49 Fun Facts About The Crucifixion

Which prisoner did the crowd ask the Roman governor to release instead of Jesus?

Barabbas was in prison over a deadly uprising, Mark says. The gospels describe a Passover custom of freeing one prisoner of the crowd's choosing, and the crowd shouted for him.

What is the name of the site outside Jerusalem's walls where the gospels say Jesus was crucified?

Golgotha is never called a hill in the four gospels: the 'Mount Calvary' of English hymns comes from later Christian tradition.

The name of the crucifixion site, in both its Aramaic and Latin forms, means what?

Place of a skull is the gospels' own translation, and nobody is sure why. One old legend said Adam's skull lay buried on the spot, which is why many crucifixes show a skull at the foot of the cross.

Which man was compelled by the Roman soldiers to carry Jesus's cross?

Simon of Cyrene was a passer-by coming in from the country, Mark says. The gospel also names his sons, Alexander and Rufus, which scholars take as a sign that its first readers knew the family.

Three gospels say which object in the Jerusalem Temple was torn in two at the crucifixion?

The sanctuary curtain closed off the Holy of Holies, which only the high priest entered, once a year. Two gospels have it rip from top to bottom, and Christians came to read the tear as the way to God thrown open.

Mark's gospel, which has Jesus die at about three in the afternoon, says he was crucified at what time?

9 a.m. is Mark's 'third hour', counted from sunrise, and no other gospel times the nailing. John's clock even disagrees: he has the governor still passing sentence at about the sixth hour, around noon.

What was Jesus offered to drink before being crucified, according to the gospels?

Wine mixed with myrrh or gall blends two gospels' wordings of one cup. It is usually read as a merciful Jerusalem custom, a drugged draught to dull the pain of the condemned, and Jesus refused it.

According to John's gospel, the soldiers cast lots for which item of Jesus's clothing?

His seamless robe was woven in one piece from top to bottom, so the four soldiers, who had split his other clothes into a share each, agreed to gamble for it rather than tear it.

INRI on crucifixes abbreviates a Latin phrase meaning what?

Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews is the charge John says was fixed above the cross. The other three gospels quote shorter wordings, so only his supplies all four Latin initials.

In John's gospel, how did Pilate answer the chief priests' final complaint?

'What I have written, I have written' ended the argument: the priests wanted the sign on the cross reworded to say Jesus had only claimed the title, and the governor would not alter it.

In which gospel does one crucified thief rebuke the other and ask Jesus to remember him?

Luke alone tells it: the man is promised paradise that very day, whereas two of the other gospels say both men crucified beside Jesus joined in the mockery.

What name did later Christian tradition give to the penitent thief crucified beside Jesus?

Dismas is the name the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus gave him. An Arabic infancy gospel instead calls him Titus, a robber who decades earlier paid his partner forty drachmas to let the Holy Family pass unharmed.

Which saying does John's gospel give as Jesus's last words from the cross?

It is finished is a single word in John's Greek, tetelestai. Another gospel ends instead on 'into your hands I commit my spirit', and tradition stitched the four accounts into seven last sayings.

The cry 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' quotes which Old Testament book?

Psalms: the cry opens Psalm 22, a lament whose speaker is mocked by onlookers while his clothes are divided by lot, details the gospel writers echo in their own accounts.

Bystanders hearing Jesus cry 'Eli, Eli' thought he was calling on which prophet?

Elijah had been swept up to heaven alive in the Hebrew Bible, and his return was awaited. By Mark's account one bystander said, 'Let's see whether Elijah comes to take him down.'

For about three hours during the crucifixion, the synoptic gospels say what came over the whole land?

Darkness of that kind cannot have been an ordinary solar eclipse, as a Christian writer was already arguing in the 3rd century: Passover falls at full moon, when the moon is on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun.

Which gospel alone mentions an earthquake and the raising of saints at the moment of Jesus's death?

Matthew alone reports the quake, which splits rocks and opens tombs. He is also the only evangelist to post a guard at Jesus's tomb, set there, he says, in case the disciples stole the body.

Why did Roman soldiers break the legs of the two men crucified beside Jesus?

To hasten death, John says: the bodies had to come down before the Sabbath began. Finding Jesus already dead, the soldiers left his legs unbroken.

Extra-biblical tradition gives what name to the soldier who pierced Jesus's side with a spear?

Longinus appears nowhere in the Bible: the name comes from apocryphal writings. Medieval legend then turned the executioner into a convert who gave up soldiering, lived as a monk and died a martyr.

Legend later claimed the spear-bearing soldier had what affliction, cured by the blood that touched him?

Blindness entered the story centuries after the gospels. In the medieval Golden Legend, blood runs down the spear onto his hands, he touches his eyes and sees clearly, then leaves the army for a monk's life.

Which man asked Pilate for Jesus's body and laid it in a tomb, in all four gospels?

Joseph of Arimathea sat on the council that had condemned Jesus, though one gospel says he had not agreed to the verdict. Another says the tomb was a new one he had cut in the rock for himself.

Jesus was crucified during the reign of which Roman emperor?

Tiberius was emperor from AD 14 to 37, and a Roman historian places the execution in his reign. One gospel dates the start of John the Baptist's preaching to his fifteenth year, which is how scholars anchor the dates.

Which Roman historian, writing around AD 116, recorded that Pilate had executed Christ?

Tacitus mentions the execution in passing in his Annals, while describing how Nero blamed Rome's Christians for the great fire. He had no love for the new faith, calling it a 'most mischievous superstition'.

Which first-century writer is behind the disputed passage about Jesus known as the Testimonium Flavianum?

Josephus, in full Flavius Josephus, gives the passage its name. As it stands it flatly calls Jesus the Christ, so most scholars think Christian copyists touched up an authentic core.

Which holy book says Jesus was not crucified, though it was made to appear so?

The Quran says it in verse 4:157, and the next verse adds that God raised Jesus up to himself. Mainstream Islamic teaching therefore holds that he was taken up alive rather than dying on the cross.

A crucified man's bones found in Jerusalem in 1968 still had an iron nail through which part?

The heel kept its nail because the tip had bent, apparently on a knot in the wood, and could not be pulled out. His bone box named him Jehohanan, the first crucifixion victim archaeologists had ever identified.

Which Roman emperor abolished crucifixion across the empire?

Constantine had used the cross himself early in his reign, against slaves who informed on their masters. He later abolished it, ancient writers say, in honour of the death of Jesus.

After crushing Spartacus's revolt in 71 BC, Crassus lined which Roman road with 6,000 crucified rebels?

The Appian Way linked Rome with Capua, the city whose gladiator school the revolt had burst out of. An ancient historian says the captives were crucified along the whole road between the two.

Alexander is said to have crucified 2,000 survivors after besieging which Phoenician city in 332 BC?

Tyre stood on an island and held out for seven months, until Alexander built a causeway out to its walls. An ancient historian puts the men of fighting age crucified afterwards at no fewer than 2,000.

Which English word for unbearable pain comes from the Latin word for cross?

Excruciating comes from the Latin excruciare, 'to torture', built on cruciare, 'to crucify', and crux, 'cross': Rome's word for extreme torment was taken from its own method of execution.

A cross with its beam resting on top of the upright is named after which Greek letter?

Tau is the Greek T, and one early Christian letter already read it as a picture of the cross: since tau also stood for 300, the writer found the cross hidden in the 318 servants of Abraham.

Which long-taught cause of death in crucifixion did a 2023 medical review find no evidence for?

Suffocation is still the cause most articles give, but the review traced the theory to a form of torture unrelated to crucifixion and found no direct evidence for it. Shock and heart failure are among the rival explanations.

Which apostle is traditionally said to have been crucified upside down?

Peter chose it himself, in the old tradition: Origen, writing in the 3rd century, says he was crucified head downwards 'as he himself had desired'. Later tradition added that he felt unworthy to die as Jesus had.

In 1597, 26 Christians were crucified on a hill above which Japanese city?

Nagasaki's 26 were six foreign missionaries and twenty Japanese Christians, among them boys of twelve and thirteen. Arrested around Kyoto and Osaka, they were paraded overland to the port before being put to death.

The Alexamenos graffito of about AD 200, mocking a Christian, shows a crucified figure with which animal's head?

A donkey: the scrawled caption reads 'Alexamenos worships his god'. The taunt was a familiar one, for Tertullian, writing at about the same time, complains that pagans imagined the Christian god as an ass's head.

Rome's first Christian emperor ordered which church built on the traditional crucifixion site?

The Holy Sepulchre replaced a Roman temple that had been built over the spot. Around 326 the temple was torn down and the ground dug out, so that the tomb beneath could be uncovered.

Which mother of an emperor is credited with discovering the True Cross in Jerusalem around 326-328?

Helena, the story goes, dug up three crosses and told the true one apart when its touch healed a dying woman. The nails were then worked into her son's helmet and his horse's bridle.

The fourteen Stations of the Cross retrace Jesus's route along which Jerusalem street?

The Via Dolorosa, Latin for 'Sorrowful Way', was the pilgrims' route through Jerusalem. The stations began as copies of it, set up across Europe for people who could never reach the Holy Land.

Which religious order was granted the right in 1686 to erect Stations of the Cross inside its churches?

Franciscans had been the official guardians of the Holy Land's shrines since 1342, so the devotion grew up in their hands. Even when it was opened to every church in 1731, one of their friars still had to set the stations up.

Most German states mark Good Friday's solemnity by legally banning which activity?

Public dancing falls under the 'Tanzverbot', a ban most German states keep for days of mourning. Baden-Württemberg's runs from 6 p.m. on Maundy Thursday to 8 p.m. on Holy Saturday, though dancing at home stays legal.

Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece Crucifixion was painted for a monastery hospital treating which disease?

Ergotism, or St Anthony's fire, came from a fungus on rye and brought madness and gangrene. The monks treated sufferers with good bread, herbal salves and a holy wine, and the altarpiece stood in their hospital chapel.

Which Alsace city's Unterlinden Museum has housed the Isenheim Altarpiece since the 1800s?

Colmar, in eastern France, has shown it since 1852 in a former convent that local enthusiasts had just rescued as a museum. Until the Revolution it stood in a monastery chapel at Isenheim, 15 miles to the south.

Which Scottish city has owned Dalí's Christ of Saint John of the Cross since a controversial purchase in 1952?

Glasgow's museums director bought it, copyright included, for £8,200, well under the asking price. The outcry that followed won him a friend: Dalí so admired his defence of the picture that the two wrote to each other for years.

Dalí's Christ of Saint John of the Cross, painted without nails or thorns, views the crucifixion from where?

From above: Dalí had a Hollywood stuntman strapped to a gantry to model the pose, and took the plunging angle from a drawing by the 16th-century friar St John of the Cross, hence the title.

Mel Gibson's 2004 film The Passion of the Christ has dialogue entirely in which languages?

Aramaic, Hebrew and Latin were scripted by a Jesuit professor, who left Greek out altogether and used Latin in scenes where Greek might really have been spoken.

Anatomical arguments suggest the nails were driven where, rather than through the palms as in most art?

Just above the wrist, one argument runs, a nail would sit between the two forearm bones and hold a body without ropes. The Greek helps the case: the gospel word usually translated 'hand' can take in the wrist and forearm.

Besides the mocking crowd, which onlookers do all three synoptic gospels place at the crucifixion?

A centurion and several women are the witnesses all three name. The officer is moved to speak, calling Jesus God's son or, in one gospel, a righteous man, while the women watch from a distance.

In John's gospel, into whose care does the dying Jesus entrust his mother?

The beloved disciple is never named in the gospel, though tradition takes him to be John himself. Jesus tells his mother 'behold, your son', and from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

Which 2nd-century satirist mentioned Jesus' crucifixion in his letter The Passing of Peregrinus?

Lucian was mocking, not praising. His letter follows a charlatan who lives off credulous Christians, a sect he describes as still worshipping 'the man who was crucified in Palestine'.