Topic
Bloody sweat
2 passages cited, from 2 classic reference works.
These works date from 1897–1915 and are in the public domain. They reflect the Protestant scholarship of their time: their history, archaeology and dates can be out of date, and where they interpret, other traditions read the text differently. The verses are shown in the King James Version, the wording these works were written against.
The verses
The passages the works cite, those cited by more of them first.
- Luke 22:44Easton · ISBE
And being in an agony he prayed more earnestly: and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground.
- Matthew 28:3ISBE
His countenance was like lightning, and his raiment white as snow:
In the reference works
Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897) · 1 references
The sign and token of our Lord’s great agony (Luke 22:44).
International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915) · 2 references
(swet hosei thromboi haimatos): Described in Lu 22:44 as a physical accompaniment of our Lord's agony at Gethsemane (on the passage, which is absent in some manuscripts, see Westcott and Hort, The New Testament in Greek). Many old writers take this to mean that the perspiration dropped in the same manner as clots of blood drop from a wound, regarding the Greek word prefixed as expressing merely a comparison as in Mt 28:3, where leukon hos chion means "white as snow." Cases of actual exudation of blood are described in several of the medieval accounts of stigmatization, and Lefebvre describes the occurrence of something similar in his account of Louise Lateau in 1870. For references to these cases see the article "Stigmatization" in Encyclopedia Britannica (11th edition), XXII, 550. It is perhaps in favor of the older interpretation that the word used by Aeschylus for drops of blood is stagon (Agam. 1122) and by Euripides stalagmos, not thromboi. None of the instances given by Tissot (Traite des nerfs, 279), or Schenck (Observ. med., III, 45:5), can be said to be unimpeachable; but as the agony of our Lord was unexampled in human experience, it is conceivable that it may have been attended with physical conditions of a unique nature.
Alex. Macalister
Texts: Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897); International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (1915), from the CrossWire SWORD modules (public domain). Verse references were parsed from the works' own markup and checked against the KJV verse list.