Barbet decided that the two flows were created by Jesus’ alternately pushing himself up and then sagging down to hang by his hands; thus the trickle of blood from the nail wound would follow two different paths, depending on which position he was in. The reason Jesus was doing this, Barbet theorized, was that when people hang from their arms, it becomes difficult to exhale; Jesus was trying to keep from suffocating.
Then, after a while, his legs would fatigue and he’d sag back down again.
Barbet cited as support for his idea a torture technique used during World War I, wherein the victim is hung by his hands, which are bound together over his head. “Hanging by the hands causes a variety of cramps and contractions,” wrote Barbet. “Eventually these reach the inspiratory muscles and prevent expiration; the condemned men, being unable to empty their lungs, die of asphyxia.”
Barbet used the angles of the purported blood flows on the shroud to calculate what Jesus’ two positions on the cross must have been: In the sagging posture, he calculated that the outstretched arms formed a 65-degree angle with the stipes (the upright beam) of the cross. In the pushed-up position, the arms formed a 70-degree angle with the stipes.
Barbet then tried to verify this, using one of the many unclaimed corpses that were delivered to the anatomy department from the city’s hospitals and poorhouses.
Once Barbet got the body back to his lab, he proceeded to nail it to a homemade cross. He then raised the cross upright and measured the angle of the arms when the slumping body came to a stop. Lo and behold, it was 65 degrees. (As the cadaver could of course not be persuaded to push itself back up, the second angle remained unverified.) The French edition of Barbet’s book includes a photograph of the dead man on the cross. The cadaver is shown from the waist up, so I cannot say whether Barbet dressed him Jesus-style in swaddling undergarments, but I can say that he bears an uncanny resemblance to the monologuist Spalding Gray.
Barbet’s idea presented an anatomical conundrum. For if there were periods when Jesus’ legs gave out and he was forced to hang the entire weight of his body off his nailed palms, wouldn’t the nails rip through the flesh? Barbet wondered whether, in fact, Jesus had been nailed through the stronger, bonier wrists, and not the flesh of the palms. He decided to do an experiment, detailed in A Doctor at Cavalry. This time, rather than wrestle another whole cadaver onto his cross, he crucified a lone arm. Barely had the owner of the arm left the room when Barbet had his hammer out:
Having just amputated an arm two-thirds of the way up from a vigorous man, I drove a square nail of about 1/3 of an inch (the nail of the Passion) into the middle of the palm…. I gently suspended a weight of 100 pounds from the elbow (half the weight of the body of a man about 6 foot tall). After ten minutes, the wound had lengthened; …I then gave the whole a moderate shake, and I saw the nail suddenly forcing its way through the space between the two metacarpal heads and making a large tear in the skin…. A second slight shake tore away what skin remained.
In the weeks that followed, Barbet went through twelve more arms in a quest to find a suitable point in the human wrist through which to hammer a 1/3-inch nail. This was not a good time for vigorous men with minor hand injuries to visit the offices of Dr. Pierre Barbet.
Eventually, Barbet’s busy hammer made its way to what he believed was the true site of the nail’s passage: Destot’s space, a pea-sized gap between the two rows of the bones of the wrist. “In each case,” he wrote, “the point took up its own direction and seemed to be slipping along the walls of a funnel and then to find its way spontaneously into the space which was awaiting it.” It was as though divine intervention applied to nail trajectories as well. “And this spot,” Barbet continued triumphantly, “is precisely where the shroud shows us the mark of the nail, a spot of which no forger would have had any idea….”
And then along came Frederick Zugibe.
Zugibe is a gruff, overworked medical examiner for Rockland County, New York, who spends his spare time researching the Crucifixion and “Barbet-bashing” at what he calls “Shroudie conferences” around the world. He’ll always make time to talk to you if you call, but it becomes quickly clear in the course of the conversation that spare time is something Zugibe has very little of. He’ll be halfway through an explanation of the formula used to determine the pull of the body on each of Christ’s hands when his voice will wander away from the telephone for a minute, and then he’ll come back and say, “Excuse me. A nine-year-old body. Father beat her to death. Where were we?”
Zugibe is not on a mission to prove the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin—as, I suspect, Barbet was. He became interested in the science of crucifixion fifty years ago, as a biology student, when someone gave him a paper to read about the medical aspects of the Crucifixion. The physiological information in the paper struck him as inaccurate. “So I researched it out, wrote a term paper, got interested.” The Shroud of Turin interested him only in that it might, were it for real, provide a great deal of information about the physiology of crucifixion. “Then I came across Barbet. I thought, Gee, this is exciting. Must be a real smart guy—double blood flow and all that.” Zugibe began doing research of his own.
One by one, Barbet’s theories fell apart.
Like Barbet, Zugibe constructed a cross, which has stood—with the exception of several days during 2001 when it was out for repairs (warped stipes)—in his garage in suburban New York for some forty years. Rather than crucifying corpses, Barbet uses live volunteers, hundreds in all. For his first study, he recruited just shy of one hundred volunteers from a local religious group, the Third Order of St. Francis.
How much do you have to pay a research subject to be crucified?
Nothing. “They would have paid me,” says Zugibe. “Everyone wanted to go up and see what it felt like.” Granted, Zugibe was using leather straps, not nails. (Over the years, Zugibe has occasionally received calls from volunteers seeking the real deal. “Would you believe? A girl called me and wanted me to actually nail her. She’s with this group where they put plates in their face, they surgically alter their heads, they bifurcate their tongues and put those things through their penis.”)
The first thing Zugibe noticed when he began putting people up on his cross was that none of them were having trouble breathing, even when they stayed up there for forty-five minutes. (He’d been skeptical about Barbet’s suffocation theory and dismissive of the reference to torture victims because those men’s hands were directly over their heads, not out to their sides.) Nor did Zugibe’s subjects spontaneously try to lift themselves up. In fact, when asked to do so, in a different experiment, they were unable to. “It is totally impossible to lift yourself up from that position, with the feet flush to the cross,” Zugibe asserts. Furthermore, he points out, the double blood flows were on the back of the hand, which was pressed against the cross. If Jesus had been pushing himself up and down, the blood oozing from the wound would have been smeared, not neatly split into two flows.
What, then, could have caused the famed double flow marks on the Shroud? Zugibe imagines its having happened after Jesus was taken down from the cross and washed. The washing disturbed the clotting and a small quantity of blood trickled out and split into two rivulets as it encountered the ulnar styloid protuberance, the bump that protrudes from the pinkie side of the wrist. Zugibe recalled having seen a flow of blood just like this on a gunshot victim in his lab. He tested his theory by washing the dried blood from the wound of a recently arrived corpse in his lab to see if a small quantity of blood might leak out. “Within a few minutes,” he writes in an article published in the Shroudie journal Sindon, “a small rivulet of blood appeared.”