This
page is best understood by first reading the page, Forensic Pathology.
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.
Blood 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 minutes before two. They
can also see from changes in bloodstream angles that the man must have
pulled himself up repeatedly, perhaps raising himself up to relieve the
weight on his nailed feet, perhaps to relieve the pressure on his chest
that he might breathe.
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.
