Murder at Golgotha Read online

  Twice, once for each arm, this lightning bolt would have struck and kept striking. Then the crossbeam had to be lifted up, Jesus hanging from it, and dropped into position on the permanent cross upright. The Gibson Passion movie, envisaging the raising of a huge, entire cross, includes a horrifying sequence of this entire cross, already carrying Jesus, being hauled up with pulleys, then something going wrong, sending cross and occupant crashing face forwards to the ground. Neither history nor our testimonies suggest anything of this kind. The Romans had to carry out too many crucifixions for anything so cumbersome. But in even our suggested arrangement, with four executioners, two either side, probably just manually lifting Jesus and his crossbeam up onto the upright, the pain on the dangling Jesus' part has to have been torture beyond belief. This is why whole Jewish cities would capitulate rather than watch one of their own be subjected to such an ordeal.

  Nor did the torture end there. For, once the victim was in position, with the crossbeam secure on the upright, then his legs had to be secured, just as his arms had been. Since the eleventh century it has been popular among artists to show one of Jesus' feet set on top of the other, then the two fastened by a single nail. To facilitate this arrangement, it has sometimes been envisaged that his feet rested on a special platform that was fastened at foot height to the cross upright. The four testimonies offer absolutely no insights on this, nor do they even include any mention that there were holes in his feet.

  Nonetheless, that foot nailing was a standard crucifixion procedure has been readily enough confirmed from the remains of Jehohanan, the discovery of whose bones at Giv'at ha-Mivtar was mentioned earlier. Because of ultra-orthodox Jews' insistence on the quick reburial of ancient human remains, Jehohanan's bones had to be rapidly reinterred. As a result, the anatomist who studied these, the late Dr. Nicu Haas, had to rush his work, which has given rise to many subsequent disputes over his findings and interpretations. Haas theorized that Jehohanan had been crucified with the single nail through both ankles. He reconstructed a very awkward arrangement for how Jehohanan was affixed to correspond with this. Since his death, Israeli archaeologist Joseph Zias and medical examiner Eliezer Sekeles have hypothesized that the bones transfixed by the nail came from one ankle, not two. They argue that the nail would not even have been long enough to fasten both feet. Their reconstruction is that Jehohanan's feet were first let to dangle either side of the cross upright, and then fastened to these sides by nails hammered through each ankle. And, intriguingly, the Turin Shroud similarly shows a rill of blood, seemingly from a penetrative injury inflicted at ankle height, that seemingly spilled directly onto the cloth at the time of burial.

  *—Was Jesus nailed through the ankles? Throughout history artists have imagined that Jesus was nailed between the tarsal bones of the foot. A common version shows him with one foot placed over the other, requiring just one nail. However, the Turin Shroud [A] shows a spillage of blood falling away from the back of the body in the ankle area. On the front of the body only part of the foot is visible, but a possible arrangement is shown in [C]. Such an arrangement has been independently supported by Jehohanan [E], the only known victim of crucifixion whose remains have been excavated archaeologically. A twelve-centimeter-long nail was found through his ankle [F], and a recent reappraisal by the Israeli specialist Joe Zias has indicated a crucifixion arrangement as shown in the reconstruction [G].

  What would have been the effect of ankle-nailing on our victim? Any nail driven through the ankles would almost surely have been as devastating on Jesus' nerves as the continuing torture that he was suffering already from his entire body weight hanging on the nerves and bones in his wrists. Hopelessly and helplessly, he and his fellow crucified could only have writhed and strained and contorted between these twin sources of unbearable agony, with death a positively longed-for release. This was what crucifixion really involved, and which Jesus—who had done nothing but heal and teach people to lead good lives—had to go through.

  And in this regard the Gibson Passion movie, which showed the crucified's bodies relatively static hanging on the cross, could not have got it more wrong. In this so central scene to the story, Gibson actually failed to deliver anything like Golgotha's full horror, where that horror was historically and medically most justified. Assuming, of course, that a cinema audience could have borne to watch any filmed recreation of such uncompromisingly appalling human agony.

  10

  Cross-Check on Death

  DID OUR VICTIM ACTUALLY DIE? According to the testimonies, Jesus hung enduring such atrocious suffering for several hours, the "King of the Jews" placard mockingly displayed over his head. Passersby and even his fellow victims jeered at him. They taunted him to prove that he could work miracles by freeing himself from his present predicament. Almost all his disciples, if they were present at all, appear to have stayed back at a safe distance. Presumably they were terrified that if they ventured too close they might be snatched and forced to undergo a similar fate. All the testimonies agree that the several women who had accompanied him from Galilee were present, mostly watching from a respectable distance. Described as closer at hand—indeed close enough for some dialogue to be possible (John 19:26)—were his mother, her sister, and Mary of Magdala, the Galilean woman whom he had healed of a psychiatric illness. The only male definitely by their side was the same unnamed disciple earlier referred to, in the context of the Last Supper, as the one Jesus loved. He was almost certainly the same as the disciple "known to the High Priest," present during Jesus' interrogation at Caiaphas's house, and the "John" reporting these events in the testimony of that name.

  Considering that crucifixion involved no obvious, direct damage to vital organs, "only" relatively minor piercing of wrists and ankles, it can sometimes be difficult to understand how it could ever have killed anyone. In the light of the physical dynamics described in the last chapter, that question has at least been partly answered already. Nonetheless, a question that was asked back at the time of the original events, and which still gets asked today, concerns whether Jesus' death can actually have been from the effects of crucifixion? And if so, how and why he should have died so quickly? As observed from modern-day experiments, one effect that quickly shows up whenever a living volunteer is suspended crucifixion-style, even from "comfortable" straps rather than traumatic nails, is sweating every bit as excessive as the bloodshed in Gibson's Passion movie. New Yorker Dr. Fred Zugibe conducted one such experiment, setting up a cross in his office and monitoring all the physical symptoms suffered by his volunteers. As he has described these:

  The chest appeared fixed, and abdominal (diaphragmatic) breathing became very obvious. . . . Between six and eight minutes after the beginning of suspension, a marked sweating became manifest in most individuals, which encompassed the entire body and in some cases actually drenched the volunteers, running off the toes to form a puddle on the floor.

  Los Angeles-based artist Isabel Piczek, who sometimes needs life models to pose as if crucified for the huge murals that she paints for West Coast U.S. churches and cathedrals, has similarly noted such effects, even when the model is held solely by ropes to the arms, leaving his feet free but standing on tiptoe. Again the sweating is astonishingly copious, accompanied by chest expansion, breathing difficulties, distension of the abdomen, and shrinkage of the genitals. The ends of the fingers and toes are seen to turn first white, then blue.

  Given such extensive fluid loss, and with no known compensatory intake, we might expect Jesus to have become extremely dehydrated, and this is precisely the condition that is described in the John testimony:

  He said: "I am thirsty." A jar full of sour wine stood there; so putting a sponge soaked in the wine on a hyssop stick, they held it up to his mouth. After Jesus had taken the wine he said "It is fulfilled," and bowing his head he gave up his spirit. (John 19:29-30)

  One interesting aspect of this passage is that it provides virtually our only real clue concerning how high Jesus was elevat
ed on the cross. His mouth was clearly too high for anyone standing at ground level to have been able to reach directly up to it. This means that the arms of the crossbeam were probably at least eight or nine feet above ground level.

  But the other, and inevitably more crucial aspect of the same passage, is that several conspiracy theorists have suggested the sour wine to have been some kind of drug. Among the most prominent and plausible of these theorists was Hugh J. Schonfield, whose Passover Plot was a bestseller in 1965. As Schonfield and others have noted, Jesus' "giving up his spirit" occurred suspiciously quickly after the supposedly reviving "sour wine" has been offered him. Besides John's testimony to this effect, Matthew and Mark report it also. So, had a drug earlier been mixed into the wine as part of a prearranged "plot" to send Jesus into a deep coma, thereby making him appear dead and helping him to escape any too-prolonged suffering on the cross? Was the plan then to whisk him away as quickly as possible to a tomb where, under cover of darkness and the obligatory inertia of the Passover Sabbath, he could be secretly revived? Could some circumstance of this kind lie behind the subsequent, otherwise incredible claim that Jesus "rose from the dead"?

  The problem for any such "plot," a problem that should surely have been apparent enough to anyone planning to help Jesus in such a manner, is that the Bomans were far too experienced and efficient executioners to be easily duped by any such ploy. Who actually held up the vinegar-soaked sponge is unclear, Luke referring to the soldiers, the other testimonies, such as that of John, referring to "they." Certainly the soldiers were most unlikely to have drugged the vinegar, and the same is probably the case for any bystanders. As for Jesus' followers, events happened so fast in the wake of the arrest in Gethsemane, and they were so obviously terrified, that any presence of mind to prepare some kind of drugged drink—even if a formula were known to them—is highly unlikely.

  What happened once Jesus had died on the cross? It is again the John testimony, alone of the four, that defines some of the religious sensibilities surrounding what would happen to the bodies of the three "criminals" being crucified this particular day:

  To avoid the bodies remaining on the cross during the Sabbath—since that Sabbath was a day of special solemnity—the Jews asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken away. Consequently, the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with him, and then of the other . . . (John 19:31-34)

  In non-Jewish Roman provinces, individuals undergoing crucifixion might simply be left hanging on the cross until they died, an ordeal that could in some instances last up to three days. But in the Jewish world any such leaving of a body on the Sabbath was regarded as an offence against God. Burials had to be performed quickly for much the same reason. And it was characteristic of the Romans to show respect towards such religious scruples amongst the variegated peoples whom they had conquered.

  Their purpose in breaking the crucified's legs, therefore, would seem to have been to hasten their deaths, presumably by stopping the terrible seesawing between one source of pain and another that crucifixion was all about. Utterly exhausted, and unable any longer to gain any relief by pushing themselves up by the living wounds in their feet, the victims would simply die of the extra strains and stresses on top of ones that had already seemed unendurable. Perhaps the end came from heart failure, perhaps from asphyxiation. Medical examiners such as Fred Zugibe, who have specially researched the physiology of crucifixion, disagree between themselves on such issues because of the nonavailability of any practical way to test the Roman procedure in its full horror.

  As earlier noted, the practice in Jesus' time was to count the start of each day from sundown on what to us would have been the day before. The start of the Passover Sabbath, when all work had to cease, would thereby be heralded by the appearance of the first star that evening. According to the John gospel, because the two robbers were still alive as this deadline began looming, their legs were broken to make sure that they died in due time. That this was quite a commonplace measure is strongly suggested by the skeleton of the Jehohanan crucifixion victim, whose leg bones similarly seem to have been fractured by a severe blow while he was still alive.

  Did they follow this procedure with Jesus? According to the John gospel, the four Roman soldiers directly responsible for carrying out the crucifixions, when they came to Jesus, "saw that he was already dead" (John: 19:33). We need have little surprise about this. Even before he had left Gethsemane, Jesus seems to have been in a physically weakened state as a result of contemplating the terrible sufferings he was about to undergo. His lessened capacity to struggle on the cross may have been because he had suffered more preliminary mistreatment than had the two robbers or bandits crucified with him. Whatever the reason, this passage in the John testimony carries no hint of any qualifying phraseology such as that Jesus "seemed to be already dead." It is quite emphatic that he was dead. It also states that this was the opinion of the experienced four-man squad of Roman soldiers who were responsible for ensuring that everyone who was entrusted to them left them in that condition.

  Even so, the Romans apparently had a fail-safe double-check, just to make sure of the total effectiveness of their procedures. As the John testimony continues:

  So, instead of breaking his legs one of the soldiers pierced his side with a lance; and immediately there came out blood and water. (John 19:34)

  Our investigation has paid a lot of credence to John, the one testimony writer whom we have consistently sensed to have been a direct eyewitness of the events, at least in respect to these "last hours." He is the only one of the four testimony authors to mention piercing with the lance on the part of the Roman soldier. It can only have had one purpose, to deliver a blow that was itself lethal, just in case there could be any doubt about Jesus being truly dead. Much as today's armed police are taught to aim their guns at the chest to stop an attacker instantly (and even with today's medicine, frequently fatal consequences), so Roman military trainers taught their foot soldiers to aim their lances sub alas, i.e., in the chest below the armpits, for almost certainly exactly the same reason.

  Clinically, the John testimony's description of blood and water spilling from Jesus' body is interesting. That any fluid should come from a dead body in which the heart is not beating has to mean that the lance was plunged into the right side of the body. Because of the direction the heart pumps, the left side of the body would have been empty. The "water" is readily explicable as from pericardial fluid that accumulated around the heart from the severe assaults on the chest sustained during the scourging. This is corroborated by the image on the Turin Shroud, which likewise shows the right side as that where the lance entered, together with a large stream of blood and watery fluid between the fifth and sixth ribs. A lance aimed from that direction would have hit the heart. So, if Jesus was not dead beforehand, there can be no doubt that he would have died very quickly from this particular injury.

  We now have a dead body awaiting disposal. From all the testimonies it would appear that Jesus' body, along with those of his two companions, hung very lifeless-looking on Golgotha for some long while, awaiting someone to take charge of it to give it a decent burial. In the case of Jesus, even when that someone stepped forward, there was a delay while the necessary formalities were carried out for obtaining Pilate's permission. These formalities included Pilate sending a centurion to Golgotha to make a treble check that Jesus really was dead before he was prepared to release the body. Anyone who tries to argue for Jesus not having died from the crucifixion procedure therefore has to argue for the administration of some as yet unidentified coma-inducing drug, for a Roman soldier who had a very bad aim at a stationary target, and for incompetence on the part of several responsible individuals whom we would expect to have been highly experienced at diagnosing death.

  *—The evidence that Jesus genuinely died on the cross. According to anatomists, the bloodstain on the Turin Shroud [A] indicates an injury to the chest from a bladed
weapon thrust between the fifth and sixth ribs. Not only would such an injury have pierced the heart, the American physician Dr. Anthony Sava has a shown that the blood released would have been accompanied by a watery fluid [B], exactly as described in the John testimony, 19:34-35: "One the soldiers pierced his side with a lance, and immediately there came out blood id water. This is the evidence of one who saw it—true evidence . . ."

  Even so, there is a curiosity in the case of this particular Galilean crucified on Golgotha some time around the year A.D. 30. It is that the person whom now all four testimonies describe as stepping forward to take charge of the burial of his body was neither one of the disciples nor his mother Mary, nor his local friend Lazarus, nor anyone referred to earlier in the four testimonies. So who exactly was this mysterious newcomer funeral director? Where did he take the body? And what kind of burial did he give Jesus?