

Here is what has been observed physiologically in a person hanging by their hands with their full body weight borne by the arms: they begin almost immediately to struggle for air, unable to achieve adequate gas exchange, and their blood oxygen level starts to fall.

The reason is this: when a person hangs by the arms, the pain and position pull the chest into a fully expanded, inspiratory position — as though a full breath has already been taken in, without any effort. At the same time, gravity pulls the diaphragm downward and flat. The result is that the person is, in effect, stuck at full inhalation. The only way to exchange any air at all is to reverse the normal breathing process — to actively force air out using the abdominal muscles to push the diaphragm back up, so that a fresh breath can then come in automatically. But this is an extremely inefficient way to move air.

Because of this, anyone hanging by the arms begins almost immediately to suffer oxygen deprivation, while carbon dioxide builds up in the blood — a condition known as respiratory acidosis. The victim begins to feel they are suffocating, which triggers panic and terror, much like drowning.

The only way to relieve this on the cross was to push up on the nails through the feet, straightening the legs and taking the weight off the arms so that a fuller breath could be drawn. But the Romans deliberately positioned the feet and legs so the knees could never fully lock — the victim could gain temporary relief only by keeping the thigh muscles continuously flexed. Those muscles would rapidly fatigue and cramp, forcing the victim to sag back down onto the arms and resume suffocating. This cycle — pushing up to breathe, then collapsing back down — would repeat again and again.

An experienced Roman centurion could judge how close to death a victim was simply by watching this cycle. Once a victim no longer had the strength to push up and stand on the nails, the centurion knew death was near. If the Romans wanted to hasten the process, they would break the victim’s legs with a mallet. With the legs broken, the victim could no longer push up to breathe and would suffocate almost immediately.

That, in essence, is the mechanism of death by crucifixion.

#Discussion and Questions

Were Christ’s legs broken? No — because He had already died. That part of the ritual (breaking the legs) was reserved for hastening death in those who were taking too long.

Why was flogging always part of the process? It seems to have been a deliberately debilitating step. A man crucified at full strength could otherwise survive for days, since he would have the strength to keep pushing himself up to breathe. It was, in that sense, a prolonged death struggle. There was also, according to the source article, a practice of striking victims hard beneath both arms, which may have hastened death, though the exact mechanism isn’t entirely clear.

The final confirmation of death. The Romans had a set routine to confirm death: a soldier would take a spear and stab the victim in the right side, beneath the ribs, angling upward toward the heart to puncture it and guarantee death. Only after this was the victim taken down from the cross.

Did Christ die of a ruptured heart? This is a theory sometimes attributed to James E. Talmage, but it’s unlikely from a medical standpoint. It’s more probable that Christ died before the final spear wound was administered, and that the ultimate cause of death was the cumulative effect of the suffocation process described above — not a spontaneous cardiac rupture.

Were some people crucified upside down? Tradition holds that Peter asked to be crucified upside down. Physiologically, though, it’s hard to see how the same suffocation mechanism would apply in that position — death upside down would more likely have come from exposure over a longer period, since the mechanics of breathing would work differently. There were, in fact, many variations of crucifixion. Some crosses included a small seat, called the sedile, allowing the victim to sit and prolong the ordeal — sometimes over days or even a week — with death eventually coming from exposure and dehydration rather than suffocation. But the Roman method used on Christ appears to have been the standard, efficient form described above.

Did Christ choose the moment of His death? It seems there was a divinely appointed measure of suffering He was to endure — not more, not less — and that He was given to know when it was finished. There was an element of will involved in the final act of giving up His life: He said, “It is finished,” and stopped striving to push Himself up to breathe, and so He died. This doesn’t mean He was incapable of enduring more; rather, He appears to have voluntarily suspended His divine power and submitted Himself to the process as a mortal man would, just as He submitted to the whole of His mortal experience. He could, as He Himself said, have called on legions of angels to rescue Him — but He chose instead to submit fully to the cross.