I saw parts of a Discovery Channel show about stigmata, but I couldn’t watch the whole thing.
I thought it would have been very interesting if cases of mysterious stigmata wounds had been reported in ancient Egypt, or among the Chinese or Indians or Native Americans any other non-Christian country, or before Jesus was born.
Has this ever happened?
Then again, some may say that it would be even MORE interesting if no cases of stigmata wounds had ever showed up before Jesus was crucified.
I don’t know of any examples before Christ. There are those who claim that the first stigmata were on Paul, who talked about being marked by Christ, but most people take this as a metaphorical marking. Some think he was tattooed.
The only cases I know of where people were marked in any way similar to those of their culture heros involve passage rites that everyone goes through (like circumcision). I don’t know of any parallels to RARE markings like the stigmata, that only a very few ever have.
…but I play one on TV. I do believe the first stigmatic was St. Francis of Assisi, a good long time after Christ. The shift on the religious art was made near that time, going from a Christ who seemed relax and accepting of His fate, to the typical one today, with a pained face and look of sorrow. St. Frank was apparently very devout, and in his longing to become more Christ-like, had these wounds appear. Miracle, fraud, or psychsomatic, I’ll leave that to the REAL professional. I have never heard of any stigmata in a non-Christian, but I don’t watch Discovery Channel ALL the time!
Stigmata would be either:
A Christian miracle, if you beleive in such
Or
Psychological/psychosomatic in origin, if you don’t
In either case, you wouldn’t expect them on someone who isn’t either a Christian or Christian-inspired/motivated.
This assumes you define “stigmata” as the seemingly spontaneous appearance of the wounds of Christ on a person’s body. People were of course crucified before Christ was. I beleive the first mention of such is in the very closing part of Herodotus’ Histories, where someone —I believe it was the Persians— crucify a Greek in their employ for screwing up big time. As he dies, they beat his son to death in front of him. It was apparently important to portray the Persians as unusually cruel. But it also seems that from the way in which the crucifixion is described, Herodotus is introducing something new to his audience; crucifixion seems to be previously unknown to the Greek world, at least outside of Asia Minor.
One telling point here is that the wounds are actually misplaced. Historical Roman accounts and modern day anatomists suggest that crucifixion was actually performed by nailing the victim to the cross through the wrists, not the palms, which would not have supported the weight:
From http://www.konnections.com/Kcundick/crucifix.html - it has also been commented on by other sources. It appears that the Romans also sometimes tied the victims, possibly nailing them only at the heels.
I’ve never heard of anybody getting stigmata on their wrists.
Yabob-
I watched the “Jesus” show on Discovery (I think), and they had someone who suggested that people were nailed to the cross through their hands. In addition, people were either nailed through the heel or given a small platform to stand or sit on. His reasoning was that some people who were crucified did not die for days, which wouldn’t be likely if someone were only nailed through the wrists. I can’t vouch for the credentials of whoever said this, or even where the show was going with this since Jesus only lasted a few hours, but thought it was interesting.
Could be, I suppose. I’ll concede that there was undoubtedly a lot of variation in the procedure. Though historians claim that the Romans nailed victims up through the wrists or simply tied them to die of exposure and dehydration. And I tend to believe the anatomical argument that nailing somebody by the palms wouldn’t support their weight - you would have had to stand them on a platform as you indicated or tie them as well. There doesn’t seem to have been any consistency in the cross, either - they nailed them up on X-crosses, T-crosses and simple posts as well as the familiar item.
The Romans engaged in mass crucifictions at times - Crassus, the general who put down Spartacus’ rebellion had thousands of the rebellious slaves crucified along the Appian way according to most accounts. Large scale affairs like that were probably done haphazardly by soldiers who normally did not perform executions, but Christ was executed by civil authority, and the act carried out according to established procedures. I would guess that it conformed to whatever usual practice there was.
At any rate, I tend to believe a psychological / pyschosomatic origin for stigmata, which would naturally conform to the beliefs of the stigmatee.
But were there any stigmatics before Christ? I don’t mean people who bled from their hands and feet in the Christ-like pattern. What interests me about the poster’s original question is the thought that there must have been people who could get emotional about something to make bruises appear on their body before Christianity even existed. If so, then where did they bleed/bruise?
