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By Root 529 0

images of the feet are the parts of each foot that were inside after the left foot was crossed on top of the right. In other words, we don’t have a very good image of the bottom of the left foot or the top of the right foot. But we can clearly see from the ventral view that the left knee is bent and the body rotated from the hip to accommodate the left leg resting partially on top of the right leg. Crucified this way, the lower part of the body would have been twisted somewhat away from the left, with the knees protruding most likely to the right. The crucified man’s back would have rubbed against the wood of the upright beam of the cross each time the man lifted his body up or down in the process of breathing. In doing so, the scourge wounds on the back would have been reopened and rubbed raw.”

In his mind, Castle quickly reviewed the many painted images of crucified Christ that he had seen in museums around the world. What Middagh was describing differed from the painted images in several important aspects. “So you don’t think, then, that the feet of the man in the Shroud were nailed to any footrest that he could have used to support his weight?”

“The Shroud shows no evidence of a suppedaneum, or footrest,” Middagh answered. “You’ve got to remember the precise way Roman executioners fixed a man to the cross depended upon how long the Romans wanted the man to live. The arms and legs could be tied to the cross, which would prolong the time the man had to suffer. A footrest or even a little seat or sedile was fashioned as a block of wood and nailed to the upright crossbeam so the man could rest his buttocks. Again, these niceties prolonged the death. A fully adult man crucified this way could last two or three days, possibly longer, providing he had not been scourged to within an inch of his life and that he had been tied to the cross instead of nailed. With a suppedaneum and a sedile, breathing was easier and the problem became dehydration and thirst, with the crucified man more likely to die from a combination of thirst and exposure, rather than asphyxia.”

“The problem in Christ’s crucifixion was that the Roman executioners were up against the Sabbath,” Morelli interjected. “To comply with Jewish law, Christ had to be dead and buried by sundown. In Jerusalem, two thousand years ago, much more so than today, everything in the Jewish community was expected to come to a total standstill once the sun went down on Friday.”

“That’s right,” Middagh said. “From the evidence of the Shroud, there was no footrest or seat on the cross. The man’s body was allowed to hang free, supported only by the nails in the wrists and the nail in the feet. The other variable was that the man in the Shroud shows evidence of a brutal scourging, back and front, from his shoulders to his heels. Crucifixion itself was meant to be a relatively bloodless process. The Roman executioners were expert in placing the nails so as to avoid piercing an artery. If they made a mistake and pierced an artery, the man could die in a matter of minutes. Making that mistake, a Roman centurion would have faced severe punishment for incompetence. But by scourging a man just short of the point where the scourging itself killed him, the time the man lived on the cross would have been shortened. This is what looks like was done to the man in the Shroud.”

“If all else failed,” Morelli added, “and the crucified man was living too long, the Romans typically took what amounted to a sledgehammer and broke the man’s legs below the knees. With the legs broken, the only way the man could breathe was by raising and lowering his body by using his arms and pivoting against the nails in his wrist. As you can imagine, breathing like this would barely work at all and the pain of even trying to do so would have been unbearable. Once the legs were broken, death tended to come a few minutes later. Typically, those crucified died from a combination of pulmonary asphyxia and cardiac arrest.”

Middagh added a point of clarification. “In the case of the man in the Shroud, the legs show no