Truth About The Crucifixion — Page 154
The beast opened up my side. Its lance was thrust from below into my chest, it did not hit my heart. My side bled. My body was lifeless but not dead. My heart was still beating, my wounds were treated with balm. Joseph of Arimathea laid me in a grave of rocks. My body could rest. My heart grew stronger. Then I rose again. ". While Jesus was talking to him, as Naber wrote on the paper, Naber could recall each item in vivid close-up, the most vivid of which were the last words of Jesus: "I am Jesus whom men crucified. You, Hans, have seen that I did not die on the cross. You must render testimony of this fact. " Then Jesus was gone. . Naber slept for three days and, revived from the ordeal, quit the black market and began giving fervent witness to the truth which had been revealed to him. Neue Zeitung, an occupation army newspaper published by the Americans for. German civilians, published in 1947 an interview with Naber. . Most readers did not take the story seriously, some readers were outraged to think he would challenge the fact that Christ died on the cross. He needed proof, Naber said, and not long thereafter, he heard of the shroud of Turin for the first time. . In 1973, when Naber and I met in London, he filled me in on what happened next. A priest friend gave him a book on the shroud by R. W. Hynek, a Czechoslovakian doctor who had done work on the possible causes of Christ's death. When he came to the chapter stating that all doctors who had studied the photographs at length believed it held a corpse, he stopped. . If the shroud had wrapped a dead man, he realized, then his vision could not be true. He would have to admit he was imagining things, perhaps even hallucinating. Naber could not accept either of these conclusions. So he bought all the books he could on the shroud, as well as life-size blow-ups of the 1931. Enrie photographs. . Poring over the apparent bloodstains on the shroud, he told me, he suddenly recalled an incident in the war. “It was in 1942 on the home front. There had been an automobile accident in which a man in our company had been killed. As the company writer I was to go to the autopsy room and make the report. I was standing there with my sargent. The doctor made a cut on the man, but no blood came out. I was surprised and asked the sargent why this was so. He replied 159