Did Jesus Die on a Cross or a Torture Stake? WATCHTOWER in Question? - David Bercot

Hi, I'm David Burso, and this afternoon we're going to be talking about, did Jesus die on a cross or on a torture stake? As I've shared before in other videos, I spent about a third of my life as a Jehovah's Witness. I was an elder and a pioneer, and during those years, if you had asked me the question, did Jesus die on a cross or on a torture stake, I would have said without any question, "Oh, definitely on a torture stake."

Well, this afternoon we're going to see if that's the correct answer. Now, the reason I'm recording this message is that it's part of a series on what I call Crossing the Bridge to Vibrant Spiritual Fellowship After Leaving Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm not trying to get you to join any particular denomination or church, but I am interested in helping former Jehovah's Witnesses to find vibrant spiritual fellowship wherever that may be.

And when you leave the Witnesses, one of the barriers you're going to be confronted with is the issue of the cross. For example, if you visit a church, there's often going to be a cross on the building somewhere, or if you pick up a piece of literature in a church, you're likely going to find a representation of the cross somewhere on it, maybe a picture of Jesus in the springtime anyway, a picture of Jesus on the cross.

Without a doubt, in almost any church you will go to, you're going to hear the cross mentioned in a lot of sermons and a lot of Sunday school lessons. So if you think that Jesus didn't really die on a cross, you're going to have a mental objection every time you hear that word.

So it's important to know if Jesus really did die on a cross or if the cross is something pagan that has somehow slipped its way into Christianity. In other words, maybe there should be a mental barrier there. But yeah, let's dig and find out what the case is.

I know personally, after leaving Jehovah's Witnesses, I had lots of questions about various theological subjects. The cross was just one of them. And of course, everybody had lots of answers, but it was sometimes hard to know, well, just who to believe.

I felt like I'd been misled once, and I was going to be very careful who I'd listen to a second time. So I decided to go straight to the horse's mouth. I would see for myself what those Christians believed who learned Christianity straight from the apostles or from the disciples of the apostles.

So I purchased a set of their writings, and I began reading them, not just the Christians who learned directly from the apostles, but from all the Christians who lived before Constantine. It took me an entire year of reading to cover all of this, but I wanted to know the truth about a lot of things. Well, and as you can imagine, one of the questions I had, as I said, was whether Jesus died on a cross or on an upright stake without any crossbeam.

Well, as it turned out, I found the answer in just a few weeks of reading. I was reading a work entitled The First Apology of Justin Martyr. You perhaps have heard of Justin Martyr. He was an early Christian writer who died as a martyr.

His first apology was written, say, between the years 150 and 160 AD. So we're talking about just 50 years after the apostle John died. Now, Justin Martyr's apology, and apology means a defense of Christianity in this setting, it was addressed to the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius.

So here we have a believer explaining Christianity to the Roman Emperor. Now, the Roman Emperor would have known how Romans crucified people. I'm sure he ordered a lot of people to be crucified. He would know whether it was on a simple upright stake or whether it was on a stake with a crossbeam.

Also, Antoninus Pius spoke Greek like most educated Romans did, and Justin Martyr wrote to him in Greek. Now, in chapter 55 of his first apology, and this is something that's online, you can go and read it for yourself, Justin Martyr talks about the cross.

And in his discussion, he uses a form of the Greek word staros, which is the same word used in the New Testament. This is the word that the New World Translation renders as torture stake, but I think every other translation renders as cross.

Now, you can imagine the level of anticipation I had when I first began reading this passage. I thought to myself, hopefully Justin will describe the shape of a staros. Did it have a crossbeam or not? Was it just an upright stake? What was it?

Well, thankfully, as it turned out, Justin Martyr describes what a staros was in detail. And this is what he wrote. I'm going to just share this with you on a PowerPoint presentation.

See if I got this correctly. Now, this is the passage from Justin Martyr, and this is what he says. And this, and he's talking about the cross, as the prophet foretold, is the greatest symbol of his power and position. Again, I'm reading Justin Martyr.

This is also proved by the things which fall under our observation. For consider all the things in the world, whether they could be administered or even have any society without this shape. So he says the shape of the cross is so important, he asks the Roman Emperor to think about, could human society even exist if this shape wasn't out there in the human universe? Okay. So again, I'm anticipating, okay, what does he say about this shape? All right. Well, first of all, he says this, "For the sea cannot be traveled unless that trophy, which is called a sail, remains safely on a ship."

So this is what an ancient Roman ship looked like. And you have a sail there and the mast, and what do you see? It's in the shape of a cross. So just with that one illustration, I knew right away, okay, so the cross staros had a crossbeam on it.

But then he goes on, and the earth is not plowed without it. This is a Roman plow from a museum. And you can see it looks like a cross laying horizontal. He continues, he keeps giving examples. So it takes away all doubt what shape this was. He says, "Diggers and mechanics cannot do their work except with tools which have this shape."

And he's talking about, I think this is called a matlock that you dig with. Now, this is a modern one, but it turns out the Romans used this very tool. We got this from the Romans or someone before the Romans. This is from a museum, and here are two Roman digging implements, what Justin Martyr is talking about. Now, the wood, of course, is modern wood because the wood from these rotted a long time ago, but you still have the iron heads, and you can see the shape. It's in the shape of a cross, roughly in that shape.

And we have this. This is all that exists, again, the wooden part that would have gone through the center. And again, you see the same kind of instrument that once the wood was affixed to it, you would have the shape of a cross.

So as I was reading this, it quickly answered my question. But Justin Martyr, he keeps going on. I mean, by the end of this, I mean, there was no possible doubt. He says, "And the human form differs from that of the irrational animals in nothing else than in its being erect and having the hands extended." Now, of course, he wasn't talking about apes, but the animals that were common there in the Roman world, like cows and dogs, horses, things like that.

So he's saying that the human shape is in the very shape of a cross when the arms are out extended. Then his last illustration, and he's talking to the Roman Emperor, "And the power of this form is shown by your own symbols on what are called banners and trophies with which all your state possessions are made, using these as the insignia of your power and government." So the Romans had these banners. You've probably seen them in movies or in pictures here and there.

And often it had SPQR or it may have something else on it. But when you look at it, you can see the shape of a cross. It goes up, and there's a crossbar that holds the banner.

So in short, I mean, there's just absolutely, I'm going to go back to that. There's just no question. I mean, that settled it for me. I mean, this is just 50 years after the apostle John. The church is very faithful. People are dying for the faith. These are the very Christians who assembled our New Testament and Old Testament canon.

And this is what they're saying about the cross. But more importantly, it's not that he's saying, "Well, this is what we Christians believe about it." He's talking to the Roman Emperor. The Roman Emperor knew what shape the cross was, what a staros represented. Was it an upright pole or was it a pole with a crossbeam? I mean, he was the Emperor of the Romans. He's the one who crucified people. So yeah, there's no question. I mean, he's just saying, "You know this shape, the very shape that Christians." And why it came up is because some pagans were thinking Christians worship crosses because Christians would sometime inscribe the shape of a cross on a wall or something like that.

So that's why the subject came up. And he said, "Well, you see it all the time, everywhere throughout the whole world." That's Justin's argument. Now, Tertullian, he was writing maybe 45 years later, 35 years later, somewhere in there. And he wrote a work called To the Nations. And I'm going to be quoting from chapter 12 of that. Again, this is online. You can find this. Now, Tertullian is writing in Latin, and he's writing to the Roman people. And he uses the Latin word for cross, which is crux.

In the Latin Bibles, it would translate the Greek word staros. And he says this, "Every piece of timber which is fixed in the ground in an erect position is a part of a cross, and indeed the greater portion of its mass. But of course, an entire cross is attributed to us." He's talking again that the Romans say, "You Christians worship crosses with its transverse beam and its projecting seat."

So again, he says the cross, an entire cross, the greater mass is the upright pole, but then there's the traverse beam that makes a complete cross. So again, he defines it where there can be no question. And all throughout the early Christian writings, they make mention of it. One of the things they talk about a lot is when Moses, I think they were fighting the Amalekites, and God had him, when he would hold out his arms, that the Israelites would prevail. And when he put him down, then the Amalekites would prevail.

And so I think it was Aaron, and I'm not sure if it was Joshua was the other one. They held up his arms outstretched. And the early Christians talk about this was an early shape of the cross. It's why the Israelites prevailed. It was prophesying about the coming of the cross that would bring salvation to mankind.

So yeah, between Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and like I say, there's a whole lot of quotations I could give, but they all say the basic same thing. It made it clear that the cross was not merely an upright stake. It had a crossbeam across it. And that's why we call it today a cross. Okay. Now, this is something interesting in that same writing of Tertullian.

I think it's in the same chapter 12. He says this, "Some among you, talking to the pagan Romans, have dreamed that our God is a donkey's head, an absurdity which Cornelius Tacitus first suggested." Now, Tacitus is a famous Roman writer of history. And he wrote, oh, I think it was the end of the first century. And he talks about Christians. He's one of the first ones to mention Christians and to mention Christ. And he came up with this idea that Christians worship the head of a donkey.

Now, why I'm mentioning this is because in the 1800s, archaeologists found this piece of graffiti. They found it in the Palatine Hill, which is in Rome. And on it, it portrays, this is written by a pagan, not by a Christian or was inscribed by a pagan. And you see a man being crucified, a man with a donkey's head. It's just what Tertullian said, "You all accuse us of worshiping a God with a donkey's head." But notice the cross. He's being crucified. And you can see his arms are stretched out. And the wood goes not only vertical but also horizontal to hold his hands. Now, here is a black and white rendition of this. And you can see it a lot more clearly, the cross shape of what this so-called God is being crucified on.

And the graffiti that is scribbled below, what it says is, "Alexa Menos worships his God." So this is ridiculing Christians. This isn't Christians who wrote this. This is a pagan making fun of Christians. But it shows crucifixion in the form of a cross. And this piece of graffiti dates back to about the year 200. So it's almost contemporaneous with the writings of Tertullian. If you want to read more about it, you can find a number of articles online. Just Google Alexa Menos graffiti, and it'll come up. There's even a Wikipedia article about it. And to me, and I didn't even know about this picture. I was convinced just reading Justin Martyr and Tertullian. But yeah, it was a couple of years later when I came across this picture.

It was in a book because this was before the internet. And I thought, "Oh, well, this removes all doubt. Here you have an actual depiction of a crucifixion in jest, but it shows an actual cross, not an upright stake."

So the evidence is overwhelming that the Romans crucified people on an upright pole with a crossbeam. Jesus was crucified on a cross, not on a simple stake.

So then the question is, where did Jehovah's Witnesses get the idea that Jesus was crucified on a stake, not on a cross? I mean, after all, the entire scholarly world would say, and it doesn't matter if they are unbelievers, if they're Jews or Christians, they all say the same thing, that he was crucified on a stake with a crossbar on it. No one in the scholarly world is doubting that. No one in the Christian world is doubting it. So where did Jehovah's Witness get this idea that he was crucified on an upright stake?

Well, actually, it was not originally a teaching of Jehovah's Witnesses. Charles Russell never taught this. For decades, the Watchtower magazine featured the cross on its front covers. You perhaps have seen this. I remember seeing this when I was a boy because we had some old Watchtowers in our Kingdom Hall library. You'll notice in the top left-hand corner, there's a picture of a cross inside of a crown. And then the actual Watchtower itself being depicted, you'll notice there's two crosses that are built into the masonry of that Watchtower. So yeah, originally, Jehovah's Witnesses taught the same thing about the cross as everyone else.

It was J.F. Rutherford who decided that the cross was a pagan symbol. And he eventually had it removed from the pages of the Watchtower. This was around the year 1930. And in this, he was heavily influenced by the book entitled The Two Babylons. And perhaps you've seen this book before. So again, this is the book we're talking about, The Two Babylons. This is where Jehovah's Witnesses got the idea that Jesus was not put to death on a cross.

This book was written in the 1800s by a Scottish minister named Alexander Hislop. It says at the bottom, "Reverend Alexander Hislop." And the book gives the appearance of being a scholarly book because it has a lot of footnotes in it.

But the footnotes are nearly all to secondary sources when you look them up. He's just quoting what somebody else said in another book. And then people who've looked up the actual quotations find that he's frequently taking things out of context. Now, Hislop wrote this book for the purpose of trying to prove that the distinctive practices of the Roman Catholic Church are actually taken from pagan religion. That was his reason for writing it. But among many other accusations he makes, Hislop makes this very strange, unique claim that the cross is of pagan origin. And this is where Jehovah's Witnesses got the idea.

And his argument is based upon what's called guilt by association. He states in the book that some pagans used religious symbols that look similar to the shape of a cross. Therefore, he argues, the Christian cross came from the pagans.

But this is simply faulty logic. I mean, atheists have long used this method when attempting to discredit Christianity. They'll point to the fact that pagans had similar beliefs, for example, about a universal flood, about a slain and risen Savior.

There's myths about virgin mothers and heavenly ascensions and so on. Therefore, the atheists say, "Well, the Bible narratives are simply retelling pagan myths." But the fact that two things are similar doesn't prove that one thing was copied from the other. It proves nothing at all. It just proves two things are similar.

For example, the Bible mentions things like kneeling in prayer, raising hands, taking off shoes on holy ground, offering first fruits. Now, pagans did all of these same things. Does this mean that God's people borrowed these practices from the pagans?

Of course not. As Christians, we don't reject prayer just because pagans also prayed to their gods. We don't reject water baptism just because some ancient religions used similar rituals like baptism in their religion. We don't reject the Bible as God's word just because pagans believe that their sacred writings were inspired by their gods.

So just because some pagan religions use symbols that are similar in shape to a cross doesn't mean that Christians borrowed the cross from pagans or that Jesus died on a stake, not on a cross.

In fact, if you look in the New World Translation, look up the word pole or stake, and you'll find all throughout the Old Testament, I think there's something like 160 references to pagans worshiping sacred poles and the righteous kings of having cut down these sacred poles. So if you want to say something had a sacred or rather a pagan origin, well, the pole had a pagan origin just as much as the cross did. I mean, it's kind of silly using that kind of reasoning.

Now, one of the things that the book, The Two Babylons, correctly points out is that originally the Greek word staros did refer to a simple upright stake. He is right on that. This form of cruel punishment, crucifixion, was actually invented by the Persians. And later during the time of Alexander the Great, when he conquered Persia, well, then he and the Greeks adopted this form of punishment themselves for certain situations. And they called the stake by which somebody was crucified. They called it by the Greek name staros. So yeah, Hislop is right. In the beginning, it was a stake.

But another error that he has made is to assume that because a Greek word meant one thing in 330 BC, that it necessarily meant the same thing 300 years later. In every language, words change meanings over time. Greek is no exception.

English is the same. 300 years ago, the English word prevent meant to precede something. It could even mean to assist. Today, prevent means to hinder. It's almost the exact opposite of what it meant three or four centuries ago. 300 years ago, suffer meant to permit or allow. Today, it means to endure pain or distress. 300 years ago, conversation meant our manner of living.

Today, it means talking with someone. So it's faulty logic to argue that because staros meant a certain thing among the Greeks in the days of Alexander the Great, that this word continued to mean the exact same thing 300 years later in the Roman world of the Caesars.

Languages don't work that way. As we've already seen from the early Christian writings and from that piece of Roman graffiti, in the ancient Roman world, staros clearly meant an upright stake with a crossbeam. So Jesus died on a cross, not on a mere stake.

Well, before closing, I want to address one last question. Recently, the Watchtower Organization has stated that no archaeologists have ever unearthed an ancient wooden cross that was actually used for an execution. And I assume that's true for an obvious reason.

And that reason is wood rots. And wood disappears because people use it. So it would almost be a miracle if a wooden cross would have survived 2,000 years and that someone would actually find one today. You may remember those pictures of Roman tools that we looked at. Well, the wooden parts are always something that the museum had to add to complete the instrument because the original wood rotted away thousands of years ago or a thousand or more years ago.

And more importantly, as we can see from the biblical narrative of Jesus' death, a cross was not something permanently attached to a place of execution. That's because crucifixion wasn't the ordinary form of execution used by the Romans. It was a temporary thing used on special occasions for certain criminals and certain slaves.

If you remember, Jesus carried his cross to Golgotha. It wasn't there waiting for him. They didn't have a bunch of crosses just waiting for people to be executed. No, he had to carry it there. So after an execution, a cross was taken down and the wood was reused for something else.

So of course, we're not going to find any ancient crosses, even if the wood didn't rot. They weren't permanent structures. They weren't intended to be. In fact, if the Watchtower argument were valid, it would also disprove the existence of torture stakes. That's because archaeologists have never found any ancient torture stakes either.

In short, wood rots and wood gets reused. So we can't expect to find any wooden crosses or any wooden torture stakes. Well, in conclusion, as I've said, the reason why I'm sharing this message is because when you leave Jehovah's Witnesses and attend a church somewhere, you're going to hear a lot about the cross and about Jesus being crucified. And if you falsely imagine that the cross is something pagan, it's going to make it difficult to cross the bridge into vibrant spiritual fellowship somewhere else. You're always going to have this mental barrier in front of you.

Now, the Watchtower teaching about the cross is simply one more spiritual barrier that the Watchtower has wrongfully, and I'll even say purposefully, erected to make it difficult for people who leave the organization to find fellowship elsewhere. Well, thank you for listening. I hope this brief explanation has been of help to you in your spiritual journey. And God bless you.