I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ and him crucified,

writes Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:2. The determination not to know anything but the crucifixion of Jesus Christ was narrowing down knowledge to rather a small compass. Evidently converts in Corinth were questioning, and Paul begins by establishing that questions are not allowed to Christians. Paul has to berate the wise and praise the foolish in this epistle. God chose the foolish things of the world not the wise. And so it has always remained—the most marvellous way of gulling the credulous. Anyway, already in the 50s of the first century some people were asking questions and one of the questions will have been whether Jesus was really crucified.

Irenaeus, one of the most frequently quoted Christian writers of the ancient bishops, declares upon the authority of the martyr Polycarp, who claimed to have got it from S John and all the elders of Asia, that Jesus Christ was not crucified, but lived to be about fifty years old. There must have been a large margin for distrusting the fact of the crucifixion.

Yet, if Jesus was a saviour, it is likely that he must have been crucified because other saviours of the same type were.

“Sacrilege!” Paul’s Christians, trained in foolishness, cry.

“Jesus Christ was the only crucified saviour!”

Sorry, other saviours are suspected of crucifixion, and certainly many were cruelly punished for saving humanity. Irenaeus might have felt it politic to deny crucifixion to distinguish the Christian saviour from the others!

The Persian equinoctial ceremonies dedicated to Mithras seem to have involved crucifixion, when Haman the Wicked, standing for the winter sun, is crucified in Esther to arise as the summer sun who is the Saviour, Mithras. The slain Divine Intercessor of the Caucasians, Prometheus, suffered hung on a tree or a rock for the sins of mortal beings. Attis, Ixion, Tantalus were all hung on trees or wheels in crucifixion. Yet the Christian disciple hugs to his breast the bloody cross of the murdered Jesus, confident that he was the one god that ever died for the sins of man.