What Blood Type Was Jesus? Nobody Knows, and Where the AB Claim Comes From

Nobody knows what blood type Jesus had. The Bible never mentions one, and blood groups were unknown until Karl Landsteiner described them in 1901. The popular answer, type AB, comes from tests on three relics: the Lanciano Eucharistic miracle, the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo. But stains that old can falsely test as AB.

What the New Testament cares about is that his blood was real, human like ours, and shed for the forgiveness of sins. Nobody wrote down its type, but the blood itself runs through the whole story.

The Gospels speak of his blood but never of its type, because no one in the ancient world knew that blood comes in types. Landsteiner, working in Vienna, found three groups in 1901, and the fourth, AB, was found in 1902 by Sturli, one of the colleagues whose blood Landsteiner had tested. In 1930 Landsteiner received the Nobel Prize “for his discovery of human blood groups.” The Gospels are just as silent about his height, his face and how much Jesus weighed.

What Scripture does say is that he shared our flesh and blood, and Hebrews puts it plainly: “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same,” and “in all things it behoved him to be made like unto his brethren” (Hebrews 2:14, 17). Every human being has a blood group, so as a man Jesus had one too, but it was never recorded.

The claim comes from three relics that many Christians venerate as connected with Christ’s body, and each of them has been reported as type AB. Here they are in the order the results appeared:

Relic	Who reported AB	When
Lanciano flesh and blood, Italy	Odoardo Linoli	1971
Shroud of Turin	Pierluigi Baima Bollone and colleagues	1982
Sudarium of Oviedo, Spain	Baima Bollone; repeated by Carlo Goldoni and the Spanish Center for Sindonology	Before 1989; again 1993

Supporters of the relics point out that all three agree. Critics answer that AB is the result old, contaminated blood tends to give, so the agreement may come from the test rather than from the blood. Both sides have a case.

The Italian town of Lanciano keeps what tradition calls a Eucharistic miracle, which accounts place in the seventh or the eighth century. The story goes that a monk who doubted Christ’s presence in the sacrament was saying Mass when the host became flesh and the wine became blood, and the blood later congealed. In November 1970, at the initiative of the archbishop of Lanciano and with permission from Rome, the Franciscans of Lanciano decided to have the relics examined scientifically.

Odoardo Linoli, a professor of anatomy and pathology who headed the pathology laboratory of the hospital in Arezzo, did the work with Ruggero Bertelli, a retired professor of anatomy at the University of Siena. Linoli presented his findings on March 4, 1971, and published them that year in an Italian laboratory journal, Quaderni Sclavo di Diagnostica. There he reported that the flesh was heart tissue and that the blood was human and of type AB. Speaking in 2005, he said the blood group “is the same as that of the man of the holy Shroud of Turin.” The same report noted that Linoli “is the only doctor who has analyzed the relics,” so the Lanciano result rests on a single examination that no independent team has repeated.

When Kelly Kearse and Frank Ligaj reviewed Linoli’s report in 2024, they called the investigation “commendable” as the first major scientific attempt to examine a Eucharistic miracle in detail. They also named its weak points. The samples held “conspicuous accumulations of spores and of hypha of hyphomyces,” a fungus, and two standard tests for haemoglobin, the Teichmann and Takayama tests, were negative. The antiserum used to show that the blood was human was checked against only two other species, cattle and rabbit, so in their judgement the result was not shown to be specific to human blood. Franco Serafini, an Italian physician who defends the miracle, comes to the opposite view in his 2021 book A Cardiologist Examines Jesus: “it is qualitatively unquestionable that the miracle of Lanciano contains true human blood.”

You will often read that a World Health Organization commission confirmed Linoli’s results in 1973 after 500 tests. Kearse and Ligaj searched for that report and contacted both the WHO and the United Nations, and neither had any record of such an investigation. They also tell how Serafini himself, the miracle’s defender, found the document said to be that report kept in Lanciano: a front and back page about Lanciano attached to unrelated pages of tests on Egyptian mummies.

The Shroud is a linen cloth about fourteen feet long, kept in Turin, bearing the faint image of a man with wounds like those of scourging and crucifixion. On the night of October 9, 1978, during the scientific examination of that year, threads were drawn from a bloodstained area of the cloth. Pierluigi Baima Bollone, a professor of forensic medicine at the University of Turin, later tested fibres from those threads with Maria Jorio and Anna Lucia Massaro. In the journal Sindon in 1982 they concluded that “the traces of Shroud blood which we examined belong to the AB group.”

Baima Bollone’s result came four years after the threads were taken, and before it, in 1980 and 1981, the researchers Heller and Adler had reported that the stains contained blood. A later study, reported in Garza-Valdes’s 1999 book The DNA of God?, used a different antibody method and gave “similar results as before, type AB.” Kearse adds that it shares the same weakness: false positives from contamination “cannot be excluded.”

Whether the Shroud is Christ’s burial cloth is a separate and older argument. In 1988 three laboratories, at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich, carbon-dated small samples of the linen, and their joint report in Nature gave its age as “AD 1260-1390, with at least 95% confidence.” Defenders of the Shroud have challenged the dating ever since, and a 2019 statistical study of the laboratories’ raw data found that it “strongly suggests that homogeneity is lacking in the data and that the procedure should be reconsidered.” The Catholic Church has never ruled either way, and when Pope John Paul II visited Turin in 1998, he said: “Since it is not a matter of faith, the Church has no specific competence to pronounce on these questions.”

The Sudarium is a cloth about 84 by 53 centimetres, kept in the cathedral of Oviedo in northern Spain, and tradition holds that it covered Jesus’ face after the crucifixion. John’s Gospel mentions such a cloth in the empty tomb: “the napkin, that was about his head, not lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped together in a place by itself” (John 20:7). The Sudarium carries no image, only stains. Most of its written history comes from Pelagius, a twelfth-century bishop of Oviedo, who traced it from Jerusalem shortly before the Persian conquest of 614. A list of the relics in Oviedo’s chest drawn up on March 14, 1075 includes it.

Baima Bollone made the first analysis of its stains and suggested the blood might be group AB. The result was repeated in 1993 by the haematologist Carlo Goldoni and by the Spanish Center for Sindonology, whose researchers treat the match with the Shroud as a sign that both cloths covered the same man. The Sudarium’s linen has also been radiocarbon-dated, and Mario Moroni and colleagues, who hold both cloths authentic, argue that radiation could have made the radiocarbon ages of both cloths come out too young. Its AB result, though, faces the same question as the Shroud’s: whether a test on stains this old can be trusted.

Blood typing works well on fresh blood, but on blood that is centuries old it is much less trustworthy. The A and B markers that the tests look for are not found only on human red blood cells, and many bacteria and fungi carry them too. So a stain that has grown microbes for hundreds of years can react to both tests and read as AB, whatever the person’s real type was.

Kearse made this case about the Shroud in 2023 in the International Journal of Forensic Sciences. He notes that tests on Jewish skeletal remains 1,600 to 2,000 years old gave AB in 51% of cases, far more than heredity would produce. He also cites a microscopic examination, reported in Garza-Valdes’s book, that found the Shroud’s bloodstained threads heavily contaminated by bacteria and fungi. The second test used on the Shroud, which looks for antibodies in the serum, also tends toward AB in old material, because the antibodies break down with age. The Shroud’s AB findings, he points out, “were never published in a peer-reviewed format,” and he concludes that the stains “should be considered as type unknown pending further testing.”

The researchers knew of the problem, and Baima Bollone’s own paper lists “animal antigens, worms and bacteria capable of giving a false positive result.” He argues that his controls ruled them out, because unstained Shroud fibres, tested on the same slides, gave no reaction. Kearse answers that contamination could be greatest in the bloodstains themselves, the richest food on the cloth for microbes. He and Ligaj raise the same doubt about Lanciano: “doubts have been raised regarding the validity of such results as bacteria also express AB antigens.”

So each of the three relics has been reported as type AB, but by antibody tests that, on contaminated samples, cannot tell genuine AB blood from old blood of another type. Kearse and Ligaj suggest that newer techniques, able to tell bacterial markers from human ones, might help clarify the question. Until then, Jesus’ blood type remains unknown.

Neither claim has a test behind it, because no published account of the tests gives an Rh factor. A full blood type has two parts, the ABO group and the Rh factor, which is the plus or minus. So “AB positive,” “AB negative” and the popular idea that Jesus was Rh negative all add a detail that no laboratory has claimed. In the United States, about 4 people in 100 have type AB, positive and negative together.

The late Ron Wyatt claimed to have found 92 biblical objects and places. He said he had found the Ark of the Covenant in a cave in Jerusalem, beneath what he said was the place where Jesus was crucified, with Christ’s blood on its mercy seat. He said a laboratory found the blood had only 24 chromosomes: 23 from Mary and one, by his reckoning, from the Holy Spirit. No such lab report has ever been produced, and Wyatt never published any of his discoveries in a peer-reviewed journal, so there is no evidence behind the story.

The Christian faith says it was, though some popular teaching has said otherwise. In The Chemistry of the Blood (1943), the physician M. R. DeHaan argued that “every drop of blood in an infant’s body is the contribution of the male parent.” From such reasoning some have taught that Christ’s blood came from his heavenly Father alone, and so was divine rather than human. In the Calvary Baptist Theological Journal in 1987, the physician Daniel Borkert and the theologian Ken Pulliam answered that a baby’s blood is made by the baby’s own body, from genes given by both parents, and that “a person’s blood type is determined not by the father alone but by both parents.” On the theology they were just as direct: “His blood, therefore, must have been true human blood.”

That matches Hebrews, which says he “took part of the same” flesh and blood as the children he came to save. The Gospels show that blood as real: when a soldier pierced his side on the cross, “forthwith came there out blood and water” (John 19:34). How the virgin conception worked in his cells, Scripture does not say, and no test could tell.

The New Testament speaks of Christ’s blood as the price of forgiveness. At the Last Supper Jesus took the cup and said, “For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins” (Matthew 26:28). Paul writes, “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins” (Ephesians 1:7), and Peter reminds his readers that they were redeemed “with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter 1:19). Hebrews draws on the old sacrifices: “without shedding of blood is no remission” (Hebrews 9:22). These and other passages are gathered in Bible verses about the blood of Jesus.

Christians also meet Christ’s blood at the Lord’s table, and the churches describe that meeting in their own words. The Catholic Catechism, quoting the Council of Trent, teaches “a change of the whole substance of the bread into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord and of the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood.” The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America explains the change in the words of John of Damascus: “it is effected by the Holy Spirit. The manner of the change can in no way be understood.” Lutherans confess in the Augsburg Confession that “the Body and Blood of Christ are truly present.” The Westminster Confession, held by Presbyterian churches, says believers “spiritually, receive, and feed upon, Christ crucified,” and Southern Baptists call the Lord’s Supper “a symbolic act of obedience” that memorializes his death. Eucharistic miracles such as Lanciano belong to the Catholic understanding of that change. Many Christians also pray to the Precious Blood, and some of those prayers are collected in prayers to the blood of Jesus.

No one wrote down the type of that blood. What the early preachers cared about was what it had done, and John Chrysostom, preaching on John’s Gospel, told his congregation: “This blood poured forth washed clean all the world.”

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