Stauros- cross or stake

This blogpost is meant to be very specific and will not have wide distribution. For those who are Jehovahs Witnesses or those who work reaching out to them, this will be of great interest.  The Pop Star Prince talks about 'stauros' in an attempt to communicate his JW background beliefs, so there may be a wider audience than perhaps I think.  Most of the material below is not mine, I make no apologies for that, sometimes rather than writing ones own material promoting another persons work is the best way forward. I may condense this into a shorter pamphlet soon.   Enjoy.........!

As is widely known, the Watchtower Society insists that Jesus did not die on a two-beamed cross but on a single-timber "torture stake". I agree with most people that this issue is pretty pointless and amounts only to a historical curiosity. As most Christians of faith would say, "It doesn't matter what he died on; it matters that he died for us". The purpose of this discussion is not to detract from that theological issue but instead to show that this subject is yet another instance of the Society's intellectual dishonesty and failure to represent the sources they quote. It will also provide a fairly interesting survey of what is historically known about the most heinous form of capital punishment in the Roman world.

The principal argument the Society furnishes is a linguistic one: that the Greek terms stauros and xulon and the Latin term crux (which translates stauros in the Latin Vulgate) did not mean "cross" in the first century. If the words used by the Bible writers referred only to a simple single-timber stake, then Jesus would not have died on a stake that had a crossbeam. So where Christendom get the idea that Jesus was put to death on a cross? The Society claims that the early Catholic church imported the cross symbol from neighboring pagan religions as part of its apostasy from original apostolic Christianity and their use of the cross in worship led them to claim that Jesus had in fact died on one. Of course, if Jesus did die on a cross (or was believed to have done so by the earliest Christians), then the use of the cross symbol by later Christians is certainly intelligible. The following quotation from the Society's literature is quite typical:

***w92 11/15 p. 7 The Cross-Symbol of Christianity? ***

Dr. Frank Turek on the Evidence for Christianity

Frank Turek on the Historical Criterion of Embarassment and its Applicability to the New Testament

Would Pontius Pilate have Released a Prisoner at Passover?

This is a question I’ve heard raised from a few sceptics previously. It stems from a popular strain of thought that suggests the more sceptical of something you are the more critical you are being. However the problem is that if such a level of ‘hyper-scepticism’ were used for any other ancient events or figures we would know very little about anything in the past. This leaves people espousing radical scepticism no more critical than those whose credulity may lead them to the same or other conclusions, as vocal as they may be.


A type of informal logical fallacy known as an argument from silence is being used, what this means is someone draws a positive conclusion from the silence of a person or event. The argument from silence is unanimously recognised amongst historians to be one of the weaker weapons in the historians arsenal. Specifically here the argument used to deny that the gospels are correct in their recording of Pilates release of a prisoner at Passover (Mk 15:6, Mat 27:15, Luke 23:17 and John 18:39). It's argued that because there is no record of Pilate taking part in this custom outside of the New Testament it therefore is unlikely to have occurred. Now I may not be able to prove that this happened but it can be shown with a fair amount of certainty that it was most likely a historical event. All four Gospels record the practice of releasing a prisoner at Passover and its likely that Johns Gospel does so independently of the other three.

40 Arabic Words

Crucifixion - Could Jesus have survived?

How did the Romans come to use crucifixion as a means of execution?

It is not true that it was the Romans who first came up with the idea of using crucifixion for the means of execution. The Romans were a military powerhouse for over five hundred years before their well documented decline which had lead them all over the known world. A by-product of this was that both previously and during their conquests they picked up and learnt many of the skills, knowledge and technology that were part of the societies and nations they had conquered. Ancient historians generally accept that the Romans learnt it from the Carthaginians made from drawing upon details given in the work of many ancient historians [Livy 22.13.9; 28.37.2; 38.48.13, Diodurus Siculus 25.5.2; 10.2; 26.23.1].

Most ancient historians would actually agree that crucifixion began with the Persians [Herodotus 1.128.2, 3.125.3, 3132.2, 3.159.1, Darius also had three thousand inhabitants of Babylon crucified; 4.43.2,7;6.30.1; 7.194.1]. Although there is no agreed upon consensus.

In fact crucifixion was used as a means of execution by many other people groups including the Indians, Assyrians, Scythians, Greeks and the Taurians. There are even accounts of crucifixions amongst the ancient Celts who would crucify criminals in this way as a sacrifice to their gods [Diodorus Siculus 5.32.6 - And they are monstrously impious in their sacrifices; for they crucify evildoers for their gods].