the marginal reading in Luke xxiii. 33 ought certainly to be in the text.
One thing alone is very certain. There is not the slightest authority for the common idea, that the place where our Lord was crucified was a hill, or mountain. The common expression in hymns and religious poetry, " Mount Calvary," is utterly in- correct and unwarrantable, and the favorite antithesis, or com- parison between Mount Sinai and Mount Calvary, is so com- pletely destitute of any Scriptural basis, that it is almost pro- fane. Anything more unlike, as a matter of fact, than Sinai and Golgotha, cannot be conceived.
Origen, Cyprian, Epiphanius, Augustine, Jerome, and Theoph- ylact, all mention an old tradition, that Golgotha was the place where the first Adam, our forefather was buried, and that the second Adam was buried near the first ! This of course is a ridiculous, lying fable, as Noah's flood must have swept away all certainty about Adam's grave.
18. — [ Where they crucified Him.] This famous mode of execu- tion is so well known to every one that little need be said of it. The common mode of inflicting it, in all probability, was to strip the criminal, — to lay him on the cross on his back, — to nail his hands to the two extremities of the cross-piece, or fork of the cross, — to nail his feet to the upright piece, or principal stem of the cross, — then to raise the cross on end, and drop it into a hole prepared for it, — and then to leave the suflferer to a lingering and painful death. It was a death which combined the maximum of pain with the least immediate destruction of life. The agony of having nails driven through parts so full of nerves and sinews as the hands and feet, must have been in- tense. Yet wounds of the hands and feet are not mortal, and do not injure any great leading blood-vessel. Hence a crucified person, even in an eastern climate, exposed to the sun, might live two or three days, enduring extreme pain, without being relieved by death, if he was naturally a very strong man and in vigorous health. This is what we must remember our blessed Lord went through, when we read " they crucified Him." To a sensitive, delicate-minded person, it is hard to imagine any capital punishment more distressing. This is what Jesus en- dured willingly for us sinners. Hanging, as it were, between earth and heaven. He exactly filled the type of the brazen ser- pent, which Moses lifted up in the wilderness. (John iii. 14.)
Whether the person crucified was bound to the cross with ropes, to prevent the possibility of his breaking off" from the nails in convulsive struggling, — whether He was stripped com- pletely naked, or had a cloth round His loins, — whether each foot had a separate nail, or one nail was driven through both feet, — are disputed points which we have no means of settling. Some think, following Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Justin Martyr, that there was a kind of seat or projection in the middle of the stem