Before the rise of Christianity, indeed even before Christianity adopted a crucifix as a symbol (which didn’t happen for at least one and probably two or three centuries after it began), there was a well-known painting in antiquity depicting the god Prometheus…crucified. I won’t be arguing anything from this about Christianity. There is no known connection. Christianity was around for centuries before it took up any such imagery. And we already know crucifixion, conceptualy, would be the imaged mechanism of any martyr’s death at the time Christianity began (we can even see it anticipated of the messiah in pre-Christian variant readings of Psalm 22 and Isaiah 52-53 at Nahal Hever and Qumran), and was how even Jewish executions by stoning were described (On the Historicity of Jesus, Ch. 4.3, pp. 61-62), so no further inspiration for the idea was required. Nevertheless, the novelty of this side-story—about a controversial depiction of a pagan god’s death—is worthy of comment.

The Titan Himself

Prometheus of course is a savior god of sorts, who in a sense does undergo a physical death and resurrection in his popular mythic cycle. I didn’t include him in my survey of much clearer examples of the trope in Dying-and-Rising Gods only because he’s an edge-case that apologists would scoff at with their love of semantic games. “Technically” Prometheus is daily eviscerated rather than explicitly “killed,” though as no one survives the devouring of their liver by a rampant eagle, the implication is surely that he was killed, and then resurrected each night as his body regenerated his liver, only to be eviscerated by the same eagle the next day, and so on, for ages until Hercules finally rescues Prometheus once and for all (whence he presumably goes on to live forever somewhere). But we know of no savior cults of the age that centered on Prometheus. He was mostly worshiped among the sub-pantheon of patrons of the mechanical arts, along with Hephaestus and Athena (and her Roman parallel, Minerva), as an analog to the Muses.

Even though many a personal savior cult existed, in which a son (sometimes daughter) of a god had undergone some suffering or death, by which they gain victory over death itself, a victory they then share with their followers, who are baptized into their guarantee of eternal life in paradise, further secured by regular sacred meals with a fictive kin group (on all of which, see On the Historicity of Jesus, Chs. 4 and 5, Elements 11 and 31), Prometheus had not been made into one of these so far as we know. His myth did have some comparable characteristics though: like Jesus, Prometheus was the (grandson) of a god, who acted as mediator between God and Man, bringing “salvation,” in his case in the form of the knowledge of fire (and associated technologies), and both (at least in myth) arranged an important development in popular sacrificial cult: Prometheus, by tricking the gods into taking the useless bits of animal sacrifices, leaving the delicious meat for meager humans to enjoy; and Jesus, by eliminating any need of animal sacrifices at all. And both ultimately had to die for it—and in either case, not for too long. The parallels are too loose to be particularly instructive, but they do represent a range of similar thinking about the roles of mediator gods and their potential fates.

Prometheus was nevertheless an important figure in antiquity. As I wrote in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (p. 393):

[T]he trickster god Prometheus—creator of humankind, mythical progenitor of the arts and sciences, and patron of crafts and technologies—was repeatedly killed and resurrected by Zeus for conning the gods into a cult contract more favorable to mortals, until he was saved by Hercules, and then stole fire from the gods and gave that to mortals, along with all the arts and tools of civilization (and by some accounts it is this that angered Zeus into unleashing his ghastly punishment). [Just as] for [the god of healing and resurrection] Asclepius, the portrayal of Prometheus is routinely favorable, as having heroically benefited humanity at his own cost. And just as Asclepius came to be revered or worshiped by practitioners of medicine, Prometheus was worshiped by potters and other craftsmen, and his theft of fire and other gifts to humanity were celebrated with an annual torch race at Athens.

And yet:

Notably, certain Jewish sectarians who later influenced the Christians reversed this sentiment, replacing Prometheus with the Watchers, fallen angels in league with Satan, portraying their bringing to humanity knowledge and technology as an evil deed and a betrayal of God that ruined the world.

This trend toward anti-scientific sentiment is similarly revealed when the Christian Tertullian would do the same thing to the legend of a real scientist, Thales (Scientist, p. 484):

[Tertullian’s antiscientism] inspire[d] him to mock the legend that Thales was so engrossed in studying the stars one night that he stumbled into a well. To pagans, this tale often represented his single-minded devotion to higher concerns. But to Tertullian it symbolized his damnation: “His fall,” Tertullian says, “is a figurative picture of the philosophers—of those, I mean, who persist in applying their studies to a vain purpose, since they indulge a stupid curiosity on natural objects, which they ought rather have for their Creator and Governor.”

I give many other examples of the same sentiment across early Christian authors. They certainly would not have been fans of Prometheus or his legend. But they’d be even more inclined to conveniently “forget” any such disturbing fact as that Prometheus was crucified for the sake of mankind before Jesus was, and was publicly displayed in his ensuing Passion of the Cross in a famous painting at Athens.

And yes. That was a thing.

We have by report that there was a famous painting of a crucified Prometheus in the Parthenon, which was used as an example in a hypothetical legal case written up by Seneca the Elder (father of the more famous Seneca the Younger), based on versions of it in prior textbooks. During my dissertation work at Columbia I happened to read the case because the elder Seneca discusses in it the subject of the medical dissection of human cadavers, which pertained to my research at the time, as you’ll discover in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire (pp. 299-300). There I wrote:

There was at least one Roman legal writer who regarded scientific dissection as a legitimate defense for cutting open the dead. Seneca the Elder, writing shortly before or after the turn of the era, describes a fictional trial set in Athens in the 4th century B.C. [in Controversies 10.5.9 & 17], in which the famous painter Parrhasius is on trial for crucifying a slave as a model for his painting of the crucifixion of Prometheus.

Seneca discusses the handling of the scenario by previous law professors in their own casebooks, observing that one of them proposed as a defense “how much license the arts have always had,” giving the specific example that “doctors have laid bare the vital organs so they will know the hidden power of a disease, and even today (hodie) the limbs of cadavers are opened up so the position of sinews and joints can be ascertained.” Unfortunately the name of the professor [Seneca] is quoting is missing, but scholars conjecture it to have been Seneca’s contemporary, Marcus Porcius Latro. The casebooks Seneca quotes go all the way back to the Greeks, with this example simply taken up by Roman law schools and treated in their own way, yet Seneca says none of the Greek professors dared even propose a defense. So the argument from human dissection certainly came from a Roman, and whether Latro or not, all the Romans quoted by Seneca on this case date from the 1st century B.C.

Klaus-Dietrich Fischer [in Sudhoffs Archiv 68 (1984)] argues that Seneca would surely have criticized this defense had it been out of touch with reality, which means educated Romans of the first century must have believed human cadavers were being dissected by scientists in the 1st century B.C., and thought this was not only appropriate, but admirable enough to cite in defense of a painter murdering a slave for his art. Though Latro could be speaking within the historical context of the case, Fischer argues against this, noting that it is set in 348 B.C., when it could not plausibly be said that doctors in the past had dissected human bodies for discovering pathology, nor even that they were “now” doing so for anatomical knowledge; and neither ever happened in Athens. Moreover, Latro would more likely have assumed a present condition obtained in the past, than have known (even erroneously) such obscure details of medical history. But either way, no one would propose such a defense unless Latro and his peers embraced the idea that dissecting cadavers for science could be an allowable exception to something that might generally be condemned. There is certainly no way Latro would propose such a thing if scientific dissection were illegal.

That was my principal interest in this passage. But there remains this side-interest…these guys are casually discussing a painting of a crucified god, as if it’s no big deal—indeed, as if everyone knows what they are talking about. It was common knowledge. Seneca mentions the whole account as a “test case” (involving a slave tortured to death to produce a realistic model for the painter) that was widely discussed in legal schools of his own day, so his remarks date at least as far back as 25 B.C., but the gist going back in legal textbooks as far as the 4th century B.C. The most recent persons named in his discussion flourished between 50 B.C. and 14 A.D. Seneca even quotes a poem about the painting by a Diocles of Carystus, and we know a physician of that title who lived in Athens in the 3rd or 4th century B.C., who is thus, given the subject matter, most likely the same man. That would make him a near or actual contemporary of the painter himself—and an eyewitness to the painting.

Seneca’s hypothetical “case study” relates to a fictional exercise (no such trial or crime likely actually occurred), but certainly pertained to a real painter and painting. The idea for the hypothetical “case” was likely inspired by the excellent (and no doubt horrifying) realism of the artwork itself. Modern scholars judge the case itself to be a fiction based on the fact that (1) most of the commentators Seneca cites are not Athenians, but Romans, (2) the discussion contains many hints, even in the Greeks quoted, that it was a fictional exercise and not a real case record, (3) fictional cases are not at all unusual in this kind of textbook, in fact are common, and (4) the famous Athenian painter Parrhasius (the defendant in this case, who never speaks—another reason to judge the case a fiction) must have been dead before any such case would have been brought to court, given the historical context established for it. Other accounts of that painter make no mention of this astonishing case either, yet surely would have.

Of course, that all assumes there was no other painter of that name in the generation or two after the famous painter so-named; and the case is set so clearly in a specific historical context one could ask why that context was chosen if this wasn’t a genuine case. But regardless, the context clearly intends to mean the Parrhasius and not someone else of that name; hence I suspect the source of this thought experiment was the evidently quite famous painting itself, which we know existed, if medical doctors were writing poems about it and Seneca assumed his intellectual peers well knew of it. If Parrhasius did produce this painting, which remained observable in the Parthenon for centuries, it was perhaps so realistic it inspired the legend (or legal fiction) of “the tortured slave as his model” a generation later, which arose as a legal exercise in lawschools at Athens, and later transmitted to Rome, likely along with Greek intellectual culture generally, as we know transpired between 200 and 100 B.C. And though we have lists of paintings by Parrhasius and none do mention this one, those lists are not plausibly comprehensive.

In the hypothetical, Parrhasius is put on trial for torturing a slave to death in order to create a lifelike model for his painting of a crucified Prometheus. Which means, in the imaginary “case,” his slave was crucified and tortured to get his facial expressions and bodily appearance and contortions right—which is another clue to this story being fiction, since the Parrhasius earned his fame for precisely that technique: an amazing precision of facial detail in his painted subjects. The painting thus produced (and evidently framed) was then placed within the Parthenon, the most renowned Temple of Athena in the ancient world. In the “case” as set forth in lawbooks, this slave was flogged and stretched and burned, and possibly chained to the crux. Notably, a Christian scribe who converted this casebook of Seneca’s into a medieval schoolbook clipped out its digression on the actual myth of Prometheus (a common frustrating behavior of medieval Christian preservers of books), but kept in the closing words of the narrator who says the story he just told (but that we didn’t get to read) is “surely” fiction—an example of an ancient explicitly saying he doesn’t believe his own myths.

The most notable remark in this discussion is that Parrhasius placed the painting of “the cross [crucem] of an old Olynthian [i.e. the slave model who was allegedly tortured for the painting] among the altars.” In other words, according to this story, a hyper-realistic painting of a crucified God was hanging in the Parthenon. By description here, and what we know of his legend, this would not have been a literal crucifix (as in a “cross” in our sense), since real crosses back then were more varied in construction and more commonly resembled a T-shape or even a door lintel or scaffold (along which multiple victims could be crucified in a row). But given the specific use of the term crux, the stake or pole element (the “cross” part being called a patibulum; but crux, or in Greek stauros, would commonly be used to refer to the whole thing by synecdoche), the image depicted would have been as close an approximation to Christ’s crucifixion (imagined or real) as we could even be sure of (since we don’t know what the exact shape or structure of his cross was, or was originally imagined to be, either). The specific word used at one point is eculeus, “rack,” so named because it resembled a carpenter’s horse, which would imply arms outstretched and body hanging or otherwise stretched out, even if the instrument was more “n” shaped than “t” shaped.

In any event, Seneca remarks that “Prometheus was tortured for the sake of men,” a sentiment that will sound eerily familiar to a Christian today. Though giving no definite clue as to the painting’s survival, Seneca seems to assume the painting remained well known, and I don’t believe the Parthenon burned at any time after this painting was placed there. And though Athens was subsequently looted at least once, by Sulla, had Sulla taken the painting he would have hung it somewhere publicly in Rome, and Seneca would not likely fail to mention that. Being the sacred image of a god in a temple, Sulla could well have let it be. Otherwise, there is no inherent reason why a framed painting wouldn’t survive 400 years. We have many still on display today that are as old; and other paintings by Parrhasius were known to have endured longer.

I’d have to say that by preponderance of evidence it is probable that there was a painting of a crucified Prometheus still hanging in the Parthenon at the time of Christ. But whether it was still there or not, it was still then being talked about widely, quite often in fact among law professors of the very generation preceding and occupying the time of Christ’s proposed ministry. And I mean widely: Seneca quotes numerous Greek and Roman law professors and published poets. Thus, it is likely to have been heard discussed wherever the law was being taught, which would be most major Roman and Greek cities. For example, very likely the Roman state center of Caesarea; or any city of the Decapolis. It would have been accessible in the books of some poets, and of course if the painting still existed it could still be seen by any Jewish disapora traveler visiting or from Athens. A chain of oral report could even extend thereby to unlimited reaches, to wherever people traveled or wrote letters.

Yes, most likely this was probably a painting of a man chained, not nailed, to an “n” rather than “t” shaped instrument. But it’s still a painting of a crucified God—that no one thought odd for a temple to have, and that elite authors assumed would be well known. Make of that what you will.