Do I need to cover this in my genetics course? Years ago, Ron Wyatt, the infamous pseudoarchaeologist, claimed to have made a remarkable discovery: he found the site of Jesus’ crucifixion! There was a hole, where the cross had been erected, and beneath that was a small chamber, and in that chamber was the Ark of the Covenant! Furthermore, Jesus’ blood had dripped down through the hole, and had splattered on the Ark, allowing him to collect a dried blood sample.

You don’t believe it? It’s on video, sort of. There’s a hole in the ground, and Wyatt squats in it and says there’s a chamber 60 feet down, and a door, and the Ark had been stuffed in there and packed in animal hides and boards and rocks. He doesn’t actually show that, but would he lie to you?

Ron Wyatt found this site by a combination of reading the Bible really hard, and by having visions, so it must be true.

One day in Jerusalem, after the swelling in Ron’s legs and feet went down a bit, he decided to go sightseeing in the immediate area around his hotel near the Damascus Gate. Walking along an ancient stone quarry, known to some as “the Calvary Escarpment,” he began conversing with a local authority about Roman antiquities. At one point, they stopped walking, and Ron’s left hand pointed to a site being used as a trash dump and he stated, “That’s Jeremiah’s Grotto and the Ark of the Covenant is in there.” Even though these words had come from his own mouth and his own hand had pointed, he had not consciously done or said these things. In fact, it was the first time he had ever thought about excavating for the Ark.

It was a very special trash heap.

Then he spent years digging down into the trash heap, and finally found something deep in a crack.

With adrenalin flowing through his veins and great anticipation, he looked around to see what else he could see, which wasn’t much. He shined his flashlight around the open area and then up to the ceiling. There, he saw something that caught his eye – it was a crack in the ceiling with a black substance within the crack.

Crawling slowly and painfully over the rocks to the rear of the chamber, he saw a stone case extending through the rocks. It had a flat stone top which was cracked completely in two and the smaller section was moved aside, creating an opening into the stone case. But the top was too near the ceiling for him to look inside. Yet he knew what was inside – the crack in the ceiling was directly above the cracked part of the lid, where it was open, and the black substance had fallen from the crack into the case because some of it had splashed onto the lid.

It was at this time, as Ron recalls, as the instant realization of what had happened here dawned on him, that he passed out. When he realized that the crack in the ceiling was the end of the crack he had found in the elevated cross-hole many feet above him, and the black substance was blood which had fallen through the crack and into the stone case, he KNEW the Ark was in the stone case. But the most overwhelming realization was that Christ’s Blood had actually fallen onto the Mercy Seat.

If he says it was Christ’s blood, I guess that must be what it is. Who can argue with such meticulous logic?

Now comes the fun part for a biologist. He collected a sample of the black goop, and rehydrated it. It was blood! Red blood cells, white blood cells, the works, and it was still alive. He says he was able to culture the cells, squash some white blood cells, and examine their chromosomes.

Suddenly, I have qualms. If Jesus’ blood was immortal, and could survive 2000 years of dessication and bacterial invasion, how could he squash a cell? And if he did, did the chromosomes and cellular debris on the slide continue to live? Are these tissues still living and growing in a slide box somewhere?

That’s a prompt for a horror story somewhere, but right now we’re talking about SCiEnCE, so let’s get back to that karyotype. We have discovered how many chromosomes Jesus had.

Under normal circumstances all human beings have 46 chromosomes…. 23 from their mother and 23 from their father. There are 22 pairs of autosomes which determine things such as our height, hair and eye color, etc. The 23rd pair is the sex determinant pair. They consist of either “X” or “Y” chromosomes. The mother only has “X” chromosomes. The father has both “X” and “Y” chromosomes.

If the sex-determinant pair is matched “X-X”, the child is a female. If “X-Y”, the child is a male. Thus we see that the single chromosome provided by the father in this chromosome pair determines the gender of the child. When the blood sample Ron Wyatt took from the crack in the rock ceiling above the Mercy Seat was tested, it contained 24 chromosomes…. 23 from the mother and one “Y” chromosome from the father, 24 chromosomes.

As Dr. Eugene Dunkley states in his article on the genetics of the blood of Christ, 24 chromosomes is exactly what would be expected if a man was born of a virgin. There are 23 chromosomes from the mother and a “Y” chromosome from a father. But that father cannot be a human father because the other 22 chromosomes on the father’s side are missing. Therefore the existence of a “Y” chromosome is at the very least a mystery, if not a miracle.

Not only was Jesus haploid, he was aneuploid! I’m glad that mystery has been cleared up.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any photographs of the karyogram, no samples available, and you can’t get a piece of Jesus’ immortalized haploid cell line, which would be interesting for biological research, and would probably be worse than HeLa at taking over cell cultures. All we have is “Ron Wyatt said so.”

Oh, also, possibly relevant to my genetics course: that last link talks about somatids, which are immortal blobs found in everyone’s cells, which can only be seen using a special microscope called a somatoscope, invented by a guy named Gaston Naessens. I tried following an explanation of what they are, how they work, and how they disprove the germ theory of disease, but the dense layers of bullshit and bogosity proved too much for me. Cut me a break, I’d just read a bunch of Ron Wyatt nonsense, I was already saturated.

Maybe I’ll dig deeper into that trash heap, but at least I’ve concluded it’s not suitable for any science class.