Jehohanan

Jehohanan was a Judean man sentenced to death by crucifixion sometime in the 1st century CE. His ossuary was found in 1968 when building contractors working in Giv'at ha-Mivtar accidentally uncovered a Jewish tomb. The stone ossuary had the Hebrew inscription of "Jehohanan the son of Hagkol" (; the meaning of hgqwl is uncertain, hence his name sometimes being given as Johanan ben Ha-galgula).

In his initial anthropological observations in 1970 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Nicu Haas concluded that Jehohanan was crucified with his arms stretched out and his forearms nailed, possibly on a two-beamed cross. However, a 1985 reappraisal by Joseph Zias and Eliezer Sekeles of the Hebrew University found multiple errors in these observations. Zias and Sekeles proposed that a horizontal beam was affixed to vertical stakes, with Jehohanan's arms tied and death occurring from asphyxiation.

Anthropological observations

Initial observations, Haas, 1970 In his article "Anthropological Observations on the Skeletal Remains from Giv'at ha-Mivtar" published in the Israel Exploration Journal in 1970, Nicu Haas of the Department of Anatomy at Hebrew University, wrote of the remains of a man crucified:

Haas was unable to examine the remains any further because of serious health problems, and while his conclusions became widely accepted by the general public, several errors in his observations were later identified by Joseph Zias and Dr. Eliezer Sekeles of the Hebrew University in their 1985 reappraisal.

Reappraisal, Zias & Sekeles, 1985 In 1985, Joe Zias, curator of the Israel Department of Antiquities and Museums, and Eliezer Sekeles, from the Hadassah Medical Center, re-examined the crucifixion remains. They alleged that Haas' analysis was fraught with errors:

Zias and Sekeles also stated the presence of the scratch in one of the forearms "was not convincing" evidence of a nail wound:

In conclusion, the findings of Zias and Sekeles do not indicate whether in this case a horizontal patibulum cross-beam was attached to the upright stake to which the victim's heel was nailed. The evidence was so ambiguous concerning the arms that Zias and Sekeles had to rely on the data provided by contemporary writings to support their reconstruction of the position of the arms as attached to a crossbar:

Their reconstruction includes a crossbar which the condemned man could carry to the place of execution, and which could be used repeatedly for attachment to the upright stake permanently fixed in the ground: