"The linen traditionally wrapped around the body of Jesus after the crucifixion actually came into contact with the blood of a man who died as a result of many heavy and traumatic blows ," write scientists from the Crystallographic Institute in Baria, the Istituto Officina dei Materiali in Trieste and the Department of Industrial Engineering in University of Padua.
They published their latest research on the Shroud of Turin in the prestigious American scientific journal Plos One . "The man whose shape was imprinted on the Shroud was subjected to severe torture before finally bleeding to death ," the researchers write.
Why was the blood on the Shroud red?
This is not the first study of the Shroud - certainly the most thoroughly analyzed relic in the world. For several decades, various scientists have puzzled over questions about the origin of the material, the creation of the very image of Jesus.
For example, Barrie Schortz, an American scientist who has been studying the Shroud for nearly 40 years, has proven that no human technique is able to obtain such an effect . The image is therefore not an artist's work, it contains hemoglobin.
Other experts asked questions. For example: why the blood on the Shroud was red, after all, after a cut, the blood usually clots quickly and turns brown. It was proved here that Christ's torment lasted 18 hours, the tortured man was not given anything to drink then, particles of bilirubin from the liver must have got into his blood, hence the redness of the blood. The questions kept coming. Hypotheses abounded.
Shroud of Turin: The first such analysis
But only now have scientists from Trieste, Bari and Padua examined the Shroud for the first time "at such an insightful level". Experiments were conducted using the latest electron microscopy and scanning X-ray techniques. For the first time in history, scientists checked the nanoscopic properties of the fibers taken from the Shroud of Turin (they examined, among others, the reflection in the vicinity of Jesus' feet).
They analyzed those fragments of the canvas that are far from the blood stains. In-depth analysis of the nanoparticles revealed a hitherto unknown detail: the fibers of the Shroud are sprinkled with creatinine with a size of 20 to 100 nanometers, and particles of ferritin, i.e. iron oxide, with a size of 2 to 6 nm, have been isolated around it. What does it mean?
Creatinine is a chemical compound found mainly in the muscles. Its high blood concentration in a healthy person is most often the result of muscle breakdown, e.g. as a result of an injury. And as the researchers emphasize in a fragment of their work entitled Atomic resolution studies detect new biological evidences on the Turin Shroud - "ferritin binding to creatinine occurs in the human body in the case of polytrauma".
Jesus extremely brutally beaten
So if both substances are scattered all over (!) the Shroud, it means that Jesus "was tortured in an exceptionally bestial way", so that His muscles fell apart. The tools used by the soldiers who scourged Christ had to be hard and sharp, they pierced and lacerated His body. From a faith perspective, it's really hard to read (and write) about it calmly.
The scientists themselves wrote: "On the fibers of the linen, an extremely brutal scenario of the victim is written at the nanoscopic level, who was then wrapped in a funeral sheet." The shroud, they add, "tells a terrible story." And they emphasize: "We have obtained this certainty only thanks to the latest methods in the field of electron microscopy at atomic resolution."
There is no room for debate here - there is a hard result of work under several latest-generation microscopes, in three different major and highly regarded research centers. The result confirms the hypotheses of Alan Adler , a biochemist who in the 1990s announced that the Shroud wrapped the body of a tortured man, according to the scenario described in the Gospels.