Death on a Friday Afternoon

Some time back I read about Maximilian Kolbe. He was prisoner 16670 in the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp in August 1941 when SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Karl Fritzsch was the Lagerführer (camp leader). Fritzsch, a soulless man, once placed a Christmas tree with lights on the roll call square. He forbade the prisoners, however, from singing carols. Under the tree were bodies of dead prisoners who were worked to death or froze to death while standing at roll call. Fritzsch called the bodies his presents to the living.

When an inmate allegedly escaped from the camp (there was no proof) Fritzsch randomly chose ten men to die of starvation, his favorite method of torture and execution. One of the men chosen was Franciszek Gajowniczek. Upon hearing the sentence, Gajowniczek began crying, “"My poor wife! My poor children! What will they do?"

Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take Gajowniczek’s place. “I want to go instead of the man who was selected. He has a wife and family. I am alone. I am a Catholic (Polish) priest.” Besides, Kolbe contended, he was “elderly” and Gajowniczek young. In fact, at the time Kolbe was 47; Gajowniczek was 41.

Fritzsch quickly consented and Kolbe and the other victims were led off to the starvation chamber, Building 13. Kolbe was the last to die. Gajowniczek lived another 53 years to age 94.

Lagerführer Fritzsch never questioned why Kolbe would die for a fellow prisoner.

Throughout history people have given their lives to save others. Soldiers have thrown themselves on grenades to protect comrades. Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities around the theme of the killing spree called the French Revolution in which one of his characters took the place of another at the guillotine. But the best known substitutionary death took place over 2,000 years ago outside of the gates of Jerusalem.

In contrast to an almost commonplace knowledge of Jesus, whose execution and resurrection will be the center of worship in Christian churches this Sunday, we know almost nothing of the man who, by executing him, had such a profound impact on the world’s history from that point forward. Pontius Pilate, the archetypal Robespierre and Fritzsch,  is absent in recorded history before he came to Judea in 26 AD and is unremarkable during the history of his eleven-year rule as the fifth Roman governor of a third rate province in the Empire. That he was stationed in Judea speaks volumes about his insignificance in the Roman political constellation.

The historians Josephus and Philo, contemporaries of Pilate, describe a much harsher man than the weak-willed, fair-minded one that seems to be described in the Bible’s four gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. From Josephus and Philo we learn that Pilate’s assignment in Palestine probably ended as a consequence of his vicious crackdown on a Samaritan messianic fanatic and his followers who armed themselves and intended to climb to a holdout on Mt. Gerizim. Pilate had his troops block their way, and in typical Roman fashion, there was a slaughter. He executed the leaders and killed or imprisoned the followers. Representatives of the Samaritan leaders, however, went over Pilate’s head to complain to Vitellius, the legion commander and governor of Syria, about Pilate’s brutality in the affair. Vitellius evidently outranked Pilate, because he sent a representative to Palestine to replace him, and sent Pilate back to Rome to explain himself. What happened to Pilate after that is lost in history. His life, at least as we know of it, consisted of only the eleven years in backwater Palestine, renown  primarily for ordering the death of Jesus.

In 1961, a stone plaque further confirmed the historical Pilate. It was found bearing his name in the ancient maritime city of Caesarea, the capital of Judea in Jesus day. Pilate lived in Caesarea Maritima and went to Jerusalem only when business called him there. The two-foot by three-foot slab refers in Latin to a Tiberium, a temple for the worship of Tiberias Caesar, the emperor during the time of Pilate and Jesus. The four-line engraving on the slab refers to Pontius Pilate, Prefect of Judea – the title by which the Bible refers to the man who ordered Jesus’ execution. We can only guess that the purpose of the slab was to identify the Tiberium and perhaps credit its construction to Pilate.

There also can be no doubt that the historical Jesus and the historical Pilate crossed paths in the former’s execution. Apart from the Biblical accounts of their encounter, there are many secular accounts. For example, the first century apologist for Judaism, Flavius Josephus, who was sympathetic with the Romans and whose disbelief in the deity of Jesus was renowned, nevertheless wrote of him in Antiquities of the Jews XVIII 3:3:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.

                                   

Likewise, Cornelius Tacitus in his Annals, xv. 44, wrote: “Christus ... was executed at the hands of the procurator Pontious Pilate.” Lucian of Samosata, a rigorous historian, satirized the Christians in his Passing of Peregrinus and yet wrote, “(Christ was) the man who was crucified in Palestine.”

Crucifixion was undoubtedly the cruelest method man has ever devised to torture someone to death. It was an instrument of state terror whose origins in history are lost, but it’s known that Darius the Great, third king of the Persian Empire, used it in 519 BC to kill 3,000 Babylonian captives. Alexander the Great, the leader of the Greek Empire, brought the practice with him to Egypt and Carthage (modern Tunisia), and with their defeat of the Carthaginians, the Romans apparently learned of its practice. They perfected it to a form of torture and capital punishment that was designed to inflict maximum pain and suffering, and if desired, to prolong death for days. When the Thracian gladiator Spartacus led a breakout from the gladiatorial school around 70 BC, which subsequently developed into a slave revolt against the Roman Empire, their defeat was celebrated with the crucifixion of 6,000 of Spartacus’ followers.

By the time Jesus was born, Pax Romana – Roman peace – had reigned for almost 30 years. It spanned the rule of Caesar Augustus (27 BC) to the death of Marcus Aurelius (180 AD), a period of about two centuries during which there was virtually no internal discord. But the lack of discord was due to a large army that always stood ready to crush any form of civil disobedience with unbridled cruelty. It was the kind of “peace” which would have reigned had the Nazis won the WW II.

Into this peace were cast accusations that Jesus was subverting the nation, opposing payment of taxes to Caesar, and claiming to be Christ, a king and thus a threat to the authority of the Empire. Initially, Pilate saw the matter as little more than a religious dispute and told the Jewish leaders to settle it themselves. They reminded him that under Roman law they couldn’t execute anyone, implying that Jesus was guilty of a capital crime. Only when the wily Jewish leaders accused Pilate of being no friend of Caesar, did he relent and order the execution, showing just how insecure he was in his position as a Roman Prefect.

Scourging was a legal requirement of Roman law before a victim could be crucified. Sometime the lash could be laid on lightly to prolong the suffering of crucifixion. Other times, the victim never survived scourging. The condemned was stripped naked. His (women were not crucified) arms were stretched up and tied near the top of a pole set in the courtyard of the praetorium where Pilate held court in Jerusalem. But the victim might alternately be pulled over a stump of wood or stone with outstretched feet and hands tied to the ground such that his back was arched for the torture. Either method was intended to expose the back to the full effect of the lash.

A flagellum, or short whip, consisted of a wooden handle with leather thongs of different lengths in which iron balls and sharp pieces of sheep bones were tied. One or two soldiers, called lictors, administered the beating, making sure that the back, legs, and buttocks were ripped open as the lash landed on the flesh and was jerked back toward the lictor. The iron balls were intended to inflict deep contusions. Continued lashing would rip through outer layer of tissue and begin tearing the skeletal muscles, producing ribbons of dangling bleeding flesh. Circulatory shock often accompanied the trauma and blood loss.

The gospel accounts of the flogging and crucifixion are remarkably benign because the writers apparently assumed their readers were already familiar with both so a lot of detail wasn’t needed.

Two types of crosses were used for crucifixion. One looked like a lower case “t” which is the Latin cross commonly worn as jewelry and shown in pictures of the crucified Jesus. Archeological evidence, however, indicates this almost surely was not the type of cross on which Jesus was crucified. Rather the “tau” cross, resembling an upper case “T” was prevalent in Roman Palestine and was likely the type of cross used.

Moreover, pictures showing Jesus carrying the entire cross on which he was crucified are wrong. The victim would only carry the patibulum or horizontal part of the cross for two reasons: first, the vertical part of the cross, the stipes, remained permanently in the ground and second, the patibulum would have weighed 75 pounds or so, whereas, the entire cross could have weighed over 300 pounds – more than the victim could have carried after being scourged. The scourging that Jesus received was so extreme, that he wasn’t able to carry even the patibulum, and Simon, a passerby, was ordered to carry if for him.

Aside from the taunts the victim heard from the crowd as he walked with his arms often tied to the patibulum, which was placed across the nape of his neck, he often walked naked to the place of execution and was crucified naked to add to his humiliation. After his scourging, the soldiers put a robe on Jesus and placed a crown of thrones on his head, bowing to mock him as the king he was accused to be. But before he began to walk the 700 yards to Golgotha, the place where crucifixions took place outside the city wall, the robe was taken off and his clothes were returned, suggesting that Jesus didn’t walk fully naked to the execution site. However, once crucified, his clothes were gambled for by the soldiers suggesting that he may have been naked on the cross.

Nakedness is significant because even today it is a humiliation for a Middle Eastern man to be naked among others, especially strangers. The courts martial and imprisonments associated with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq show the seriousness of this cultural violation.  Naked men there were forced to lie on each other in a pile. Touching each other while naked was humiliation enough but a female soldier was also present.

Medieval and Renaissance painters show the crucified Jesus with nails through his palms. Nails through the palms cannot support the weight of the victim and would strip out between fingers. Archeological remains of crucified victims show the nails were driven through the wrists, most often through the space between the radial and ulna wrist bones. Arriving at the execution site, the victim would be pushed to the ground, falling back on the patibulum tied across his shoulders. Any wounds that had clotted across the back would reopen allowing dirt to contaminate them further. Using iron spikes of 5” to 7” in length, a soldier skilled in crucifixion could find the spot in the wrist to drive the nail through without breaking a bone or piercing the radial or ulnar arteries. However, the nail would likely pierce the median nerve running up the wrist, causing bolts of unbearable pain to shoot up the arms. That and damage to tendons would paralyze the hand, forcing it into the shape of a claw.

The object of crucifixion was to suffocate the victim. Therefore, after nailing both wrists to the patibulum with enough slack to avoid pulling the arms taunt, the patibulum would be hoisted up atop the stipes and dropped into a mortise and tenon joint. The victim’s feet would be pulled up so the knees were bent, and with the left foot overlapping the right, a spike would be driven through arches. The soldier-executioner would do this without breaking metatarsal bones, allowing the victim to push up on his nailed feet in order to breathe. However, the medial and plantar nerves would be crushed causing agonizing pain in the legs when the victim pushed against his feet.

At this point the victim would be fully crucified and the death struggle would begin. As he sagged, it put more weight on the nails in the wrists. Unbearable pain would race through his fingers and up his arms because the nails would press the median nerves. The median nerve passes through the carpal tunnel, and if you’ve ever had the pain of carpal tunnel syndrome, multiply it by ten thousand to understand what a crucified man felt.  

In order to relieve the pain in his arms, shoulders, and neck, the victim would unconsciously push up on his nailed feet to take weight off of his wrists. Doing so would scrape his already shredded back on the rough-hewn stipes, inflicting more pain by opening the wounds, which ran horizontally. But shifting his weight to his nailed feet ripped at the nerves running through the metatarsal bones. It would also rotate the wrists on the nails, rubbing nails against nerves and inflicting excruciating pain. The victim would raise and lower himself between these alternate positions trying to relieve his pain. But he would also begin to have trouble breathing. He would find that he could only inhale with his weight on his wrists with arms fully outstretched. He could only exhale by raising himself allowing him to flex his arms, rotating his wrists, but even then he had to force the air out of his lungs by flexing his diaphragm. Only during the exhalation was Jesus able to speak from the cross.

As muscles fatigued from lack of oxygen, the onset of cramps began, making it harder with each attempt to push up and exhale. Hanging by his wrists, the victim could only inhale and panic would set in. Shallow respiration would cause a build-up of carbon dioxide in the blood and fluid would accumulate in the lungs, making breathing more difficult. Intermittently, the victim would push up to gasp for breath but rapidly fatiguing leg muscles would fail from spasms. Inadequate respiration would lead to further multiple failures – fluid in the pericardium, making it harder for the heart to pump, and inadequate oxygenation, which raises the heart rate. Congestive heart failure would begin. The loss of tissue fluids, kidney failure, and the compressed heart would produce searing thirst, which caused Jesus to cry out “I thirst!” His body at that point was in extremis with enough strength to push and exhale out his last words, after which he died – most likely due to asphyxia.

The two thieves who were crucified on each side of Jesus had not died when the soldiers broke their shin bones with a heavy club to prevent them from pushing up to breathe. Asphyxic death would have come to them within minutes.

In his book Night, Elie Wiesel wrote of the gallows deaths that he and other prisoners were forced to witness when at 15 years of age he was interred in his first Nazi concentration camp. One incident involved a Dutch Oberkapo – an overseer who was himself a camp prisoner but one with special privileges. The Dutchman had a small servant boy who was given extra food in return for serving the Kapo. These boys, called pipels, were often used for sex by Kapos, but there’s no indication this was true for this boy, whom Wiesel said had the face of a sad angel.

When a nearby power station was sabotaged, the SS found a trail leading to the Dutch Oberkapo. He was tortured for weeks but revealed no names of collaborators, so he was then shipped off to Auschwitz not to be heard from again. The pipel was left behind, tortured, but he too did not speak. He was sentenced to hang along with two adults found with weapons.

Returning from work, Wiesel and the other prisoners were summoned to roll call to witness the execution.

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him. This time the Lagerkapo refused to act as executioner. Three SS replaced him.

The victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses. "Long live Liberty!" cried the two adults. But the child was silent.

"Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind me asked. At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over.

Total silence throughout the camp. On the horizon, the sun was setting. "Bare your heads!" yelled the head of the camp. His voice was raucous. We were weeping. "Cover your heads!"

Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive...

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet glazed. Behind me I heard the same man asking: "Where is God now?"

And I heard a voice within me answer him: "Where is he? Here he is – he is hanging here on this gallows. . . "

But Wiesel was wrong. God was not dead. His silence means neither absence nor impotence. God wept the day those three people were hanged because that’s who God is.

For now we must accept the evil in the world. It is not mankind’s invention. It has a father and some have chosen to follow that Evil One. While 9/11 and the Holocaust are dramatic examples of his evil, more pernicious though less dramatic examples of it permeate life in a thousand disguises because a deluded “enlightened” and “tolerant” society have made it acceptable.

At the beginning of time a cosmic struggle between good and evil began. Throughout the Bible it is spoken of beginning in Genesis when God foretold its outcome. Satan would wound but not kill his redeemer. And true to his word, the apparent defeat of a death on a Friday afternoon gave way to the victory of Easter Sunday.

Life is a microcosm of that drama. When it seems like evil is winning, we should remember that we’ve yet to see the end of the story.