Murder at Golgotha Read online

  Large black-and-blue and reddish purple bruises, lacerations (tears), scratches, welts, and swellings . . . all over the front and back of the victim's body. . . . The victim's breathing would be severely affected because the severe blows to the chest would cause excruciating rib pain and splinting every time he attempted to take a breath. The intercostal muscles, located between the ribs and the back and chest muscles, would be hemorrhagic and the lungs lacerated, badly bruised, and frequently collapsed, all of which would have contributed to the severe pain.

  *—"Pilate then had Jesus taken away and scourged" (John 19:1). How the controversial Shroud preserved in Turin may provide unique forensic information concerning this punishment of Jesus: [A] The back of the body imprint on the Shroud, showing a full-length body covered in dumbbell-shaped marks, seen in close-up [B]. In the foreground [C] is the weapon that the Romans called the flagrum, tipped with metal pellets in the shape of dumbbells. [D] Reconstruction of the pattern of injuries as they would have appeared on the victim's actual body, mirror-reversed because the Shroud imprint is necessarily a mirror-reverse of the body that it theoretically once wrapped.

  But in true Roman usage—as distinct from the Emmerich/Gibson imaginings—scourging, like the antics of picadors and toreadors preceding the matador at a Spanish bullfight, was but a preliminary "softening up" to the real torture that was to follow.

  7

  Sentenced to Death

  WITH OR WITHOUT the bloody excesses of the Gibson movie, Jesus' scourging must have rendered him a very sorry spectacle indeed, wracked with pain, gasping for breath, and covered with great, purplish bruise marks, many no doubt oozing blood from breaks in the skin at each point of impact. Even so, the Roman soldiers who had inflicted this punishment had not finished with him. According to the John testimony, they

  twisted some thorns into a crown and put it on his head and dressed him in a purple robe. They kept coming up to him and saying "Hail, king of the Jews!" and slapping him in the face. (John 19:2-3)

  The Matthew and Mark testimonies likewise describe this same bizarre "crown of thorns" indignity, though Luke curiously omits it. The likelihood is that lying around the soldiers' quarters, where we have envisaged Jesus receiving his scourging, there were quantities of thorn branches. With wood always being a scarce commodity around Jerusalem, the soldiers had probably gathered these as fuel for the fires to keep themselves warm during the cold Jerusalem nights at this time of year, just as there had been fires in the High Priests' courtyard. No doubt some bully boy soldier hit upon the idea of twisting some of the thorn branches into a mock crown, then performing a heavy-handed "coronation" upon this unlikely looking "king of the Jews." For good measure he even threw over the prisoner's bloody shoulders an old cloak, as a "royal robe," to complete his handiwork. In all history, Jesus is the sole individual ever recorded to have received such a mockery, and if only for this reason of singularity, it carries all the hallmarks of its having been a real occurrence.

  Again, the Turin Shroud's enigmatic imprint serves to provide a rather more authentic and credible glimpse of this crowning with thorns than does the Gibson movie's imaginings. On the Shroud image, all around the top of the head area there are puncture wounds from which rivulets of apparent blood have flowed as if from something spiked thrust on the head. On the body imprint's front half there are trickles on the forehead, one in the shape of a "3," as if the brow was furrowed with intense pain at the time. On the back of the head the number and distribution of the rivulets suggests something more like a crudely fastened clump of thorns rather than the neatly plaited circlet often imagined by artists. As pointed out by medical examiner Dr. Fred Zugibe, the human head area claimed to be king of the Jews. The photograph shows the hauntingly lifelike face that is visible on the Turin Shroud when it is viewed in negative. In this form the bloodstains (arrowed) show up in white, and a convincing series of rivulets can be seen all around the forehead, also all around the back of the head area. Forensic specialists, such as the New York medical examiner Dr. Fred Zugibe, have noted that the wounds' extensiveness suggests not the mere neat circlet often imagined by artists but a horrendously prickly clump that was thrust hard onto the scalp to cause the maximum amount of pain.

  *—"They dressed him up in purple, twisted some thorns into a crown and put it on him. And they began saluting him, 'Hail, king of the Jews!'" (Mark 15:17—18). Crowning with thorns was not a normal part of the preliminaries of a Roman crucifixion, and it seems to have been uniquely inflicted upon Jesus because of the allegations that he is covered with the most dense and intricate network of blood vessels and nerve endings. Any plunging of thorn spikes into these, as from the repeated blows to the face and head described in the testimonies, would have triggered severe pains resembling a red-hot poker or electric shock.

  What sort of thorny plant would have been around in first-century Jerusalem to be suitable for such a crown? Lemon trees occasionally throw out from their roots long, pliable shoots bearing vicious thorns, easily twisted into a crown. The most likely plant, however, is the Syrian Christ Thorn (zizyphus spinachristi), a member of the Buckthorn family. This grows between nine and fifteen feet tall, and it has very strong uneven curved spikes, closely spaced and thereby consistent with what can be seen on the Turin Shroud. Another possibility is the thorny acacia (acacia nilotica) which is abundant in Jerusalem's surrounding hills. Amongst the many claimed relics of Jesus scattered around Europe there are odd individual thorns and the occasional crown. Of the latter, the most reputable is one that was kept in Constantinople during the first millennium A.D., then in the mid-thirteenth century was acquired by the saintly French king Louis IX. Louis built the beautiful Sainte-Chapelle in Paris to preserve this relic. But this seems to have long lost its thorns, being essentially just a branch bent into a circle, and no serious deductions can be made from it.

  With the priestly delegation and the Temple guards all still insistent on their remaining outside the Praetorium, Pilate slipped inside the building to catch up on how Jesus had fared under the soldiers' scourging. Seeing Jesus clad only in an old cloak, covered with bloody pellet marks, and with great trickles of blood coursing down his forehead from the mock crown, even he, hardened Roman administrator that he was, seems to have been moved to use this sorry spectacle to try to persuade the priestly delegation that their prisoner had surely suffered enough. According to the John testimony:

  Pilate came outside again and said to them, "Look, I am going to bring him out to you to let you see that I find no case against this man." Jesus then came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said "Here is the man." When they saw him, the chief priests and the guards shouted "Crucify him! Crucify him!" (John 19:4-6)

  Pilate tried several more times to persuade the priests and the guards to relieve him of any further responsibility for executing Jesus. So, why was he not able to follow his own inclinations? The priests would have nothing of it, at this point using their trump card. As the John testimony continues, they told him:

  "If you set him [Jesus] free you are no friend of Caesar's; anyone who makes himself king is defying Caesar." Hearing these words, Pilate had Jesus brought out and seated him on the chair of judgment at a place called the Pavement, in Hebrew Gabbatha. It was the Day of Preparation, about the sixth hour. "Here is your king," said Pilate to the Jews. But they shouted, "Away with him, away with him, crucify him." Pilate said, "Shall I crucify your king?" The chief priests answered, "We have no king except Caesar." So at that point Pilate handed him over to be crucified. . . ." (John 19:12-16)

  Neither this John testimony, nor the equivalent passages in Mark's and Luke's versions, makes any mention of the famous episode of Pilate washing his hands of responsibility for shedding Jesus' blood. This particular scene only occurs in the Matthew testimony, the version that Mel Gibson dramatized in his Passion movie. And it is thereby again only in the Matthew testimony that there occurs the Jewish "crowd"—notably "every one of them"�
��reportedly responding "Let his blood be on us and on our children!" (Matthew 17:25) The terrible aspect of this passage is that repeatedly it has been used over the centuries to fuel anti-Semitism—as an indictment that "the Jews" as an entire people should be regarded as responsible for Jesus' death throughout all time. And by including this episode in his Passion movie Mel Gibson was only perpetuating what may well have been another of those late, anti-Semitic, and historically weak scribal additions to the Matthew testimony.

  For, if the John testimony is followed as the more authoritative (and note how John conscientiously observed the day and the hour; "It was the Day of Preparation, about the sixth hour"), essentially the only people gathered outside Pilate's Praetorium shouting for Jesus' crucifixion that fateful Friday morning were those who had brought Jesus to the place, i.e. "the chief priests and the guard" (John 19:6). There may well have been a large number of these for their own collective security while escorting through the streets a prisoner with a big popular following. But there is no way that they were a representative voice of the entire Jewish people. They were hired lackeys of a clique of high-ranking priests who were acting underhandedly and illegally, even under their own Jewish law, by hustling Jesus off to Pilate without proper trial, then effectively using blackmail to make sure that the Roman administered the death penalty. It is for this reason that the now inevitable execution of Jesus can be, and should be, regarded as nothing less than coldblooded murder, with the High Priests Caiaphas and Annas as the number-one perpetrators.

  Pontius Pilate, having given in and ordered his own soldiers to prepare Jesus for immediate crucifixion, still had one final duty to perform. Throughout the Roman Empire, whenever a prisoner was marched through public streets for execution, it was Roman practice for a placard-type notice to accompany him, detailing for all to see his name and the crime that he had committed. In the case of a crucifixion, this same placard would then be affixed in a clearly visible place on the cross while the prisoner hung on it. It is again the John testimony that alone describes a little tussle between Pilate and the priestly delegation about how this should be worded:

  Pilate wrote out a notice. It ran: "Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews" . . . and the writing was in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. So the Jewish chief priests said to Pilate, "You should not write 'King of the Jews,' but that the man said, 'I am King of the Jews,'" Pilate answered, "What I have written, I have written." (John 19:19-22)

  Given that the notice's first line was in the Jewish language, it is most unlikely that Pilate personally lettered the placard that would actually be carried through the streets. He simply dictated the wording, and then had a scribe write out the trilingual placard.

  A key piece of data for our crime scene investigation may exist in the form of an ancient fragment of walnut wood that is certainly purported to be the remains of this original placard. Preserved in one of Rome's most ancient churches, that of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme ("Holy Cross of Jerusalem"), this came to light there in 1492, after having been overlooked for several centuries. The Santa Croce church is so named because it houses what is claimed to be a piece of Jesus' cross, found by Empress Helena, mother of the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, when she journeyed to Jerusalem in A.D. 327. Her purpose in making the journey was to unearth Jesus' tomb after it had been covered over for two centuries by a Roman temple of Venus. And reputedly, when she indeed found the tomb, there inside was some wood from Jesus' cross, and also the trilingual "Jesus the Nazarene" placard ordered by Pilate.

  Originally painted white with red lettering on it, the placard has certainly suffered considerably from the ravages of time. Nevertheless, three lines of lettering are still distinguishable, the first Hebrew, the second Greek, and the third Latin. Despite one oddity—that the Greek and Latin lines read from right to left, rather than from left to right—there can be no doubt that the original inscription read "Jesus the Nazarene, King of the Jews" in all three languages.

  Inevitably, such a relic, along with so many others of similarly uncertain origins, has long been thought to be too good to be true. However, from recent research by German scholar Carsten Peter Thiede, the possibility of its being authentic has been greatly strengthened. Thiede's specialty is lettering styles as these differ over the centuries, and according to him the style of the Latin and Greek letters strongly matches the fashion of the first century A.D. Thiede sees no great difficulty in the fact that the placard's order of languages (Hebrew, Greek, Latin) differs from that given in the John testimony (Hebrew, Latin, Greek). Anyone's memory might be flaky on such a detail, and a forger would actually be likely to carefully follow, rather than diverge from the John testimony's sequence.

  Particularly interesting is the fact that the letters in the Greek and Latin lines run from right to left. Both in Jesus' time and to this day Jewish writing is not left to right in the way standard among our European language. Jews write from right to left. So did a Jewish scribe, after writing first in his own language (the one that most spectators of the crucifixion would have been able to read), scrawl beneath a word-for-word Greek and Latin translation in the same direction he was used to?

  Whatever the answer, it would be in the company of some placard worded in this way that our victim now began the last walk of his life. . . .

  8

  The Victim's Last Walk

  WAS OUR VICTIM SUBJECTED to any further punishment prior to his crucifixion? Certainly. The mocking "King of the Jews" cloak was removed from Jesus, and his own clothes put back on him. These would inevitably have stuck to his flesh wherever this had already become caked with blood and sweat. He was then made to shoulder the large length of timber on which he would be crucified, and led by the soldiers out of the Praetorium on what would be the last walk of his life.

  At Eastertime every year, a procession of Jerusalem's Christian community re-enacts this walk through the city's streets along a traditional route known as the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows. This follows fourteen "Stations of the Cross," designated by medieval Franciscans as key points of Jesus' journey—where he received his cross, where he had his first fall, where he met his mother, where a woman called Veronica wiped his face, where he suffered his second fall, where he spoke to women of Jerusalem, etc. Several of the commemorated incidents are not found in any of our four testimonies, and were derived from apocryphal stories originating much later. Even so, Roman Catholic churches often have their walls lined with scenes from these Stations, and Mel Gibson followed them faithfully in his Passion movie.

  Crime-scene-wise the uncertainty concerning even the site of Pilate's Praetorium makes it impossible for anyone to know the accuracy of the route followed in today's annual commemoration. The fact that it starts at the site of the Antonia fortress, rather than at the Citadel, makes it unlikely. However, either of the two possible starting points would have resulted in a relatively short walk, probably no more than a third of a mile, to the execution site, which the John testimony specifically describes as "near the city" (John 19:20).

  Both Jerusalem's annual Stations of the Cross procession and Passion portray Jesus as carrying—or attempting to carry—a complete cross for this journey. Was this physically possible? As has been pointed out by Dr. Fred Zugibe, if Jesus had already suffered anything like the excessive beating and the massive blood loss portrayed in Passion, there is no way that he would have been still alive, let alone in any condition to lift such a heavy burden. To be strong enough to carry the weight of a writhing adult male, a full-size cross can hardly have weighed less than 175 to 200 pounds. Even for a squad of soldiers it would have been highly impractical to have to struggle erecting and securing such an awkward object every time there was a prisoner needing to be crucified.

  Particularly given a time when up to two thousand crucifixions might be performed in a single day.

  And the Romans were ever a practical people. As known from the writings of Roman historians, the prescribed procedure was for th
e victim to carry only the patibulum, or crossbeam of the cross. The stipes, or upright—usually a beheaded tree-trunk still rooted in the ground—remained permanently in position, so that the crossbeam carried by the victim could simply be lifted up and dropped into position for each fresh execution. That the upright was a simple tree trunk also makes sense of a later statement by Jesus' disciple Simon Peter that "they killed him by hanging him on a tree" (Acts 10: 39).

  Whether Jesus was somehow lashed to the crossbeam during the walk is unrecorded, though if the Turin Shroud can begin to be considered as possible testimony, this certainly shows abrasions in the shoulder region, as if from carrying the beam across the shoulders. Even a beam weighing around fifty to sixty pounds—again, the likely weight necessary—would have been struggle enough for a prisoner already seriously debilitated from psychological and physical pain, from blood loss, from breathing difficulties caused by all the blows to his chest, and from lack of sleep. The Stations of the Cross tradition has it that Jesus fell several times in the course of his journey. While not a single one of the testimonies actually mentions this, it can certainly be inferred from the Mark and Luke testimonies, and logically it seems highly probable. Both describe how the soldiers had to conscript a bystander, Simon of Cyrene, to shoulder the burden on Jesus' behalf, and to carry it behind him. Also, the Turin Shroud image notably shows hazy but severe damage to the knees.