Hematidrosis (Sweating Blood)

A rare medical condition in which capillary blood vessels that feed the sweat glands rupture under extreme stress, causing the sweat to mix with blood. Luke 22:44 describes Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: “His sweat became like drops of blood falling to the ground.” The 1986 JAMA study noted that Luke, who tradition identifies as a physician, uses medically precise language: the Greek word thromboi (“clots”) suggests coagulated blood. Hematidrosis is documented in modern medical literature but is extremely rare; a first-century fisherman could not have invented this detail. It is consistent with what modern medicine knows about the physiological effects of anticipatory grief and extreme psychological stress. The presence of this detail in a document written in a pre-medical era is a subtle but significant marker of eyewitness reporting.