At the very centre of the Christian faith, is a cross on which Jesus was crucified. This is true, and somewhat counter-intuitively, good news. We must be honest, it is a strange feature to celebrate a crucifixion.

Sometimes though preachers in seeking to bring something so strange to life will focus on the gruesome suffering of Jesus and make it sound as though Jesus was extra special in this. But what marks out Jesus’ death is not the how but the why. 

Christians turned an evil on its head. They said, this shows us how much God loves us. “This is love”, they said, “not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” That’s the why.

But there’s something about the how that I hadn’t thought much about until this year. Jesus is rare among victims of crucifixion because we know his name. In fact because Jesus’ dying on a cross is so widely known it can be easy to think that we know the names of everyone else who was crucified. In fact the opposite is true. We know the names of only a handful of people who were crucified.

We don’t even really know for sure the names of the men crucified next to Jesus, although later Christian tradition (not in the Gospels, but in 4th-century apocryphal texts) suggests their names were Dismas (the good thief) and Gestas (the bad one).

The Romans were good at crucifixion. It was their most shameful, most humiliating and most painful means of execution because it was public, it was excruciating to watch and, of course, much much worse to experience. Rome crucified enormous numbers of people. Josephus alone describes mass crucifixions in the thousands across the Jewish War period. Yet nearly all of them are completely anonymous — gone without a trace. The default fate of a crucified person in 1st century Judea was total historical oblivion. No one wrote their names down. No one told their stories. 

Do you know how many names of those people we know? Hardly any. James & Simon were sons of Judas the Galilean (Acts 5:37) and they were crucified about 15 years after Jesus. We know because they got a passing mention by Josephus’. The most important one (other than Jesus) was Yehohanan. He was unknown for 2000 years before an archaeologist accidentally discovered his tomb in 1968 and noticed that he had a nail through his heel bone. It is, perhaps, the best attested of remarkably few archaeological discoveries that demonstrate the practice of crucifixion and it is the only one, so far, that has supplied us with a name.

Across the entire empire, across five centuries of Roman crucifixion practice, there are only a very small number of individuals whose crucifixion we can name with any confidence — and most of those are from Christian tradition rather than independent sources. And many of those crucifixions were people crucified because they were Christians. A double mocking on the one side and a badge of honour on the other. 

The Roman Empire was extraordinarily efficient at killing people and extraordinarily indifferent to recording their names. Partly because most people crucified were of low status but then, to the Romans, so was Jesus.

His crucifixion should have produced the same result as every other crucifixion. Obscurity. The disciples scattered. The leader dead and publicly shamed. By every social logic of the ancient world, that should have been the end not only of Jesus but his movement. It worked every other time. 

Every. Other. Time.

So how come we know about Jesus?

Jesus, by contrast, generated letters and biographies (the gospels) within 20-40 years, and a new religious movement spread fast across the ancient world. And every one of them insisted on the fact that Jesus died on a cross.

They didn’t claim that he didn’t die. They 100% agreed with the Romans. You crucified him. You did your job. Jesus died.

Rome’s cross was specifically designed to to shame, deter, and socially obliterate. Wisdom didn’t survive the cross. Movements didn’t survive the cross.

So how come we know about Jesus? Because at the very least the claim that death had been undone was so powerful and so compelling and so believable despite being incredible that not even a cross could suppress it.