Was Christ crucified through the hands or wrists?

[stevejosem]

Some scientists have said that they think crucifixion could only have been done with nails through the wrists and not through the hands. They make this argument based on experiments that they claim to have made on cadavers whose hands would not support the weight of the body when the hands are driven through with nails.

What is the Church’s position on this, if there is one, and what about stigmatics who have the stigmata on their hands? I personally think that it could be possible that they could have first tied ropes around the wrists for extra support and then driven the nails through the hands.

 

[Michelle_Arnold]

The Church’s only position is that Christ was crucified; whether it was done through the hands or through the wrists is a question that can be left to the various scientific disciplines that study such matters.

That said, here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

First, in ancient times, people used the term hand to refer to the entire area of the arm that we now distinguish between the hand and the wrist. Thus, Christ could have been nailed to the cross through the wrists and the Gospel writers would have been correct to say that he was crucified through the hands.

Second, since for many centuries people assumed that Christ was crucified through the palms of his hands, the wounds could have been placed in the palms of stigmatics since that is where they would have been expected to have been placed. Simply because the actual wounds may have been in Christ’s wrists does not mean that God couldn’t have placed the stigmatic wounds of various saints through the palms so that people would better understand that they were meant to be an image of Christ’s crucifixion.