Many believe the ‘bitter cup’ of wine and myrrh offered to Jesus was an analgesic; it may, in fact, have been an attempt to increase pain
‘The Crucifixion’, a 1886 painting by Jean Francois Portaels in the St. Jacques Church in Brussels, Belgium. Credit: iStock As millions solemnly reflect on the journey of Jesus Christ through the Via Dolorosa to Golgotha today, a small, yet surprising aspect shines a light on how important spices were during those times.
Christ was offered wine to drink by his executioners. This is referred to in two of the canonical gospels — that of Mark and Matthew.
“Then they offered him wine mixed with myrrh, but he did not take it,” notes Mark 15:23-25 (New International Version).
“There they offered Jesus wine to drink, mixed with gall; but after tasting it, he refused to drink it,” Matthew 27:34-36 (New International Version) notes.
There is a lack of scholarly consensus on why Jesus may have been offered wine mixed with myrrh, an ancient spice.
For the devout, the myrrh may have been added as an analgesic, to dull the pain that Jesus was to go through in the process of crucifixion. The act of Christ refusing it has been interpreted as His being prepared to suffer extreme, unbearable pain for the salvation of humanity.
Other scholars however interpret that the mixing of wine and myrrh and the result being offered to Christ was the executioners being at their sadistic best. They wanted Jesus to suffer even more pain than he already was bearing.
Myrrh is an “oleo-gum resin”. The word is derived from the Akkadian murru, which comes into modern Semitic languages such as the Arabic mur, and Hebrew mar, meaning ‘bitter’, according to Frankincense, Myrrh, and Balm of Gilead: Ancient Spices of Southern Arabia and Judea published by Israeli researchers in 2012 in the journal Horticultural Reviews.
According to Wine Mixed with Myrrh (Mark 15.23) and Crurifragium (John 19.31-32): Two Details of the Passion Narratives published in 2005 by researchers from Finland in the Journal for the Study of the New Testament, myrrh “is the resin of a thorny bush or small tree. The species of the genus Commiphora belonging to the family Burseraceae are common in the Arab peninsula and northern Ethiopia”.
They add that “the genus includes over 100 species, of which Commiphora abyssinica is defined as the species producing myrrh today”.
The trees were incised twice a year so that resin would flow out of the bark. Myrrh was an extremely important spice in the ancient world. The Egyptians, under the fabled Queen Hatshepsut, may have brought myrrh trees from the Land of Punt (today’s Eritrea and Ethiopia) in their flotilla of ships over 3,500 years ago.
Meanwhile, the Israeli study notes that “Increased demand and escalating prices made incense (made from frankincense and myrrh) more precious than gold, and Arabia’s wealth caused the country to be renamed Arabia Felix… (Fortunate or Blessed Arabia).”
Indeed, myrrh also plays a role in other key moments in the New Testament. Matthew 2:11 famously notes how the Magi (three wisemen from the east) brought gifts of gold, incense and myrrh to the infant Jesus in Bethlehem.
“The New Testament mentions myrrh in John 19:39, where Nicodemus brought about 45 kg myrrh and aloes for treating the crucified body of Jesus before his burial. This huge quantity of such an expensive material demonstrates the esteem conferred on Jesus,” according to the Israeli researchers.
Myrrh was thus very important in the ancient world as a perfume and as incense. Its importance in medicine can be gauged from the fact that it is mentioned 54 times in Hippocratic literature, a corpus of around 60 medical texts, written in the fifth and fourth century Before Common Era and mostly ascribed to Hippocrates, the ancient Greek physician considered the ‘Father of Medicine’.
However, the Finnish researchers note that myrrh, in fact, had no strong analgesic effect:
A small amount of myrrh in wine preserves it, but if it is used excessively, it makes the wine impossible to drink, and offering it to a man suffering from strong dehydration would be a form of torture.
In an attempt to deduce as to what actually happened that day, the Finnish researchers used “some myrrh brought by botanists of the University of Helsinki from Yemen in 1994”.
“When some myrrh was added to red wine, however, the result was a surprise. Within 10 minutes the pieces started to dissolve in the wine. In two hours the wine was corrupted, and the next morning the saturated solution was as impossible to drink as gasoline or vinegar,” they wrote.
A flogged and crucified person lived his last hours in a hypovolemic shock. The amount of the blood circulating in his arteries was reduced, according to the researchers.
“Should somebody try to save such a man, part of the first aid would be to give him a great amount of liquid. The loss of liquid leads, of course, to a strong thirst…apparently Jesus was not the first man crucified by the executioners and the use of a sharp potion was not an uncommon practice,” they stated.
Jesus’ executioners knew that he would be thirsty. “For that purpose they had provided the wine mixed with myrrh. Matthew tells that the wine was mixed with gall. It is a form of torture, which was part of the executioners' sadistic methods,” they concluded.
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