was crucified

The Text

The instrument is the doctrine. Christianity’s central symbol — the only symbol it shares across every period and every culture in which it has been received — is an instrument of Roman execution. Not a crown, not a sword, not a temple, not a book, not a flame. A wooden cross, on which a man was tortured to death by the state. The Apostles’ Creed names the instrument by naming the act done with it: crucifixus. The whole gospel pivots on this word.

Translation Notes

Crucifixus / staurōthenta. Both Latin and Greek use the technical vocabulary of Roman execution. Crucifigere / crucifixus — to fix to a cross — appears in Roman legal sources for this and no other penalty. Stauros in pre-Christian Greek denotes the upright stake on which condemned persons were impaled or hung; stauroō is the verb for that act. Neither word permits a metaphorical reading. To say “Jesus was crucified” in either language is to say something extremely specific: he was put through this form of Roman execution, in this historical period, on this particular wooden instrument.

The participial form. Like passus (suffered) and natus (born) in the previous clauses, crucifixus is a past passive participle. Jesus is the patient, the one acted upon. The Roman state did this to him. The creed’s grammar refuses to soften the violence: the Son did not arrange his own death in a way that minimized human responsibility for it. He was put to death by human hands.

1662 BCP: “was crucified, dead, and buried.” The older English creed combined the crucifixion and the death in a single phrase, treating them as one act with three moments — crucified, dead, buried. Modern revisions (ICET, ELLC, Roman Missal, UMC ecumenical) split them: was crucified, died, and was buried. The split is not a doctrinal change. It separates the manner of death (by crucifixion) from the fact of death (he died) and the consequence of death (he was buried) — clarifying for readers who might have read dead as a description of the crucifixion rather than a distinct claim. The 1662 form’s compression is older and theologically tight; the modern form’s clarity is pastorally useful. Both are correct.

Historical Context

Crucifixion was the Roman state’s most public and most humiliating mode of execution. It was reserved by Roman law for three categories: slaves (Cicero, Against Verres V.165 — “the cross is the most cruel and disgusting form of punishment… let the very name of the cross be far removed not only from the body of a Roman citizen, but also from his thoughts, his eyes, his ears”), foreigners (provincials without Roman citizenship), and political subversives (those who threatened the maiestas of the Roman state). Roman citizens were exempt — Paul, having Roman citizenship, was beheaded; Peter, who did not, was crucified.

The mechanics of crucifixion were designed for prolonged agony. The condemned was scourged with a flagrum (a multi-tailed whip with metal or bone weights), forced to carry the cross-beam (the patibulum) through the city to the execution site, stripped, and nailed or bound to the wood. Death came primarily by asphyxiation: the position of the body made breathing increasingly difficult, and the condemned died of suffocation as exhaustion set in. The process could last hours or days. The public visibility of the cross was central to its function. Crucifixion was not merely punishment; it was terror policy, intended to deter future revolts. After the Spartacus slave revolt (73–71 BC), the Roman general Crassus crucified six thousand surviving rebel slaves along the Appian Way as a public warning.

Jesus of Nazareth was executed by this means under the authority of Pontius Pilate, on the political-religious charge that he had claimed to be “King of the Jews” — a title interpreted by the Roman authorities as treasonous. The titulus affixed to his cross (John 19:19) named the charge in three languages: Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum — Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. From Rome’s perspective, this was the execution of one more provincial troublemaker. From the church’s perspective, this was the saving act of God.

The early church’s adoption of the cross as its symbol was, in the first three centuries, a profound and consequential act. Roman observers found it incomprehensible. Pliny the Younger reports the Christian practice; Lucian of Samosata mocks the worship of a “crucified sophist”; the Alexamenos graffito (early 3rd c.) shows a Roman soldier mocking a Christian who worships a crucified figure with a donkey’s head. Christians’ insistence on the cross was, from the outside, an absurdity. From the inside, it was the gospel: the instrument the empire used to terrorize subject peoples had been transformed, by the death of the Son of God, into the symbol of the empire’s defeat.

The Old Testament background for the crucifixion in Christian reading is Deuteronomy 21:22–23 — “if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God.” Paul takes up this text directly in Galatians 3:13: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us — for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.’” The crucifixion is, in this reading, the Son’s deliberate identification with those whom the Law cursed — and the breaking of the curse from inside it.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho §§ 89–96; Irenaeus, Against Heresies V.17; Athanasius, On the Incarnation §§ 19–25; Ambrose, On the Christian Faith

The patristic reading of the crucifixion centers on the paradox: the instrument of curse has become the instrument of blessing. Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho devotes extensive sections to Old Testament prefigurations of the cross — Moses’s outstretched arms at the battle with Amalek (Exod. 17:11–12), the bronze serpent lifted up (Num. 21:8–9, which John 3:14 explicitly applies to Christ’s lifting up on the cross), the wood that floated the iron in 2 Kings 6:6. Irenaeus develops the recapitulation theme: as the first Adam lost the world by reaching for the tree, the second Adam recovers the world by being nailed to a tree. Athanasius reads the manner of death — arms outstretched between heaven and earth — as the visible sign of Christ’s reconciling work between God and humanity.

Strengths

• Anchors the cross in the whole of Scripture, refusing to treat it as a freestanding event
• The recapitulation reading binds creation and redemption together in a single narrative

Weaknesses

• The typological method, in its strongest forms, sometimes reads Hebrew texts in ways their original authors did not intend
• Patristic anti-Jewish polemic in the cross-reading texts has caused real historical harm and needs to be acknowledged

Scholastic

Tradition: Anselm, Cur Deus Homo; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 46 (on the Passion); q. 48 (on the efficacy)

Anselm and Aquinas develop the satisfaction account of the cross (treated more fully under [[died]]). What is distinctive in their treatment of the crucifixion specifically is the focus on the fittingness of this particular mode of death. Why this manner of execution? Aquinas (III, q. 46, art. 4) gives five reasons of fittingness: the cross is a wood, recapitulating the tree of the Fall; it is a public execution, fitting the universal scope of the redemption; it is a slow death, allowing Christ to commend the dying thief; the outstretched arms image the universal embrace of his saving work; and the elevation of the cross prefigures the resurrection’s lifting up.

Strengths

• Takes seriously the question why this particular death, rather than simply some death
• Holds the historical mode and the theological meaning together

Weaknesses

• The fittingness arguments can feel decorative — explaining after the fact what could not have been predicted before it
• The satisfaction framework, as discussed under the next clause, has its own difficulties

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Heidelberg Disputation (1518), Theses 19–24; sermons on Galatians 3:13

Luther’s theology of the cross is the central Lutheran contribution. The Heidelberg Disputation (1518) sets the framework: God is deus absconditus (hidden God) precisely where God is most fully revealed, and the place of fullest revelation is the cross. The theologian of glory looks for God in success, in strength, in visible majesty; the theologian of the cross looks for God where God has actually shown himself — in suffering, weakness, and the apparent defeat of the cross. Luther’s sermons on Galatians 3:13 develop the commercium admirabile (the wonderful exchange): Christ became cursed that we might be blessed; Christ became sin that we might become righteousness; Christ took our death that we might receive his life.

Strengths

• Among the most penetrating reflections on the paradox of the cross in Western theology
• Has anchored ongoing theological resistance to power-religion in every age

Weaknesses

• The strongest forms of cross-centered theology can leave the resurrection underdeveloped
• Theologia crucis has occasionally been used to baptize suffering uncritically rather than to discipline the church’s reading of it

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes II.16.5–7; Heidelberg Catechism Q. 39

Calvin gives the question of why crucifixion specifically a clear pastoral answer in Institutes II.16.5–7. Crucifixion, he notes, was specifically the death the Law had named as cursed (Deut. 21:23). The Son’s voluntary submission to this particular form of death was the public sign of his bearing the curse the Law pronounced. The Heidelberg Catechism Q. 39 puts it crisply: “Is there anything more in his having been ‘crucified’ than if he had died some other death? Yes; for thereby I am assured that he has taken upon him the curse which lay upon me; for the death of the cross was accursed of God.”

Strengths

• Connects the specific mode of execution to the Pauline doctrine of the curse-bearing
• The Heidelberg Q. 39 is one of the cleanest single-sentence statements of the cross in the catechetical tradition

Weaknesses

• The curse-bearing reading, taken alone, can underweight the Christus Victor and recapitulation dimensions
• Has sometimes been read in ways that imply the Father’s wrath against the Son, distorting the trinitarian unity of the saving act

Liberation — The Cross and the Lynching Tree

Tradition: James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011); Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (1972)

Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree reads the crucifixion through the analogous Roman-state-and-lynching-mob violence of the American South. The cross was a public terror policy; so was lynching. Both used the body of an innocent victim as a warning to subject peoples. Both were carried out under the cover of legal forms (Roman judicial procedure; the segregation-era Jim Crow legal order) and with the participation of religious authorities. The gospel claim — that God is on the side of the crucified, not the crucifiers — is, in Cone’s reading, theologically continuous from Jerusalem to the American South to anywhere a victim of state-sanctioned violence has hung from a tree.

Strengths

• Refuses the depoliticization of the cross that comfortable Christianity has too often required
• Reactivates the patristic and Pauline cross-as-curse-bearing tradition for the American context

Weaknesses

• The analogy, pressed to its strongest form, can flatten the distinction between Christ’s redemptive death and other unjust deaths
• The eschatological reservation — that the cross is followed by resurrection — must be held carefully, lest the analogy collapse into a theology of solidarity-without-victory

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s treatment of the crucifixion is woven through nearly every sermon and into the marrow of Charles’s hymnody. The doctrinal core is substitutionary in the broad Reformed sense: Christ bore the death we deserve, in our place, that we might be free. Wesley’s sermon “The Lord Our Righteousness” (Sermon 20, 1765) holds the substitution and the imputation of righteousness together carefully. His “Justification by Faith” (Sermon 5, 1746) is the locus classicus of the Wesleyan reading of the Pauline texts on the cross.

What is distinctively Wesleyan is the experiential register. The cross is not, for Wesley, a doctrine to be agreed with but a reality to be received. His Aldersgate moment — hearing Luther’s preface to Romans, his heart “strangely warmed” — was the personal appropriation of the cross for me. The Spirit’s witness to the believer’s spirit that Christ has died for me is, for Wesley, the doctrinal core of Methodist experience.

Wesley’s social-political reading of the cross, though less systematically developed than later liberation readings, has clear edges. His Thoughts upon Slavery (1774) — written in opposition to the British slave trade — refuses to use providence to license what he could see was sin, and his last letter (to William Wilberforce, four days before his death in 1791) named slavery as “that execrable sum of all villainies.” The Son of God did not die on a Roman cross so that Christian commerce could chain African bodies and call it Providence.

The practical Wesleyan posture: receive the cross personally as the act of God for one’s salvation; let it warm the heart; refuse to let it be domesticated by power; live a “cross-shaped life offering ourselves for others.”

Hymnody

The Wesleyan hymnody on the crucifixion is, by general consensus, among the finest in any Christian tradition.

“And can it be that I should gain” (Charles, 1738): “He left his Father’s throne above, / So free, so infinite his grace, / Emptied himself of all but love, / And bled for Adam’s helpless race… / Amazing love! how can it be / That thou, my God, shouldst die for me!”

“O Love divine, what hast thou done” (Charles, 1742): “Th’ immortal God hath died for me! / The Father’s coeternal Son / Bore all my sins upon the tree.”

“Hark! the herald angels sing” (Charles, 1739) holds the cross in tension with the manger: “Mild he lays his glory by, / Born that man no more may die.”

Isaac Watts’s “When I survey the wondrous cross” (1707) is the indispensable Methodist Passion hymn alongside the Wesleys’. “Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast / Save in the death of Christ my God; / All the vain things that charm me most, / I sacrifice them to his blood.”

The 1780 Collection’s sections on “Believers Praying” and “For Believers Rejoicing” return to the cross repeatedly. The Methodist tradition has carried its doctrine of the atonement in song more often than in doctrinal treatise; the hymnody is theologically dense in ways the prose sermons less often achieve.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

Why is a Roman instrument of torture our central symbol of faith?

Christians do not wear the cross to mark a death. We wear it to mark the defeat of death. The Roman state used the cross to terrorize subject peoples; the empire’s purpose was to make subject peoples afraid. The gospel turned the instrument inside out. The wood of cruelty became the wood of life. The mark of public humiliation became the mark of public hope. This reversal is not metaphorical decoration; it is the heart of the Christian claim about what God did in Jesus’ death.

The pastoral question, then, is whether we let the cross do the work the gospel claims it does. A cross worn as jewelry, displayed in a sanctuary, fixed to a chain — none of these by itself is yet a sign of the gospel’s reversal. The cross becomes that sign when the believer’s life is shaped by what it points to: a willingness to lose for the sake of love, a refusal to return violence for violence, an unwillingness to use the methods of empire to advance the kingdom of the One whom empire killed. The cross is a cruciform life or it is only an ornament.

The cross is also a scandal. The Greek word skandalon — Paul’s word for the cross in 1 Corinthians 1:23 — does not mean racy or outrageous. It means stumbling-stone. The cross is what trips people up. It tripped up the Greeks (foolishness) and the Jews (a curse). It trips up the modern world too. A culture that worships strength, success, and visible victory cannot easily understand a God who chose to be tortured to death by a provincial Roman administration. The cross is meant to be hard to receive. To accept it as the central event of human history is to accept that the world’s measures of value are, at the deepest level, false.

For pastors: this is also why the cross matters for grief. The God we confess at the cross has been all the way through human suffering. He has not stood at a distance from death; he has died it. Marie Antoinette, told that the people of Paris had no bread, is supposed to have said, “Let them eat cake.” Whether or not she actually said it, the phrase captures a particular kind of distance — the distance of those who cannot conceive of what suffering actually is. The cross is the abolition of that distance. The God of the gospel is not on the throne, indifferent to the bread of the people. He is on a Roman cross, taking the worst of what the world can do, so that the bread we will eventually share is the bread of a kingdom where there is no more crying, and no more dying, and no more crosses.

Further Reading

• Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho §§ 89–96 — Old Testament prefigurations of the cross
• Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies V.17 — recapitulation
• Athanasius, On the Incarnation §§ 19–25
• Cicero, Against Verres V.165 — Roman aristocratic horror at crucifixion
• Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo (1098)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 46 (on the Passion of Christ)
• Martin Luther, Heidelberg Disputation (1518), Theses 19–24
• Martin Luther, sermons on Galatians 3:13 (in his Galatians commentary, 1535)
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion II.16.5–7
• Heidelberg Catechism Q. 39
• John Wesley, Sermon 5, “Justification by Faith” (1746)
• John Wesley, Sermon 20, “The Lord Our Righteousness” (1765)
• John Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery (1774); letter to William Wilberforce (1791)
• Charles Wesley, “And can it be” (1738); “O Love divine, what hast thou done” (1742)
• Isaac Watts, “When I survey the wondrous cross” (1707)
• A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780)
• Martin Hengel, Crucifixion (Fortress, 1977) — the standard scholarly treatment of crucifixion in the ancient world
• John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (IVP, 1986) — the standard modern evangelical treatment
• James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis, 2011)
• Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ (Eerdmans, 2015) — a recent ecumenical synthesis