Two old pieces of linen sit about 700 miles apart in Europe and each one is stained with the blood of a dead man.
The first is over 14 ft long.
It’s kept in Turin in northern Italy and you’ve almost certainly heard of it.
The second is roughly the size of a kitchen towel.
It’s locked inside a cathedral in Spain and hardly anyone has.
Jesus blood was reanalyzed by AI.
The findings were unexpected.
So this time we’re leaving the face alone and going straight to the blood because what the AI said about those two cloths shouldn’t be possible.
It’s blood that got onto the linen first.
Blood that never went black and a second cloth out of your own Bible laid right across the first.
I’m Ambrose Wild and by the end of this video you’ll know whether those two cloths could have touched the same head and what that does to the date the labs put on the famous one.
Turin, northern Italy.
The Shroud of Turin is a strip of linen about 14 ft 5 in long and on it you can just make out the front and the back of a man head to head as if he was laid on one half and the other half was folded over him.
In 1532 it nearly burned.
A fire broke out in the chapel at Chambery where the cloth lay folded in a silver reliquary and the melting silver dripped straight down through the layers leaving a row of matching holes.
Two years later the Poor Clare nuns of Chambery sewed on 14 large triangular patches and eight smaller ones.
A box of molten silver and the man on the cloth came through almost untouched.
Look at what was done to him.
His back and legs are covered in small paired wounds, the kind a Roman whip with weighted tips leaves, more than a hundred of them.
His scalp is punctured all the way around.
There’s a wound at each wrist, wounds in the feet and one long wound in the side.
The Gospels give you the same order.
Matthew 27 says that when he had scourged Jesus he delivered him to be crucified.
After that come the thorns, the nails, and in John 19, the spear.
Every one of those wounds left blood soaked into the threads.
And for all the arguments about the face, the blood is the part almost nobody stops to look at.
That changed in October 1978 when the church gave a group of American scientists the Shroud of Turin Research Project, 120 straight hours with the cloth.
They photographed it, x-rayed it, and pressed sticky tape onto the linen to lift fibers, 32 tape samples in all.
Five days and nights with that cloth, and I doubt anybody slept much.
Decades later, I handed an AI every published test on that blood and asked it a simple thing.
Forget what people want to be true.
What do the measurements actually show? First is the red even blood.
One of America’s best-known microscope experts said no.
Walter McCrone examined the tapes and reported red ochre, an iron oxide pigment, with the blood stains touched up in vermilion.
To him, it was a 14th-century painting with no blood at all.
But two other scientists had the same tapes.
John Heller was a medical doctor, and Alan Adler was a chemist who studied the molecules blood is built from.
They reported hemoglobin, bilirubin, and albumin, the main protein in the clear part of your blood.
They even agreed there’s iron on the cloth, but traced it to the way flax is soaked in water to make linen.
Then the photographers on the 1978 team lit the cloth with ultraviolet lamps, the black light a crime scene unit uses.
Thin glowing borders showed up around the blood stains, and in a 1981 paper, they suggested those were serum rings, the pale fluid that separates as blood clots and dries.
A painter in the 1300s couldn’t have known to paint a ring that only shows under ultraviolet.
So, when I asked the AI where the chemistry landed, its answer was careful.
The stains carry real blood components, and the paint explanation doesn’t account for them.
Then it added something believers rarely hear.
As of 2025, nobody has proven that this blood is human.
Hold on to that because it comes back.
So, which came first, the blood or the picture? Put yourself in a medieval forger’s workshop.
You draw the man first, the face, the shoulders, the whole outline, and then add the blood exactly where the wounds belong.
Any artist works in that order.
Adler tested it.
He took fibers from inside the blood stains, dissolved the blood away with a protease, an enzyme that breaks down protein, and looked at the linen underneath.
In 1986, he reported that no image color was there.
The thread under the blood was bare.
So, the blood got there first, and the image formed around it, never under it.
That’s backwards for a forger.
To be fair, it rests on a small number of fibers, and the blood researcher Kelly Kearse has called it important and worth further investigation.
But, nobody has shown image color under that blood.
Here’s the detail that everyone missed at the time, and it’s in the hands.
Medieval crucifixes almost always put the nails through the middle of the palms.
On the cloth, the blood flows from the wrist.
In the 1930s, a French surgeon named Pierre Barbet nailed freshly amputated hands through the palm and reported that the flesh tore out between the fingers at around 88 lb of pull, far less than a hanging man’s weight.
Later, Frederick Zugibe showed that a nail driven at an angle through the base of the palm can come out at the wrist.
Either way, the wound ends up at the wrist, right where the cloth shows it, while centuries of painters kept putting it in the palm.
And it fits the burial.
Luke 23 says, “Joseph of Arimathea took the body down and wrapped it in linen”.
A man taken off a cross that afternoon is still bleeding, so the first thing to stain the linen is his blood.
It was a rushed burial before the Sabbath, so the blood came first and the image came after.
But there’s a stranger problem, and you can see this one yourself.
Bleed on a bandage, and by morning the spot has turned brown, and a few years on it’s close to black.
Turin’s blood stains are still red.
It’s a dull red, but it’s red after more than six centuries of recorded history, a fire, and more hands than anyone could count.
That’s not a typo, by the way.
Adler proposed an answer.
His test showed what he called an extraordinarily high bilirubin count.
Bilirubin is the orange-yellow pigment left over when red blood cells are broken down, and it floods the blood when someone is beaten, whipped, and pushed into shock.
Mixed into old blood, he argued, it keeps the stain red.
If he was right, the color itself is a medical record of torture.
I’ll be straight with you, though.
A 2010 experiment found no visible difference after 4 months between ordinary blood and blood loaded with bilirubin, and other chemists have offered different explanations.
The AI’s read was that high bilirubin fits a man who suffered terribly, but the color question isn’t closed.
The suffering started the night before in the garden.
Luke 22 says his sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground.
There’s a medical name for that, hematidrosis.
In 2017, the Canadian Medical Association Journal counted 42 medical articles on it since 1880, and more than half of 28 recent patients have been under severe stress.
And Isaiah, seven centuries earlier, wrote that he was wounded for our transgressions, and with his stripes we are healed.
Stripes are whip marks.
The red on that cloth is exactly that, the marks of the whip.
What type was it? In the early 1980s, an Italian forensic professor named Pierluigi Baima Bollone reported type AB, the rarest of the main blood groups.
Roughly four or five people out of a hundred carry it.
This is where the AI surprised me.
In a recent paper, Kersch pointed out that bacteria and fungi carry the same A and B markers those tests detect, and the cloth is full of both.
So an AB reading on ancient linen can’t be trusted without a genetic test.
So here’s the honest summary.
Real blood components on the linen before the image still read with a blood type that’s possible but unproven, and one cloth will always be argued over.
So what if there were two? Open your Bible to John 20.
It’s Sunday morning and Mary Magdalene has found the stone rolled away.
Peter and John run for the tomb.
John gets there first, stoops down, and sees the linen clothes lying there, but he doesn’t go in.
Then Peter arrives and walks straight in.
That’s Peter for you.
And verse seven tells us what he saw.
And the napkin that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself.
So there were two cloths, one long linen sheet for the body and a smaller one that had been around his head, rolled up and set apart.
It’s an easy line to read right past.
The old word for that face cloth is sudarium, a cloth for wiping sweat, the kind laid over a dead man’s face.
So if one burial cloth was kept, why not the other? A cathedral in northern Spain says it was.
The sudarium of Oviedo has been there for more than nine centuries, and the story of how it got there reads like an escape.
The catch is who wrote it down.
Most of it traces to Pelagius, bishop of Oviedo from 1101, a man historians nicknamed the prince of falsifiers for forging church documents.
So, hold it loosely.
The story says the cloth left Jerusalem around 614, just ahead of the Persian army, went to Alexandria with a priest named Philip, crossed North Africa, and landed at Cartagena in Spain.
It moved to Seville, then Toledo, where it stayed until 718.
When the Moors advanced, it was carried into the mountains to a cave called Monsacro, and then to Oviedo, where King Alfonso II built a stone chapel for it, the Camara Santa.
That room still stands.
Here’s what a forger can’t arrange.
The Swiss criminologist Max Frei sampled pollen from the cloth and reported species typical of Oviedo, Toledo, North Africa, and Jerusalem, one stop after another along that road.
A congress in Oviedo in 1994 added pollen from an oak that grows in Palestine.
Frei has his critics, but it’s hard to plant pollen in the order a legend needs.
Then the paper trail.
On the 14th of March, 1075, the chest of relics was formally opened in Oviedo.
King Alfonso VI was there with his sister Urraca, and beside them stood Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the knight Spain knows as El Cid.
That’s quite a crowd to watch somebody open a box.
Nobody alive had seen inside that chest.
They prayed, lifted the lid, and found among the relics a small cloth stained with old blood.
Afterward, the king had the oak chest covered in silver, and one line in the metal reads, “The sacred sudarium of our Lord Jesus Christ”.
The chest is still there in Oviedo today, with the cloth kept beside it.
Keep that year in mind, 1075, because it comes back later.
What’s on the cloth? First surprise, there’s no image at all, just faded brown stains that repeat the way they would if the cloth had been folded.
It measures about 84 by 53 cm, roughly 33 by 21 in, and it’s shown to the public 3 days a year on Good Friday, the 14th of September, and the 21st of September.
A team from the Spanish Center for Sindonology studied those stains for years, led by Guillermo Heras, with the medical work by Dr. Jose Villalain.
He recreated the stains on a model head again and again until the shapes matched.
Here’s where they landed.
The stains are one part blood to six parts fluid from the lungs, the fluid that builds up when a man dies of asphyxiation.
A crucified man hangs by his arms.
To breathe, he has to push up on the nail through his feet.
When he can’t anymore, fluid fills his lungs, and when the body is moved, it comes out through the nose and mouth.
Six parts to one.
That’s nobody who died peacefully at home.
The shroud shows that same struggle to breathe, and the version you’ve heard isn’t the full picture.
The blood on the forearms runs in more than one direction.
In 2018, the forensic anthropologist Matteo Borrini and the chemist Luigi Garlaschelli tested those flows on a living volunteer and published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences.
They said the flows don’t fit a single position and argued the cloth isn’t genuine.
Defenders read it the other way.
A man on a cross isn’t held in one position.
He sags and pushes up again and again until he can’t.
Back in Spain, the team worked out the head’s position at death, bent about 70° forward and 20° to the right.
That’s a man who died hanging upright.
The first stain formed while he was still on the cross with the cloth wrapped over his head and pinned at the back of the neck.
The second came about an hour later when the body was taken down.
The third came about 45 minutes after that when the body was lifted from the ground.
Through all of it, someone held that cloth to his nose and mouth.
Somebody cared enough to cover his face.
At the back of the head, the Sudarium has small blood spots from sharp points.
Matthew 27 says that when they had platted a crown of thorns, they put it upon his head.
Now lay it beside the cloth in Turin.
An American researcher, Alan Wanger, used what he called the polarized image overlay technique to line images of the two cloths up.
He counted 70 points where the front of the Sudarium matches the shroud’s face and 50 more across the back of the head and the neck.
In 2016, Juan Manuel Miñarro, a sculpture professor at the University of Seville, ran a separate study and found more than 20 points of correspondence at the forehead, the nose, the right cheekbone, and the chin.
Most courts ask for between eight and 12 points to identify someone.
The Sudarium’s nose works out to about 8 cm, the same as on the shroud.
And the Sudarium’s blood has also been reported as AB with the same warning attached.
So, I put the big question to the AI.
Could these two cloths have covered the same head? It listed where they agree.
The nose, the forehead, thorn wounds on the scalp and at the nape sitting in matching spots on both cloths.
Then where they differ.
The shroud’s stains have crisp edges left by a body lying still.
The Sudarium’s are soaked and smeared from a man upright and being moved.
Its verdict was that the overlap is far too close to be chance and the simplest explanation is one head covered at two different moments just after death.
Miñarro put it plainly, “The two cloths almost certainly covered the same body, though the match alone doesn’t prove the man was Jesus.
One cloth went over his face before he was taken down, and the other wrapped his whole body in the tomb.
The same two cloths John saw that Sunday morning.
And this is where it turns into more than a curiosity because of the date.
On April 21st, 1988, a strip was cut from one corner of the shroud and shared among three labs at Oxford, Zurich, and the University of Arizona.
Radiocarbon dating measures a kind of clock that starts ticking when a living thing dies.
In this case, the flax plants the linen was woven from.
In February 1989, the journal Nature published the answer.
Between 1260 and 1390 at 95% confidence.
Medieval.
It’s the date most of us grew up hearing, but the Sudarium was opened in front of a king in 1075, almost two centuries before the earliest year the labs allowed.
What happens to that date, I asked, if both cloths really touched one head? The AI’s answer was blunt.
They can’t both be right.
Then it gave me the part I didn’t expect.
The Sudarium has been carbon dated, too.
Tests at Arizona in 1990 and Toronto in 1992 put it between the 6th and 9th centuries, most likely the 8th.
And a 2007 test in Madrid agreed.
That’s not the time of Jesus, either.
But play by the labs’ own rules, even an 8th century Sudarium is centuries older than the shroud’s date.
And if both cloths touched one head, the shroud can’t be younger than the face cloth.
The medieval painting theory breaks either way.
The 1988 sample has its own problems.
In 2005, the chemist Raymond Rogers reported that the corner they cut held cotton and a coating the rest of the cloth doesn’t have, and he called it the worst possible sample for carbon dating.
In 2019, another team got the labs’ raw data and found the measurements didn’t agree the way the published results suggested.
Others reject the repair idea completely, so the argument goes on.
The AI brought up the final objection without being asked, and it’s a smart one.
What if a medieval forger copied the Sudarium stains onto his fake? Think about what he’d need.
He’d have to study a cloth that came out a few days a year, match dozens of points from faint brown stains, put the blood on before the image, and use something that tests like blood.
So, you get three options: a genius forger, 70 coincidences in a row, or the same man John describes laid in the linen, his head covered by the napkin.
My own pick is the same man.
Which one gets your vote? Put it in the comments.
So, add it up.
Blood components on the cloth in Turin that went on before the image, blood that stayed red, possibly from a man who was tortured, a second cloth, the kind John saw, matching the same head at a different moment, with a paper trail that starts two centuries before the lab’s date.
For a fake, that’s an awful lot of blood.
But the stain that matters most to me is the one in his side.
John 19 says one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood and water.
On the cloth in Turin, the side wound shows red blood with a clear pale fluid around it.
John knew nothing about serum or ultraviolet light.
He reported what he saw, standing close enough to see it.
And when the body was laid down, blood from that wound ran around to the back, where the shroud shows a band of it across the lower back.
Why does this blood matter at all? The answer starts in Egypt on the night of the first Passover, when God said, “When I see the blood, I will pass over you”.
Hebrews 9 says, “Without shedding of blood is no remission, no forgiveness at all”.
First John says, “The blood of Jesus Christ, his son, cleanseth us from all sin”.
And Peter wrote that we weren’t redeemed with silver and gold, but with the precious blood of Christ as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.
That blood is the one that counts, and it was shed for you.
The cloths are evidence, and good evidence.
Still, the blood was never really about cloth.
Think about what John found left in that tomb.
Linen, [clears throat] lying where the body had been.
A face cloth, folded by itself.
Two pieces of cloth, now 700 miles apart.
Everything that had touched him was still there.
He wasn’t.
People can fight over a carbon date for decades.
An empty tomb is a much harder thing to argue with.
Oviedo still brings the Sudarium out every Good Friday, if you ever want to see it for yourself.
Would you go? I’m Ambrose Wilde, and if you want more of the evidence behind the Bible’s own words, there are plenty more videos like this one coming.
So, stay close for the next one.
