This is something I did research into and wrote up quite a while ago (years, in fact), but ended up never posting. Because the information might be useful, I've opted to "dust off" the post and put it up after some editing. Due to the length of time between writing and posting it, it is possible information here may be a bit out of date (one link stopped working between writing and posting it, and one of the people discussed in this post, Henry Gruver, died in the meantime!), but again perhaps it will be of use to someone.
This post concerns a claim of Ron Wyatt. Ron Wyatt was a man who claimed to have found no small number of biblical artifacts, including but not limited to: Noah's Ark, the location of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Tower of Babel site, the Ark of the Convent, and Jesus's blood on said ark (fallen there from the Crucifixion).
Ron Wyatt has come under criticism for his various claims; for example, here
is a site going through him in detail. However, the specific question here is the claim of having found the blood of Jesus (when he found the Ark of the Covenant) and had it analyzed by a laboratory. The laboratory, according to him, told him that it was blood but that, unlike normal human blood, which has 46 chromosomes, this blood had only 24 Chromosomes--23 female (from the mother) and 1 male. This is allegedly the blood of Jesus, as Jesus had no human father if the virgin birth is true, and the male chromosome added because Jesus was male.
An astounding claim... but one he has did not offer proof for. He never made public any lab reports or even said what lab he tested it at. Given this lack of offered proof, many have concluded he made the whole thing up.
Now, these criticisms are things one can already easily find online (e.g. the link above or also here) or even in print (e.g. the book "Holy Relics or Revelation : Recent Astounding Archaeological Claims Evaluated"). While I don't necessarily agree with everything on those sources, they do appear to explain well the lack of evidence on this. So normally there wouldn't be much reason to bother with this post. But there are a few defenses I've seen that don't seem to often be responded to, so I wanted to look into them a little.
Defenders I have seen generally claim two things: One, that those who met Wyatt found him to be trustworthy, and the second is that there are those who claim to have seen the lab reports. How good are these?
In regards to the first, one issue with various of these people cited is that they are not necessarily trustworthy themselves. For example, someone I've seen cited sometimes is Michael Rood, who
complained that those who criticize Wyatt are frequently those who never met him; this is a weak claim. Why is that a prerequisite to examining the evidence?
As for Rood himself, he has certainly come under some criticism himself. For example, he's given false prophecies. See, for example, this page (no longer around, perhaps to obscure it, but an archive is available):
Specifically:
In the coming months we will see that Iraq has nuclear warheads that were produced outside of the country, and brought into Iraq after the U.N. inspectors conveniently left the Job in the late 1990’s. The warheads were flown into Iraq and sealed into the rocket-propelled flying containers, which will be launched from the land of Shinar against Israel. The land of Israel, the house of the LORD, will be judged first. But the judgment will continue into the Christian world, which has been profusely swearing falsely. In order to bring America into the battle theatre with Iraq, a major incident will be necessary. Zechariah records that incident – he saw it take place – and so did I.
So according to him, Iraq not only had nuclear weapons that they brought in after the UN weapon inspectors left, it was going to launch them at Israel. As anyone will know, the US invaded Iraq on the assumption that Iraq had those weapons--which turned out to be false.
This doesn't make Rood a liar. Maybe he actually did think this was a legitimate prediction. In fact, I'd say it's more likely than not he did believe it; fake seers, or at least the smart ones, don't give predictions that can be disproved in the near future. Still, this is hardly the only example; this page goes over some of his prophecies that didn't pan out. Again, this doesn't necessarily mean he's a liar, as he could think they were real prophecies and be mistaken. But it's an issue if you are trying to rely on his judgment. And furthermore, even if Rood thought Wyatt was credible, there were others who met Wyatt had issues with him; here is testimony from someone who says they knew him who did not find him credible.
But the important one here is Henry Gruver, who is probably the reason this post exists at all, as I have not seen much examination of him in regards to this. His testimony can be found here.
This is of course a site devoted to trying to prop up Ron Wyatt's claims about finding Noah's Ark (a claim not under examination in this post, but someone offered a critique here), so this holds up Gruver's testimony as evidence, and the page also cites Jonathan Gray and Jesslyn Johnson. However, Gray appears to be so far in with Wyatt that if Wyatt is a fraud, so is he. As for Johnson, the page claims "Jesslyn Johnson said Ron had the blood tested in Israel and
on the final day he "took his lab report and left."" This quote attributed to her I cannot find attributed to her anywhere else. Notably, the page does not claim either of them actually saw the lab reports.
The page primarily concerns Henry Gruver, though. This page is not directly written by Gruver, but rather is what someone else said Gruver told them. However, I did find a video in which Gruver discusses it and he says basically the same things as are on that, so I think we can consider this an accurate description of his remarks. Gruver does say he saw the lab reports, and that they were verified by a documentation specialist in a meeting with Demos Shakarin. Does this lend credence to their authenticity?
Well, we only have Henry Gruver's word that the meeting occurred. Demos Shakarin passed away quite a while ago, and appears to have done so before Gruver made this claim. So he cannot give any confirmation or denial. And if this evidence could be presented to them by Wyatt, why exactly could he not simply make it public?
Even ignoring that, various other questions remain. First, exactly what were the credentials of this "documentation specialist" that verified that the lab reports were legitimate? Gruver claims that they were certified. But as far as I can tell, there is no such certification. Searching indicates there is a certification for CLINICAL documentation specialist, but that position has nothing to do with what was described. Perhaps he did not remember the specific job title correctly. But that brings us to the question of, assuming he is saying what he thinks is true, how well he's remembering it to
begin with. That testimony was given
back in 2012, about 22 years after the event supposedly happened, and he was 70 years old at the time.
But even assuming the documentation specialist was qualified, how exactly could the documentation specialist verify them? Gruver says he verified the signatures and record numbers, because he had information from "every laboratory around the world." I'll admit I'm not an expert on laboratories, but it seems that would be too much documentation to lug around, and is that information they would even give out? And if the specialist can have all that information (signatures, laboratory order numbers), then why in the world couldn't they simply contact the labs and get confirmation? This documentation specialist clearly had to have contacted them to get all those test numbers. This whole thing seems like a needlessly roundabout way to confirm what should be easy to do by simply contacting the applicable labs.
To my knowledge, Wyatt has never disclosed where he had the blood tested, only that it was somewhere in Israel. However, a separate laboratory-related claim of his is that he found the ruins of Noah's Ark and that it was tested at Galbraith Laboratories. Looking it up, this is questionable:
https://creation.com/special-report-amazing-ark-expose
Admittedly, this involves independent research on their part I cannot verify. But it's hard to accuse Creation Ministries International of bias in this given that a creationist organization would be predisposed to believe in the discovery of an ark. If they are saying it's false, that seems a strong indication it is.
There is another reason to be skeptical of Henry Gruver's testimony. Henry Gruver makes the claim that Wyatt was not a Seventh Day Adventist. Everything I have found about him elsewhere says he was (this is why it is notable that one of the most in depth criticisms of him, the book "Holy Relics or Revelation", was written by two Seventh Day Adventists). I suppose it is theoretically possible everyone else was wrong, but if he was in fact a Seventh Day Adventist, it would seem that Gruver is either making this up, perhaps to make Wyatt seem more palatable to those who are not Seventh Day Adventists, or he is misremembering things. In either of these situations, his testimony regarding the documentation specialist becomes more suspect, because if he remembered Wyatt's religion incorrectly or is lying about it, why could that not be true for the experience with the documentation specialist?
It ultimately seems to me that Henry Gruver's testimony provides little backing for Wyatt's claims. Gruver's account brings up too many questions, has no corroborating witnesses, and is given by someone who has incentive to verify Wyatt's authority given that he went around advertising his claims. To be clear, I am not accusing him of deliberately lying. Even if what he says is false, he could have simply not remembered things properly after more than 20 years. But the testimony seems very questionable.
I did try to see what kind of information I could find out about him, personally. Unfortunately, outside of a few individuals that seem a bit out there themselves, there doesn't seem to be anyone that did a real examination. One I found was here, which had some people being critical and some people praising them... unfortunately, they're all semi-anonymous people on the Internet. (note: The URL is now defunct, and it does not seem to have ever been archived by archive.org. I will retain the link just in case it is ever restored or there is some archive someone can find elsewhere)
So in summation, the claims of Ron Wyatt finding the blood of Jesus on the Ark of the Covenant appears to have no apparent real backing. No one has been able to demonstrate the laboratory evidence that he supposedly found, and even people who knew him personally have not claimed to actually see it. Gruver seems to be one of the few people that claims to have seen the laboratory evidence, and his account has many questionable aspects.
Others have done more in-depth examinations of Wyatt's claims in this area, and yes, there have indeed been some defenses on these points. However, I didn't see people who had looked into what Gruver said about him, so I thought the information might be useful to someone. While I am skeptical, as can presumably be seen in this post, let the reader draw their own conclusions.