you should put it that way,’ he said, wiping a little edge of foam from his upper lip with the knuckle of his left thumb. ‘Because the actual procedure probably didn’t look much like what you see in the stained glass at church. But it was nasty enough. The Romans got famous for crucifying people because of all the press Jesus got, but it had about a thousand-year run as a common form of capital punishment, probably starting with the Persians around the sixth century BCE, then the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Seleucids, even the Jews themselves. But a lot of them, including the Romans, tended not to do it to each other. Saved it for slaves and conquered peoples. Odd thing, though: the idea that Jesus was crucified – I mean on a cross – didn’t crop up in any texts of known authenticity until a century or two after the fact.’
‘So what did happen?’
‘Oh, I’m sure they didn’t let him walk,’ Jonas said. ‘But what they actually did to him is anybody’s guess.’ He crunched a nacho and drank from his own Corona. ‘Anyway, Constantine outlawed crucifixion in the Roman Empire in 330-something.’
‘How’d it kill the victim?’
‘Open question,’ Jonas said. ‘The leading candidates are things like exhaustion, shock, heat stroke, heart failure. On the other hand, I read a paper a few years ago to the effect that it was most likely asphyxia.’
‘How would that work?’
‘When they used a crossbeam, the arms were fixed to it, usually before it was put up on the stanchion, which more often than not was a tree, by the way, but probably never by just nailing through the hands. Then, whether it was a post or crossbeam, the weight of the body pulling down on the arms and restricting chest movement prevented proper respiration. The victim suffered progressive hypoxia leading to eventual death by asphyxiation.’
‘What’s the story on using trees?’ I asked.
Jonas shrugged. ‘Convenience, probably. Who’s gonna hunt up a beam the size you’d need for a stanchion, drag it out there, dig a two- or three-foot hole for it in that rocky soil and plant it just to kill one troublesome Jew, when there’s an olive tree or whatever right there?’
‘Why not nail the hands?’
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