After the death of Jesus and the blow with the lance which opened His heart, Joseph of Arimathea “went in boldly” (audaciter ) and asked Pilate for the body of the Saviour. Now, “Pilate wondered that He should be already dead—Pilatus autem mirabatur si jam obiisset—O de Pilatos ethaumasen ei èdè tethnèken. ” “And sending for the centurion, he asked him if He were already dead. And when he had understood it by the centurion, he gave the body to Joseph” (Mk. XV, 43-5).
Jesus had, in fact, only been in agony for about three hours, which for a crucified man is fairly short. The thieves had survived Him and in the end only died because, by breaking their legs, their asphyxia was hastened on. The Jews asked Pilate for this, because they wished to bury the three of them before nightfall. The Jewish rule was that crucified bodies should be taken down and buried on the same day. There was the further reason that this Friday was the eve of the Sabbath, and, even more, the eve of the great feast of the Pasch. It was the Parasceve.
Most of those who were crucified had a longer agony, more or less according to circumstances. It was not rare, according to Origen, to see them survive the whole night and the following day. There is an Arab text which affirms that in 1247 at Damascus a crucified man had lasted till the second day after. Even longer survivals have been mentioned, with less certainty.
It even happened that men who had been crucified were taken down, and survived. We are told of the case of one of Darius’s magistrates (Herodotus) and that of Chéréas (Chariton). But the example quoted by Josephus is more interesting. During the siege of Jerusalem, in A.D. 70, three of his friends were taken prisoner by the Romans when he was absent, and were crucified. When he returned in the evening to the Roman camp, he immediately went to Titus and obtained their pardon; they were taken down from their crosses. The doctors were unable to restore two of them to life, but the third survived. Now, the first two had been nailed but the third had only been tied to the cross with ropes. One can thus see that a variation in the method of crucifixion could effect the length of the time which it took to cause death. Those who were bound with ropes, says Josephus, died less rapidly than those who were nailed, and could be more easily revived.
All the other authors who have referred to it are agreed in describing the cross as the most terrible and cruellest of tortures; crudelissimum et teterrimum supplicium, ” wrote Cicero. But none of them have given the reason why, except that the torments lasted a long time. But why did Jesus succumb so much more rapidly than most of the condemned? That is what we must try and discover.
We can see that a whole series of circumstances, some of which have been brought forward as the causes of death, joined together in diminishing His physical resistance. And we know, through our psychological experiences, that a series of painful shocks do not just add up together, but in a certain sense, multiply each other. (A series of excitations lowers the level of resistance.)
Already, on the evening before, He had undergone, on the mount of olives, an appalling mental agony, produced by the foreknowledge of His physical Passion, and the knowledge of all the sins of men, the burden of which He was Himself assuming for their redemption. He Himself had said to the apostles: “My soul is sorrowful even unto death.” He was sorrowful even unto death. Such deep distress can bring on a phenomenon which is known to medical men, and of which St. Luke, who was himself a doctor, gives a perfect clinical description, which is most striking in its conciseness. This phenomenon, which is also extremely rare, is provoked by some great mental disturbance, following on deep emotion or great fear. And St. Luke describes how there was, in Gethsemani, the struggle of the Humanity of Jesus when faced with the chalice of suffering which was offered to Him, and the acceptance of that chalice (Father...not my will, but thine be done). And St. Mark adds: “Coepit pavere et tӕdere— And He began to fear and to be heavy.”
Then St. Luke adds: “Et factus in agonia, prolixus orabat. Et foctus est sudor ejus sicut guttӕ sanguinis decurrentes in terram— And being in an agony He prayed the longer. And His sweat became as drops of blood, trickling down upon the ground.” {10} St. Luke’s Greek text is more exact: “Egeneto o hidros autou ôsei thromboi aimatos katabainontes epi tèn gèn ” Now, thrombos means a clot. These clots have always presented translators with difficulty; they quite rightly say that clots cannot come out of a body. And thus they have set out to do violence to the words, because they do not understand the physiological phenomenon. Some ancient manuscripts have gone further still and have suppressed the passage, as if it was unworthy of the Divinity of Jesus. Father Lagrange, who was a most attractive exegetist, but not a doctor, translates it “like globules of blood, running right down to the ground.”
Now, this phenomenon, which is known in the profession as hӕmatidrosis, consists of an intense vasodilatation of the subcutaneous capillaries. They become extremely distended, and burst when they come into contact with the millions of sweat glands which are distributed over the whole skin. The blood mingles with the sweat, and it is this mixture which pearls over the whole surface of the body. But, once they reach the outside, the blood coagulates and the clots which are thus formed on the skin fall down on to the ground, being borne down by the profuse sweat. St. Luke thus proved himself to be a good doctor and a good observer when he wrote: “And His sweat became as clots of blood, trickling down upon the ground.”
We can now conclude two facts from this phenomenon. There would first be an enormous fall in vital resistance after such a hӕmorrhage, which would be a very serious one, on account of the extent of surface where it is produced. On the other hand, the abnormal state of this skin, which, having bled in close connection with its sudoral glands over the whole surface of the body, becomes tender and painful, makes it less able to bear the violence and the blows which it will receive during the night and during the following day, right on till the scourging and the crucifixion.
This sensitisation of the skin, which is a purely physiological phenomenon, causes us to reflect, by the way, about another fact which dominates the whole Passion; it must not be lost sight of, and it will help to explain, humanly speaking, why the agony was brief. All men have not the same resistance or the same defences in the face of physical pain. We doctors become aware every day that a rough type of patient is less sensitive to pain than one who is more refined and cultivated. And this is not merely a psychological phenomenon, for one often finds that labouring men, if their wills are weak, can bear quite ordinary pain very badly. On the other hand, individuals who are physically of a more refined type endure it with the greatest patience and in general put up a better resistance, under the influence of a more courageous soul and finer sensibility. It would seem, then, that there is some definite connection between the refinement of the sensitive nervous system and the intensity of even physical suffering, quite independent of purely psychical reactions.
Now, we are bound to believe that in the case of Jesus, the union of His divine with His human nature would have developed this physical sensibility to the highest degree. And then, as Our Lord had assumed this human nature, He had a firm will to endure the painful consequences to the utmost extent.
Under the same heading of the causes of general weakness we must also include the ill-treatment which He endured during the night, especially between the two examinations, when He was the prey and the object for mockery of a hateful mob of temple attendants, those “bloodthirsty dogs” as St. John Chrysostom calls them. To this we should add the blows which He received in the praetorium, after the scourging and the crowning with thorns; slaps on the face, blows with the fist and even with a stick, for the word “rapismata ,” which St. Jerome translates as “alapas” (slaps on the face), means first and foremost blows with a stick.
The proof that this is the true meaning of “rapisma ” is to be found in the comparison of St. John’s with St. Matthew’s Gospel, at the time of the scourging. Each of them tells us that having crowned Him, they said: “Hail, King of the Jews!” Then St. John adds: “Kai edidosam autô rapismata—et dabant ei alapas— and they gave Him blows” (with a stick) {11} But St. Matthew goes into greater detail: “Kai elabon ton kalamon kai etapton eis ten kephalén autou—acceperunt arundinem et percutiebant caput ejus— they took the reed (a stick) and struck His head.”
We can find the marks of this ill-treatment on the shroud, for there is a large bruised wound on the right cheek and the septum of the nose is broken. But these blows, most of which fell on the head, could have produced quite a serious concussion, what we should call cerebral shock or even cerebral contusion; it would consist of a fairly widespread breaking of the small vessels in the meninges and in the brain itself.
The hӕmorrhages would also have considerably weakened His vital resistance, by progressive stages. We have already spoken of the sweat of blood. But along with the bruised wounds with which we shall meet, it is above all the savage scourging and the crowning with thorns which He underwent in Pilate’s praetorium, at the Lithostrotos , which would have caused the most serious loss of blood. The thongs, which as we know were barbed, would have covered the body with wounds which continued to bleed long enough for us to find their blood-stained traces on the shroud, where they have left their counter-drawings, perhaps six hours later. I will pass over the wounds left by the carrying of the cross, which we shall study in detail. The crucifixion itself would only have caused a relatively small loss of blood.
But all these hӕmorrhages, which would certainly have caused such extreme weakness that it was necessary to make Simon carry His cross if He was ever to reach Calvary, were not enough to cause death, or yet to account for the relatively short duration of the agony.
Hunger has been mentioned. It is true that He ate nothing from the Last Supper till His death. But one does not die of hunger in twenty hours. Nor is it very probable that during long agonies on the cross death was caused by hunger, as Eusebius maintains.
He was thirsty, violently thirsty, like all crucified beings. This thirst was due in the first place to loss of blood, and then to the profuse sweats which, as we shall see, went with the hanging by the hands and the cramps which this brought on. But this could not as yet be a cause of death. The exposure to the rays of the sun has also been suggested; the crucified died just as well in the shade and in all kinds of weather.
It is true that He experienced one of the most terrible forms of suffering which can be imagined, that caused by the rupture of a great nerve trunk, such as the median nerve. This rupture is accompanied by a sharp fall in arterial tension, even under a general anӕsthetic, and it is our custom always to inject them with novocain before cutting them. This wound can cause loss of consciousness. But there is nothing in the Gospels to make us suppose that Jesus consented to benefit by such a fainting fit in order to interrupt His pain; and the nails would have continued to press upon these nerve wounds, when He struggled to speak. And these fainting fits are not mortal.
Some English authors, Dr. Stroud in particular, have produced the hypothesis of rupture of the heart, which would, in his opinion, account for the issue of blood and water (clots and serum!) at the moment of the blow with the lance. We shall deal with this last assertion at the end of Chapter VII. As for a cardiac rupture, this only takes place in an unhealthy organ, suffering from an infarctus or from fatty degeneration. We have no reason for thinking that there was any pathological condition in the heart of Jesus; the issue of clots and of serum, as we shall see, would be absolutely impossible in such a hypothesis. This can only be a pseudo-mystical fancy, which is indeed rather beautiful: that the heart of Jesus should break from excess of love for men. It cannot, however, be sustained scientifically.
There certainly was a hydropericardiac condition, which means that there was a serious effusion within the envelope of the heart; we shall study this along with the wounds in the heart (Chapter VII). It is possible, as Judica holds, that it was due to a traumatic pericarditis, which developed rapidly, and was the consequence of the various traumatisms undergone by the thorax, especially during the scourging. This effusion would have been the cause of terrible pain and anguish, but one cannot imagine it bringing about a rapid death.
In his article on Le Supplice de la Croix (The Suffering of the Cross), in the revue l ’Evangile dans la Vie (April, 1925), Dr. Le Bee has brought forward the hypothesis, which since then has been fully supported by Dr. Louis (Revue de la Passion , November, 1936), that the swallowing of a little water by a crucified being brings on a mortal syncope. He cites the case of Kléber’s murderer, who was impaled and died in this way. “He had scarcely drunk, when he cried out and died.” It is certainly tempting to trace a connection between this fact and the sponge soaked in vinegar which was offered to Jesus. All modern exegetists consider that this vinegar was the posca, the ordinary drink of the legionaries. It consisted of water, with some vinegar and beaten eggs. There was always a pailful of it for the guards.
According to St. Mark and St. Matthew, it would seem that He died after receiving this drink. The phrase immediately following it in the text, which however stresses no relation between cause and effect, simply says: “And Jesus having cried out with a loud voice, gave up the ghost” (Mk. XV, 37). “And Jesus again crying with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost” (Mt. XXVII, 50). They do not say whether this great cry was a word. St. John is more explicit. He is also the only one to record the words of Jesus, “I thirst,” and to describe the act of one of the assistants who offered Him a drink. And he adds: “Jesus therefore, when He had taken the vinegar, said: It is consummated. {12} And bowing His head, He gave up the ghost” (Jn. XIX, 30). He thus spoke after He had drunk (if He did drink) and this was not like the brutal swoon of the impaled man.
As for St. Luke, he passes over the episode of the sponge in silence. This is most astonishing on the part of a doctor, who was an excellent observer, and was most eager for information, for which he sought on every side. “Having diligently attained to all things from the beginning,” as he says in his prologue. {13} He reads all these details in the works of his predecessors, and yet he overlooks them! Was this so-called swoon through swallowing really well known by the ancients, as Le Bee says? He does not give his sources and I have been able to find nothing. How then can one explain a doctor such as St. Luke having overlooked such an important fact, which would have been the cause of death and would account for the shortness of the agony? This would be an unpardonable fault in a young student and is a most surprising act of neglect on the part of a fine clinician, such as our holy colleague was.
Now, he describes the darkness, the rending of the veil of the temple; then he continues: “And crying with a loud voice” (like St. Matthew, but now come the important words), “said: Father into Thy hands I commend My spirit. And saying this, He gave up the ghost” (exepneusen , the medical term). {14} No—I certainly do not find the hypothesis of this mortal swallowing satisfactory.