On a “Reason to Doubt” podcast recently I demonstrated, as I have done before, that the alleged wrist wound was demonstrably through the ‘palm’ of the hand rather than the ‘wrist,’ although these areas are sometimes difficult to distinguish, so I refined my demonstration to show that the nail was between the metacarpals, not among the carpals. I used this diagram, from good ol’ Wikipedia, to show what I mean:
The long bones above the carpals are the metacarpals. Beyond them are the proximal, middle and distal phalanges, and the knuckles are the ends of the metacarpals, the “balls” around which the “socket” ends of the proximal phalanges rotate.
I showed that the distance from the carpals to the knuckles is invariably longer than the proximal phalanges, and that the nail wound on the Shroud, being approximately the same distance from the knuckles as the length of the proximal phalanges, must therefore be between the metacarpals, and not among the carpals. This series explains it clearly:
Q.E.D. I thought, and left it at that. The podcast has since been watched nearly 1600 times in 10 days, and much criticised, especially with regard to my comments on the flagrum (in a different section from this). Few added anything to my consideration of the hand except my friend Gerardo, who remarked that the distance from his wrist to the tips of his fingers was 20cm.
I didn’t find that very helpful, as I was working off images of the Shroud at no defined magnification, and anyway there’s no knowing whether Gerardo has longer or shorter hands than the “Man in the Shroud.” Nevertheless I found that my own distance was about the same, and, interestingly, that my knuckles are about half way along, 10cm from either end of the measurement. I then applied this to Shroud Scope, a splendid resource provided by Mario Latendresse at sindonology.org. To my astonishment, what I had assumed to be the proximal-middle phalanx joint of the Shroud was in exactly the same place as my, and Gerardo’s knuckles. The line below is exactly 10cm long (on the Shroud, not in the illustration!):
Was it possible, I asked myself, that I had assumed a wrong location for the knuckles all along?
Of course I knew that various people, especially Alan Whanger, thought they could see the metacarpals because the Shroud was a kind of X-ray, but where, I wondered, did they see them? There are a couple of not very helpful photos on the internet, which at least persuaded me that placing them in the “new” position has not been not widely considered. Alan Whanger took some x-rays of himself, and compared them to the Shroud like this (blue additions mine):
From these, it appears that Whanger assumed that the upper blue lines, more or less in line with the groove between the first and second finger, mark the outer ends of the metacarpals, i.e. the knuckles, and the lower blue lines, more or less in line with the fourth finger, mark the proximal-middle phalangeal joints. That this is the “normal” way of seeing the hands is confirmed by illustrations from images from Ian Wilson (himself and sketched by Isabel Piczek), Lorenzo Ferri, John Jackson, Giulio Fanti, Luigi Mattei, Gilbert Lavoie, Giulio Fanti again, and Alvaro Blanco.
But could in fact the lower blue lines be the knuckles? (Spoiler alert: I think they may be.)
Like this? Illustrations by Nora Creech and Juan Manuel Miñarro:
We note that in the top collection of images the nail wound, or the wrist if it is not visible, is some distance from the upper edge of the left hand, while in the lower images, and on the Shroud itself, it is very close to it.
One possibility that has been suggested is that the metacarpus is steeply angled so that it appears foreshortened from 10cm to about 6cm. Like this:
However, this is not justified by any consideration that the alleged “cloth-body distance” relates to the intensity of the image on the cloth.
Here is a painting of the Lamentation by the 15th century Dutch Painter Petrus Christus, and on the right an enlargement, with the point of the elbow, the wrist and the knuckles indicated in green, and the centre of the nail wound in pink. Below it is the arm from the Shroud, and on the right the point of the elbow and two possible sets of knuckles in blue, and the blood flow in red:
Now, we can superimpose the Shroud onto the painting in two ways, pinning the point of the elbow, and each one (separately) of the rows of knuckles to their equivalents on the painting. Rather unexpectedly, they both make reasonable sense:
And if we assume that the upper set of “knuckles” is correct, then the nail wound is between the metacarpals, but if we assume that the lower set is correct, the the wound is among the wrist bones. But which is correct? Returning to Shroud Scope, we can acquire some measurements.
As it happens, these measurements not only correspond reasonably well to my own arm, but also to a study of 480 males in Poland, whose average forearm length was 25.4cm.
(N. Zarzycka, S. Załuska, ’Measurements of the Forearm in Inhabitants of the Lublin Region.’
Annales Universitatis Mariae Curie-Sklodowska, 1989)
If the nail wound is among the carpals, then the elbow-wound distance would be 26cm and the wound-knuckle distance 10cm; if the nail wound is among the metacarpals, then the elbow-wound distance would be 30cm and the wound-knuckle distance 6cm. Only the first is justified by the measurements.
There is thus good reason to suppose that the “wrist-wound” really is in the “wrist” and not in the centre of the back of the hand as I have previously maintained.
We must ask ourselves why this should be. Those who think the Shroud is authentic, and that Jesus was nailed through the wrist, will simply find what is to be expected, but those who think it medieval will need an explanation. I suspect it is utterly prosaic. We have no idea where Romans placed their nails, and we can’t suppose that a medieval monastic artisan did either. So did he make his own anatomical deduction, as did Pierre Barbet, or did he place the blood at random? I suspect not. I think he simply made the same ‘mistake’ as almost all our modern interpreters, and thought that the four well marked parallel bars at the top of the hand were indeed the proximal phalanges, and placed the nail wound roughly in the middle of the hand (between the metacarpals), just like everybody else at the time.