I’m surprised that you didn’t cite the article, “On the Physical Death of Jesus Christ,” by William Edwards, Wesley Gabel, and Floyd Hosmer, in the Journal of the American Medical Association of March 21, 1986. Their conclusion (in the case of Jesus’ crucifixion) is that “it remains unsettled whether Jesus died of cardiac rupture or of cardiorespiratory failure.” They didn’t mention, however, that, according to longstanding medical procedure, the ultimate physical cause of every human death is lack of oxygen to the brain.
My money is on blood loss, in the death of Jesus. Whatever it was, it was unusually fast, because when Joseph of Arimathea went to Pilate to ask for the body Pilate was surprised, as in "you mean he’s dead already?’
Such early outside accounts of Christianity as we possess do not seem to doubt it. In general, those who have denied it through the centuries have denied it because it went against their own religious prejudices, ee.g., the Gnostic cults, who denied that anyone so holy as Jesus could possibly have such a dirty, icky thing as a human body to begin with, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, whose objections are ultimately based on a naïve translation.
Why would they? Assuming this is an actual technical definition of death, which is doubtful, the truism that every death has this cause has no explanatory power. Why waste time with what becomes a meaningless redundancy?
I seem to remember an episode of “Quincy, M.E.” with William Shatner in a guest role as an investigator who was trying to prove that an apparently natural death wasn’t. Shatner’s character got himself drunk or partly drunk and put himself in the killer’s path. The upshot was that the killer had gotten the victim drunk and bound him in a standing position until his blood volume pooled in his lower body and overworked his heart and lungs, resulting in the victim’s death from cardiac failure. Shatner’s actions scare the killer, Quincy and Co. save Shatner, and the killer gives himself away and is arrested.
I saw a special on crucifixion recently, and one of the ideas they came up with was the fact that since Jesus fell with the beam while carrying it, he got an anurism (sp?) on his heart which ruptured once increased blood flow was required as his body was strained. The “mix of blood and water” when the solder stabbed him being “water” (fluid) from the sack around the heart followed by blood from the rupture in the heart.
A crucifixion as a means of torture? Yes, we’ve found remains that bear most/all of the description of a crucified body, but I suspect you mean of Jesus?
We don’t even have enough proof to convince everyone there WAS a Jesus of Nazareth, much less a crucifixion. Nonetheless the Bible has been a wonderful insight into, if not actual history, the mindset of the time. As it would incorporate many actual methods law, torture, ritual etc of the time the crucifixion of Jesus can at least be taken as a reasonable analogue to the real thing and as such speculation on his causes of death shouldn’t be discounted entirely, at least not until we have enough evidence to show that crucifixion as portrayed in the bible is an utter crock.
If you’re trying to be funny, you’re failing. Personal attacks are not permitted outside the BBQ Pit, as you well know. You may consider this an official warning.
Their own. Their error is the assumption that the vocabularies of ancient Greek and English possess a one-to-one mapping (which, of course, no two languages do), wherefore they maintain that, because the word “σταυρός” means “stake” in Homer, or Plato, or Aristophanes, it must consequently mean “stake” anywhere else, and therefore the translation “cross” must be part of the Evil Conspiracy.
