Deliverance from the Cross — Page 77
between fifteen and forty-five seconds. In the case of Jesus a brief phase in the passage of events has been overlooked, or rather not properly considered. - While this is without doubt a fully established case of suffocation, one link of the chain of evidence is missing a small link, yet one of the greatest importance. Suffocation, yes, to the expert, this is what the photographs of the Turin Shroud clearly reveal. But this slow suffocation came to a spontaneous end! A man on the cross, only a minute away from giving up the ghost, is not likely to ask for a drink in a loud and clear voice audible to all. Assuming that at this time the suffocation agony had reached such a stage, the words: I thirst; would hardly have been spoken. But they must have been spoken because they are in the Gospels. It follows that the suffocation agony was not near the end. It was probably in the third and last stage, but this does not adequately explain how it came about that two minutes later, Jesus gave up the ghost. Contemporary accounts of the critical stage bear this out. When research on the Shroud had reached the point where suffocation was established as the cause of death, the whole course of the death struggle of Jesus became clear. 1. It was suffocation, as borne out by the physical condition which the imprints on 77