Worst Ways to Die - Crucified Upside Down

As one story goes, Peter the Apostle, one of the 12 apostles, is walking at a quick pace down the Roman Road known as the Appian Way. The reason he’s in a bit of a rush is that the Romans want to crucify him, enough to make any man wear out the soles of his sandals. As he gets farther away from the city, he sees something and can’t quite believe his eyes. It’s Jesus, walking towards him, carrying a wooden cross over his shoulder.

The same cross that he died on. Jesus, with the woven crown of thorns still attached to his head, looks determined as he marches on. Peter almost falls back in shock at seeing him, but manages to get out the words, “Where are you going?” Jesus turns back for a moment and says, “I am going to Rome to be crucified again.” Peter then thinks, “Well, if he’s going, so am I.

Damn the Romans. I shall carry on teaching the good word.” If that actually happened is up for debate, but it’s been written this decision Peter made eventually led to his arrest and subsequent execution by crucifixion. But, according to the legend, he wasn’t executed like Christ was. Instead, he was crucified upside down. We’ll come back to why that happened and how that went down later.

First of all, we need to know a little bit about normal crucifixion. The reason the Romans did it was because for one it was dreadfully painful. The English word “excruciating” can be understood to mean something like torment coming from the cross.

They weren’t the first to do it, though. Alexander the Great executed thousands of his enemies by way of crucifixion, which kind of paved the way for the Romans. There were quite a few types of crucifixion throughout history, but the one you all know quite well consists of a person’s arms spread wide against a horizontal beam and their body connected to a vertical beam.

There are a few things you might not be familiar with in regard to crucifixion, even if you’ve attended bible class or watched movies about the life of Jesus Christ. Firstly, when the Romans stuck someone on a cross they didn’t think, “Hmm, we better cover his genital area and show some decorum here.” They were killing someone they deemed a threat to society.

Worst Ways to Die - Crucified Upside Down

They didn’t cover up the naughty bits. Far from it, crucifixion was supposed to be humiliating as well as painful. It’s hard to say how long a person would last up there. Another thing we tend not to think about is the number of things that can go wrong with the body when someone is strung up like that. Just think about how it would feel, the full weight of your body dangling up there, either nailed or tied to the wood.

The most common question regarding crucifixion is, how did Jesus die? It is possible that if Jesus’ hands were nailed to the cross he had some kind of footrest, otherwise it’s unlikely the nails driven through either the palms or the wrists could have supported his full body weight. If so, death might have come later than if his feet were simply tied with rope or nails were driven through them.

Nonetheless, there are numerous interpretations as to exactly how he was crucified, but scientists usually agree about the cause of death. It’s generally thought that a person crucified with their arms spread would not last longer than a day. But, if there was no footrest it would be over in possibly a matter of minutes or perhaps a couple of hours because the position the person was in would make it almost impossible to breathe.

The Romans would sometimes break a person’s legs if they wanted it to be over quickly. Without support from the legs and feet, the effort of straining upwards to draw breath would eventually be too much and the person would quickly die. What would eventually kill a victim of crucifixion would be heart failure, hypoglycemic shock, acidosis, asphyxia, and arrhythmia.

One scientist explained why these things would happen, saying, “The resultant lack of oxygen in the blood would cause damage to tissues and blood vessels, allowing fluid to diffuse out of the blood into tissues, including the lungs and the sac around the heart.” That in itself is a worst way to die, even though the death was kind of fast-tracked.

Still, we can’t repeat enough that it all depended on how a person was positioned on the cross. For instance, one ancient historian wrote this: “They were first whipped and then tormented with all sorts of tortures, before they died, and were crucified before the wall of the city... the soldiers, out of wrath and hatred they bore the Jews, nailed those they caught to the crosses in different postures, by way of jest.”

The great Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca, not a big fan of crucifixion, wrote this: “I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in many different ways: some had victims with their heads bowed to the ground, some stabbed their private parts, others stretched out their arms.” Seneca witnessed all kinds of horrific tortures that some Romans seem to have endured to enjoy, including watching a person being torn apart after being tied to two chariots that sped off in different directions.

Still, he said crucifixion was the worst of them all. He once wrote, “Anyone facing such a death would plead to die rather than mount the cross.” Let’s say a person didn’t die in minutes or a few hours from what we have already talked about. Maybe the person had a foothold and could breathe ok, but they still had other ways to die before dehydration got them.

Worst Ways to Die - Crucified Upside Down

After being vigorously whipped and nails being hammered into them, they could die within hours from a blood infection that resulted in sepsis. Sepsis is when your body releases a torrent of chemicals to fight an infection, which leads to hyper inflammation. The person on the cross would first start to feel very faint, then develop a fever with confusion and breathing difficulties following.

The end result would be organ failure. But let’s say the person dodged that bullet, too. Maybe they were even given a little seat to sit on while they were on the cross, which did happen from time to time – not as a treat, but to keep them alive longer. First of all, prior to going up there they very likely had to carry the cross, which might have weighed as much as 300 pounds (135 kg).

Maybe that Scottish bloke who just won the world’s strongest man could cope with that, but your average scrawny guy back in the day wouldn’t have stood a chance. Still, they probably only carried the crossbeam, which weighed an estimated 100 pounds (45 kg). To put things into perspective, that’s about the weight of a mildly obese male German Shepherd Dog.

The “Via Dolorosa”, aka, “The Way of Suffering” is the route Jesus took with the cross on his back on his way to be executed. It’s said to be about 2,000 feet (600 meters), although if he carried it all the way or got help from Simon of Cyrene has been debated. We can’t say we know what happened, but historians agree that the Romans did make people carry their own beams.

That almost certainly meant they were dehydrated when they got to the crucifixion site. Once they were up on the cross, they might last a couple of days before they died from dehydration. The hot sun would have been a killer, never mind the wild animals visiting what looked like a tasty, injured piece of prey.

That would have been awful, just as the poet William Butler Yeats described in a poem about crucifixion, “If it were hanging or bowstringing, or stoning or beheading, it would be bad enough. But to have the birds pecking your eyes and the wolves eating your feet!” That’s why it was worse than any other execution the Romans had in their torture catalog.

As the Roman statesman and philosopher, Cicero, said, it was “a most cruel and disgusting punishment.” Ok, we think we’ve hammered this point home now. That’s another pun. We already know thanks to Seneca that some Roman pranksters would get a thrill from crucifying some people in various postures.

This also brings us back to Peter the Apostle. One story has it that this former fisherman actually asked to be crucified upside down, but not because he thought it might be less painful. He requested this because he felt unworthy to go the same way as his master had. If this was true it’s hard to say, because the story is said to be Apocrypha.

When we talk about Apocrypha, we mean religious writing that is not accepted as a canon of scripture. There are also different takes on certain tales, such as maybe Peter wanted to die upside down not because he didn’t want to die like Jesus, but because it symbolized how man’s values were all upside down.

Worst Ways to Die - Crucified Upside Down

The “Acts of Peter” is part of this Apocrypha, but it doesn’t mean what’s in the stories is all fake news. Sure, the book talks about a flying man, curing cripples, and how he raised a fish, but an upside-down crucifixion is believable enough. According to the legend, the Romans granted Peter his wish. He was crucified, had some time to deliver a speech, and then died.

Scholars have since questioned this, saying that there is little chance the Romans would have messed up an average day by hauling Peter’s feet up by a rope and crucifying him this way, nor would they have nailed him to a cross while laid on the ground and gone to the effort of erecting it. Why would the punishers have been committed to needless extra hard work?

We’ve seen different representations of the crucifixion in the form of paintings. One painted by Caravaggio around the year 1600 has Peter nailed to an ordinary cross on the floor and then the entire thing with him on it is lifted into a vertical position. His arms are nailed to the cross beam and his ankles are nailed to the vertical beam, but the whole thing is upside down.

A painting by the artist Masaccio which was finished in 1426 shows it a different way, with the cross being in the normal position but Peter’s feet are splayed where arms are usually stretched. Some people say both scenarios are unlikely. If the cross was upside down, it wouldn’t have stood erect since the top of a cross wasn’t usually very strong compared to the bottom.

Still, if this is really how it happened, then we guess Peter’s crucifixion was one of the speedy deaths we have already discussed. We don’t know the exact age when he died, but it’s thought he was in the mid-60s, which was pretty darn old back then. Hanging upside down for a while at the best of times can be dangerous, but as an aging man, Peter must have really felt that rush of blood to the head.

All that pressure again would have made it hard to breathe, so asphyxiation likely came pretty quickly. Maybe even faster than the regular crucifixion because of the extra weight on the lungs in the downward position. There are variations to the story as to how long Jesus survived on the cross.

One story says after about six hours he was done, shouting out, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” But there is also an account from Saint Matthew that seems suggested three hours:“ From noon, darkness enveloped the whole country until three o'clock in the afternoon.

Worst Ways to Die - Crucified Upside Down

And about the third hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Lord, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Jesus cried again with a loud voice, and gave up His spirit." However long it takes, it must feel like forever. As for Peter, we would imagine he didn’t get through six or even three hours of agony. It’s very likely that all that blood going to his head would not only have led to huge migraines, but the blood would have started to pool in his nose and throat, making it very hard to breathe.

His heart would have had to work especially hard, and given his age, a heart attack or stroke would have likely occurred. Even if someone much younger and fitter than Peter was crucified upside down, we very much doubt that the person would have lasted long enough to die from dehydration. If he did manage to last into the night, you can only imagine the distress he might have felt if a wolf or pack of wild dogs approached when he was hanging upside down.

There is every possibility that he could have had his face chewed off. So, we’re going to go out on a limb here and say that the upside-down crucifixion was even worse than your run-of-the-mill execution. Now you need to watch, “Was Jesus Actually Resurrected.” Or, have a look at, “Strangest Ways People Died.”

Worst Ways to Die - Crucified Upside Down