I have personally been familiar with and influenced by Habermas’ material since I began my bachelor’s degree, and throughout my studies all the way through my doctorate to the present. He is accurately regarded as a scholar in this field, and arguably as well as others, such as NDE’s (near death experiences), the historical Jesus, suffering, and skepticism, to name a few.
I was thinking about this the day before Licona made this post, and so I replied,
“I was literally just remembering a conversation I had with him (Habermas) about the location of the nails in Christ on the cross. I still cannot be convinced that they were in the wrists. I understand what the experts say, but having personally worked professionally as a leather tanner, I think that the idea of not being able to use the palms of the hands because the nail would pass through the flesh is deeply underestimating… Perhaps I don't know all the arguments for such, but if this is the only one, that the palm flesh would not be able to support His body due to gravitational force, it fails miserably in my mind.
That being said, I deeply appreciate his work on the subject!”
I remember Habermas recalling in our conversation that there was one scholar (perhaps Barbet) who said that the pierced part of Jesus was immediately below the palm of the hand, which was also based on the Shroud, though this would still be considered the wrist. I think it seems safe to conclude that if one is an expert in the Resurrection, he knows his way around the details of the Crucifixion as well.
My issue is that if the only argument (aside from the Shroud) for Jesus having His wrists nailed as opposed to the palms of His hands is that the palms would not be able to support such, then this is utterly unconvincing. There are other arguments to be made about Christian art portraying the nails in His wrists, but these seem to not arrive until about 1900 years after the fact of the crucifixion, with one exception being the Shroud of Turin.
From here, I want to dive right in.
Tensile Strength of Human Palm Flesh
As briefly mentioned, I worked for two months’ time in a cow-hide tannery, which was essentially a leather factory, and (fortunately, yes, you read that correctly) the reason I had to stop working there was because I was allergic to the chemicals used in the process. We would process 400 cow hides a day into absolutely beautiful full-grain leather. The company I worked for also sold leather to Louie Vuitton, which at that time (late 90’s) was going for $75 a square foot. In any event, this experience is partly what drives my curiosity concerning such. Handling leather and witnessing the sheer strength it was able to demonstrate whether it was wet or dry was quite impressive.
I got to thinking that human flesh is not much different in some respects, so I wanted to discover what the tensile strength of flesh in general happened to be. This research led me to consider the tensile strength of human palm flesh.
Florida State University measured the heavily keratinized flesh of human palms and found it to be considerably thicker than other parts of the human body.
“Primates, whether human or nonhuman, feature volar (palm and sole) skin on the hands and feet that is hairless, thickened, heavily keratinized, and dominated by sweat glands.
Referred to also as "thick skin," the palms and soles of a human may be 0.8 to 1.4 millimeters thick to protect against regular pressure and rubbing, while the epithelium on other parts of the body is usually only 0.1 millimeter thick.”[1]
I think the above information clarifies that we are dealing with a specialized part of the human body, as opposed to say, the flesh material of the eyelids or elbows.
A newton (N) is the standard unit of force. It is essentially the measure of how much "push" is needed to make an object change its speed or direction. The way this applies is by asking how much force is needed to tear through leather. So how much force would it take for a piece of leather to tear away from say, a steel shaft or hook (which obviously has incredible tensile strength but is only required to have more strength than leather), that is embedded into a steel beam?
ICAMS (International Conference on Advanced Materials and Systems) conducted a test which was performed in Romania, on leather used for upper parts of footwear with a tensile testing machine measuring different types of leather, based on “genre, age, animal gender, leather measuring type, tanning method, mechanical processing, grease type and nature.”[2] The test material size was about 7.5 inches by ¾ of an inch (190 mm x 20mm). The least strong leather tested had a breaking point of 164 N, which is the equivalent of 36.8 pound-force. The highest was 510 N, which is the equivalent of 114.6 pound-force. This is a ¾-inch-wide strip, remember. Not a 3.5-inch-wide piece of leather, which is the average human male palm size. The fact is that the more volume of leather used equals more strength, which is the reason why every piece must be exactly the same size. ICAMS concludes that “The strength at break of the tested leather has value between 7-22 N/mm2.”[3] This means that there is a pound-force of 1015.26 per square inch at minimum. What does all this mean? It means that leather, and flesh in general, is ridiculously strong.[4]
I get that leather is not human palm flesh, but let’s be real, there are not a lot of tensile strength tests for leather out there, and there are, for obvious reasons, immeasurably less of such tests for human skin.[5] But, I think that this helps us understand better with what we are dealing. Moreover, we must also consider that Jesus’ hand from the nail’s perspective is going through two layers of flesh, one of these layers being the heavily keratinized flesh of the palm. We should also consider that Jesus was a man who worked with His hands (See footnote 5).
But there is something else to consider, which is that dehydration makes flesh arguably even stronger. In an article titled, “Hydration Disrupts Human Stratum Corneum Ultrastructure” from the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, it is said that “water is known to increase skin permeability.”[6] This means that liquids or gasses are more easily able to pass through something, in this case, human flesh. So decreased permeability is what we find resulting in leather products. This low permeability makes material stronger (at least to a point), based on still having flexibility, but containing less moisture. Leather that becomes brittle is because of an ultra-lack of moisture, which is why we massage neatsfoot oil into it in order to revive its flexible strength.
On the cross, Jesus said, “I thirst.”[7] For what it’s worth, this only adds to the argument that the palm flesh, plus the flesh from the back of His hand, is strong enough to hold His body weight.
Earliest depictions and icons of Christ on the cross
First, let me make it clear that I am and remain a proponent of the Shroud of Turin. I believe it is an early depiction, so to speak. But I might see the historical events surrounding the Shroud a bit different than others, it seems. The following is how I see a possible scenario of what took place with the Shroud… If all the angles and situation of the Shroud resting on the surface of the body are perfect when the image was burned into the linen, then the reason that the Shroud reveals the blood stains over the wrists is because there were three notably different events. The first event would be the blood soaking into the Shroud. Blood coagulation would have begun quickly after death, and it seems that He likely would not have a lot of blood left in His body, based on the piercing of His side to ensure death (see John 19:33-34), as well as the flagellation before the crucifixion, which reduced quantity would then seem to cause even faster coagulation of the blood. The idea here is that the blood would be dry by the time He was placed in the tomb. The second event is the act of transporting the wrapped body to the resting place (tomb). The third event would be Jesus coming back into His body, burning the image into the Shroud itself.
This raises some questions… In the time between the first event and the third event, did any angle or situation of the Shroud on the surface of the body change? On the other hand, did Jesus’ body (i. e. His hands) remain exactly in the same place the whole time? Did they wrap the body of Jesus in the tomb itself or in the open air, immediately after they took Him down from the cross? From a biblical perspective, it seems that His body was wrapped immediately after being taken down from the cross (they were in a hurry because of the coming Sabbath; see John 19:31), and then transported the body, permitting the Shroud to be not in the exact situation when the blood came out of Jesus’ body to when He was Resurrected.
John 19:38-42
After these things Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, asked Pilate that he might take away the body of Jesus, and Pilate gave him permission. So he came and took away his body. Nicodemus also, who earlier had come to Jesus by night, came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds in weight. So they took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews. Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid. So because of the Jewish day of Preparation, since the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there.[8]
The following verses should also be taken into consideration:
Mark 15:46 “And Joseph bought a linen shroud, and taking him down, wrapped him in the linen shroud and laid him in a tomb that had been cut out of the rock. And he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb.”
Matthew 27:59-60 “And Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen shroud and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had cut in the rock. And he rolled a great stone to the entrance of the tomb and went away.”
Luke 23:53 “Then he took it down and wrapped it in a linen shroud and laid him in a tomb cut in stone, where no one had ever yet been laid.”
I think that after reading these, it goes without saying that we can understand that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus wrapped Jesus’ body not in the tomb, but they wrapped it elsewhere and then transported it to the tomb. This means that during transportation, the Shroud would very likely have moved around the surface of Jesus’ body, making the blood stain on the Shroud not necessarily the exact site from which Jesus bled.
Moving on, the Alexamenos Graffito is the earliest depiction we have of Christ on the cross. There are several things that are significant about this. First, Alexamenos was a follower of Christ. As a pastor, I think this is underappreciated. We will have some amazing discussions with him when we get to Paradise.[9] Second, the Alexamenos Graffito should be considered extrabiblical. Since we understand that Alexamenos is the one being ridiculed by the artist, we can safely assume that the artist himself was not a Christian. This is significant because it shows the earliest common understanding of the crucifixion.
Finally, the Alexamenos Graffito portrays Christ’s hands pierced. Looking up at the patibulum, (the crossbeam of the cross), from the artists perspective, one would see the prominence of the patibulum’s lower facet over the prominence of the upper facets. This is to say that the bottom corner of the patibulum would be the closest part to the eyeballs of the artist, necessitating the greater detail in such a depiction.
There is a lesser-known graffito, which I will refer to as the Alkimilla Crucifixion Graffito from Pozzuoli (Puteoli), Italy. This also depicts someone (not Christ) whose name was perhaps Alkimilla (Ἀλκίμιλα), which is etched above the patibulum on the left, who was crucified. This image also depicts the hands, not the wrists, being pierced.
Does any of this matter? I think it matters if truth and historical accuracy matters. I think that the point of all this is to say that we need to re-evaluate our beliefs about the nails in His wrists, based on the strong opposing evidence. This also means that we should take another look at the Shroud of Turin.
Written by Nace Howell through the grace of the Lord Jesus
© Nace Howell, 2025
[2]https://icams.ro/icamsresurse/2010/proceedings/III_Systems_and_Technologies_06.pdf#:~:text=The%20value%20of%20strength%20at%20break%20depends,method%2C%20mechanical%20processing%2C%20grease%20type%20and%20nature.
[3] Ibid.
[4] AI says, “The tensile strength of human skin, including that of the palm, is generally reported to be around 18 MPa (i. e. 1800000 N/M2).”
[5] Though Pierre Barbet’s research should be considered (https://www.shroud.com/zugibe.htm), I disagree with his conclusion concerning the textile strength of human flesh, especially the palm flesh of a carpenter (or stonemason. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB59Byju_5c). But even if it is the case, according to the shroud link mentioned in this footnote above, Barbet used severed cadaver hands to pull a nail through after piercing it to see how many pounds were required for it to fail (clearly dismissing numerous variables). The number comes to 88 lbs., which times two, is 176. In other words, a 175-pound man would be able to hang on the cross by his hands alone, according to Barbet’s research, not even including having support from the nails in the feet. The other thing is, it is very likely that Galileans at the time weighed around 110 lbs., based on archaeological measurements of skeletal remains of the time and place (https://books.google.com/books?id=VM8DAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA68&dq=popular%20mechanics%20face%20oo%20jesus&pg=PA71#v=onepage&q&f=false).
[6]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022202X15301676#:~:text=Implications%20for%20occupational%20dermatology,permeability%20(Scheuplein%2C%201978.
[7] John 19:28.
[8] John 19:38-42; Emphasis added.
[9] See Colossians 3:2.
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