The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [87]
Father Middagh was prepared for this. “Let’s start with the nail wounds on the feet.”
“Okay,” Castle said. “I’m listening.”
Middagh projected an image from his computer onto the screen at the end of the conference room. “This is a view of the feet and calf area of the legs from the posterior image of the man in the Shroud. Remember, you are looking at a negative image in which left and right appear exactly as they would appear in the body of the crucified man in the Shroud. The image of the left foot shows only the heel area. The images of the feet are on the dorsal side of the body and were formed by blood contacting the Shroud, as we discussed before.”
“In simple terms, what does all this mean?” Castle asked.
“It means the Roman executioners placed the sole of the right foot flat against the upright beam of the cross. Then they bent the left knee and twisted the body so the instep on the bottom of the left foot rested on top of the right foot. One nail appears to have been used to drive through both feet. The wound looks like it is in the metatarsal area of both feet, which would have been just forward of the small cuneiform bones just above the heel. The Roman executioners could have a different calculation with the feet than in nailing the wrists.”
Studying the slide, Castle followed the explanation clearly.
“As we discussed before,” Father Middagh went on, “the nails had to go through the small bones in the wrist, not the palms of the hands, because the hands nailed to the cross had to carry most of the weight of the body. The feet were different. The feet nailed to the cross did not have to carry body weight, but a crucified man would need to push down on the feet in order to lift himself up so he could breathe. In a way, the metatarsal region of the foot is more like the palm of the hand. If a man were crucified upside down, the feet would have to be nailed through the small cuneiform bones above the metatarsals. But the Romans needed to leave that region of the foot intact so the crucified man could push down with his legs to lift his body up. Basically, the nail in the feet just rode back up toward the heels as the crucified man lifted up to breathe.”
“The pain had to be excruciating,” Castle said.
“It was,” Middagh said. “In fact, the word ‘excruciating’ derives from the Latin ex crucis, which denotes ‘from being crucified.’ The point of crucifixion was to make the death painful beyond description. Most people who were crucified died of suffocation. The weight of the body hanging down on the arms tended to fix the muscles needed for breathing in an inhalation state. To exhale, the crucified man had to pivot his weight down against the nail in his feet to allow the diaphragm to force the air out of his lungs. The nail in the feet rubbing on the bones in the feet would cause searing pain. In the process of breathing, the man’s elbows would flex, causing the wrists to rotate around the iron nails, resulting in burning pain along the damaged median nerves leading to the thumbs. Eventually, the muscles tired and cramped, and the crucified man died of cardiopulmonary asphyxia.”
Castle quickly grasped the anatomy of crucifixion. “What does the frontal view of the man in the Shroud show about the feet?”
“The feet in the frontal view are less distinct in the Shroud,” Middagh said, “so you won’t see much from the slide. From the ventral view, the bloodstain on the left foot is clear. The left foot was the foot placed on top, so we can see where the nail pierced the metatarsal area, about two-thirds of the way up the foot toward the heel from the toes. In the dorsal view of the man in the Shroud, we saw more clearly the sole of the right foot that rested flat against the cross. Hidden in the Shroud