Archive Home Page I think that it would be impossible to identify, in total, with the negative side of the human condition and all the while have (or at least know of) an out.
To know helplessness, he would have to have experienced helplessness. To know despair, he would have to have experienced total despair. To know never ending loneliness, he would have to have experienced never ending loneliness. To know hopelessness in it's deepest manifestation, he would have to have experienced states of mind in which there was no hope, no way out, no escape, no redemption, no salvation.
To know betrayal, he would have to have been totally betrayed. To know blame he would have to have been blamed. To know untruth he would have to be lied to. To know rage, he would have to have been filled with rage. To know child abuse, he would have to have been abused. To know stigma he would have to feel stigma. To know humiliation he would have had to have been humiliated. To know futility he would have had to have known that one man can not possibly in his lifetime resolve every single problem of untold billions of people past, present, and future and still be expected to do so. To know mortality he would have to fear death. To know death he would have to die.
To know self hatred he would have to hate himself. To know the total range of hate, he would have to have been forced to hate everything. To know emptiness, he would have to had known the total absense of love.
And on and on and on...
After all that I don't think that any literal cross, public or otherwise, would be needed to kill him. These are all knowable human emotional states. The Biblical account, in a symbolic and metaphorical way, really only touches the surface of what he would have had to have gone thru.