A Swooning Saviour? - Part 2

Once Jesus arrived at the cross He was laid down and His outstretched hands nailed to the horizontal beam, which was at this stage separate from the vertical beam. Without going into detail of the nailing of Jesus’ wrists, it is suffice to say that the pain was intolerable. So uniquely intense was the pain that a new word was invented to describe the agony: excruciating, literally meaning ‘out of the cross’.

However, what was it that actually caused the death of a crucifixion victim?

“Once a person is hanging in the vertical position…crucifixion is essentially an agonizingly slow death by asphyxiation.

“The reason is that the stresses on the muscles and diaphragm put the chest into the inhaled position; basically, in order to exhale, the individual must push up on his feet so the tension on the muscles would be eased for a moment. In doing so, the nail would tear through the foot, eventually locking up against the tarsal bones…eventually complete exhaustion would take over, and the person wouldn’t be able to push up and breathe anymore.”

As breathing slows, the crucifixion victim goes into respiratory acidosis. Carbon dioxide in the blood dissolves as carbonic acid. This increases the acidity of the blood, eventually leading to an irregular heartbeat. He would then die of cardiac arrest.

Before Jesus died, His heart rate would have been rapid due to the hypovolemic shock. This results in the collection of fluid in the membrane around the heart, known as a pericardial effusion. This accounts for the blood and water which flowed from Jesus’ side after He was pierced by the Roman soldier (see John 19:34).

At this point, there is absolutely no doubt that Jesus would have been dead.

But what if Jesus wasn’t dead, but merely unconscious as the ‘swoon theory’ suggests?

This is not probable. Firstly, the Roman soldiers were employed to kill and knew how to do their job. Secondly, they would not have found it difficult to determine if a person was dead; the soldiers themselves thrust the spear into Jesus’ side. Thirdly, should a prisoner happen to escape, the soldiers responsible would be put to death. There was a huge incentive to ensure that each victim was definitely dead when removed from the cross.

Suppose however that Jesus did actually survive the Crucifixion; is this plausible?

Strobel quotes Dr. Alexander Metherell:

“… a person in that kind of pathetic condition would never have inspired his disciples to go out and proclaim the he’s the Lord of life who had triumphed over the grave…

“After suffering that horrible abuse, with all the catastrophic blood loss and trauma, he would have looked so pitiful that the disciples would never have hailed him as a victorious conqueror of death; they would have felt sorry for him and tried to nurse him back to health.

“So it’s preposterous to think that if he had appeared to them in that awful state, his followers would have been prompted to start a worldwide movement based on the hope that someday they too would have a resurrection body like his. There’s just no way.”

A swooning Saviour? An unlikely theory. Instead, evidence and logic point to Jesus’ definite death, which raises the next question: How can we know that Jesus was resurrected?

'The Swooning Saviour" posts are a summary of Lee Strobel’s "The Case for Easter".