Excruciating

ex·cru·ci·at·ing

[ik-skroo-shee-ey-ting]
adjective - extremely painful; causing intense suffering; unbearably distressing; torturing:

We have a penchant for embellishing things. Exaggeration is just kind of in-grained into the way we talk, the way we tell stories, and our humor.  It goes pretty well with it's cousin sarcasm.  So, we say things like; "I'm starving to death," when we're barely even hungry and probably just finished a snack sometime in the last couple of hours.

One word that is definitely no exaggeration is the word excruciating.  Excruciating is quite the loaded word. In fact, it was coined to describe a type of execution so horrendously painful that an appropriate description had yet to be invented. The Greek version of excruciating literally means, "out of the cross".

That's the kind of experience Christ went through for you and I.  Something so terrible that when it was first dreamt up in the 6th century B.C. they needed to contrive a new word for just how bad it was.

Even so, the word might have come from the cross; but I'm not entirely convinced that it can altogether describe just how bad it might have been.

*For a better understanding of the agony Christ endured on the cross I suggest Lee Strobel's "The Case for the Real Jesus".  There is a chapter on forensics that specifically addresses the physiological torment Christ suffered in scientific detail.