a thorn plant: any prickly weed, thistle, or bramble, not one named species
In the Greek of the New Testament this is the ordinary, broad word for a thorny plant: any prickly weed, thistle, or bramble, not a named species. Greek writers used it for everything from field weeds to the acacia tree, and even for a fish's backbone. When the Gospel writers reach for it, though, they draw on the way the Greek Old Testament had already loaded the word with meaning.
There, thorns are the mark of cursed, unfruitful ground. After the first sin, the ground is told it will bring forth "thorns and thistles" (Genesis 3:18), pairing this word with a companion word for a spiny thistle (τρίβολος). That fixed pair, and the picture behind it, echoes through the rest of Scripture: land that should yield a crop yields only briars instead.
The New Testament puts the image to work in three ways:
- In the story of the sower, thorns spring up and choke the young grain, standing for the worries, riches, and pleasures that slowly strangle a person's response to God.
- In the warning about false prophets, the question whether people gather grapes from thorns insists that a thorn plant cannot bear good fruit, so a person's true character shows in what their life yields.
- In Hebrews, ground that grows only thorns is called worthless and close to being cursed, its end to be burned.
All of these meet at the cross. The soldiers twist thorns into a wreath and press it onto Jesus' head. Early Christians saw the point at once: the very thing the ground produced under the curse was set as a crown on the one they believed had come to undo that curse.
Disputed
Which thorny plant the soldiers used for the wreath set on Jesus' head. The Gospels say only that it was made of thorns, and the ancient evidence does not settle the species; the modern discussion narrows to a short list of candidates.
- majorityThe thorny burnet (Sarcopoterium spinosum), a low shrub with dense small thorns on flexible young shoots that was the common household fuel of the Jerusalem hills and would have been ready at hand; the leading candidate on ecological grounds.; Michael Zohary, Plants of the Bible (Cambridge, 1982), 153-55; F. Nigel Hepper, Baker Encyclopedia of Bible Plants; Lytton John Musselman, Figs, Dates, Laurel, and Myrrh: Plants of the Bible and the Quran
- minorityThe Christ's-thorn jujube (Ziziphus spina-christi), the traditional identification preserved in the plant's scientific name, though its branches are brittle rather than pliable and it is uncommon in the hill country around Jerusalem.; Henry Baker Tristram, The Natural History of the Bible
- minorityDate-palm leaflets, whose upward-projecting spines would imitate the radiating crown of a divinized Roman emperor; argued from the meaning of the soldiers' mockery rather than from local plant life.; H. St. J. Hart, "The Crown of Thorns in John 19,2-5," Journal of Theological Studies n.s. 3 (1952): 66-75