PASSOVER/EASTER STORIES: SIMON OF CYRENE FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

Did Jesus look like a Renaissance Boy Band member on His way to Calvary?

Brace yourself! It is the detail which makes me a boring person that brings the Bible alive for me. There may be more here than the normal, well adjusted person would care to know.

This is longer than my usual offering because there is a depth. We live in the Land of the Catchphrase where it is expected that the answer to difficult questions be shorter than the original question — and contain no big words. Also, we suffer from being bombarded with mental clichés where words are taken for granted. We think we know what they mean but we don’t. “That seems to makes sense,” has more weight than, “That is what the facts are.” We don’t know the definition of the popular definition. In doing that it may be discovered that that the popular definition had nothing to do with what is written in the Word of God. L-O-R-E is not always L-A-W.

Some background on the Roman crucifixion.

• They were not spontaneous. Three crosses were ready so three men were planned to die that day. It didn’t matter who.
• The intention of the process was to indelibly stamp Pax Romana onto the keeping of the peace. Rome practiced a ruthless rule and demonstrated absolute power by occasionally showing ‘mercy’ by the capricious releasing of condemned prisoners. The message to the populous was, “You belong to Rome!”
• The objective was to inject fear into the subjected peoples so that they would behave. It was not so much that victim died. It was that he was seen to die — horribly.
• Part of the process was to humiliate the guilty by forcing the culprit to carry the instrument of the imminent excruciating pain death to the location of the execution. Something similar would be someone digging their own grave. Everyone could see it and tremble.
• The reality is that Our Lord was not guilty! I can’t put thoughts in God’s Head but it seems not unreasonable that the Father would not allow His Son to be paraded before all Creation, through all Eternity, as guilty. That was the whole point of the Cross that day.

Some speculations about that particular day.

• Pontius Pilate had been in Judea long enough to write the placard above the Cross in Hebrew (Luke 23:38) so it is not unreasonable to deduce that he knew that every able bodied Jewish man would be there. It would also not be surprising if the executions were deliberately timed to give most bang-for-buck.
• The Religious Leaders did not want Jesus to be taken on the day before the High Shabbat. They were not stupid either. The disproportionate number of Jewish men, coupled with what would have been extra security, was a powder keg ready to be ignited.
• Jesus would also have known the situation. It was Him who goaded the she-wolf (Romulus and Remus) by preempting the Religious Leadership.
• Various speculations place Calvary about one kilometre distant. (I’m not getting into that. Argue amongst yourselves. But it was outside the walls of the City.)

Was the Lord actually capable of carrying the cross that far? What physical condition would He have been in?

It is not necessary to speculate on this. There is more than enough information in the Bible. It starts right back in Genesis 3:21 where Yehovah Elohim presented Adam and Eve with tunics of skin to replace their attempts with leaves. For that to happen, an innocent animal had to be killed. They had just committed the first Human sin so the dead animal’s skin was the covering from a sin offering.

In a teaching on the Book of Leviticus published by the Koinonia Institute, the late Chuck Missler used a book published in 1860, Gospel in Leviticus, by A Joseph Seiss, a seminal work on the Book of Holiness. It highlights that all the regular Blood Sacrifices at the Temple, mentioned in the book were replaced by the single Sacrifice of Jesus. (Another story for another time.) They were ALL skinned. (There was another, the Red Heifer mentioned in Numbers 19:2, but that was a different issue.)

The Lord was identified as, “The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Also the general English translation of 2 Corinthians 5:21 is that Jesus was the, “One who became sin for us.” A peculiarity of Hebrew is that the words sin and sin offering are the same. The Orthodox Jewish Bible, NT translation by a Believing Hebrew speaker, renders the passage, “This one HaShem (The Name, aka Yehovah) made a chattat (sin) offering on our behalf.”1 (reference at end of post)

So what?

Being the ultimate sin Offering, Yeshua provided the ultimate covering for sin. So He also had to be skinned (at least enough to satisfy the Father).

How would this apply to The Lamb of God?

Isaiah 53:2b tells us is that Jesus’s normal appearance was just like any other man’s — He was an ordinary-looking bloke.
“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him.”

The Messianic text, Isaiah 50:6, gives a glimpse at the way He was treated.
I gave My back to those who struck Me,
And My cheeks to those who plucked out the beard;
I did not hide My face from shame and spitting.

Isaiah 52:14 describes the inhuman cruelty He suffered at being scourged prior to His crucifixion to the point that He no longer looked like a human being.
His appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man and his form marred beyond human likeness

The New Testament reveals the Old

It is written in the famous Isaiah 53:4–5
Surely He has borne our griefs
And carried our sorrows;
Yet we esteemed Him stricken,
Smitten by God, and afflicted.
But He was wounded for our transgressions,
He was bruised for our iniquities;
The chastisement for our peace was upon Him,
And by His stripes (H2250) we are healed.

Many a sermon has been delivered to New Testament Saints correlating the 39 lashes allowable by the Sanhedrin to the sic“39 known diseases” and how the scourging by Pilate healed all of our diseases. However, the Hebrew word translated stripes, H2250 — ḥabûrâ, is a singular noun, not plural; it should be stripe = bruise, stripe, wound, blow, welt. But there is more being conveyed in the original Hebrew than in English.

H2250 is the noun form of the Hebrew verb H2266 — ḥāḇar = to unite, join, bind together, to be coupled. The Christ was not whipped by Jews but by Romans, who had no constraints. The flavour of H2250 + H2266 is that the welts overlapped and merged into each other to result in effectively one large wound. There were many blows but one resulting wound. There was also the pulling out of the beard, Isaiah 50:6. Jesus was effectively skinned, just as were all the Blood Sacrifice Offerings in the Tabernacle/Temple.

The Isaiah 53 tract doesn’t mean much until John 19:1–5,
So then Pilate took Jesus and scourged Him. And the soldiers twisted a crown of thorns and put it on His head, and they put on Him a purple robe. Then they said, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they struck Him with their hands. Pilate then went out again, and said to them, “Behold, I am bringing Him out to you, that you may know that I find no fault in Him.” Then Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. And Pilate said to them, “Behold the Man!”

There were two candidates for the Cross that day named JESUS, SON OF THE FATHER. Jesus the Christ and Jesus Barabbas. The Jews had already chosen Jesus to die in John 18. Bible teaching from the Koinonia Institute,2 (reference at end of post) John: A Comprehensive Commentary by Ron Matsen, teaches that when Pilate said , “Behold the Man!” the Greek implied that he was saying, “This is the man you chose,” because the Lord was unrecognisable. He had been effectively skinned alive (back and sides) by the Roman flogging, plus other abuse, and the Jews didn’t want Pilate to pull a shifty.

The general consensus about the weight of the the Cross is that it would have been over 135 kg (300lb); not a trivial mass. Piecing together the varying descriptions of Jesus, it is not unreasonable to deduce that He could not carry that structure, presumably not ergonomically designed, the required distance. Add to this that He was innocent. The whole concept of the Cross is that the Innocent had to die for the Guilty, and I suspect guilty Barabbas was long gone by then.

• I’m open to correction but, based on the evidence presented here, it is postulated that Jesus didn’t carry the whole Cross the whole way because he was physically not capable. I wouldn’t hazard a guess at how far, except not far.
• Each of the Gospels add a different dimension to the Crucifixion episode. Simon from Cyrene being press-ganged into carrying the Cross behind Jesus is recorded in Matthew 27:32, Luke 23:26, and Mark 15:21. If the four Gospels were all identical it would point to connivance. Not having John record the event does not mean he didn’t see it. It could be he just didn’t record it. There are numbers put forward that there may have been two million people in town that day. I don’t know but it surely was a crowd big enough so that not everyone could see everything. If anyone rejects what happened just on that issue, they are forfeiting their Eternity cheaply.

But why all the blood and ugliness?

Is God a Savage?!! There is more on that to come. This post has already exceeded the Principle of eating a Big Mac — bight-sized, chewable, pieces.

Conclusion

It is incredible the way the Father used the hideous physical abuse of Messiah to choreograph the situation to ensure that His sinless Son would not be paraded before Creation as anything other than incorruptible.

It is only the guilty that must pick up their cross daily.
We are all walking in the shoes of Simon of Cyrene.

The forgoing evidence has not been presented to convince any reader but to allow a personal decision to be made. There is much more to know about this subject. Perhaps you’ll pay another visit, sometime.

All Glory to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

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1 Orthodox Jewish Bible https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Kehillah%20in%20Corinth%20II%205:20-21&version=OJB

2 Koinonia Institute https://koinoniainstitute.org/