If you ever have read the Hebrew - Greek versions the word used is actually "stauros", this translates literally
Strong's, Thayer's, and Vine's dictionaries leave little or no room for doubt that "stauros", translated "cross," refers to an upright stake or pole. Ergo...
It is highly unlikely that Lord Jesus was crucified on a T-shaped cross. Instead, He was probably crucified on an upright stake. Science has proven the unlikely hood of a human even being supported on a stake.
But "stauros" also, according to the standard lexicographical work of the Greek language, can mean a "cross".
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3D%2396298Also:
"The gibbet on which crucifixion was carried out
could be of many shapes.
Josephus describes multiple tortures and positions of crucifixion during the siege of Jerusalem (70) as Titus crucified the rebels;[8] and Seneca the Younger recounts: "
I see crosses there, not just of one kind but made in many different ways: some have their victims with head down to the ground; some impale their private parts; others stretch out their arms on the gibbet."[9]
At times the gibbet was only one vertical stake. This was the simplest available construction for torturing and killing the criminals.
Frequently, however, there was a cross-piece attached either at the top to give the shape of a 'T' (crux commissa) or just below the top, as in the form most familiar in Christian symbolism (crux immissa).[10] Other forms were in the shape of the letters X and Y.
The earliest writings that speak specifically of the shape of the cross on which Jesus died describe it as shaped like the letter T (the Greek letter tau),[11] or composed of an upright and a transverse beam, together with a small peg in the upright.[12]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion#Cross_shape8. Josephus, Wars of the Jews, 5.11.1
9. Seneca, Dialogue "To Marcia on Consolation", in Moral Essays, 6.20.3, trans. John W. Basore, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946) 2:69
10. "The ... oldest depiction of a crucifixion ... was uncovered by archaeologists more than a century ago on the Palatine Hill in Rome. It is a second-century graffiti scratched into a wall that was part of the imperial palace complex. It includes a caption - not by a Christian, but by someone taunting and deriding Christians and the crucifixions they underwent. It shows crude stick-figures of a boy reverencing his "God," who has the head of a jackass and is upon a cross with arms spread wide and with hands nailed to the crossbeam.
Here we have a Roman sketch of a Roman crucifixion, and it is in the traditional cross shape" (Clayton F. Bower, Jr: Cross or Torture Stake?). Some second-century writers took it for granted that
a crucified person would have his arms stretched out, not connected to a single stake: Lucian speaks of Prometheus as crucified "above the ravine with his hands outstretched" and explains that the letter "T" (the Greek letter tau) was looked upon as an unlucky letter or sign (similar to the way the number thirteen is looked upon today as an unlucky number) saying that the letter got its "evil significance" because of the "evil instrument" which had that shape, an instrument which tyrants hung men on (ibidem).
11. Epistle of Barnabas, Chapter 9. The document no doubt belongs to the end of the first or beginning of the second century.[1]
12. "The very form of the cross, too, has five extremities, two in length, two in breadth, and one in the middle, on which [last] the person rests who is fixed by the nails" (Irenaeus (c. 130–202), Adversus Haereses, II, xxiv, 4).
