The earliest existing depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus is thought to be a piece of graffiti from roughly 200CE. It was scraped into a wall in Rome. The image shows a man stood before the execution of a human form with the head of a donkey. The scrawled text reads “Alexaminos worships his god.” Here is a window into the imagination of that old imperial world. The idea of a crucifixion scene as a thing of reverence was a weird mirror to the pax romana. At first, no doubt, it found the vision embarrassing and absurd, as this piece of archaic street art shows.
It's significant that the subject is animalised. People were crucified naked, without the garb that distinguishes the human from the animal. The subject is excommunicated from the human community of civilisation.
It's also significant that the subject is depicted as a donkey, an animal considered both stupid and useful, a beast of burden and venting space for condescending anger toward the non-rational. In Roman law, crucifixion was a punishment that could only be given to those outside the bounds of citizenship. The crucified body seen by the road was very often a slave: a non-citizen, categorised as property, whose embodied life was itself being performed as the payment of a debt to the masters. Crucifixion was, in fact, commonly referred to as “the slave's punishment.” This was a matter of security. The slave population of Rome in the First Century is estimated at five to ten million people, so it wouldn't do for these resident outsiders to feel too much hope. As the slave Sceledrus says in Plautus’ play Miles Gloriosus,
“I know the cross will be my grave. That is where my ancestors are, my fathers, gandfathers, great-gandfathers, great-great-grandfathers…”
Crucifixion wasn’t just the fate of some unfortunates; it was an identity marker for all slaves. It belonged to them, and they to it. Every slave lived under the shadow of crucifixion.
It is thought that Alexaminos might have been a slave, and that some mischievous friends or bitter enemies had graffitti'd this image in his honour. Certainly, if any might resonate with the absurd image of a crucified messiah figure, the slaves of Rome would. Whoever he was, he spoke for the slaves, because crucifixion was written across their whole existence. In this astonishing image—the messianic crucifixion—their exclusion from life was no longer their shame; it might even become their power. A strange and sudden transferal had occurred. The violent tool of the master was now in the hands of the subjected. They had found a way to own it, in this image which spoke of the sacredness of their own excluded lives. The image of a crucified Messiah might be the image of a slave who didn't cower from the curse but took it and made it their own. This non-citizen was no longer governable by the fear of punishment. The cross itself becomes the point of exit from an economy in which they were property, out into an open beyond all debts and masters.
Here is a mystery: a transformation that sometimes occurs quite suddenly, and of its own volition, after years lived under the threat of some curse. Something that was always quietly and secretly known to the oppressed life is birthed into the world against all expectation. There is a widening of the eyes, a drawing of breath, a jolt of awareness. They are grinning, because now they are hungry and all their fear is gone. Anything might happen. All the rules have fallen away. Something in the cosmic balance has shifted. Something has triggered a wondrous exchange. In a moment of awakening, they will find that the grief of living under the constant threat of that curse finally outweighs the fear of it. In this moment they walk across the room, as though possessed by some deeper mind—not by the law of the state but by the law of the spirit of life. They pick up this thing, long feared, in their hand; this threat that hung over them to control them every day. They say, it is mine now. They say, I know so much more of this than you do. From now on, this will never be used to control them again. From now on it belongs to them, and not the masters. From now on they are the curse. In the blink of an eye they have transformed. They have become something monstrous. They are beyond law, and their way will be decided by other frames altogether, by frames of their own choosing.
Whatever gallows are used to maintain the power relation of tyranny over life, wear them around your neck and grin like a fool.
The first counter-move of power is, generally, condescension and mockery, then violent repression. Last of all it will co-opt the image of defiant exit and to sell it back to the crowd. It will turn it back into a point of entry. The test is simple: from whom did you receive liberation? From the crucified or from the crucifiers?
The first messianic communities chose to gather around the ongoing ritual of breaking bread. This was the centre of their common life and the first expression of their political body. There could be no mistaking the meaning of this. They gathered weekly around the horror of the Slave’s Punishment, the curse that hung over every slave’s life: torn bread for torn bodies. At the centre of everything was the embodied experience of slavery, the sacred life of those excluded from citizenship. Slaves gathered round the table and the table round the slave, until the movement found itself identified with slavery.
And so it is that the Book of Revelation begins like this:
“The Revelation of Jesus the Messiah which God gave him to show his slaves what must soon take place; and he made it known by sending his angel to his slave John.”
And the Messiah himself was reported to have said that if anyone wished to be the greatest, they should become a slave.
Thank you for writing about this image, David. It's been on my mind, though I'll have to tell a story to explain why.
I wonder if you have seen the film of Ivan Illich speaking at the Architectural Association in London in 1974, soon after the publication of Medical Nemesis? It's on YouTube, the quality of the recording is not great, but it is fascinating, not least because much of the time is taken up with him responding to questioners.
About forty minutes in, he is taken to task by a man who introduces himself as a doctor, speaking in the tones of the English establishment: "I believe that the deficiency you are talking about is a spiritual one, and I would have thought, as a theologian, you would have hammered it in your book!"
Illich does not respond immediately, you might wonder if he is saying a prayer under his breath.
The doctor comes in again, pushing his point further. There is a little banter between them as to whether Illich having gone to theological college means he is a Christian – "it is not sufficient," Illich replies, "but no worry!" – and then the doctor doubles down: "As a Christian, I would have thought that in Jesus Christ, in his life, in his death and resurrection, we have got the key to this. You have used in your book classical mythology, but in Him you have both a historical and a transcendental [inaudible]. Now, of course, as a theologian, it may be that this now is out of date, I don't know, I'm just a [inaudible] Christian."
Now Illich begins to explain himself. "You see, it is rather easier to gain understanding, when I speak about the need for political action of self-limitation, about Prometheus and Epimetheus..."
"But they didn't exist!" the doctor heckles.
"Oh la la!" mutters Illich. "What kind of a doctor... you say you are a doctor?"
"Yes, I'm a doctor of medicine."
"But you do know, how do you call, that sin of yours which makes you operate on a person at high cost, engaging in a transaction of which you know that it is useless..."
"Not guilty!"
"Well, let me leave out your case. If I spoke on another level, conversation about the technical issues which I want to deal with would be practically impossible. For instance, when I told you that I began to write this book sitting on the steps of the Ganges in Benares, and just open-mouthed because I had never known that there would be thousands and thousands of people who would come in the hope that dying at the Ganga, they wouldn't have to go through it once more. Now, quite evidently, if you deal as a doctor with that population, you're in a very different situation than if you deal as a doctor with a population who says, 'But everybody in the world will give anything which he can give in order not to die!' An answer which, sooner or later, this evening, will pop up in this room..."
The doctor begins to interrupt, and this time Illich tells him, "Wait a minute."
"If I spoke... you introduced a very strange confusion between the theologian and the Christian... but if I talk to you about what I had the opportunity to mention... for some strange reasons, I hadn't talked about it for years, and today somebody mentioned something similar to me, and I said to him, friend, do you know how the first crucified Lord was represented? Do you?"
"Represented?" asks the doctor, puzzled. "Well he was represented by..."
"In art?" asks a woman elsewhere in the audience.
"Yes," says Illich. "Who here knows what the first crucifix looks like? The crucifix, the cross with Jesus nailed to the cross, represented physically. Look up any archaeology and you'll find out that I'm not kidding. It was found as a graffito, next to some phalluses, on the outside of a [Sabura?] house that was most probably a brothel. It represents a cross, a human body, a donkey's head and underneath written, 'So-and-so, some Alexis, worships his god!'"
"How do you know this?" demands the doctor.
"From archaeology!"
"Ooh, you see, archaeology!" And he pushes back, disputing how we could know that this was the first time the cross was represented. "Mr Illich, how could you possibly know?"
"I am sorry, check with anybody, we can go over to the museum."
"It's the first, maybe, that is extant. I honestly think that this is irrelevant..."
"One moment! Why should it be irrelevant? Let us check a moment why I say that [inaudible], if you ask for it, I gladly move to them. What we have here is, if I understand it correctly, ridicule heaped on people who would consider their saviour somebody who was hung on the gallows. There is ridicule heaped on religion not used for any purpose which is healing, which is this-worldly healing, feeding, but for the recognition of total powerlessness. Right? I see in this particular representation which, in the church's bureaucracies very quickly disappeared, and there must be more than three people here who have been brought up, who believe that we have been brought up as Christians, and nobody has told them that the first representation of the crucifix is slanderous, is ridiculing, and is, in a way, the deepest and the only, if you read the gospel, representative representation of what a crucified God-man means. Now, why do you want me to speak... to whom do you want me to speak about this?"
"I don't really see the relevance of this, the first representation of the cross..."
"As a Christian..." Illich begins, but the doctor continues.
"...I would think that you as a theologian and a man who is dealing with fundamental matters, you can not [inaudible] brought in any evidence of the spiritual."
"My friend, I told you that I had to speak about something upsetting, about our Promethean behaviour, our imitation of Prometheus having led us into a situation where we are culprits in a form of destruction and of suffering in front of which we must recognise ourselves as totally helpless, impotent to do anything. I'm speaking about something which is deeply anguishing. But I will refuse, under any circumstances, to *use* for any practical purposes His name. For this, I am too Jewish! I'll gladly use such tools as Epimetheus or Aesklepios."
Pardon me cluttering up your comments with such an extended transcript – I'd been meaning to revisit this part of the recording for something I'm writing, and your post gave me the excuse – but there's something in this encounter that I find magnetic. The confident, self-assured voice of the evangelical Christian from the English upper middle classes for whom salvation is an instrument, a "key" or something to be "hammered", with which to fix all that is wrong with the world, and the haunted witness of this wandering thinker who has glimpsed how outrageous the mystery of faith is, what violence it does to it to make it useful or to treat it as though it ought to be self-evident to reasonable people.
Excellent delving! You have helped me understand what I puzzled about for years: why an instrument of execution would have center place in the altars of those who worship the crucified one....