Murder at Golgotha Read online

  It is true of every murder investigation that there will always be a certain amount of misinformation, false rumors, and mistaken ideas that will muddy the data before the police find what really happened. Jesus' walk to the crucifixion site has given rise to a particularly famous tall tale, that of the "Veronica" cloth. According to the most popular of several variations, a Jerusalem woman standing in the crowd that lined the streets as Jesus toiled past was so moved with compassion that she rushed out to wipe his face with her veil. The image of his sweating, bleeding face was then miraculously imprinted on the veil. The story appears in the Stations of the Cross, and was a popular theme with medieval and Renaissance artists. Mel Gibson dramatized it as part of his Passion movie. There is even a relic claimed to be the true cloth of Veronica preserved in St. Peter's in Rome.

  Our investigation fails to establish the veracity of this story. The problem is that the Veronica story is entirely absent from the four testimonies, and in the form just described does not appear until the Middle Ages. It seems to have arisen from a copy of the Turin Shroud face that was made in Constantinople in the tenth or eleventh century, as a gift for the Pope in Rome, thereafter becoming the cloth preserved in St. Peter's. In Latin, this copy would have been described as a vera icon, or "true likeness." And as memories of its origin faded, so began the confusion that this was the name of the person who had owned the cloth, bringing into being the myth of Veronica and her veil. It is a story that we can confidently dismiss as a fiction with no relevance at all for Jesus' true journey to our crime scene proper, Golgotha, the Place of the Skull.

  *—"Then . . . carrying his own cross he went out to the Place of the Skull or, as it is called in Hebrew, Golgotha . . ." (John 19:17). Not only would Jesus have been too weakened by the scourging to carry the huge, full cross featured in Mel Gibson's movie Passion of the Christ, such carrying of a complete cross is unlikely historically. Victims of Roman crucifixion normally carried just the crossbeams of their crosses, as seen in the inset, top right. The cross uprights, often the trunks of trees still rooted in the ground, remained permanently in position.

  So where was Golgotha? In Hebrew the word golgothe means skull. This translates into Latin as "Calvaria," hence the use of Calvary as an alternative name for the site. When Emperor Constantine's mother Helena made her visit to Jerusalem in A.D. 327, it was she who ordered the demolition of a temple of Venus built over the site, and who thereby found both Jesus' tomb and the Golgotha hillock on which he had been crucified. Both locations, being relatively close to each other, her son Constantine then enshrined both locations in a single, great Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Though this went through many destructions and rebuildings as Muslims and Crusaders later fought over the Holy Land, Jerusalem's present Church of the Holy Sepulchre undoubtedly occupies the sites that were first rediscovered by Empress Helena.

  But did Helena, three centuries after the original events, find the true locations? Not according to British general Charles Gordon, famed for his last stand at Khartoum. Visiting Jerusalem in 1883, Gordon noted that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—as we have seen, incorporating both the crucifixion and the tomb sites—lay within the city's ancient walls. This clearly violated the gospel information that Jesus was crucified and buried outside these walls. Wandering around Jerusalem's outskirts, Gordon found a skull-shaped hillock and an ancient rock-cut tomb that he duly pronounced to have been the true crucifixion and burial sites. These can still be visited to this day at Jerusalem's "Garden Tomb'' visitor attraction.

  However, what Gordon could not know at that time was that the walls that he saw and supposed to have belonged to the era of Jesus were in fact not built until a decade after Jesus' lifetime. Between the years A.D. 41 and 44, Herod Agrippa built for Jerusalem a so-called Third Wall. This was the one seen by Gordon; it enclosed the area of Jesus' crucifixion and burial. But archaeologists have since traced the line of the so-called Second Wall, and from their findings the crucifixion and burial sites enshrined in today's Church of the Holy Sepulchre quite definitely lay outside this in Jesus' time. They thereby readily conform to the John testimony's information that the place where Jesus was crucified was outside the city, but sufficiently near that many passing by were readily able to read the placard describing him as "King of the Jews" (John 19:20).

  And if from these findings we can be reasonably confident that the "Golgotha" housed within today's Church of the Holy Sepulchre was the Golgotha on which Jesus was crucified, it immediately makes nonsense of another sequence in the Gibson Passion movie. In the movie Jesus and his cross-bearer, Simon of Cyrene, are seen struggling up a horrendously steep hill set some considerable distance outside Jerusalem. The Golgotha housed within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was nothing of this kind. Even though to accommodate it within a church Constantine the Great's engineers and architects undoubtedly deprived us of any real feel for the original landscape, it cannot have been more than a relatively low hillock standing a few paces outside the walls. There can be little doubt that it was the regular place where crucifixions were carried out. A near-contemporary author, Quintilian, specifically described the Romans as choosing to carry out their crucifixions in well-frequented thoroughfares, so that the greatest number of people could "watch and experience the horror of it." And more crucifixions were carried out in Judaea than in any other Roman province. There can be little doubt that the hillock Golgotha, with its proximity to Jerusalem's walls, would have been chosen so that citizens could see what took place and be suitably deterred from committing the same crime as displayed on the victim's placard.

  Ironically, what the Gibson movie actually failed to do, for all the excessive brutality and gore with which it represented the scourging, was actually show the crucifixion itself—the central point of Jesus' sufferings—in that full horror. As a punishment, crucifixion was reserved solely for Roman society's lowest of the low, slaves, traitors, and rebels, never for a Roman citizen. Roman historians viewed the punishment with such revulsion that all too few left any detailed description. Nonetheless evident from the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus is that even the threat of a crucifixion could be sufficient to subjugate a whole city. Josephus described how a particularly well-liked Jew was captured by the Romans during the Jewish revolt one generation after Jesus' death. The Romans were besieging the Jew's city, which he had slipped out of to carry out a raid on them, only to be caught. So the Romans simply set up a cross just outside the city's walls, and showed every sign that they were about to crucify their captive. The city actually surrendered rather than watch him be subjected to that particular form of death.

  So what exactly was it about crucifixion that was so horrifying?

  9

  Cold-Blooded Murder

  "CRUCIFY HIM! Crucify him!" Those were the demands that the High Priest's delegation had so enthusiastically shouted to Pilate, urging their guard employees to ask for the same. Well, now they were about to get their way.

  The Roman politician Cicero called crucifixion "the most cruel and terrible of punishments," one normally reserved for slaves, thieves, and rebels. At least Jesus was not to be alone enduring it. According to the John testimony "they (the Romans) crucified him with two others, one on either side, Jesus being in the middle" (John 19: 18). But quite evident from the Matthew, Mark, and Luke versions is that these two others were either terrorists or thieves, depending on which translation is preferred. Certainly they were individuals who had been properly tried, found guilty, and sentenced for crimes recognized in any society as deserving punishment. Their killing was legal capital punishment. That of Jesus was cold-blooded murder.

  What was the crucifixion procedure as carried out by Romans? The first stage was for the victim to be stripped of his clothing. Given all the blood and sweat with which Jesus' body would have been caked when his clothing was returned to him after the scourging, this was all part of the torture. We all know the pain when even a small bandage is pulled sharply away from
our skin. Imagine how many times worse this would have been when the "bandaging" was full-length clothing.

  Was our victim clothed or naked for the crucifixion? Stripping the victim fully naked, as the Roman procedure demanded, was not only humiliating for the person, it offended Jewish sensibilities rather worse than other peoples. The Jewish scriptures forbade nudity in any public place, and none of the four testimony authors can even bring themselves to describe this removal of Jesus' clothes. This can only be inferred from their descriptions of the four-man execution squad dividing his garments between them (John 19:23). To this day, crucifixes in Christian churches almost invariably represent Jesus with a loincloth. This is partly because in the middle of the sixteenth century Pope Paul IV, reacting to the full nudities in Michelangelo's Last Judgment (which he ordered to be covered over), expressly forbade that anything of this kind should ever again appear in Christian art. Mel Gibson, despite all his zeal to be ultrarealistic and truthful in his Passion movie, likewise shrank from going to the lengths of his actor being fully naked for the crucifixion scene. But in real life history the Romans intended that any crucifixion victim should undergo the fullest humiliation. And Jesus most graphically demonstrated his preparedness for humiliation when, slavelike, he had insisted on washing his disciples' feet less than twenty-four hours earlier.

  The next stage of the crucifixion procedure was the nailing of the victim to the wood of the cross. To carry the weight of an adult body that cross would have demanded some strong nails—heavy and at least six inches long. No problem for the Romans, who were proficient iron workers. At a Roman legionary base, Inchtuthil, in what is today Scotland, near to the Roman empire's farthest borders, British archaeologists found a hoard of three-quarters of a million nails dating to within two generations of Jesus' lifetime. When the Empress Helena made her discovery of Jesus' tomb, among its contents were the nails reputedly used to hang Jesus. At least two of what were reputably four nails were brought back to Rome to the same Santa Croce church that preserves the "King of the Jews" placard. One of these, of suitably convincing size and shape, was "rediscovered" with the placard in 1492, and it continues to be housed there in a typically ornate reliquary.

  Of the four executioners' task of actually driving nails into Jesus' body, again the testimony writers cannot bring themselves to say anything. This atrocity can only be inferred from the fact that John, reporting Jesus' appearance to his disciples after his death, quotes the disciple Thomas speaking of "the holes that the nails made in his [Jesus] hands." (John 20:25). As a result of this, ever since the very earliest known artist's depiction of Jesus' crucifixion—created a century after crucifixion had been banned throughout the Roman Empire—there has been a widespread assumption that Jesus was nailed through the palms of the hands. Almost every church crucifix shows this. And in Gibson's Passion movie the actor playing Jesus was nailed likewise, it reportedly being Gibson's own hand that is seen in the close-up driving a nail into actor Jim Caviezel's palm.

  But is the palm the point that the Romans would actually have chosen for holding the full weight of a perhaps 170-pound adult, male body writhing in pain throughout the crucifixion procedure? Not so, according to modern-day medical experiments. These have shown that the flesh of the hand is insufficiently strong to avoid it being torn through by the body weight and the frenetic struggling that would inevitably have accompanied this.

  Not so, also, according to the remains of the only known, certain victim of a Roman crucifixion so far discovered, a Jew in his late twenties called Jehohanan, whose bone box, carved on the outside with his name, was found by Israeli archaeologists in 1968. When developers were bulldozing at Giv'at ha-Mivtar in northern Jerusalem they opened up a complete cemetery dating from around Jesus' time. Clearly identifying Jehohanan's bones as those of a crucifixion victim was a large nail, almost six and a half inches long, that had been driven straight through his ankles. And of no less interest were scratches to the bones at the wrist end of his forearms. Seemingly from the nails that had been used to suspend him, these showed that the Romans, with their long experience of crucifixions, recognized that when you nailed the arms you needed the strength of bone rather than flesh alone to support the weight of a body on the cross.

  *—"Unless I can see the holes that the nails made in his hands ..." (the disciple Thomas in John 20:25). Artists since as early as the fourth century a.d. have imagined that Jesus was nailed through the palms of his hands and that his hands were fastened to the front of the cross. However, the forearm area on the Shroud of Turin [A] clearly indicates a major blood flow issuing from a point between the bones of the wrist [B]. This is independently supported by the only known victim of crucifixion to have been archaeologically excavated, whose lower forearm bone bears a distinctive indentation [C] (arrowed) as if from the chafing of a nail. The direction of the blood flows on the Shroud, and their intact appearance, also suggests the angle the arms assumed during crucifixion [D], and that they may have been fastened to the cross from the back of the hand. The illustration [E] shows the appearance of one of the nails claimed to have been found in Jesus' tomb on its rediscovery in a.d. 326.

  Also seeming to offer significant insights—this time specifically in respect of the crucifixion of Jesus—is the image on the Shroud of Turin. Even before the discovery of Jehohanan's remains, this had been recognized as showing its theoretical occupant to have been nailed through the wrists rather than the palms. From as early as the 1930s some highly respected international medical experts have tossed around some of the finer points of detail arising from this deduction. For instance the side of the forearms that we see on the Shroud is the back of the hand, not the palm side. Trickles of blood flowing down these forearms seem to have come from a wound at the bending fold part of the wrist. This has led Dr. Fred Zugibe to suggest that the nail could still have been driven through the palm, but obliquely, so that it exited through the wrists. In arguing for this, Zugibe seems to want to avoid rejecting history's many stigmatics who have displayed Jesus' wounds in their palms rather than their wrists. However, as stigmatics have widely diverged between themselves on many other aspects of their wounds (which often match those on their favorite crucifix), this is not a particularly serious consideration.

  The one sure common deduction from all the medical and archaeological insights, one flying in the teeth of fifteen centuries of artists' tradition, is that it would have been via the wrists rather than the palms that Jesus' body would have been nailed to the cross. But did this nailing start from the palm side, as has almost universally been imagined because of the assumption that Jesus had his back to the cross? Or did the nailing start with the back-of-the-hand side of the wrist uppermost? As an Australian medical examiner, the late Dr. Victor Webster, has pointed out from his studies of the Shroud's bloodstains, the blood that we see issuing from the wound on the back side of the wrist shows no sign of any rubbing or abrading. Yet we would surely expect this if the back of the arms had been against the cross. This leads to two possible scenarios:

  1. Jesus was actually made to face the cross, rather than to have his back to it. In Pozzuoli, Italy, there is an early graffito of a crucifixion which seems to support such an arrangement;

  or

  2. While Jesus had his back to the cross, his arms were fastened by a nail driven through the back of his wrists into the back of the crossbeam, but with his body otherwise facing forwards. He would thereby have looked as if he was carrying the crossbeam tied across his shoulders, as he may well have looked at the start of the journey to Golgotha—except that he was now nailed to this cross beam and hung suspended from it.

  This latter possibility, an entirely new suggestion offered here for the first time, is based on a curious piece of evidence brought to light by certain threads from the Turin Shroud. These were removed in 1988 by Italian microscopist Professor Giovanni Riggi, the scientist authorized to provide the sample of Shroud linen divided between the three laboratories which carri
ed out the carbon-dating test that same year. According to Riggi, he had obtained the then Cardinal of Turin's permission to take and use these threads for his own researches, and in the early 1990s he made some of these available to a Texas-based physician, Dr. Leoncio Garza-Valdes, to further his research into the Shroud.

  One of these samples came from one of the "crown of thorns" bloodstains in the back of the head section of the Shroud imprint. And on examining this under the microscope, Garza-Valdes found a minute fragment of oak embedded in the blood glob. Obviously dependent on the Shroud being genuine, such a fragment strongly suggests that it came from Jesus' crossbeam, and that that crossbeam was of oak. It also means that the back of Jesus' head has to have been hard against this crossbeam, necessitating that he faced forward while on the cross. Though such a possibility has to remain theoretical because of the unofficial way that Garza-Valdes obtained his samples, it certainly supports the second of the two alternative crucifixion arrangements suggested above.

  Given this arrangement, Jesus was very likely made to lie flat on the ground, face driven into the earth, the crossbeam roped across his shoulders, as his arms were forced into the right position and the nails were driven into each wrist. This would have given the execution squad maximum hold over him as they performed a procedure bound to cause him to convulse otherwise uncontrollably. It would also have helped muffle his equally uncontrollable screams, as his whole body seared with one of the most unbearable of all pains, sharp metal drilling into a major nerve. While medical examiners differ between each other on some minor points of detail, there is general agreement between them that the driving in of the nail would have hit the median nerve, causing, in Dr. Fred Zugibe's words, one of the worst pains known to man, which physicians call causalgia. Soldiers who experienced shrapnel wounds to the median nerve during World War I often went into profound shock if the pain was not promptly relieved. . . . [It] was unbearable, burning, and incessant, like a lightning bolt traversing the arm.