imageWhat was surprising and will ultimately be useful to many people is the experimental work done by Arthur C. Lind and Mark Antonacci explained in their St. Louis paper, Hypothesis that Explains the Shroud’s Unique Blood Marks and Several Critical Events in the Gospels.

Our experimental approach was not to duplicate a miracle, but to show that natural methods by an artist or by natural contact of a linen shroud with a bloody body cannot duplicate what has been reported about the blood on the Shroud of Turin. To accomplish this it is necessary to better acquaint the reader with the properties of blood by using photographs because much that has been written about blood on the Shroud lacks the information that can only be fully understood by actual visual observations. Barbet very succinctly described the coagulation process as “Coagulation takes place in a very short time, never longer than a few minutes. Secondly, the clot grows smaller, exudes its liquid content, the serum.   It then gradually dries.” This clotting process is described below using both words and photographs.

It is, in essence, two papers in one. The first paper of the paper explains and defends Antonacci’s Historically Consistent Method and the second part is all about blood experiments. This is how the conclusion to part two begins.

A variety of methods were used in an attempt to create blood stains on linen like those found on the Shroud of Turin. Some of the blood stains created in this research matched some of the reported features of blood stains on the Shroud. Other the blood stains created in this research matched different reported features. No one blood stain created in this research matched all the reported features. Reports frequently address the stains in a general manner without describing the exact location of the blood. Some blood stains on the Shroud were probably created from post mortem blood flow and others were not. Clearly any one blood stain created in this research would not be able to match all the blood stains reported on the Shroud. Also, the reported features do not describe both the forward and reverse details of any one blood stain on the Shroud to allow it to be compared with the many stains created in this research. Only Reference 2 has pictures of both sides of the Shroud (Figure 1 above), but they are not detailed enough for this research.

Experiments conducted in this research revealed that accepted explanations previously reported for certain properties of blood on the Shroud are incorrect.