The Slave’s Death: The Cost of Our Salvation–Podcast and Transcript

May you have a blessed Passover season! This week’s broadcast/podcast concerns the Passion of our Savior, His crucifixion and death as our Passover:

Have we forgotten His tangible and costly act of love in all our focus on the Torah?

The Passover week is upon us, and in all of our celebrations of the Exodus from Egypt, sometimes we forget the greater Exodus enacted on behalf of the world at the Cross of Messiah/Christ. In the Bible, Yeshua/Jesus tells His disciples over and over again about being a slave to all, being a servant, about the servant of all being the greatest. That kind of language can sneak by us when we are not aware of how crucifixion was regarded in the Roman Empire. What does servitutis extremum summumque supplicium (and I apologize ahead of time for not being able to read latin fluently) mean, and how does it relate to I Cor 1:21-25?

Here’s the podcast link (click on the blue) if you want to listen instead of read.

Hi, this is Tyler Dawn Rosenquist and welcome to Character in Context, where we explore Scripture in its original historical context and talk about how God is communicating His expectations to us as His image-bearers—Because, after all, if all this information doesn’t bring us closer to God’s character, it’s just useless brain candy..

You can catch my blogs at www.theancient bridge.com and my children’s context teachings at contextforkids.com. Past broadcasts of Character in Context can be found both on youtube and on my podcast channel—characterincontext.podbean.com. I also have two youtube channels where you can watch my video teachings for adults and kids, which can be accessed through my websites, as can my books and my family curriculum series.

And remember my weekly disclaimer—scholars are an important part of the Kingdom, but the Kingdom is bigger than scholarship. We need all sorts of servants, and we need to give them the respect they are owed according to the area in which they have expertise—anyone who is functioning in their calling, becoming conformed to the image of God as we see in Messiah, and devoting their life to God is worthy of our respect, whether we agree with them 100% on this and that or not.

This is my Passover broadcast, and so it is going to be hard for me to get through this without tears. I was going to just teach on honor and shame and the Cross, but after reading Martin Hengel’s masterpiece “Crucifixion in the Ancient World and the Folly of the Message of the Cross” I decided to switch gears and talk about what crucifixion meant in the ancient world, and how it ties into all of Yeshua’s (you might know Him as Jesus) teachings about the vital importance of being a servant to all. I want you to understand how first-century people would view His death on the Cross.

The foundation of this teaching is found in I Cor 1

²¹For seeing that—in God’s wisdom—the world through its wisdom did not know God, God was pleased—through the foolishness of the message proclaimed—to save those who believe. ²²For Jewish people ask for signs and Greek people seek after wisdom, ²³but we proclaim Messiah crucified—a stumbling block to Jewish people and foolishness to Gentile people, ²⁴but to those who are called (both Jewish and Greek people), Messiah, the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (TLV)

Let’s look at Is 42 really quick, which is quoted in Matthew chapter 12:

¹⁸“Here is My servant whom I chose, the One I love, in whom My soul takes delight.
I will put My Ruach upon Him, and He shall proclaim justice to the nations.
¹⁹He will not quarrel or cry out, nor will anyone hear His voice in the streets.
²⁰A crushed reed He will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out,
until He brings forth justice to victory.
²¹And in His name the nations shall hope.” (TLV)

Matt 20, right after the mother of James and John asked for them to be at his right and left hand side.

²⁵But Yeshua called them over and said, “You know that the rulers of the nations lord it over them, and their great ones play the tyrant over them. ²⁶It shall not be this way among you. But whoever wants to be great among you shall be your servant, ²⁷and whoever wants to be first among you shall be your slave— ²⁸just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.” (TLV)

Matt 23, where many people like to focus on the small stuff while ignoring the nuclear bomb at the end.

⁸“But you are not to be called rabbi; for One is your Teacher, and you are all brothers. ⁹And call no man on earth your father; for One is your Father, who is in heaven. ¹⁰Nor are you to be called teachers; for One is your Teacher, the Messiah. ¹¹But the greatest among you shall be your servant. ¹²Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled, and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted. (TLV)

People like to focus on the Rabbi, teacher, father thing because most people who read aren’t called those things. It’s always easy to focus on ways to scold others, and even sometimes when we have to take stuff out of context to do so, but what is the context. You are all brothers. One is your father, in heaven. One is your teacher, the Messiah. Then, BAM, the greatest among you shall be your servant. Who is the greatest among them?—Yeshua. BAM.

Mark 9:35, again, speaking of Himself.

Sitting down, He called the Twelve and said to them, “If any man wants to be first, he shall be least of all and the servant of everyone.” (TLV)

a lot more obvious later in the chapter

⁴³Yet it is not this way among you. But whoever wants to be great among you shall be your servant, ⁴⁴and whoever wants to be first among you shall be slave of all. ⁴⁵For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many.” (TLV)

I could keep going on, but the gist of a lot of the preaching in the Gospels is that Yeshua is the ultimate servant, the one who serves all. He, by the way, is the only one who can truly make that claim. We can serve some people, and a few can serve a great many, but the truth is that most of us serve very few if any—and certainly not in the way that Yeshua did. What is the most remarkable about Yeshua, of course, is that He is Master and King, and should, by all rights, be served by all. But he served all instead. He is our true example of the character and humility of God.

But yes, we see that Yeshua was the ultimate servant, we get that, it isn’t big news. But what is this alluding to, in His future? What weren’t they seeing or even suspecting?

Summum supplicium. The ultimate penalty.

More specifically—servitutis extremum summumque supplicium—the ultimate penalty for slaves. That is what the Romans called crucifixion.

Valerius Maximus, who wrote during the reign of Tiberius Caesar and a contemporary of Yeshua, wrote, on the subject of the crucifying of Roman deserters by Scipio in Africa in the 3^rd century BCE. “I will not pursue this matter further, both because it concerns Scipio, and Roman blood should not be insulted by paying the slaves penalty.”

The slave’s penalty. An insult to Roman blood. It was actually almost entirely illegal to crucify a Roman citizen. Pontius Pilate was finally removed from power after he crucified high ranking Samaritans. It was the death for the lowest of the low—those who were slaves (for pretty much any reason) and for state criminals. That Yeshua died not only as a rebel to Rome but, in His own words, as a servant, a slave, is not something we often hear about.

The Romans were outraged by the very idea of anyone with worthy blood being crucified, but a god? Or His Son? Utter nonsense. There was no greater stumbling block to the heathens than the fact that Yeshua died, and on top of that, died as a criminal. Let’s read some quotes from those times about what the Romans and others thought about Christianity, because of the Cross.

Justin Martyr, in Apology I 13.4 “They say that our madness consists in the fact that we put a crucified man in second place after the unchangeable and eternal God, the Creator of the world.”

Hey, what about all those memes out there telling us about dying Messiahs in every heathen religion on the plant? Could they actually be untrue?

Pliny the Younger called Christianity, (Epistulae 10.96.4-8) “nothing but a perverse and extravagant superstition.” (61-113 CE)

Tacitus (56-120 CE), who was governor of Asia and presided over the trials of Christians, called Christianity a “pernicious superstition.” To prove it, he describes the shameful fate of the founder, “Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate.”

From Minucius Felix’s dialogue Octavius, published in 197 CE, we get these gems.

Now, before I start reading these, understand that Macrus Minucius Felix was writing as a Christian, in “dialogue form” between a pagan and a lawyer. These sorts of writings record the common objections of the time, which include: “sick delusions,” “senseless and crazy superstition,” “old womanly superstition,” all which lead to the destruction of true religion. “To say that their ceremonies center on a man put to death for his crime and on the fatal wood of the cross is to assign to these abandoned wretches sanctuaries which are appropriate to them and the kind of worship they deserve.”

In other words, they deserve crucifixion themselves and the sanctuary of crosses of their own.

Notice how destructive to “true religion” early Christianity was believed to be. There is nothing in this worship of Yeshua that in any way draws them, is sympathetic or comfortable to them, or acceptable at all. This worship of a man crucified, a slave’s death, the death of an enemy to Roma, Great Rome personified as a goddess, was an abomination, abhorrent, superstition, crazy. He goes on to say that these early believers “worship a criminal on his cross.”

The protagonist, Octavius, counters the accusation that they worship the Cross itself:

“Moreover we do not reverence the cross, nor do we worship it. But you, who hold your wooden gods to be holy, also worship wooden crosses, as parts of your divine images. For what are the military emblems, the banners and standards in your camps, if not gilded and decorated crosses? Not only is the form of your signs of victory like the structure of the cross; it even recalls a man fastened to it.”

Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE) recorded an oracle from Porphyry of Tyre (3^rd century) to a man lamenting over his wife’s newfound belief in this Jewish Savior:

“Let her continue as she pleases, persisting in her vain delusions, and lamenting in song a god who died in delusions, and who was condemned by judges whose verdict was just, and executed in life by the worst of deaths, a death bound in iron.”

Crucifixion was such an abomination in the pagan world that even many Christian commentators didn’t want to talk about it. Gnosticism dealt with the whole thing through something called Docetism—they did away with the crucified man. His body wasn’t real, and so his sufferings and shame weren’t real either. The crucifixion was that shameful, yes, and that much of a stumbling block.

This is why Paul said,

I Cor 1:18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

And

We don’t really “get” how foolish the Cross is because it is not shameful in our culture. It is tamed. We are so used to that picture of Yeshua crucified, it is an image of honor to us, and yes it absolutely should be, but unless we see the shame of it in that world, we just can’t understand what on earth the big deal was.

We think that the hardest thing on earth to believe and justify is the resurrection of the dead. To our scientific minds, and speaking as a scientist myself, that’s the choke point. But to an ancient audience who believed in a multitude of gods who could never be killed by mere mortals (but could be killed by other gods), it was the most ludicrous claim on earth, and that a god would die not only at the hands of men but as the basest of criminals? Utter nonsense. Gods were arrogant, willful, self-seeking, dangerous, full of wrath to all but their favorites (and sometimes even to their favorites). Man was created for one purpose—to serve the gods, and certainly not to be served by one. Gods were there to be honored, not shamed.

As Celsus said, in Origen’s Contra Celsum (248 AD), “What drunken old woman, telling stories to lull a small child to sleep, would not be ashamed of muttering such preposterous things?”

Indeed, it was just that crazy. To put it into perspective, it would be like a modern man accused of and executed for child molestation. Okay, I want you to remember that level of disgust and horror. That was how people felt about crucifixion. Even the people who condemned people to be executed that way, didn’t like to write much about it. It was practically taboo. Now, all of a sudden, people had to talk about it. How convicted and convinced would you have to be in order to go around telling people to follow the teachings of a convicted and executed Jewish pedophile? And we don’t like witnessing to our neighbors!

No wonder people wanted the disciples dead. Wouldn’t people want to kill you if you were promoting, as Divine, a child molester? There would be riots. God would have to truly be calling someone to Himself in a huge way for them to even listen. No one asks if a convicted child molester is guilty. Heck, no one even asks if an arrested child molester is guilty—the arrest itself and the abominable nature of the crime just offend us so terribly that we stop thinking logically and just react with disgust. Welcome to the world of the believers of at least the first four centuries of Christianity.

*************

Summum supplicium. The ultimate penalty.

More specifically—servitutis extremum summumque supplicium—the ultimate penalty for slaves.

Now I want you to think about every single time Yeshua/Jesus called Himself a servant of all, a slave even. He was communicating more than we naturally see, removed 2000 years from the context of His life.

Now read what Paul wrote to the Philippians in chapter 2

But He emptied Himself—
taking on the form of a slave,
becoming the likeness of men
and being found in appearance as a man.
He humbled Himself—
becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
For this reason God highly exalted Him
and gave Him the name that is above every name
that at the name of Yeshua every knee should bow,
in heaven and on the earth and under the earth,
and every tongue profess that Yeshua the Messiah is Lord—
to the glory of God the Father. (TLV)

Mark 9:35

Sitting down, He called the Twelve and said to them, “If any man wants to be first, he shall be least of all and the servant of everyone.” (TLV)

This is why He is first.

But we aren’t done yet, because I haven’t told you about how they humbled Him, how they made Him the least of all when He is really the greatest of all. This part isn’t pretty, and some of it—you might not want your children to hear, although I have had kids as young as five read this material out of my first volume of Context for Kids. It’s okay to know. We need to know what He did for us. What it cost Him. Kids in other countries aren’t so sheltered as ours, and in the honor/shame countries of Asia and Africa, children will die before denying Him. It’s because they understand very well what I am about to tell you—the price of our freedom and our admission into the Kingdom of God.

It’s the greatest story ever told because it is also the most terrible story ever told. I figure if He endured it for us, the least we can do is look Him full in the face as He endured it. It’s really the very least we can do. I see a lot of people turn from Him, thinking that once they find Torah that they can pretend they got there on their own. Much like any scarlet woman who, having had one man bring her to the dance, pretending she got there on her own and leaving with someone else.

I have mentioned in previous broadcasts about honor and shame. In the ancient world, a man’s reputation, his honor (which had nothing to do with morality or inner character) was more important to him than his money, his life, his family—anything you can imagine. A man would endure anything in order to keep his honor intact. To be shamed was to lose honor. The most horrible thing about crucifixion wasn’t the pain—that’s our take on it, having no awareness of how important honor was to people in that world. The most terrible thing was the absolute complete loss of personal honor. It left one without even the slightest shred of dignity. Contrast the crowds of Galilean pilgrims calling out His Name and heralding Him as the “Son of David” not even a week earlier to the few women and one man gathered at the foot of the Cross. His brothers were all in town for the Passover, His cousins. Everyone he had ever healed. Lazarus, whom He raised from the dead, lived a stone’s throw away. His disciples. Everyone He had delivered, raised, healed. Everyone who had asked to follow Him, gone.

That’s the poison of crucifixion, being so terrible that almost no one wanted to be associated with Him anymore. So what did they do to Him? How did they turn someone whom so many heralded to someone whom no one wanted anything to do with in the space of less than twenty-four hours? As I talk about this, I want to ask you to do something shocking. We often think of Yeshua as not really someone we know, but I want you to imagine this is someone you know and love, someone who is precious to you. I want this to be real to you and not just an academic exercise. He suffered. There is nothing academic about it. Yeshua should be just that real to us, that when we read about the crucifixion, it strikes us to the heart.

Much of the remainder of this podcast will be taken from the final chapters of my family curriculum book Context for Kids Volume I: Honor and Shame in the Bible. Within the context of understanding the honor/shame culture of the day, this is far more impactful, but time is limited to share that here.

First, I want you to think of how bad it looked to the gathered crowd of Temple guards that night as one of Yeshua’s own disciples betrayed Him. Can you hear the jeers? “Not much of a judge of character eh? I hear that’s even the guy he trusted with the money bag. So much for being ben David, the heir to Solomon’s wisdom and David’s strength—he didn’t even have the good sense to discern thieves from honest men.”

Yes, Yeshua knew it was going to happen, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt, that it wasn’t deeply wounding to see Judas fall so low. And then the disciples ran. Again, the jeers.

“And there go the rest. You don’t inspire much loyalty there, do you Rabbi? You chose these guys, right?”

They chained him and drove him by foot to the city, about a two-mile hike in the dark, lit only by the brightness of the Passover moon. We can only imagine their callous words, the prodding him along with their weapons. In the ancient world, one of the greatest shames you could inflict upon a man was to render him helpless, and our Savior was very helpless as He trudged along in heavy chains. But it had all just begun.

When they arrived at the courtyard of Annas, the father in law of the high priest Caiaphas, it was undoubtedly cold and he was definitely sweating from the exertion of the forced march in irons. Bound hand and foot, they began to call false witnesses against Him—and even though none could give the same testimony, they kept forcing Him to listen to the lies, the character assassination. These people whom He came to save, tearing Him down before the gathered crowd of elders and Sadducees.

When they could not find two in agreement they were forced to question Him, but Matthew and Mark tell us that He remained silent until they compelled Him, by the Name of God, to tell them whether or not He was the Messiah, the Son of God. When He confirmed that He was, He was convicted of blasphemy — the most shameful crime of all because it was against God Himself and not simply against men. This conviction showed the trial for what it was — an honor challenge to Yeshua’s claim of being the Son of God. As soon as the sentence was handed down, the guards started slapping and striking Jesus; they spit in his face, blinded Him and mocked Him while He was tied up and defenseless. We would call this sort of behavior cowardly and despicable, but in the ancient world it was all part of shaming a person who deserved no respect. Jesus was being forced to bear all the shame His enemies had felt when they challenged Him and were themselves humiliated in public. It was their own fault, but they were making Him pay the price.

Once the Sadducean chief priests had ruled Him guilty of blasphemy, John tells us that Yeshua was taken to Herod. Movies like to show Pilate having private conversations with Jesus during His hearing — going outside to talk to the Jewish leaders and inside to talk to Jesus in hushed tones, but there was nothing private about his conversation with Jesus. Pilate wasn’t treating Jesus like a friend; to Pilate, Jesus was nothing more than a pawn in his own honor games with the Jewish leadership. He was a brutal, bloodthirsty man whom even Roman historians spoke ill of.

Pilate knew there was only one reason Yeshua had been brought before him. Around 30 CE, the Jews had lost their right to execute people. Pilate knew the Jews needed him, and he was playing games with them for his own amusement. He was forcing them to admit that his honor was greater than theirs. “It’s against the (Roman) law for us to put anyone to death.” (So, we need you because you have higher honor than we do) When Pilate did take Yeshua inside the Praetorium, he mocked and shamed Him by asking if He really was the King of the Jews, and pointed out that His own people had handed Him over for death (which was very shameful). Really, this was a game to Pilate — he held all the cards and everyone was beholden to him. When he found out that Yeshua was a Galilean, he sent the self-proclaimed King of the Jews to the Roman-appointed King of the Jews. Although John did not include this account, Luke recorded it.

The Bible says that Herod Antipas, the son of Herod the Great, had been longing to see Him — after all, for a while Herod was worried that Yeshua was John the Baptist returned from the dead, since Herod had John beheaded. Herod wanted to see a miracle, yes, but he probably also wanted reassurance that Jesus was not John. The only person who wasn’t honoring him was Yeshua— who remained silent and didn’t even acknowledge him. By not responding to Herod, Yeshua was challenging Herod’s claim of authority, his ascribed honor from the Emperor. Herod responded by mocking Yeshua and allowing his soldiers to do the same. In order to ridicule Yeshua’s Kingly claims and to show His power to shame Yeshua, Herod dressed Him up in royal robes and sent Him back to Pilate.

To have a known murderer and insurrectionist (rebel) released instead of Himself would have been incredibly shaming to Yeshua publicly. It was a complete rejection of His worth as a human being, placing Him beneath even a murderer as the national leaders decided that they would rather embrace a criminal back into their fold than someone whose only crime really came down to making them all look bad in comparison. Pilate declared Yeshua innocent, yes, but everyone knew that it was only a ploy to further shame the Judean elites. It did nothing to vindicate or restore honor to Yeshua at this point.

This is the point where things get truly ugly—things that The Passion movie didn’t dare show, but we know archaeologically and from doctors familiar with the brutality of crucifixion.

The scourging and crucifixion of our Savior are detailed in Matthew 27:26-50, Mark 15:15-37, Luke 23:26-46, and John 19:16-30. The writers had no need to describe crucifixion because in those days everyone knew exactly what the Romans did, how they did it and what happened to the victim. Unless we read eye-witness accounts from the time, we assume that the paintings and wall hangings or movies do a fairly good job of telling us the story. The truth is that we really don’t have an adequate appreciation for what happened. A Roman scourging was a brutal event. It involved stripping a person down completely naked, in public, and using a weapon resembling a many-tailed whip, and each tail having a metal tip at the end. He would have been whipped front and back. The purpose of this flogging was humiliation. Just being bound and defenseless, in and of itself, was deeply shameful to a man. The soldiers, however, would also cause a man so much agony through this torture that he would lose control over his bowels and bladder. The point was to cause a man to lose complete control and dignity in front of an audience. As if this was not enough, they dressed Him in royal robes, wove a crown of thorns and pressed it into His head, then placed a reed in His hand and mocked His claims to kingship. His head was cut and bleeding already when they took the reed out of His hand and beat Him about the head with it. Pulling His clothing back onto His torn body, not for decency but for the sport and agony of it, they forced Him to carry the implement of His own death — the crossbeam that they would nail Him to. Although this is not usually seen as an indignity when the soldiers forced Simon of Cyrene to carry the crossbeam instead they were showing Jesus to be an object of even greater scorn, not even man enough to carry it Himself much less the Son of God. Most criminals were given more dignity than this, and He would have been jeered at for not being able to do it Himself. The Roman crucifixion was barbaric, beyond the nails. Jesus would have been stripped down naked again, not even left with a loincloth to protect the last remnants of His dignity. He would have been lifted up high enough that people from far around would have seen Him. Flies and birds would have harassed Him, and people would have gathered to mock Him. In those days or honor and shame, it was a public form of entertainment to see a shamed person ‘get what he deserved.’ They shouted challenges at Him, demanding that He prove His power as the Son of God; they mocked His weakness and inability to even prevent His own crucifixion. To the people gathered there, except for a small group of supporters, His appearance on the cross was all the proof they needed that He was a false prophet, a false Messiah, a false claimant to the throne of David and deserving of everything that was happening to Him. Their admiration had turned to contempt and hatred — the Judean elites must have been right about Him, because after all, He couldn’t even save Himself.

As the mocking went on, Jesus’ body would have started to betray Him even more, to the delight of the crowd. His body would have become distorted, limbs dislocating and swelling. Due to a physiological phenomenon related to the method of crucifixion, His exposed genitals would have become swollen with blood and grossly distended. If He had not already lost control of His bowels and bladder during the scourging, He would have completely lost control upon the cross. Naked, bleeding, covered with His own excrement and beaten and swollen to the point of being unrecognizable as a man, Jesus endured all the shame and ridicule our sins had brought upon ourselves and upon our Creator. He died in absolute disgrace — rejected and mocked by the very people He had come to save.

He died like this, surrounded not by his family and closest friends, but only his mother, and a few other women, and John. Almost everyone he had healed, delivered, supernaturally fed, taught and raised from the dead—absent. Have you ever felt abandoned? I imagine you have. Have you ever felt this abandoned, being utterly innocent and guilty only of serving all? I am certain you have not. The triumph of the Cross over Yeshua was absolute and it stripped Him of everything except the loyalty of a very few. He died in unimaginable pain and humiliation—and in loneliness that we just can’t even begin to imagine.

Pilate said one thing that we need to listen to. He said, “Behold the man.” We need to look Him full on, in all this horror, and know the price of our freedom, what it cost Him. Vindication was still days away. I doubt it did much to lessen what He was enduring. People sometimes say that He thought of us on the Cross and He might have, but I imagine that He was thinking more about the Father. This was an act of perfect obedience. Beautiful loyalty. A full commitment to Creation by the Creator.

That He could have called down a legion of angels to His defense makes it all the more amazing, His love all the more worthy of worship. Awe-inspiring.

What we take for granted was so costly. Nothing has ever been bought at dearer a price than our salvation. The Docetists were so offended by it that they made a doctrine where He didn’t suffer at all, where He just faked everyone out by pretending. You have to admit, it’s a comforting thought, but also a great insult. Just another form of shame heaped on to the pile—He was a charlatan, pretending to suffer. No, He is not a charlatan, not then and not now.

Let’s reread what Paul wrote to the Philippians in chapter 2

Mark 9:35

Sitting down, He called the Twelve and said to them, “If any man wants to be first, he shall be least of all and the servant of everyone.” (TLV)

This is why He is first. And this is why we dare not focus on the happy ending without seeing what He did, the blood price for our freedom and entry into the Kingdom.