The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [45]
Castle had never seen anything like this happening ever before, but his mind flashed to Bartholomew’s description of how he had suffered the stigmata. While Castle discounted the possibility it was real, his immediate intuitive reaction was that Bartholomew was suffering a severe scourging, and the thought of ancient Roman whippings came to his mind. Castle’s mind flashed on the scourging Jesus had received at the pillar as part of his torture leading up to his crucifixion and he began to worry that Bartholomew’s neurosis was pushing him even deeper into personally experiencing the passion and death of Christ. Could it be possible that here in the back of the ambulance, Castle and Morelli were watching the scourge wounds appear on Bartholomew’s body, adding the injuries of Christ’s scourging at the pillar to the stigmata in Bartholomew’s wrists?
To stop Bartholomew from thrashing about, Castle quietly injected a second dose of the tranquilizer, again to apparently no effect. Bartholomew’s body continued twitching in spasms of pain, as if he were being beaten.
WITH HIS MIND back in the ancient courtyard, Bartholomew felt like a trapped animal. There was no escape from the repeated blows that drove him to his knees. The instant he fell, the centurions taunted him to get up. “What kind of man are you?” they jeered. “Can’t even take a little beating?”
Since he was unable to get back to his feet, the centurions with the whips stopped long enough to kick him, then grabbed him by his arms and lifted him back to his feet. Once Bartholomew was upright, the beating resumed.
Bartholomew struggled to twist around to expose his front to the whips, thinking the soldiers might not beat him on his chest and genitals, but he was wrong. While he saved his back for a moment from further injury, the centurions whipped his forelegs and chest, not sparing his stomach and abdomen. No matter which way Bartholomew twisted, front or back, he suffered the continued blows of the flagrum, the lead weights tearing his skin away. With his wrists bound to the short marble pillar, there was no escape from the torture. For what seemed like more than an hour, they beat him, the centurions with the whips and the soldiers in the courtyard seeming to get an almost sexual pleasure from his suffering and pain.
“Why can’t you save yourself?” the soldiers taunted, mocking his agony. “Where’s your army now, King of the Jews? Why have your legions abandoned you?”
They laughed as he fell to his knees or fell to the ground, his upper body hanging from the metal ring, his bound hands suspended back above his head by the rope that held his wrists to the ring. “You cry like a woman!” they jeered. “This is the way a child would die. Do you want your mother? Stand up and take your punishment like a man.”
More than once in the throes of his passion, Bartholomew’s mind froze with alarm, realizing how the goal of his torturers was to bring him as close to death as possible, but not so far as to actually kill him, just prolong his agony and intensify his pain. Bartholomew knew this was a beating from which he would never recover. Somehow, he comprehended that this scourging was just the first act in a prolonged drama of death that would have several acts. The soldiers would beat him to a point where the injuries would cover every inch of his body, but he was by no means the first victim these brutes had tormented and he would by no means be the last.
In his horror, Bartholomew realized that these Roman centurions dressed in their military garb, with their wine-red tunics and tight-fitting leather bindings, were not savage beasts. To the