Hand and wrist surgeon Paul Casey argued, in an April 2020 article for OnePeterFive, that anatomical and historical evidence favors the traditional view that Christ was nailed through the palms, against the now-popular theory that He was nailed through the wrists.
The wrist theory originated with Pierre Barbet, a French battlefield surgeon who studied the Shroud of Turin in the 1930s. In a cadaver experiment, Barbet drove a nail into the soft center of the palm and found it tore free under weight. Rather than testing other points in the palm, he concluded no part of the palm could bear the body's weight, and proposed the nail instead passed through Destot's space, a gap between the wrist bones. He argued this location matched the wound on the Shroud and, he claimed, would sever the median nerve — which he offered as an explanation for why the Shroud shows no visible thumbs.
Decades later, forensic pathologist Frederick Zugibe — a medical examiner with a Ph.D. in anatomy, and so arguably …More