I hear that Mel Gibson is re-releasing The Passion of the Christ this year. I remember going to see it the first time at the opening night in London in 2004. A London film director went with me and after seeing the stunning effects of the crucifixion he said, ‘‘I was so taken with it that I couldn’t even see where they used computer graphics – and that’s what I do for a living. I was too distracted by the story’.

Gibson had reportedly tried to arrange film shots to mirror Caravaggio’s painting of the cross (at the beginning of the 17^th century). But where did Caravaggio get his ideas from?

The National Gallery of Ireland has numerous crucifixion paintings going back even earlier – back to one by Francesco da Rimini in the 1330s[1]

Of course, in Ireland we have a couple of hundred Celtic crosses of which the earliest appears to be the ‘Donagh high cross’ in Donegal from the seventh century.[2]

When Neil Macgregor, director of the National Gallery in London, wrote his book Seeing Salvation[3], much of it was depictions of the cross going back as far as the fifth century. The earliest he can find is a ‘tiny ivory relief’ (8×10 cm) made in Rome around 420. The same relief also manages to depict the centurion, Mary, John, Judas and his money[4].

One hundred years before that, Helena the mother of the Emperor Constantine, at the age of nearly eighty, had gone to Jerusalem to do a bit of ghastly archaeology, looking for that cross. Nobody is sure what she found.

But that’s it – you can’t find any other crucifixes by going back further. And there’s a reason. John Stott explains why in his book The Cross of Christ[5]

‘It is probably the most cruel method of execution ever practiced… When the Romans adopted it, they reserved it for criminals convicted of murder, rebellion or armed robbery… Roman citizens were exempt…

The early enemies of Christianity lost no opportunity to ridicule the claim that God’s anointed and man’s Saviour ended his life on a cross. The idea was crazy. This is well illustrated by a graffito from the second century discovered on the Palatine Hill in Rome on the wall of a house… a crude drawing depicts, stretched on a cross, a man with the head of a donkey. To the left stands another man, with one arm raised in worship[6]’

Even Pontius Pilate was warned off sending Jesus to the cross by his own wife who had had a bad dream about it[7] (who wouldn’t?). He tried to let Jesus off three times[8].

The British historian Tom Holland recounts in Dominion[9] that his opinion was completely changed on ‘the making of the Western mind’ by his research in Rome history which unearthed the story of crucifixion. His description is so grotesque that I won’t recount it here.

Suffice it to say, once I discovered what was involved, I wouldn’t have a cross around the house and certainly not around my neck. A friend at the University of Birmingham sometimes asked his acquaintances in the Guild of Students, ‘Why are you not wearing a little electric chair around your neck?’, much to their consternation.

There’s one commentator on this whole cross business that is worth quoting – Jesus.  He had made it clear that he knew what he was getting into and he said this was ‘for the forgiveness of sins’[10]. From his followers’ point of view the forgiveness of their sins was a very welcome outcome (what’s not to love about the forgiveness of your sins?).

But now crosses are all over the place. It’s too late to recall them. You can see one out of our back bedroom window. In the classical Western movie, a hero dies, is buried and what do they stick in the ground above his grave? – a cross.

This Spring, while the Chinese government is trying to take down crosses that have been erected above churches[11], in other places people are putting crosses up – like the new one on the Sagrada Familia building in Barcelona making it the ‘tallest church in the world’[12]

I need to be careful about what I say here because there are sincere people who wear these things around their neck. They do it to show their appreciation of the cross because Jesus forgave their sins. Like Nadia Eweida, a British Airways check-in employee at Heathrow, who was sent home without pay in 2006 for wearing a small silver cross on a necklace[13]. It took seven years for her case to be vindicated.

With all this information staring us in the face I am mystified that more people don’t take the option of signing up to follow Jesus. I’m tempted to say it’s a no-brainer, but I know (and I bet you know) that it’s not just a matter of your brain. In my case it was a matter of my free will – would I wallow in my own self-righteous little kingdom or would I jump?

I jumped.

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[1] The Crucifixion, Noli Me Tangere National Gallery of Ireland number 1022.

[2] Churchland Quarters, Carndonagh, County Donegal,

[3]  Neil Macgregor, Seeing Salvation (BBC Worldwide Ltd/Yale University Press: 2000)

[4]  Scenes from Christ’s Passion British Museum.

[5]  John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Nottingham: Intervarsity Press 2007 ed)

[6] Alexamenos worships God Kircherian Museum, Rome

[7] Matthew 27:19

[8] John 19:6

[9]  Tom Holland, Dominion (London: Abacus 2020)

[10] Matthew 26:28

[11] https://www.churchinchains.ie/news-by-country/east-asia/china/china-huge-crackdown-on-zhejiangs-yayang-church-network

[12] BBC 9 June 2026

[13] Guardian 15 January 2013