Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Did Jesus Die On A Cross?


 

At this time of year when many persons in the Christian world are thinking about Easter and the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ we are going to see numerous portrayals of Jesus hanging on a cross in the print, broadcast, and on-line media.

The cross according to some writers has almost become more important in the minds of some of "the faithful" than Jesus himself according to some researchers. The Catholic archaeologist Adolphe Napolean Didron says that this cross he is portrayed as dying on has, in some cases, received more veneration than Jesus himself. "This sacred wood is adored almost equally with God himself," he claims.

But did Jesus really die on a cross? According to the Bible writers Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John the Romans put Jesus to death on a stau-ros or single upright stake -- not a two-piece cross. Moreover J.D. Parsons, the author of The Non-Christian Cross wrote that there is no support in the Christian Greek Scriptures or New Testament for the idea that Jesus died on a cross, but other Bible writers do support the words of the Gospel writers. At Acts 5:30, for instance, the Apostle Paul wrote that Jesus was put to death on a stake. This was a common Roman practice at the time –executing criminals others the Romans considered to be terrorists or insurgents – on stakes – not crosses.

It wasn't until some 30 years after the death of Jesus that Christians sliding away to Babylonian ideas and apostasy introduced the idea of the two-piece cross into the Christian congregation.

Long before the time of the Jesus Christ and the Romans the ancient Babylonians used this two-piece cross in their worship of the fertility goddess Tammuz. From them this use of the cross spread like a plague in the ancient world.

Many nations in the early Middle-Eastern world were influenced by the culture and religious practices of the Babylonians and gradually the use of this cross was accepted into the rituals of the ancient Egyptians, Indians, Chinese, Syrians – and the Israelites who time and gain forgot God's hatred for image worship or the use of images in supposed worship of him.

Some persons claimed that whether or not Jesus died on a stake or cross is moot or unimportant, but that is not true. Scriptures like Ezekiel 8: 13, 14 make it very clear that such things are not acceptable to God. It is something that he warned the Israelites about on numerous occasions. And using images in their worship cost them dearly when he allowed pagan nations surrounding them to overrun them because of this disobedience. It is a pagan concept used by pagan religions that were disgusting to God.

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