The Suffocation of Christ

The Gospels say that after three hours of agony on the Cross, Jesus "yielded up his spirit." How, precisely, did he die? Not even Luke, who according to tradition was a doctor, offers an explanation, so it has generally been assumed that death came from the cumulative effect of the agony--thirst, heat, shock, and exhaustion. French Physician Jacques Brehant, 59, who has been pursuing the elusive medical mystery of the Crucifixion for nearly 30 years, makes a more specific diagnosis: Jesus died of suffocation.

Brehant, whose findings caused something of a stir in France when they were publicized recently in the Paris daily Le Monde, bases his conclusion on a study of both Roman historical references to crucifixions and reports by Nazi prison-camp survivors who saw the grisly method of killing carried out during World War II. Nailed to the cross by wrists and ankles, the victim, in a desperate struggle for breath, alternately shifted his weight from arms to legs until he slumped down utterly exhausted. With the body weight resting on the arms, the diaphragm could no longer expel carbon dioxide from the lungs, and thus the man died.

Although he is a devout Roman Catholic, Brehant seriously questions whether Jesus could have lasted anything like three hours on the Cross, and argues that hardly ever in Western art is there a "medically accurate and scientifically serious portrayal of the event." The reason, he explains, is that the Cross itself did not become an object of veneration for pious Christians until about the 5th century--more than 100 years after Constantine abolished crucifixion from the Roman Empire as a method of capital punishment.

Forced to rely more on imagination than on eyewitness accounts, artists of subsequent ages customarily pictured Jesus stretched on a crux sublimis, towering high above the earth, which the Romans reserved exclusively for illustrious victims. An obscure carpenter from Nazareth, contends Brehant, would have rated nothing more than the low T-shaped cross, scarcely taller than a man, that was used for the execution of common criminals.

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