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  • Been going down a lot of early Christianity rabbit holes, and my latest over the past few days has been oddities to the depiction of the crucifixion in John (allegedly based on earlier eyewitness testimony).

    Crucifixion as an execution method didn't even necessarily involve nails. It was excruciating because it dragged on over a very long period of time. Your body's survival instinct to keep breathing effectively tortures you to keep struggling to breathe as it gets more and more unbearable.

    Except - that's not at all how Jesus's execution turns out in John.

    He just sort of chills up there, takes a sip of sour/bitter wine brought up to him on the cross (19:29), and then not long after is just like "ok, peace out" and croaks midday.

    This is so unusual that in the evening the guards who are then breaking the legs of the other prisoners being executed to speed up the process for the Sabbath have to double check whether Jesus is actually dead by poking his side with a spear, when suddenly water and blood pour out (19:34).

    So, some fun facts about the Mediterranean in antiquity:

    • Euthanasia was a thing, mentioned a number of times BCE as performed by high doses of opium
    • Opium has a bitter taste
    • Acute opium poisoning causes pulmonary edema where your lungs fill up with fluid

    (Notably both Matthew 27 and Mark 15 deny that he drank the wine offered when he was on the cross, though there's a doubled denial of wine where the soldiers offer it that's found in all the Synoptics. In theory Luke depends on Mark, but doesn't have the non-consumption of the wine on the stick as drunk in John, so it looks a bit like the extant version of Mark may have had post-John parts of Matthew edited into it later on.)

    So suddenly dying only a few hours into crucifixion shortly after drinking bitter/sour wine and then having fluid pour out of a lung puncture sounds a bit like even if you put him in a cage it wouldn't necessarily have lasted very long anyways assuming he still had access to beverages provided by his mom. Also, a rather dark but humanizing perspective to the story if what I'm suggesting was historically correct and his mother effectively euthanized him to shorten his suffering...

  • All the biblical fiction heaven vs hell fantasy fiction is basically this. Gotta harvest those potential biblical artifacts for their apocalyptic powers.

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