JERUSALEM - Jesus may have died from a blood clot that reached his lungs, an Israeli physician said Wednesday, challenging the popular conception that he died of asphyxiation and blood loss during his Crucifixion.

Dr. Benjamin Brenner, a researcher at the Rambam Medical Center in the Israeli port city of Haifa, said he was publicizing his theory to raise awareness of pulmonary embolism, a potentially fatal disorder often associated with long-distance air travel.

However, the author of an earlier in-depth medical report into the cause of Jesus' death dismissed the theory, and Bible scholars said that while establishing the physical cause of Jesus' death was interesting, it ignored the spiritual dimension.

"It is known that the common cause of death in the setting of multiple trauma, immobilization and dehydration is pulmonary embolism," wrote Brenner in Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis. "This fits well with Jesus' condition and actually was in all likelihood the major cause of death of crucified victims."

A pulmonary embolism is caused when a blood clot travels to the lungs, usually from the leg, causing an acute shortness of breath and chest pains. It is frequently fatal.

Brenner based his understanding of Jesus' condition at the time of his death on a 1986 work based on the New Testament and contemporary religious sources that was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

That paper found that before his Crucifixion, Jesus went 12 hours without food or water, was under emotional stress, was beaten and forced to walk to the crucifixion site carrying the heavy crossbeam of the cross on which he was crucified. He also was scourged before being nailed to the cross, leading to some blood loss.

Brenner said the authors may have missed the blood clot possibility because it was not fully understood then.

But Dr. William Edwards, who co-authored the original paper, dismissed Brenner's theory, saying he was well aware of the effects of pulmonary embolisms at the time.

"Jesus was on the cross for only six hours. It seems unlikely that a large, deep- leg vein thrombus could develop and cause fatal pulmonary embolization in that short time," he said in a letter published in the journal.

But Bible scholars said that focusing on Jesus' physical suffering as the cause of death missed the point.

"The major trauma for the son of God is the spiritual trauma, the loneliness feeling the rejection of God and the shame of the world that came upon him at that point," said Stephen Pfann, a Bible scholar in Jerusalem.