The Crucifixion Took on New Religious Meaning in the Centuries After the Death of Jesus. Here’s What Changed

The Romans, for all that they had adopted crucifixion as the “supreme penalty,” refused to countenance the possibility that it might have originated with them. Only a people famed for their barbarousness and cruelty could ever have devised such a torture: the Persians, perhaps, or the Assyrians, or the Gauls. Everything about the practice of nailing a man to a cross—a “crux”— was repellent.