The Dark History of Crucifixion – And Why Jesus Wasn't Alone

Two thousand years ago this week, according to Christian tradition, a Jewish preacher from Galilee was nailed to a wooden beam outside Jerusalem's city walls and left to die. For billions of believers, the crucifixion of Jesus is the central event in human history. For the Romans overseeing it, it was a Tuesday.

This is the strange history of the practice that led to Jesus’s death: what crucifixion was, why it was used, and how it worked. 

Rome Didn't Invent Crucifixion

Crucifixion was, above all else, a crowd-control strategy – but the Romans weren’t the first to come up with it. The practice likely originated in Persia and spread west through Phoenicia before Rome adopted and refined it. However, no civilization embraced it with quite the same… enthusiasm as the Roman Empire did. 

By the time of Jesus, it had been in use for centuries as the Romans’ preferred method of execution for slaves, non-citizens, and political troublemakers. Roman citizens convicted of capital crimes were typically beheaded. The cross was reserved for everyone else. 

Crucifixion was designed to be slow, agonizing, and very very public. Executions were carried out along major roads and in crowded gathering places specifically so that as many people as possible would witness them – and hesitate before breaking Roman laws themselves. 

How Crucifixion Worked

The practice was grim, to put it lightly. A condemned person was typically flogged first, then forced to carry the horizontal beam – called the patibulum – through the streets to their own execution site. The vertical post (or stipes) was often already fixed in the ground. 

Victims were attached to the crossbeam by rope or nails, then hoisted into place. Death came slowly, from exhaustion, dehydration, and exposure. It could take hours, or it could take days. The whole thing was designed intentionally to be as prolonged as possible.

(A note: we've kept this description brief by design. The reality was considerably more gruesome than what's described here.)

How Common Was Crucifixion?

Christ’s crucifixion is the most well known to history, but the truth is that Jesus was just one of many thousands who died this way. The ancient world was cruel, and those who spoke truth to power often paid a heavy price. 

For example, when the slave rebellion led by Spartacus was crushed in 71 BC, the Roman general Crassus lined the Appian Way – the main road into Rome – with 6,000 crucified slaves, a haunting message that stretched for miles.  

The historian Josephus records that after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Roman soldiers crucified so many people that they ran out of wood and space for crosses. The practice continued until Emperor Constantine abolished it in the early fourth century.

What the Archaeological Record Shows

Evidence of all this is surprisingly scarce, for a grim reason: Rome typically left bodies on the cross to decay, then discarded the remains. The most notable find came in 1968, when construction workers outside Jerusalem unearthed the bones of a man named Yehohanan. 

His heel bone still had an iron nail driven through it, with a fragment of olive wood attached – almost certainly from the cross itself. A second crucifixion victim was identified decades later in Cambridgeshire, England, the same way. One reason physical evidence like this is so rare: nails were routinely removed and repurposed as lucky charms after executions.

Where Did the Cross End Up?

Despite these challenges, there has naturally been much curiosity about what happened to the specific cross Jesus was nailed to. Is it possible it was preserved somehow?

The Bible notes that Jesus was not crucified alone – two men were there alongside him that day. Could they provide clues? The Gospels describe the men as thieves or criminals (the exact word varies by translation) condemned under the same Roman system that had sentenced Jesus for sedition. Their deaths also provide key evidence in this mystery.

According to Christian tradition, the cross of Jesus was buried near Golgotha and largely forgotten until the fourth century, when Helena, the elderly mother of Emperor Constantine, traveled to Jerusalem around 326 CE. 

Early accounts hold that excavations near the site did indeed uncover three crosses, as the story suggests. To identify the True Cross, each was touched to a dying woman – and only one revived her. Helena took this as proof, and divided the wood into sections: one remained in Jerusalem, one went to Rome, one to Constantinople. Constantine then built the Church of the Holy Sepulchre over the site.

The fragments reportedly spread from there with remarkable speed. By around 348 CE, Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem was already noting that pieces of the “True Cross” had reached every corner of the inhabited world. This naturally invited skepticism about many claims. 

The reformer John Calvin later quipped that if all the claimed relics were gathered together, they could fill a ship. But when a French architect named Charles Rohault de Fleury actually tracked down and measured every known fragment in the 1870s, he concluded that combined they would amount to less than a third of the volume of a full-size cross.

Is the "True Cross" Authentic?

There remains substantial disagreement about the authenticity of these relics, even today. While they are venerated in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions, some historians and religious scholars say claims that Jesus’s cross still exists are impossible to prove. 

The largest known relic of the True Cross today rests in Rome's Basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme – the very church Helena built in her palace to house what she carried back from Jerusalem. 

In 2023, Pope Francis gifted two fragments of the cross to King Charles III at his coronation, placed inside the processional Cross of Wales. Nearly seventeen centuries after Helena first divided it, the wood is still on the move.