Hands-wrist crucifixion question

[AdoroTeDevote]

If Christ was supposedly nailed on his wrists rather than His hands, why does He say to Doubting Thomas to stick his fingers into His Hands?

 

[JulianN]

The word hand also covers the wrist area.

 

[BartholomewB]

The word “hand” can include the wrist, even in English. Think of “handcuffs.” Or do you call them “wristcuffs”?

 

[Dan_Defender]

The Shroud of Turin shows that the nails were most likely through Destot’s space:

 

[DaveBj]

The original language of the New Testament was Greek, and in that language the word translated “hand” can mean anything from the elbow down.

(Be grateful the original language wasn’t Russian; the word ruka covers anything from the shoulder to the hand itself.)

D

 

[Hugh_Farey]

The language used to describe the position of the nails during Christ’s crucifixion can indeed be interpreted to include some way up the forearm. To say that the palms are specified is unjustified. However, since the Shroud of Turin only shows the back of the hand, the supposed entry position is not at all easy to define. The French anatomist Pierre Barbet, in the 19th century, decided that the nail had worked its way through the “Space of Destot” (above), while Fred Zugibe, a forensic pathologist in New York, went for either the point where G,F, and A (in DD’s diagram above) meet, or the space between G,F and the two phalanges above them (3). Some Italian pathologists go for the point where A, B and the radius (1), meet, and others have gone for the space between 2 and 1. There fact is that there has been no consensus, even among ‘expert’ pathologists, as to where, precisely, an indeterminate splodge on the vague image of the back of a hand might have originated.