• Frans Said (The Cross Carried By Jesus, April 11) seems to think that just because he reads and quotes from the Bible, he knows all the facts while others do not.
Just because Jesus was helped by a man of Cyrene to carry the ‘cross’, it does not mean that what Jesus (and later) Simon were carrying was a real cross as we envisage it to be.
The Bible we have today is a translation (copy) from the Greek (written some 60-70 years later) and, therefore, one can find many instances where words meant to mean one thing end up meaning something else.
What in the English Bible or Maltese (for that matter) we find written as being a cross carried by Jesus, in the original Greek it’s worded as stauros meaning a stake! This makes it more probable and easy to envisage Jesus carrying it, since it would not have been as heavy as a cross. The cross is a pagan thing created much earlier, before Christ. If we believe that Jesus was flogged, then it explains why he needed some help on his way to Golgotha. Jesus’ Roman escort had the responsibility of making sure the condemned was alive when they arrived at the top of the hill. The man had to suffer the ultimate of pain, degradation and insults, besides being left there naked, in the cold and for the birds to make a feast of the body. Therefore, the beam on its own was still too heavy for any man to carry all the way up the hill. That seems to explain it.
Now that I have said my piece, though by no means saying I know all the facts (far from it), I hope that Said won’t call me a heretic since he ended his letter by stating that “anything else would be heretical”. For what is the truth? Do we have all the truth just because we have the four Gospels (which, we must admit, don’t always see eye to eye) and written many years after Jesus was crucified? In my opinion nothing is absolute and things may be different from what they look to us on the outside or on paper.
One last word. When Jesus told Pilate that He was the truth, Pilate asked him: “What is the truth?” Jesus did not answer!