Byron wrote:
Crucifixion was deeply shameful to Romans. I trust that this isn't in doubt. Jews also had the added shame from Deuteronomy 21:22-23, of Adonai cursing a man hung from a tree. So, for Jews to have invented a crucified messiah is doubly absurd: there's the general shame of crucifixion, and the specific shame of Deut.'s curse.
The idea that the Jews rejected Jesus as under a "curse" because of the manner of his death is entirely wrong. Many Jews died by crucifixion and were regarded as heroes and martyrs, not as under a curse. Paul's very individual use, in Galatians 3:13, of the biblical verse (Deut. 21:23) about hanging after death by crucifixion, as if it applied to a Roman crucifixion, was not based on any rabbinic source. Even a criminal dying by Jewish execution was not regarded as an atonement for his sin. But a Jewish patriot dying by Roman oppression was not regarded as a criminal in any way, but as a martyr.
While some scholars, in recent years, have stressed the alleged Jewishness of Paul's ideas, this is one area in which Paul is supposed to have rejected a rooted Jewish idea, the "curse" of crucifixion, and substituted something new and shocking -- especially shocking because of the alleged previous Jewish belief that he who died on a cross incurred a curse -- the redemptive power of the cross. There was, in fact, no "curse" or "scandal" of crucifixion in Judaism to exercise, the "curse" being entirely of Paul's own manufacture; what was new, however, was the concept of the cross, or any form of violent death of a savior-figure, as the central way to atonement and redemption for mankind ... the idea that Jesus's catastrophic failure was a success on the cosmic level was not part of Jewish thinking, and was therefore rejected; but his death on a Roman cross was cause for sorrow, not condemnation, like the deaths of other Messiah-figures before and after him.
(Hyam Maccoby, Paul and Hellenism, p. 75-76)