The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [46]
What they wanted was to intensify and prolong his anguish so as to intensify and prolong their pleasure at watching him suffer.
Even in their most sadistic impulses, these Roman centurions weren’t so foolish as to allow their victim to die, lest they themselves be beaten for ineptitude. Prolonging the scourging was essential to the torment.
Bartholomew’s entire body throbbed, but every time his mind threatened to go blank, the soldiers doused him with water, reviving him for more punishment.
The centurions paused only when it was time to pass the whips to fresh hands. The soldiers competed for the privilege of beating their bound victim, pushing one another aside as they lined up to be the next man wielding the flagrum.
AS THEY ARRIVED at Beth Israel, Bartholomew’s bloody body went limp.
The paramedics moved quickly, fearful that Bartholomew might die before they could get him inside the emergency room. The paramedics moved Castle and Morelli aside respectfully as they pulled the stretcher from the ambulance, lowered the gurney’s wheels, and rolled the injured man forward as quickly as they could.
Once he was inside the hospital, the ER team took over and went to work immediately. Stripping Bartholomew of clothes, they were shocked to see his body was severely injured front and back by hundreds of small cuts.
Pushing his way into the emergency room station, Castle was equally shocked to realize Bartholomew’s injuries crisscrossed virtually every square inch of his body, from his shoulders down to his ankles. Trying to stay in the background so he wouldn’t be thrown out, Morelli pushed himself into the ER right behind the psychiatrist.
Looking closely at Bartholomew’s back as the ER doctors turned him over, Castle could see that the back wounds were about twice as numerous as the wounds Castle had suffered on his front side. Trying to estimate the total number of wounds, Castle picked a small area below the shoulders and counted. He could see dumbbell-shaped wounds clustered in groups of three. Taking into account that the injuries were fewer on his front side, Castle extrapolated and made a quick estimate that Bartholomew had suffered possibly as many as one hundred groups of what amounted to some three hundred separate dumbbell-shaped wounds.
Each wound was nearly identical—less than a half inch in length, with two small circles of injury defining the ends of each wound. Looking closely he could see what looked like lash wounds connected to each dumbbell-shaped wound. His mind envisioned a whip of three thongs that had a dumbbell-shaped weight tied at the end of each thong. He recoiled when he imagined that Bartholomew could have been hit by as many as one hundred different scourge blows. He wondered how anybody could survive a beating that brutal. What he was seeing of Bartholomew’s naked body in the ER explained the anguish he had observed in the ambulance.
Standing in the background behind Castle in the ER, Morelli was coming to the same conclusions. Looking at Bartholomew as the doctors and nurses worked frantically to identify and treat his wounds, the thought flashed through Morelli’s mind that here was the live image of the scourged man of the Turin Shroud.
Moving quietly forward, Father Morelli finally had the chance to begin administering extreme unction. Praying in a whisper, Morelli blessed Bartholomew’s forehead with the sign of the cross and began bestowing on him the Church’s last rites.
For several minutes, the doctors and nurses did the best they could to contain the bleeding. Then Bartholomew suddenly relaxed. His breathing became more normal and his vital signs, measured on the monitors, were strong.
“We need to send him to the burn unit,” one of the ER doctors advised Castle. “His wounds cover his body. There’s too many to stitch and we have to stop the bleeding. These wounds have to be cleaned out carefully to prevent further injury.