I’m wondering if this description while Jesus is being crucified could mean something completely different than most interpretations. Emphasizing insult to both a broken person and spiritual hope.
“Immediately one of them ran, and taking a sponge, he filled it with sour wine and put it on a reed, and gave Him a drink.” Matthew 27:48 (NASB)
Most interpreters assume this oxos rather than oivos (woinos) (I don’t have a greek character set) was a cheap, sour wine used to quench thirst and offered as a humane gesture. Could an alternative meaning be based on how the ancients used sponge placed on reeds and soaked in vinegar to wipe butts after deffecating? This was a common tool and hygiene action which the gospel authors and gospel consumers would have been familiar. I readily concede this is sour wine rather than vinegar, but perhaps the different terms is minor within the context.
Consider the irony: This self-proclaimed king of the jews is not only helplessly crucified but is offered to drink what would be considered a vile insult.
Could be that no one has interpreted it this way because first – it is so vile; second – scholars have not considered the mythical meaning and powerful insult.
Now, consider the phrasing “Immediately one of them ran…” Ran where? If the sour wine was readily available running to it would not have been necessary. The sponge could have been clean – we are not told. Would the authors have needed to state “placed an unclean sponge on a reed”? Perhaps not if such a sponge on a reed soaked in sour wine was well understood culturally relating to wiping one’s butt.
** you do not have permission to see this link **, or the native Latin, tersorium. There are sources listed at the bottom, but it looks like it would take work to dig them up.
I sort of like the theory. I’ve always been bothered by that detail and how it was meant to make narrative sense. Why would soldiers have some wine-vinegar on hand? And why would they race to comfort a man they they were torturing to death? But it would fit really well if it was a reference to a xylospongium: It might be plausible for them to have one on hand, and it would be a cruelly degrading sport to offer it to a thirsty criminal: a used xylospongium would have been really foul, having marinated in vinegar and faeces.
That said, if that’s what Mark meant to describe, why would the individual need to fabricate it on the spot, as Mk 15:36 seems to describe?
I may have a suggestion for how to overcome my prior objection that it wouldn’t make sense to fashion the xylospongium at the time: perhaps what Mark is describing is not fashioning the xylospongium but attaching it to a reed so the person could reach Jesus’ mouth.
The first set of issues in determining the plausibility of this is (a) the length of the xylospongium’s handle and (b) the height of a Roman cross.
I don’t think we have much good information on either.
As to (a): my own experimental archaeological research indicates that the most ergonomic length would be around 8″ (though that would put your hand awfully close to the messy business end) and anything over 18″ would impossibly uncomfortable to use (unless you choked up on the handle, but then why make a handle so long that no one will use the added length?). I think we can say that the xylospongium was roughly a foot long, plus or minus a couple of inches.
As to (b): estimates range from 6′ to 15′; Britannica says 9′-12′; but I don’t think we have solid historical evidence. 6′ would work–all you need is to make sure it is tall enough to keep the victim’s toes off the ground. But if a public display and humiliation is a principal objective, you’d want something higher that would get the victim well above the heads of the people around him. I’m inclined to think Britannica’s estimate of 9′-12′ is about right.
If we put these two things together, a typical (by today’s standards) adult male, holding a 12″ stick by the end will still be a pretty good way off from getting the other end up to 9′. So it would be plausible that the person would have tied the handle of the xylospongium to a longer stick so he could reach Jesus’ mouth.
The only real objection I can think of at this point is, if Mark is describing a xylospongium getting tied to the end of a longer reed, why did he call it a spongon, rather that a xylospongium? One possible answer is that–although xylospongium is formed from Greek roots, it is a Latin word. I’m not sure that Greek actually had a word for this thing, and I’m not sure that Greeks used anything like it. Describing it as a spongos might have been the most natural way to name it in Greek, though one might suspect that any Greek speaker living in the Roman empire would be familiar with the thing and have known what was being described.
Robert, one source is ** you do not have permission to see this link **
but many other sources exist, as I found just searching for ‘how did ancient people wipe their butts’. Even ceramics have been found showing illustrations of ‘wiping’.
Now, the reason I searched for this is both simple and profound, I think. Conservative evangelicals who think they know how to interpret the bible literally don’t even know simple things about the ancient world. I wondered how the ancients ‘wiped’ because that had to be a common and daily activity. If those people who are so sure how to interpret ancient documents even though our cultures are separated by several thousand years, why would they not know ‘wiping’? This could be a powerful and graphic challenge to begin a conversation with conservative evangelicals.
Thanks all for your comments. Seems a quite viable interpretation, after decades of thinking it meant an act of comfort during torture which is not really consistent.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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