23 you must not leave the body hanging on the pole overnight. Be sure to bury it that same day, because anyone who is hung on a pole is under God’s curse. You must not desecrate the land the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance.
Reading the first chapter of The Cross of Christ, and Stott mentions first how the cross arose, out of many representations and with objections, as a sign and as a physical practice for early Christians. Then, Stott shares how the barbaric (from Barbarians) practice was adopted by the Romans. The Romans viewed it as offensive an act as we view rape, an act no citizen should be condemned to (Stott 28-29). Cicero, in particular, has some descriptions for the view on crucifixion;
“Cicero in one of his speeches condemned it as
crudelissimum taeterrimumque supplicium, ‘a most cruel and
disgusting punishment’. A little later he declared: To bind a
Roman citizen is a crime, to flog him is an abomination, to kill
him is almost an act of murder: to crucify him is - What? There
is no fitting word that can possibly describe so horrible a deed.’13
Cicero was even more explicit in his successful defence in 63 bc
of the elderly senator Gaius Rabirius who had been charged with
murder: ‘the very word “cross” should be far removed not only
from the person of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts, his
eyes and his ears. For it is not only the actual occurrence of these
things (sc. the procedures of crucifixion) or the endurance of them,
but liability to them, the expectation, indeed the mere mention of
them, that is unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man.’
And God’s covenant people would have the law in Deuteronomy 21:23 to interpret Christ’s crucifixion.
