Crown of Thorns: the botany and physiology of suffering

The Parisian relic - the Crown of Thorns. Photo: UOJ

On April 15, 2019, when the spire of Notre-Dame de Paris collapsed in flames and molten lead from the roof ran down the walls, Fr. Jean-Marc Fournier, chaplain of the Paris fire brigade, demanded to be allowed inside together with a special rescue unit. He passed beneath what he later described to journalists as waterfalls of fire and carried out two things from the cathedral – the Holy Gifts and a crystal capsule containing the Crown of Thorns.

At the same time, firefighters were forcing open the safe where the relic was kept – the lock would not yield, the code had to be found, and one team was trying to break the door by hand. The key was located at the last possible moment. Fournier – a former military chaplain who had survived an ambush in Afghanistan and the Bataclan terror attack in 2015 – later said that before leaving, he blessed the burning cathedral with the Holy Gifts: “I did not want simply to walk out with Jesus. I used that moment to give the blessing.”

The bundle of dried thorns for which a man hardened by Afghanistan risked his life survived the fire that devoured centuries-old oak beams. And that was hardly the first thing it had survived over the last eighteen centuries.

What actually lies inside the crystal ring

What is preserved in Paris today does not look the way famous painters imagined it when depicting the Savior’s Golgotha. At first glance, it appears to be an ordinary ring, twenty-one centimeters in diameter, woven from reed stalks.

The thorns once woven into that framework were gradually removed one by one over the centuries. French kings distributed them as relics across Europe, from Pisa to Prague.

The Paris crown today is a skeleton without teeth.

But the teeth can be reconstructed from their traces. Botanists who studied thorn fragments preserved in European cathedrals identified two main candidates – Ziziphus spina-christi and Paliurus spina-christi. Both plants belong to the buckthorn family, both grow in the Jordan Valley and around Jerusalem, and both carry a Latin name that speaks for itself: spina-christi – “Christ’s thorn.” Yet it is Ziziphus, Christ’s thorn jujube, that bears double thorns up to two and a half centimeters long, curved backward like fishhooks.

Not a wreath, but a helmet

Western painting has trained us to imagine a neat circlet resting on the Savior’s hair – a delicate branch and a few drops of blood, the aesthetic of stoic sorrow.

European artists painted a victor’s laurel wreath, only made of thorns. It is beautiful – and utterly false.

Scholars who spent decades studying the Turin Shroud drew attention to the pattern of the bloodstains: they cover not only Christ’s forehead, but the entire upper part of the skull – the back of the head, the temples, the crown. If only a ring had been placed on His head, the blood would have run in a narrow band along the line of the circlet. But the stains are scattered across the whole surface. That means the legionaries did not weave a crown, but a dense cap of thorns – something like a crude helmet imitating the royal tiaras of the East. And they drove it into His head with sticks.

The Gospel of Matthew confirms precisely this mechanism: the soldiers “put a reed in His right hand” – and then “struck Him on the head” with that same reed (Matt. 27:29–30). The reed was not merely a mock scepter. It was the tool by which they forced the thorns deeper into the flesh, down to the periosteum.

What happens when hooks are hammered into the head

The scalp is one of the most densely innervated regions of the human body. The trigeminal nerve and the greater occipital nerve thread through the tissues of the head in a fine and tightly packed network. When the thorns of Ziziphus – bent like fishhooks – sank into that network, the pain would not have been dull or aching, but electric, a series of violent flashes. Even today, trigeminal neuralgia is considered one of the most excruciating pain syndromes known to medicine; physicians sometimes call it “the suicide disease.” Surgeon Frederick Zugibe, who devoted an entire forensic monograph to the crucifixion, noted that every movement of the head on the Cross – and the Crucified had to keep raising and lowering His head in order to breathe – would have driven those curved thorns afresh into the tissues, unleashing new bursts of agony.

The hooked shape of the thorns meant something else as well: such a “helmet” could not be removed without tearing the skin apart. A thorn enters easily, then catches and clings like a burr in cloth. To pull it free is to rip muscle and open new wounds.

The crown was designed to inflict pain not once, but continuously – with every breath, until death itself.

A Thorn worth three cathedrals

In 1238, King Louis IX of France – the future saint – purchased the Crown of Thorns from Baldwin II, the bankrupt emperor of the Latin Empire in Constantinople. The price was 135,000 livres. By comparison, Sainte-Chapelle, the masterpiece of Gothic architecture that Louis built specifically to house the Crown, cost the treasury 46,000. This bundle of thorns was worth nearly three times more than the stone sanctuary with its stained glass.

What was Louis buying for that sum? An instrument of torture. A first-century criminal exhibit, stained with the dried blood of the Executed One, whom the buyer believed to be God. For the modern mind, there is something unbearable in this: we are accustomed to seeing holy things encrusted with gold and diamonds, but here precious stones were lavished upon an implement of sadism.

The Church kisses what once killed – because the One it killed rose again, and the instrument of execution became a trophy of victory.

The curse taken up by the Savior

St. Cyril of Jerusalem wrote in his Catechetical Lectures: “He was crowned with thorns who crowns the earth with flowers.” This is not merely a beautiful antithesis. In Genesis, after the Fall, God says to Adam: “Cursed is the ground for thy sake… thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee” (Gen. 3:17–18). The thorn is the sign of the curse stamped upon creation. And when the Roman legionaries drove that barbed helmet into Christ’s head with a reed, they were, without knowing it, pressing Adam’s curse directly into the skull of the New Adam.

He took that curse upon Himself – not as metaphor, not as allegory, but as a two-and-a-half-centimeter hooked thorn driven into the periosteum.

That bundle of dry thorns, rescued from the fire by a priest with combat experience, now rests in a crystal capsule, waiting for Notre-Dame to open its doors again. It has outlived the Roman Empire, the Crusades, the French Revolution, and the fire. And it offers a silent answer to a question one cannot hear without falling to one’s knees: it bears witness to the true cost of our salvation.

Read also