**Thanks for the informative article.
Medical research using cadavers has proved that nails in the palms will not support the weight of a human body. The nails will tear through the hands.
The wrist, however, has strong ligaments, and a nail there will not tear out. The Aramaic word for hand also included the wrist.
Archeological evidence indicates that the nails were driven into Jesus’ wrists. That same evidence also shows the direction of that blood flowed from His wrists.
It must also be noted that we have a reasonably accurate conception of what Jesus’ face looked like. **
This was a theory popularized by Dr. Pierre Barbet in the 1930s. The problem with the wrist theory, however, is that during his experiments (which involved the use of amputated limbs and human cadavers) you might say that there was something flawed in Barbet’s methods, which led him to the wrong conclusion.
What Barbet did was essentially use a single amputated arm, drive a nail through its palm, and suspend an 88-pound weight from the elbow. The nail did tear through the hand after ten minutes. However, the late Dr. Frederick Zugibe argued that the results were skewed for a number of reasons:
(1) Barbet’s theory was based on the
tension formula - which is applicable only to a free-hanging person. In other words, Barbet’s theory (that the hand would rip off the nail when driven through the palm) would only be true if we suppose that the person crucified was only nailed through the palms - he is left dangling, with his feet not nailed or tied to the upright.
What would happen if:
INDENT The victim’s hands were not nailed, but tied?
(2) The victim was resting or sitting on some kind of support - which would help relieve the pull of gravity?*
(3) The victim’s feet or legs were fixed in some manner to the vertical post?
(4) Any combination of the above?
- What we do know from ancient sources is that at least in some crucifixions, a sort of ledge or peg is attached halfway down the upright post, wherein the crucified person could ‘sit’, thus relieving tension to an extent. (You might notice this support depicted in the artworks in my last post.) Some Church Fathers called this the ‘horn’ (cornu) of the cross, but it’s more commonly known nowadays as sedile or ‘seat’.
(2) Barbet conducted the experiment for one time only, using a single arm. He didn’t attempt to replicate it, which Zugibe argues makes it statistically insignificant and invalid.
(3) We don’t know the arm’s provenance - Barbet never mentioned it in detail. Zugibe wonders whether the arm might have been gangrenous; if so, the results would have been skewed, since in
vascular obstructive disease the tissues would be less resistant to the force.[/INDENT]
Excluding the Shroud, we don’t really have anything to suggest how the hands would have been nailed to the cross. The only crucifixion-related archaeological evidence we have is a 1st century guy’s heelbone with a nail driven through it, suggesting that nails were driven through his ankles.
(And even then, just because this man was crucified in this particular way doesn’t mean that Jesus was crucified in
exactly the same way as he was. There was no ‘standard procedure’ for crucifixion, actually: the only thing that was constant in crucifixions was that there was some kind of shaming the victim: he was whipped or beaten, and is naked when hung up on the cross. It wasn’t even necessary for the victim to carry the cross, just like in Jesus’ case: in some cases, it was already set up beforehand - all the executioners had to do was lead the condemned person to where it is.)
Even the Shroud itself is not as firm an evidence as it first seems: it only shows where the nail went out, not where it was driven in - and even then, only in one arm. Just because the nail stuck out through the wrist area (in one arm) doesn’t necessarily mean that the nail was driven through the wrist.
