Murder at Golgotha Read online

  No less intriguing, and highly pertinent in the context of Joseph's and Nicodemus's activities that evening, is that some of the Shroud's bloodstains take the form of direct, postmortem blood spillages onto the cloth. On the half of the Shroud that theoretically lay beneath the back of Jesus' body, off to one side of the ankle area can be seen a stain difficult to interpret other than from blood that trickled directly onto the cloth from the nail wound in the ankle. Another small puddle of blood ran from a raised elbow.

  *—The apparent transfer of blood and body stains to the Turin Shroud (seen here in its present-day appearance [A]). A convincing feature is the way that blood from the chest wound [B], and from the nail in one ankle [C] appears to have spilled directly onto the cloth at the time that the body was laid in the Shroud. There is a trickle from one elbow that seems to have done the same (inset [D]). Disproportionate quantities of dirt have been noted at the soles of the feet [E]. Indicative that this was a body genuinely in rigor mortis is the way that the legs are sharply flexed, as if in the manner the body assumed as it hung in death on the cross. Likewise the elbows do not rest on the horizontal plane but are stiff, as if the arms have been forced from the crucifixion angle into a position suitable for burial.

  By far the most dramatic of these stains is an extensive blood spillage right across the small of the back. This can only have derived from the chest wound at the front of the body, blood accumulation within which became spilled directly onto the cloth. In the case of this particular blood spillage variety of stains, it is difficult to come to any other conclusion than that they occurred during Joseph's and Nicodemus's efforts to transfer Jesus' body from the bier on which it had been transported from Golgotha directly onto the Shroud.

  From a forensic standpoint, a further highly compelling element is that where the soles of the feet can be seen, the Shroud's surface, which has accumulated all sorts of microscopic debris over time, bears by far its highest proportion of dirt. When an American scientific team examined the Shroud in 1978, it was in the region of these sole imprints that their equipment produced far stronger signals for extraneous matter. This would have been from the dirt that Jesus' feet had gathered during that last walk to Golgotha through Jerusalem's streets.

  Yet another highly compelling feature of the Shroud's image is its conformity to the very pose of a body that has hung dead on a cross. As can be confirmed from experiment, whenever anyone poses in the exact manner indicated on the Shroud, one of the strongest impressions is the awkward feeling to the arms. The elbows do not rest on the ground, but are raised several inches above, level with the body's upper surface. One shoulder is lower than the other. The hands rest not on the genitals but on the upper thighs. The whole feeling is of stiff arms that have been awkwardly forced into this position, exactly as Joseph and Nicodemus would have been obliged to do to break our victim's rigor mortis. Adding to this impression, the upper back and head are raised above horizontal, and the legs do not lie flat, but are bent quite acutely at the knees, both of these appearing as if they resulted from the body's last posture as it hung on the cross. Just one of many opportunities for verisimilitude that the Mel Gibson Passion movie had available to it and missed.

  If indeed the Turin Shroud is the actual cloth that Joseph and Nicodemus wrapped Jesus' body in late in the day that fateful Friday, what did it look like? Totally without decoration, it is of pure, undyed linen, woven in a complex herringbone weave, not the plain weave typifying the fabrics used by the ancient Egyptians. This in itself indicates its procurement by individuals of wealth and taste.

  In this same context a most intriguing technical feature is a seam that runs its full length, offset some three and a half inches from one edge. Thanks to recent examination of the Shroud's underside this seam has been revealed to be of a very cleverly devised "invisible" variety. Archaeologists excavating the Masada fortress on the Dead Sea, where Jewish rebels made a heroic last stand in A.D. 70, found a fabric fragment with a near identical seam. So, could both this and the Shroud have come from the very same workshop as that highly valued "garment without seam" which was removed from Jesus at the time of his crucifixion?

  Following wrapping, what was left to do to our corpse?

  With Jesus' Shroud-wrapped body having been carefully maneuvered onto the limestone slab inside Joseph's tomb, the next task was to pack it around with the large quantity of myrrh and aloes, aromatics that Nicodemus had already brought to alleviate the inevitable bad smells. All that then remained for Joseph and Nicodemus to do was to close off the body to the outside world using the large rolling stone boulder that stood in a special track at the tomb's doorway. Whatever the boulder at the original entrance to the tomb housed within Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre, this has long since disappeared. However that Jesus' tomb featured such a boulder is quite evident from the Matthew, Mark, and Luke testimonies. Matthew specifically reported that Joseph "rolled a large stone across the entrance of the tomb and went away" (Matthew 27:60). And he, Mark, and Luke would all speak of this again in relation to the extraordinary developments that were about to follow.

  For although Jesus' disciples had so far been mostly conspicuous by their absence, Joseph's and Nicodemus's activities had not been entirely without observers. The Luke testimony reported:

  The women who had come from Galilee with Jesus were following behind. They took note of the tomb and how the body had been laid. (Luke 23:55)

  Mark noted the names of these women witnesses:

  Mary of Magdala and Mary the mother of Joset took note of where he was laid. (Mark 15:47)

  Likewise Matthew:

  Now Mary of Magdala and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the sepulchre. (Matthew 27:61)

  As the testimony writer also makes clear, these women wanted to know where Jesus had been taken so that they could carry out what they regarded as their own essential funerary duties. But with the imminence of the Passover Sabbath, these duties would now have to wait until the Sabbath was over. . . .

  13

  On the Mortuary Slab

  IF THE Turin SHROUD may be regarded, however provisionally, as a possibly authentic "witness" to the events of Golgotha, then the image that it bears can come remarkably close to our having Jesus' body in front of us on a mortuary slab. Indeed, a Los Angeles-based medical examiner, the late Dr. Robert Bucklin, actually treated it as such nearly thirty years ago in an authoritatively clinical and matter-of-fact presentation for the TV documentary The Silent Witness, that has never been surpassed.

  To have such an "on-the-slab" facility for Jesus as he lay in death is all the more valuable because of the earlier mentioned lack of any direct documentary description of his physical appearance. This is compounded by the fact that there is no portrait of him dating from anything approaching the lifetimes of individuals who knew him personally, and who might have been able to brief an artist about his physical appearance. Extreme skepticism is needed in the case of certain claimed "portraits" preserved in Rome and elsewhere that have been attributed to St. Luke. Usually their style indicates a much later period. And as the Jewish religion expressly forbade the making of the likeness "of anything in heaven above, or on earth beneath" (Exodus 20:4), Jews quite simply had no custom for making portraits of themselves in the manner of the Romans and other contemporary peoples. So the creation of any portrait of Jesus either in his own lifetime, or for a century or more after, is extremely unlikely.

  Equal skepticism is needed for a facial reconstruction that was recently made from the skull of an unknown first-century Jew, which Britain's BBC claimed as the closest that we were ever likely to get to what Jesus might have looked like. Beautifully crafted by world-class specialist Richard Neave, it is a highly lifelike rendition of the face of a Jew who may well have walked the streets of Jerusalem back in Jesus' time. But it is the equivalent of some archaeologist of A.D. 3000 presenting the face of President George W. Bush and declaring this the closest to what actor Tom Cruise might
have looked like. It carries no evidential value whatsoever.

  So giving the Turin Shroud very cautious and provisional benefit of the doubt, what picture does it give us of Jesus as his body lay lifeless on that tomb slab nearly two thousand years ago? The Shroud shows imprints seemingly deriving from the front and back of the body of an entirely naked adult male laid out in death, hands crossed at the pelvis. When viewed in photographic negative these imprints take on a remarkably lifelike, photographic quality still defying rational explanation. As seen on the frontal half, the face carries a moderate beard that was possibly forked, with an equally moderate moustache, possibly bare between upper chin and lower lip. Long hair falls relatively abundantly at either side of the face, seemingly from a center parting. The nose shows signs of serious damage to the septum, and there is definite swelling as from severe bruising on one cheek. This may have been sustained when Caiaphas's guards and Pilate's soldiers had their opportunities to abuse Jesus, though another alternative could be from Jesus' face having been pressed hard against the rock of Golgotha while a Roman soldier drove the nails into his wrists.

  On the half of the Shroud bearing the imprint of its occupant's back, what seems to be hair is shoulder length, with what might be a further length extending ropelike down to the lower line of the shoulder blades. Not a lot is known about Jewish hair fashions in Jesus' time, specifically because of the ban on portraiture. Nevertheless, beards and long hair were certainly more common among Jews than they were among the Romans, whose general preference was for being shorthaired and clean-shaven.

  Heightwise, the fact that the Shroud's exact dimensions are known, and that its images are of both sides of the body, makes it possible to try to compute its theoretical occupant's height. One method of doing this is to project and mark out on an exact cloth replica of the Shroud all the salient body features—eyes, nose, chest, hands, forearms, hands, feet, buttocks, etc.—then get volunteers to try to "fit" these in the manner of a Cinderella slipper. Just such an experiment was carried out in 1978, using cadets from the U.S. Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. Those in charge of this experiment calculated that the Shroud man's height was probably somewhere in the region of five feet eleven inches. As this approximates the author's own height, a personally conducted repeat of their experiment broadly corroborated their findings.

  *—"They [Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus] took the body of Jesus, and bound it in linen cloths . . . following the Jewish burial custom" (John 19:40). The fourteen-foot-long Shroud preserved in Turin bears back- and front-of-body imprints that uncannily fit [A] when draped over a near-six-foot-tall male body laid out in a burial attitude. Attempts to reconstruct the pose [B] indicate that the head and upper back appear to have been elevated, the knees sharply bent, and the arms held stiffly over the pelvis as if there was some kind of binding [C] to prevent them returning to the position that they had assumed on the cross. Besides the all-enveloping shroud [D] there may also have been chin [E] and ankle bindings [F], which were commonly used by morticians throughout many millennia. An uncannily convincing feature is that an insufficient length of cloth has been allowed to cover the front half of the body [G], an over-generous amount having been used for the half on which the body actually rested. According to the testimonies the body was laid in a rock-cut tomb of a kind still seen in the environs of Jerusalem [H]

  Was our victim actually as tall as the occupant of the Shroud? The very suggestion of such a relatively tall height has of itself caused some to disbelieve that the Shroud, even if it genuinely once contained a dead body, could ever have had anything to do with Jesus. As their argument runs, even a century ago people were much shorter than we of the present day. People in antiquity would therefore have been shorter still, with Jesus "tall" at perhaps five foot two inches. Yet the idea that people in antiquity were all significantly shorter than in our own time is actually a fallacy. While certain populations at certain periods may exhibit some variations in height due to dietary and other factors, the general rule is that human height has gone relatively unchanged throughout the last tens of millennia. Several early English kings are known to have been six-footers. Even the first century Jerusalem cemetery where Jehohanans remains were found included at least one six-foot individual among the skeletons that were excavated.

  Physiquewise the man of the Shroud's chest area shows well-developed pectoral muscles, as from an individual who was fit and well exercised. This would be consistent with our victim's previous physically demanding occupation as a carpenter. He was neither excessively thin nor overweight. His weight has been calculated to have been around 175 pounds.

  Also consistent with our investigation is that this was a man who had definitely died from the obvious injuries that he had received. There is consensus on this point among well over a dozen professional medical examiners who have studied the Shroud image. As noted earlier, it is difficult to interpret the lance wound to the chest as having been anything other than fatal. Dr. Fred Zugibe, for one, has pointed out:

  Even if the spear did not strike the heart a . . . collapse of the lung would occur because the pressure outside the chest is greater than that within the chest, causing the lung to collapse. The other lung then becomes more inflated, causing a shift of the heart structures, and ... he would have succumbed quickly.

  According to Zugibe, even if Jesus had somehow managed to survive the lance thrust, this would have been obvious to everyone around him from the continuous loud sucking sound that would have come from his body. As he related from his own medical experience:

  I responded to a call with the paramedics to a hippie commune where a man had been stabbed in the chest. . . . The man was unconscious, but the sucking sound made by air being drawn into the chest through the blood and other fluids could be heard across the room.

  Additionally there are all the earlier noted signs of the onset of rigor mortis. Among the indicators, Dr. Zugibe has identified the head and upper back raised as if from the slumping forward on the cross, the raised appearance of the chest, and a difference in density between the right and the left calves, indicative of these being stiff and rigid. Additionally British medical examiner Professor Taffy Cameron noted on the hands of the Shroud image what he called a "degloving" at the fingers, a phenomenon characteristically seen in the early stages following death. A mortician who attended a slide lecture given on the Shroud by theologian Professor Francis Filas declared from the back-of-the-body imprint that the continued tension he could see in the gluteal muscles of the buttocks was a sure sign to him that this was a body in rigor mortis.

  Shroud or no Shroud then, a cloth-wrapped, still blood-dripping body—or something along these lines—would have been what Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus left inside Joseph's tomb, just a stone's throw from the Golgotha execution site, as dusk fell on that fateful Friday evening. To all appearances there lay dead on that stone slab a bearded male Jew who even before his undergoing crucifixion had been too weak to carry his cross the full distance to his execution site. An individual who had been brutally beaten by Temple guards, savagely scourged, and subjected to the torture of the ancient world's most barbaric form of capital punishment, crucifixion. An individual who even when he had appeared long dead from all these ordeals had then been stabbed deep into his chest by a professional soldier whose very job—the Romans titled him exactor mortis, or exactor of death—rested on those submitted to him being dead when they left his charge.

  This was the body that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus had secured from any outside interference by their rolling across the tomb entrance a huge boulder (Mark 16:4). Despite this boulder's size, moving it would not have been overly difficult for this pair, even working entirely on their own. As known from tombs of Jesus' time in Jerusalem's immediate environs, the channel cut for the rock's path across the tomb's entrance was typically sloped downward. While the tomb was needed to remain open, a simple stopper stone in the channel served to check the boulder from moving. Upo
n this stone being removed, the boulder rolled effortlessly downward across the entrance. All the difficulty—one demanding the efforts of several strong men—lay with opening it up again.

  During the next thirty-six hours theoretically no one— and certainly not any Jew—would have dared to attempt anything so strenuous. This was because of the day being a Passover Sabbath. Even on a normal Sabbath the Jewish scriptures were absolutely emphatic:

  You shall do no work on that day, neither you nor your son nor your daughter nor your servants, men or women, nor your animals nor the alien living with you. (Exodus 20:10).