The Blood Chemistry of the Bloodstains on Shroud of
Turin - Implications in the Quest for the Historical Jesus
The bloodstains, as forensic scientists and chemists
now know, are from real human blood. Moreover, the stains are from real
human bleeding from real wounds on a real human body that came into direct
contact with the cloth. Immunological, fluorescence and spectrographic tests
as well as Rh and ABO typing of blood antigens reveal that the stains are
from Type-AB human blood. When the stains formed, the man was lying on his
back with his feet near one end of the fourteen foot long, banner shaped
piece of cloth. The cloth was drawn over the top of his head and loosely
draped over his face and the full length of his body down to his feet. Many
of the stains have the distinctive forensic signature of clotting with red
corpuscles about the edge of the clot and a clear yellowish halo of serum.
The forensic experts are
also able to identify that some of the blood flow was venous and some was
arterial. Most of the blood flowed while the man was alive and it remained
on his body. There is some blood that clearly oozed from a dead body, as
was the case for stains resulting from a wound in the man’s chest. Here,
the blood, with a deeper color and more viscous consistency, as is the case
for blood from a postmortem wound, ran from a chest wound, flowed around
the side of the body and formed a puddle about the man’s lower back.
Mingled with these large bloodstains are stains from a clear bodily fluid,
perhaps pericardial fluid or fluid from the pleural sac or pleural cavity.
This suggests that the man received a postmortem stabbing wound in the
vicinity of the heart.
Blood that flowed along once-outstretched arms
emanate from the victim’s wrists and course their way downward along the
forearm, past the elbow and onto the back of the upper arm. Near the man’s
armpit the blood pooled and likely dripped to the ground. So much blood
flowed along his outstretched arms that several rivulets of blood, pulled by
gravity, ran straight down. It seems likely that blood dripped all along the
man’s arms like rain drips from a tree branch in a storm. From the angles of
the flows and rivulets, forensic experts have determined that this blood
flowed while the man was upright with his arms at angles like the hands of a
clock at ten minut |
