Truth About The Crucifixion — Page 217
In 1973, when Naber and I met in London, he filled me in on what happened next. A priest friend gave him a book on the shroud by R. W. Hynek, a Czechoslovakian doctor who had done work on the possible causes of Christ's death. When he came to the chapter stating that all doctors who had studied the photographs at length believed it held a corpse, he stopped. If the shroud had wrapped a dead man, he realized, then his vision could not be true. He would have to admit he was imagining things, perhaps even hallucinating. Naber could not accept either of these conclusions. So he bought all the books he could on the shroud, as well as life- size blow-ups of the 1931 Enrie photographs. Poring over the apparent bloodstains on the shroud, he told me, he suddenly recalled an incident in the war. "It was in 1942 on the home front. There had been an automobile accident in which a man in our company had been killed. As the company writer I was to go to the autopsy room and make the report. I was standing there with my sargent. The doctor made a cut on the man, but no blood came out. I was surprised and asked the sargent why this was so. He replied he did not know. We asked the doctor and he said that corpses do not bleed. They can bleed a little, a few drops maybe, but not in large quantities. "And so while I was looking at the shroud pictures and all the blood on the shroud I remembered what the doctor had said. Corpses do not bleed. And then realized here was my proof. The body in the shroud was covered with blood. Yet corpses do not bleed. The body could not have been a corpse. It must still have been alive when put in the shroud. Otherwise how could the blood have gotten on it? The heart must still have been pumping when they put Jesus in the shroud. " Later Naber qualified his statement. Corpses, as the doctor 209