How many crucified with jesus

Time would see him hailed, not just as a man, but as a god. By enduring the most agonizing fate imaginable, he had conquered death itself. The utter strangeness of all this, for the vast majority of people in the Roman world, did not lie in the notion that a mortal might become divine. The border between the heavenly and the earthly was widely held to be permeable. So vast had the scope of Roman power become that any man who succeeded in making himself its master was liable to seem less human than divine.

The ascent into heaven of one of those, a warlord by the name of Julius Caesar, had been heralded by the blaze across the skies of a fiery-tailed star. Divinity, then, was for the very greatest of the great: for victors, and heroes and kings. That a man who had himself been crucified might be hailed as a god could not help but be seen by people everywhere across the Roman world as scandalous, obscene, grotesque.

The torture of the Son of the Most High God was a horror simply too shocking to be portrayed in visual form. Only centuries after the death of Jesus —by which time, astonishingly, even the Caesars had been brought to acknowledge him as Christ—did his execution at last start to emerge as an acceptable theme for artists.

By AD the cross was ceasing to be viewed as something shameful. Banned as a punishment decades earlier by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, crucifixion had come to serve the Roman people as an emblem of triumph over sin and death. So it was, in an empire that—although today we call it Byzantine—never ceased to insist that it was Roman, a corpse came to serve as an icon of majesty.

Byzantium, though, was not the only Christian realm. In the Latin-speaking West, a millennium and more after the birth of Christ, a fresh revolution was brewing. Increasingly, there were Christians who, rather than keeping the brute horror of crucifixion from their gaze, yearned instead to fix their eyes fully upon it. Why could you not bear to see the nails violate the hands and feet of your Creator?

Its author, a brilliant scholar from northern Italy by the name of Anselm, was a man of noble birth: a correspondent of countesses, an associate of kings. No matter how high in the affairs of the world he rose, he never forgot that it was in lowliness, and nakedness, and persecution that his Savior had redeemed him.

In his prayer to the crucified Christ, copied as it was and read across the whole of the Latin West, Anselm articulated a new and momentous understanding of the Christian God: one in which the emphasis was laid not upon his triumph, but upon his suffering humanity. The Jesus portrayed by medieval artists, twisted, bloody, dying, was a victim of crucifixion such as his original executioners would have recognized: no longer serene and victorious, but racked by agony, just as any tortured slave would have been.

The response to the spectacle, however, was far removed from the mingled revulsion and disdain that had typified that of the ancients to crucifixion. Men and women, when they looked upon an image of their Lord fixed to the cross, upon the nails smashed through the tendons and bone of his feet, upon the arms stretched so tightly as to appear torn from their sockets, upon the slump of his thorn-crowned head onto his chest, did not feel contempt, but rather compassion, and pity, and fear.

There was certainly no lack of Christians, in medieval Europe, to identify with the sufferings of their God. Rich still trampled down poor. Gibbets stood on hills. In fact, it can be quite detrimental! They have used the Greek language to introduce a bias, a tradition of their own! All criminals are malefactors, but not all malefactors are thieves.

Now, John settles the matter as to how many individuals were crucified with Jesus. This little clue, paired with a little common sense, will now work wonders!

Theft is a crime, and a malefactor is a criminal. Being two thieves automatically qualified them to be two malefactors! How simple! That supposition greatly damages simple passages. Permit us to demonstrate. See, it gets sillier and sillier when we carry the concept all the way throughout the Bible. Here is the simple truth. There was one Barabbas freed when Jesus was condemned.

Barabbas, one man, fit all four descriptions. There were no four criminals crucified with Christ any more than there were four Barabbases who were released when Jesus was condemned. In the case of the thieves and malefactors, there were two people— two malefactors who were also thieves. Of course not! Again, beloved, we need not complicate Scriptures. He was cleansed from what he had judged in himself. Nevertheless, he did not get rid of his indwelling sin.

He represents the people who are cleansed from their sins but have no desire for anything more. This was none other than Jesus Himself. The first thief directed his mockery at Him, but He did not reply; the other thief replied for Him.

Today, too, God has saved thieves who can answer all the world's questions about Jesus and refute their arguments and turn aside their mockery. Jesus, however, does not answer them a single word. Jesus not only took our sins on His body up on the tree, He also bore sin in His body. He was made sin for us. God condemned sin in His flesh. Romans When this work was finished, He gave up His spirit. It was impossible for the law to judge sin in the flesh, because all the sin that is committed by a man is outside the body.

However, now God did what was impossible for the law: He condemned sin in Christ's flesh. Everyone who now wants to be saved from indwelling sin must take up his own cross daily.

The thief was saved from his transgressions, but he did not become a partaker of divine nature. Jesus did not have the nature of angels; He was of the seed of Abraham. Hebrews This was so that He could destroy sin in the body and in its place plant the fullness of the Godhead, which now dwells in Him bodily.

There is no condemnation for the judgment that takes place in the body over sin in our nature, because it takes place within the body. There is a growth of the body, a salvation of the body and a judgment of the body, so that everyone will be rewarded according to what he has done with his body.