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August 28, 2024

A new study has analysed the blood stains on the Shroud of Turin and found them to be consistent with Jesus’s experience before and during His crucifixion and with the subsequent removal of His body for burial.

Conducted by Giulio Fanti, a professor of mechanical and thermal measurements at the University of Padua, and a veteran researcher into the Shroud of Turin, the July report argues that “macroscopic and microscopic” analyses of the bloodstains reflect the physical conditions experienced by a man being tortured before and during a crucifixion and then moved for burial.

“All of these results are consistent with the description of Jesus Christ in the Holy Bible and, in particular, within the four Canonical Gospels,” the study concludes.

The “macroscopic” analysis involved investigating the directions of blood flow and the final position of the blood stains on the shroud, which is imprinted with the body and face of a man wearing a crown of thorns and is covered in bloodstains.

The report highlights: “the single rivulets show a sudden change of their direction; it is probable that the blood flows streamed when the corpse was moved.” 

At the “microscopic level” the study analysed and found three different types of blood consistent with the state of a body before death, when experiencing torture and then after death.

The study also found the blood stains appear to reflect scourge marks that are consistent with the scourging of Christ at the pillar before the crucifixion, while the quantity of blood matches the amount of blood that would have resulted from the wounds described in the Gospels.

The study notes nanoparticles such as creatine – a naturally occurring substance in the body that is linked to stress – which were found in the blood and are consistent with “the very heavy torture suffered by Jesus” and “intense flagellation”.

It also detected evidence showing the occurrence of “microcytic anemia”, a condition that is consistent with the “extreme difficulties” Jesus would have had in “exchanging oxygen” during “extremely laboured breathing”.

In addition to authoring more than 50 studies on the Shroud of Turin, Fanti has published books on the topic as well. 

His latest study on the bloodstains supports the 2017 findings by a team from the Hospital University of Padua, which is affiliated with the University of Padua in Italy, led by Matteo Bevilacqua, which focused similarly on the physical experience of the person wrapped in the shroud and how much it tallied with the experience of Jesus during the Passion.

That team conducted a forensic study of the imprint and found it was of a person who suffered and died in exactly the manner of Christ as recorded in the Gospels.

Writing in the Open Journal of Trauma, this team speculated that the cause of death was a heart attack complicated by heart rupture with hemopericardium in a subject crucified with the nailing of hands and feet.

The study inspired a 2022 paper by the Rev. Professor Patrick Pullicino, a priest in Southwark and formerly an NHS consultant neurologist, who proposed that the shoulder injury caused a huge internal bleed which resulted in the collapse of the circulatory system of the man being crucified.

Up to three pints of blood spilled out from the cavity where the blood accumulated, he wrote in the Catholic Medical Quarterly, which tallies with when the side of Jesus was speared by a Roman lance, as recorded in the Gospel of St John.

Other studies, including a recent one by Italians researchers, have focused on the questions surrounding the age of the shroud, finding that it does appear to date from the time of Christ, refuting a previous study and claim that it is a medieval forgery.

Scientists at the Institute of Crystallography of the National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR) studied eight tiny samples of fabric from the shroud, a burial garment which bears the imprint of a man killed by crucifixion, using a method called wide-angle X-ray scattering (WAXS).

They were able to age flax cellulose – long chains of sugar molecules which slowly deteriorate over time – to show that the shroud is 2,000 years old, based on the conditions it was kept in.

They deduced that the shroud was kept in conditions maintaining a temperature around 22.5 degrees Celsius and a relative humidity of about 55 per cent for 13 centuries before it was brought to Chambery, France, in the 1350s; thereby taking the shroud’s chronology all the way back to the time of Christ.

If it had been kept in conditions with a different temperature and relative humidity, the aging of the flax cellulose and resultant dating would have been different too.

“The data profiles were fully compatible with analogous measurements obtained on a linen sample whose dating, according to historical records, is 55-74 AD, found at Masada, Israel,” said the study in the journal Heritage.

The samples were also compared with similar linens from the 13th and 14th centuries but none was a match.

Dr Liberato De Caro, one of the scientists involved in the study, dismissed a 1988 test which concluded that the shroud was probably a Medieval forgery and only seven centuries old as inaccurate because “fabric samples are usually subject to all kinds of contamination, which cannot be completely removed from the dated specimen”.

He added: “If the cleaning procedure of the sample is not thoroughly performed, carbon-14 dating is not reliable. This may have been the case in 1988, as confirmed by experimental evidence showing that when moving from the periphery towards the centre of the sheet, along the longest side, there is a significant increase in carbon-14.”

The study also noted: “To make the present result compatible with that of the 1988 radiocarbon test, the Shroud of Turn should have been conserved during its hypothetical seven centuries of life at a secular room temperature very close to the maximum values registered on the earth”, thereby different to the temperature and humidity levels that were discovered by the Italian researchers.

The WAXS-based study is the second published this year that dates the Turin Shroud to the time of Jesus – and the fourth study to reach the same conclusion in little more than a decade.

In the other study published earlier this year, isotope tests revealed that the flax used to make the linen was grown in the Middle East.

Fragments of cloth taken from the shroud show that its flax originated in the western Levant, a swathe of land occupied today by Israel, Lebanon and western parts of Jordan and Syria.

William Meacham, the American archaeologist who commissioned that study, said: “With a probable near Eastern origin, new doubts must be raised about interpreting the shroud as simply a fake relic made in medieval Europe, and new questions arise about what the image on the cloth signifies.

“The possibility that this cloth is actually the burial shroud of Jesus is strengthened by this new evidence. In my view, that remains the best explanation for the shroud.”

The shroud is held in the Chapel of the Holy Shroud in Turin, Italy. Many Christians come to venerate it as a holy relic of Christ’s crucifixion. The Vatican has not officially recognised its authenticity.

Photo: Graphic from the report based on a deep study of the Turin Shroud in which the areas in white reflect the the human body parts not imprinted on the shroud due to incomplete wrapping; screenshot from report PDF.

Photo: Graphic from the report showing the three principal directions of the blood pattern that were detected in correspondence with the side wound on the right side of the body; image on the left represents the side wound on a life-size model; screenshot from report PDF.

Photo: The Shroud of Turin or Turin Shroud is a length of linen cloth bearing the image of a man who appears to have suffered physical trauma in a manner consistent with crucifixion. There is no consensus yet on exactly how the image was created. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty images.)