I cut out a little metal plate of the same shape and size as the wound and I fixed this on certain of my pupils, whom I chose because they would have been of about the same height as the Christ, at the exact spot marked by the measurements which I have quoted. I then had teleradiographs made in the Hôpital Saint-Joseph (with a four metre ampoule) so as to obtain images which were perceptibly orthodiagrammatical, of the same dimensions as the body which was being radiographed. I reproduced one of these radios by means of a diagram, only including the front part of the skeleton and of the visceral shadows for the sake of greater clearness.
As could be seen, the little plate stood out, fairly well to the outside, against the sixth rib, and extending beyond the fifth right intercostal space. The measurements gave much the same figures as on the shroud. Behind the breastbone, which was only clearly visible in its upper part, one could see the cardio-pericardial shadow (the heart), with the shadow of the great blood-vessels rising above (the aorta and the superior vena cava). The right part of the heart extended noticeably beyond the right edge of the breastbone. The heart rested on the hepatodiaphragmatic shadow (the liver). Below the left diaphragm the gaseous sac of the stomach was outlined. The right convexity of the heart was 8 centimetres away from the centre of the wound, following a somewhat oblique line going inwards and upwards. The wound was definitely above the mass of the liver.
The lance must then have entered above the sixth rib, have perforated the fifth intercostal space and penetrated deeply beyond it. With what would it then have met? The pleura and the lung. If St. John’s soldier had given the blow with his lance in an almost vertical direction, he would, first of all, have scarcely been able to perforate the intercostal space; if he had, the point of his lance would have become lost in the lung, in which he would only have been able to draw blood from a few pulmonary veins. He might have caused a great deal of blood to flow, but no water. The pleural fluid, if there was any, would have been necessarily accumulated at the base of the pleural cavity, which was behind and below the level of the wound. What I have in mind, as will be understood, is hydrothorax or dropsy of the chest, the pleural fluid which would be transuded as the result of the death agony, which we shall find in the pericardium. The hypothesis which was put forward some time ago in La Folie de Jésus, that there was tuberculous pleurisy, was intended by its author to be blasphemous; it was in fact merely untenable. We shall come back to this shortly.
The blow with the lance was then oblique and not far off the horizontal, which is easy to understand if the cross, as I think, was not very high. If it was more than 6 feet high, which I think most unlikely, a horseman would have been needed to deal the blow. But the executioners and the guards, that is to say the soldiers who were probably sent by Pilate for the crurifragium, were all foot-soldiers; nor was the centurion a mounted officer. If the cross was less than 6 feet high, as I believe to have been the case, a foot-soldier had only to stand in the position of the challenge, as we used to say when doing bayonet drill, in order to deal the blow with his lance correctly.
This blow at the heart from the right was always mortal, and must have become classical and have been taught in the fencing-schools of the Roman armies; all the more so in that the left side was usually protected by the shield. I have also discovered, when rereading Cӕsar’s Commentaries (De Bello Gallico, Lib. I, 25, 6—Lib. VII, 50, 1—De Bello Civili, Lib. Ill, 86, 3), that the expression “latus apertum—the side being opened” were the classical words for denoting the right side. Farabeuf blows into the intercostal spaces on the right edge of the breastbone do not allow of recovery, because they open up the very thin wall of the right auricle. And this is still true today, even when a surgeon can intervene quickly.
And then: the point moved naturally across the thin, forward part of the right lung and, according to the radiographs, after a course about 3 inches in length, reached the right border of the heart enveloped in the pericardium.
Now, and this is the important side of the question , the part of the heart which extends to the right of the breastbone is the right auricle. And this auricle, which is prolonged upwards by the superior vena cava, and downwards by the inferior vena cava, is in a corpse always filled with liquid blood.
Jesus, as we read at the beginning in the text of the Gospel, was quite dead at the time of the blow with the lance. It would also seem that St. John was thoroughly aware of the importance of this fact, for he continues, with an insistence that is significant, and which reminds one of the first lines of his Gospel: Et qui vidit testimonium perhibuit, et verum est testimonium ejus. Et ille scit quia vera dicit , ut et vos credatis ”— ”And he that saw it hath given testimony; and his testimony is true. And he (Jesus) knoweth that he saith true; that you also may believe” (Jn. XIX, 35). {23} Father Lagrange says that the Greek “ekeinos ” for the second “he” refers to Our Lord, whom St. John cites as a witness to the truth of his testimony.
If the blow with the lance had been given from the left it would have pierced the ventricles, which in a corpse have no blood in them. There would have been no flow of blood but only of water, as we shall see. But the shroud tradition and reasoning would place the wound on the right. We now have only to experiment on a dead body, which has fresh surprises in store for us.