Religion

And the eastern part of the empire was mostly Greek speaking. You got Latin, but you got a lot of Greek.

The account also says that it wasn't a pre-prepared xylospongium. They had to find something and rig it for that use.

Pessoi and ostraca were also used. But that doesn't mean that every pebble or bit of smooth pottery was an asswipe.


Sponges were used for all kinds of things. Wiping tables, for instance. Or your face. I'm not going to assume that it was standard practice to wipe your ass and then the table and then your face. Later, Europeans even used it for precisely the purpose in the NT--a rather poorly designed drinking vessel. It would come in handy in numerous ways--given a bucket or a stream it might be easier to use a sponge than to get your mouth to the water or use a hand to get water to the mouth.


The topic makes sense if you leave out a lot of "mights" and alternatives. And not otherwise.


More to the point (since it's not without some interest) was the question as to whether the sponge was clean (in the sense "tahor", ceremonially pure or kosher, not the more banal sense you, um, rise to), because otherwise the last thing Jesus would have done was consume something tame. (Yes, that has two syllables. "Unclean" or "impure".)

Apparently sponges were considered more plant than animal, however we socially construct the terms now, and their skeletons, at least, were considered tahor by the time of the Talmud and the time the Talmud claims to historically recall. I don't recall their mention from my reading of the Mishnah (and I haven't read the Tosefta), but the Mishnah's a small, little thing. And I wasn't really focused on sponges (more on Pesah).