Crucifixion, NOT fiction.

Christ's Passion is not just a topic for re-affirmation at Easter. Books denying it appear at all seasons. They are part of the campaign to disprove the earthly existence of Christ, something I refuted in my 'No Earthly Reason To Disbelieve' in Christian Courier, Nov. 13, 1998.

In that supreme Sixties silliness, The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross, John Allegro alleged that the crucifixion was merely a phallic symbol used by his supposed mushroom cultists--more an Allegro phallusy than Christian fallacy, I fancy. Now, thirty-something years on (1999), we have a cognate absurdity, The Christ Conspiracy, by an understandably obscure figure known only as Acharya S, in which the entire Christian story is dismissed as a fraud perpetrated by "the infamous church fathers, who were liars, forgers, and general psychotics whose brains were afflicted by the lead in Roman pipes." For good measure, there is also Ahmed Osman's The House Of The Messiah (1992), which relocates 1300 years back in time.

Between these extremes, there are such academic disbelievers as G.A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Christ (1982), and the late classical scholar and British politician J.Enoch Powell whose The Evolution of The Gospel (1994) asserts that Christ was not crucified but stoned to death by "the Jewish establishment of Jerusalem."

Non-Christian writers

All of this founders upon a single rock: the evidence of ancient non-Christian writers. The crucifixion is attested in the Slavonic (not the Greek) text of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus in his The Jewish War. Among other sources, he was able to quote a Temple inscription recording the event. Some commentators, without a shred of manuscript evidence, have attempted to banish these passages as Christian interpolations, a line of argument that owes more than they care to admit to the crude Marxist effort of Karl Kautsky's The Foundations Of Christianity. The authenticity of these Christian references is ably defended by the best twentieth-century Josephus scholar G.A. Williamson, in his Penguin translation of The Jewish War.

The case does not depend upon Josephus alone. The second-century Eastern Greek satirist Lucian mentions in a lampoon on the charlatan Peregrinus who had exploited the kindly generosity of the Christians that these latter worshipped "the crucified sophist." Lucian was emphatically not a friendly witness: his mockeries of Christianity earned him a reputation in Byzantium as the Anti-Christ and a place on the first edition of the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books.

As the poet W.H. Auden wrote in Friday 's Child (dedicated to the martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer), "By suffering in a public place/A death reserved for slaves," crucifixion was indeed a servile punishment. Their masters in Roman comedy are always threatening errant slaves with it. "Go hang on a cross" was their version of our "Go to hell." Convicted foreigners were also liable, which is why Jesus and Peter were crucified but not Paul, a Roman citizen.

Paintings

Crucifixion paintings from the Renaissance to Salvador Dali do not begin to convey its full horror, well described by Emile Male as "the abyss of suffering." For easy instance, putting a loin-cloth on Christ conceals the humiliation of public nudity. Michael Hengel sets out the grim details in his Crucifixion In The Ancient World (1977). The Romans intended it as a deterrent "so that others shall by the sight of it be deterred from the same crimes" (from their Digest of law-codes, 48.19.28.15). The 6000 followers of Spartacus, crucified along the Appian Way from Rome south to Capua, are the ultimate example--there were no more slave uprisings.

There were two methods of crucifixion: tying to the cross and nailing. The latter brought a quicker death, for obvious reasons: loss of blood and trauma leading to metabolic acidosis of the bloodstream from cramp, with death by suffocation rapidly following.

So, the New Testament account is quite credible, especially considering that Christ had been flogged to the point of flaying alive and had carried the cypress-wood crosspiece ('patibulum') of 75-125 lbs (roughly the weight of a bag of cement) along 700 yards of winding narrow streets from Pilate's judgement seat to Golgotha. Despite this, there have been perennial published claims that Christ merely fainted on the cross and was taken down and spirited away by his followers, even though Josephus says his body vanished from its tomb unseen by the 30 Romans and 1000 Jews guarding it.

Purveyors of such twaddle range from the Seventies sensationalist The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail by M. B Baignent/R.L.eigh/H.L.incoln to Australian feminist Barbara Thiering's Jesus The Man (1992--to compensate, she has Judas crucified after being cheated by Pilate!), to a 1992 article in the Journal of tire Royal College of Physicians by medicals Margaret and Trevor Lloyd who minimise the New Testament detail of the soldier's sword-thrust producing blood and water as merely pricking a bleb caused by the flogging. In fact, this will have been the coup de grace administered by a professional Roman legionary, the water coming either from lung or bladder.

When The Age, a respected Australian newspaper, averred some years ago that "the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth is a historical fact, authenticated by cross references," the choice of words was perhaps not the happiest; but it was on the right track.

What did He look like?

Reviewing an exhibition, Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ, in the London National Gallery, John Drury (Times Literary Supplement, March 24, 2000) observes "theologians may be above such a question, but for ordinary people it matters." In another essay (the London Sunday Times, April 3, 1994), art historian Waldemar Januszcak remarks, "There is no contemporary description of Christ. Nothing. We do not know if He was fat or thin, bearded or bald, handsome or ugly. And yet nine out of ten of us would recognise Him immediately in the street. Art has given Him a face."

To put it another way, did Christ at all resemble (say) Willem Dafoe, Jeffrey Hunter, Enrique Irazoqui, Robert Powell, or Max von Sydow, five of the actors who have played him on the screen? I shall here leave Out of account, since they remain sub judice, the Shroud of Turin, the Veil of Veronica, and the Mandylion of Edessa. Byzantine art and literature, even if they do not lead back to a guaranteed conclusion, provide a rich trail of clues as to how Christians from the fourth century on imagined Jesus.

Eusebius (Church History 7.18) mentions seeing coloured portraits of Christ, Peter, and Paul at Caesarea. Although providing no details, he thus confirms what ordinary people believed, also an early stage in the history of Christian iconography, which was to cause great controversy for several centuries.

A little later, the fiery Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis expostulated, "They paint the Saviour with long hair, and this by conjecture because He is called a Nazarene and Nazarenes wear long hair. These impostors invent things according to their whims. They represent Peter as an old man with hair and beard cut short, Paul with receding hair or bald, and the other apostles as cropped short."

This mention of long hair will transport older readers back into the Sixties, that decade of parents fretting over their childrens' tresses and of Jesus Christ Superstar. Fifth century ivories in the British Museum depict Christ as a stocky and clean-shaven Hercules; alternatively as a handsome Apollo. These were evidently designed to attract pagan patrons. Theodore Lector (Church History 1.15) knew that painters were known discreetly to represent Christ as Zeus for just that reason, adding that pictures of Him with short curls were more veracious than ones with hair parted away from the forehead.

The 82nd Canon of the Quinisext Council of 692 commanded that Christ should be depicted in human form rather than symbolically as often hitherto. It is no coincidence that this is in the period of Justinian II, the first emperor to put Christ on his coinage, using the bearded Zeus look that evolved into the standard Byzantine image of Christ the Pantokrator.

This was clearly an attempt to settle earlier disputes over His appearance. Because of Isaiah 52.14, "His visage was so marred more than any man," some early church fathers (Basil, Clement, Cyril) thought He was a short, plain man. Others preferred the Messiah of Psalm 44.3, "the most beautiful of the sons of men," for their more rapturous imaginings in which Christ is compared to the glorious face of Moses and the angelic looks of Stephen the Protomartyr.

A key text is the Letter to the Emperor Theophilus, written around 847 and attributed to John Damascene, reproduced almost verbatim in a ninth or tenth century manual for religious painters entitled On Bodily Characteristics by Ulpius the Roman.

This is a collection of notes on (as well as Christ) Adam, the prophets, Peter and Paul, and eleven church fathers. Ulpius and company were attempting to do for the great figures of Christianity what Byzantine chroniclers had done for Homeric heroes. There was a widespread mania for these identikit pictures.

Christ receives the fullest treatment and the only one that claims explicitly to be derived from ancient sources. The Greek adjectives are either very rare or also applied to other individuals in the Christian gallery; I have set out all the details in my 'Images of Christ and Byzantine Beliefs,' in the Italian journal Aevum 2 (1984), pp. 1448. Jesus's physical characteristics are: eyebrows that meet (likewise Peter and Paul); beautiful sharp eyes; prominent nose (also Paul, Basil, John Chrysostom, and Cyril); curly-haired (only Cyril of the others); stooping; fair (also Athanasius); black-bearded; wheat-coloured of visage, "taking after his mother" (Mary is so described in one other text); and long-fingered - this attribute perhaps influenced by descriptions of Mary as large-handed; she is also round-faced in a monster Greek adjective likewise applied to the prophet Malachai.

Januszczak closed his essay thus: "In the crucified Christ, art found a likeness that was overtly human, yet fully divine. This, truly, was a godsend." This does the Byzantines less than full justice. To want to know what Jesus looked like was a natural and legitimate desire. The trouble was, their biggest problem was also the most attractive feature about Christ. He wasn't 50 feet tall or three-headed or physically supernatural in any way; He was human."

Professor Barry Baldwin has lectured and published on early Christian history over the last 40 years. He is Emeritus Professor of Classics & Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.