Deliverance from the Cross — Page 79
Even in the case of a healthy person, the intrusion of vinegar into the air channel can produce the most serious spasms of suffocation. This is even more so when the body is tired and exhausted and all the organs directly or indirectly associated with breathing are in a state of cramp. Further more, we are here dealing with a man who, after a slow process of suffocation, is already at the door of death which looks like being his inevitable fate. - Did the man on the cross want vinegar when he exclaimed: I thirst! Certainly not. He may have expected to be given the kind of vinegar water which the Roman soldiers drank on long marches water they usually found in springs or carried with them in tubes, and to which they added vinegar. To give the man on the cross pure vinegar was obviously an infamy perpetrated by the hangman's assistant. We know that in antiquity there was no such thing as mercy at an execution. It was a fundamental mistake of scientific research to present this offering of vinegar as an act as harmless as if it had been vinegar water, or to interpret it even as an act of kindness. Jesus, we must remember, was as a criminal, and the doubts and wavering which beset a few people after he gave up the ghost was their reaction to the natural phenomena which accompanied it. The mystery is how these circumstances could escape the attention of the scientists for so long. It is clearly striking that three Evangelists have corresponding accounts of Jesus giving up the ghost immediately after 79