Why do they keep finding communion wafers have AB blood type if it’s not blood?
This question only confuses people because they think that if something gives any result on a blood type test it must be human blood. But that is not the case.
To quote Tesoriero’s current favourite specialist, Dr Zugibe, “[I]t is well known that false positives are common in typing ancient blood due to many factors, including antigens from other organisms such as insects.[1]” He further quotes Dr. Alan Adler saying “a lot of old materials test AB because it can be confused with bacterial cell-wall contamination. You get immunological tests for two reasons: the proteins have stretches of sugars, so-called saccharides, that the common blood antibodies react to, and the cell wall of bacteria are in fact saccharides.” Dr. Zugibe was talking about very old blood on the Shroud of Turin, but the same principle applies. Contamination from other organisms, including animals, plants, fungi and bacteria, can lead to false positives on a blood test.
An ABO blood type test isn’t a test for blood. The test assumes that you already know that the sample is uncontaminated blood and are just trying to determine what type it is.
Humans do not develop antibodies to ABO antigens so that we will die if we got a blood transplant from a mismatched donor. The purpose of antibodies is to protect us from pathogens, and we develop these antibodies because they are similar to antigens found on things that can hurt us, like bacteria. That’s why our immune system learned to attack them. As a result, lots of organisms (or bits of dead organisms) will give a “blood type” result on an ABO blood test. This includes bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, and other animals. People can even develop an “acquired blood type” due to a bacterial infection which will cause them to get different results on a blood test than would be expected from their genes.
Serratia maracens, the bacteria that likely causes the red colour in most of the rotting communion wafers, all by itself, gives a B blood type on an ABO blood test. To get AB, some other organism would also have to be present that produces a protein sufficiently similar to the human A antigen to be recognized by human anti-A antibodies. But a starchy communion wafer left in water for weeks will naturally have a whole community of microorganisms growing on it. Most of the likely candidates haven’t been tested for blood type, because these tests are done to determine which contaminants might affect forensic blood typing, so they tend to focus on things that grow on corpses not things that grow on wet bread. However, given how many different organisms are likely to be growing on any given sample, it wouldn’t surprise me if nearly every communion wafer left in water for weeks would test as having blood type AB, whether it turned red or not.
[1] Zugibe, Frederick T., The Crucifixion of Jesus: A Forensic Inquiry, Second Edition, 2005
Hugh Farey is a christian who is a shroud skeptic and he goes over how easy it is to get an ab type if the sample is contaminated, which all of the eucharist samples are.
should be timestamped but check the section on “blood type”
https://youtu.be/_c43oVE9t2U?feature=shared&t=1932
I’ve been trying to figure out for years how I can test my home grown wafers for blood type, and I keep dismissing the idea because it’s just not practical to do at home. Doing it properly would be a complex laboratory process. And then I read these lab reports from various miracles and they’re doing all the things I dismissed because they wouldn’t work! Let’s just say I’m yet to see one that would hold up in court. It’s all unvalidated processes.
very interesting. Just wanted to say, glad i found your blog. ive been looking at various categories of catholic miracles off an on for prob a year at this point. you’ve inspired me to try and reproduce the eucharistic miracles. Hopefully you found my other comments about pointers to other sources.
Bought some wafers off amazon to get started with the water dissolving experiment, need to not clean my bathroom for a while to get some serratia going. The reviews on the wafers were pretty funny, had some ppl pouring sauce all over them and eating them. but now that i have them i dont blame them, these things are strangely delicious.
Really? I found them almost inedible even when they were fresh, and now they’re really gross. Don’t bother not cleaning your bathroom, I haven’t found it makes much difference. My “control” wafer, which I tipped into water using gloves straight after opening the sealed package, turned red. I’ve never had one turn red by directly touching it to a red stain in the bathroom, I don’t know why but I don’t seem to be able to seed them. What works best is just tossing them in water, and let them sit for a couple weeks, ideally somewhere warm and humid. They won’t turn red every time, my success rate is something like 1 in 15. But I think the smallest pack I’ve seen was 500 wafers so you should have enough for a few tries. The biggest problem I’ve had is that after a few days they start to sink. If you have a big container, once they sink the red spots tend to stop growing, presumably because Serratia likes oxygen and there’s not much at the bottom. But if you have a small container it dries out before the spot gets very big. So I can get the relatively unimpressive ones, like Lignica or Buenos Aires 1996. But I haven’t managed to get a really impressive one yet, with a big gooey “blood clot” in the middle. Of course, most of those are known to be Serratia, so I know it can happen. I just haven’t had much luck with it.
I’ve done a bit of troubleshooting, and I think the reason that trying to dip it in a red bathroom stain doesn’t work isn’t because you need 3 things for the wafer to turn red.
1)Serratia
2) That Serratia to produce the pigment
3) The pigment to be red.
I’ve cultured a sample from my sink on agar, and it’s growing bacteria, and that bacteria seems to have the characteristics of Serratia, so I don’t think the problem is #1. But it’s staying white. My samples don’t turn pink when I add vinegar, and pH is the main thing that makes the pigment change colour, so I don’t think it’s #3. So it’s probably #2. Serratia only produces the pigment under certain conditions, generally in competition with other organisms. From this paper it looks like it’s actually weirdly specific. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-23538-5/figures/3
So to get red you need the right combination of microbes growing under the right conditions. Which I seem to be able to hit by random chance leaving out enough wafers, but it’s going to be complicated to do intentionally. So the best strategy is probably to just try a bunch of wafers.
Very interesting.
I recently saw this (article dated dec 2024) from the same Stacy Transacos I’ve mentioned before
https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/exaggerations-and-eucharistic-miracles
It cited two scholarly articles from Nov 2024
a quote from Trasancos:
“Kearse devised, for the first time ever, a set of control experiments. He obtained unconsecrated communion wafers and processed them according to the same conditions described above. He left them in a dusty, dark corner for several days and then stored them in water at ambient temperature and humidity for 7-10 days. Approximately 15 percent of the control wafers formed a gelatinous red substance on the surface, like the photos from the Eucharistic miracle reports. ”
in the second report he has some magnification of the the hosts, none of them look like heart tissue or could be construed to look like anything ive seen from the official miracles’ microscope pictures, what little there are.
Maybe reading through Kearse’s papers will be instructive on getting better eucharistic miracle reproductions? I bet he has an email somewhere and you could ask him directly.
I’ll take a look