headscratcher4 said:
I've never understood why people claim to have stigmata in the palms when the palms couldn't possibly support the weight of the body during cruxifiction. Stigmata in the palms seems to me to be a dead giveaway to a hysterical reaction interpritation or an outright fraud (heavens forbid!).
Experiments on cadavers show that nails through the palms won't support for long the weight of a dead body (I'll leave aside the question of whether there are reasons why a living body and a dead body might behave differently under such treatment). But I don't see any reason why nails through the palms couldn't do the trick if the limbs were securely bound to the crossbeam with rope. In fact, regardless of whether one nailed through the wrist or the palm, tying the victim's down would seem to be a sensible precaution - even a wrist could be expected to give way once in a while (because of a slighly off-center nail placement, or for some other reason), and that would spoil the aesthetics considerably. In fact, if the limbs weren't secured except by nails, I daresay even a weakened victim might occasionally be able to exert enough leverage to pry a maimed wrist free, leaving the nail in place. All the more reason to tie the arms down! Do we know of any basis for rejecting the notion that such tying might have been a feature of at least some Roman executions?
At any rate, although I can't assent to any supernatural explanation for stigmata, there's
another reason why the mere location of some stigmata on the palms never struck me as conclusive evidence of their inauthenticity: if they
were real, it doesn't necessarily follow that stigmata would appear on the wrists even if Jesus
was crucified through the wrists. Assuming that God's purpose in inflicting "real" stigmata might be to create a reminder or association (in the subject's mind or the mind of the beholder) with the sufferings of Christ, the fact that most people have an artistically-influenced mental image of Christ's bleeding palms, bleeding wrists might not convey the same symbolic significance. In other words (subject, of course, to my earlier assumptions), the form of the message might reasonably be expected to be influenced, at least in many instances, to the frame of mind in which the stigmatic could be expected to receive such message. The message could be "dumbed down" (bleeding palms versus bleeding wrists). For example, if Jesus were really the Son of God and he wanted to speak to me, I hope he wouldn't expect me to understand a message delivered in, say, technically flawless and historically irreproachable 1st-century Aramaic.
headscratcher4 said:
Well... Most people who give any significance to this do believe in the Bible, and the Bible says it was the hands...
So, there..
P.S. Yes, this does make the wrist wounds, evident on the Shroud, contrary to holy scripture...
Interestingly, this
modern medical diagram suggests that from an anatomical point of view, the carpal or wrist bones are considered to be part of the hand itself. I wonder if the Gospel writers thought the same way, and for that matter, if we even know the precise scope of whatever ancient Greek term was translated in the Gospels as "hand".
