A new blood stain analysis seems to have cast doubt on the authenticity of the famous Shroud of Turin, reports say.
The Shroud is believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ.
According to Roman Catholic website, Crux, Dr. Matteo Borrini, a forensic anthropologist at the Liverpool John Moores University in England, used bloodstain pattern analysis on the Shroud of Turin.
Together with fellow researcher Luigi Garlaschelli, he published the results this month in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.
“Assuming that the red stains on the Turin linen are actually blood from the crucifixion wounds, the results of the experiments demonstrate that the alleged flowing patterns from different areas of the body are not consistent with each other,” the paper reads.
Borrini and Garlaschelli thus argue that the Shroud is not genuine.
Borrini began conducting his research in 2014, and has presented his findings before, but this was the first publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
He told Crux, “When we have bloodstains – you can have bloodstains on the walls, on the objects, on the victims, on the perpetrator or on the clothes – the approach is to analyze the shape and the direction of that stain to understand what happened during the crime.
“This is a forensic technique that is used to reconstruct a criminal event, to determine how that event occurred.”
Using a volunteer, he “reconstructed the crime” and studied how the blood would flow from the wounds depicted on the Shroud. Although some of the stains were consistent with what you would expect from someone crucified and then placed in a burial garment, there were also “inconsistencies.”
“The BPA of blood visible on the frontal side of the chest (the lance wound) shows that the shroud represents the bleeding in a realistic manner for a standing position while the stains at the back-of a supposed post-mortem bleeding from the same wound for a supine corpse-are totally unrealistic,” the article reads.
“What we see on the Shroud is a ‘double bleeding.’ There is a bleeding on the chest, and a few rivulets near the lumbar region that are running horizontally across the body from left to right.
“We did this test: If you have a person standing affixed to a cross, the blood flows from the top of the body to the bottom, as you would expect because the blood is following the gravitational flow from the chest to the bottom of the body. And this is what we see on the Shroud, so this part seems to be consistent,” he said.
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