To speed death, executioners would often break the legs of their victims to give no chance of using their thigh muscles as support. It was probably unnecessary, as their strength would not have lasted more than a few minutes even if they were unharmed.
Frequently, the legs of the person executed were broken or shattered with an iron club, an act called crurifragium, which was also frequently applied without crucifixion to slaves. This act hastened the death of the person but was also meant to deter those who observed the crucifixion from committing offenses.
Because the Jews did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other.
As they hit Jesus in the head (Matthew 27:30), the thorns from the crown push into the skin and He begins bleeding profusely. The thorns also cause damage to the nerve that supplies the face, causing intense pain down His face and neck.
The five wounds comprised 1) the nail hole in his right hand, 2) the nail hole in his left hand, 3) the nail hole in his right foot, 4) the nail hole in his left foot, 5) the wound to his torso from the piercing of the spear.
Death by crucifixion now begins. As Jesus slowly sags down with the weight of His body on the nails through His wrists, excruciating, fiery pain shoots along the most sensitive nerve endings in the body – called the median nerves – and travels along the fingers and up the arms to explode in the brain.
Christ descended into hell, experienced all its horrors. He tasted every dimension of its pain. And He did that on the cross.
Suffocation, loss of body fluids and multiple organ failure. It wasn't pleasant, but for those with a strong constitution take a deep breath and read on. "The weight of the body pulling down on the arms makes breathing extremely difficult," says Jeremy Ward, a physiologist at King's College London.
Once the crossbar was in place, the feet may be nailed to either side of the upright or crossed. In the first case, nails would have been driven through the heel bones, and in the second case, one nail would have been hammered through the metatarsals in the middle of the foot.
Apparently there is only one extant account (in Josephus) of one person surviving crucifixion out of the hundreds reported in ancient literature. (And that case was only when excellent medical care was immediately provided by the Romans, and even so, only one out of three who were so rescued actually survived!)
3rd Word From the Cross: 'Behold Your Son; Behold Your Mother'| National Catholic Register.
She takes on Pilate's guilt for his execution of Jesus and he executes her as well, in a scene in which she is baptized in blood and made a martyr.
The attending Roman guards could only leave the site after the victim had died, and were known to precipitate death by means of deliberate fracturing of the tibia and/or fibula, spear stab wounds into the heart, sharp blows to the front of the chest, or a smoking fire built at the foot of the cross to asphyxiate the ...
Some would argue that only ropes were employed in crucifixion. 2 Others, like Hengel, state that nails were almost always used, and ropes were the exception3—the majority of scholars fall some- where in between.
The point of crucifixion is a slow agonizing death. The way JWs say Jesus died, with his hands over his head, he would only have survived a few hours at the most. Maybe 1 or 2 hours.
The exact number of the Holy Nails has been a matter of speculation for centuries. The general modern understanding in the Catholic Church is that Christ was crucified with four nails, but three are sometimes depicted as a symbolic reference to the Holy Trinity.
He may have stood about 5-ft.-5-in. (166 cm) tall, the average man's height at the time.
Prior to the Seventh Crusade, Louis IX of France bought from Baldwin II of Constantinople what was venerated as Jesus' Crown of Thorns. It is kept in Paris to this day, in the Louvre Museum.
Crucifixion leads to death by suffocation and exhaustion. The shoulders have to support the weight of the body and it gets progressively harder to take a breath. For a considerable time, a person can survive by conserving energy and allowing air to diffuse into the lungs with the minimum of effort.
Added to what Jesus had already suffered from being beaten and flogged, the crown of thorns would have caused an almost indescribable pain as Jesus labored, with a heavy cross on His back and crown of thorns on His head, through the streets of Jerusalem to the place where He was ultimately crucified.
Jesus also forgave people who didn't know they were doing something wrong. He asked Heavenly Father to forgive the men who crucified Him. They didn't know they were hurting the Son of God. Jesus forgives people because He loves them.
Luke's gospel also records that Jesus wept as he entered Jerusalem before his trial and death, anticipating the destruction of the Temple.
LAWTON: According to the New Testament, Jesus was crucified at a spot outside Jerusalem called Golgotha, which in Aramaic means “place of the skull.” The Latin word for skull is calvaria, and in English many Christians refer to the site of the crucifixion as Calvary.
According to pious legend, St. Bernard asked Jesus which was His greatest unrecorded suffering and the wound that inflicted the most pain on Him in Calvary and Jesus answered: "I had on My Shoulder, while I bore My Cross on the Way of Sorrows, a grievous Wound which was more painful than the others and which is not ...