Recently I have been comparing the Legacy Standard Bible with the New American Standard Bible.
1 Peter 2:24 LSB
Who Himself bore our sins in His body on the tree, so that having died to sin, we might live to righteousness; by His wounds you were healed.
1 Peter 2:24 NASB95
and He Himself, bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness; for by His wounds you were healed.
From my understanding of the LSB version is saying that Christ died to sin and the NASB95 is saying that we died to sin. Am I misreading something or does these two translations mean the same thing?
Most Bibles say Christ was “crucified” rather than “impaled.” This is because of the common belief that the torture instrument upon which he was hung was a “cross” made of two pieces of wood instead of a single pale, or stake. But it's tradition, not the Scriptures why they translate this way, also as the tradition says that the condemned man carried only the crossbeam of the cross, called the patibulum, or
antenna, instead of both parts. In this way some try to avoid the predicament of having too much weight for one man to drag or carry to Golgotha.
The Bible writers themselves used the Greek noun stauros 27 times and the verbs stauroo 46 times, synstauroo (the prefix
syn, meaning “with”) 5 times, and
anastauroo (
a·naʹ, meaning “again”) once. They also used the Greek word
xylon, meaning “wood,” 5 times to refer to the torture instrument upon which Jesus was nailed.
Stauros in both the classical Greek and Koine carries no thought of a “cross” made of two timbers. It means only an upright stake, pale, pile, or pole, as might be used for a fence, stockade, or palisade. The Douglas’
New Bible Dictionary of 1985 under “Cross,” page 253: “The Gk. word for ‘cross’ (
stauros; verb
stauroo . . .) means primarily an upright stake or beam, and secondarily a stake used as an instrument for punishment and execution.”
The fact that Luke, Peter, and Paul also used xylon as a synonym for
stauros gives added evidence that Jesus was impaled on an upright stake without a crossbeam, for that is what xylon in this special sense means. (Acts 5:30; 10:39; 13:29; Galatians 3:13; 1 Peter 2:22)
Xylon also occurs in the Greek
Septuagint at Ezra 6:11, where it speaks of a single beam or timber on which a lawbreaker was to be impaled.
It should be noted what W. E. Vine says on this subject: “STAUROS (σταυρός) denotes, primarily, an upright pale or stake. On such malefactors were nailed for execution. Both the noun and the verb
stauroo, to fasten to a stake or pale, are originally to be distinguished from the ecclesiastical form of a two beamed cross.” Greek scholar Vine then mentions the Chaldean origin of the two-piece cross and how it was adopted from the pagans by Christendom in the third century C.E. as a symbol of Christ’s impalement.(
Vine’s Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, 1981, Vol. 1, p. 256)
In the book titled,
The Non-Christian Cross, by J. D. Parsons (London, 1896), it says: “There is not a single sentence in any of the numerous writings forming the New Testament, which, in the original Greek, bears even indirect evidence to the effect that the stauros used in the case of Jesus was other than an ordinary stauros; much less to the effect that it consisted, not of one piece of timber, but of two pieces nailed together in the form of a cross. It is not a little misleading upon the part of our teachers to translate the word stauros as ‘cross’ when rendering the Greek documents of the Church into our native tongue, and to support that action by putting ‘cross’ in our lexicons as the meaning of stauros without carefully explaining that that was at any rate not the primary meaning of the word in the days of the Apostles, did not become its primary signification till long afterwards, and became so then, if at all, only because, despite the absence of corroborative evidence, it was for some reason or other assumed that the particular stauros upon which Jesus was executed had that particular shape.”(Pp. 23, 24) A person should also see,
The Companion Bible, 1974, Appendix No. 162.)
