Adventures in Human Being by Gavin Francis

Author:Gavin Francis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465079674
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2015-09-12T16:00:00+00:00

Pierre Barbet published his experiments on the nailing of a human body in the 1930s, but in 1968, in a burial cave near Jerusalem, a skeleton was found of a young man who’d been crucified during the Roman period. A nail about eleven centimeters long had been driven into the outside aspect of his right heel bone – the calcaneum – and traces of coarse olive wood, presumably used in the vertical stake of the crucifixion, were found under the head of the nail.

Dramatic claims were made after the find – the first direct evidence of Roman crucifixion – and the professor of anatomy at the Hebrew University suggested that a single nail had been put through both feet, that the forearms had been nailed, and that the victim’s legs had been broken while still alive, in a coup de grâce. Fifteen years later two skeptical colleagues – Joseph Zias and Eliezer Sekeles – re-examined the remains and came to different conclusions: the nail had been passed through only one heel – the right (the other heel bone had been lost) and the arms showed no trace that they’d been nailed. They concluded that crucifixion, as practiced by the Romans, involved tying the arms to a T-shaped cross-beam with rope, and nailing each heel to a vertical stave. Olive trees usually generate straight beams for only two to three meters at the most, and so victims would not have been hoisted very high.

That Roman crucifixion occurred through the palms is such a commonplace in Western culture that “stigmata,” the development of bleeding wounds over the points of the body where Jesus was said to have been nailed, have surfaced throughout the last millennium. I’ve read of them on palms, wrists, the flank (where Jesus was said to have been stabbed), and even on the tops of the feet. I haven’t heard of them happening on the side of the heel, and I’m yet to see someone fire a nail gun through their calcaneum.

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