Cross and Kingdom

Joel Marcus has an intriguing article on the Markan crucifixion account in JBL (2006). He points out that Mark reserves the title “king” until chapter 15, where Jesus is called king six times. As in the other gospels, Mark presents the crucifixion as an exaltation.

Old news, that. Where Marcus shines is in showing that the connection between crucifixion and exaltation predates Christianity. Crucifixion was reserved for criminals who had tried to “exalt” themselves, to lift themselves up to a place they didn’t deserve, to sit in a seat they had not earned. Crucifixion was a “penal liturgy” parodying the pretensions of rebels against Rome.

Marcus writes, “For it is revealing that the criminals so punished were often precisely people who had, in the view of their judges, gotten ‘above’ themselves—rebellious slaves, for example, or slaves who had insulted
their masters, or people of any class who had not shown proper deference to the emperor, not to mention those who had revolted against him or who had, through brigandage or piracy, demonstrated disdain for imperial rule. Crucifixion was intended to unmask, in a deliberately grotesque manner, the pretension and arrogance of those who had exalted themselves beyond their station; the authorities were bent on demonstrating through the graphic tableau of the cross what such self-promotion meant and whither it led. Crucifixion, then, is a prime illustration of Michel Foucault’s thesis that the process of execution is a ‘penal liturgy’ designed to reveal the essence of the crime.”

He adds, “The terminology of crucifixion may have both reflected and further assisted the linkage with kingship, since sedile , the word commonly used for the small wooden seat or peg on which the buttocks of the crucified victim rested, could also be used for a royal chair. One of the passages in which sedile is used in this regal way, significantly, has to do with an aspiration to imperial rule that resulted in execution: Hadrian compelled Servianus to kill himself, ‘on the ground that he aspired to empire, merely because he gave a feast to the royal slaves, sat in a royal chair ( sedili regio ) placed close to his bed, and, though an old man of ninety, used to arise and go forward to meet the guard of soldiers” (Aelius Spartianus, Historia
Augusta , Hadrianus 23.8). The torturous sedile of the cross, therefore, may sometimes have been viewed as a punishment for the victim’s ambition to take a seat he did not deserve.”

He cites this description of Persian penal parody from Dio Chrysostom: “They take one of their prisoners, . . . who has been condemned to death, set him upon the king’s throne, give him the royal apparel, and permit him to give orders, to drink and carouse, and to make use of the royal concubines during those days, and no one prevents his doing whatever he pleases. But after that they strip and scourge him and then hang him . . . . Is it intended to show that foolish and wicked people frequently acquire this royal power ( ejxousiva ) and
title and then after a season of wanton insolence come to a most shameful and wretched end? . . . Therefore, O perverse man, do not attempt to be king before you have attained to wisdom.”

In the gospel story, of course, this parody gets reversed, as the truth about Jesus shines through the mockery. Jesus suffers with such royal dignity that the centurion concludes not only that He is king but that He is Son of God. Marcus writes, “At such moments, the ‘hidden transcript’ of resistance bursts into the
open with electrifying power, so that mockery is reversed and the derided victim demands to be taken seriously. We can identify at least one such paradigmatic moment of reversal in the Gospel passion narratives: the juncture at which Jesus meets the sneering question of the emperor’s representative, ‘You are the king of the Jews?’ with the equally derisive rejoinder, ‘You say so’—that is, you, Pilate, by your actions and words, are declaring me royal (Mark 15:2 parr.). Here the mockery that has transformed kingship into a joke encounters a sharper mockery that unmasks it, so that the derision of kingship is itself derided and true royalty emerges through negation of the negation. For many early Christians, this reversal of a reversal, which turned penal mockery on its head, was probably the inner meaning of Jesus’ crucifixion.”

Marcus doesn’t say it, but perhaps we are to understand this as a subversion not only of this specific crucifixion but of the whole penal system that supports Roman power.