I have intentionally waited until the Holy Week was over. Now that certain enthusiasm has abated, one needs to look ahead to next year's celebrations. It is a pity that certain elements are mesmerised by Hollywood and ignore the written word. These same people feel that the gospel according to Hollywood is more reliable than the original four gospels. Some film producer wanted to depict Jesus carrying just the transept of the cross. This is wrong and might even verge on blasphemy. There is ample proof in the four canonical gospels that Jesus carried the full cross, that is the upright and transept as one single unit.

The Romans had many methods of crucifying the condemned, from impaling on a stake, to affixing to a tree, to an upright pole (what some call a crux simplex) or to a combination of an upright (in Latin, stipes) and a crossbeam (in Latin, patibulum).

The condemned man or woman (even women were crucified) was forced to carry the cross on his or her shoulders to the place of execution. The crossbeam on its own would weigh only 75-125 pounds (35-60 kilograms) but a whole cross would weigh well over 300 pounds (135 kilograms). This explains why those carrying the whole cross would often be helped, as was the case with Jesus when Simon of Cyrene was ordered to carry the cross on his behalf.

There are no historical references that any help was ever provided to those carrying just the cross beam, apart from the fact that the condemned would already have been nailed to it and would invariably have been stripped completely naked.

The gibbet on which crucifixion was carried out could be of many shapes. Josephus, a Judean who defected to the Roman side during the Jewish uprising of AD66-72, describes multiple tortures and positions of crucifixion and Seneca the Younger recounts: "I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in many different ways: some have their victims with head down to the ground; some impale their private parts; others stretch out their arms on the gibbet."

At times, the gibbet was only one vertical stake, called in Latin crux simplex or palus. Frequently, there was a cross-piece attached either at the top to give the shape of a T (crux commissa) or just below the top, as in the form most familiar in Christian symbolism (crux immissa). Other forms were in the shape of the letters X and Y. The earliest writings that speak specifically of the shape of the cross on which Jesus died describe it as shaped like the letter T (the Greek letter tau), composed of an upright and a transverse beam, together with a small peg in the upright.

Thus, I am surprised, firstly by the parish priests who still allow such false depictions, and even more by the Curia that does not stop this false and misleading trend.

Jesus carried the full cross and any other interpretation would be diametrically opposite to the descriptions given in the gospels. Let us stop this stupidity and pseudo modernism. The depiction of a person carrying just the transept would not be that of Jesus but, at most, of one of the thieves that were crucified with Him.