गॉलगोथाच्या टेकाडावर...Why, the Very Word is Harsh on Our Ears

Today April 10 2020 is Good Friday

Tom Holland, 'Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind':

“…Only a people famed for their barbarousness and cruelty could ever have devised such a torture: the Persians, perhaps, or the Assyrians, or the Gauls. Everything about the practice of nailing a man to a cross – a ‘crux’ – was repellent. ‘Why, the very word is harsh on our ears.’  It was this disgust that crucifixion uniquely inspired which explained why, when slaves were condemned to death, they were executed in the meanest, wretchedest stretch of land beyond the city walls; and why, when Rome burst its ancient limits, only the world’s most exotic and aromatic plants could serve to mask the taint. It was also why, despite the ubiquity of crucifixion across the Roman world, few cared to think much about it. Order, the order loved by the gods and upheld by magistrates vested with the full authority of the greatest power on earth, was what counted – not the elimination of such vermin as presumed to challenge it. Criminals broken on implements of torture: who were such filth to concern men of breeding and civility? Some deaths were so vile, so squalid, that it was best to draw a veil across them entirely….

The condemned man, after his sentencing, was handed over to soldiers to be flogged. Next, because he had claimed to be ‘the king of the Jews’, his guards mocked him, and spat on him, and set a crown of thorns on his head. Only then, bruised and bloodied, was he led out on his final journey. Hauling his cross as he went, he stumbled his way through Jerusalem, a spectacle and an admonition to all who saw him, and onwards, along the road to Golgotha. There, nails were driven into his hands and feet, and he was crucified. After his death, a spear was jabbed into his side. There is no reason to doubt the essentials of this narrative. Even the most sceptical historians have tended to accept them. ‘The death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross is an established fact, arguably the only established fact about him.’ Certainly, his sufferings were nothing exceptional. Pain and humiliation, and the protracted horror of ‘the most wretched of deaths’: these, over the course of Roman history, were the common lot of multitudes.... 

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 ही सदानंद रेगेंची वरील अप्रतिम कविता पूर्वी ह्या ब्लॉग वर आली आहेच. पण टॉम हॉलंड यांचे पुस्तक वाचताना असे वाटले की रेगेंना क्रूसावर चढवण्याचा प्रक्रियेबद्दल थोडं जास्त्त लिहायला हवे होते का?

Illustration: Pratap Mulick
 
Script: Rev. Dr. Drakshathota Aruliah

courtesy: Amar Chitra Katha