1When I came to you, brothers, I didn’t come with excellence of speech or of wisdom, proclaiming to you the testimony of God. 2For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling. 4My speech and my preaching were not in persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5that your faith wouldn’t stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.
6We speak wisdom, however, among those who are full grown, yet a wisdom not of this world nor of the rulers of this world who are coming to nothing. 7But we speak God’s wisdom in a mystery, the wisdom that has been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds for our glory, 8which none of the rulers of this world has known. For had they known it, they wouldn’t have crucified the Lord of glory. 9But as it is written,
“Things which an eye didn’t see, and an ear didn’t hear,
which didn’t enter into the heart of man,
these God has prepared for those who love him.”
10But to us, God revealed them through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. 11For who among men knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so, no one knows the things of God except God’s Spirit. 12But we received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might know the things that were freely given to us by God. 13We also speak these things, not in words which man’s wisdom teaches but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with spiritual things. 14Now the natural man doesn’t receive the things of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to him; and he can’t know them, because they are spiritually discerned. 15But he who is spiritual discerns all things, and he himself is to be judged by no one. 16“For who has known the mind of the Lord that he should instruct him?” But we have Christ’s mind.
Until fairly recent times, no physical archaeological evidence had been found of the practice of crucifixion. In 1968 archaeologists working in Givat ha-Mivtar, a suburb of Jerusalem, found the skeleton of a man who had been crucified named Jehohanan. The bones shed new light on how crucifixions were performed. Although traditionally it was thought that nails were driven through the hands and feet, this was shown to be erroneous. The nails were actually driven through the ankles of the victim. Initially, marks on the skeleton’s wrists led researchers to conclude that nails had also been driven through Jehoanan’s wrists, but Joseph Zias and others have questioned the identification of the marks. Instead, some posit that only ropes were used to secure the victim to the horizontal beam of the cross. At any rate, Jehoanan’s remains are a stark reminder of the brutality of crucifixion as a means of execution, and how excruciatingly painful the experience must have been.