Story: George Sydney Abugri

I have the same blood type as our Lord Jesus Christ. This is not some sacrilegious joke from an irreverent writer but a fact of medical laboratory science. Jesus’s blood group was AB+ and so is mine.

This blood group is known as the “universal recipeint” group. We can receive blood transfusion from the other blood groups, namely blood groups A, B, and O but can donate blood only to people with blood type AB.

Yet while I have the same blood type as Jesus, that is where the similarity ends, for whereas the typology of the blood of other people with blood type AB is the same as mine, the mathematical probability of finding someone with the typology of Jesus’s blood’s is estimated by scientists to be about one in 200 billion {1 in 200,000,000,000}.

How could anyone tell the blood group of someone who died more than 2000 years ago? By examining blood from the Shroud of Turin which is believed to have been the cloth wrapped around Jesus’s body for burial.

How can we confirm that the famous Shroud of Turin which has attracted many people from around the world to Italy is not a forgery? For centuries, Jesus’s burial cloth has generated very intense controversy. Many scholars, historians, scientists and theologians have been convinced that it is the cloth in which Jesus Christ was wrapped after his crucifixion and that by some unknown process, his image was transferred onto the cloth. It was in1889 that technical progress made in the field of photography made it possible for the first photograph of the Shroud to be taken. The photographer, Mr. Secundo Pia, examined the first glass-plate negative of the photograph and, “almost dropped it in shocked excitement”, according to some historical documents.

The photograph of the Shroud which Pia took was described as “a very clear positive image” which caused some sensation among experts investigating the authenticity of the Shroud but the actual image on the Shroud itself was found to be a negative image! Do you get it?

How could a negative image be produced on a piece of cloth centuries before photography was invented? It was at this point that specialists from all over the world began to join in the investigation.

Leo Vala, a photographic expert who developed “3-D-photography” {three dimensional photograph} told Amateur Photographic Magazine, that skilled painters had demonstrated that “no artist was able, even when using a model, to convert a human face by the process of the mind, into a negative image and paint it. “ In 1978, scores of the world's top scientists, pathologists, textile experts, chemists, physicists and photographic specialists, got together under the Shroud of Turin Research Project and went to Italy where they obtained permission to spend five days examining the mysterious cloth. In reporting on the project, National Geographic noted that, never before had an object of art or archeology been subjected to such exhaustive examination by scientists. “The scientists bombarded the relic {Shroud} with ultraviolet radiation, X-rays, and examined it microscopically and took photo micrographs.” Confronted with all the evidence, Dr. John Heller of Yale Medical School who had earlier dismissed the Shroud as a forgery, was humble enough to revise his notes, admitting that “there is now no question in my mind, that there was a the image of a scourged, crucified man in the Shroud." A scientist who worked on the Shroud of the Turin Research Project, Dr. Robert Bucklin, described as “chief pathologist of the Los Angeles city morgue”, is quoted as having said that “If I were asked in a court of law to stake my professional reputation on the validity of the shroud of Turin, I would answer very positively and firmly that it is the burial cloth of Christ. It's Jesus whose figure appears on the Shroud. It is not a matter of faith to me; it's just a matter of common sense. Knowing what we know, who else could this have happened to in all history?"

Dr. Max Frei of the University of Zurich, a specialist who uses “microscopic pollen analysis” to trace where any fabric has been reported that: "My tests have convinced me that this Shroud is in fact the cloth in which Christ’s body was wrapped. I have isolated from the Shroud, more than a dozen pollen grains from plants that grow only around Jerusalem and its deserts."

He continued that “the image on the Shroud is not a painting. It was left by the corpse of a man who was beaten and crucified. Computer processing has shown that the image has three-dimensional properties, something which neither paintings nor standard photographs possess.”

Some of the most trusted work confirming the genuineness of the Shroud and its blood AB stains was undertaken by the famous Genetics Forensic Laboratory of the University of Bologna.

The laboratory specializes in everything related to DNA and is reputed to work with Secret Services and the Police investigators of many countries around the world. The laboratory is equipped with very highly sophisticated equipment and manned by a team of top researchers, doctors and university The investigators discovered something quite mind blowing: The Genetics Forensic Laboratory of the University of Bologna keeps a world-wide data bank with the data of 22,000 males from 187 different populations around the world. It was found that the configuration of the genetic features found in the Y chromosome of Jesus’s blood, does not correspond to any of the configurations present in any blood AB type in the database.

According to the research documents, “the blood from the Shroud is so rare that it must be considered as almost unique. By calculation, the statistical probability of finding a typology of the same blood type, is almost nil and the mathematical probability of this happening, is in the order of one in 200 billion possible cases."

“There is no one in the world who could be in a position to produce blood with similar characteristics to those found on the Shroud. The data indicates that it belongs to only one single Person and to no other person in all of humanity's history.

Therefore, it comes from a Man who has no ancestor and no descendant or offspring. Therefore it becomes quite clear, that He {Jesus} was a man but unlike any other man.” This must be food for thought among those confused by the God-man image of Jesus Christ.

Easter is considered by many as the most significant event on the Christian calendar and while most Christians have little or no knowledge of the deep mysteries of the blood of Jesus as revealed by medical scientific investigations, many Christians who consume Jesus’s blood, can attest to the awesome power within.

One thing is now clear: When Jesus Himself told his followers that anyone who ate his body and drunk his blood would have life and that he would raise them up as He was raised up at Easter, he meant it.

Some of his followers were understandably quite scandalized or revolted by the gory image of cannibalistic Christians eating human flesh and drinking human blood as part of Christian teaching.

Yet if Jesus were merely joking and intended his statement to convey some imagery, he would have stopped those followers who began to leave him the moment he said this: “Easy now, guys. Just kidding.” He did not stop them because he meant business. That is why I celebrate Jesus’s blood at Easter. Email:georgeabu@hotmail.com