The Gladiators
Correction: take away 3 legions and names of the 4 legions cause its irrelevant. Include 2 legions and Nabataean auxiliary troops sent by King Aretas
Nazareth has 100-200 people.
More crucifixions by Romans: see Crucifixion and the Death Cry of Jesus Christ By M D Geoffrey L Phelan
According to tradition, Sepphoris was the home of Joachim and Anna, the parents of Mary, the mother of Jesus. If true, this would mean that Jesus’ one set of true grandparents lived in this cosmopolitan city, and this would have been the place where His mother grew up. It could also mean that Joseph, a craftsman from Nazareth, perhaps while working on a building in Sepphoris, met the mid-teenager Mary and took her back to Nazareth as his bride.
Augustus crucifying 6,000 of Sextus Pompey’s rowers in 36 BC, all slaves.
The crucifixion of the 2,000 following the razing of Sepphoris was not an anomaly. It’s not like the Romans crucified these Galileans and then decided to abstain from the practice until Jesus came along and gave them a good excuse to do it again. While I can find no historical accounts of crucifixions at the hands of the Romans in the roughly 30 years between 4 BCE and the crucifixion of Jesus, there were probably ample opportunities during that period for Rome to justify (from its perspective) crucifying Judeans, as well as people in other troublesome areas within its sizeable empire.
Josephus wrote in his Antiquities of the Jews that in 6 CE, Judas the Galilean teamed up with a Pharisaic priest named Zadok and founded a group of Jewish nationalists called the Zealots, who rebelled against Rome in response to a census in Judea imposed for tax purposes by the Roman governor of adjacent Syria, Sulpicius Quirinius. The census was the same the one mentioned in the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke in the Christian Scriptures… although Luke placed the census no later than 4 BCE while Herod the Great was still king. Predictably, the revolt was put brutally put down by the Romans, and Judas was killed. Jesus would have been about 10 years old at the time.
It is not known how Judas died — whether he was killed in battle or whether he was captured and may have been crucified. Josephus does mention in his writings that Judas’ two sons, James and Simon, were crucified by the procurator of Judea, Tiberius Julius Alexander, around 46 CE — more than a decade after the crucifixion of Jesus.
The point is that Rome had a well-established crucifixion record even before Sepphoris, and the empire showed no signs of abandoning this form of capital punishment until long after the death of Jesus. Apart from Sepphoris, the two most glaring examples of mass crucifixions by the Romans occurred in 71 BCE and a century later in 70 CE.
The Rise and Fall of the Gladiators
In 73 BCE, a small band of escaped gladiators and slaves led by the gladiator Spartacus, rebelled against Rome. The group eventually grew to become an army of more than 70,000 people roaming southern Italy and defeated several Roman armies, posing a threat to the institution of slavery within the Roman republic and to the stability of the empire. One out of every three people in Italy were slaves.
For two years, Spartacus and his army held out against Rome, until finally in 71 BCE they were defeated at the battle of Apulia by a force under the command of the Roman general, Marcus Licinius Crassus. Spartacus was killed in the battle. The conflict was known as the Third Servile War.
Following the victory, Crassus ordered the crucifixion of more than 6,000 gladiators and slaves along the 125-mile Appian Way road from Capua to Rome.
The 6,000 was probably the most massive number of crucified peope in history until Augustus matched it in 36 BC >.. see http://books.google.com/books?id=j3LowhKACVwC&pg=PA191&lpg=PA191&dq=%22crucified%22+and+%22Pompey%22+and+%22rowers%22&source=bl&ots=pD00zS2pVK&sig=6__Zrz1stOX-1B_w7Ihs6ffVZv0&hl=en&ei=LX4JTOiRMYWclgfsq_3_Dg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CBsQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22crucified%22%20and%20%22Pompey%22%20and%20%22rowers%22&f=false
