'Crucifiction' is a common enough misspelling of
crucifixion that it's not at all surprising to see even Christian clergy and other
apologistically inclined authors include it in hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of books and newsletters, and almost endlessly in blogs and Internet forum posts and
Twitter tweets.
Atheists and other dyed-in-the-wool opponents of
Christianity will sometimes pounce upon this error-- "Aha, cruci-
fiction!!" (as readily as they pounce on the recurrent misspelling of Atheism as "Athiesm"; don't even get me started on misspellings of
Pandeism). But is this taunt simply
mockery? Or is it an underlining of a deeper
truth, an inherency of knowledge, of whether the incorporation of 'fiction' into the belief claimed is not in some sense the Christian heart's own confession of there being certain, to be gentle, errant aspects to it. Let us not be hasty to judge; but instead, let us examine this coincidence of diction.
The words, fiction and crucifixion, have perhaps unsurprisingly similar origins. Our friends over at
Wiktionary (a
dictionary offshoot of
Wikipedia) tell us that "fiction" comes "from Latin
fictionem, accusative of
fictio ("a making, fashioning, a feigning, a rhetorical or legal fiction"), in turn from
fingere ("to form, mold, shape, devise, feign")"; while crucifixion comes "from Latin noun of process
crucifixio, from perfect passive participle
crucifixus, fixed to a cross, from prefix
cruci- ("cross"), + verb
ficere ("fix, do"), variant form of
facere ("do, make"). Seems, at least, that there were lots of words in those days having to do with
making.
There are,
investigation reveals, websites
such as this one (which proposes that the crucifixion happened, but the death thereby was faked), and even whole books fixating entirely upon this
proposition -- one is
Crucifixion Or Cruci-fiction? by one Ahmed Deedat, who proposes that we use:
CRUCIFICT instead of CRUCIFY - (Verb)
CRUCIFICTED instead of CRUCIFIED - (Verb)
CRUCIFICTION instead of CRUCIFIXION - (Noun)
This simple and natural use of the right words will break the "CROSS" of Christianity which finds itself at the "CROSSROADS", not knowing which way to turn. And if we use the words frequently enough, we will soon find them in the English dictionaries of the world.
Naturally, no
wrong turn of
pen or
tongue can affect the true question of historicity. And it is an undoubted historic fact that there was a time of Roman occupation of those lands to the East of the
Mediterranean Sea; and that during that time a great many men were
executed by crucifixion. No misspelling could ever change the fact of those grisly deaths occurring by that barbaric scheme. And it must be acknowledged that there was a share of men living in amongst the Jews in that day who espoused prophetic contentions and claimed messianic status and knowledge of a higher truth -- and indeed that there were men in that day given the name '
Jesus,' and so it is hardly unlikely that from time to time Jewish men named Jesus would claim to be a messiah or a Christ, and would end up executed on the
cross. So it can hardly be asserted with any authority that the crucifixion modernly most widely envisioned was, in fact, a fiction.
But if one must be asked, then the thing which gives lie to the belief in the crucifixion is no
typo or
slip of the tongue, but a wholesale lifestyle of behavior adopted by virtually all who claim such belief, which stands in opposition to the principles claimed to underscore such belief. Are we loving towards all, even those we would call our enemies? Do we eschew wealth and material things and dedicate ourselves to the comforting of the needy? Do we dedicate our resources and our days to tending to the sick in prison? Perhaps if we live as if the crucifixion were a fiction, then to us it was never real at all.