Cross or Torture Stake?

Crucifixion at Golgotha

“And when they came to the place which is called The Skull, there they crucified him, and the criminals, one on the right and one on the left.”

Luke 23:33

Every Sunday, in Catholic churches around the world, the faithful make the sign of the cross and lift their eyes to a crucifix. For Christians from the earliest centuries, the cross has been the central symbol of the faith — the sign of how the Lord laid down his life for the world.

Jehovah’s Witnesses reject it. They teach that Jesus did not die on a cross at all, but on a single upright pole — a “torture stake”, in the wording of their New World Translation — with his hands nailed together above his head. On their view the cross is not merely a historical mistake but a pagan emblem smuggled into a corrupted Christianity, so that those who venerate it are guilty of idolatry. The case rests chiefly on one Greek word, stauros, which they insist can mean only an upright stake.

So the question is a historical one, and it can be examined on the evidence: language, Roman practice, the New Testament text, archaeology, the earliest manuscripts, and the testimony of the earliest Christian writers. Did the stauros on which Jesus died have a crossbeam, or was it a bare pole? Which account better fits the evidence: the Watchtower’s torture stake, or the traditional cross?

I invite your engagement with me on these questions. You may leave comments below, but please be sure to read our policy on commenting before doing so.

Watchtower View

Jump to the Catholic View ↓

Jehovah’s Witnesses hold that Jesus was not put to death on a cross, but on a single upright wooden pole — rendered “torture stake” throughout their New World Translation. On this view the cross is not the instrument of Christ’s death at all, and the familiar two-beamed cross venerated by other churches is rejected.1

The argument rests primarily on a single Greek word. The Watchtower’s Insight on the Scriptures states that the word stauros, rendered “torture stake” in their translation, “primarily denotes an upright stake, or pole, and there is no evidence that the writers of the Christian Greek Scriptures used it to designate a stake with a crossbeam.” In support they cite John Denham Parsons’ The Non-Christian Cross (1896), the Imperial Bible-Dictionary, and Hermann Fulda’s The Cross and Crucifixion, each of which they take to show that the original sense of stauros — and of the Latin crux — was a plain upright pole.2

From this they conclude that, since the New Testament says Jesus died on a stauros, he died on a single vertical beam with his hands nailed together directly over his head, fixed by a single nail — the manner shown in Watchtower artwork and in the Justus Lipsius woodcut reproduced in earlier editions of the New World Translation.3

The Watchtower also presents a theological reason “why Jesus had to die on a stake.” Citing Galatians 3:13 (“Accursed is every man hanged upon a stake”) together with Deuteronomy 21:22–23, they argue that Jesus bore the curse of the Law by being hung upon a stake of wood, the Hebrew term there meaning simply a tree or wooden pole.4

Underlying the whole position is a further claim: that the cross is of pagan origin — an emblem they associate with pre-Christian sun-worship and even with phallic imagery — which entered a corrupted Christianity after the apostles and which faithful Christians must therefore reject as idolatry. For Jehovah’s Witnesses, refusing the cross is part of keeping worship pure.5

Endnotes
  1. On the “torture stake” rendering throughout the New World Translation, see the NWT at Matthew 27:32–40, John 19:17–19, and elsewhere, and the article “Did Jesus Die on a Cross?” at jw.org. The teaching is summarized in Reasoning From the Scriptures (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, 1985, rev. 1989), pp. 89–93, under “Cross.” ↩
  2. Insight on the Scriptures (Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society of Pennsylvania, 1988), vol. 2, under “Torture Stake”: the word “in classical Greek … primarily denotes an upright stake, or pole, and there is no evidence that the writers of the Christian Greek Scriptures used it to designate a stake with a crossbeam.” The supporting citations are John Denham Parsons, The Non-Christian Cross (London, 1896), pp. 23–24; the Imperial Bible-Dictionary, ed. P. Fairbairn (London, 1874), vol. 1, p. 376; and Hermann Fulda, Das Kreuz und die Kreuzigung (1878). ↩
  3. On the single-nail depiction (both hands together above the head, one nail), see the illustrations in What Does the Bible Really Teach? (2005), p. 52, and earlier Watchtower publications. The Justus Lipsius woodcut of a crux simplex was reproduced in the Appendix to the 1950 and 1969 editions of the New World Translation and the Kingdom Interlinear Translation, with the caption stating “This is the manner in which Jesus was impaled” (altered in the 1984 edition). ↩
  4. On the “why Jesus had to die on a stake” argument from Galatians 3:13 and Deuteronomy 21:22–23, see Insight on the Scriptures (1988), vol. 2, under “Torture Stake,” and the article “Did Jesus Die on a Cross?” (jw.org). The NWT renders the relevant phrase “hanged upon a stake” (Gal. 3:13). ↩
  5. On the cross as an alleged pagan emblem (associated with sun-worship and, in some Watchtower statements, with phallic symbolism) introduced into a corrupted Christianity, see Reasoning From the Scriptures (1989), pp. 90–92, and “Should You Use the Cross in Worship?” (The Watchtower). The charge of idolatry against those who venerate the cross is standard in the Society’s literature. ↩

Catholic View

The Catholic Church holds that Christ died on a cross with a crossbeam, as Christians have held from the beginning. The Watchtower’s case for the torture stake rests almost entirely on the root meaning of one Greek word. But words are not defined by their roots, and on this question we are not left with words alone: there is evidence in the ground, in the oldest manuscripts, and in a hostile pagan cartoon.

The Word Is Not the Argument

In classical Greek, centuries before Christ, stauros did mean an upright stake, a palisade post. That is its root. But meaning is fixed by use, not by etymology, and by the first century the word had long since become the ordinary term for the Roman execution instrument, whatever its shape. The same is true of the Latin crux. To argue from the older sense to the first-century object is the error of supposing that because “pen” once meant a feather, a modern writer must be holding a quill.1

The authorities cited for the stake do not carry the weight placed on them either. They are nineteenth-century works (Parsons’ The Non-Christian Cross of 1896 among them) written before the archaeological and papyrological evidence of the last century existed. No standard modern lexicon of New Testament Greek supports the claim that stauros in the Gospels means a bare pole.

The Sources Cited Say the Opposite

More awkwardly, the ancient authorities marshalled for the stake do not say what they are said to say. Livy is cited for crux meaning a bare stake, but Livy never describes its shape, and uses palus when he means a stake. Lucian’s Prometheus is quoted in support, yet that passage has the hands stretched out “from crag to crag,” each fastened separately, and Lucian elsewhere says the cross takes its name from the letter tau, which is T-shaped. Artemidorus compares the stauros to a ship’s mast, which has a crossyard.2

The pattern extends to pictures. For decades the New World Translation’s appendix reproduced a woodcut of a single-stake execution from Justus Lipsius, captioned “This is the manner in which Jesus was impaled.” Lipsius’s book in fact illustrates some sixteen forms of crucifixion, most with a crossbeam: the one image was lifted from a gallery that teaches the opposite, and the caption was altered in the 1984 edition.

What the Gospels Themselves Show

The evangelists do not pause to describe the shape, because their first readers knew what a Roman execution looked like. But three details, taken together, point one way.

The carrying. John says Christ went out “bearing his own cross” (John 19:17), and the Synoptics say Simon of Cyrene was made to carry it behind Him (Luke 23:26). The condemned man did not carry an entire cross; he carried the patibulum, the crossbeam, to a site where the uprights already stood. That is what every attested Roman crucifixion involved, and the verb John uses is the one pagan writers use for exactly that act.3

The inscription. Matthew records that Pilate’s charge was set “over his head” (Matt. 27:37). On a bare stake, with the hands nailed together above the head, there is no space above the head for a placard. The wording assumes an upright projecting above a crossbar.

The nails. Thomas speaks of seeing in Christ’s hands “the print of the nails,” plural (John 20:25). Watchtower illustrations show both hands pinned by a single nail above the head. Two outstretched hands, each nailed separately, account for the wording exactly; and the Society has itself conceded that Thomas could have meant a nail through each hand.4

The Evidence Outside the Text

In the ground. In 1968, in a burial cave at Giv’at ha-Mivtar in Jerusalem, archaeologists found the physical remains of a crucifixion victim, a man named Yehohanan, executed around A.D. 70. The examining anatomist found the heel bones transfixed by a spike and reconstructed the arms as stretched out and separately nailed; the later reassessment of the same remains withdrew the nail finding for the arms and judged them more likely tied — outstretched on either reading. It is the most direct evidence available of how Rome crucified in the Gospel period, and it shows outstretched arms rather than hands pinned overhead.5

In the manuscripts. In the oldest surviving copies of the Gospels, papyri of roughly A.D. 175–250, the scribes abbreviated stauros with a device now called the staurogram: the Greek letters tau and rho superimposed, the tau forming upright and crossbar, the loop of the rho suggesting the head of the crucified. These men lived while crucifixion was still practiced and knew what the word meant. Their own shorthand for it was a picture of a cross.6

In a hostile cartoon. The oldest surviving depiction of the crucifixion is the Alexamenos graffito, scratched into a wall on the Palatine Hill around the turn of the third century. It is not a Christian image but a pagan mockery: a crucified figure with a donkey’s head, arms spread wide on a crossbeam, captioned “Alexamenos worships God.” A hostile witness, drawing in order to ridicule, drew a cross. The shape was simply what everyone understood crucifixion to be.7

The Earliest Christians

The deeper claim is that the cross entered Christianity later, as part of an apostasy. But the earliest Christian writers, long before Constantine, already describe the stauros as two-beamed, and describe it as something received rather than newly proposed.

The Epistle of Barnabas, from the A.D. 130s, within about forty years of John’s Gospel, already treats the cross as tau-shaped. Justin Martyr, around 150, describes it plainly as one upright with a second beam fitted across it, the ends projecting “like horns.” Irenaeus, about 180, is more precise still: the cross “has five extremities, two in length, two in breadth, and one in the middle, on which the person rests who is fixed by the nails.” Five points (upright, crossbar, and a projecting top) describe the traditional cross exactly, and a bare stake not at all.8

The Watchtower Once Taught the Cross

For more than fifty years the organization used the cross-and-crown emblem and taught that Christ died on a cross; Rutherford in 1921 called it “the greatest pivotal truth of the divine arrangement.” The torture-stake teaching came later, and it came from a prior conviction that the cross was pagan rather than from any new evidence about the first century; there was none to be had, since the archaeology and the papyri lay decades in the future. The movement’s own principle was that new light never extinguishes older light but adds to it. An outright reversal is not addition, and it raises a fair question about how a reader is to know that today’s teaching will not be reversed in turn.9

The Reply in Brief

The stake rests on an etymology and on nineteenth-century authorities written before the evidence existed. Against it stand the Gospels’ own details: a crossbeam carried, an inscription above the head, nails in the plural in the hands; a first-century crucifixion victim recovered from the ground with his arms stretched out; the shorthand the earliest scribes invented for the word, which is a picture of a cross; a pagan mocking a Christian by drawing one; and the Fathers of the second century describing five extremities and beams fitted crosswise.

None of this is a Catholic tradition asserted against the evidence. It is the evidence, and it converges from directions that could not have been coordinated: Jewish archaeology, Christian scribes, and a hostile Roman graffito all describing the same shape.

This is the short answer. The full treatment adds the semantic history of stauros and crux with the primary sources, what Roman writers say about the mechanics of crucifixion, the argument from Deuteronomy 21:23 and “hanged upon a tree,” and full documentation for everything asserted here. It is available as a Word document at the end of this page.

Endnotes
  1. On the semantic development of stauros, see the standard lexica (Bauer–Danker–Arndt–Gingrich; Liddell–Scott), which give “cross” as the New Testament sense while noting the earlier sense of upright stake. The Watchtower’s cited authorities (John Denham Parsons, The Non-Christian Cross (1896); the Imperial Bible-Dictionary; Hermann Fulda) all predate the twentieth-century evidence. ↩
  2. Livy uses palus where a stake is meant and nowhere describes the shape of the crux. Lucian, Prometheus 1–2, has the hands fastened separately from crag to crag; and in Trial in the Court of Vowels 12 he derives the instrument’s name from the letter tau. Artemidorus, Oneirocritica 2.53, likens the stauros to a ship’s mast, which carries a crossyard. ↩
  3. John 19:17; Luke 23:26; Matthew 27:32; Mark 15:21. On the patibulum as the beam carried by the condemned, see Plautus, Miles Gloriosus 359–360, and the discussion in Martin Hengel, Crucifixion in the Ancient World. ↩
  4. Matthew 27:37 for the placement of the titulus; John 20:25 for the plural “nails.” The concession is the Society’s own: “That could have meant a nail through each hand, or the plural ‘nails’ might have reference to nail prints in ‘his hands and his feet’” (The Watchtower, August 15, 1987, “Where Were His Legs?”, pp. 28–29). ↩
  5. The Giv’at ha-Mivtar ossuary of Yehohanan, excavated 1968; see V. Tzaferis, “Jewish Tombs at and near Giv’at ha-Mivtar,” Israel Exploration Journal 20 (1970), with N. Haas’s anatomical study in the same volume, and the reassessment by J. Zias and E. Sekeles, IEJ 35 (1985). ↩
  6. The staurogram appears in P66, P45 and P75, of roughly A.D. 175–250. See Larry W. Hurtado, The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), ch. 4. ↩
  7. The Alexamenos graffito, Palatine Hill, Rome, usually dated c. A.D. 200, now in the Palatine Antiquarium. ↩
  8. Epistle of Barnabas 9 and 12 (A.D. 130s), on the tau; Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 40 and 91, and First Apology 55 (c. 150), on the transverse beam and the projecting ends; Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.24.4 (c. 180), on the five extremities. Texts in William A. Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, vol. 1. ↩
  9. On the cross-and-crown emblem, which appeared on the cover of The Watch Tower until 1931, and on the introduction of the torture-stake teaching under J. F. Rutherford. The principle that new light adds to older light rather than extinguishing it is the Society’s own. ↩

Summary

The shape of the instrument on which Jesus died is not in itself a matter of salvation, since what saves is that Christ died. The question is worth answering only because the Watchtower has made the “torture stake” a test of true religion and a reason to brand the historic Church as idolatrous. When the claim is examined, it does not survive.

The case rests chiefly on one word, frozen in time. The Watchtower argues that stauros must mean “stake” because that is what it meant in the classical Greek of Homer’s day. But languages change, and a word’s oldest meaning is not its only meaning. By the first century stauros was the ordinary Greek word for the Roman cross, which is the meaning given by the standard lexicon (Bauer-Danker). In modern Greek stauros still means “cross,” and it is a cross, not a stake, atop every Greek church.

The Romans used a two-beamed cross, and had words for its parts. The upright fixed in the ground was the stipes or palus; the crossbeam the victim carried was the patibulum; the whole was the crux. The playwright Plautus describes all of it two centuries before Christ.

The Watchtower’s own sources contradict it. It claims Livy used crux to mean a mere stake, but Livy never describes its shape and uses palus when he means a stake. It quotes Lucian’s Prometheus in support, yet that passage describes hands stretched out “from crag to crag,” each nailed separately, and Lucian elsewhere says the cross is named after the T-shaped letter Tau. Artemidorus compares the stauros to a ship’s mast with its crossbeam.

The New Testament points to a crossbeam. Jesus carried His cross (John 19:17), and the attested practice was carrying the crossbeam to an upright already planted rather than dragging a bare pole. The charge was placed above His head (Matt. 27:37), which assumes an upright projecting above a crossbar rather than hands nailed at the top of a stake. Thomas saw the mark of the nails, plural, in Jesus’ hands (John 20:25), which fits two outstretched hands nailed separately rather than one nail through both. The Watchtower itself conceded that Thomas “could have meant a nail through each hand.”

Archaeology and the manuscripts agree. The remains of Yehohanan, a man crucified near A.D. 70 and found in 1968, show the arms outstretched — nailed or, on the later reassessment, bound — rather than pinned overhead. The oldest Gospel papyri, from about A.D. 175 to 250, abbreviate stauros with the “staurogram,” a tau-rho ligature that pictures a cross. The Alexamenos graffito, a pagan mockery from around A.D. 200, draws the crucified figure with arms spread on a crossbeam.

The earliest Christians describe a cross, not a stake. Barnabas in the 130s, Justin Martyr about 150 and Irenaeus about 180 all describe a two-beamed cross, Irenaeus naming its “five extremities,” and all of them treat it as the settled, unargued meaning of the word long before Constantine. A shape already obvious to writers in the 130s cannot be a fourth-century corruption. The early habit of tracing the sign of the cross presupposes the same shape.

The Watchtower once taught the cross. For more than fifty years the organization used the cross-and-crown emblem and taught that Jesus died on a cross. Rutherford called it “the greatest pivotal truth of the divine arrangement” in 1921. The “torture stake” teaching was introduced later, under Rutherford, out of a prior conviction that the cross was “pagan” rather than from any new evidence about the first century. Since the organization’s founders said that “new light never extinguishes older light, but adds to it,” the outright reversal raises a fair question: how is a reader to know that today’s teaching will not be reversed in the same way?

In short: a single word frozen at an outdated meaning, propped up by sources that say the opposite when read in full, stands against the converging witness of language, Roman history, the New Testament text, archaeology, the earliest manuscripts and the earliest Christian writers. On a question of history the conclusion is about as secure as such questions get. Jesus died under Roman authority, by the ordinary Roman method, on a cross. Paul used the very word in dispute when he wrote that “the message of the cross (ho stauros) … is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18).

The Postal Carrier Analogy

Think of the postal carrier again. He can stand at the foot of the street and recite every address on it without a mistake — and none of that accuracy brings him one step inside a single home. The Watchtower reads its three favorite authorities exactly this way. Livy is cited accurately for the stake — the address is right — but the reader never enters the text, where Livy writes palus when he means a stake and nowhere describes the shape of the crux. Lucian is quoted correctly — and the very passage cited has the hands fastened separately from crag to crag, while elsewhere he derives the device’s name from the letter tau, which is T-shaped. And Artemidorus is delivered to the right door — but inside, he likens the stauros to a ship’s mast, which carries a crossyard. Three citations, three accurate quotations, three sources never read past the excerpt. That is the whole method in miniature: a knowledge of the evidence that is real, detailed, and entirely external — the knowledge of the man who walks the route, mistaken for the knowledge of the families who live there. And it is the tell of a man-made religion. A system built from the address side of its sources is just what unaided human reading produces — personal interpretation, confident precisely where reading on would have corrected it. An organization actually directed by God would know the families.

For a more complete essay on this topic, download Cross or Torture Stake? (.docx)

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