The image is that of a muscular Jewish male, about five feet eleven inches tall, weighing about 170 pounds, about age 35, whose body is in cadaveric spasm (a type of near instantaneous rigor mortis occurring in those severely traumatized), and who has a spear wound through the right chest into the heart with a post mortem flow of blood and serum from the wound. The appearance of the blood clots shows that the body disappeared from within the Shroud without the cloth being unwrapped. The appearance of the blood clots and the body, as well as the images of the flowers, indicates that this event took place between 24 and 36 hours after death.
The image of a crown of thorns is visible on the Shroud, and history records only one use of a crown of thorns. The image records a remarkable event between 24 and 36 hours after death when the body abruptly disappeared, leaving its image in vertically directed electron corona and soft X-ray radiation. To more certainly identify the Man of the Shroud, the title (the sign over the head) and several letters in Greek and Latin of Jesus of Nazareth are faintly visible on the Shroud.
The images of 28 flowers and thorns on the Shroud, twenty of which grow in Jerusalem, and the other eight within 12 miles of Jerusalem. Most do not grow in Europe at all. Pollens of twenty-five of these species had been previously and independently identified by Dr. Max, a noted Swiss criminalist and botanist, from sticky tape slides that he took from the Shroud in 1973 and 1978. Their common blooming time is March and April.