Question: Acts 5:30 says `The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead- whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree`, Acts 10:39 says `…They killed him by hanging him on a tree` and Acts 13:29 says `When they had all carried out all that was written about him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in a tomb`. Was not Jesus crucified and died at the CROSS?`
Answer:
The apparent difficulty here comes in the translation from Greek to English. In Acts 5:30 and Acts 10:39 the word that that is translated as tree is ξύλον, which carries many meanings[1]:
1) wood as a plant substance in unmanufactured form, wood
2) object made of wood
3) a relatively long piece that can be set in the ground, pole
4) a device for confining the extremities of a prisoner, stocks
5) a wooden structure used for crucifixion, cross
6) tree
As you can see the word can mean tree, like an olive tree, or it can also mean a pole that can be set in the ground (#3). If we look at the word “cross” in the Gospel according to John (as an example), it is σταυρός, which also means a pole to be placed in the ground and used for capital punishment.[2]
Another piece of this is that the word “tree” in English also has a board sense of meaning[3] (especially note definition 2):
tree
■ noun
1 a woody perennial plant typically with a single stem or trunk growing to a considerable height and bearing lateral branches.
2 a wooden structure or part of a structure.
▶ archaic or literary the cross on which Christ was crucified.
▶ archaic a gibbet.
3 (also tree diagram) a diagram with a structure of branching connecting lines, representing different processes and relationships.
■ verb (trees, treeing, treed)
1 North American force (a hunted animal) to take refuge in a tree.
2 informal, chiefly US force into a difficult situation.
– phrases
out of one’s tree informal mad.
– derivatives treeless adjective treelessness noun tree-like adjective
So as you can see, the only difference depends on the English translators preference in choosing the word. History records the death of Christ by crucifixion, and that fits the biblical account. So yes, he died on a cross.
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[1] William Arndt, Frederick W. Danker and Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 685.
[2] William Arndt, Frederick W. Danker and Walter Bauer, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 941.
[3] Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson, Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).