clot

The Blood on the Shroud

Adler talks extensively about the blood in this paper. They are, he says, “exudates from clotted wounds transferred to the cloth by its being in contact with a wounded human male body.” It is his specialty. It has been confirmed that the blood is indeed human blood through numerous tests. The stains are from real bleeding from real wounds on a real human body that came into direct contact with the cloth. Adler wrote:

Enzymatic removal of the blood from a blood coated fiber reveals that the blood got on the cloth first and therefore protected the blood covered areas of the cloth from the image forming process. All the microscopic, chemical, spectroscopic, and immunological evidence is consistent with these images, not only being exudates from clotted wounds, but those of a man who suffered severe trauma prior to death, explaining the red color of the blood at the microscopic level. . . . That these are clotted wound exudates is clearly seen in the ultraviolet photographs where every single blood wound shows a distinct serum clot retraction ring. . . . Note that any attempt to explain the formation of the body images must take these properties of the blood images into account. One cannot simply say that the blood images were painted on afterwards. One would need a constant supply of fresh clot exudates from a traumatically wounded human to paint in all the forensically correct images in the proper nonstereo register and then finally paint a serum contraction ring about every wound. Logic suggests that this is not something a forger or artisan before the present century would not only know how to do, but even know that it was required. (40)

Mind Numbing Realism

It is hard to imagine how a forger achieved such realism as we see was in light of what was known about human anatomy and forensic pathology by the Middle Ages. Many skeptics of the shroud’s authenticity focus their and our attention only on the arguments that support medieval origin and shy from the mind-numbing realism found in the shroud images, realism that was almost imperceptible in a negative image. Some, such a John Dominic Crossan, seem to be more realistic and recognize the near to sheer impossibility of this.

Part of the realism is in the bloodstains. As forensic scientists and chemists now know, the stains are from real human or at least primate blood. Immunological, fluorescence and spectrographic tests reveal this. ABO typing of blood antigens suggests that the blood is type AB. However, there is considerable doubt that blood typing is accurate for old blood for various reasons. The stains are from real bleeding from real wounds on a real human body that came into direct contact with the cloth. There is no doubt about that. 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 serum retraction ring.

Misconceptions About Post Mortem Blood Flow

Most, if not all of the blood on the shroud flowed or oozed out after death. That surprises many people because of a common misconception that dead bodies do not bleed because the heart has stopped pumping.  Fred Zugibe who was the Chief Medical Examiner of Rockland County, New York for more than thirty years, has written a widely used textbook in a specialized field of diagnostic pathology and who if a frequent media consultant in forensic science writes:

In our daily experiences in the medical examiner's office, we observe bleeding or oozing from lacerations, bullet wounds, stab wounds, traumatic injuries, and the like, even the next day when moving the body around in the autopsy room. In addition to the fluidity of the blood caused by the thrombolysins and altered clotting factors, there is an absence of the normal contractions of tiny blood vessels that play a prominent role in bleeding control in the living state.

There is a distinctive wound in the man’s side and when the blood flowed from this wound, it flowed around the side of the body and formed a puddle near the man’s lower back.  Mingled with these large blood 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 stabbing wound in the vicinity of the heart and the image of that wound clearly supports this.

Hard to Imagine Art in the Realism

The clots, the serum separations, the mingling of body fluids, the directionality of the flows, and all other medically expected attributes would have been nearly impossible to create by brushing or daubing or pouring human blood onto the cloth. The blood, rich in the bilirubin, a bile pigment that the body produces under extreme trauma, is unquestionably the blood of the man whose lifeless, crucified body was enshrouded in the cloth; even if only for the purpose of crafting a relic-forgery in medieval times as Crossan suggests.