In 1 Cor. 1:23, the Apostle Paul speaks of the Greek reaction to the preaching of Christ crucified as “folly”—the Greek work is mania—“madness.” In his 1973 book, Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross, Martin Hengel explains why.
Years ago, watching the classic film, Spartacus, was the first time I saw crucifixion outside of the context of New Testament stories of Jesus’s crucifixion. Hengel’s survey of the use of crucifixion as a penalty in the Graeco-Roman world introduces us to the cultural and emotional background behind the New Testament preaching about a crucified Christ (and intense reactions against the same).
Reading through the book for Good Friday, I was struck by how obscenely common this form of execution was in Rome and even in the surrounding nations of the first century. It was especially useful for political enemies and common as a deterrent to slave revolts.
Hengel surveys the literature of the time that preserves the horror that most people felt about the threat of crucifixion. I was particularly struck by his reference to popular romances of the time, where a cross may be threatened but the hero is always rescued:
Crucifixion of the hero or heroine is part of their stock in trade, and only a higher form of this 'recreational literature', as represented say by Heliodorus' Aethiopica, scorns such cruelty. In the Babyloniaca written by the Syrian lamblichus, the hero is twice overtaken by this fearful punishment, but on both occasions he is taken down from the cross and freed. Habrocomes, the chief figure in the romance by Xenophon of Ephesus which has already been mentioned, is first tortured almost to death and later crucified. Even his beloved, Anthea, is in danger of being crucified after she has killed a robber in self-defence. However, heroes cannot on any account be allowed to suffer such a painful and shameful death—this can only befall evil-doers. Chariton of Aphrodisias, who was perhaps still writing in the first century AD, gives a vivid description of crucifixion as a punishment for slaves: sixteen slaves from the domains of the satrap Mithridates escaped from their lodgings, but were recaptured and, chained together by necks and feet, were led to the place of execution, each carrying his own cross… The hero of the romance is saved at the last moment, just before he is to be nailed to the cross.
Of course, in the Bible’s love story, the hero is not saved from the cross, but suffers and dies, vindicated by resurrection 3 days later.
In fact, the resurrection, in this light, becomes a powerful sign of vindication in a culture that cannot imagine such a thing as a suffering, dying divine hero. But even with the good news of the resurrection, spreading a message of a crucified Son of God was no easy job:
To believe that the one pre-existent Son of the one true God, the mediator at creation and the redeemer of the world, had appeared in very recent times in out-of-the-way Galilee as a member of the obscure people of the Jews, and even worse, had died the death of a common criminal on the cross, could only be regarded as a sign of madness. The real gods of Greece and Rome could be distinguished from mortal men by the very fact that they were immortal - they had absolutely nothing in common with the cross as a sign of shame, the 'infamous stake,’ the 'barren' or 'criminal wood,' the 'terrible cross,' (maxuma mala crux) of the slaves in Plautus, and thus of the one who, in the words of Celsus, was 'bound in the most ignominious fashion' and 'executed in a shameful way'.
But wouldn’t the lower classes have been drawn to the message of the cross, comforted that a god so identified with them? No, says Hengel:
An alleged son of god who could not help himself at the time of his deepest need (Mark 15.31), and who rather required his followers to take up the cross, was hardly an attraction to the lower classes of Roman and Greek society. People were all too aware of what it meant to bear the cross through the city and then to be nailed to it and feared it; they wanted to get away from it.
Even in the first century, then, there was temptation to mitigate the offense of the cross:
For Paul and his contemporaries the cross of Jesus was not a didactic, symbolic or speculative element but a very specific and highly offensive matter which imposed a burden on the earliest Christian missionary preaching. No wonder that the young community in Corinth sought to escape from the crucified Christ into the enthusiastic life of the spirit, the enjoyment of heavenly revelations and an assurance of salvation connected with mysteries and sacraments. When in the face of this Paul points out to the community which he founded that his preaching of the crucified messiah is a religious 'stumbling block' for the Jews and 'madness' for his Greek hearers, we are hearing in his confession not least the twenty-year experience of the greatest Christian missionary, who had often reaped no more than mockery and bitter rejection with his message of the Lord Jesus, who had died a criminal's death on the tree of shame.
“Even now,” Hengel observes, “any genuine theology will have to be measured against the test of this scandal.”
The theological reasoning of our time shows very clearly that the particular form of the death of Jesus, the man and the messiah, represents a scandal which people would like to blunt, remove or domesticate in any way possible. We shall have to guarantee the truth of our theological thinking at this point. Reflection on the harsh reality of crucifixion in antiquity may help us to overcome the acute loss of reality which is to be found so often in present theology and preaching.
Thankfully, though the preaching of Christ crucified is still “madness” to many listeners today (1 Cor. 1:23), Paul assures us in the next verse that “to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks,” the message—indeed the subject of the message—is “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
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