Indistinguishable - "that is right out"
1. Jesus was beaten until the bones were visible, spat on, cursed, rejected by every friend he had.
2. Your guy was probably surrounded by many loved ones and given any medicines to stop pain and anxiety needed.
3. Jesus felt every ounce of pain of his torture.
4. You guy was not conscious of the surgical operation at all.
5. Jesus refused even the wine/gall that was a very mild anesthetic held up to him on a stick and sponge.
6. Your guy had his choice of juice.
7. Jesus only had two choices to hang from the nails in his arms and suffocate or to stand on the nail through his heal. Most alternated between the two.
8. Your guy was in a hospital bed after his painless surgery and apparently in a blissful coma for 3 days. With every comfort possible provided.
9. Jesus was thorn in a cave and sealed shut.
His pain was only going to get worse for the next 3 days.
I have had facial reconstructive surgery twice (I guess I was that ugly). I would rather have 100 more than to spend 2 hours on the cross.
Jesus' ordeal just got worse after death. The bible says he went to hell for 3 days. It depends which version of view of hell you subscribe to. But in any description you are infinitely separated from God and all God comes with, love, contentment, joy, etc......... It is worse than hanging out with those death eaters from Harry Potter. This was the primary sacrifice. And it occurred to a man who voluntary surrendered all these after having enjoyed them from eternity past.
Also remember this. There is no necessity that Jesus physically suffer the worst possible pain wee can imagine. Just that he suffered something horrific and sufficient.
I will conclude with a coroners report of crucifixion. One of the least graphic ones.
The
JAMA study led McKeating to the classic text in the field,
A Doctor at Calvary, an exhaustive account written by French Catholic surgeon Pierre Barbet. Barbet completed his book in 1949 after decades of research.
McKeating praises both studies for their scholarship and their unflinching care.
"Anyone who studies the matter has to start with these sources," he said. "But keep in mind that it is a start. As we advance in medicine, we are able to learn still more about our Lord's passion."
How did crucifixion usually happen? Applying their medical knowledge to the historical data, doctors such as McKeating, Barbet and the
JAMA team have attempted to reconstruct the events.
Maximum pain
The ancient Romans had a special genius for torture. It helped them keep order in a vast empire. The public spectacle of extreme suffering repeated with some regularity served as a deterrent to would-be rebels and insurgents.
Crucifixion was the utmost refinement of the Roman art of torture. The Jewish historian Josephus called it "the most wretched of deaths." It was designed to cause the most pain in the most parts of the body over the longest period of time.
Crucifixion was humiliating, too, so it was usually reserved for slaves, lower-class criminals or those whose crimes were especially heinous. The stripped man was exposed, naked, to a boorish crowd that delighted in such spectacles. They cast stones at him, spat at him, jeered at him.
The end began when executioners extended the condemned man's arms and bound them to a wooden beam. Sometimes, they would also drive nails through the man's wrists at the highly sensitive median nerve. The executioner relied on the element of surprise for the first hammer blow. The victim was unlikely ever to have experienced such pain before. It was "the most unbearable pain that a man can experience," Barbet concluded.
Nailing the second arm, however, could pose a problem, because the nervous system would instinctively recoil from any repetition of that pain. The executioner would need to struggle against an arm rigidly resistant to his efforts. All of this wrangling, involuntary on the part of the victim, would intensify the pain in the arm already nailed.
The beam then was attached to a pole. Every shift of the beam renewed the pain in the median nerve. But all of that was just a prelude to the real torture of crucifixion.
The victim found himself suspended above the ground, his body slumped forward, his knees bent and his feet positioned as if he were standing on tiptoe. That position made it almost impossible for him to draw a breath.
"Crucifixion stretches the chest cavity open," McKeating explained, "and the weight of the body pulls down on the diaphragm so the lungs are kept open. It requires great effort to breathe in and even greater effort to exhale which is normally a fairly passive process."
The victim could not breathe inward or outward without lifting his body up by the nails in his wrists and pushing up on the nail in his feet. With every breath, then, he felt the coarse metal tearing at his nerves.
Gradually, his limbs cramped and weakened. As he was less able to lift himself up, he began, slowly, to suffocate.
A victim of crucifixion alternated between the panicked sense of asphyxiation and the searing pain of the nails in his flesh. Relief from one inevitably brought about the other.
In a strong man, this could go on for many hours, even days. If the Romans wanted to accelerate the process, they would break the victim's legs so he could no longer push himself upward to take a breath.
Even before the cross
"Jesus was probably a strong man," McKeating said. "He was relatively young, He worked hard, and He tended to travel by foot. But by the time He reached Calvary, He had undergone many hours of preliminary tortures that alone might have killed him."
In the Garden of Gethsemane, "His sweat became like drops of blood falling to the ground" (Lk 22:44). The
JAMA article, following Barbet, attributes this to a phenomenon called hematidrosis or hemohidrosis hemorrhaging into the sweat glands. This is a rare condition that occurs in people at the extremes of human emotion. It leaves the skin very tender and highly sensitive to pain.
Jesus would have keenly felt every blow as His captors "mocked him and beat him" (Lk 22:63). The beatings continued through long hours in which He was also forced to walk from one interrogation to another before the Sanhedrin, before Pilate, before Herod and again before Pilate. The
JAMA research concludes that He walked two-and-a-half miles during that sleepless night.
Pilate ordered Jesus to be flogged, and Roman flogging alone could kill a man. A typical whip of cords was studded with metal, sharp animal bones or shards of pottery. It was designed to bruise and tear the skin. Often, a man was whipped by two torturers, one on each side, while he was bound to a post or pillar. It was here that Jesus probably suffered His greatest blood loss.
His back, torn open by the Romans, then had to bear the rough wood of the crossbeam, which probably weighed 75 to 125 pounds. He had to carry the burden along an uneven roadway from Pilate's praetorium to the hill of Calvary, a third of a mile. Surely, He fell often.
"Some people say that Jesus' suffering was somehow easier because he was God," McKeating said. "But that's not so. Many theologians believe He suffered in a greater way because He had perfect knowledge of what was happening. Also, His senses would have been more acute and more sensitive to pain because they were not at all dulled, as ours are, by sin and self-indulgence."
Cause of death
What killed Jesus?
"I think it's multifactorial," McKeating said. "I think the proximate cause of death was probably suffocation asphyxia. But I think the end came relatively swiftly just three long hours because our Lord was probably in shock before He was actually crucified.
"After the exposure, the emotional duress, the severe beating and then the scourging, He was probably in Class 3 shock, out of a possible 4."
A great physiologist once described shock as the rude unhinging of the cellular machinery of our bodies.
"The technical definition," said McKeating, "is that it's inadequate perfusion of blood to the tissues of our body.
Our bodies normally have five liters of blood. McKeating said that "in a typical Roman scourging, a man would have lost a liter and a half."
Shock would have weakened Him and left Him anxious and confused, hastening the end.
The Gospels suggest other factors, McKeating said. "After Jesus died, the soldier's lance thrust brought forth blood and water (Jn 19:34). Where did the water come from? Probably pericardial effusion. Fluid would have built up from internal injuries, pulmonary contusions, bruises, beatings, and it would have filled His chest cavity or the sac around His heart. Every time the heart would beat, then, it couldn't expand the way it needed to, and it couldn't fill up. Eventually, it would stop."
Forensic scientists say that the better we know what killed someone, the more likely we are to find out who killed him.
Who killed Jesus? After a decade-and-a-half of study, McKeating doesn't hesitate to respond.
"I did," he said. "My sins did."
What Killed Jesus
The word excruciating derived from crucifixion.
