According to John Granger Cook, the stimulus for writing the book under review came from a request from Martin Hengel to revise the latter's short, but influential, work of 1977, Crucifixion. Cook states that he soon realised that it would be best if he wrote his own work.

The book joins a spate of heavy tomes on the subject of crucifixion, including Gunnar Samuelsson's Crucifixion in antiquity (2013) and David Chapman's Ancient Jewish and Christian perceptions of crucifixion (2008). Where one is taken up with issues to do with the semantics of crucifixion (with which Cook is not in agreement) and the other with views of the punishment among Jews and Christians, Cook's is a broad survey of texts, graffiti and archaeological evidence pertinent to the practice of crucifixion in the ancient world.

The work consists of an introduction, conclusion and six chapters. In the introduction Cook defines crucifixion as ‘execution by suspension’, but is clear that this should not include hanging or impalement. He then proceeds to examine a number of pertinent Greek and Latin words which could reasonably be taken to refer to crucifixion. There then follow lengthy surveys of texts in Latin referring to crucifixion, Roman crucifixions, crucifixions in Greek texts, Hebrew and Aramaic texts, crucifixion in law and historical development, and then a final substantive chapter on Roman crucifixion in the New Testament. The book comes with nineteen figures at the end, including two photographs of the partially preserved image of a crucified man from the Arieti tomb from the mid-second century bc.

The volume has something of the quality of an encyclopaedia on crucifixion with all the usefulness associated with such a genre. Discussions range widely from the character of the so-called patibulum (the horizontal beam of the cross which gave it its distinctive shape in the form of the Greek letter tau and which Jesus probably had to carry [rather than the whole cross] and which Cook thinks the Arieti image elucidates) to questions relating to when crucifixion ceased in the West (probably in or around the reign of Constantine). Interesting tidbits of information emerge, including the observation that the account of Jesus’ crucifixion in the Gospels is the longest account from antiquity of a crucifixion, and that we only have the names of just over twenty individuals who were crucified in the nearly 600 years of its practice as a form of punishment in the Roman and Greek world. Crucifixion, it seems, was by and large discussed incidentally or à propos of other subjects, though the incidental character of its mention in so many texts shows that it was a well-known form of punishment which impressed itself upon the minds of many, with the second-century author Artemidorus assuming its appearance in dreams. It was applied to a range of crimes and its victims were mainly slaves, foreigners and citizens of low standing. Cook, whose work is notable for its circumspection, has eschewed writing a history of crucifixion, thinking that the evidence will not sit easily with such an undertaking; and he is quick to scotch some generally held conclusions such as that relating to a diminution in crucifixions from the second and third centuries onwards.

His section on the Gospels is brief. In part he wants to show how the lengthy discussion of the previous five chapters elucidates the account that we find there. Surprisingly, in this context, he devotes quite a lot of discussion to the theology of the cross, though it was not immediately clear to this reviewer how that was elucidated by what had preceded (not least his discussion of the role of Psalm xxii in the account).

This is a helpful addition to the ever-increasing number of books on crucifixion. The reader might have hoped for a more discursive conclusion (we are given a mere three pages in which much of the discussion is taken up with a summary of Cook's semantic observations). In that respect this book bears little relationship to Hengel's much shorter, but more invigorating, book of almost forty years ago. But by dint of its competent and careful coverage of a mass of material, it will remain an important point of reference to those interested in further research on this gruesome subject.