The offense of the cross

Can the gods suffer? Aristophanes' in The Frogs (~405 BC) makes use of the idea that they cannot.

DIONYSUS in agony
    Man' don't torture me!
    I am a god. You'll blame yourself hereafter
    If you touch me. 
AEACUS
    Hillo! What's that you are saying? 
DIONYSUS
    I say I'm Bacchus, son of Zeus, a god,
    And he's the slave. 
AEACUS
    You hear him? 
XANTHIAS
    Hear him? Yes.
    All the more reason you should flog him well.
    For if he is a god, he won't perceive it.

Crucifixion was the most degrading of deaths in the ancient world: Not merely an execution, but a torturous humiliation; a public spectacle and an intended example to others; a penalty reserved for slaves and foreigners (‘barbarians’), but hardly even spoken of in civilized society. This caused all manner of problems for early Christian writers: What kind of 'god' suffers humiliation on this scale?

A brief list of references will illustrate this.

Plato in his dialogue with Gorgias (380 BCE), requiring a rhetorical example of the worst imaginable death to suffer, sets impalement / crucifixion on a par with being burned alive:

is racked, mutilated, has his eyes burned out, and after having had all sorts of great injuries inflicted on him, and having seen his wife and children suffer the like, is at last impaled or tarred and burned alive...

Cicero (106-43 BCE) had occassion to discuss crucifixion and its reputation in 63 BCE, in the course of defending a man he esteemed highly against a charge of treason:

16 Wretched is the loss of one's good name in the public courts, wretched, too, a monetary fine exacted from one's property, and wretched is exile, but, still, in each calamity there is retained some trace of liberty. Even if death is set before us, we may die in freedom. But the executioner, the veiling of heads, and the very word ‘cross,’ let them all be far removed from not only the bodies of Roman citizens but even from their thoughts, their eyes, and their ears. The results and suffering from these doings as well as the situation, even anticipation, of their enablement, and, in the end, the mere mention of them are unworthy of a Roman citizen and a free man. Or is that, while the kindness of their masters frees our slaves from the fear of all these punishments with one stroke of the staff of manumission, neither our exploits nor the lives we have lived nor honors you have bestowed will liberate us from scourging, from the hook, and, finally, from the terror of the cross?

[ continuing ... ]

Christian writers of the second and third centuries CE had to contend with Greek and Roman attitudes to crucifixion. The sheer (and justified) revulsion associated with the practice made it seem ridiculous that any 'god' worth speaking of would suffer such a fate.

More generally this contributed to Docetism, the view that Jesus was fully divine, but not fully human, and was related to the Gnostic dualism that viewed matter as intrinsically evil or corrupt.

This seems to be what Paul has in mind in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25:

18 For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written:

"I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate."

20 Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. 22 Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, 23 but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.