ginof wrote: if someone wants to make up wonderful stories, I'll read harry potter, the hobbit, etc. But if someone wants me to base my belief system on this. I want it to be factual. And being able to show that it is factual, or at least reasonably should be factual, is very, very important.
Ginof, I completely agree, but the question I was trying to raise in mentioning the wrist/palm crucifixion issue was that actual belief systems have a mutating mythic content, and that this content evolves in response to cultural resonance. The cross is primarily a myth (ie a source of cultural meaning) rather than a basis for objective knowledge. I view the story of the cross as a displaced trauma. Josephus in
The Jewish Wars described the Roman behaviour towards the Jews in 70 AD in the siege of Jerusalem as follows (see
http://www.religiousstudies.uncc.edu/jd ... ephus.html
they were first whipped, and then tormented with all sorts of tortures, before they died, and were then crucified before the wall of the city. This miserable procedure made Titus greatly to pity them, while they caught every day five hundred Jews; nay, some days they caught more: yet it did not appear to be safe for him to let those that were taken by force go their way, and to set a guard over so many he saw would be to make such a great deal of them useless to him. The main reason why he did not forbid that cruelty was this, that he hoped the Jews might perhaps yield at that sight, out of fear lest they might themselves afterwards be liable to the same cruel treatment. So the soldiers, out of the wrath and hatred they bore the Jews, nailed those they caught, one after one way, and another after another, to the crosses, by way of jest, when their multitude was so great, that room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses wanting for the bodies.
It is estimated at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_(70) that more than one million people may have died as a result of the siege of Jerusalem in 70AD. According to Josephus, the limiting factor on crucifixion was wood for crosses. This massive assault led to the Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean.
Analysing Christian beliefs about the cross against the psychological framework of mythic displacement of trauma, it can be argued that the massive Roman assault of 70AD was too much for collective memory to bear, so the memory mutated into the 'one for all' idea of Jesus as the sacrificial lamb, already attractively presented by Paul and the Gospels. The stigmata are signs of kingly power, like power beams from the fantastic four. Hence in the popular imagination this version that Jesus was crucified through the hands as a sacrificial scapegoat came to have pride of place. It is a shame that the church is incapable of analysing its beliefs through mythic anthropology. I think this example helps to show why Christianity had such powerful popular resonance in the ancient world, with the massive shocking reality of the Roman assault transmuted into something bearable and even redeeming. Part of the issue is that in the history written by the victors the Romans shared their guilt with the Jews, when in reality the death of Christ was primarily a crime of Rome. In deconstructing such a story it is important to be sensitive to the dimension of mythic cultural meaning, rather than rejecting it simply because it is inconsistent.