lclapshaw wrote: ↑Tue Apr 12, 2022 1:26 pm
Where does σταυρὸς fit in anywhere at all in a discussion of Caesar?
TL;DR: skip to last paragraph
It is likely that the NT got written and redacted by Romans, and as such the Roman loanwords testifying to that are unlikely to come from a knitting club or to have an agricultural provenance, for example. Navy, military: those were the commanding forces and hence the lingua franca's vocabulary contained elements of them
Staking is an easy punishment if you are at war, on to the next battle, and want to leave behind a message for the friends of your enemies. You take one of them, put them on the ground and drive a stake through their abdomen - and you have carried out a death sentence at that same time and it only took you a minute and a piece of wood at an arm's length
You don't want to kill them right away, you want to torture them into death - but you don't have the time nor want to waste material on them. So if you want to do this to a few hundred or thousand men, you go into the woods for some wood and if you're quick about it it'll take 15 minutes max.
Crucifying on a cross? Are you out of your stupid mind? Have you any idea how much wood that costs? Bloody expensive nails too?! Just for one "death"? The moment you turn your back the friends of your enemies come, they take the victim off who will need only a few days of rest to heal his hands and feet, and you've left him great defense material with which they could build a wall - and it must have taken you over an hour to chop the two tree trunks, and let's not even begin about constructing the nails. The wood you can make on the spot with soldiers but the nails require a smith!
You MUST forget all the stories, and discard and reject them. They're is no crucifixion in any of the NT, and hence the execution of Jesus is nothing but a simple execution.
Look at the text, dammit! How much time and energy is spent at the very act of "crucifying" Jesus?
It's an afterthought! There's nothing there!! It's an invention by the Falsifying Fathers and a bloody stinking lie like everything else
You can strike John the Baptist in the same way, his only role is to be Jesus's BFF and the vessel for Elijah - he is of no other importance.
You can strike "James the brother of the Lord", he doesn't play any role in the gospels nor in Paul.
And so on: you MUST get these lies out of your head because they will cloud your judgment and obfuscate your problem analysis
(I mean I'm not telling you what to do, to each his own, but I'm just getting carried away in general)
So why look at σταυρὸς? It's not even a Roman loanword, let alone that it is of any importance. The word is significant for the texts, yes - not even once do they predict that they will simply kill him - but it only plays one single part, it's not like they are all crazy about stakes and use them all over the place: the σταυρὸς is exclusively reserved for Jesus
And now it dawns me LOL, and this is what I do: I just write in order to slow down my thinking (not that I'm brilliant or anything) - and
Julius Caesar got stabbed 44 times of course.
That's an awful lot, and that's symbolic
And a σταυρὸς is a pale or stake, there is some correlation. Slightly far-fetched perhaps, but it has a closer relation to stabbing Caesar than to hanging Jesus from a wood.
Anyway, I'm going to leave the preaching in place LOL
