Christ crucified
And his 'love-letter to the world', by the apostle John
This is Who made our minds?, my Thursday essay probing the greatest, cruellest and most beautiful minds of the past 5,000 years, inspired by my book, The Soul: A History of the Human Mind (Penguin 2024).
Next Thursday: Paul converts the gentiles (4th of several essays on Christianity)
IN THE YEAR 217 BEFORE CHRIST, Hannibal Barca’s army reached the plains beneath Mount Falernus in Latium (central Italy).
The Carthaginian general asked a terrified guide where the hell they were. The guide admitted they were lost. Hannibal had him crucified, ‘to terrify the others’.
Around this time, a Carthaginian spy who had eluded capture for two years was caught in Rome. According to the Roman historian Livy, the spy’s hands were cut off and he was allowed to go, but ‘five and twenty slaves were crucified, on the charge of having conspired in the Campus Martius’.
In 73 BCE, Spartacus le…