If you are a son of God, come down off the TORTURE STAKE

[tonychanyt]

See If you are a son of God, come down off the TORTURE STAKE

 

[HTacianas]

New World Translation, Matthew 27:


Thayer's Greek Lexicon:

1. an upright stake, especially a pointed one (Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon).
2. a cross.

The Greek is ambiguous, New International Version:


Was Jesus nailed on an I-shaped stake or a T-shaped cross?

There are clues that point to the latter. Thomas was skeptical in John 20:


The T-shape cross required more than one nail.

A chapter later, Jesus prophesied the manner of Peter's death in John 21:


on the horizontal beam of the cross


This is the staurogram:


It is a ligature composed of a superposition of the Greek letters tau (Τ) and rho (Ρ). Some 2nd-century manuscripts used the staurogram to spell G4716.

There are also artifacts from the Shroud of Turin:


Was Jesus nailed on an I-shaped stake or a T-shaped cross?

Lexically, σταυρός is ambiguous. However, some strong textual and physical evidence points to the T-shaped cross.

Jesus was crucified on a t-shaped cross. That is the reason for the very early adoption of the cross as a symbol of Christianity. One of the problems you're running into is the use of the New World Translation of the Watchtower organization, commonly called the Jehovah's Witnesses. Charles Taze Russel followed in the footsteps of Alexander Hislop and others in their notion that all of the symbols of the Roman Church were pagan in origin, including the cross. According to them the cross was an adoption of the Egyptian Ankh. As you pointed out above, the cross in Matthew is an upright stake, but oftentimes the Romans would nail or tie the victim's arms to a cross member then hoist it onto the stake forming a cross.

But, it makes you wonder why no one ever translated it as "tree", because the crucifixion is also described as him being "hanged on a tree", see Acts 5:30. In the old testament when a person was stoned to death their body was hoisted into a tree and left in public sight as a deterrent for others. So, it was either a simple stake, or a tree, or a cross. Given that Christianity chose the cross as its symbol, and the countless available descriptions of Roman crucifixion carried out using a cross, it was likely a cross.