Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

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* Indeed, so sparse are descriptions of the punishment in ancient sources that Gunnar Samuelsson, in a recent monograph, has (controversially) argued that ‘there was no defined punishment called crucifixion before the execution of Jesus’ (p. 205).

* Although Jesus is described in the gospels as carrying a stauros, the Greek word for a cross, the likelihood is that he carried what in Latin was termed a patibulum: a horizontal cross bar. ‘Let him carry his patibulum through the city, and then be nailed to his cross.’ So wrote the Roman playwright Plautus, a couple of centuries before the crucifixion of Jesus.

* The earliest Christian texts, Paul’s letters, also report that Jesus was ‘buried’ (1 Corinthians 15.4).

* The phrase is from the title of R. I. Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society.