Scholars’ Corner: New Analysis of the Crucified Man

Home > Magazines > BAR > November/December 1985

In our January/February 1985 issue, we published an article about the only remains of a crucified man to be recovered from antiquity (“Crucifixion—The Archaeological Evidence,” BAR 11:01). Vassilios Tzaferis, the author of the article and the excavator of the crucified man, based much of his analysis of the victim’s position on the cross and other aspects of the method of crucifixion on the work of a medical team from Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School headed by Nico Haas, who had analyzed the crucified man’s bones. In a recent article in the Israel Exploration Journal, however, Joseph Zias, an anthropologist with […]

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Footnotes

“The Crucified Man from Giv‘at ha-Mivtar: A Reappraisal,” Israel Exploration Journal Vol. 35, No. 1 (1985), pp. 22–27.

Zias and Sekeles also note a number of other errors in Haas’s report:

1. The victim’s legs were not broken as a final coup de grâce. The break so identified by Haas was postmortem.

2. The victim did not have a cleft palate. The upper right canine was not missing, despite Haas’s report to the contrary.

3. The wood from which the plaque under the nail head was made was olive wood, not acacia or pistacia, as Hans suggested.

4. The wood fragments attached to the end of the nail were too minute to be analyzed. Haas suggested the vertical shaft of the cross was olive wood. This is possible, but unlikely.