Muddlehead: I wish my master was dead!
Eyebald: Then why not do something about it?
Muddlehead: I wouldn’t mind.
Eyebald: Tell me how.
Muddlehead: You couldn’t keep it secret.
Eyebald: My lips are zipped.
Muddlehead: I know you too well.
Eyebald: No, honestly, trust me.
Muddlehead: Only as far as I can throw you.
Eyebald: All right, listen. You know my master hates yours?
Muddlehead: Old news.
Eyebald: Because of the love affair.
Muddlehead: You’re wasting your breath.
Eyebald: Why?
Muddlehead: I knew it before.
Eyebald: Fine. So if you helped my master dispose of yours by leaking some inside information…
Muddlehead: Too risky.
Eyebald: Why?
Muddlehead: Because if you told anyone, I’d have to change my name from Muddlehead to Shinwreck.
Eyebald: I wouldn’t tell. I’d give my master the information without even mentioning your name.
Muddlehead: Says you. Do you swear not to tell anybody?
Eyebald: Cross my heart. What can you tell us?
Muddlehead: Well…
This little interchange comes from ‘The Little Carthaginian’ (Poenulus) by Titus Maccius Plautus. The translation is mine. Eyebald and Muddlehead are a couple of slaves whose Latin names are Milphio and Syncerastus. Although the play is in Latin the names are derived from Greek, and mean, literally, something like ‘Eyelash-loss,’ and ‘Mixed drinks.’ In comic Latin, punished slaves often had their names changed by their masters, and one of the most severe punishments a slave could endure was to have both legs broken. Syncerastus fears he will have to change his name to Crurifragius – ‘broken legs.’ The clever translation, ‘shinwreck’ is, sadly, not mine. I think it is by Wolfgang de Melo. ‘Crurifragius‘ is a play on a more common word, ‘naufragium,’ which means “shipwreck.”
It may come as a surprise to sindonologists that this is the single use of the word ‘crurifragius‘ (or ‘crurifragium‘) in the whole of classical literature. There is a single use of the Greek equivalent – “σκελοκοπηθη” – in the apocryphal Gospel of Peter, referring to the crucifixion of Jesus, but otherwise the practice of breaking a criminal’s legs as a way of hastening death by crucifixion is unique to the New Testament, and there is no evidence that it was either typical or usual.
Strictly speaking, “σκελοκοπηθη” refers to cutting or chopping rather than breaking: perhaps ‘beating’ would translate the “-κοπηθη” part best. John uses the word “κατέαξαν,” which means ‘shatter.’
Since I first posted this I’ve been indebted to two of my colleagues (Teddi Pappas and Joe Marino) who referred me to a couple of very detailed reviews of the primary evidence, both of whom concur with my own conclusions above. John Granger Cook points out in ‘Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World,’ that crucifixion and having ones legs broken were “actually two different forms of death,” and Thomas McGovern, in ‘Did Jesus Die by Suffocation?: An Appraisal of the Evidence,’ (The Linacre Quarterly, 2022) writes “Crurifragium was a stand-alone form of capital punishment in the Roman Empire, and no writing outside the Gospels has been found demonstrating another instance of combining crucifixion and shattering of the legs.” I’ve not read McGovern’s book, ‘What Christ Suffered: A Doctor’s Journey Through the Passion,’ from 2022, but cannot suppose it says anything different.
As a post script, John Granger Cook’s book mentioned above refers on to the remarkable book of astrological predictions by Julius Firmicus Maternus, written at almost exactly the same time as the Emperor Constantine the Great abolished crucifixion as an official punishment in the Roman Empire. It is called Matheseos Libri VIII, The Eight Books of Knowledge, and, because it mentions a solar eclipse of 334 AD, must have been written after that date. The Knowledge referred to is entirely astrological, and Book Eight, Section Six, concerns the effect of non-zodiacal constellations close to Aries, namely Argo, Orion, Auriga, Haedus, the Hyades, and Capra. To précis somewhat, when these are in the ascendent during birth, the baby will become involved in the sea, travel, gymnastics, depravity, belligerence, and nervous curiosity, respectively. If they are in the descendent, they are doomed to drowning, death while travelling, broken bones, death in childhood, sudden and unexpected death or religious persecution.
Paragraph 11, on Auriga descending, says: “Si Auriga in occasu geniturae fuerit inventus, et eum malivolarum stellarum radius inpugnet, deiecti quadrigis miseris lacerationibus dissipantur, ut fracto corpore acerba mortis patiantur incommoda, aut fulmine icti repentino mortis opprimuntur occasu, aut tolluntur in crucem, aut crura illis publica animadversione franguntur.”
“If Auriga is in the descendent at the time of someone’s birth, with a malevolent star within it, he will be thrown from a chariot and savagely lacerated, and suffer the agonies of death from his broken body; or, he will be struck by lightening and die suddenly; or he will be hoisted onto a cross; or will have his legs broken by public decree.” [My translation]
Either crucifixion, or broken legs. The text does not say, suggest, or imply, both.
Sources:
Pautus’ Poenulus: A Student Commentary, Erin K. Moodie
The Little Carthaginian. Pseudolus. The Rope, Wolfgang de Melo
Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World, John Granger Cook
Did Jesus Die by Suffocation? An Appraisal of the Evidence, Thomas McGovern et al., in The Linacre Quarterly, 2022
Matheseos Liber VIII, Firmicus Maternus, at penelope.uchicago.edu
====================
It is, I think, a capital mistake to grab some Latin from the bible and/or classical literature and wrench its meaning to fit a presupposition, rather than than to begin with the original word and try to derive its meaning from its context and contemporary references. Take ‘plumbatae,’ for example.
Neither plumbata nor anything like it appear in the bible. It derives from the Latin for the metal ‘lead,’ plumbum (which is referred to a few times), and seems to refer to round lumps of lead used for various purposes. In its first occurrence in literature, in the second or third century, it appears to refer to egg-shaped weights at the base of arrowheads to give them extra penetrative power. However, following a putative reconstruction of the sort of object which might have caused the scourge marks on the Shroud, it has been assumed by some authors that such scourges actually existed, and had lead-balls on the ends of their lashes. Surely, goes the reasoning, these balls would have been called plumbatae, and therefore any references to plumbatae in literature might refer to such scourges – and probably do!
Not only is this prima facie unlikely, but the evidence is against it. The first mention of any connection between lead and punishment comes in the 3rd century, where a whole series of sources mention being struck with lead weights, without necessarily associating them with thongs or whips. The word for the blow itself is occasionally associated with verbera (which may mean thongs or lashes), but most often ictus, which is often used with reference to heavy weights, but never with cords or thongs.
The Gospel of Luke does not mention Jesus being flogged – its reference to the punishment of Jesus being to ‘chastising’ (in Greek, the same word also means ‘educating’) – but the other three gospels do, all using derivatives of the the word flagellum, a word never associated with lead. The same word occurs throughout the Latin bible; the word flagrum, incidentally, never. Ictus occurs a few times, for being hit with a stone (twice), a sword, the flow of a river, a manual strike, and the famous “twinkling of an eye” (in ictu oculi). Verbera refers to the beating of a donkey, of wings, of thunder, but sometimes of people, including, once, what appears most clearly to be a flogging with a whip: “Duo juvenes […] qui circumsteterunt eum, et ex utraque parte flagellabant, sine intermissione multis plagis verberantes” (2 Maccabees 3:26). But neither verbera nor any of its derivatives are associated with the scourging of Jesus, nor, in the bible, with lead. In Greek, and in all four Gospels, ‘scourging’ in general is μαστιγόω, but this word is not used of Jesus’s flogging except by John. Matthew and Mark use φραγελλώσας, which appears to be a back-formation from the Latin.
It has been suggested that some things are so familiar that they seem to slip ‘under the radar’ of literature, so speak, so that precise descriptions of them are considerably rarer than the objects or events themselves. John Loken, in a comment below, asks whether I “expect a Roman writer to tell of a flogging ‘with a flagellum made of three leather thongs with little lead balls at the ends of each one’ before you will acknowledge the strong possibility that such a configuration was sometimes used.” There is some reason to this, and I certainly acknowledge some possibility that lead tipped thongs were used, even though there is neither literary nor archaeological evidence for them.
However, John goes on to compare the alleged lead balls which tipped flagella with the lead “glandes,” or slingshot, which were used in abundance for hundreds of years before and after the first century. This, I think, does little to support his case. These ‘little lead balls,’ unlike flagella or any part of them, are found in abundance across the Roman world, and frequently mentioned in contemporary literature. The Aeneid has a reference to “glandes liventis plumbi” (Book VII, Line 686), and Ovid’s Metamorphosis 14 describes Romulus’s apotheosis as his body disappearing into the air, like “lata plumbea funda missa solet medio glans intabescere caelo,” “a lead pellet from a broad sling strap, that often melts away in mid-air.” In Greek, Xenophon, in Anabasis, refers to the warriors of Rhodes, whose slingshot have a longer range than usual because they use leaden pellets, “μολυβδίσιν” (Anabasis 3, 3). Remarkably, Polybius describes a variety of sling in almost exactly the terms which John Loken seems to think ridiculously unlikely: “The so‑called cestrus was a novel invention at the time of the war with Perseus. The form of the missile was as follows. It was two cubits long,a the tube being of the same length as the point. Into the former was fitted a wooden shaft a span in length and a finger’s breadth in thickness, and to the middle of this were firmly attached three quite short wing-shaped sticks. The thongs of the sling from which the missile was discharged were of unequal length, and it was so inserted into the loop between them that it was easily freed. There it remained fixed while the thongs were whirled round and taut, but when at the moment of discharge one of the thongs was loosened, it left the loop and was shot like a leaden bullet from the sling, and striking with great force inflicted severe injury on those who were hit by it.” (Translation from The Histories of Polybius, Volume V of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1926, at penelope.uchicago.edu). The Greek for the “leaden bullet from the sling” is “μολυβδὶς ἐκ τῆς σφενδόνης.”
I think my case stands.
Sources:
The Scourge of Jesus and the Roman Scourge, Andrea Nicolotti
The Bible in various translations, English, Latin and Greek
A Latin Dictionary, Charlton T. Lewis & Charles Short
====================
Another word found more often in sindonological literature than ancient writing is ‘patibulum.’ An article in New Testament Studies (CUP) called ‘Carrying a Patibulum: A Reassessment of Non-Christian Latin Sources,’ by Ruben van Wingerden (5 June 2020) examines eight Latin sources for the word in context, and concludes that half of them lend credence to the cross-bar of the cross being carried to the place of crucifixion, and half of them don’t. The half which do all come from Rome, and van Wingerden is reluctant to extend the practice to other parts of the empire. His idea, I think, is that the punishment consisted of being fastened to some kind of yoke and led through the streets, but not necessarily to crucifixion.
Van Wingerden’s article is, however, countered by ‘The Spectacle of the Patibulum: A Response to Ruben van Wingerden,’ by John Granger Cook (6 December 2022), who seems to show that every instance of a slave being fastened to a patibulum as a punishment does end in crucifixion, even if the patibulum is not expressly described as part of the cross. It can be contrasted with the furca, which seems to have been a similar instrument and used in a similar way (perhaps to facilitate whipping the prisoner through the streets), but did not result in death afterwards – there was a particular name for people who had endured it and survived: furcifer (furca-bearer).
There are a few classical descriptions of people having to carry their cross to the crucifixion site, and in those cases they are invariably carrying a stauros (Latin) or σταυρός (Greek), which must refer to the upright, not the crossbar. Only the gospels (all of them) speak of taking up, or carrying, a crucem, but even then, the Greek is σταυρός. That Jesus was given something to carry seems well testified, but what, precisely, it was, is anyone’s guess.
Sources: identified in the text above.
Hi Hugh,
On the Roman whips question, I’m not surprised to read your contrary use of the Roman sling bullets evidence I newly related to you, with your insertion of a new paragraph about it (and me) into your original post of Jan. 2.
Once again your presentation seems odd and unfair. The sling bullets were clearly identifiable as such, were found at battlefield sites, and were extremely numerous. In contrast, the disputed small rounded weights (evidenced by the scourge wounds on the Turin Shroud Man) on the tips of some – repeat, some, surely not most – Roman whips would have been far fewer in number (how many whips for human punishment are needed by a Roman legion?). They would very probably also have been lost or been repurposed when the leather thongs holding them deteriorated. And they would have been so tiny that they were not depicted on any Roman paintings, drawings, or sculptures (that we know of so far).
The small bones that are rarely so depicted on Roman whip thongs seem to have been larger in size and hence more visible to observers. I seem to recall that a few of those depictions come in ritual situations, too, which would presumably have been more popular and approved than situations depicting mere punishments of lawbreakers. I also seem to recall that the entire roster of examples of non-metal ball tipped Roman whips numbered only about a dozen. That’s not many for an empire that lasted several hundred years and stretched two thousand miles and more. Or do you now know of more examples? You yourself even state that the slingshots’ “little lead balls, unlike flagella, are found in abundance.” You may have meant unlike flagella bullets, but your phrase “unlike flagella” is also quite correct, because none of those, the flagella or whips as a whole, have yet been found. They presumably all disintegrated in time or their parts were eventually used for other purposes. (The metal chains found in an Italian museum or two and long thought to be ancient Roman whips have since been proved not to be.)
Your quotations of a few phrases from the Aeneid, Ovid, Xenophon, and Polybius merely seem to reflect the great abundance and public visibility of those lead sling bullets. Slings were also clearly considered honorable weapons, used in heroic battles. Not so whips used to brutalize slaves and criminals. Being a public executioner has never been a glamorous job.
That “cestrus” sling contraption you cite sounds like a true monstrosity, and unique too, a “novel invention” as Polybius writes. No wonder it was described in detail by him. I don’t think it was “ridiculous” at all for it to be so fully described. But I can’t quite figure out from that description whether it was a machine, like a tiny catapult (with that “two cubit” long missile), or was “merely” a massive handheld sling, whirled around and let fly by some beefy 250-lb. soldier looking like a modern Olympic Games hammer thrower. It was a unique monstrosity in either case, well worth being mentioned and described in Roman literature, assuming it was not a fiction or exaggeration. By the way, is Polybius the only source in antiquity for that cestrus, that supersling, or are there others?
My mention of the small lead bullets or pellets used with Roman army slings was meant to highlight three points consistent with the Turin Shroud scourge wounds: (1) the use of lead in Roman weaponry, (2) the very widespread use of small leaden or other metallic objects by the Romans, and (3) the use of such small leaden objects to inflict injury and even death. All these points seem good circumstantial evidence for lead-tipped (or bronze-tipped?) leather thongs on some Roman Army whips, namely, those used on people not horses.
By the way, a general question for you now: What do a spear, an arrow, a battle axe, and a war hammer all have in common? “They are all, or can be, military weapons,” you might answer. Second question: But why? The answer, in case you haven’t thought of it yet: Because they each consist of a handle and/or a shaft made of lighter material, at the end of which an object of heavier material is affixed that is meant to inflict serious damage. They were so devised according to obvious laws of physics (think Archimedes and leverage, or the aerodynamics of an arrow). A whip, while not used in battle, belongs in the same general category, as a weapon or harmful tool. I do not have the slightest doubt that the Romans, sometimes or even often, similarly tipped their whip thongs with metal weights – rounded ones so that they wouldn’t shred the body and thus create an unnecessary bloody mess, including much spatter on the floggers themselves.
Hi Hugh,
Thank you for extending the commenting deadline on your medievalshroud.com blog posts from that earlier nano-period of three days to the merely miniscule one of two weeks now. It’s unfortunate that the period has not always been so generous since you began your blog five years ago in 2019.
It would also be nice now if you would actually state the length of that open commenting period somewhere, either at the head of your blog or at the head of the Comments box following each post, so that readers will not remain in the dark for additional years about your newly generous dispensation and still miss their chance to comment.
Of course, you do now offer the opportunity to subscribe to your blog, which I never saw offered in the past but did see when I checked the blog last week on Jan. 5 (2024). Thanks for that new feature, too, though some of us don’t like to register with too many blogs and websites. Anyway, maybe more discussion and even consensus answers will result. Hurray. But your dozens of previous blog posts since 2019 will remain as they are, almost entirely un-commented on, including criticism as some of them may have deserved. The very few comments which by chance slipped in under that earlier and unknown three-day time limit were surely just the tip of the potential iceberg of comments that would otherwise have been made.
With regard now specifically to your Jan. 2, 2024 post on “Crurifragius,” you have made some statements that seem to me slightly odd. In reply to my Jan. 5 comment, you wrote that breaking the legs of a crucifixion victim to hasten death in the rare cases where a quick death was necessary for religious reasons, as in Roman Judaea just before the high holy days, was, as a method, “not impossible.” Hmm. Your phrase suggests something like a 1000 to 1 chance, if not more, against that happening. But why be so skeptical, Hugh? If breaking of the legs was a fairly common means of executing people, as your “Crurifragius” post apparently confirms, and which was news to me, it must have been practiced at various times by some of the Roman soldiers stationed in Judaea. And the alternative method of quickly killing a crucifixion victim still up on the cross, namely, a lance jab to the heart, would have been, one might assume, a little too quick and therefore too kind. In any case, I really don’t see the point of your dwelling on the broken legs question. If you wish to deny that the several passages in the Gospel of John, 19:31-33, about the robbers’ legs being broken, are true, that seems more a question for New Testament research, not for Turin Shroud research.
Hugh, you also seem fixated on the lack of references to any little lead balls used on Roman whips. You clearly have the Turin Shroud’s many rounded scourge wounds in mind, and the corresponding claims of little lead or other metal balls used on the tips of Roman lashes/thongs, and you wish to undercut the Shroud’s authenticity. You write that “neither plumbata nor anything like it appear in the Bible.” But you don’t acknowledge that lead was very widely used by the Romans throughout their empire and for a wide variety of products both big and small. The Roman army, to cite a relevant example, definitely used little lead “bullets” or pellets for their slings when that weapon was used in battle. There are archeological sites, ancient battlefields, where many such have been found. Why not use lead (or bronze) balls for the tips of their whips too? It certainly makes good (punitive) sense, to inflict more pain while not shredding the body as sharp bone fragments would do.
You also write, “the first mention of any connection between lead and punishment comes in the 3rd century.” Could you please quote your source for us? Does it really say the first mention, or does the first citation so used by the modern author come from the 3rd century? Moreover, even if the first extant (since most Latin sources went lost, of course) “mention” of it is from the 3rd century, that almost certainly means the first punitive use of lead in reality occurred in the 2nd or even 1st century. Such a lag-time in the sources is well known among historians and archeologists.
Moreover, probably all of those (few? many?) Roman accounts of whippings you cite are brief and do not go on for sentence after sentence after sentence. Surely they do not describe in detail the component parts of the whips, because that was not the point of the narratives. The point was the strokes, the beating, the violent act itself, the pain inflicted. And so they used terms like that Latin “ictus,” stroke, etc., you mention, and nothing more.
Likewise, in early modern times, before writers got more elaborate in their descriptions of almost everything, they probably did not write, or only rarely wrote, that a soldier shot another soldier “with a musket that was made of both wood and steel.” Such material detail was superfluous in the writings of those days. Likewise with tales from bow and arrow days. Writers did not interrupt their narratives to specify that archers shot their enemies “with arrows made of metal heads and shafts of wood with feathers attached at the end.” That was all just taken for granted, surely in 99 out of 100 cases. And so, Hugh, for you to expect a Roman writer to tell of a flogging “with a flagellum made of three leather thongs with little lead balls at the ends of each one” before you will acknowledge the strong possibility that such a configuration was sometimes used (as appears on the Turin Shroud), seems to me a case of extreme skepticism. Such a whip makes perfect sense in terms of physics – to give it more reach and momentum before striking the body.
John Loken
Hi John,
Thanks for commenting. I think I’ve extended the comment limit to a fortnight. I didn’t know how to do that till a few days ago!
Anyway, I agree with all you’ve written. It’s not at all impossible that leg breaking and crucifixion were occasionally combined – although frankly, if you’ve got a spear available, it would be far quicker to use that than bash about with a hammer.
As for the lead weights, I think they were used for crushing criminals, not for throwing at them, although some illustrations seem to show a kind of cosh.
Best wiahes,
Hugh
There seem to be several problems with Hugh’s latest post “Crurifragius.” I should start, however, by noting perhaps the biggest problem of all, namely, that the Comments to all of Hugh’s posts are “closed” after just three days. This if the reason why so very many of his posts in the past, since he started writing this blog several years ago, have no comments on them. It is not because readers have had no comments to make, but rather that they had no time to make them. Most readers, like myself who discovered Hugh’s blog a couple of years ago, did not even know about that three day time limit. It is nowhere posted on the blog. Hugh has written me, once about a year ago, that he merely chose the cheapest blog format available and that is the reason for the mere three day time limit to comment. I find that frankly fishy. And I think Hugh should announce on a few Turin Shroud online forums just when he has made a new post. Enough said. I have to finish this comment of mine, as I’m writing on the third day of Hugh’s post and I may get zapped off into the netherworld before I finish it.
As for the breaking of the legs of a crucifixion, could it not be that the act was very rare among the Romans in general simply because they generally always left the victim to die slowly on the cross? But in Roman Judaea/Palestine, the Jews had other priorities and insisted that the victims be removed from the cross before the holy days. So they insisted on a quick killing? Breaking the legs would, of course, have prevented further pushing with the legs to enable the victim to breath, and so the victim would die within minutes.
I don’t see any reason why crucifixion and breaking of the legs could not therefore occasionally have been combined. After all, in old England there was the practice of victims being “drawn AND quartered.” And other people’s may have had similar combinations.
One might object that a lance could have done the job with a thrust into the heart. True, but on the other hand, the Romans did have their big hammers there at the cross, for the nails, so they could just as easily have used them.
On the lead and thongs question, several of those few references to lead weights alone could very easily have implied whipping to any Roman of the time, but the writer just left out the trivial leather thongs aspect and focused on the deadly lead. I find it hard to picture the Romans throwing balls of lead at a victim. Why not simply throw natural stones, as so many other peoples did, including the Jews? It may well be a case of incomplete testimony, not contradictory testimony.
Pardon any mistakes above, but I’ve written this very fast to squeak in under the deadline.
Thank you both for your comments, and especially for your references to John Granger Cook and Thomas McGovern, both of whom agree that the breaking of a criminal’s legs was a different punishment from crucifixion, and that there is no evidence that breaking the legs of a crucifixion victim was typical or common. That’s not to say that it didn’t happen, and I’ve no doubt the author of John’s Gospel thought it did. Do I think he was an idiot? No, of course not; that’s not how I think of people. I’m not sure what Teddi means by “straw-manning.” Look through almost any less scholarly work on the crucifixion than those you have quoted, and you will find the specific word “crurifragius” or “crurifragium” mentioned, as if it had actually existed in that context, which in fact it doesn’t. Perhaps you knew that already, but I didn’t.
Similarly, I’ve no doubt that Jesus was whipped with a flagellum, and I’ve no doubt that the author of Luke knew that too; but it is interesting that Luke uses a word for ‘instruct’ or ‘correct’ in this context rather than simply ‘punish.’ Perhaps he was hoping to lessen Pilate’s guilt.
The cobbled together flagrum in the British Museum was acquired in the 19th century from an Italian jeweller and antiquities seller, not an archaeologist. The balls are bronze, not lead, could not have caused the wound-patterns observed on the Shroud and are almost certainly nothing to do with scourging.
Best wishes,
Hugh
American physician Dr. Thomas McGovern published a book in 2021: “What Christ Suffered: A Doctor’s Journey Through the Passion.” (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor), 2021. The book (available in print or Kindle on Amazon) contains 2 appendices: “What Ancient Literature Reveals about Crucifixion” and “What Archaeology, Graffiti, Epigraphy, and Art Reveal About Crucifixion. They are on pages 207-263. There is probably more information on crucifixion than most people realize.
Edit: I meant to say that one of the definitions of chastising is scourging. Obviously, it can mean someone “being read the Riot Act.”
Hi, Hugh,
There’s a lot of straw-manning going on here, and I don’t have the time to go in-depth with all of it right now. But, some key points.
Crurifragium does not need to be commonplace with crucifixions in order to be a form of public punishment/execution –which it most definitely was (even in before Jesus’ time.). See Firmicus Maternus Math. 8.6.11 (II, 298, 14-20 K/S/Z) –from page 148 of John Granger Cook’s book “Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World.” One did not have to be crucified in order to receive this type of death blow. And, arguably, especially if it was not commonplace, then why would John mention it if it were not true? Do you think that he was an idiot to make something up like that? That would be like my writing a report on someone being executed via the electric chair and claiming that the executioner first cut off the person’s hands before the switch was pulled. What would be the point of lying about something like that unless it really happened?
The definition of “chastising” is scourging. Jesus was most definitely scourged –anyhow, that was a common pre-crucifixion punishment –there’s historical evidence for that.
And, there were scourges that had lead weights on them. Do we have any historical proof of this other than the example in the British Museum that was found but, I think they describe it as having been put back together again (or something like that.). But, the way it is described, the (presumably) archeologist that found it must have found the components, but the leather degraded over time, so they just put it back together again with some leather.
With the issue of the patibulum issue, I tend to waiver on that, but (at least my thoughts at the moment) I think that the slightly better argument is that it is just the crossbeam. But, perhaps it varied. I don’t know that it is necessarily overly relevant in terms of whether Christianity is True or whether the Shroud is authentic.
Best regards,
Teddi