Where was Jesus put on when he was crucified ?

Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi

In Mark 15 : 32, we are told that Jesus was put on a cross” to be crucified :

Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross, that we may see and believe. And they that were cru­ci­fied with him reviled him.

The word for cross” here in Greek is stau­ros”, which James Strong defined as :

(4716) from the base of 2476 ; a stake or post (as set upright), i.e. (specif­i­cal­ly) a pole or cross (as an instru­ment of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment); fig­u­ra­tive­ly, expo­sure to death, i.e. self-denial ; by impli­ca­tion, the atone­ment of Christ : — cross.James Strong, The New Strong’s Exhaus­tive Con­cor­dance of the Bible (Thomas Nel­son, 1996)

Yet in I Peter 2:24, we are told that Jesus was cru­ci­fied on the tree”:

Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto right­eous­ness : by whose stripes ye were healed. 

The word for tree” in Greek is xulon”, and is defined by Strong as :

(3586)from anoth­er form of the base of 3582 ; tim­ber (as fuel or mate­r­i­al); by impli­ca­tion a stick, club or tree or oth­er wood­en arti­cle or sub­stance : –staff, stocks, tree, wood.James Strong, Op. Cit.

The error here is obvi­ous. The Greek word stau­ros means defin­i­tive­ly a cross”. There is no dou­ble mean­ing employed to the word. Where­as the word xulon can be trans­lat­ed inter­change­ably as wood”, staff”, tree”, etc. but in the case of I Peter 2:24, it is trans­lat­ed as tree”. Now we need to ask why would the word xulon was used in the first place when there is a more defin­i­tive word for it, stau­ros, if the verse real­ly intends to mean the cross”?

It is there­fore obvi­ous that the word xulon is indeed used for tree” in I Peter 2:24, and there­fore there is a con­tra­dic­tion with Mark 15 : 32.

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