title: The Exodus

text: While ancient Egyptian texts from the New Kingdom mention "Asiatics" living in Egypt as slaves and workers, these people cannot be securely connected to the Israelites, and no contemporary Egyptian text mentions a large-scale exodus of slaves like that described in the Bible. The earliest surviving historical mention of the Israelites, the Egyptian Merneptah Stele (c. 1207 BCE), appears to place them in or around Canaan and gives no indication of any exodus. Archaeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman say that archaeology has not found any evidence for even a small band of wandering Israelites living in the Sinai: "The conclusion – that Exodus did not happen at the time and in the manner described in the Bible – seems irrefutable [...] repeated excavations and surveys throughout the entire area have not provided even the slightest evidence." Instead, modern archaeology suggests continuity between Canaanite and Israelite settlement, indicating a primarily Canaanite origin for Israel, with no suggestion that a group of foreigners from Egypt comprised early Israel.


title: The Exodus

text: Despite the absence of any archaeological evidence, most scholars nonetheless hold the view that the Exodus probably has some sort of historical basis, with Kenton Sparks referring to it as "mythologized history". Scholars posit that a small group of people of Egyptian origin may have joined the early Israelites, and then contributed their own Egyptian Exodus story to all of Israel. William G. Dever cautiously identifies this group with the Tribe of Joseph, while Richard Elliott Friedman identifies it with the Tribe of Levi. Most scholars who accept a historical core of the exodus date this possible exodus group to the thirteenth century BCE at the time of Ramses II, with some instead dating it to the twelfth century BCE at the time of Ramses III. Evidence in favor of historical traditions forming a background to the Exodus myth include the documented movements of small groups of Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples into and out of Egypt during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, some elements of Egyptian folklore and culture in the Exodus narrative, and the names Moses, Aaron and Phinehas, which seem to have an Egyptian origin. Scholarly estimates for how many people could have been involved in such an exodus range from a few hundred to a few thousand people.


title: The Exodus

text: Joel S. Baden noted the presence of Semitic-speaking slaves in Egypt who sometimes escaped in small numbers as potential inspirations for the Exodus. It is also possible that oppressive Egyptian rule of Canaan during the late second millennium BCE may have aided the adoption of the story of a small group of Egyptian refugees by the native Canaanites among the Israelites. The expulsion of the Hyksos, a Semitic group that had conquered much of Egypt, by the Seventeenth Dynasty of Egypt is also frequently discussed as a potential historical parallel or origin for the story. Alternatively, Nadav Na'aman argued that oppressive Egyptian rule of Canaan during the Nineteenth and especially the Twentieth Dynasty may have inspired the Exodus narrative, forming a "collective memory" of Egyptian oppression that was transferred from Canaan to Egypt itself in the popular consciousness.


title: The Exodus

text: Many other scholars reject this view, and instead see the biblical exodus traditions as the invention of the exilic and post-exilic Jewish community, with little to no historical basis. Lester Grabbe, for instance, argued that "[t]here is no compelling reason that the exodus has to be rooted in history", and that the details of the story more closely fit the seventh through the fifth centuries BCE than the traditional dating to the second millennium BCE. Philip R. Davies suggested that the story may have been inspired by the return to Israel of Israelites and Judaeans who were placed in Egypt as garrison troops by the Assyrians in the fifth and sixth centuries BCE.


title: The Exodus

text: The earliest traces of the traditions behind the exodus appear in the northern prophets Amos and Hosea, both active in the 8th century BCE in northern Israel, but their southern contemporaries Isaiah and Micah show no knowledge of an exodus ( contains a reference to the exodus, which many scholars take to be an addition by a later editor); while Jeremiah, active in the 7th century, mentions both Moses and the Exodus.


title: The Exodus

text: The story may, therefore, have originated a few centuries earlier, perhaps in the 9th or 10th BCE, and there are signs that it took different forms in Israel, in the Transjordan region, and in the southern Kingdom of Judah before being unified in the Persian era. The Exodus narrative was most likely further altered and expanded under the influence of the return from the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BCE.


title: The Exodus

text: Evidence from the Bible suggests that the Exodus from Egypt formed a "foundational mythology" or "state ideology" for the Northern Kingdom of Israel. The northern psalms 80 and 81 state that God "brought a vine out of Egypt" (Psalm 80:8) and record ritual observances of Israel's deliverance from Egypt as well as a version of part of the Ten Commandments (Psalm 81:10-11). The Books of Kings records the dedication of two golden calves in Bethel and Dan by the Israelite king Jeroboam I, who uses the words "Here are your gods, O Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt" (1 Kings 12:28). Scholars relate Jeroboam's calves to the golden calf made by Aaron of Exodus 32. Both include a nearly identical dedication formula ("These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt", Exodus 32:8). This episode in Exodus is "widely regarded as a tendentious narrative against the Bethel calves". Egyptologist Jan Assmann suggested that event, which would have taken place around 931 BCE, may be partially historical due to its association with the historical pharaoh Sheshonq I (the biblical Shishak). Stephen Russell dated this tradition to "the eighth century BCE or earlier", and argued that it preserves a genuine Exodus tradition from the Northern Kingdom, but in a Judahite recension. Russell and Frank Moore Cross argued that the Israelites of the Northern Kingdom may have believed that the calves at Bethel and Dan were made by Aaron. Russell suggested that the connection to Jeroboam may have been later, possibly coming from a Judahite redactor. Pauline Viviano, however, concluded that neither the references to Jeroboam's calves in Hosea (Hosea 8:6 and 10:5) nor the frequent prohibitions of idol worship in the seventh-century southern prophet Jeremiah show any knowledge of a tradition of a golden calf having been created in Sinai.


title: The Exodus

text: Some of the earliest evidence for Judahite traditions of the exodus is found in Psalm 78, which portrays the Exodus as beginning a history culminating in the building of the temple at Jerusalem. Pamela Barmash argued that the psalm is a polemic against the Northern Kingdom; as it fails to mention that kingdom's destruction in 722 BCE, she concluded that it must have been written before then. The psalm's version of the Exodus contains some important differences from what is found in the Pentateuch: there is no mention of Moses, there are only seven plagues in Egypt, and the manna is described as "food of the mighty" rather than as bread in the wilderness. Nadav Na'aman argued for other signs that the Exodus was a tradition in Judah before the destruction of the northern kingdom, including the Song of the Sea and Psalm 114, as well as the great political importance that the narrative came to assume there.


title: The Exodus

text: A Judahite cultic object associated with the exodus was the brazen serpent or nehushtan: according to 2 Kings 18:4, the brazen serpent had been made by Moses and was worshiped in the temple in Jerusalem until the time of king Hezekiah of Judah, who destroyed it as part of a religious reform, possibly around 727 BCE. In the Pentateuch, Moses creates the brazen serpent in Numbers 21:4-9. Meindert Dijkstra wrote that while the historicity of the Mosaic origin of the Nehushtan is unlikely, its association with Moses appears genuine rather than the work of a later redactor. Mark Walter Bartusch noted that the nehushtan is not mentioned at any prior point in Kings, and suggests that the brazen serpent was brought to Jerusalem from the Northern Kingdom after its destruction in 722 BCE.


title: The Exodus

text: The revelation of God on Sinai appears to have originally been a tradition unrelated to the Exodus. Joel S. Baden noted that "[t]he seams [between the Exodus and Wilderness traditions] still show: in the narrative of Israel's rescue from Egypt there is little hint that they will be brought anywhere other than Canaan – yet they find themselves heading first, unexpectedly, and in no obvious geographical order, to an obscure mountain." In addition, there is widespread agreement that the revelation of the law in Deuteronomy was originally separate from the Exodus: the original version of Deuteronomy is generally dated to the 7th century BCE. The contents of the books of Leviticus and Numbers are late additions to the narrative by priestly sources.


title: The Exodus

text: Scholars broadly agree that the publication of the Torah (or Pentateuch) took place in the mid-Persian period (the 5th century BCE), echoing a traditional Jewish view which gives Ezra, the leader of the Jewish community on its return from Babylon, a pivotal role in its promulgation. Many theories have been advanced to explain the composition of the first five books of the Bible, but two have been especially influential. The first of these, Persian Imperial authorisation, advanced by Peter Frei in 1985, is that the Persian authorities required the Jews of Jerusalem to present a single body of law as the price of local autonomy. Frei's theory was demolished at an interdisciplinary symposium held in 2000, but the relationship between the Persian authorities and Jerusalem remains a crucial question. The second theory, associated with Joel P. Weinberg and called the "Citizen-Temple Community", is that the Exodus story was composed to serve the needs of a post-exilic Jewish community organized around the Temple, which acted in effect as a bank for those who belonged to it. The books containing the Exodus story served as an "identity card" defining who belonged to this community (i.e., to Israel), thus reinforcing Israel's unity through its new institutions.


title: The Exodus

text: Writers in Greek and Latin during the Ptolemaic period (late 4th century BCE–late 1st century BCE) record several Egyptian tales of the expulsion of a group of foreigners that were connected to the Exodus. These tales often include elements of the Hyksos period and most are extremely anti-Jewish. The earliest non-biblical account is that of Hecataeus of Abdera (c. 320 BCE), as preserved in the first century CE Jewish historian Josephus in his work "Against Apion" and in a variant version by the first-century BCE Greek historian Diodorus. Hecataeus tells how the Egyptians blamed a plague on foreigners and expelled them from the country, whereupon Moses, their leader, took them to Canaan. In this version, Moses is portrayed extremely positively. Manetho, as preserved in Josephus's "Against Apion", tells how 80,000 lepers and other "impure people", led by a priest named Osarseph, join forces with the former Hyksos, now living in Jerusalem, to take over Egypt. They wreak havoc until the pharaoh and his son chase them out to the borders of Syria, where Osarseph gives the lepers a law code and changes his name to Moses. The identification of Osarseph with Moses in Manetho's account may be an interpolation or may come from Manetho. Other versions of the story are recorded by the first-century BCE Egyptian grammarian Lysimachus of Alexandria, who set the story in the time of Pharaoh Bakenranef (Bocchoris), the first-century CE Egyptian historian Chaeremon of Alexandria, and the first-century BCE Gallo-Roman historian Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus. The first-century CE Roman historian Tacitus included a version of the story that claims that the Hebrews worshipped a donkey as their god in order to ridicule Egyptian religion, whereas the Roman biographer Plutarch claimed that the Egyptian god Seth was expelled from Egypt and had two sons named Juda and Hierosolyma.


title: The Exodus

text: It is possible that the stories represent a polemical Egyptian response to the Exodus narrative. Egyptologist Jan Assmann proposed that the story comes from oral sources that "must [...] predate the first possible acquaintance of an Egyptian writer with the Hebrew Bible." Assmann suggested that the story has no single origin but rather combines numerous historical experiences, notably the Amarna and Hyksos periods, into a folk memory. There is general agreement that the stories originally had nothing to do with the Jews. Erich S. Gruen suggested that it may have been the Jews themselves that inserted themselves into Manetho's narrative, in which various negative actions from the point of view of the Egyptians, such as desecrating temples, are interpreted positively.


title: The Exodus

text: Commemoration of the Exodus is central to Judaism, and Jewish culture. In the Bible, the Exodus is frequently mentioned as the event that created the Israelite people and forged their bond with God, being described as such by the prophets Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. The Exodus is invoked daily in Jewish prayers and celebrated each year during the Jewish holidays of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. The fringes worn at the corners of traditional Jewish prayer shawls are described as a physical reminder of the obligation to observe the laws given at the climax of Exodus: "Look at it and recall all the commandments of the Lord" (Numbers). The festivals associated with the Exodus began as agricultural and seasonal feasts but became completely subsumed into the Exodus narrative of Israel's deliverance from oppression at the hands of God.


title: The Exodus

text: For Jews, the Passover celebrates the freedom of the Israelites from captivity in Egypt, the settling of Canaan by the Israelites, and the "passing over" of the angel of death during the . Passover involves a ritual meal called a Seder during which parts of the exodus narrative are retold. In the Hagaddah of the Seder it is written that every generation is obliged to remind and identify itself in terms of the Exodus. Thus the following words from the Pesaḥim (10:5) are recited: "In every generation a person is duty-bound to regard himself as if he personally has gone forth from Egypt." Because the Israelites fled Egypt in haste without time for bread to rise, the unleavened bread matzoh is eaten on Passover, and homes must be cleansed of any items containing leavening agents, known as Chametz.


title: The Exodus

text: Shavuot celebrates the granting of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai; Jews are called to rededicate themselves to the covenant on this day. Some denominations follow Shavuot with The Three Weeks, during which the "two most heinous sins committed by the Jews in their relationship to God" are mourned: the Golden Calf and the doubting of God's promise by the Twelve Spies. A third Jewish festival, Sukkot, the Festival of Booths, is associated with the Israelites living in booths after they left their previous homes in Egypt. It celebrates how God provided for the Israelites while they wandered in the desert without food or shelter. It is celebrated by building a sukkah, a temporary shelter also called a booth or tabernacle, in which the rituals of Sukkot are performed, recalling the impermanence of the Israelites' homes during the desert wanderings.


title: The Exodus

text: The Christian ritual of the eucharist and the holiday of Easter draw directly on the imagery of the Passover and the Exodus. In the New Testament, Jesus is frequently associated with motifs of the Exodus. The Gospel of Mark has been suggested to be a midrash on the Exodus, though the scholar Larry Perkins thinks this unlikely. Mark suggests that the outpouring of Jesus' blood creates a new covenant (Mark 14:24) in the same way that Moses' sacrifice of bulls had created a covenant (Exodus 24:5). In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus reverses the direction of the Exodus by escaping from the Massacre of the Innocents committed by Herod the Great before himself returning from Egypt (Matt 2:13-15). Other parallels in Matthew include that he is baptized by water (Matt 3:13-17), and tested in the desert; unlike the Israelites, he is able to resist temptation (Matt. 4.1-3). The Gospel of John repeatedly calls Jesus the Passover lamb (John 1:29, 13:1, 19:36), something also found in 1 Peter (1 Pet 1:18-20), and 1 Corinthians (1 Cor 5:7-8). Michael Graves calls Paul's discussion of the exodus in 1 Corinthians 5:7-8 and his comparison of the early church in Corinth to the Israelites in the desert "[t]he two most significant NT passages touching on the exodus". John also refers to Jesus as manna (John 6:31-5), water flowing from a rock in the desert (John 7:37-9), and as a pillar of fire (John 8:12). Early Christians frequently interpreted actions taken in the Exodus, and sometimes the Exodus as a whole, typologically to prefigure Jesus or actions of Jesus.


title: The Exodus

text: In Romans 9:17, Paul interprets the hardened heart of Pharaoh during the Plagues of Egypt as referring to the hardened hearts of the Jews who rejected Christ. Early Christian authors such as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Augustine all emphasized the supersession of the Old Covenant of Moses by the New Covenant of Christ, which was open to all people rather than limited to the Jews.


title: The Exodus

text: A number of historical events and situations have been compared to the Exodus. Many early American settlers interpreted their flight from Europe to a new life in America as a new exodus. American "founding fathers" Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin recommended for the Great Seal of the United States to depict Moses leading the Israelites across the Red Sea. African Americans suffering under slavery and racial oppression interpreted their situation in terms of the Exodus, making it a catalyst for social change. South American Liberation theology also takes much inspiration from the Exodus.


title: Death by burning

text: Death by burning (also known as immolation) is an execution and murder method involving combustion or exposure to extreme heat. It has a long history as a form of public capital punishment, and many societies have employed it as a punishment for and warning against crimes such as treason, heresy, and witchcraft. The best-known execution of this type is burning at the stake, where the condemned is bound to a large wooden stake and a fire lit beneath.


title: Death by burning

text: In the process of being burned to death, a body experiences burns to exposed tissue, changes in content and distribution of body fluid, fixation of tissue, and shrinkage (especially of the skin). Internal organs may be shrunken due to fluid loss. Shrinkage and contraction of the muscles may cause joints to flex and the body to adopt the "pugilistic stance" (boxer stance), with the elbows and knees flexed and the fists clenched. Shrinkage of the skin around the neck may be severe enough to strangle a victim. Fluid shifts, especially in the skull and in the hollow organs of the abdomen, can cause pseudo-hemorrhages in the form of heat hematomas. The organic matter of the body may be consumed as fuel by a fire. The cause of death is frequently determined by the respiratory tract, where edema or bleeding of mucous membranes and patchy or vesicular detachment of the mucosa may be indicative of inhalation of hot gases. Complete cremation is only achieved under extreme circumstances.


title: Death by burning

text: The amount of pain experienced is greatest at the beginning of the burning process before the flame burns the nerves, after which the skin does not hurt. Many victims die quickly from suffocation as hot gases damage the respiratory tract. Those who survive the burning frequently die within days as the lungs' alveoli fill with fluid and the victim dies of pulmonary edema.


title: Death by burning

text: The 18th-century BC law code promulgated by Babylonian King Hammurabi specifies several crimes in which death by burning was thought appropriate. Looters of houses on fire could be cast into the flames, and priestesses who abandoned cloisters and began frequenting inns and taverns could also be punished by being burnt alive. Furthermore, a man who began committing incest with his mother after the death of his father could be ordered to be burned alive.


title: Death by burning

text: In Ancient Egypt, several incidents of burning alive perceived rebels are attested to. Senusret I (r. 1971–1926 BC) is said to have rounded up the rebels in campaign, and burnt them as human torches. Under the civil war flaring under Takelot II more than a thousand years later, the Crown Prince Osorkon showed no mercy, and burned several rebels alive. On the statute books, at least, women committing adultery might be burned to death. Jon Manchip White, however, did not think capital judicial punishments were often carried out, pointing to the fact that the pharaoh had to personally ratify each verdict. Professor Susan Redford speculates that after the harem conspiracy in which pharaoh Ramesses III was assassinated, the non-nobles who had participated in the plot were burned alive, because the Egyptians believed that without a physical body, one could not enter the afterlife. This would explain why Pentawere, the prince whose mother instigated the would-be coup, was most likely strangled or hanged himself; as a royal, he would have been spared this ultimate fate.


title: Death by burning

text: In the Middle Assyrian period, paragraph 40 in a preserved law text concerns the obligatory unveiled face for the professional prostitute, and the concomitant punishment if she violated that by veiling herself (the way wives were to dress in public):


title: Death by burning

text: For the Neo-Assyrians, mass executions seem to have been not only designed to instill terror and to enforce obedience, but also as proof of their might. Neo-Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–859 BC) was evidently proud enough of his executions that he committed them to monument as follows:


title: Death by burning

text: In Genesis 38, Judah orders Tamar—the widow of his son, living in her father's household—to be burned when she is believed to have become pregnant by an extramarital sexual relation. Tamar saves herself by proving that Judah is himself the father of her child. In the Book of Jubilees, the same story is told, with some intriguing differences, according to Caryn A. Reeder. In Genesis, Judah is exercising his patriarchal power at a distance, whereas he and the relatives seem more actively involved in Tamar's impending execution.


title: Death by burning

text: In Hebraic law, death by burning was prescribed for ten forms of sexual crimes: the imputed crime of Tamar, namely that a married daughter of a priest commits adultery, and nine versions of relationships considered as incestuous, such as having sex with one's own daughter, or granddaughter, but also having sex with one's mother-in-law or with one's wife's daughter.


title: Death by burning

text: That is, the person dies from being fed molten lead. The Mishnah is, however, a fairly late collections of laws, from about the 3rd century AD, and scholars believe it "replaced" the actual punishment of burning in the old Biblical texts.


title: Death by burning

text: According to ancient reports, Roman authorities executed many of the early Christian martyrs by burning. An example of this is the earliest chronicle of a martyrdom, that of Polycarp. Sometimes this was by means of the "tunica molesta", a flammable tunic:


title: Death by burning

text: In 326, Constantine the Great promulgated a law that increased the penalties for parentally non-sanctioned "abduction" of their girls, and concomitant sexual intercourse/rape. The man would be burnt alive without the possibility of appeal, and the girl would receive the same treatment if she had participated willingly. Nurses who had corrupted their female wards and led them to sexual encounters would have molten lead poured down their throats. In the same year, Constantine also passed a law that said if a woman had sexual relations with her own slave, both would be subjected to capital punishment, the slave by burning (if the slave himself reported the presumably having been he was to be set free). In 390 AD, Emperor Theodosius issued an edict against male prostitutes and brothels offering such services; those found guilty should be burned alive.


title: Death by burning

text: In the 6th-century collection of the sayings and rulings of the pre-eminent jurists from earlier ages, the Digest, a number of crimes are regarded as punishable by death by burning. The 3rd-century jurist Ulpian said that enemies of the state and deserters to the enemy were to be burned alive. His rough contemporary, the juristical writer Callistratus, mentions that arsonists are typically burnt, as well as slaves who have conspired against the well-being of their masters (this last also, on occasion, being meted out to free persons of "low rank"). The punishment of burning alive arsonists (and traitors) seems to have been particularly ancient; it was included in the Twelve Tables, a mid-5th-century BC law code, that is, about 700 years prior to the times of Ulpian and Callistratus.


title: Death by burning

text: Beginning in the early 3rd century BC, Greek and Roman writers commented on the purported institutionalized child sacrifice the North African Carthaginians are said to have performed in honour of the gods Baal Hammon and Tanit. The earliest writer, Cleitarchus is among the most explicit. He says live infants were placed in the arms of a bronze statue, the statue's hands over a brazier, so that the infant slowly rolled into the fire. As it did so, the limbs of the infant contracted and the face was distorted into a sort of laughing grimace, hence called "the act of laughing". Other, later authors such as Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch say the throats of the infants were generally cut, before they were placed in the statue's embrace In the vicinity of ancient Carthage, large scale grave yards containing the incinerated remains of infants, typically up to the age of 3, have been found; such graves are called "tophets". However, some scholars have argued that these findings are not evidence of "systematic" child sacrifice, and that estimated figures of ancient natural infant mortality (with cremation afterwards and reverent separate burial) might be the real historical basis behind the hostile reporting from non-Carthaginians. A late charge of the imputed sacrifice is found by the North African bishop Tertullian, who says that child sacrifices were still carried out, in secret, in the countryside at his time, 3rd century AD.


title: Death by burning

text: According to Julius Caesar, the ancient Celts practised the burning alive of humans in a number of settings. In Book 6, chapter 16, he writes of the Druidic sacrifice of criminals within huge wicker frames shaped as men:


title: Death by burning

text: Slightly later, in Book 6, chapter 19, Caesar also says the Celts perform, on the occasion of death of great men, the funeral sacrifice on the pyre of living slaves and dependents ascertained to have been "beloved by them". Earlier on, in Book 1, chapter 4, he relates of the conspiracy of the nobleman Orgetorix, charged by the Celts for having planned a "coup d'état", for which the customary penalty would be burning to death. It is said Orgetorix committed suicide to avoid that fate.


title: Death by burning

text: Throughout the 12th–14th centuries, a number of non-Christian peoples living around the Eastern Baltic Sea, such as Old Prussians and Lithuanians, were charged by Christian writers with performing human sacrifice. Pope Gregory IX issued a papal bull denouncing an alleged practice among the Prussians, that girls were dressed in fresh flowers and wreaths and were then burned alive as offerings to evil spirits.


title: Death by burning

text: Under 6th-century Emperor Justinian I, the death penalty had been decreed for impenitent Manicheans, but a specific punishment was not made explicit. By the 7th century, however, those found guilty of "dualist heresy" could risk being burned at the stake. Those found guilty of performing magical rites, and corrupting sacred objects in the process, might face death by burning, as evidenced in a 7th-century case. In the 10th century AD, the Byzantines instituted death by burning for parricides, i.e. those who had killed their own relatives, replacing the older punishment of "poena cullei", the stuffing of the convict in a leather sack along with a rooster, a viper, a dog and a monkey, and then throwing the sack into the sea.


title: Death by burning

text: The first recorded case of heretics being burnt in Western Europe in the Middle Ages occurred in 1022 at Orléans. Civil authorities burned persons judged to be heretics under the medieval Inquisition. Burning heretics had become customary practice in the latter half of the twelfth century in continental Europe, and death by burning became "statutory" punishment from the early 13th century. Death by burning for heretics was made positive law by Pedro II of Aragon in 1197. In 1224, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, made burning a legal alternative, and in 1238, it became the principal punishment in the Empire. In Sicily, the punishment was made law in 1231, whereas in France, Louis IX made it binding law in 1270.


title: Death by burning

text: In England at the start of the 15th century, the teachings of John Wycliffe and the Lollards began to be seen as a threat to the establishment, and draconic punishments started to be enacted. In 1401, Parliament passed the "De heretico comburendo" act, which can be loosely translated as "Regarding the burning of heretics." Lollard persecution would continue for over a hundred years in England. The Fire and Faggot Parliament met in May 1414 at Grey Friars Priory in Leicester to lay out the notorious Suppression of Heresy Act 1414, enabling the burning of heretics by making the crime enforceable by the justices of the peace. John Oldcastle, a prominent Lollard leader, was not saved from the gallows by his old friend King Henry V. Oldcastle was hanged and his gallows burned in 1417. Jan Hus was burned at the stake after being accused at the Roman Catholic Council of Constance (1414–18) of heresy. The ecumenical council also decreed that the remains of John Wycliffe, dead for 30 years, should be exhumed and burned. (This posthumous execution was carried out in 1428.)


title: Death by burning

text: Several incidents are recorded of massacres on Jews from the 12th through 16th centuries in which they were burned alive, often on account of the blood libel. In 1171 in Blois, 51 Jews were burned alive (the entire adult community). In 1191, King Philip Augustus ordered around 100 Jews burnt alive. That Jews purportedly performed host desecration also led to mass burnings; In 1243 in Beelitz, the entire Jewish community was burnt alive, and in 1510 in Berlin, 26 Jews were burnt alive for the same crime. During the "Black Death" in the mid-14th century a spate of large-scale massacres occurred. One libel was that the Jews had poisoned the wells. In 1349, as panic grew along with the increasing death toll from the plague, general massacres, but also specifically mass burnings, began to occur. Six hundred Jews were burnt alive in Basel alone. A large mass burning occurred in Strasbourg, where several hundred Jews were burnt alive in what became known as the Strasbourg massacre.


title: Death by burning

text: A Jewish man, Johannes Pfefferkorn, met a particularly gruesome death in 1514 in Halle. He had been charged with having impersonated a priest for twenty years, performing host desecration, stealing Christian children to be tortured and killed by other Jews, poisoning 13 people and poisoning wells. He was lashed to a pillar in such a way that he could run about it. Then, a ring of glowing coal was made around him, and gradually pushed ever closer to him, until he was roasted to death.


title: Death by burning

text: Not only Jews could be victims of mass hysteria. The charge of well-poisoning was the basis for a large-scale hunt of lepers in 1321 France. In the spring of 1321, in Périgueux, people became convinced that the local lepers had poisoned the wells, causing ill-health among the normal populace. The lepers were rounded up and burned alive. The action against the lepers had repercussions throughout France, not least because King Philip V issued an order to arrest all lepers, those found guilty to be burnt alive. Jews became tangentially included as well; at Chinon alone, 160 Jews were burnt alive. All in all, around 5,000 lepers and Jews are recorded in one tradition to have been killed during the Lepers' Plot hysteria.


title: Death by burning

text: The charge of the lepers' plot was not wholly confined to France; extant records from England show that on Jersey the same year, at least one family of lepers was burnt alive for having poisoned others.


title: Death by burning

text: The Spanish Inquisition was established in 1478, with the aim of preserving Catholic orthodoxy; some of its principal targets were "Marranos", formally converted Jews thought to have relapsed into Judaism, or the Moriscos, formally converted Muslims thought to have relapsed into Islam. The public executions of the Spanish Inquisition were called autos-da-fé; convicts were "released" (handed over) to secular authorities in order to be burnt.


title: Death by burning

text: Estimates of how many were executed on behest of the Spanish Inquisition have been offered from early on; historian Hernando del Pulgar (1436–) estimated that 2,000 people were burned at the stake between 1478 and 1490. Estimates ranging from 30,000 to 50,000 burnt at the stake (alive or not) at the behest of the Spanish Inquisition during its 300 years of activity have previously been given and are still to be found in popular books.


title: Death by burning

text: In February 1481, in what is said to be the first auto-da-fé, six Marranos were burnt alive in Seville. In November 1481, 298 Marranos were burnt publicly at the same place, their property confiscated by the Church. Not all Marranos executed by being burnt at the stake seem to have been burnt alive. If the Jew "confessed his heresy", the Church would show mercy, and he would be strangled prior to the burning. Autos-da-fé against Marranos extended beyond the Spanish heartland. In Sicily, in 1511–15, 79 were burnt at the stake, while from 1511 to 1560, 441 Marranos were condemned to be burned alive. In Spanish American colonies, autos-da-fé were held as well. In 1664, a man and his wife were burned alive in Río de la Plata, and in 1699, a Jew was burnt alive in Mexico City.


title: Death by burning

text: In 1535, five Moriscos were burned at the stake on Majorca; the images of a further four were also burnt in effigy, since the actual individuals had managed to flee. During the 1540s, some 232 Moriscos were paraded in autos-da-fé in Zaragoza; five of those were burnt at the stake. The claim that out of 917 Moriscos appearing in autos of the Inquisition in Granada between 1550 and 1595, just 20 were executed seems at odds with the English government's state papers which claim that, while at war with Spain, they received a report from Seville of 17 June 1593 that over 70 of the richest men of Granada were burnt. As late as 1728 as many as 45 Moriscos were recorded as having been burned for heresy. In the May 1691 "bonfire of the Jews", Rafael Valls, Rafael Benito Terongi and Catalina Terongi were burned alive.


title: Death by burning

text: In 1560, the Portuguese Inquisition opened offices in the Indian colony Goa, known as Goa Inquisition. Its aim was to protect Catholic orthodoxy among new converts to Christianity, and retain its hold on the old, particularly against "Judaizing" deviancy. From the 17th century, Europeans were shocked at the tales of how brutal and extensive the activities of the Inquisition were. Modern scholars have established that some 4,046 individuals in the time 1560–1773 received some sort of punishment from the Portuguese Inquisition, of whom 121 persons were condemned to be burned alive; 57 actually suffered that fate, while the rest escaped it, and were burnt in effigy instead. For the Portuguese Inquisition in total, not just at Goa, modern estimates of persons actually executed on its behest is about 1,200, whether burnt alive or not.


title: Death by burning

text: From the 12th to the 18th centuries, various European authorities legislated (and held judicial proceedings) against sexual crimes such as sodomy or bestiality; often, the prescribed punishment was that of death by burning. Many scholars think that the first time death by burning appeared within explicit codes of law for the crime of sodomy was at the ecclesiastical 1120 Council of Nablus in the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. Here, if public repentance were done, the death penalty might be avoided. In Spain, the earliest records for executions for the crime of sodomy are from the 13th to 14th centuries, and it is noted there that the preferred mode of execution was death by burning. The Partidas of King Alfonso "El Sabio" condemned sodomites to be castrated and hung upside down to die from the bleeding, following the Old Testament phrase "their blood shall be upon them". At Geneva, the first recorded burning of sodomites occurred in 1555, and up to 1678, some two dozen met the same fate. In Venice, the first burning took place in 1492, and a monk was burnt as late as 1771. The last case in France where two men were condemned by court to be burned alive for engaging in consensual homosexual sex was in 1750 (although, it seems, they were actually strangled prior to being burned). The last case in France where a man was condemned to be burned for a murderous rape of a boy occurred in 1784.


title: Death by burning

text: Crackdowns and the public burning of a homosexual couple sometimes led others to flee out of fear of a similar fate. The traveller William Lithgow witnessed such a dynamic when he visited Malta in 1616 :


title: Death by burning

text: In 1532, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V promulgated his penal code Constitutio Criminalis Carolina. A number of crimes were punishable with death by burning, such as coin forgery, arson, and sexual acts "contrary to nature". Also, those guilty of aggravated theft of sacred objects from a church could be condemned to be burnt alive. Only those found guilty of "malevolent" witchcraft could be punished by death by fire.


title: Death by burning

text: Burning was used during the witch-hunts of Europe, although hanging was the preferred style of execution in England and Wales. The penal code known as the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (1532) decreed that sorcery throughout the Holy Roman Empire should be treated as a criminal offence, and if it purported to inflict injury upon any person the witch was to be burnt at the stake. In 1572, Augustus, Elector of Saxony imposed the penalty of burning for witchcraft of every kind, including simple fortunetelling. From the latter half of the 18th century, the number of "nine million witches burned in Europe" has been bandied about in popular accounts and media, but has never had a following among specialist researchers. Today, based on meticulous study of trial records, ecclesiastical and inquisitorial registers and so on, as well as on the utilization of modern statistical methods, the specialist research community on witchcraft has reached an agreement for roughly 40,000–50,000 people executed for witchcraft in Europe in total, and by no means all of them executed by being burned alive. Furthermore, it is solidly established that the peak period of witch-hunts was the century 1550–1650, with a slow increase preceding it, from the 15th century onward, as well as a sharp drop following it, with "witch-hunts" having basically fizzled out by the first half of the 18th century.


title: Death by burning

text: Notable individuals executed by burning include Jacques de Molay (1314), Jan Hus (1415), Joan of Arc (1431), Girolamo Savonarola (1498), Patrick Hamilton (1528), John Frith (1533), William Tyndale (1536), Michael Servetus (1553), Giordano Bruno (1600), Urbain Grandier (1634), and Avvakum (1682). Anglican martyrs John Rogers, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley were burned at the stake in 1555. Thomas Cranmer followed the next year (1556).


title: Death by burning

text: In Denmark, after the 1536 Reformation, Christian IV of Denmark (r. 1588–1648) encouraged the practice of burning witches, in particular by the law against witchcraft in 1617. In Jutland, the mainland part of Denmark, more than half the recorded cases of witchcraft in the 16th and 17th centuries occurred after 1617. Rough estimates says about a thousand persons were executed due to convictions for witchcraft in the 1500–1600s, but it is not wholly clear if all of the transgressors were burned to death.


title: Death by burning

text: Mary I ordered hundreds of Protestants burnt at the stake during her reign (1553–58) in what would be known as the "Marian Persecutions" earning her the epithet of "Bloody" Mary. Many of those executed by Mary are listed in "Actes and Monuments", written by Foxe in 1563 and 1570.


title: Death by burning

text: Edward Wightman, a Baptist from Burton on Trent, was the last person burned at the stake for heresy in England in Lichfield, Staffordshire on 11 April 1612. Although cases can be found of burning heretics in the 16th and 17th centuries in England, that penalty for heretics was historically relatively new. It did not exist in 14th-century England, and when the bishops in England petitioned King Richard II to institute death by burning for heretics in 1397, he flatly refused, and no one was burnt for heresy during his reign. Just one year after his death, however, in 1401, William Sawtrey was burnt alive for heresy. Death by burning for heresy was formally abolished by Parliament during the reign of King Charles II in 1676.


title: Death by burning

text: The traditional punishment for women found guilty of treason was to be burned at the stake, where they did not need to be publicly displayed naked, whereas men were hanged, drawn and quartered. The jurist William Blackstone argued as follows for the different punishments for females and males:


title: Death by burning

text: However, as described in Camille Naish's "Death Comes to the Maiden", in practice, the woman's clothing would burn away at the beginning, and she would be left naked anyway. There were two types of treason: high treason, for crimes against the sovereign; and petty treason, for the murder of one's lawful superior, including that of a husband by his wife. Commenting on the 18th-century execution practice, Frank McLynn says that most convicts condemned to burning were not burnt alive, and that the executioners made sure the women were dead before consigning them to the flames.


title: Death by burning

text: The last person condemned to death for "petty treason" was Mary Bailey, whose body was burned in 1784. The last woman to be convicted for "high treason", and have her body burnt, in this case for the crime of coin forgery, was Catherine Murphy in 1789. The last case where a woman was actually burnt alive in England is that of Catherine Hayes in 1726, for the murder of her husband. In this case, one account says this happened because the executioner accidentally set fire to the pyre before he had hanged Hayes properly. The historian Rictor Norton has assembled a number of contemporary newspaper reports on the actual death of Mrs. Hayes, internally somewhat divergent. The following excerpt is one example:


title: Death by burning

text: James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) shared the Danish king's interest in witch trials. This special interest of the king resulted in the North Berwick witch trials, which led more than seventy people to be accused of witchcraft. James sailed in 1590 to Denmark to meet his betrothed, Anne of Denmark, who, ironically, is believed by some to have secretly converted to Roman Catholicism herself from Lutheranism around 1598, although historians are divided on whether she ever was received into the Roman Catholic faith.


title: Death by burning

text: The last to be executed as a witch in Scotland was Janet Horne in 1727, condemned to death for using her own daughter as a flying horse in order to travel. Horne was burnt alive in a tar barrel.


title: Death by burning

text: Petronilla de Meath (–1324) was the maidservant of Dame Alice Kyteler, a 14th-century Hiberno-Norman noblewoman. After the death of Kyteler's fourth husband, the widow was accused of practicing witchcraft and Petronilla of being her accomplice. Petronilla was tortured and forced to proclaim that she and Kyteler were guilty of witchcraft. Petronilla was then flogged and eventually burnt at the stake on 3 November 1324, in Kilkenny, Ireland. Hers was the first known case in the history of the British Isles of death by fire for the crime of heresy. Kyteler was charged by the Bishop of Ossory, Richard de Ledrede, with a wide slate of crimes, from sorcery and demonism to the murders of several husbands. She was accused of having illegally acquired her wealth through witchcraft, which accusations came principally from her stepchildren, the children of her late husbands by their previous marriages. The trial predated any formal witchcraft statute in Ireland, thus relying on ecclesiastical law (which treated witchcraft as heresy) rather than common law (which treated it as a felony). Under torture, Petronilla claimed she and her mistress applied a magical ointment to a wooden beam, which enabled both women to fly. She was then forced to proclaim publicly that Lady Alice and her followers were guilty of witchcraft. Some were convicted and whipped, but others, Petronilla included, were burnt at the stake. With the help of relatives, Alice Kyteler fled, taking with her Petronilla's daughter, Basilia.


title: Death by burning

text: In 1327 or 1328, Adam Duff O'Toole was burned at the stake in Dublin for heresy after branding Christian scripture a fable and denying the resurrection of Jesus.


title: Death by burning

text: The brothel madam Darkey Kelly was convicted of murdering shoemaker John Dowling in 1760 and burned at the stake in Dublin on 7 January 1761. Later legends claimed that she was a serial killer and/or witch.


title: Death by burning

text: In 1895, Bridget Cleary (née Boland), a County Tipperary woman, was burnt by her husband and others, the stated motive for the crime being the belief that the real Bridget had been abducted by fairies with a changeling left in her place. Her husband claimed to have slain only the changeling. The gruesome nature of the case prompted extensive press coverage. The trial was closely followed by newspapers in both Ireland and Britain. As one reviewer commented, nobody, with the possible exception of the presiding judge, thought it was an ordinary murder case.


title: Death by burning

text: The Greek War of Independence in the 1820s contained several instances of death by burning. When the Greeks in April 1821 captured a corvette near Hydra, the Greeks chose to roast to death the 57 Ottoman crew members. After the fall of Tripolitsa in September 1821, European officers were horrified to note that not only were Muslims suspected of hiding money being slowly roasted after having had their arms and legs cut off but also, in one instance, three Muslim children were roasted over a fire while their parents were forced to watch. On their part, the Ottomans committed many similar acts. In retaliation they gathered up Greeks in Constantinople, throwing several of them into huge ovens, baking them to death.


title: Death by burning

text: According to the jurist , the last case he knew of where a person had been judicially burned alive on account of arson in Germany happened in 1804, in , close by Eisenach. The manner in which Johannes Thomas was executed on 13 July that year is described as follows: Some feet above the actual pyre, attached to a stake, a wooden chamber had been constructed, into which the delinquent was placed. Pipes or chimneys filled with sulphuric material led up to the chamber, and that was first lit, so that Thomas died from inhaling the sulphuric smoke, rather than being strictly burnt alive, before his body was consumed by the general fire. Some 20,000 people had gathered to watch Thomas' execution.


title: Death by burning

text: Although Thomas is regarded as the last to have been actually executed by means of fire (in this case, through suffocation), the couple Johann Christoph Peter Horst and his lover Friederike Louise Christiane Delitz, who had made a career of robberies in the confusion made by their acts of arson, were condemned to be burnt alive in Berlin 28 May 1813. They were, however, according to Gustav Radbruch, secretly strangled just prior to being burnt, namely when their arms and legs were tied fast to the stake.


title: Death by burning

text: Although these two cases are the last where execution by burning might be said to have been "carried out" in some degree, Eduard Osenbrüggen mentions that "verdicts" to be burned alive were given in several cases in different German states afterwards, such as in cases from 1814, 1821, 1823, 1829 and finally in a case from 1835.


title: Death by burning

text: Indigenous North Americans often used burning as a form of execution, against members of other tribes or white settlers during the 18th and 19th centuries. Roasting over a slow fire was a customary method. (See Captives in American Indian Wars.)


title: Death by burning

text: In Massachusetts, there are two known cases of burning at the stake. First, in 1681, a slave named Maria tried to kill her owner by setting his house on fire. She was convicted of arson and burned at the stake in Roxbury. Concurrently, a slave named Jack, convicted in a separate arson case, was hanged at a nearby gallows, and after death his body was thrown into the fire with that of Maria. Second, in 1755, a group of slaves had conspired and killed their owner, with servants Mark and Phillis executed for his murder. Mark was hanged and his body gibbeted, and Phillis burned at the stake, at Cambridge.


title: Death by burning

text: In Montreal, then part of New France, Marie-Joseph Angélique, a black slave, was sentenced to being burned alive for an arson which destroyed 45 homes and a hospital in 1734. The sentence was commuted on appeal to burning after death by strangulation.


title: Death by burning

text: In New York, several burnings at the stake are recorded, particularly following suspected slave revolt plots. In 1708, one woman was burnt and one man hanged. In the aftermath of the New York Slave Revolt of 1712, 20 people were burnt (one of the leaders slowly roasted, before he died after 10 hours of torture) and during the alleged slave conspiracy of 1741, at least 13 slaves were burnt at the stake.


title: Death by burning

text: In 1731, 51-year-old Delaware housewife Catherine Bevan was burned for murder, and in 1746, Esther Anderson was burned in Maryland for another murder.


title: Death by burning

text: The last known burning by the Spanish colonial government in Latin America was of Mariana de Castro, during the Peruvian Inquisition in Lima on 22 December 1736 after she had been convicted on 4 February 1732 of being a "judaizante" (a person who was privately practicing the Jewish faith after having publicly converted to Roman Catholicism).


title: Death by burning

text: In 1855 the Dutch abolitionist and historian spoke to the Anti Slavery Society in Amsterdam. Painting a dark picture of the condition of slaves in Suriname, he mentions in particular that as late as in 1853, just two years previously, "three Negroes were burnt alive".


title: Death by burning

text: In 1760, the slave rebellion known as Tacky's War broke out in Jamaica. Apparently, some of the defeated rebels were burned alive, while others were gibbeted alive, left to die of thirst and starvation.


title: Death by burning

text: In 1774, nine enslaved Africans in Tobago were found complicit of murdering a white man. Eight of them had first their right arms chopped off, and were then burned alive bound to stakes, according to the report of an eyewitness.


title: Death by burning

text: In Saint-Domingue, enslaved Africans found guilty of committing crimes were sometimes punished by being burnt at the stake, particularly if the crime was attempting to foment a slave rebellion.


title: Death by burning

text: The witnesses of the ongoing evolution of Islamic religious thought and practice, including the information of some of the main features of classical Islam. Hence, the sources may manifest religious, legal, and political ideas quite an evolution from the chronological aspect and different from those that prevailed in early caliphates since the practice of burning convicted person is forbidden in the Sharia Law.


title: Death by burning

text: The Arab chieftain Tulayha ibn Khuwaylid ibn Nawfal al-Asad set himself up as a prophet in 630 AD. Tulayha had a strong following which was, however, soon quashed in the so-called Ridda Wars. He himself escaped, though, and later was reconverted to Islam, but many of his rebel followers were burnt to death; his mother chose to embrace the same fate.


title: Death by burning

text: A number of monks are said to have been burnt alive in Tunis and Morocco in the 13th century. In 1243, two English monks, Brothers Rodulph and Berengarius, after having secured the release of some 60 captives, were charged with being spies for the English Crown, and were burnt alive on 9 September. In 1262, Brothers Patrick and William, again having freed captives, but also sought to proselytize among Muslims, were burnt alive in Morocco. In 1271, 11 Catholic monks were burnt alive in Tunis. Several other cases are reported.


title: Death by burning

text: Apostasy, i.e. the act of converting to another religion, was (and remains so in a few countries) punishable with death.


title: Death by burning

text: The French traveller Jean de Thevenot, traveling the East in the 1650s, says: ""Those that turn Christians, they burn alive, hanging a bag of Powder about their neck, and putting a pitched Cap upon their Head."" Travelling the same regions some 60 years earlier, Fynes Moryson writes:


title: Death by burning

text: "Certain accursed ones of no significance" is the term used by Taş Köprü Zade in the "Şakaiki Numaniye" to describe some members of the Hurufiyya who became intimate with the Sultan Mehmed II to the extent of initiating him as a follower. This alarmed members of the Ulema, particularly Mahmut Paşa, who then consulted Mevlana Fahreddin. Fahreddin hid in the Sultan's palace and heard the Hurufis propound their doctrines. Considering these heretical, he reviled them with curses. The Hurufis fled to the Sultan, but Fahreddin's denunciation of them was so virulent that Mehmed II was unable to defend them. Farhreddin then took them in front of the Üç Şerefeli Mosque, Edirne, where he publicly condemned them to death. While preparing the fire for their execution, Fahreddin accidentally set fire to his beard. However, the Hurufis were burnt to death.


title: Death by burning

text: John Braithwaite, staying in Morocco in the late 1720s, says that apostates from Islam would be burnt alive:


title: Death by burning

text: Similarly, he notes that non-Muslims entering mosques or being blasphemous against Islam will be burnt, unless they convert to Islam. The chaplain for the English in Algiers at the same time, Thomas Shaw, wrote that whenever capital crimes were committed either by Christian slaves or Jews, the Christian or Jew was to be burnt alive. Several generations later, in Morocco in 1772, a Jewish interpreter for the British, and a merchant in his own right, sought from the Emperor of Morocco restitution for some goods confiscated, and was burnt alive for his impertinence. His widow made her woes clear in a letter to the British government.


title: Death by burning

text: In 1792 in Ifrane, Morocco, 50 Jews preferred to be burned alive, rather than convert to Islam. In 1794 in Algiers, the Jewish Rabbi Mordecai Narboni was accused of having maligned Islam in a quarrel with his neighbour. He was ordered to be burnt alive unless he converted to Islam, but he refused and was therefore executed on 14 July 1794.


title: Death by burning

text: In 1793, Ali Pasha made a short-lived "coup d'état" in Tripoli, deposing the ruling Karamanli dynasty. During his short, violent reign he seized the two interpreters for the Dutch and English consuls, both of them Jews, and roasted them over a slow fire, on charges of conspiracy and espionage.


title: Death by burning

text: During a famine in Persia in 1668, the government took severe measures against those trying to profiteer from the misfortune of the populace. Restaurant owners found guilty of profiteering were slowly roasted on spits, and greedy bakers were baked in their own ovens.


title: Death by burning

text: The previous cases concern primarily death by burning through contact with open fire or burning material; a slightly different principle is to enclose an individual within, or attach him to, a metal contraption which is subsequently heated. In the following, some reports of such incidents, or anecdotes about such are included.


title: Death by burning

text: Perhaps the most infamous example of a brazen bull, which is a hollow metal structure shaped like a bull within which the condemned is put, and then roasted alive as the metal bull is gradually heated up, is the one allegedly constructed by Perillos of Athens for the 6th-century BC tyrant Phalaris at Agrigentum, Sicily. As the story goes, the first victim of the bull was its constructor Perillos himself. The historian George Grote was among those regarding this story as having sufficient evidence behind it to be true, and points particularly to that the Greek poet Pindar, working just one or two generations after the times of Phalaris, refers to the brazen bull. A bronze bull was, in fact, one of the spoils of victory when the Carthaginians conquered Agrigentum. The story of a brazen bull as an execution device is not unique. About 1,000 years later in 497 AD, it can be read in an old chronicle about the Visigoths on the Iberian Peninsula and the south of France:


title: Death by burning

text: Walter Stewart, Earl of Atholl was a Scottish nobleman complicit in the murder of King James I of Scotland. On 26 March 1437 Stewart had a red hot iron crown placed upon his head, was cut in pieces alive, his heart was taken out, and then thrown in a fire. A papal nuncio, the later Pope Pius II witnessed the execution of Stewart and his associate Sir Robert Graham, and, reportedly, said he was at a loss to determine whether the "crime" committed by the regicides, or the "punishment" of them was the greater.


title: Death by burning

text: György Dózsa led a peasants' revolt in Hungary, and was captured in 1514. He was bound to a glowing iron throne and a likewise hot iron crown was placed on his head, and he was roasted to death.


title: Death by burning

text: In a few English 18th- and 19th-century newspapers and magazines, a tale was circulated about the particularly brutal manner in which a French midwife was put to death on 28 May 1673 in Paris. No fewer than 62 infant skeletons were found buried on her premises, and she was condemned on multiple accounts of abortion/infanticide. One detailed account of her supposed execution runs as follows:


title: Death by burning

text: In 88 BC, Mithridates VI of Pontus captured the Roman general Manius Aquillius, and executed him by pouring molten gold down his throat. A popular but unsubstantiated rumor also had the Parthians executing the famously greedy Roman general Marcus Licinius Crassus in this manner in 53 BC.


title: Death by burning

text: Genghis Khan is said to have ordered the execution of Inalchuq, the perfidious Khwarazmian governor of Otrar, by pouring molten gold or silver down his throat in , and an early-14th-century chronicle mentions that his grandson Hulagu Khan did likewise to the sultan Al-Musta'sim after the fall of Baghdad in 1258 to the Mongol army. (Marco Polo's version is that Al-Musta'sim was locked without food or water to starve in his treasure room)


title: Death by burning

text: The Spanish in 16th-century Americas gave horrified reports that the Spanish who had been captured by the natives (who had learnt of the Spanish thirst for gold) had their feet and hands bound, and then molten gold poured down their throats as the victims were mocked: "Eat, eat gold, Christians".


title: Death by burning

text: From the 19th-century reports from the Kingdom of Siam (present-day Thailand) stated that those who have defrauded the public treasury could have either molten gold or silver poured down their throat.


title: Death by burning

text: The 16th-/early-17th-century prime minister Malik Ambar in the Deccan Ahmadnagar Sultanate would not tolerate inebriation among his subjects, and would pour molten lead down the mouths of those caught in that condition. Similarly, in the 17th-century Sultanate of Aceh, Sultan Iskandar Muda (r. 1607–36) is said to have poured molten lead into the mouths of at least two drunken subjects. Military discipline in 19th-century Burma was reportedly harsh, with strict prohibition of smoking opium or drinking arrack. Some monarchs had ordained pouring molten lead down the throats of those who drank, "but it has been found necessary to relax this severity, in order to conciliate the army."


title: Death by burning

text: Shah Safi I of Persia is said to have abhorred tobacco, and apparently in 1634, he prescribed the punishment of pouring molten lead into the throats of smokers.


title: Death by burning

text: According to historian Pushpa Sharma, stealing a horse was considered the most heinous offence within the Mongol army, and the culprit would either have molten lead poured into his ears, or alternatively, his punishment would be the breaking of the spinal cord or beheading.


title: Death by burning

text: Apparently, for many centuries, a tradition of devotional self-immolation existed among Buddhist monks in China. One monk who immolated himself in 527 AD explained his intent a year before, in the following manner:


title: Death by burning

text: In the first half of the 17th century, Japanese authorities sporadically persecuted Christians, with some executions seeing persons being burnt alive. At Nagasaki in 1622 some 25 monks were burnt alive, and in Edo in 1624, 50 Christians were burnt alive.


title: Death by burning

text: "Sati" refers to a funeral practice among some communities of Indian subcontinent in which a recently widowed woman immolates herself on her husband's funeral pyre. The first reliable evidence for the practice of "sati" appears from the time of the Gupta Empire (400 AD), when instances of sati began to be marked by inscribed memorial stones.


title: Death by burning

text: According to one model of history thinking, the practice of "sati" only became really widespread with the Muslim invasions of India, and the practice of "sati" now acquired a new meaning as a means to preserve the honour of women whose men had been slain. As S.S. Sashi lays out the argument, "The argument is that the practice came into effect during the Islamic invasion of India, to protect their honor from Muslims who were known to commit mass rape on the women of cities that they could capture successfully." It is also said that according to the memorial stone evidence, the practice was carried out in appreciable numbers in western and southern parts of India, and even in some areas, during pre-Islamic times. Some of the rulers and activist of the time sought actively to suppress the practice of "sati".


title: Death by burning

text: The East India Company began to compile statistics of the incidences of "sati" for all their domains from 1815 and onwards. The official statistics for Bengal represents that the practice was much more common here than elsewhere, recorded numbers typically in the range 500–600 per year, up to the year 1829, when Company authorities banned the practice. Since the 19th and 20th centuries, the practice remains outlawed in Indian subcontinent.


title: Death by burning

text: The practice of burning widows has not been restricted to the Indian subcontinent; at Bali, the practice was called "masatia" and, apparently, restricted to the burning of royal widows. This practice is probably resulted from the spread of Hindu culture into Southeast Asia. Although the Dutch colonial authorities had banned the practice, one such occasion is attested as late as in 1903, probably for the last time.


title: Death by burning

text: C.H.L. Hahn wrote that within the O-ndnonga tribe among the Ovambo people in modern-day Namibia, abortion was not used at all (in contrast to among the other tribes), and that furthermore, if two young unwed individuals had sex resulting in pregnancy, then both the girl and the boy were "taken out to the bush, bound up in bundles of grass and ... burnt alive."


title: Death by burning

text: Even fateful encounters with cannibals are recorded: in 1514, in the Americas, Francis of Córdoba and five companions were, reportedly, caught, impaled on spits, roasted and eaten by the natives. In 1543, such was also the end of a previous bishop, Vincent de Valle Viridi.


title: Death by burning

text: In 1844, the missionary John Watsford wrote a letter about the internecine wars on Fiji, and how captives could be eaten, after being roasted alive:


title: Death by burning

text: The actual manner of the roasting process was described by the missionary pioneer David Cargill, in 1838:


title: Death by burning

text: In 1790, Sir Benjamin Hammett introduced a bill into Parliament to end the practice of judicial burning. He explained that the year before, as Sheriff of London, he had been responsible for the burning of Catherine Murphy, found guilty of counterfeiting, but that he had allowed her to be hanged first. He pointed out that as the law stood, he himself could have been found guilty of a crime in not carrying out the lawful punishment and, as no woman had been burnt alive in the kingdom for more than half a century, so could all those still alive who had held an official position at all of the previous burnings. The Treason Act 1790 was duly passed by Parliament and given royal assent by King George III (30 George III. C. 48). The Parliament of Ireland subsequently passed the similar Treason by Women Act (Ireland) 1796.


title: Death by burning

text: In the modern era, deaths by burning are largely extrajudicial in nature. These killings may be committed by mobs, small numbers of criminals, or paramilitary groups.


title: Death by burning

text: In 1941, Polish natives—in cooperation with Nazi German police—locked 340 Jews in a barn and set it on fire during the Jedwabne pogrom. During the 1943 Khatyn massacre, the SS-Sturmbrigade Dirlewanger and the Schutzmannschaft Battalion 118—a Nazi-sponsored battalion of Ukrainian partisans—locked 149 villagers into a shed and set it on fire. The World Jewish Restitution Organisation reported to the Jerusalem Post that the Nazi staff of Auschwitz burnt children alive in 1944. In another 1944 atrocity, the Waffen SS locked 452 French women and children in a church and set it on fire. German prosecutors charged an alleged perpetrator of that massacre in 2014. SS-"Sturmbannführer" Adolf Diekmann—commander of the 1st Battalion, 4th SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment—ordered the massacre, claiming retaliation against French partisans for burning SS-"Sturmbannführer" Helmut Kämpfe alive. In April 1945, the SS camp guards of Dora-Mittelbau—along with local civilian and military authorities—set a barn on fire with more than a thousand inmates trapped inside.


title: Death by burning

text: Benjamin B. Ferencz, one of the prosecutors in the Nuremberg trials after the end of World War II who, in May 1945, investigated occurrences at the Ebensee concentration camp, narrated them to Tom Hofmann, a family member and biographer. Ferencz was outraged at what the Nazis had done there. When people discovered an SS guard who attempted to flee, they tied him to one of the metal trays used to transport bodies into the crematorium. They then proceeded to light the oven and slowly roast the SS guard to death, taking him in and out of the oven several times. Ferencz said to Hofmann that at the time, he was in no position to stop the proceedings of the mob, and frankly admitted that he had not been inclined to try. Hofmann adds, "There seemed to be no limit to human brutality in wartime."


title: Death by burning

text: During the post-World War II expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia, a number of attacks against the German minority occurred. In one case in Prague in May 1945, a Czech mob hanged several Germans upside down on lampposts, doused them in fuel and set them on fire, burning them alive. The future literature scholar Peter Demetz, who grew up in Prague, later reported on this.


title: Death by burning

text: In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, burning people standing inside a pile of tires is a common form of murder used by drug dealers to punish those who have supposedly collaborated with the police. This form of burning is called "micro-ondas" (microwave oven). The film "Tropa de Elite" ("Elite Squad") and the video game "Max Payne 3" contain scenes depicting this practice.


title: Death by burning

text: During the Guatemalan Civil War, the Guatemalan Army and security forces carried out an unknown number of extrajudicial killings by burning. In one instance in March 1967, Guatemalan guerrilla and poet Otto René Castillo was captured by Guatemalan government forces and taken to Zacapa army barracks alongside one of his comrades, Nora Paíz Cárcamo. The two were interrogated, tortured for four days, and burned alive. Other reported instances of immolation by Guatemalan government forces occurred in the Guatemalan government's rural counterinsurgency operations in the Guatemalan Altiplano in the 1980s. In April 1982, 13 members of a Qʼanjobʼal Pentecostal congregation in Xalbal, Ixcan, were burnt alive in their church by the Guatemalan Army.


title: Death by burning

text: On 31 August 1996, a Mexican man, Rodolfo Soler Hernandez, was burned to death in Playa Vicente, Mexico, after he was accused of raping and strangling a local woman to death. Local residents tied Hernandez to a tree, doused him in a flammable liquid and then set him ablaze. His death was also filmed by residents of the village. Shots taken before the killing showed that he had been badly beaten. On 5 September 1996, Mexican television stations broadcast footage of the murder. Locals carried out the killing because they were fed up with crime and believed that the police and courts were both incompetent. Footage was also shown in the 1998 shockumentary film, "Banned from Television".


title: Death by burning

text: A young Guatemalan woman, Alejandra María Torres, was attacked by a mob in Guatemala City on 15 December 2009. The mob alleged that Torres had attempted to rob passengers on a bus. Torres was beaten, doused with gasoline, and set on fire, but was able to put the fire out before sustaining life-threatening burns. Police intervened and arrested Torres. Torres was forced to go topless throughout the ordeal and subsequent arrest, and many photographs were taken and published. Approximately 219 people were lynched in Guatemala in 2009, of whom 45 died.


title: Death by burning

text: In May 2015, a sixteen-year-old girl was allegedly burned to death in Río Bravo, Guatemala, by a vigilante mob after being accused by some of involvement in the killing of a taxi driver earlier in the month.


title: Death by burning

text: In Chile during public mass protests held against the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet on 2 July 1986, engineering student Carmen Gloria Quintana, 18, and Chilean-American photographer Rodrigo Rojas de Negri, 19, were arrested by a Chilean Army patrol in the Los Nogales neighborhood of Santiago. The two were searched and beaten before being doused in gasoline and burned alive by Chilean troops. Rojas was killed, while Quintana survived but with severe burns.


title: Death by burning

text: Burnings continued as a method of lynching in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly in the South. One of the most notorious extrajudicial burnings in modern history occurred in Waco, Texas on 15 May 1916. Jesse Washington, an African-American farmhand, after having been convicted of the rape and subsequent murder of a white woman, was taken by a mob to a bonfire, castrated, doused in coal oil, and hanged by the neck from a chain over the bonfire, slowly burning to death. A postcard from the event still exists, showing a crowd standing next to Washington's charred corpse with the words on the back "This is the barbecue we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe". This attracted international condemnation and is remembered as the "Waco Horror".


title: Death by burning

text: More recently, during the 1980 New Mexico State Penitentiary riot, a number of inmates were burnt to death by fellow prisoners, who used blowtorches.


title: Death by burning

text: In South Africa, extrajudicial executions by burning were carried out via "necklacing", wherein a mob would fill a rubber tire with kerosene (or gasoline) and place it around the neck of a live individual. The fuel is then ignited, the rubber melts, and the victim is burnt to death. The method was most commonly used during the 1980s and early 1990s by anti-Apartheid opposition. In 1986, Winnie Mandela, wife of the then-imprisoned ANC (African National Congress) leader Nelson Mandela, stated, "With our boxes of matches, and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country", which was widely seen as an explicit endorsement of necklacing. This caused the ANC to initially distance itself from her, although she later took on a number of official positions within the party.


title: Death by burning

text: It was reported that in Kenya, on 21 May 2008, a mob had burned to death at least 11 accused witches.


title: Death by burning

text: Dr Graham Stuart Staines, an Australian Christian missionary, and his two sons Philip (aged ten) and Timothy (aged six), were burnt to death by a gang while the three slept in the family car (a station wagon), at Manoharpur village in Keonjhar District, Odisha, India on 22 January 1999. Four years later, in 2003, a Bajrang Dal activist, Dara Singh, was convicted of leading the gang that murdered Staines and his sons, and was sentenced to life in prison. Staines had worked in Odisha with the tribal poor and lepers since 1965. Some Hindu groups made allegations that Staines had forcibly converted or lured many Hindus into Christianity.


title: Death by burning

text: On 19 June 2008, the Taliban, at Sadda, Lower Kurram, Pakistan, burned three truck drivers of the Turi tribe alive after attacking a convoy of trucks en route from Kohat to Parachinar, possibly for supplying the Pakistan Armed Forces.


title: Death by burning

text: In January 2015, Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh was burned in a cage by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). The pilot was captured when his plane crashed near Raqqa, Syria, during a mission against IS in December 2014.


title: Death by burning

text: In December 2016, ISIS burned to death two Turkish soldiers, publishing high-quality video of the atrocity.


title: Death by burning

text: On 20 January 2011, a 28-year-old woman, Ranjeeta Sharma, was found burning to death on a road in rural New Zealand. The police confirmed the woman was alive before being covered in an accelerant and set on fire. Sharma's husband, Davesh Sharma, was charged with her murder.


title: Peoples Temple

text: The Peoples Temple of the Disciples of Christ, originally Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church and commonly shortened to Peoples Temple, was an American new religious organization which existed between 1954 and 1978. Founded in Indianapolis, Indiana by Reverend Jim Jones, the Peoples Temple spread a message that combined elements of Christianity with communist and socialist ideology, with an emphasis on racial equality. After Jones moved the group to California in the 1960s and established several locations throughout the state, including its headquarters in San Francisco, the Temple forged ties with many left-wing political figures and claimed to have 20,000 members (though 3,000–5,000 is more likely).


title: Peoples Temple

text: The Temple is best known for the events of November 18, 1978, in Guyana, when 909 people died in a mass suicide and mass murder at its remote settlement, named "Jonestown", as well as the murders of U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan and members of his visiting delegation at the nearby Port Kaituma airstrip. The incident at Jonestown resulted in the greatest single loss of American civilian life in a deliberate act prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Because of the killings in Guyana, the Temple is regarded by scholars and by popular view as a destructive cult.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Before he founded his church, Jim Jones had become enamored with communism and he was also frustrated by the harassment which communists were being subjected to in the U.S. during the Red Scare. This, among other things, provided a clerical inspiration for Jones; as he himself described it in a biographical recording:


title: Peoples Temple

text: Although Jones feared that he would end up being the victim of a backlash for being a communist, he was surprised when a Methodist superintendent (whom he had not met through the American Communist Party) helped him enter the church, despite his knowledge that Jones was a communist. In 1952, Jones became a student pastor in Sommerset Southside Methodist Church in Indianapolis, Indiana, but left that church because it barred him from integrating African-Americans into his congregation. In 1954, Jones founded his own church in a rented space in Indianapolis, at first, he named it the Community Unity Church.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Jones had previously observed a faith healing service at the Seventh Day Baptist Church, which led him to conclude that such healings could attract people, and generate income, which he could use to accomplish his social goals. Jones and the Temple's members knowingly faked healings because they found that the healings increased people's faith and generated financial resources which they could use to help the poor and finance the church. These "healings" involved the use of chicken livers and other animal tissue, which Jones (and confederate Temple members) claimed were cancerous tissues which had been removed from the bodies of the people who had been healed.


title: Peoples Temple

text: In 1955, Jones bought his first church building, located in a racially mixed Indianapolis neighborhood. He first named his church Wings of Deliverance, and later that year, he renamed it the Peoples Temple Full Gospel Church, the first time he used the phrase "Peoples Temple." Jones's healings and purported clairvoyant revelations attracted spiritualists.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Jones began closely associating with the Independent Assemblies of God (IAoG), an international group of churches who embraced the Latter Rain movement. The IAoG had few requirements for ordaining ministers and were accepting of divine healing practices. In June 1955, Jones held his first joint meetings with William Branham, a healing evangelist and Pentecostal leader in the global Healing Revival.


title: Peoples Temple

text: In 1956, Jones was ordained as an IAoG minister by Joseph Mattsson-Boze, a leader in the Latter Rain movement and the IAoG. Jones quickly rose to prominence in the group. Working with the IAoG, Jones organized and hosted a healing convention to take place June 11–15, 1956, in Indianapolis's Cadle Tabernacle. Needing a well-known figure to draw crowds, he arranged to share the pulpit again with Reverend Branham.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Branham was known to tell supplicants their name, address, and why they came for prayer, before pronouncing them healed. Jones was intrigued by Branham's methods and began performing the same feats. Jones and Branham's meetings were very successful and attracted an audience of 11,000 at their first joint campaign. At the convention, Branham issued a prophetic endorsement of Jones and his ministry, saying that God used the convention to send forth a new great ministry.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Many attendees in the campaign believed Jones's performance indicated that he possessed a supernatural gift, and coupled with Branham's endorsement, it led to rapid growth of Peoples Temple. Jones was particularly effective at recruitment among the African American attendees at the conventions. According to a newspaper report, regular attendance at Peoples Temple swelled to 1,000 thanks to the publicity Branham provided to Jones and Peoples Temple.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Following the convention, Jones renamed his church the "Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel" to associate it with Full Gospel Pentecostalism; the name was later shortened to the Peoples Temple. Jones participated in a series of multi-state revival campaigns with Branham and Mattsson-Boze in the second half of the 1950s, making multiple joint appearances with them. Jones claimed to be a follower and promoter of Branham's "Message" during the period. Peoples Temple hosted a second international Pentecostal convention in 1957 which was again headlined by Branham. Through the conventions and with the support of Branham and Mattsson-Boze, Jones secured connections throughout the Latter Rain movement.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Jones used the convention meetings with other Pentecostal speakers to gain wide publicity, and Jones continued to disguise the fact that he was using religion to further his political ideology. Those conventions drew as many as 11,000 attendees, as Jones and the other preachers conducted "healings" and impressed attendees by revealing private information—usually addresses, phone numbers, or Social Security numbers, which private detectives could easily discover beforehand. Jones and Temple members also drove through various cities in Indiana and Ohio on recruiting and fundraising efforts.


title: Peoples Temple

text: The Temple stressed egalitarian ideals, asking members to attend in casual clothes so poor members would not feel out of place, and providing shelter for the needy. While the Temple had increased its African-American membership from 15% to nearly 50%, in order to attempt further gains the Temple hired African-American preacher Archie Ijames (who had earlier given up organized religion). Pastor Ijames was one of the first to commit to Jones's socialist collective program. In 1959, the church joined the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and was renamed the Peoples Temple Christian Church Full Gospel. This affiliation was a successful attempt to both raise the dwindling membership and restore the reputation of the organization.


title: Peoples Temple

text: In February 1960, the Temple opened a soup kitchen for the poor and expanded their social services to include rent assistance, job placement services, free canned goods, clothing, and coal for winter heating. Jones and his wife Marceline helped to increase the Temple's soup kitchen service to an average of about 2,800 meals per month. The Temple's public profile was further elevated when Jones was appointed to the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission. He engaged in public attempts to integrate businesses and was the subject of much local media coverage.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Jones had read extensively about Father Divine, the founder of the International Peace Mission movement. Jones and members of the Temple visited Divine several times, while Jones studied his writings and tape recordings of his sermons. The Temple printed Divine's texts for its members and began to preach that members should abstain from sex and only adopt children.


title: Peoples Temple

text: In 1959, Jones tested the new fiery rhetorical style that Divine had used in a sermon. His speech captivated members with lulls and crescendos, as Jones challenged individual members in front of the group. The speech also marked the beginning of the Temple's underlying "us versus them" message. Jones carefully wove in that the Temple's home for senior citizens was established on the basis "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need", quoting Karl Marx's "Critique of the Gotha Program". He did so knowing that his Christian audience would recognize the similarities with text from the Acts of the Apostles (4:34–35) which stated: "distribution was made to each as any had need." Jones would repeatedly cite that passage to paint Jesus as a communist, while at the same time attacking much of the text of the Bible.


title: Peoples Temple

text: The Temple began tightening control over its organization, asking more of its members than did other churches. It required that members spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with its Temple "family" rather than with blood relatives, the beginning of a process to wean members from outside contact and redirect their lives toward a total commitment to the Temple and its goals. Jones began to offer a deal towards a socialist collective, which he called "religious communalism", in which members would donate their material possessions to the Temple in exchange for the Temple meeting all those members' needs. Pastor Ijames was one of the first to commit.


title: Peoples Temple

text: The Temple had little luck converting most Midwesterners to communist ideals, even when disguised as religion. Admiring the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Jones traveled to the island nation in 1960 in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade poor black Cubans to move to his congregation in Indiana. The Temple's religious message transitioned during this period, to one treading between atheism and the subtle notion that Jones was a Christ-like figure. While Temple aides complained privately, Jones said that the new message was needed to foster members' dedication to the Temple's larger goals. He maintained such implications until the mid-to-late 1970s.


title: Peoples Temple

text: In 1961, Jones claimed he had had a vision in which Indianapolis and Chicago were destroyed in a nuclear attack, convincing aides that the Temple needed to look for a new location. A 1962 "Esquire" magazine article listed the nine safest places to be in a nuclear war, with Belo Horizonte, Brazil, topping the list because of its location and atmospheric conditions. Jones traveled through Brazil from 1962 through early 1963. He requested money from the Temple while in Rio de Janeiro, but the Temple lacked adequate funds for such a request because of shrinking finances in Jones's absence. Jones sent a preacher that had become a follower in Brazil back to Indiana to help stabilize the Temple. Jones returned to Indiana in 1963.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Jones returned from Brazil in December 1963 to find Peoples Temple bitterly divided. Financial issues and a much smaller congregation forced Jones to sell the Peoples Temple church building and relocate to a smaller building nearby. To raise money, Jones briefly returned to the revival circuit, traveling and holding healing campaigns. After dealing with the issues at Peoples Temple, and possibly in part to distract from them, he told his Indiana congregation that the world would be engulfed by nuclear war on July 15, 1967, leading to a new socialist Eden on Earth, and that the Temple must move to Northern California for safety.


title: Peoples Temple

text: With Jones's return, the majority of his congregation gradually returned to Peoples Temple, improving their financial situation. During 1964 Jones made multiple trips to California to locate a suitable location to relocate. In July 1965, Jones and his followers began moving to their new location in Redwood Valley, California, near the city of Ukiah. Jones's assistant pastor, Russell Winberg, strongly resisted Jones's efforts to move the congregation and warned members of Peoples Temple that Jones was abandoning Christianity.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Winberg took over leadership of the Indianapolis church when Jones departed. About 140 of Jones's most loyal followers made the move to California, while the rest remained behind with Winberg.


title: Peoples Temple

text: In California, Jones was able to use his education degree from Butler University to secure a job as a history and government teacher at an adult education school in Ukiah. Jones used his position to recruit for Peoples Temple, teaching his students the benefits of Marxism and lecturing on religion. Jones planted loyal members of Peoples Temple in the classes to help him with recruitment. His efforts were successful, and Jones recruited 50 new members to Peoples Temple in the first few months. In 1967, Jones's followers coaxed another 75 members of the Indianapolis congregation to move to California.


title: Peoples Temple

text: In 1968, the Peoples Temple's California location was admitted to the Disciples of Christ. Jones began to use the denominational connection to promote Peoples Temple as part of the 1.5 million member denomination. He played up famous members of the Disciples, including Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, and misrepresented the nature of his position in the denomination. By 1969, Jones increased the membership in Peoples Temple in California to 300.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Jones developed a theology that was significantly influenced by the teachings of the Latter Rain movement, William Branham, Father Divine, and infused with Jones's personal communist worldview. Jones referred to his belief as "Apostolic Socialism". Following the relocation of Peoples Temple to California, Jones began to gradually introduce the concepts to his followers. According to religious studies professor Catherine Wessinger, Jones always spoke of the Social Gospel's virtues, but chose to conceal that his gospel was actually communism until he began to do so in sermons at the Temple in the late 1960s.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Jones taught that "those who remained drugged with the opiate of religion had to be brought to enlightenment", which he defined as socialism. Jones asserted that traditional Christianity had an incorrect view of God. By the early 1970s, Jones began deriding traditional Christianity as "fly away religion", rejecting the Bible as being a tool to oppress women and non-whites. Jones referred to traditional Christianity's view of God as a "Sky God" who was "no God at all". Instead, Jones claimed to be following the true God who created all things.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Jones taught that ultimate reality was called the "Divine Principle", and this principle was the true God. Jones equated the principle with love, and he equated love with socialism. Jones asserted he was a savior sent by the true God, to rescue humanity from their sufferings. Jones insisted that accepting the "Divine Principle" was equivalent to being "crucified with Christ".


title: Peoples Temple

text: Jones increasingly promoted the idea of his own divinity, going so far as to tell his congregation that "I am come as God Socialist." Jones carefully avoided claiming divinity outside of Peoples Temple, but he expected to be acknowledged as god-like among his followers. Former Temple member Hue Fortson Jr. quoted him as saying:


title: Peoples Temple

text: What you need to believe in is what you can see... If you see me as your friend, I'll be your friend. As you see me as your father, I'll be your father, for those of you that don't have a father... If you see me as your savior, I'll be your savior. If you see me as your God, I'll be your God.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Further attacking traditional Christianity, Jones authored and circulated a tract entitled "The Letter Killeth", criticizing the King James Bible, and dismissing King James as a slave owner and a capitalist who was responsible for the corrupt translation of scripture. Jones claimed he was sent to share the true meaning of the gospel which had been hidden by corrupt leaders.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Jones rejected even the few required tenets of the Disciples of Christ denomination. Instead of implementing the sacraments as prescribed by the Disciples, Jones followed Father Divine's holy communion practices. Jones created his own baptismal formula, baptizing his converts "in the holy name of Socialism".


title: Peoples Temple

text: While in the United States, Jones remained fearful of the public discovering the full extent of his communist views. He believed that if the true nature of his views became widely known, he would quickly lose the support of political leaders and even face the possibility of Peoples Temple being ejected from the Disciples of Christ. Jones also feared losing the church's tax-exempt status and having to report his financial dealings to the Internal Revenue Service. Jones took care to always couch his socialist views in religious terms, such as "apostolic social justice". "Living the Acts of the Apostles" was his euphemism for living a communal lifestyle.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Jones frequently warned his followers of an imminent apocalyptic genocidal race war and nuclear war. He claimed that Nazi fascists and white supremacists would put people of color into concentration camps. Jones said he was a messiah sent to save people by giving them a place of refuge in his church. Drawing on a prophecy in the Book of Revelation, he taught that American capitalist culture was irredeemable "Babylon". Explaining the nature of sin, Jones stated, "If you're born in capitalist America, racist America, fascist America, then you're born in sin. But if you're born in socialism, you're not born in sin." He taught his followers the only way to escape the supposed imminent catastrophe was to accept his teachings, and that after the apocalypse was over, they would emerge to establish a perfect communist society.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Historians are divided over whether Jones actually believed his own teachings, or was just using them to manipulate people. Jeff Guinn said, "It is impossible to know whether Jones gradually came to think he was God's earthly vessel, or whether he came to that convenient conclusion" to enhance his authority over his followers. In a 1976 phone conversation with John Maher, Jones admitted to be an agnostic and an atheist. Marceline admitted in a 1977 "New York Times" interview that Jones was trying to promote Marxism in the U.S. by mobilizing people through religion, citing Mao Zedong as his inspiration: "Jim used religion to try to get some people out of the opiate of religion." She told the reporter that Jones had once slammed the Bible on the table yelling "I've got to destroy this paper idol!" Jones taught his followers that the ends justify the means and authorized them to achieve his vision by any means necessary. Outsiders would later point to this aspect of Jones's teachings to allege that he did not genuinely believe in his own teachings and that he was "morally bankrupt" and only manipulating religion and other elements of society "to achieve his own selfish ends".


title: Peoples Temple

text: Jones began using illicit drugs after moving to California, which further heightened his paranoia. Jones increasingly used fear to control and manipulate his followers in California. Jones frequently warned his followers that there was an enemy seeking to destroy them. The identify of that enemy changed over time from the Ku Klux Klan, to Nazis, to redneck vigilantes, and finally the American government. He frequently prophesied that fires, car accidents, and death or injuries would come upon anyone unfaithful to him and his teachings. He constantly told his followers that they needed to be crusaders in promoting and fulfilling his beliefs.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Through his tactics, he successfully implemented a communal lifestyle among his followers that was directed by him and his lieutenants who were part of a committee called the Planning Commission. Jones, through the Planning Commission, began controlling all aspects of the lives of his followers. Members who joined Peoples Temple were required to turn over all their assets to the church in exchange for free room and board. Many members working outside of the Temple were also required to turn over all their income to be used for the benefit of the community. Jones directed groups of his followers to work on various projects to earn income for the People Temple and set up an agricultural operation in Redwood Valley to grow food. Jones organized large community outreach projects, taking his followers by bus to perform work community service across the region.


title: Peoples Temple

text: The first known cases of serious abuse in Peoples Temple arose in California as the Planning Commission carried out discipline against members who were not fulfilling Jones's vision or following the rules. Jones's control over the members of Peoples Temple extended to their sex lives and who could be married. Some members were coerced to get abortions. Jones began to require sexual favors from the wives of some members of the church. Jones also raped several male members of his congregation.


title: Peoples Temple

text: Members who rebelled against Jones's control were punished with reduced food rations, harsher work schedules, public ridicule and humiliations, and sometimes with physical violence. As the Temple's membership grew, Jones created a security group to ensure order among his followers and to ensure his own personal safety. The group purchased security squad cars and armed their guards with rifles and pistols.