Did Jesus really suffer the most that any human being has ever suffered? Did he really carry the cross? Is there any truth behind the popular depiction of the crucifixion depicted in the film, The Passion of the Christ? Dr. Bob MacDonald, a medical doctor and Catholic Deacon, offers a medical perspective on what really happened to Jesus in the moment of his crucifixion.
00:04:10.180The first thing he did was to take on all of the sins that were being committed right there and then in Rome and throughout the known world at that very moment.
00:04:27.500And finally, he looked down into the future, and he saw the sins that would be committed by mankind in the future.
00:04:35.980He saw my sins personally, and he saw your sins too, John Henry, and he saw these with love.
00:04:43.140He was able to take those sins on himself.
00:04:46.540And can you imagine the agony that he must have felt taking on all of the sins ever committed or ever would be committed in the world?
00:04:56.580And I wonder sometimes with him covered, as it were, with black sin and the power of Satan,
00:05:01.980if God the Father could even discern his son under that mountain of filth.
00:05:07.780But that is what happened, and the result was pain of such intensity for Jesus that he sweat blood.
00:05:15.100And St. Luke tells us in the scriptures that Jesus sweat blood and the blood would fall to the ground.
00:05:22.540That condition is medically known, and we call it hematidrosis.
00:05:27.540And what happens is that the small blood vessels in the scalp actually get swollen and stretched,
00:05:35.980so much so that red blood cells are able to escape from the small blood vessels,
00:05:40.660and they end up in the sweat glands, and the sweat of blood takes place.
00:05:45.700What we do know is that this can be produced in human beings other than Jesus,
00:05:54.340but it has to be in a situation where the person is under extreme physical and psychological pain,
00:07:19.060He had held the court in his own house instead of in the temple.
00:07:23.300He held the court in darkness instead of in daylight, where justice could be seen to be done.
00:07:28.900And there wasn't a proper quorum of the Sanhedrin there to have a valid vote.
00:07:36.180And so the whole thing was illegal and invalid, and the sentence of death was pronounced.
00:07:44.260And so Jesus was dragged before Pilate, the coward.
00:07:47.620Pilate could find nothing wrong with Jesus, but he was in a bind because he knew that the crowd was crying for his crucifixion.
00:07:57.060So he had him scourged, and the scourging was a terrible, terrible torture.
00:08:03.780It consisted of being beaten by rods and then beaten with a phlegrum.
00:08:08.260And the phlegrum is an instrument which has a short wooden handle, and on the end of the handle are five cords.
00:08:16.260And on each end of these cords is a very sharp piece of lead.
00:08:24.180And so when the soldiers struck Jesus, the lead embedded itself in his skin,
00:08:31.140and with a flick of the wrist and pulling back, the soldier was able to bring Jesus' skin with the phlegrum.
00:08:39.300And this was so much so that Jesus suffered hundreds of wounds.
00:08:44.740We don't know how many lashes he took.
00:08:47.220We know that the Jewish law was that you would have no more than 40 lashes, but the Romans had no such limitation.
00:08:55.460And we know that Jesus suffered more than 40 lashes from two soldiers, one tall, one shorter.
00:09:03.380And the force of this terrible, terrible phlegrum on the chest wall to start with caused the chest wall to try and protect itself, to protect the lungs.
00:09:17.700And so it built up fluid between the chest wall and the lung.
00:09:24.180And the pleurisy increased to such a stage that the lungs were compressed, and so Jesus began to be short of breath.
00:09:32.420And then that force was also transmitted to the heart.
00:09:35.460And so the lining of the heart, which is called the pericardium, it also poured out fluid to protect the heart muscle.
00:09:43.460And that fluid is called pericarditis, and the pericarditis caused the heart to go into failure.
00:09:49.780And so Jesus was even more short of breath and was turning blue.
00:09:55.220And the favorite place for the phlegrum to be lodged in the body was in the loin,
00:10:02.580which is that part of the back that is below the ribs and above the pelvis.
00:10:07.700And the loin muscles protect the kidneys.
00:10:10.900So the force on the loin muscles was transmitted to the kidneys, and the kidneys went into failure.
00:10:17.780And as a result of that going into failure, the result was that Jesus was now even more short of breath.
00:10:24.100His eyes were sunken in the orbit, and Jesus was, in fact, in very great confusion and fatigue.
00:10:39.300So the confusion was there, and he would be confused as to where he should go or what he should do,
00:10:45.540and you can be sure that the soldiers lashed him enough on the way to Calvary to make sure that he was going in the right direction.
00:10:54.260So, if we look at the Shroud of Turin, we know that Jesus had a cap of thorns thrust down upon his head.
00:11:06.260Now, this was not a nice woven crown, as you see on the crucifixes in today's houses.
00:11:14.580The fact of the matter is, it was just a clump of thorns, which were put together and pressed down onto his sacred head.
00:11:23.300And there is, the thorns would go into the skin at one point and appear out of the skin another point.
00:11:30.820And if we look at the Shroud of Turin, there's an exit wound just over the supraorbital point of the eyebrow.
00:11:40.580That's where the supraorbital nerve comes out of the skull, turns upwards, and provides a nervous area to the forehead of the patient.
00:11:54.100And so this would be a very painful thing, because if you press on that point, it's on the inside of the eyebrow close to the nose.
00:12:03.540And if you press on that, you will suffer quite severe pain.
00:12:07.060And so I know that this exit wound caused tremendous pain for Jesus throughout the remainder of the Passion.
00:12:14.420Now, they put 150 pounds of wood on his shoulders.
00:12:20.100And the question really is, what did Jesus carry all the way to Golgotha?
00:12:25.820And we know that Simon of Cyrene was seconded and forced to help Jesus.
00:12:31.540And so he did carry a lot of the wood for Jesus on the way to Golgotha.
00:12:37.060But having said that, the modern scholars unanimously insist that Jesus carried the crosspiece of the cross on his shoulders, that is to say, the patibulum.
00:12:51.620Well, that just doesn't stand up to examination, in my opinion.
00:12:55.700The crosspiece would be placed across the back of the neck, and his arms would be over the crosspiece, and he would carry it that way.
00:13:05.060If that was the case, he would have a tremendous abrasion lesion on the back of the neck and across the shoulders, where the wood had rubbed the broken skin.
00:13:19.060There is no such sign of any such wound in Jesus' body.
00:13:24.340So, I doubt very much if he carried the patibulum.
00:13:28.260And in fact, if we go to Scripture, Scripture says in John, the Gospel of John, that he carrying the cross by himself.
00:13:38.340And when we look at the word cross, it is a Greek word, of course, and it's the word stouros.
00:13:44.340And stouros means the upright of the cross, the upright, which is surprising.
00:13:51.460And so, you can be sure, if Jesus carried the upright, then the Roman carpenters had already fixed the crosspiece onto the upright for convenience.
00:14:01.700Because if it was not, then that crosspiece would have to be attached up in Golgotha at the crucifixion site,
00:14:10.300and that would take minutes and minutes of work to do that.
00:14:14.720It was clumsy, and what would they do with Jesus, who was almost at death's door at this point?
00:14:20.660Would he have to stand around and wait, or lie down and wait?
00:14:24.940It just would be messy, and the Roman soldiers were anything but messy.
00:14:29.740So, I believe that they had already attached the crosspiece to the upright before Jesus set out on the road to the Via Dolorosa.
00:14:38.280And so, I believe, therefore, that Jesus carried the whole cross, just as the church has depicted it for 2,000 years.
00:14:49.080And that seems to me to sum up the situation for ourselves, and that we know that our Lord wanted to suffer everything.
00:15:01.200He didn't want anything made easy for him, and so he took on the whole and entire weight of the cross
00:15:07.480until, having fallen three times, he had to have Simon of Cyrene help him carry it the rest of the way.
00:15:14.680So, one of the questions that often comes up here is this idea of crucifixion and how much pain it is with regard to being crucified.
00:15:27.960We know none of his bones were broken, but yet are there nerves in the hands where he would have been crucified that he would have struck as well?
00:15:39.060I've heard there is some talk of that. What's your take on that medically?
00:15:43.340Well, we start with the nose. We know that the nose was displaced because one of the soldiers punched Jesus in the face
00:15:52.420when he talked with Caiaphas, and the soldier took exception to it.
00:15:57.920But it's interesting that the nose was displaced but not broken.
00:16:01.900The lower part of the nose consists of cartilage, and it can easily be moved around, and that's what was displaced.
00:16:10.240The upper part of the nose is bone, and it was not broken.
00:16:14.240And Scripture tells us that not one of his bones were broken, and this agrees with that.
00:16:21.060As to the crucifixion itself, the nails could not be put through the hands, the palms of the hands,
00:16:28.540because had it done so, the weight of the body on the cross would have pulled the nails through the hand,
00:16:34.320and it would have ripped the hand apart, and Jesus would have fallen from the cross.
00:16:38.580So that did not happen. It had to be through the wrist.
00:16:43.600And the Scripture does say that he was crucified by the nails in the hand.
00:16:49.100But the important thing to understand is that the Aramaic word for hand includes the wrist.
00:16:55.480There is no separate Aramaic word for wrist.
00:17:00.040So the hand is the palm, the fingers, and the wrist bones itself.
00:17:05.760And so when Jesus was being crucified, he was laid down on the cross on the ground,
00:17:12.320and in the patibulum, the cross piece of the cross,
00:17:16.300there were two holes already burned into the wood to take the nails.