The young Julius Caesar was famously taken hostage for ransom by pirates when he was a very young man. By the time of Jesus’s life, most educated people would have read or heard the thrilling story about how young Caesar later tracked the pirates down and crucified them.

Of course this doesn’t have any direct bearing on atonement theory, but when you’re talking about ransom and hostages and crucifixion, many people automatically would have thought about the Caesar story. It’s worth thinking about what their frame of mine would have been.