I’ll speak about the pain of crucifixion. It was the worst possible way to die. Here is a little about what the body goes through while on the cross, in fact here is the whole procedure:
Sorry for sounding smart-alecky here, but I’ll let you in a little secret. Much of what we supposedly ‘know’ about crucifixion is actually 90-95% conjecture.
Do you know the only thing we know most likely happened across different crucifixions, the
one, single thing the various ancient accounts of crucifixion agree on? It’s that the person to be crucified was beaten or whipped first. That’s it, really. And they don’t even tell you the severity of this beating; the common ‘the person to be crucified would look like raw hamburger’ analogy is actually more based on both the Shroud of Turin (which itself is already a rather shaky piece of artifact to make definitive claims on) and a mish-mash of ancient texts describing scourgings, including which were not a prelude to crucifixion!
Everything else varied with the occasion and the whim of the executioners: so in some crucifixions, the victim apparently did
not carry a
patibulum (the crossbeam?); rather, the cross was already carried or set up in the place where he’d be hanged beforehand, and all the executioners had to do was to drag him there and put him up on it. We know that Jesus was nailed at least in His ‘hands’, and that the 1st-century crucifixion victim with the name of Yehohanan was nailed in his ankles, but it would seem that other crucified victims were just tied to their crosses. So even there you had variation.
There wasn’t even a set place for crucifixions: in some places, it would seem like people were crucified on especially-designated execution areas, but in others, they were crucified on the roadsides or even at the place where they were caught perpetrating the crime. The only thing consistent is that it should be a public area - basically where anyone can see the person hanging.
In fact, it was not the physical pain that made crucifixion horrible - it was more the shame. That’s why scourging was the (only) constant element of crucifixion: it wasn’t simply done to physically weaken the victim, it was also done to symbolically emasculate and shame him - to ‘depersonalize’ him, to make him ‘not human’. (From the ancient POV, ‘real’ human beings - real free men - are not crucified; only ‘subhumans’ are.) And it did not just shame the person hanging up on the cross, but also everyone associated with him. His family, his friends, his associates are also guilty by association.
It was not simply the physical torture of crucifixion, then, that made this death so despised. Rather, the public humiliation that went along with it made it all the more loathsome. Crucifixion played upon widely held ideals of masculinity. In the ancient context of Mark’s Gospel, it was thought appropriate and necessary or adult males to demonstrate prowess. Demonstrations of prowess could take any number of forms, such as the conferral of benefits; teaching, rhetoric, the writing of poetry; military victory; or avenging some type of insult or injury. Overly reserved men gave the appearance of being effeminate. … T]o be rendered unable to demonstrate prowess, to be made powerless, was shameful for a man. To be beaten, to be unable to repulse an attacker, was degrading because it was the inverse of the masculine ideal. …] Crucifixion, a very public act of brutal physical abuse, represented the loss of prowess and power in the extreme.
Status had a direct bearing on the likelihood that one might die by crucifixion. It was a punishment for the lower classes, a fact that increased its power to degrade. …] Among the upper classes …] the cross was an obscenity, best not to be spoken of in polite company. For the lower classes, it was a very real threat and a shocking manifestation of the violence that could be inflicted when the more powerful members of society felt threatened by their social subordinates.
Joel Marcus discusses crucifixion as a death that was generally reserved for people who had “gotten above themselves.” Slaves who revolted against their masters or people who engaged in rebellion against the government would be good candidates for this punishment. Irony, Marcus argues, was the very intention of such a death: “this strangely ‘exalting’ mode of execution was designed to mimic, parody, and puncture the pretensions of insubordinate transgressors by displaying a deliberately horrible mirror of their self-elevation.” The “elevation” of crucifixion, the “enthronement” upon the cross, was a way of mocking those who had acted above their proper social station.
The deterrent force of the cross also relied upon the group-oriented personality of the ancient world. People were embedded in groups, which consisted not just of families, but friends, patron-client relationships, and other types of voluntary associations such as collegia, religious groups, or philosophical groups. …] Certain people were more important for a group’s collective honor than others. For example, the father was the most visible representative of a family’s honor. …] Crucifying the head of a group, then, would bring considerable shame on all the members of the group. The cross did not simply punish one person, but shamed all people associated with that person. It could serve as a group punishment inflicted upon a visible member of that group.
- David F. Watson’s Honor Among Christians: The Cultural Key to the Messianic Secret (pp.69-71)
And in any case, pre-crucifixion scourgings were apparently done more for symbolic reasons: as mentioned in the quote in the last post, “[T]o be rendered unable to demonstrate prowess, to be made powerless, was shameful for a man. To be beaten, to be unable to repulse an attacker, was degrading because it was the inverse of the masculine ideal.” Remember that this was an honor-shame culture: to be ‘shamed’ was worse than death. The scourging was a symbolic ritual. It wasn’t just done because the Romans were sadists and wanted to draw out some blood or maybe even to weaken the victim (that was more of a side effect than the main purpose). It was performed to ritually emasculate and dehumanize the victim in public. Real free men (= Roman citizens) are not whipped nor crucified; that was only for non-citizens, slaves, non-humans.