The Crucifixion

The Ultimate Demonstration of the Limits of State Power

Introduction

The tale of the Crucifixion is one of the most famous stories of all time, but its economic context remains poorly understood. The Roman Empire was an ethical disaster, in which the vast majority of people were economically exploited. The popular response to this exploitation took the form of a revival of the ancient Greek mystery religions and the traditional practice of debt forgiveness, which had been a fixture in virtually all societies since the dawn of the agricultural revolution. In Christianity, these two movements were combined into an unstoppable force that the Roman authorities were helpless to resist.

Julius Caesar

Roman society was history’s first great experiment in not forgiving debts. Next door in Greece, Solon of Athens inaugurated a golden age for his city with a broad debt cancellation in 594 BC. But when the Roman king Tarquin attempted it, Rome’s prominent families drove him out of town before he could cancel any debts owed to them.

Thereafter, Rome was governed by a Senate populated by the wealthy. It established a social taboo against kingship so strict that the Latin word rex became an offensive perjorative. Under this guise of democracy, the Roman oligarchy eliminated the only person with the power to protect the poor and began amassing an unprecedented hoard of wealth through merciless exploitation.

Predictably, the Roman working class responded to their exploitation and their lack of political representation with increasingly violent uprisings. A devastating civil war culminated in Julius Caesar marching on Rome as a popularis, or a political representative of the working class.

But the Senate conspired against him in one of the most infamous political assassinations of all time. Brutus belonged to an ancient Roman family that had been ringleaders in the ouster of Tarquin five centuries prior. Familial duty forced him to help gut his best friend on the floor of a theater. The conspirators claimed to have killed Julius Caesar because he violated the long-standing Roman taboo against kingship. But the fact that that taboo was established to counter a debt cancellation reveals the assassination to be a coup in a larger class war.

Ego Death

This class war was the historical stage onto which Christianity strode. It prescribed the debt forgiveness commanded in Jewish scripture as the remedy for an impending apocalypse. Forgiveness, preached Christ, is the only hope for salvation.

This rejection of Rome’s cruel economic hierarchy resonated with the exploited Roman working class. In addition to Jewish scripture, Christians also adopted the symbology of the old Greek mystery religions. For a thousand years, Greek initiates had ritualistically consumed hallucinogens from sacred chalices in Mystery Schools. Just as they would in American society during the Vietnam War era, these drugs came to symbolize resistance to authority in Roman society. And that further bolstered the appeal of the new faith to potential converts.

The psychedelic substances used in the Mystery Schools triggered a profound experience known as "ego death," revealing the self and the physical world as illusions. This insight influenced Greek culture profoundly. Democracy, for instance, reflects it by balancing individual egos through collective decision-making. Greek drama embodies it through actors who adopt and discard multiple identities. Even Plato's philosophy, rooted in the idea that the physical world is merely an illusion, was directly shaped by his initiation into several Mystery Schools.

Virtually all the fruits of Greek civilization were shaped by the mystery religions that spiritually anchored that society. But in the crucible of a dying Roman Empire, Christianity took the concept of ego death to a shocking new extreme.

The Crucifixion

The experience of ego death poses a threat to the economic interests of the wealthy. The realization that physical reality is an illusion makes people less likely to wake up every morning and report to work to make money for their bosses. In our modern era, appealing to the ego is the most effective way to stimulate purchasing behavior. People who have experienced ego death and believe reality to be an illusion make neither good customers nor good employees.

But most importantly, ego death undermines the ability of political authorities to control their subjects. The ego is the basis of state power. The authorities can throw our bodies in prison or torture those bodies to death. But when we stop identifying as our bodies, they have nothing further to threaten us with.

Pontius Pilate was the Roman prefect who ordered the execution of Jesus. “Then came Jesus forth,” says John 19:5, “wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man!”. Italian artist Antonio Ciseri captured the moment, just before the crucifixion, when Pilate presents Jesus to the crowd in Jerusalem. He titled his painting Ecce Homo, the Latin for Pilate’s phrase in John. Ciseri’s work serves as the title card for this essay; it hangs in the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence.

"And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross,” continues John a few verses later, “and the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS.” In depictions of the cross, Christian iconography often includes the letters INRI, which abbreviate that phrase in Latin: "Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum."

That sign is a fixture in Christian iconography because it’s pregnant with significance. Like Julius Caesar, Jesus stood accused of violating the Roman taboo of claiming kingship for himself. As was the case with Tarquin, kingship in the Roman sense meant the power to relieve the debts of the poor. Jesus’s own demands for debt forgiveness had been received poorly by the local religious authorities; it was they who appealed to Pilate to have Jesus executed.

But because Jesus bore his agonizing death with equanimity, his execution had the opposite of the intended effect. Early Christians followed his lead by enthusiastically volunteering themselves for martyrdom. Though they could destroy the man himself and massacre his followers, the Roman state was utterly powerless to stop the story of Jesus from spreading to every corner of the Empire. It was a consummate demonstration of the limits of state power.

Conclusion

Advocacy for the poor and downtrodden made Christianity popular in a Roman Empire that cruelly exploited its great masses of workers. But advocacy for the poor was not enough to save Julius Caesar. Christianity succeeded where he failed because of the additional insight that conceptions of self are illusory. The Crucifixion was the ultimate public demonstration of that insight. Despite the violent repression of Christianity by Roman authorities, the story of Jesus became an Empire-wide advertisement for the power of non-violent resistance. Powerless to stop the movement, the Roman government eventually adopted it as the state religion of the dying Empire.

Further Materials

Describing Tarquinius’s hostility to the aristocracy, Livy (1.54) interjects a version of the story related by Herodotus (above, Chapter 2, fn41) about Thrasybulus of Miletus advising Periander to cut off the highest stalks of grain with a scythe. In Livy’s version, Tarquinius takes a messenger from his son Sextus to his garden to reply to a message asking what to do about the town of Gabii that was resisting Rome. Tarquinius is reported to have cut down the tallest poppies—a symbolic gesture for cutting down the leading potential rivals in local aristocracies.
Reacting against public spending by the kings, Rome's oligarchy embraced an anti-government ideology as passionately as do today's anti-socialists. Much like the Greek oligarchs who accused reformers seeking popular support by cancelling debts and redistributing land of being "tyrants," Roman patricians accused reformers of "seeking kingship" by proposing debt reform and assignment of public land to settle the poor instead of letting patricians grab it for themselves. Such advocacy led to the most progressive reformers from the leading families being assassinated in political killings over the ensuing five centuries.
In the republican period the very idea of a king was viewed with an almost pathological dislike. ... The tradition is very likely correct when it says that the first acts of the founders of the Republic were to make the people swear never to allow any man to be king in Rome and to legislate against anyone aspiring to monarchy in the future. What was truly repugnant to the nobles was the thought of one of their number elevating himself above his peers by attending to the needs of the lower classes and winning their political support.
This explains why all the serious charges of monarchism (regnum) in the Republic were leveled against mavericks from the ruling elite whose only offence, it seems, was to direct their personal efforts and resources to the relief of the poor.
This Roman fear of kingship is what Judea's upper class played upon when they sought to have Jesus condemned after he incited the hatred of the Pharisees and the creditor class with his first sermon (Luke 4), when he unrolled the scroll of Isaiah and announced that he had come to proclaim the Jubilee Year of the Lord, cancelling debts as called for under Mosaic Law. They accused him of aspiring to be "king of the Jews," that is, "seeking kingship," the familiar epithet the Romans applied to leaders whom they feared might cancel debts, including Catiline and Caesar around Jesus's time.
Michael Hudson, The Collapse of Antiquity, 2023, page 187