Possibilities

I’m not done looking into this. The big thing that slowed me down is that there seems to be a lot of different information from Dr. Ricardo Castañón Gómez, the man who actually took the samples from the church. But his writings and videos are all in Spanish, which I am gradually learning, but I am far from the being able to comfortably read technical information.

However, people keep asking me to finish this. So I’m going to try to make a table of the different information I have and which possible theories about what happened are consistent or inconsistent with the various data. I reserve the right to add and/or modify to this table as I discover more information.

There are possibilities that I’m not listing in the table largely because the data is irrelevant to them. For example, what if the story was made up entirely? The only independent sources I’ve found are Tesoriero, Castañón Gómez, and the church website. The books could be fiction with a fake website created to support them. But if that’s the case it’s odd that the three sources have different information. And the number of people appearing in the various videos is large, so you would need a large group of people or paid actors. There are some recognizable people like Zugibe, and the videos mostly predate good quality deepfakes. So that seems unlikely to me. But it also just doesn’t fit in the table because if the data is all made up I don’t know what I should expect it to look like.

Similarly, if we’re allowing supernatural possibilities there are infinite options we have no way of discounting. The church thought the wafer was tampered with by a Satanist, what if Satan set up this whole thing to make Catholics look silly? But again, I can’t say what I’d expect the test results to be if that was the case.

Personally, at this point I’m not willing to entertain the idea that the sample that arrived at the forensics lab was anything other than a mouldy communion wafer. The clearest, most objective, best documented tests with the least opportunity for human error all clearly show that the sample they received was not heart tissue. The ortho-tolodine test result alone is clear, there was no blood or heart tissue in this sample.

That leaves two options that I can see (that don’t involve supernatural pranksters):

• The slides contain dead/dying microorganisms, and the expert’s reported conclusions are wrong. I don’t think this is unlikely for a few reasons:
  • No matter what, three of the experts I know of were wrong. Three saw heart, three saw muscle. I also know that more experts have seen the sample (some reports have double digits) and I don’t know what they said. There is clearly selective reporting of the expert’s opinions. To find information from the first three doctors that thought it was skin, you have to go back in history to the time when Tesoriero was satisfied that it was skin. As soon as someone told him it could be heart, the doctors that thought it was skin are edited out of the story. How many unreported experts saw something else that we just don’t know about?
  • The experts tend to report it’s something in their field. When they take it to a cardiologist, he sees heart. But obviously, when a lawyer shows up in a cardiologist’s office with a slide, he’s expecting that it’s going to be heart, and is focusing, as Zugibe clearly was in the videos, on determining cause and time of death. They are not looking at the big picture.
  • I have a few reasons to believe Zugibe was not convinced that this was the heart of Jesus. I’m less clear what his reasons were, but I think that’s significant when his assessment is the main evidence on the side of it being heart tissue.
  • The slides show cellular debris. There is not much distinctive about them.
  • The expert that would have looked at the cells under the highest magnification, the one taking the sample for the single cell DNA test, did not think the cells looked like white blood cells.
• The microscope slide was swapped out, either accidentally or on purpose, for a slide from a heart attack victim, after it was made in the lab.
  • I don’t like this option. That’s probably partially my own bias because lab accidents and fraud are boring. If some tech mislabeled a slide and that’s the whole story, I feel like I’ve been wasting my time. But that doesn’t make it any less likely. Accidents happen everyday, even in places like forensic labs where they shouldn’t.
  • Dr. Lawrence also noted the presence of fungi on the slide, which would be odd if the slide had just been mixed up with a heart attack or car accident victim. However, it sounds like he looked at multiple slides, and it’s unclear to me if the one slide that was identified as skin/heart tissue, which seems to be the only one passed on to the other experts, also had fungi on it, or if it was a bunch of slides of fungi and one that just had skin/heart tissue. But if that was the case, you would think they’d double check if there had been a mistake.
  • As for fraud, it would have had to taken place after the sample left the church. That doesn’t rule out all suspects, Tesoriero and Castañón Gómez certainly have motivation, they’re both still trying to profit off of this incident. It would also explain why Tesoriero kept shopping for experts after the first three said it was skin, he knew that was the wrong answer. But, if that was the case, I would have expected him to find an expert with the right answer before publishing his first book. But why would they not alter the sample before sending it to the forensics lab? Why include the original forensic report in their books? That seems like an odd choice if you know those tests were done on mouldy bread.

At this point, I think both are possibilities.