It was a skandalon!

The New Testament witnesses had to fight with all their strength to keep the Lord’s death at the forefront of the preaching, worship, and ethics of the new faith. Paul’s term skandalon (“stumbling block,” “pitfall”) well conveys the perverse nature of the cross. Forces within and without the early church exploited every opportunity to minimize or set aside the absurdly irreligious claim that a degrading, state-sponsored execution had secured the salvation of the entire cosmos. But all four Evangelists resisted these pressures to move in the direction of something more spiritually familiar, and instead made the long, continuous passion narrative the climax of their work.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 69