stauroō

Crucifixion was the Roman empire's most public and most shameful way of killing a person. The condemned was nailed or tied to an upright wooden cross and left to die slowly, in full view, as a warning to everyone watching. The word names that specific execution, and in the New Testament it is overwhelmingly about one death in particular: the killing of Jesus. Most of its appearances are in the trial and death scenes of the Gospels, in the crowd's shouted demand to have him crucified, and in the apostles' charge that the very people they were preaching to had crucified the Lord.

The same writers also turn the word toward the believer's own life. Paul says that those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh, and that through the cross the world has been put to death to him and he to the world. This is not a second, unrelated meaning. It is the literal execution used as a deliberate picture: a decisive, deadly, public end, applied now to one's old self-centered nature rather than to a body. The force of the image depends entirely on the brutal reality behind it.

Because the word is so tied to the cross of Christ, the New Testament can speak of "Christ crucified" almost as a title, summing up the whole message of the gospel in a single, scandalous fact.