Jesus died from a heart attack brought on by fatal internal bleeding from a ruptured artery in his shoulder, a doctor-turned-priest has said.

The Rev. Professor Patrick Pullicino, a priest in Southwark and formerly an NHS consultant neurologist, said there is evidence that Christ dislocated his shoulder in a fall on the way to Calvary and that the artery ruptured when he was on the cross.

The injury caused a huge internal bleed which resulted in the collapse of his circulatory system, he says in the latest edition of the Catholic Medical Quarterly.

When a Roman soldier pierced the side of Jesus with a lance the build-up of pressure made up to three pints of blood spurt out, as recorded in the Gospel of St John.

Fr Pullicino, a former consultant neurologist at East Kent Universities Hospitals NHS Trust who since retirement has become a priest, based his conclusions on earlier finding of forensic and medical experts who investigated the Shroud of Turin.

There has been some speculation over the authenticity of the relic and in recent years scientific techniques have been deployed to resolve it. Among the first attempts was a radiocarbon test of 1988 and it concluded that it was probably medieval. More recent studies – conducted in 2012 and 2015 – argue instead that the science proves that the linen sheet dates precisely from the time of Jesus.

In 2017, a team from the Hospital University of Padua, Italy, led by Matteo Bevilacqua, conducted a forensic study of the imprint and found it was of a person who suffered and died in exactly the manner of Christ as recorded in the Gospels.

When Fr Pullicino reviewed these studies, what was especially significant to him was the dislocation of the right shoulder. It was yanked so far from its socket that the right hand stretches 10cm (four inches) lower than the left.

He concurs with Bevilacqua et al that the dislocation was probably the result of a fall in which the arm of the Jesus was trapped in the supporting strut of the Tau, or T-shaped, cross that he was carrying. Abrasions on the back of the Turin Shroud indicate that it was shifted from Jesus’s right side to his left, possibly because of his inability to use his dislocated arm after he fell.

The evidence, says Fr Pullicino, shows that “the right arm was stretched to greater than its normal length during crucifixion which was facilitated by a combination of shoulder dislocation and loss of shoulder muscle power”.

“Because of this right arm stretching, the right subclavian/axillary artery was also subjected to stretch, as it was one of the only remaining intact structures connecting the body and the right arm,” he explains.

“Transferring of body weight to the arms in inspiration is likely to have caused further stretching of the right subclavian artery. Transferring weight to the legs in exhalation would reverse this stretch. This would cause the stretched subclavian artery to move across the rib surface with each breath and its underside would be subject to friction.

“This paper postulates that over the course of three hours, the subclavian artery became abraded, injured and its wall attenuated until finally the artery ruptured and profuse bleeding ensued.”

What this produced, says Fr Pullicino, is a condition called a “large tension haemothorax”, a huge sack of blood filling the cavity between the lungs and the rib cage. It would have continued to increase in volume all the time Jesus was on the cross, pushing the left lung and the heart to one side as it grew bigger.

Fr Pullicino cites medical literature from 2020 to state that tension haemothorax “can contain up to 40 per cent of the circulating blood volume and may lead to fatal circulatory collapse”.

He also has an explanation for the effusion of water witnessed by St John.

He believes it was probably cerebrospinal fluid, one of the few liquids in the body that is sufficiently clear to take the appearance of water. He argues that it leaked into the peri-pleural space adjacent to the upper lung and cites a medical study of 2013 by Hebert-Blouin et al to demonstrate that this a documented complication of the sort of brachial plexus (severe shoulder) injury that Jesus suffered on the way to Calvary.

In the 12th century, St Bernard of Clairvaux said that he received visitations from Jesus in which Our Lord revealed the agony of his shoulder wound.

He said that Jesus told him: “I had on my shoulder, while I bore my cross on the way of sorrows, a grievous wound that was more painful than the others and which is not recorded by men.”

Pope St John Paul II had a similar experience when he met Padre Pio, the 20th century Italian mystic whom he would later canonise as St Pio of Pietrelcina.

The future pope, at the time a young priest, asked the stigmatist which of his injuries were the most painful. “It is my shoulder wound, which no one knows about and has never been cured or treated,” came the reply.

Readers who are interested in this science behind the death of Jesus Christ can hear Prof Pullicino discuss his theory with Dr Gavin Ashenden, the former royal chaplain to the Queen and associate editor of the Catholic Herald on Merely Catholic, our new weekly podcast

Please follow this link to listen.

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