This is a continuation of a conversation that started in this thread:
https://www.interfaith.org/community/threads/20095/
To @badger, I apologize for bogging down your writing thread with my discussion.
Badger said:
Hi……. Josephus saved three friends who were taken down from their crosses and given treatment, one of them lived. We don’t know how long these three men were up on crosses before salvation which is a difficulty, but Jesus had only been on the cross a few hours….. convicts could often survive and keep themselves alive up to three days, the whole idea of the punishment…a slow self torturing death in the most shameful way possible because the stripped body would continue to excrete in various ways. The Christian depiction of a fairly clean European Jesus in loincloth being crucified is far from the true picture.
For your info:-
Josephus (b. 37 C.E.) is our best literary source for the practice of crucifixion in Palestine during the Greco-Roman period. As a general in command of the Jewish forces of Galilee in the Great Revolt against Rome (66-73 C.E.), he reports his attempts to save the lives of three crucified captives by appealing directly to the Roman general Titus. One survived the cross under a physician’s care, the other two could not be saved.
Life 76
And when I was sent by Titus Caesar with Cerealins, and a thousand horsemen, to a certain village called Thecoa, in order to know whether it were a place fit for a camp, as I came back, I saw many captives crucified, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintance. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physician’s hands, while the third recovered.
I am aware that one can be saved from crucifixion before death. It’s someone coming back 3 days after they died that I am skeptical of.
Personally, I doubt that there is any truth to that part of the story. I don’t think it references any natural phenomenon. I think it’s more likely to be an element of later folklore, probably exaggerating Jesus going into Heaven since the earliest account of a supposed resurrection was written several decades after Jesus died (by an anonymous author who likely never met him) and that sort of exaggeration is common with orally transmitted legends.
An exaggeration of legend seems, to me, certainly more plausible than someone coming back from the dead or any of the other proposed naturalistic explanations. For instance, Jesus was not saved from the cross by anyone in any account. On the contrary, he is consistently portrayed to have died on the cross and to have had his side pierced by a spear to prove it. I don’t think he would have survived such a crucifixion.
(Discussion in ‘Ancient History and Mythology‘ started by Ella S., Apr 8, 2022)
Follow thread