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About 26 years ago, soon after I read the Book of Isaiah (particularly the 53rd) I had a very strange, moving experience.

It was like an extremely vivid, detailed "dream"... but it kept on running in my consiousness after I woke up, and went on for about a week.
It was all I could do to focus on my work or daily activities; as soon as I let my mind come up to breathe, there it was, as if on a translucent screen suspended in front of my face... and it was so fascinating!

My Doctor said it was a "Hypnogognic Phenomenon"; My Pastor suggested that I had too much pepperonni on my pizza, and my Wife seriously considered having me committed to an insane asylum.

So I shut up about it.

Some years later, a Charismatic Christian considered this experience to have been my "Baptism of the Holy Spirit", but they still wondered about me because I didn't "Speak in Tounges" - at least not publicly.

So I kept shut up.

I'll spare you the weirdness, but it essentially involved a sort of "memory" that burst into my senses involving a younger Member of Y'shuah's Family before, I suppose, his public ministry. I think they called him "Yuda", or "Yude" for short. His elder Brother liked to nickname people, and we were his first recipients, I guess.

There were other insights as well - particularly of that incident involving "Doubting Thomas" several of you have already mentioned. To say that was "powerful" would be an absurd understatement.

I remember how smokey the room was, and how his eyes burned as he slumped over the table. The light was remarkable; the guttering of the clay lamps and firepot made a fluttering, surreal dance of shadows on the walls and faces of the berieved... Were his eyes burning from the smoke, or from a crushed and defeated heart... ashamed of having fallen for it all; for having failed Him in the end?

What would he tell his Family?

How could he have been such a fool?

And to think; how he had Loved Him - the very one who had so cleverly decieved him for those three whole years - so terribly much.

The light was blurred from the tears, and the heavy, acrid smoke; even the muffled hubbub of conversation and the soft clatter of utensils seemed somehow to meld into an auditory blur.

Then a hush suddenly cut through the dark and cloistered room like the cold thrust of a Soldier's gladius; The ruddy and tremblinging ambient light seemed to take on a strange, steady, calm, liquid, bluish cast...

He would have looked up, if he had cared any more....

I think I'd better shut up now.... again.

Suffice it to say, while I was watching a "preview" of Passion on FOX News a couple of evenings ago which showed some of the Via DeLaRosa and Crucifiction scenes, I kept (much to my Wife's annoyance) saying things like;

"Good night!; in the best of health he would have a hard time toting that thing! That cross has to weigh about 245 pounds all together, even if it was dry!
The crossbeam alone would have gone a good 75 or 80!
After that flogging he'd be doing well just to DRAG that!"

(Wife glares at the TV and pretends not to notice)

"Holy mackerel!; What ARE those Legionarries packing - those are bloomin' BROADSWORDS! The standard issue Gladius was a lot shorter than that!; They could never have whipped those things out of the scabbard under their right arm or brought it out in a flash of cold steel into a high cubit block like they used to do!"

(As the "hand" - alledgedly that of Mr. G. himself - places the nail in the center of the Actor's palm):

"They didn't drive the nail THERE!!! - it went between the distal heads of the radius and ulna, so that they'd bear the load! I saw the scars, for Godssakes..."

Oops..

Shutting up again.

You can put that butterfly net away now; I'll be OK.

Really.