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The following are quotes added to my Shroud of Turin unclassified quotes in July 2007. See copyright conditions at end.
[Index: May, Jun, Aug (1), Aug (2), Sep , Oct, Nov, Dec]
1/07/2007
"The Shroud of Turin ... a linen cloth measuring 1.1 x 4.3 m, depicts two images, back and front views, of a
naked crucified man. A beautiful image that fits perfectly the New Testament version of the crucifixion ..."
(McCrone, W.C., "The Shroud of Turin: Blood or Artist's Pigment?," Accounts of Chemical Research,
Vol. 23, 1990, pp.77-83, p.77)
2/07/2007
"Like Wolfli, it did not take long for Damon and Donahue to discover which of their samples was taken from
the Shroud. They were helped with the addition of a red silk thread and some blue fibrils. The red silk was, of
course, from the material which covers the relic in its reliquary, and the blue fibrils were from the backing
cloth. They decided to divide the Shroud sample into four pieces; each about 0.5cm2 in area. Each was
stored in a different location." (Sox, H.D., "The Shroud Unmasked: Uncovering the Greatest Forgery of All
Time," Lamp Press: Basingstoke UK, 1988, p.144)
2/07/2007
"For the sample preparation Damon consulted a textile expert at Proctor & Gamble about the best procedure
for cleaning. He recommended special commercial detergents: hydrochloric acid to get rid of calcium
carbonate; ethyl alcohol for soluble greases, double distilled water and sodium hydroxide. About 25 to 30%
of the original cloth weight was lost, but the linen remained a yellowish colour." (Sox, H.D., "The Shroud
Unmasked: Uncovering the Greatest Forgery of All Time," Lamp Press: Basingstoke UK, 1988, pp.144-145)
2/07/2007
"Gove arrived at the Physics Department around 9.00am. The 60-foot-long accelerator is in the basement and
looks like three large oil tanks hooked together in the shape of a T. It is surrounded by an impressive array
of dials and other monitoring devices. The AMS radiocarbon dating process is complex, but basically AMS
is an oversized mass spectrometer powered by two million volts. It takes that kind of energy to break up
interfering molecules so that only charged atoms reach the detector. The mass spectrometer sorts and
counts atoms according to mass. Like gunpowder packed into a bullet casing, the Shroud sample now
reduced to graphite is compressed into metal pellets one millimetre in diameter. A drill press with thousands
of pounds of pressure is used for this task. Ten pellets with graphite are loaded into holes in a small
carousel that is a little larger than a two pence coin. Two of the pellets contain graphite with precisely
known amounts of carbon atoms. They are supplied by the National Bureau of Standards in Washington for
all accelerators of Arizona's type, thus ensuring consistent results. The carousel is loaded into the end of
the accelerator, and under a vacuum, a beam of caesium atoms is fired at the graphite target. About one in a
trillion carbon atoms m living things is the carbon-14 variety. Most of the rest are carbon-12 and some are
carbon-13. The caesium beam bombardment transforms neutral carbon atoms into negatively charged ions.
The carbon-12, carbon-13 and carbon-14 atoms are pulled off the target's surface by a powerful electric field
further into the device, where they are then steered by a magnet into a `stripper' containing atoms of argon
gas. Collision of the argon atoms with the carbon knocks, electrons away, leaving the carbon atoms with a
positive charge. The positive electric field then repels the carbon atoms, sending then toward the particle
detectors at the end of the line. Magnets deflect the path of the passing carbon atoms. Since carbon-14
atoms are a little heavier than carbon-12 or carbon-13, they are deflected less and thus strike a different
detector. The detectors, connected to a computer, record the impacts of the carbon-13 and carbon-14 atoms,
allowing a rapid calculation of the relative amount of radioactive form. Those raw numbers must then be
corrected for known variations in carbon-14 content of the atmosphere over the years. Tree-ring dating was
conceived at Arizona in the early 1900s and the university remains the world centre for such studies. That
has helped calibrate natural variations in carbon-14 levels introduced by humans burning fossil fuels and
more importantly, by nuclear weapons." (Sox, H.D., "The Shroud Unmasked: Uncovering the Greatest
Forgery of All Time," Lamp Press: Basingstoke UK, 1988, pp.145-146)
2/07/2007
"At 9.50am what matters to the layman was available - the results of the measurements, the first carbon
dating test on the Turin Shroud. Speculation as to those results had been going on since it was announced
Arizona was one of the chosen labs. Over at Los Alamos the Reverend Robert Dinegar who had worked so
long to have STURP involved in the carbon dating had said to newsmen he had `a gut feeling the Shroud
may be what it claims to be.' In a pool in which other Los Alamos scientists staked a bottle of wine on their
guests, Dinegar chose the date of AD 1. He explained: `I suppose it would be nicer if it actually turned out I
had handled the burial cloth of our Lord and Saviour, but if the Shroud proves to be much newer, my life
isn't ruined ... I feel pretty good about having participated in this fascinating project. The night before the
test Damon told Gove he would not be surprised to see the analysis yield a date around the fifth-century,
because after that time the crucifixion was banned and a forger would not have known of the details
depicted so accurately on the Shroud. Timothy Linick, a University of Arizona research scientist, said: `If we
show the material to be medieval that would definitely mean that it is not authentic. If we date it back 2000
years, of course, that still leaves room for argument. It would be the right age - but is it the real thing?'
Donahue's wife, who believed the Shroud was genuine, was going for 2000 years. So was Shirley Brignall.
She and Gove had a bet. Gove said 1000 years although he hoped for twice that age. Whoever lost was to
buy the other a pair of cowboy boots. The calculations were produced on the computer, and displayed on
the screen. Even the dendrochronological correction was immediately available. All eyes were on the screen.
The date would be when the flax used for the linen relic was harvested. Gove would be taking cowboy boots
back to Rochester." (Sox, H.D., "The Shroud Unmasked: Uncovering the Greatest Forgery of All Time,"
Lamp Press: Basingstoke UK, 1988, pp.146-147)
2/07/2007
"Douglas Donahue was devastated by what he saw on the screen. The night before his wife had jokingly
threatened divorce if the Arizona test did not show the Shroud was 2000 years old. As the first dating came
to be known by a very select few, and was soon confirmed by Zurich's first test twenty days later, there
were others who were surprised and disappointed by the results." (Sox, H.D., "The Shroud Unmasked:
Uncovering the Greatest Forgery of All Time," Lamp Press: Basingstoke UK, 1988, p.151)
2/07/2007
"A great quantity of ink has been used searching for the Shroud's `missing years', and nothing has clouded
a balanced approach to the Shroud more. Wilson got a lot of mileage out of his Mandylion / Shroud theory
in both his book and The Silent Witness; so much so that few challenged the conjecture. He took
advantage of a situation: what the Shroud most needed, as it appeared to have defied scientific probing, was
a history. Well - he certainly supplied one. Appendix A takes us almost year-by-year from circa AD 30 to the
1977 New Mexico Conference. There STURP, noticeably lacking any archaeological-art history-history
expertise, practically swallowed the gospel of the Shroud by Wilson as the fifth. I have purposely avoided
re-hashing the Wilson line as it is an exercise in futility, but in hindsight am only glad I took a step toward
scepticism with my first effort, The File on the Shroud. What amazes one, now the dust has settled, is
how many were taken in. I found it increasingly embarrassing as General Secretary of the British Society for
the Turin Shroud, to read so many letters which assumed the society accepted no other view. Probably the
nadir for unbridled enthusiasm was reached after STURP scientists announced they had found evidence of
real human blood. An American tabloid proclaimed there was `a clear sign the Second Coming was just
around the corner.' Robert Bucklin's equally ludicrous remark '... there is support for the resurrection in the
things we see on the Shroud' was a logical conclusion of events set in motion once STURP was conceived.
Things seen on the Shroud would now comprise a volume in itself. How silly they now appear: Father Filas'
Pontius Pilate coins over the eyes; Max Frei's first-century Palestinian pollen; Jackson and Jumper's
producing third dimensionality." (Sox, H.D., "The Shroud Unmasked: Uncovering the Greatest Forgery of
All Time," Lamp Press: Basingstoke UK, 1988, pp.152-153)
2/07/2007
"Heaven knows what would have happened if the date had been first-century. As a clergyman, I think it is
best it is a fake. D'Muhala's notion of `a love letter, a tool left behind for the analytical mind' should have
sent more shivers down spines than it did. There is little doubt how matters would go. In Stevenson-
Habermas's conclusion, the direction was indicated: `... God must have a purpose in preserving it at least
until our day. The evidence indicates that it is authentic. Perhaps God means for the Shroud to encourage
faith in an age when there are so many doubters and questioners, even among believers.'" (Sox, H.D., "The
Shroud Unmasked: Uncovering the Greatest Forgery of All Time," Lamp Press: Basingstoke UK, 1988, p.153)
2/07/2007
"And yet the Shroud has kept many of its mysteries. Even Luigi Gonella interviewed by The Sunday
Times (7 August 1988) which proclaimed: `Turin Shroud: Vatican steels itself for "fake" result' admitted: `If
the Shroud is carbon dated for the middle ages, there is still the mystery of how it came into being.' Walter
McCrone has steadfastly maintained he has detected the composition of the image. He admits it is not a
typical painting: 'There are no brushmarks and no solid film of pigment plus medium. Instead, there is a
very thin film of collagen tempera with tiny iron earth (red ochre) or vermillion particles dispersed more or
less individually throughout that film.'" (Sox, H.D., "The Shroud Unmasked: Uncovering the Greatest
Forgery of All Time," Lamp Press: Basingstoke UK, 1988, pp.155-156)
2/07/2007
"McCrone just may be right, but it is painfully apparent now the religious dimension has been removed that
the Shroud should next face art experts, for it is a most extraordinary object by any estimation, and it would
be interesting to see what they could determine. It must be remembered that the linen has been dated, not
the image. It can be more than easily supposed that a `forger' (for want of a better term) looked around for an
old cloth on which to produce a convincing image of the dead Christ. Old for him would be a century or two.
But. why and how? This could take a long time to unravel." (Sox, H.D., "The Shroud Unmasked: Uncovering
the Greatest Forgery of All Time," Lamp Press: Basingstoke UK, 1988, p.156)
2/07/2007
"Sir Steven Runciman wrote the preface to my first book on the Shroud in 1978 and stated: `Perhaps the
Holy Shroud should be left a mystery ... ' He added: `But modern churchmen are afraid of mystery'.
Unfortunately - or fortunately - depending upon your point of view, it's too late for that now. A vicar, who
knew of my interest in the Shroud once approached me after reading all the material which proclaimed its
authenticity, and said he still found it very difficult to believe the Shroud was real. `God doesn't operate this
way, does He?' he asked. He was right. He doesn't." (Sox, H.D., "The Shroud Unmasked: Uncovering the
Greatest Forgery of All Time," Lamp Press: Basingstoke UK, 1988, p.156)
2/07/2007
"Damon's and Donahue's radio-isotope laboratory is located at Tucson, amidst the tall saguaro cacti
landscape of Arizona's Sonora desert. Together with the Oxford and Zurich laboratories, this laboratory
owes its origins to the inventiveness of Professor Harry Gove of the University of Rochester's Nuclear
Structure Research Laboratory, who during the late 1970s pioneered the development of the new
accelerator-mass spectrometer method of radiocarbon dating that all three laboratories share. Through
various political vicissitudes Gove had been baulked of being able to work on a shroud sample at his own
laboratory, and so as a kindly gesture Damon invited Gove to travel the 2000 miles from Rochester to
Tucson to be present when the shroud date would emerge on Arizona's computer, even though this was
against the secrecy agreement that Damon had signed in Turin." (Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places:
The Quest for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991, p.7)
2/07/2007
"The central principle of carbon dating is that anything that has once lived, whether animal or vegetable, on
death loses its natural radiocarbon content at a precisely determinable rate through time. First developed by
Chicago's Willard F. Libby in the late 1940s, the early method of calculating the radiocarbon loss or `decay'
was by isolating the gas from combustion of the sample, then measuring its proportion of carbon 14 to that
of the stable carbon 12 with the aid of an advanced form of Geiger counter. The improvement pioneered by
Gove was to convert the combustion to a pellet of pure carbon, or graphite, then with the aid of caesium,
argon gas and a couple of million volts of electricity to so isolate the carbon 14 that it could be directly
counted. One of the advantages of this latter method is that it needs substantially less sample than the
earlier one, hence its choice for the shroud." (Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places: The Quest for Jesus'
True Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991, pp.7-8)
2/07/2007
"In the event, when the Arizona laboratory's computer chattered out the result, it was Harry Gove's face that
bore the broadest grin. According to the laboratory's instrument readings the shroud sample was only
between six and seven hundred years old. The shroud itself had therefore to be medieval, and some thirteen
hundred years younger than it would have to have been to have wrapped the body of Jesus. Although
Damon, Donahue and Gove were the first to learn this news, and were obliged to keep it under wraps, later
that summer their colleagues at the Oxford and Zurich laboratories independently produced similar datings,
all supplied to the British Museum's Dr Michael Tite as central co-ordinator. Despite some irritating prior
`leaks', it took until 13 October before these results were allowed to be officially disclosed to the world at
large. In Turin early in the morning of that day the shroud's custodian, Cardinal Anastasio Ballestrero baldly
stated the salient facts, and declared his acceptance of them on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church."
(Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places: The Quest for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991,
pp.8-9)
2/07/2007
"The same afternoon Dr Michael Tite provided further details at a crowded press conference held at
London's British Museum, accompanied on the platform by the Oxford laboratory's Professor Hall and Dr
Robert Hedges. To minimize the possibility of anyone getting the results wrong, Tite or someone else had
scrawled on the blackboard in large numerals: 1260-1390! According to Tite the three laboratories' datings
were `all within a hundred years of each other' and made it 95 per cent certain that the shroud had originated
sometime between the years 1260 and 1390, and 99.9 per cent certain that it dated `from about 1000 to 1500
AD'. The laboratories also exhibited a satisfying accuracy in their results from the control samples."
(Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places: The Quest for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991,
pp.8-9)
2/07/2007
"For the press it was a simple enough story, the essentially cliche'd one of an object of pious superstition
having at last and deservedly been proved wanting under the remorseless scrutiny of science. That evening
and throughout the subsequent few days numerous newspaper and television announcements across the
world featured the familiar image of the shroud face, accompanied by the unequivocal declaration that it had
been proved a fake. In typical disparaging vein Britain's Independent newspaper commented: `The
disappointment to believers in the shroud is unlikely to deter enthusiasts for the tens of thousands of relics,
many of them the products of medieval tricksters, which repose in gilded cases and cushioned jewel-boxes
in churches throughout Italy. In Rome one may view a feather from the Archangel Gabriel at the Church of
Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. Other examples include vials containing the last breath of St Joseph, several
heads of St John the Baptist, innumerable splinters from the True Cross, and two thorns from the crown.'
[Sheridan, M. & Reeves, P., "Turin Shroud shown to be a fake," Independent, 14 October 1988]." (Wilson,
I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places: The Quest for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991, pp.8-9)
2/07/2007
"There followed in February 1989 a formal paper in the highly respected, international scientific journal
Nature, carrying as its signatories the names of twenty-one of those most closely involved in the carbon
dating. After carefully setting out all the procedures that had been followed to obtain the dating result, the
paper commented: `These results therefore provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the shroud of
Turin is medieval.' [Damon, P.E., et al., "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin," Nature, Vol. 337, 16
February, 1989, pp.611-615, p.614]" (Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places: The Quest for Jesus' True
Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991, pp.9-10)
2/07/2007
"Inevitably there were a number of individuals, among them the present author who, having conducted their
own prior researches on the shroud, felt that the word `conclusive' for such a date seemed overstrong,
particularly given that carbon dating on its own could certainly not yet offer any explanation for how
someone of the Middle Ages had produced an image of the shroud's extraordinary subtlety and complexity.
Nonetheless, such was the seemingly overwhelming acceptance with which the results were received that
most objections of this kind, if voiced at all, were tossed aside by the media. To the glee of the British press,
Oxford's Professor Hall derisively labelled such protestors `Flat-Earthers'." (Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret
Places: The Quest for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991, p.10)
2/07/2007
"Instead the most strident rebuttal that came to be raised, predominantly taken up only by the Italian
and French press, was that of a French priest, Brother Bruno Bonnet-Eymard. Representing a
reactionary group calling itself `The Catholic Counter-Reformation in the Twentieth Century', Bonnet-
Eymard claimed nothing less than that it was the carbon dating itself which had been faked. [La
Contre-Réforme Catholique au XXe Siècle, No. 200, Christmas 1988] According to Bonnet-Eymard the
villain of the exercise had been the highly respected invigilator of the whole project, the British
Museum Research Laboratory's Dr Michael Tite. Allegedly, shortly before going to Turin, Dr Tite had
clandestinely requested and obtained a sample of medieval linen, very similar in appearance to the
shroud, from a cope of the late thirteenth-century French St Louis d'Anjou that is preserved in the
church of Saint-Maximin, Provence. This had been procured by fellow-nuclear physicist Jacques Evin
of the radiocarbon-dating laboratory of Lyon, France, and handed to Tite in Turin by Gabriel Vial, a
specialist from the Textile Museum of Lyon who had been invited to be present at the taking of the
shroud sample in order to make a study of the cloth's weaving and sewing characteristics. When the
sample for carbon dating had been cut from the shroud and divided for the three laboratories,
according to Bonnet-Eymard there was a brief period during which Tite and the Cardinal were alone in a
side-room. This was the point at which Tite was responsible for putting the shroud segments and the
control samples into the respective coded canisters for each laboratory. It was virtually the only part of
the proceedings which was not videotaped and watched by others, and according to Bonnet-Eymard's
allegations it provided Tite with just the opportunity he needed surreptitiously to dispose of the real
shroud samples and replace them with ones from the medieval cope. The carbon dating was therefore
rigged, Tite's less than impartial role being subsequently corroborated by his surprise appointment as
Professor Hall's successor as Director of the Oxford radiocarbon laboratory." (Wilson, I., "Holy Faces,
Secret Places: The Quest for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991, pp.10-11)
2/07/2007
"Moreover, equally squarely to be faced is the fact that the fourteenth century was a time particularly
notorious for the forgery of just such religious relics as the shroud. As Oxford's Professor Hall
exaggeratedly but nonetheless justifiably [sic] told the British Museum press conference: `There was a
multi-million-pound business in making forgeries during the fourteenth century. Someone just got a bit of
linen, faked it up and flogged it. [Sheridan, M. & Reeves, P., "Turin Shroud shown to be a fake,"
Independent, 14 October 1988]. Hall's assistant, Dr Hedges ... , dismissing suggestions that the shroud's
radiocarbon content might have been altered by a burst of radiation from Christ's resurrection, [Phillips, T.J.,
"Shroud irradiated with neutrons?" Nature, 16 February 1989, p.594] added with some confidence that it
was surely odd that this hypothetical burst should have been so precisely tuned to give a date of the
fourteenth century, the earliest to which the shroud can be historically traced with any certainty. [Hedges,
Ibid., p.594] (Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places: The Quest for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday:
London, 1991, pp.12-13)
2/07/2007
"As Arizona's Professor Paul Damon summed it up in a letter to me: `Radio-carbon dating has simply
confirmed the fourteenth-century investigation of Bishop Pierre d'Arcis ... No one has questioned the
integrity of the artist or his skill. [sic] The shroud is still an object worthy of contemplation and the identity
of the unknown, brilliant author is the greatest remaining mystery ... Why don't you address these
problems?" [Damon, P.E., Personal correspondence, 12 June 1989]" (Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places:
The Quest for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991, pp.12-13)
2/07/2007
"Very small samples from the Shroud of Turin have been dated by accelerator mass spectrometry in
laboratories at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich. As controls, three samples whose ages had been determined
independently were also dated. The results provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of
Turin is mediaeval. ... The age of the shroud is obtained as AD 1260-1390, with at least 95% confidence"
(Damon, P.E., et al., "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin," Nature, Vol. 337,
16 February, 1989, pp.611-615, p.612).
2/07/2007
"The laboratories were not told which container held the shroud sample. Because the distinctive three-to-one
herringbone twill weave of the shroud could not be matched in the controls, however, it was possible for a
laboratory to identify the shroud sample. If the samples had been unravelled or shredded rather than being
given to the laboratories as whole pieces of cloth, then it would have been much more difficult, but not
impossible, to distinguish the shroud sample from the controls. (With unravelled or shredded samples,
pretreatment cleaning would have been more difficult and wasteful.) Because the shroud had been exposed
to a wide range of potential sources of contamination and because of the uniqueness of the samples
available, it was decided to abandon blind-test procedures in the interests of effective sample pretreatment.
But the three laboratories undertook not to compare results until after they had been transmitted to the
British Museum." (Damon, P.E., et al., "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin," Nature, Vol. 337, 16
February, 1989, pp.611-615, p.612)
2/07/2007
"Each laboratory measured the graphite targets made from the textile samples, together with appropriate
standards and blanks, as a group (a run). Each laboratory performed between three and five independent
measurements for each textile sample which were carried out over a time period of about one month."
(Damon, P.E., et al., "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin," Nature, Vol. 337, 16 February, 1989,
pp.611-615, p.613)
2/07/2007
"The results of radiocarbon measurements at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich yield a calibrated calendar age
range with at least 95% confidence for the linen of the Shroud of Turin of AD 1260 - 1390 (rounded down/up
to nearest 10 yr). These results therefore provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin
is mediaeval." (Damon, P.E., et al., "Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin," Nature, Vol. 337, 16
February, 1989, pp.611-615, p.614)
2/07/2007
"Constitutionally the Society has no 'party-line' on the Shroud, either for or against its authenticity. The
prevalent view among members is simply that the carbon dating result has deepened rather than explained
the Shroud mystery. If the dating to the 14th century is accepted, there remains no unanimity how the
'photographic' image could have been created at that time, whether artistically, e.g. by some unknown
painter, or by some ingenious artificer, perhaps even using a specially crucified dead body. If the carbon
dating is rejected, say in favour of a first century date, still to be explained is how such a scientifically
conducted test could have produced such a major error. Not least of this same mystery is how and why
carbon dating should have pinpointed the very century in which the historical evidence is strongest for the
Shroud having been produced fraudulently." (Clift, M., "Authentic or Non-Authentic: the Society's
Neutrality," British Society for the Turin Shroud. No date. Accessed 2 July 2007)
2/07/2007
"In this context, although there are many individuals who are quite happy to accept that the shroud was
faked in the fourteenth century, and regard it as of supreme unimportance in their everyday lives, there are
others, including myself, for whom the question `Was this what you really looked like?' simply refuses to go
away. Not only is the shroud as difficult to attribute to a fourteenth-century artist as the Sistine Chapel
ceiling is attributable to Van Gogh, there is not even any comfort in not being able to dismiss it in such a
way. For if that face, however subjectively, seems as though it has transcended two thousand years, it is as
if neither time, nor the grave, have any meaning. It bespeaks the very same questions as those that wracked
the pilgrims to the Veronica: `Were those the lips that spoke the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of
the Rich Fool?'; `Is this the Face that is to be my judge on the Last Day?'" (Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret
Places: The Quest for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991, p.189)
2/07/2007
"Even if this face were, after all, the work of some fourteenth-century artist, then even in my unbelief at this I
can only marvel. For a human artificer of six hundred years ago, technologically unable ever to see the full
fruits of his creation, to have given so many well-educated and self-critical twentieth-century people the
inescapable feeling that they are in the presence of the Real Presence is the stuff of the very highest art. One
could not even remotely call such a man a faker or a forger." (Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places: The
Quest for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991, p.189)
2/07/2007
"But the alternative, inevitably, is even more daunting. In the shroud we have a piece of cloth that men cast
lots over when they put it to the test (remember the cowboy boots?). A piece of cloth they mocked when
their instruments of destruction showed it, seemingly, as of mere human frailty. Is it not all strikingly
evocative of what they did when they committed the body of Jesus himself to crucifixion and the grave?
And did not something mind-blowingly unexpected happen to this, just when Jesus's followers felt at their
most defeated? It all gives one the unnerving feeling that the shroud, even now, frail and discredited as it
might seem, is part of a cosmic drama not yet played out." (Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places: The Quest
for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991, p.189)
3/07/2007
"The genesis of the project was a letter dated 24 June 1977 I received from the Revd H. David Sox who
at that time was Secretary General of the British Turin Shroud Society. He had read an article in Time
magazine of June 1977 describing the new small sample dating technique developed at the University of
Rochester in May 1977 and wondered whether it could be used to date the age of the cloth of the Turin
Shroud. We replied that indeed it could but that the method was so new as to make the measurement
of such a controversial object untimely. He persuaded me to attend a meeting on the Turin Shroud to
be held in Turin in October 1978. By that time we were ready to take on the shroud and on my way to
Turin I stopped off at Oxford and told Professor Hall that Rochester and Brookhaven National
Laboratory would make an offer in Turin to date the shroud using a postage-size sample. Dr Garman
Harbottle at Brookhaven had developed small proportional counters which used equivalently small
samples as AMS but required much longer counting times. At that time Oxford did not have an AMS
facility but planned to obtain one and Hall was very enthusiastic about the possibility of `getting in on
the act' to use the phrase he applied to others in his article. The slow and deliberate pace of the plans to
date the shroud ensured that he would." (Gove, H.E., "Letter To The Editor: The Turin Shroud,"
Archaeometry, Vol. 31, No. 2, 1989, pp.235-237, pp.235-236)
3/07/2007
"In Turin my offer to date the shroud was received coolly to put it mildly. Professor Hall's second-hand
account of the scientific tests on the shroud carried out by members of the Shroud of Turin Research
Project (STURP) following this meeting are essentially correct. Most of the members of that
organization were and maybe still are `true believers' that this remarkable piece of cloth was Christ's
shroud. It was during this meeting that I decided that STURP should play no role whatsoever in any
carbon dating measurements if I could possibly prevent it. I am happy to say that, in the end, they did
not. The increasingly deteriorating relationship between me and Professor Gonella, who was a warm
supporter of STURP, dates from that time." (Gove, H.E., "Letter To The Editor: The Turin Shroud,"
Archaeometry, Vol. 31, No. 2, 1989, pp.235-237, pp.235-236)
3/07/2007
"In the subsequent months I, along with Dr Vittorio Canuto of the Goddard Space Centre in New York
who had worked closely with Chagas on many PAS [Pontifical Academy of Science] projects, assisted
Professor Chagas in organizing a workshop which was held, after some inexplicable delays, in Turin in
September 1986. Professor Hall's participation in the complex planning of this Turin Workshop was his
agreement to attend. It was this workshop that produced the final procedures to be followed in dating
the shroud. Although, at the insistence of Professor Gonella, members of the STURP organization
attended the workshop the final protocol assigned no role for them to play." (Gove, H.E., "Letter To
The Editor: The Turin Shroud," Archaeometry, Vol. 31, No. 2, 1989, pp.235-237, p.236)
3/07/2007
"A year later in October 1987 (it would be fascinating to know the reason for this extended delay) the
workshop participants were informed by Cardinal Ballestrero, Archbishop of Turin, acting on the
advice of his science adviser Professor Gonella, that important provisions of the Turin Protocol were to
be scrapped. These major changes involved preventing the PAS from playing any further role in the
dating enterprise, rejecting the renowned textile expert from the Abegg-Stiftung, Berne, Switzerland,
who had been selected by the workshop to supervise the sample removal and, finally, reducing the
number of laboratories from seven to three. The real reasons for making these changes will probably
never be known. I, and I think also Dr Harbottle, were amused and annoyed, but far from furious as
Professor Hall charges, by this development and I did take the vigorous steps he described to get the
decision changed and, failing that, to persuade the three laboratories to refuse to accept the new
conditions. The latter effort was pretty much pro forma on my part because I knew the publicity
benefits would probably be irresistible to some or all of the `chosen' laboratories." (Gove, H.E., "Letter
To The Editor: The Turin Shroud," Archaeometry, Vol. 31, No. 2, 1989, pp.235-237, pp.236-237)
3/07/2007
"My main concern was that this highly public application of the AMS technique, which I had played a major
role in inventing and developing, be successful. The new procedures seemed to me to be fraught with peril.
If one of the three laboratories obtained an outlier result as one did in the British Museum inter-laboratory
comparisons it would be impossible statistically to identify it and the three measurements would all have to
be included in the average thereby producing an incorrect result. The inclusion of the other laboratories
would have obviated this potential risk. As it turned out my fears were not realized. The three laboratories
performed their measurements flawlessly and the final result is a public triumph for AMS if not for the `true
believers'. That the shroud's age is the historic one is the dullest result one could have wished for. But in
science as in many other aspects of life one does not always get what one wishes." (Gove, H.E., "Letter To
The Editor: The Turin Shroud," Archaeometry, Vol. 31, No. 2, 1989, pp.235-237, p.237)
3/07/2007
"According to Bishop d'Arcis, writing closest of anyone to the radiocarbon-dating scientists' date for the
Shroud, it was `cunningly painted' just a generation before his time. As d'Arcis insisted, we should simply
regard it as `a work of human skill, and not miraculously wrought or bestowed'. But what artistic `cunning'
and `skill' would need to have been involved, purely from the point of view of the translation of the image to
the `canvas'? As the STURP examination found, whatever constitutes what the eye sees as the 'body' image,
whether this is iron-oxide pigment, as McCrone would contend, or some form of degradation of the Shroud's
surface, as favoured by most of the STURP scientists, it is undeniably a mere 'surface' phenomenon,
affecting purely the topmost fibres, with no apparent penetration to any depth. Whatever method may have
been used for applying this `surface phenomenon' to the cloth, it exhibits nothing of the directionality that
artists normally cannot help betraying as they move their brush from one side to another when
conventionally painting a canvas. And even if for the sake of argument we allow that some kind of 'paint'
might have been used in this manner, not only has this to have been vanishingly lightly applied, it also has
to have been both insoluble and thermally and chemically stable, since there is no evidence either of 'paint
run' from the water used to douse the fire of 1532, or any kind of melting from this same fire and that of 1997.
Likewise the STURP tests showed it firmly resistant to bleaching and other standard chemical agents. All
this is in addition to the image being only properly meaningful when viewed in inverse, or negative light
values, its medical, anatomical, historical and cultural accuracies." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud:
New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.195)
3/07/2007
"Even so, can we at least try to conceive of an artist of some time around the 1350s who might have
managed all this? One man who has certainly found no difficulty from this point of view is Dr Walter
McCrone ... of Chicago who, as we have seen earlier, insists that the Shroud was painted by a mediaeval
artist, essentially conventionally, using a pigment consisting of billions of minute particles of iron oxide in a
medium of water and collagen. According to McCrone the way that this `talented' artist tackled his task was
that he `... carefully studied the New Testament, sources of information on the crucifixion and other artists'
paintings of Christ. He then thought about a shroud image in terms of a dark tomb. Instead of the usual
portrait with normal light and shadow, he assumed that the image could only be produced by body contact
with the cloth. He painted directly on the cloth to image the body-contact points (forehead, bridge of nose,
cheekbones, moustache, beard, etc., over the entire body, front and back). This automatically creates a
negative image; areas that normally catch available light and appear bright, like the bridge of the nose,
would instead all be dark with a paint. However, those areas appear bright on a photographic negative. He
decorated the body with bloodstains as required by the New Testament descriptions. These he rendered
dark on the Shroud, hence they form a photographic positive image superimposed on the otherwise
negative Shroud body image.' [McCrone, W.C., "The Shroud of Turin: Blood or Artist's Pigment?,"
Accounts of Chemical Research, Vol. 23, No. 3, 1990, p.82] Now if only it were as easy as McCrone makes
it sound! While I readily acknowledge only the haziest understanding of microscopy, I do know at least
something about how to paint a human figure, and as the professional artist Isabel Piczek has already
insisted (and I can only agree with her), to create a figure accurately in reverse tones in the manner
described by McCrone, particularly without any means of checking your work, is frankly impossible."
(Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon &
Schuster: New York NY, 1998, pp.196-197. Emphasis original)
3/07/2007
"Even so, this is a very long way from demonstrating that the Shroud image really was the work of someone
from this time. Technically proficient and talented though the Parement Master and Simone Martini
undoubtedly were, their figure drawings are light-years removed from the Shroud image. Although they
painted in a monochrome that can be construed as akin to this aspect of black-and-white photography, in
every other way they followed all the conventions of mediaeval art. Their figures have totally conventional
outlines and brushmarks. Neither their lighting nor their modelling has anything even remotely photographic
about it. The crossed-hands pose in the Parement Entombment ... merely reflects the artistic trend of the
time, one whose antecedents may well even have been dictated by the Shroud's prior emergence in Lirey.
And while the Parement Master did his best to be graphically realistic in showing blood flowing from Jesus's
hands, feet and side, like everyone else of his time he had no idea of the principles of gravity. The blood that
is to be seen coming from the hands and from the side totally lacks the kind of realism exhibited by the
Shroud bloodflows." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred
Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.198)
3/07/2007
"When in early July 1988 I visited Professor Edward Hall at the Oxford laboratory, he told me that although
his recent trip to Turin had not persuaded him of the Shroud's genuineness, even so, having taken the
opportunity to examine its imprint carefully with a hand lens, he thought it very unlikely to be a painting. On
hearing this, I quizzed him why he did not accept McCrone's findings and he told me very candidly that he
was totally unimpressed by McCrone as a scientist and thought he relied far too much on subjective visual
assessments from looking through a conventional microscope. Likewise, Dr Michael Tite expressed himself
unconvinced by the McCrone mediaeval-painter hypothesis, inclining instead to the view that the Shroud
had been made, albeit in the fourteenth century, by someone who used a genuinely crucified human body
for his purpose." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic
is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, pp.198-199)
3/07/2007
"Further undermining the force of McCrone's arguments has been the discrediting of the work which won
him greatest recognition, his highly publicised debunking of Yale University's Vinland Map. Just as the
Shroud purports to show Jesus's dead body, so the Vinland map purports to show the Viking discovery of
North America before Columbus. And although when its existence was first publicised in 1965 its
authenticity was attested by a trio of distinguished scholars that included R. A. Skelton, Superintendent of
the British Museum's Map Room, [Skelton, R.A., Marston, T.E. & Painter, G.D., "The Vinland Map and The
Tartar Relation," Yale University Press: New Haven CT, 1965] when McCrone was invited to examine it in
1972 he quickly came to a quite different opinion. Initially, McCrone's suspicions were aroused by his
observing that whoever had drawn the map had first outlined its land areas in a yellow ink and had then
carefully added a black line on top of this. Then, when he studied samples of the yellow ink under his
microscope, he spotted among these a substance that he identified as anatase, a crystalline form of titanium
dioxide only developed in 1920. This identification of the map as a modern forgery [McCrone, W.C.,
"Chemical Analytical Study of the Vinland Map," Report to Yale University Library, Yale University Press:
New Haven CT, 1974] directly led to my seeking his expertise in respect of the Shroud. However, the map's
original investigators remained far from convinced, as a result of which in 1985 it was flown to the University
of California's Crocker Laboratory, where a promising new analysis technique called proton-induced X-ray
analysis (or PIXE) was being developed. This deploys a powerful cyclotron to fire a harmless beam of
protons through whatever object is being analysed, generating X-rays by which all elements present can be
almost instantaneously identified and quantified without recourse to any analytical eyeball. And whereas all
McCrone's microanalytical deductions had necessarily been made from near-invisible scrapings that were
not necessarily representative, PIXE was able to evaluate essentially the whole object. When applied to the
Vinland Map, it indeed proved a revelation. In 1987 Crocker's Dr Thomas Cahill announced in the scientific
journal Analytical Chemistry [Cahill, T.A., et al., "The Vinland Map, Revisited: New Compositional
Evidence on its Inks and Parchment," Analytical Chemistry, 15 March 1987, 59, pp.829-833] that he and
his colleagues had found the Map to contain 5000 times less titanium dioxide than the amount that McCrone
had claimed, and in fact no more than could readily be found in other mediaeval documents of unquestioned
genuineness. Arguing that McCrone had been quite wrong to claim that titanium dioxide/anatase could not
and did not predate 1920, Cahill showed that when PIXE was used to analyse the ink of an unquestionably
genuine fifteenth-century Gutenburg-printed Bible, this too was found to have quantities of titanium
dioxide, likewise a string of other authentic early documents dating from between the twelfth and fifteenth
centuries. As independently discovered by Jacqueline Olin of Washington's Smithsonian Institution,
anatase is a byproduct of the green vitoral used in the mediaeval ink-making process. It therefore cannot be
used as an arbiter of date, as McCrone had supposed. Without specifically upholding the Vinland Map's
authenticity Cahill was thereby able to conclude that McCrone's reasons for identifying it as a modern fake
had been fundamentally flawed. Although McCrone has protested with characteristic vigour, insisting PIXE
to be unsuitable for objects like the Vinland Map and the Turin Shroud, and that his method is still best, it is
Dr Cahill's findings that have carried the day with academia, such that R. A. Skelton and his colleagues'
expensive original tome on the Map has recently been reissued by Yale University, accompanied by a new
Introduction by the Smithsonian Institution's Dr Wilcomb Washbourn forthrightly declaring that those who
have hitherto cried `forgery' must now `assume a defensive role and respond to those previously on the
defensive'. [Wilford, J.N., "Disputed Medieval Map Called Genuine After All,," New York Times,
13 February 1996] Quite independently, Brookhaven radiocarbon-dating laboratory head Dr Garman
Harbottle, in personal correspondence to me shortly before the carbon dating, commented that `They [the
Crocker Laboratory] have demonstrated to my satisfaction that... McCrone was off by a factor of 10,000'.
If, then, such distinguished academic opinion has adjudged McCrone's analysis to have been in such error in
respect of the Vinland Map, clearly his findings on the Shroud can be questioned too." (Wilson, I., "The
Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New
York NY, 1998, pp.199-200. Emphasis original)
3/07/2007
"I first heard about the book, Turin Shroud, In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled, in the
newsletter of the BSTS (British Society for the Turin Shroud). Any book with a title like this must come
under immediate suspicion, as what the authors consider as the shocking truth will probably be no more
than one of the many eccentric and contradictory theories that somebody has had about the Shroud. To
claim that Leonardo da Vinci made the Shroud is such a ridiculous idea in itself it hardly seems worth the
time and effort to refute it. A simple look at dates is enough to do this. There was a recorded public
exposition of the Shroud at Germolles by Margaret de Charny on 13 September 1452, a date which not even
the most ardent anti-authenticity sindonologists deny. Leonardo was born in 1452. Is it necessary to say
more?" (Guscin, M., "The Oviedo Cloth," Lutterworth Press: Cambridge UK, 1998, pp.112-113)
3/07/2007
"During the century and a quarter of the Savoys' ownership of the Shroud, from 1578 back to 1453, the cloth
was by no means continuously in Chambéry, although it was of course in the fire in Chambéry's Sainte
Chapelle that it received its scars and subsequent patches. This chapel, like its Turin counterpart in 1997,
fared much worse than the Shroud itself, all its stained glass and fine fittings being totally destroyed. In the
earlier part of this period Savoy's dukes, mostly youngsters who died before reaching maturity, constantly
carried the Shroud around with them as they toured their domains with their entourages. Then when from
1502 they made the Sainte Chapelle its theoretically permanent home, first came the disastrous fire, then in
1535 followed a French invasion, which necessitated them sending the Shroud, for its own safety, on a
series of refugee journeys to towns and cities as far afield as Turin, Milan, Vercelli, Aosta and Nice. It took
until 1561 and the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis before Duke Emmanuel-Philibert's diplomatic and military
skills enabled its temporary return to Chambéry. But despite this itinerancy, the Shroud's adventures are
consistently well attested throughout this whole period, automatically reducing to fiction the recent theory
that Leonardo da Vinci `invented' it in 1492. An account of June 1485, two months before England's battle of
Bosworth Field, clearly records the payment of 2 ecus to ducal chaplain Jean Renguis `in recompense for
two journeys which he made from Turin to Savigliano carrying the Shroud'. Two years earlier an inventory
drawn up by the same Jean Renguis in partnership with sacristan Georges Carrelet, equally clearly describes
the Shroud as `enveloped in a red silk drape and kept in a case covered with crimson velours, decorated with
silver-gilt nails, and locked with a golden key'. Throughout the years 1478 back to 1471 archive sources
enable the tracking of repeated movements of the Shroud, to Pinerolo in 1478, from Ivrea to Chambéry in
1475, from Ivrea to Moncalieri and back again in 1474, from Turin to Ivrea in 1473, from Vercelli to Turin in
1473, from Chambéry to Vercelli in 1471, and so on. Leonardo, it should be noted, was a mere nineteen-year-
old in 1471." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is
Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.116)
4/07/2007
"None the less even if we could accept that a mediaeval sculptor had created such a statue, in doing so he
would then have had to paint in the wounds - not with whole blood, but in the mode of bloodclot transfers -
so realistically that they fooled dozens of twentieth-century doctors and pathologists. And this is aside
from all his other accuracies and the evidence we have seen for the existence of something like our Shroud
well before the Middle Ages. Further contradicting any such `scorch' theory is the fact that the STURP
team's ultraviolet fluorescence photography of 1978 revealed that whereas the cloth's scorches from the
1532 fire fluoresce red when irradiated with ultraviolet light, the body images do not. This argues strongly
against the Shroud's body image having been created in some conventional scorch-like manner.
Accordingly, despite Bishop d'Arcis, and the best efforts of McCrone, Craig and Bresee and their ilk, there
really is no hypothesis of creation by the hand of a cunning painter, at least one that has been advanced so
far, that even begins satisfactorily to explain the image that we see on the Shroud. As already noted, even
some of the radiocarbon-dating scientists readily concur with this." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud:
New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.204)
4/07/2007
"But with regard to the idea that someone of the Middle Ages deliberately used an actual dead body,
specially murdered or otherwise, for the purpose of faking the Shroud, it needs to be stressed that the whole
ethos of the time was against it. So paramount was the mediaeval concern for the dead being given a quick
and decent burial that dissections for medical research purposes were almost completely banned. The papal
bull `De sepulturis', as issued by Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303), specifically forbade all unauthorised
human autopsies under penalty of excommunication and death at the stake. Although there was some
isolated flouting of this, such as at Montpellier in France, where in 1340 a biennial anatomy class was
authorised, allowing a surgeon to dissect a cadaver while a doctor of medicine lectured,' it simply beggars
belief that anyone of the Middle Ages might have gone to the lengths and risks of killing someone for the
purpose of making the Shroud, when they might have made a perfectly credible and marketable `relic' by
spilling a few drops of animal blood onto an old rag." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence
that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.206)
4/07/2007
"Even if you did indeed tailor-crucify some poor unfortunate, lay him out for death still covered in blood,
then wrap a cloth round him, you would not get an image like that visible on the Shroud. As endless
experiments during the last decades have shown, there are always serious distortions that arise when
anyone attempts to make a Shroud-like image by this otherwise seemingly obvious means. This is because
the Shroud's image is not a direct-contact one, at least with regard to the body imprint. If created by a body
at all, it appears to derive from something that has emanated from the body and transferred itself to the cloth
even where the latter was not in immediate contact." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence
that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.206)
4/07/2007
"So what of the alternative scenario, that the Shroud was perhaps the accidental by-product of someone
who just happened to have been crucified during the Middle Ages? Besides the aforementioned difficulty
over the transfer of the image, which applies equally to this version, another objection has, long been that
crucifixion was not practised in the Middle Ages, having been stamped out in the West in the first half of
the fourth century as a result of a decree by the first Christian Roman emperor, Constantine the Great."
(Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon &
Schuster: New York NY, 1998, pp.206-207)
4/07/2007
"Indeed it was hearing news of this latter, just after returning from holidaying in Turkey and shortly before
the Shroud radiocarbon-dating verdict, which sparked off in British physician Dr Michael Straiton's mind an
idea for how the Shroud's image might have been created without anyone necessarily ever having intended
any fraudulence. ... as he reasoned in the light of the radiocarbon-dating verdict, might the person whom we
see on the cloth have been not the historical Jesus, but just some hapless Crusader who was crucified by
Turks or Saracens in deliberate mockery of Jesus's crucifixion? ... According to the scenario envisaged by
him: `I propose that the Shroud, with perhaps others that have disappeared during the intervening centuries,
is evidence of a monstrous barbaric joke of Seljuk Turk vengeance on the enemy they were finally
exterminating from the Middle East. What would be more likely than that minds like these would think up a
plan to destroy some of the enemy by carefully re-enacting in every detail the brutal death of the Divine
Master they served, by crucifixion? One, or maybe a group of victims, would have been scourged, crowned
with thorns, made to carry the cross, then nailed to it to be objects of ridicule and revenge. The ritual would
be completed after the victim expired by piercing the side in the well-known manner, and then left to rot, to
be devoured by roaming wild beasts. Later, removed possibly by sympathisers, [it would have been]
interred and wrapped in simple locally made cloth, [and put] into one of the many long-plundered Roman
tombs scattered in the area. Later the body or bodies would be discovered by peasants who recognised the
value of the cloth to relic-hunters who would take them home to France with no idea of their provenance.
What would be more natural than that such a cloth, bearing details exactly conforming to the gospel
accounts of Christ's crucifixion, would be thought to be the burial-cloth of Christ himself? The thought that
it was a product of a recent crucifixion action-replay would not even occur to them. [Straiton, M., "The Man
of the Shroud: A Crucified Crusader?," Lecture to the British Society for the Turin Shroud, 13 April 1989] As
concluded by Dr Straiton: `I suggest that the man in the Shroud is the "Unknown Soldier" of the Crusades -
the victim of a carbon-copy crucifixion.' Now however plausible Straiton's hypothesis might first appear, it
fails to answer how the `barbarian' Turks, who can hardly have been expected to have any detailed New
Testament knowledge and whose only motive would have been to mock Christianity, could have been so
clever as to have carried out such an exact re-enactment of Jesus's crucifixion, complete with implements
that so far as can be judged were one hundred per cent historically authentic. Also, it is more than a little
difficult to believe that this unknown Crusader, having suffered crucifixion, should then not have been left
to the wild beasts, but have been given such a clearly swift and dignified burial by sympathetic strangers, a
necessary corollary since, as we have seen earlier, the mode of enshrouding of the body was certainly not
western. Not least, the theory almost completely fails to account for how this particular Crusader could have
managed to leave such a detailed imprint of himself on the Shroud, when no other dead body throughout
the entire span of human history seems to have done the same. ... Furthermore, Dr Straiton's theory
necessarily demands that all the pre-1270s artistic and documentary indications of the existence of
something very like our Shroud should be tossed aside as mere coincidence. While this is an opinion to
which Straiton is obviously entitled, and he deserves our respect for it, the reader must make up his or her
own mind whether it is fully justified in the light of all the evidence we have seen. In short, the argument for
some mediaeval person crucified in the semblance of Jesus happening to have left an imprint of himself as
extraordinary as that on the Turin Shroud no more succeeds in satisfying all the evidence than does the idea
of someone having just painted the image on." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that
the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, pp.207-209)
4/07/2007
"If the Shroud really does date from the fourteenth century, yet has neither been painted by a cunning artist,
nor `imprinted' using a real-life crucified human body, there does remain one further option: that someone
even as long ago as the Middle Ages created it by some photographic means. At first sight this may well
seem the most improbable. After all, photography as we know it was not invented until well over four
centuries after the very latest date ascribed to the Shroud by radiocarbon dating. And even then its
development was a long-drawn-out process, beginning with Thomas Wedgwood's first use of light-
sensitive chemicals to copy silhouette images in 1802, then Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's making of the first
permanent pictures in 1814, then Louis Jacques Daguerre's introduction of his daguerreotype process in
1839, then Scott Archer's method using light-sensitive silver salts in a collodium film on a glass plate
launched in 1851. And even after all that it took another thirty-three years before George Eastman managed
to patent the first successful roll film." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the
World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.210)
4/07/2007
"Yet the Shroud's image is so strikingly photographic in its character, particularly from the point of view of
what appears on the negative whenever it is photographed using black-and-white film, that the possibility
has to be taken seriously that perhaps someone of earlier times may quite well have worked out very basic
photographic means of producing it. ... When in 1994 London journalist Lynn Picknett and accountant Clive
Prince launched their book Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled, their
`shocking truth' was that photography should be added to the already impressive list of Leonardo da Vinci's
inventions, the Shroud having been made by him as the world's first ever photograph. ... `Leonardo faked
the Shroud in 1492. It was a composite creation: he put the image of his own face on it together with the
body of a genuinely crucified man. It was not a painting: It was a projected image `fixed' on the cloth using
chemicals and light: in other words it was a photographic technique. The Maestro faked it for two main
reasons. First, because he had been commissioned to do it, by the Pope, Innocent VIII, as a cynical publicity
exercise. But the reason he invested it with such concentration, daring and genius was that it represented
for him the supreme opportunity to attack the basis of Christianity from within the Church itself (and
perhaps he rather liked the idea of generations of pilgrims praying over his own image). He imbued it with
subtle clues that, if understood, would be profoundly challenging to the Establishment.' [Picknett & Prince,
op. cit., p.68]. ... To support their theory of Leonardo having made the Shroud in 1492 they have repeatedly
quoted me as having told Lynn Picknett, `Yes, the Shroud did disappear around then.' With due deference
to Ms Picknett's reporting skills, I have equally consistently insisted that I would never in my right senses
have made this statement, as ought to be obvious from the chronologies of the Shroud set out both in my
1978 book and this present one. For in my lengthy chronicling of the Shroud's two `disappearances', the
year 1492 most certainly does not figure and never has. In that year the Shroud's technical owner was, in
fact, a two-and-a-half-year-old boy, Duke Charles II, the cloth's effective control thereby being in the hands
of his widowed mother the Dowager Duchess Bianca, a very devout woman who personally exhibited the
Shroud at Vercelli in 1494, and who would hardly have failed to notice had this been a different cloth from
the one that she and her retinue had carried around during their travels in the preceding years." (Wilson, I.,
"The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster:
New York NY, 1998, pp.210-212)
4/07/2007
"Of Picknett's and Prince's argument that Leonardo used his own face for the Shroud, one can only wonder
whether the notoriously vain `Maestro', as they refer to him, arranged to have his face specially beaten up to
match the man of the Shroud's injuries? Of their claim that the absence of wine on the table of his Last
Supper shows Leonardo's anti-Christian leanings, the error of this can readily be seen in Gianpetrino's
excellent early copy of this painting, currently on display at Magdalen College, Oxford, in which enough
liberally charged wine tumblers for everyone present appear on the table ... Despite the atrocious condition
of Leonardo's original painting they can be distinguished readily enough even on this, Picknett's and
Prince's mistake seemingly being due to the poor photographs they consulted. As for Pope Innocent VIII's
commissioning the Shroud as a cynical publicity exercise, the very suggestion of this is ludicrous, given
that the Shroud, of very low-grade credibility in that pope's time, was never even remotely under his control
and, for any publicity, cynical or otherwise, he had far better things available to him in Rome." (Wilson, I.,
"The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster:
New York NY, 1998, p.212)
4/07/2007
"In short Picknett's and Prince's Leonardo da Vinci arguments would deserve dismissal but for one
potentially interesting element, the basic idea that someone at some early time, though certainly not
Leonardo, may genuinely have created the Shroud by some as yet undetermined photographic means. ...
there is a far more satisfying Shroud replication, involving a whole body image free of Leonardo da Vinci
associations, that has been achieved by Professor Nicholas Allen, dean of the Faculty of Art and Design at
the Port Elizabeth Technikon, a technology university located in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. ... Professor
Allen had noted ... that the Shroud's body image seemed not to be composed of any physical substance,
such as an artist's pigment, but instead of some surface alteration to the Shroud's linen such as by the effect
of light or other form of radiant energy. This raised in his mind the idea that it might have derived from some
photography-related technology that people back in the Middle Ages could have had access to and known
at least something about. Accordingly in late 1988, prompted by the carbon-dating results ... Professor Allen
began to apply himself to thinking out the sort of substances by which someone of the Middle Ages might
have been able photographically to create the Shroud's image, even with the limited know-how of that time.
After careful thought and experimentation, the substances that he alighted upon were rock crystal, silver
salts and salts of ammonia, the latter as present, for example, in urine. However unpromising these may
sound, the important thing about rock crystal, for instance, is that in photographic terms it is quartz, optical
quality specimens of which can be perfectly suitable to serve as a camera lens. Likewise, silver salts such as
silver nitrate and silver sulphate have all the necessary properties to behave as light-sensitive chemicals. As
for salts of ammonia (scientifically, specifically ammonium hydroxide, but urine would serve), these can
dissolve silver and thereby act, in effect, like a film fixative. With regard to the knowledge of how to use
such substances photographically, the Ancient Egyptians certainly used rock crystal - quartz, and later
glass, for lenses, particularly for magnification purposes. But Professor Allen found even more pertinent the
writings of a tenth-eleventh century Arab scholar, Ibn al-Haytham, whose book Kitab al-manazir was
translated into Latin in the thirteenth century, stirring up very considerable mediaeval-European interest in
optical matters and particularly in that prototype of the modern-day camera, the camera obscura. As
Professor Allen further discovered, besides their having a basic understanding of a camera, the more
scientific-minded Arabs and Christians of the Middle Ages also had surprisingly advanced knowledge of
the properties of the light-sensitive silver salts silver chloride and silver nitrate." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and
the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY,
1998, pp.212-213)
4/07/2007
"Having thus assembled in his mind the variety of materials that someone of the Middle Ages would have
had available to him for what we would call photographic purposes, Professor Allen applied himself to how
these might practically be deployed for the obvious crucial test: the making of a truly convincing Shroud
replica. For this, Professor Allen's first task was to construct a camera obscura, in the form of a living-room-
sized room ... that he made completely light-fast with the exception of the aperture for the rock-crystal lens
.... With this aperture initially closed, he brought into the room a cloth made to the same dimensions as the
Shroud, and after setting it up some fifteen feet from the aperture and folding it once across its width
(because he was making the image in two halves, first frontal, then dorsal), he then soaked it in the light-
sensitive silver nitrate. When this was dry, and with his `camera' thus ready loaded with what was in effect
an unexposed film, i.e. the `Shroud', all that Professor Allen now needed was a suitable `corpse'. For this he
painstakingly made a perfect plaster cast ... from the naked body of a suitably bearded male life model whom
he had arranged in a pose corresponding as closely as possible to that of the man of the Shroud. He
`doctored' this cast to incorporate Shroud facial features such as a damaged nose and bruised cheek, etc.,
then once this was complete he suspended it in full sunshine fifteen feet in front of the aperture to his still
darkened camera obscura. The moment had now come for the camera obscura's aperture or shutter to be
opened and the exposure made. ... All that was needed was sufficient time, in this instance several days, for
the sun-charged reflection of the cast to imprint its `negative' upon the cloth. To create a double, i.e. back-
and-front imprint as on the Shroud, it was necessary to repeat the whole process, closing the `shutter' on
completion of the first `exposure', then turning the cast round so that the back of the body faced the
aperture, then turning the `shroud' around so that its as yet unexposed half faced the aperture, then
reopening the aperture for another few days. ... after all this there would be a purplish-brown `negative' of
the cast on the cloth formed from reduced silver salts, which would be quickly ruined upon exposure to the
light so long as the light-sensitive silver salts still remained active. Accordingly, this was where his third
ingredient, the solution of ammonia salts, came into its own. After a washing of the `Shroud' in this to
remove all the silver salts the image was made fast, enabling it safely to be brought into the light of day."
(Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon &
Schuster: New York NY, 1998, pp.213-215)
4/07/2007
"The result of this experiment, as produced and published by Professor Allen, bears some remarkable
affinities to the image visible on the Turin Shroud. ... (i) a straw-yellow discoloration of the upper fibrils of
the linen material (ii) the appearance of being photographic negatives which are only visually coherent at
distances upwards of two metres (iii) no pigment, powder, dye or stain (iv) no directionality (v) thermal
stability (vi) water stability (vii) relative chemical stability in that the author's test pieces are affected by
household bleach to the same degree as any other mild scorch on organic material is altered. [Allen, N.,
"Verification of the Nature and Causes of the Photo-negative Images on the Shroud of Lirey-Chambéry-
Turin," De Arte, April 1995, p.31] Perhaps the most impressive of all such features, however, was the
result when Professor Allen photographed his `shroud' using black-and-white film and then viewed this in
negative. Exactly as on the Shroud itself, there appeared the unmistakable naturalistic positive `photograph'
of a naked man laid out in death, convincingly three-dimensional and quite impossible to interpret as the
work of an artist ... . After all the unconvincingness of earlier replications of the Shroud - by McCrone and
Sanford, Craig and Bresee, Picknett and Prince, to name but a few, none of which even managed to get
further than producing a face only - the Nicholas Allen version has to be taken seriously. More than anyone
else, whether for or against the Shroud's authenticity, Professor Allen has demonstrated that the Shroud's
image (or at least its body image), is convincingly replicable." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New
Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, pp.215-216)
4/07/2007
"Now it can also be said unreservedly of Professor Allen that more than anyone else before him he has
demonstrated that the Shroud's image really is photographic in character. This is in fact something that
those in favour of the Shroud's authenticity have been saying for years and is certainly bad news for Walter
McCrone and others. Rather more serious, however, from the pro-authenticity camp's point of view is that
he has demonstrated that it could have been achieved with materials and knowledge readily available in
the Middle Ages. And while I for one would not wish to question that this indeed might have been
possible, this is still very far from accepting that this actually was how (and when) the Shroud's imprint came
into being. For Professor Allen himself has been more than a little hesitant with regard to certain details, not
least whether, for the Shroud proper, the hypothetical mediaeval photographer used either an actual corpse
or a plaster cast of the same. Among just some of the difficulties of the former method are that if an actual
crucified human corpse really were suspended for `several days' in full sunshine, then its likely condition
after such a length of time, particularly in any climate with the required sufficiency of sunshine, boggles
both the mind and the olfactory system. This is quite aside from the offence it would have caused to every
mediaeval religious sensitivity. An actual corpse must therefore be considered most unlikely, given that
rigor mortis would in any case never have held sufficiently long to create the impression of the figure lying
flat. Also, had the body been genuinely crucified, its correspondingly convincing `bloodstains' could hardly
have become transferred to the Shroud over Professor Allen's required focal length of twice fifteen feet."
(Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon &
Schuster: New York NY, 1998, pp.216-217)
4/07/2007
"Yet some equally imponderable difficulties pertain to the other possible method, that the Shroud may have
been made in the Middle Ages in the same way that Professor Allen created his replica, with a plaster cast
made from a living (or possibly dead) male model. .... But making a really good cast would have been quite
difficult enough in itself, without the highly elaborate subsequent procedures, necessarily demanding some
prior experience of the basics of producing a photographic-type image, by which the `Shroud' was then
contrived according to Professor Allen's hypothesis. Furthermore, it cannot be stressed enough that even in
the unlikely event of someone of the Middle Ages having successfully mastered such an advanced degree
of photographic expertise - only then to lose it again this would have been directed solely to producing a
`negative' image that to any mediaeval observer could only have seemed most unconvincing. The so
compelling hidden `positive' photograph would still have been inaccessible to anyone, even the
`photographer' who created it, for another five hundred years." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New
Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.217)
4/07/2007
"As for the Shroud `bloodstains', Professor Allen's plaster-cast theory, just like the `cunning painting'
theory, necessarily requires that these were no more than daubings-on for effect, despite all the attestations
by pathologists and doctors of their medical convincingness. And this is again all quite aside from the
historical evidence that something very like the Shroud really does seem to have existed well before the
period that this amazing piece of forgery is supposed to have been performed. Overall, then, and without in
any way wishing to undermine Professor Allen's very fine achievement, there remain some major flaws to
his, as well as to every other, hypothesis conceived so far concerning how the Shroud's image might have
been contrived in the Middle Ages or later. Which does not mean to say that the Shroud cannot have been
made by some cunning artificer in the Middle Ages. For all we know, an all-embracing theory may yet
emerge. But in the meantime it does at least justify us taking seriously that the radiocarbon dating could
have been wrong. And looking therefore at some of the ways in which three very reputable radiocarbon-
dating laboratories, despite the confidently quoted 'thousand trillion to one' odds against, just might have
come up with a very seriously incorrect result." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that
the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.217)
4/07/2007
"IN 1986, two years before the Shroud radiocarbon dating, the Hong Kong-based archaeologist Bill
Meacham wrote that among both scientists and laymen `there appears to be an unhealthy consensus
approaching the level of dogma ... that C14 will settle the issue once and for all time.' He went on: `This
attitude sharply contradicts the general perspective of field archaeologists and geologists, who view
possible contamination as a very serious problem in interpreting the results of radiocarbon measurement.
[Meacham, W., "Radiocarbon Measurement and the Age of the Turin Shroud: Possibilities and
Uncertainties," Shroud Spectrum International, June 1986, pp.15-25]" (Wilson, I. & Schwortz, B., "The Turin
Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence," Michael O'Mara Books: London, 2000, p.95. Emphasis
original)
4/07/2007
"Yet when on 13 October 1988 the scientists who radiocarbon dated the `Shroud announced their 1260-1390
result, to the world at large it was as all previous research on the subject, however scientific and well
founded, had immediately to be swept aside as of no consequence. ... For the Shroud's radiocarbon date to
have been even four or five centuries astray from the decade of Jesus' crucifixion might not have been too
disturbing. Discrepancies of this proportion are not uncommon in the general run of archaeological work,
and such a date would at least have supported the view of the Shroud as significantly older than the 1350s.
But 1260-1390 was unthinkable. As a Shroud researcher for nearly a quarter of a century, it violated
everything that I thought I knew about the cloth. As an historian, it was also totally at variance with my
under standing of the Middle Ages and of what people of that time and later were capable of technically and
artistically. The result simply did not make sense." (Wilson, I. & Schwortz, B., "The Turin Shroud: The
Illustrated Evidence," Michael O'Mara Books: London, 2000, p.95)
5/07/2007
"Indeed, from Dr Kouznetsov's initial behaviour during the succeeding months and years, there seemed
perfectly reasonable justification for such optimism. My own first guarded reaction to him was to invite
Professor Michael Tite to peruse the text of the paper that he had read in Rome. Tite's very affable response
was that because the radiocarbon-dating laboratories had found a normal ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13 in
their Shroud samples, he seriously doubted that any enrichment of the kind argued by Kouznetsov could
have happened to the Shroud's carbon 14. But no one expected Tite to go overboard to welcome anyone
questioning the carbon dating on his own ground. And when Kouznetsov responded to Tite that it was
perhaps the radiocarbon-dating scientists' definitions of `normal' which needed to be revised, honours
seemed just about even." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most
Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.220)
5/07/2007
"But as it happens, Kouznetsov has not been the only individual to advance a serious scientific case for
how the radiocarbon dating could have been wrong. At the very same Rome conference at which he
surfaced in June 1993 there was another newcomer, whose paper `Biogenic Varnish and the Shroud of Turin'
sounded so unpromising that to my own subsequent chagrin I did not attend it. This was the University of
Texas's Dr Leoncio Garza-Valdès ... whose near-professional hobbies have long been microbiology and
archaeology, in particular as applied to ancient Mayan artefacts. He has had several specialist papers on
this topic published in international scientific journals and by a round-about route this led him to the
Shroud. For in 1983 Garza-Valdès was told by two New York art connoisseurs that a purportedly ancient
Mayan carving he owned, the `Itzamna Tun', was a worthless modern fake, obvious to them from its shiny,
varnish-like coating. ... As Garza-Valdès was aware, if the `Itzamna' were genuine it would have been used in
a special ritual in which the Mayan king anointed it with his own blood and, on noting patches of brownish
detritus in the `Itzamna's' crevices, he took scrapings of these and had them analysed, finding them indeed
positive for blood and for human DNA. When he sent samples to Arizona's radiocarbon-dating laboratory,
he learned that they dated to c. AD 400, thereby conclusively overturning the dismissal of the carving as a
modern fake by the two New York `connoisseurs'. Even so, the puzzle about this date was that it was some
six centuries later than the particular Mayan period suggested by the carving's artistic style and it was here
that Dr Garza-Valdès's bioplastic coating discovery came into its own. Because the coating's steady
accumulation had covered all surfaces of the carving and, like plaque on teeth, is virtually invisible unless
its presence is revealed by a disclosing medium, the Arizona laboratory had completely unwittingly dated
this coating along with the blood. The combined result therefore made the carving seem several centuries
younger than it actually was. And as Dr Garza-Valdès further discovered, such a bioplastic coating was not
just peculiar to this one artefact. Something similar had been found on other antiquities which he was able to
study for comparison purposes, including a Mayan chert drill from Guatemala; a late Mayan chest ornament
made of jasper, also from Guatemala; an ancient Mexican carved bone used for blood-letting; even a gold
pendant from Colombia." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most
Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, pp.223-224)
5/07/2007
"The key question, therefore, was whether the Shroud's linen has such a coating. In April 1993 Dr
GarzaValdès travelled with his own portable microscope to Turin, where Giovanni Riggi allowed him to
study some of the pieces of the Shroud that he trimmed off from the sample provided for the carbon-
dating laboratories ... He has described his reactions on his first studying them: `As soon as I looked at
a segment in the microscope, I knew it was heavily contaminated. I knew that what had been
radiocarbon dated was a mixture of linen and bacteria and fungi and bioplastic coating that had grown
on the fibres for centuries.' [Garza-Valdès, L., in Barrett, J., "Science and the Shroud: Microbiology
meets archaeology in a renewed quest for answers," The Mission, Journal of the University of Texas
Health and Science Center, San Antonio, Spring 1996] Dr Garza-Valdès was able to return to San
Antonio with tiny portions of the sample. With some help from Professor Stephen Mattingly, head of
Microbiology at the University of Texas's San Antonio campus, he went on to make a very full and
thorough study of this coating and what needs to be emphasised immediately is that the coating really
is there. In his Rome talk and subsequent presentations to scientific audiences he has shown slides
and diagrams that reveal it as a tube of varying thickness surrounding the Shroud fibres reminiscent of
the protective plastic casing around electrical wiring. In early September 1994 Professor Harry Gove
accepted Garza-Valdès's invitation to an informal Round Table at the University of Texas San Antonio
campus at which he was enabled, along with the others present, to study under the microscope several
Shroud threads with this coating. He subsequently expressed himself, in his own words, thoroughly
`convinced of the general validity of Garza-Valdès's findings - [that] there was some sort of `halo' or
bioplastic coating around some of the threads'. [Gove, H., Letter to Ian Wilson, British Society Turin
Shroud Newsletter, No. 40, May 1995, pp.20-22]" (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New
Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.224)
5/07/2007
"An important factor is that the micro-organisms from which the coating has been formed not only contain
carbon, they are rich in it, and thereby in carbon 14. This was one of several points regarding Dr
GarzaValdès's argument on which I consulted Dr Thomas Loy of the University of Queensland's Centre for
Molecular and Cellular Biology for independent verification. The coating apparently necessarily has a very
high proportion of `young' carbon 14 for the very good reason that many of the bacteria and fungi are still
alive. As Dr Garza-Valdès explained to my wife and me when we visited him in San Antonio in August 1996,
he was able to demonstrate this by putting some of his Shroud samples into a culture medium, with quite
spectacular results. In his own words: `What happens is that the bacteria reproduce like crazy for a period of
two weeks. So this is the proof that the bacteria are alive. And I have the cultures showing the speed that
they grow with the deposit of the plastic. So no one can say that there is no contaminant. No way.' [Garza-
Valdès, L., Interview by Ian Wilson, 28 August 1996]" (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New
Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.224)
5/07/2007
"None of Leonardo's notebooks, in which he evidently wrote down everything he thought or conceived or
invented, ever mention a word about the Shroud of Turin. Despite the fact that Pincknett and Prince claim
that there are Leonardo notebooks which have been lost, the fact remains that there is not a shred of
historical documentation to support the theory that Leonardo created the Shroud any more than there is to
back their novel historical and theological ideas. There is as much evidence to prove that Leonardo created
the Shroud as there is that he built the pyramids." (Ruffin, C.B., "The Shroud of Turin: The Most Up-To-
Date Analysis of All the Facts Regarding the Church's Controversial Relic," Our Sunday Visitor: Huntington
IN, 1999, p.141)
6/07/2007
"Now one major objection that has been raised by Dr Walter McCrone is that if there were any coating of
this kind on the Shroud fibres (which he has disputed), this would be bound to have been removed by the
stringent pre-treatment cleaning processes that all radiocarbon-dating laboratories routinely use specifically
to remove any contaminants and impurities which might interfere with their results. In the case of the
Shroud, it is conveniently on record that all three of the participating laboratories used as cleaning agent the
same formulation of hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide (caustic soda), thereby enabling Dr Garza-
Valdès specifically to replicate this and to observe its effect on Shroud fibres bearing the bioplastic coating.
He says: `When you clean these with hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide not simply with the
concentration used by the radiocarbon laboratories but with six times the strength of that used in 1988, you
don't do a single thing to the bacteria and the bioplastic coating. The only thing that you do is to dissolve
part of the cellulose from the flax, so that you are going to make bigger the contaminant in relation to the
cellulose of the flax.' [Garza-Valdès, L., Interview by Ian Wilson, 28 August 1996]" (Wilson, I., "The Blood
and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York
NY, 1998, pp.225-226)
6/07/2007
"Another particularly forceful objection raised by Dr McCrone and others is that in order to affect the
radiocarbon dating so substantially that a true first-century date became a false fourteenth-century one, the
thickness of the coating would have to be very considerable. As calculated by McCrone, this `would require
that the linen be coated with two-thirds of its own weight' [McCrone, W.C., Letter to Ian Wilson, 17 January
1995] of modern material. Professor Hall, in his 1989 lecture to the British Museum Society, had similarly
calculated that something of the order of a sixty per cent contamination would be required to skew the
dating, and although he knew nothing of Dr Garza-Valdès's coating at that time, he ridiculed the idea that
anything more than the tiniest fraction of modern material might have been left on the Shroud sample his
laboratory worked on. As it happens, the figure of sixty per cent is one which Dr Garza-Valdès accepts
without qualm, since he claims that varying amounts up to this proportion are indeed present on some of the
Shroud fibres. He has been able to show the thickness using a special stain, base carmine, which becomes
absorbed by the cellulose of the linen fibres, but not by the bioplastic coating. This process clearly reveals
the coating's presence in the form of what Professor Gove described as a `halo' when seen in cross-section.
In the wake of his examination of the Shroud samples at San Antonio, Gove reportedly actually accepted
that this halo was present up to a proportion of fifty-seven per cent, [Scavone, D., Letter to the Editor,
British Society for the Turin Shroud Newsletter no. 41, September 1995, p.21] though he subsequently
retracted this statement." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most
Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.226)
6/07/2007
"Complicating the issue, as Dr Garza-Valdès acknowledges, is that on any artefact, including our Shroud, the
coating's thickness may vary considerably from one part to another, with bacterial growth being inevitably
greatest where there has been the greatest handling. In the case of the Shroud, this only makes yet more
questionable Gonella's and Riggi's selection of the corner site for the taking of the radiocarbon-dating
sample. Cumulatively literally hundreds of sweaty hands would have clutched this corner to hold up the
cloth at expositions over the centuries ..., thereby unwittingly creating here and at its opposite end the
maximum bacterial build-up of any areas on the cloth." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New
Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, pp.226-227)
6/07/2007
"Inevitably the greatest difficulty, however, concerns why, if the Shroud's fibres do indeed have so
substantial a coating, this has failed hitherto to be noticed either by the STURP scientists in the course of
their examination of the Shroud in 1978, or by Dr McCrone in his microanalytical work, or by the
radiocarbon-dating scientists, during their preliminary examinations of their samples prior to carrying out the
radiocarbon dating in 1988. This was a point put to me particularly forcefully by Dr McCrone: 'I have had
and observed very closely, over sixty tape samples from the Shroud on which there were, by extrapolation
from half a dozen tapes, more than 100,000 linen fibers. The only coating that I found on any of those fibres
was a paint layer made up of red ochre or vermilion and collagen tempera.' [McCrone, W.C., Letter to Ian
Wilson, 17 January 1995] To this, Dr Garza-Valdès has totally calmly and reasonedly responded that unless
you knew the coating was there, you simply would not see it, or be aware of its presence. Since it resembles
a clear plastic, you would look through it without seeing it, very much in the manner of a pane of glass. In
his own words: `This is why many people have looked with the microscope and have missed the deposit
and said the fibres are clean. A few years ago they could not have understood how the Mayans gave that
beautiful polish to the ancient jades. No one could understand the technology they used to give that
beautiful lustre. But the Mayans didn't do it. It was the bacteria that deposited this acrylic on the ancient
surfaces.' [Garza-Valdès, L., Interview by Ian Wilson, 28 August 1996]" (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the
Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998,
p.227)
6/07/2007
"Now the importance of these remarks in relation to the Shroud's earlier noted surprisingly clean-looking
appearance cannot be emphasised enough. As recorded by Professor Gove in his book on the Shroud
radiocarbon dating, the Zurich radiocarbon-dating laboratory's Dr Willi Wolfli specifically noted this
cleanness of the Shroud sample that he received. And in my own case, forcefully recalled to mind was one
of my profoundest surprises on first seeing the Shroud back in November 1973. As I remarked in my first
book on the Shroud, published in 1978: `The linen, although ivory-coloured with age, was still surprisingly
clean-looking, even to the extent of a damask-like surface sheen.' [Wilson, I., "The Turin Shroud,"
Gollancz: : London, 1978, p.8]" (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most
Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, pp.227-228. Emphasis original)
6/07/2007
"So could this same `clean', clear surface sheen have been the reason why no one, looking at Shroud
samples through the microscope, saw any coating - because of its clear plastic quality? This was another
point which I specifically checked with the University of Queensland's Dr Thomas Loy, to receive from him
the firm assurance that unless anyone possessing modern-day microbiological knowledge happened
specifically to be looking for such a coating, it could all too easily be missed. In fact, even Dr Garza-Valdès
was only able to reveal its presence by the use of an amido black stain, precisely the same stain which
McCrone used to show up what he interpreted as a gelatin painting medium. So could McCrone's `gelatin'
be one and the same as Garza-Valdès's `bioplastic coating'? Conceivably, exactly as in the case of the
Vinland Map, McCrone may have made the right observations, but had drawn the wrong interpretations.
What cannot be emphasised enough is that if Dr Garza-Valdès's findings are valid (and at the time of writing
they have yet to be fully developed and published for proper independent scrutiny), their ramifications
range far beyond just the Shroud. As he himself has stressed: `Every single ancient artefact has a covering
of the bacteria or bioplastic coating. It is not a thing peculiar to the Shroud.' [Garza-Valdès, L., Interview by
Ian Wilson, 28 August 1996]" (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most
Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.228)
6/07/2007
"In which regard, and confirming that this is no mere pseudo-scientific quackery, one person to have taken a
very serious interest indeed in these ideas is the already mentioned world-respected Egyptologist Dr Rosalie
David of the Manchester Museum. As may be recalled, during her intensive examination of the Manchester
collection's Egyptian mummy no. 1770, Dr David had been puzzled by the British Museum radiocarbon-
dating laboratory's finding that this mummy's bandages purportedly dated 800 to 1000 years younger than
its body. [David, R., "Mysteries of the Mummies: The story of the Manchester University investigation,"
Cassell: London, 1978] Although it could not be completely ruled out that the mummy had been re-wrapped
1000 years after its first interment, she did not think this likely. Accordingly, this and other aberrant
radiocarbon-dating findings, particularly pertaining to linen, led her to suspect that there might be some as
yet unrecognised contaminant to such wrappings that made them seem very substantially younger than
they really were. However, she had no real idea what this contaminant might be until she heard of Dr Garza-
Valdès's bioplastic coating. Such was her interest that when, in January 1996, Dr Garza-Valdès invited her to
give a paper at an Archaeomicrobiology Symposium in San Antonio, she accepted with alacrity, her visit
providing an opportunity for them to discuss the extent to which the coating might skew radiocarbon dates.
Together they set up a special project to check on the dating differentials between other mummy bodies and
their wrappings, their first essay in this, arranged in collaboration with Professor Harry Gove, being to
radiocarbon date some bone collagen and linen wrappings from the mummy of an ibis, a bird sacred to the
ancient Egyptians and therefore very commonly mummified by them. One of their reasons for this choice
was that, unlike in the case of a human mummy, an ibis is much less likely to have been re-wrapped in
antiquity, thereby eliminating this particular reason for a dating discrepancy." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and
the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY,
1998, pp.228-229)
6/07/2007
"At the time that this book was being finalised for publication the results of this experiment were published
in the form of a specialist scientific paper jointly authored by Professor Harry Gove, Dr Rosalie David and Dr
Garza-Valdès, together with Dr Garza-Valdès's colleague at the University of Texas Health Center, Professor
Stephen Mattingly. [Gove, H.E., Mattingly, S.J., David, A. R. & L. A. Garza-Valdès, "A problematic source of
organic contamination of linen," Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research - Section B,
Elsevier: Amsterdam, 1997, pp.504-507] From this paper we learn that after taking cloth, bone and tissue
samples from the chosen ibis at the Texas Science Health Center, Dr David hand-carried these to the
radiocarbon-dating laboratory at Tucson, Arizona, one of the three which had worked on samples from the
Shroud. There the Arizona team cleaned the cloth samples, employing the very same pre-treatment
procedure they had used for the Shroud. They then carbon dated these along with the samples from the
bird's body, the expectation obviously being that both the mummy and its wrappings ought to be very
similar in date. However, the results were that whereas an averaging of the bone and tissue samples from the
ibis showed this bird to have died some time between 829 and 795 BC, an averaging of its wrappings
showed that the flax of which these were composed had `died' some time between 384 and 170 BC. Exactly as
Dr David had discovered in the case of her Mummy 1770, there was a very significant discrepancy, an
average of 550 years, between the dating of the mummy's linen wrappings and the mummy itself. And this
despite the laboratory's claimed accuracies of its results being an average of sixty-five years. Notably, in
each case it was the linen which appeared substantially the younger. Furthermore, as Dr Garza-Valdès was
able to observe under the microscope, the ibis wrappings would have spent most of their life undisturbed in
Egypt's dry climate and did not have the same thickness of coating that the Shroud had accumulated during
its repeated handlings over the centuries. Yet still the discrepancy was of a significant proportion." (Wilson,
I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon &
Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.229)
6/07/2007
"In September 1997 Dr Garza-Valdès and his publishers Doubleday sought my help on a book that he was
writing, and as a result of this I visited him a second time in San Antonio, accompanied by my wife Judith.
On this occasion we were actually shown the bioplastic coating under the microscope. It seemed quite
obvious to me that this was indeed one and the same as that puzzling `surface sheen' that I had noted on my
first firsthand examination of the Shroud nearly a quarter of a century before. During this same visit I was
also able to interview Professor Stephen Mattingly, head of the Texas University microbiology department
that had `hosted' Dr Garza-Valdès's researches. Although no `Shroudie', Professor Mattingly told me matter-
of-factly that he regarded it as only a matter of time before the radiocarbon-dating scientists would have to
accept that its presence invalidated the results that they arrived at in 1988. During this same visit I also
spoke on the telephone to Professor Gove, who gave me to understand that despite his `thousand trillion to
one' pronouncements, the main obstacle to greater acceptance of Dr Garza-Valdès's findings now actually
lies not so much with himself, but with face-saving concerns on the part of the three laboratories who
worked on the Shroud samples in 1988." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the
World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.242)
6/07/2007
"As we went on to discuss, a very necessary preliminary to any possible retraction of the 1988 claimed
proof of the Shroud's medieval date has to be the development of a reliable method of eliminating bioplastic
coating from any ancient sample. Such a method, involving the breaking-down of cellulose into glucose, I
learned from Professor Mattingly, is actually already available. Now the immediate need is for it to be
properly tested on ordinary ancient linen samples, such as anomalously dated Egyptian mummy wrappings,
before it can be applied to the Shroud. Clearly if such samples were to exhibit significantly older radiocarbon
dates once they had the bioplastic coating eliminated, then the door would be wide open for the method to
be applied to the Shroud. In this regard we may recall that a snippet of the sample taken for carbon dating
was held back in 1988, and is understood to be in Cardinal Saldarini's safekeeping. Even with the treatment
to eliminate the bioplastic coating this would probably contain sufficient carbon for Arizona, Oxford and
Zurich to do a full rerun of their original dating." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that
the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.243)
6/07/2007
"The title of this book asks In Whose Image? The authors provide an answer: Leonardo da Vinci was
genius enough to have created it. On this point it is difficult to disagree, judging from the work of Leonardo
and Vasari's high praise of his genius. Leonardo's notebooks have revealed an incredibly fertile scientific
curiosity and creativity. All would agree in a casual way that IF anyone could have invented a rudimentary
method of photography in the Renaissance, he is a plausible candidate. They go further: only Leonardo
could have done it. This is probably not true, as other artists are known to have studied anatomy,
experimented with sfumato technique, and, as alchemists, worked with vegetal and mineral chemicals. The
authors' next conclusion is one that does not follow by the rules of logic or history: because Leonardo could
have done it, therefore he DID do it. He did it, moreover, not by any method of conventional art, but by
means of photography, and the Shroud is proof of it." (Scavone, D.C., "Book Review of `The Turin Shroud:
In Whose Image?'," by Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, New York, Harper Collins, 1994. In Guscin, M., "The
Oviedo Cloth," Lutterworth Press: Cambridge UK, 1998, pp.114-115. Emphasis original)
7/07/2007
"Yet if we seriously try to think of the Shroud as a forgery, we similarly come across some powerful
objections. How could any artist, either by accident or design, have produced an image so convincingly
photographic when seen in negative, five hundred years before the opportunity existed to check his work,
and for anyone else to appreciate it properly? Why should he want to do so, when no one of his own time
would have been able to appreciate his cleverness? Significantly, artists' copies of the Shroud, made in later
periods artistically far more competent than the fourteenth century, look crude and almost ludicrously
amateur by comparison to their original. Furthermore, in order to produce the Shroud's negativity, an artist
of any period would have needed to discipline himself to work consistently in the very reverse of the light-
and-shade modeling principles by which he would have been trained. This is extremely difficult, as attested
by modern artists who have tried making exact replicas of the Shroud, among these Britain's John Weston,
an agnostic commissioned to produce a duplicate Shroud for the television documentary The Silent
Witness in 1978, and an artist from Manchester who undertook simply to copy the Shroud face for the BBC
television QED program on the Shroud shown in November 1982." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the
Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, p.13)
7/07/2007
"But perhaps the most compelling aspect of the Shroud as a subject of inquiry is the extent to which the
visible blood flows and physical injuries have been viewed as authentic by members of the medical
profession. As early as April 21, 1902, and therefore within four years of the announcement of Pia's
photographic revelations, Yves Delage, professor of anatomy at the Paris Sorbonne, gave a lecture to the
French Académie des Sciences in which he claimed that the Shroud body image and wounds are
physiologically so flawless and meaningful that he found it impossible to believe they could be the work of
an artist. To the scandal of his rationalist colleagues, who had always known him as an agnostic, Delage
said he found no difficulty in believing that the body wrapped in the Shroud was that of Jesus." (Wilson, I.,
"The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.16-17)
7/07/2007
"When, in 1931, Giuseppe Enrie's photographs revealed the Shroud image in yet greater clarity, into Delage's
shoes stepped Dr. Pierre Barbet, chief surgeon at St. Joseph's Hospital, Paris. Fascinated by some of the
thitherto unexpected/features of crucifixion the Shroud seemed to indicate, Barbet began remarkable
experiments on cadavers, subsequently publishing a very supportive book on the Shroud's authenticity
under the title A Doctor at Calvary. Since Barbet, such medical support has grown year by year. A decade
ago, the leading figures were Milan forensic medicine professor Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, New York
physician Dr. Anthony Sava, and British general practitioner Dr. David Willis, who died in 1976. Today the
scene includes, among many others, British Home Office pathologist Professor James Cameron of the
London Hospital ...; Australian anatomy professor Dr. Michael Blunt of the University of Sydney, Australia;
Italian forensic medicine professor Dr. Pier Baima Bollone of the University of Turin; U.S, pathologist Dr.
Frederick Zugibe, chief medical examiner, Rockland County, New York; and U.S. coroner Dr. Robert Bucklin
of Los Angeles County, California." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London,
1986, p.17)
7/07/2007
"Inevitably, because of the varying backgrounds of such men and the already mentioned subtleties of the
Shroud image, not all agree on all details. Nonetheless, across their published findings there is a broad
consensus in identifying on the Shroud five distinct, major groups of injuries. The first such group consists
of variegated wounds to the head, some distinct, others less so. Among the latter, but consistently pointed
out by Bucklin, Willis, and others, are a large swelling on the upper right cheek, just below the eye, and
similar damage to the nose. Inferred from this damage is a heavy blow struck across the face."
(Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, p.18)
7/07/2007
"Still in the same group, but far more obvious to the layman, are a series of blood spillages clearly visible
around the front and back of the head. Four or five streams of blood seem to start from the top of the
forehead moving downward toward the eyes. Other streams appear clotted in the hair. The face image
has one particularly striking flow, shaped like a reversed figure 3, that starts just below the hairline,
then meanders obliquely downward, seeming to meet some obstruction in its descent. The back of the
head features some eight or more downward-flowing rivulets, each expanding and sometimes dividing
along the way, and similarly being interrupted by some obstruction. Obvious to anyone is that some
irregular spiked object-something very like a crown or cap of thorns-would seem to have been
responsible for these wounds. But what has so impressed pathologists is the true-to-life appearance of
the injuries. Some even see among the rivulets clear distinctions between arterial and venous blood,
each behaving in the manner a modern specialist would expect."
(Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, p.20)
7/07/2007
"A second group of injuries, of less variegation but much greater extensiveness, is to be seen all over
the back of the body in the form of more than a hundred dumbbell-shaped marks that can only be
interpreted as from a severe whipping. Individually the marks have been identified as contusions, or
hematomas; that is, wellings of blood into the flesh tissues without necessarily breaking the skin. They
occur in groups of two and three, and would appear to have been inflicted by a two- or three-thonged
lash tipped with dumbbell-shaped metal pellets. If these are the work of a forger, it is, again, the
thinking behind them that has so impressed pathologists. Goniometry is the science of calculating
angles, that is, for instance, enabling the direction of fire of a rifle to be calculated from the path of a
bullet through a victim's body. The Shroud whip marks spread from the tops of the shoulders to the
lower reaches of the calves, in places extending to the front of the body, in an astonishingly
convincing-looking distribution pattern. From horizontal across the loins they fan upward over the
upper back, crisscross over the shoulders, and fan downward on the thighs and calves. If the work of a
forger, he has taken the care to think out exactly how the whipmaster swung this way and that, how he
placed himself behind his victim, how high he held his hand, yet all so subtly conveyed that the marks
are hardly visible on the Shroud itself, and can only properly be followed on the photographic
negative." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, p.20)
7/07/2007
"As noted by Professor Cameron, in the shoulder regions these injuries appear to have been succeeded
by some major source of abrasion, evident from the appearance of rubbing high on the left
shoulder blade and lower down on the right. Cameron interprets this as the carrying of some heavy
weight on the back, inevitably recalling the cross or crossbeam carried by crucifixion victims, and
points out, in likely association, apparent damage to the knees, particularly the left one. From
experiments with volunteers, Cameron observes that a right-handed person with a heavy beam tied to
his outstretched arms tends naturally to carry this high on his left shoulder, lower down on his right,
and when he falls, this will be most heavily on his left knee. Again the Shroud makes sound medical
sense." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.20,22)
7/07/2007
"For the first clear evidence that the Shroud shows a victim of crucifixion, we now turn to the next group
of injuries, which take the form of what appear to be blood flows in the region of the hands and lower
arms. On the man of the Shroud's left wrist can be seen two separately angled blood flows, one broad,
the other thin and long; then, after a gap of a few centimeters, at least six blood rivulets appear to flow
on toward the elbow joint. Although the right wrist is obscured by the left, the presence of similar
bloodstains on this arm suggests a similarly originating injury. As before, it is the underlying logic that
is so compelling. Each rivulet of blood ends its course pointing in a specific direction, from which it can
be calculated that when the majority of the rivulets flowed, the man of the Shroud's arms must have
been at an angle of 65 degrees from the vertical-i.e., clearly a crucifixion position. Only one rivulet is
different, the longer and thinner of those at the wrist, which indicates not 65 but 55 degrees from the
vertical. To pathologists, this single flow almost certainly indicates the attitude the arms assumed at
death, at which time the head would have been slumped and one elbow flexed at a more acute angle."
(Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, p.22)
7/07/2007
"If these features are remarkable enough, even more so is the location from which the two separately angled
flows can be seen to emerge: the wrist. Throughout art history, the thousands of artists' representations of
the crucifixion almost invariably show the nails through the palms, not the wrists. For the Shroud to feature
such an unexpected location fascinated the French surgeon Pierre Barbet, and it was in order to try to
understand this that he conducted some of his experiments on cadavers and amputated limbs during the
1930s. Replicating the suspension of a body via a nail through the palm, as imagined by artists, Barbet
found that the flesh simply tore through. Such a location could not have supported a body on a cross. But
when Barbet drove a nail through the point he judged to be indicated on the Shroud, the highly compacted
metacarpal bones of the wrists, he found that any normal body weight was held firm and secure. Was a
fourteenth-century forger so clever that he defied artistic tradition to get such an anatomical detail correct?"
(Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.22,24)
7/07/2007
"Evidence of crucifixion is further to be found in the Shroud's fourth group of injuries: blood flows that seem
to denote nails through the feet. Although little of any bloodstains at the front of the feet are evident (as
already remarked, at the front not enough length would seem to have been allowed for the Shroud to stretch
the full distance to the toes), the back of the body image incorporates a very complete imprint of the sole of
the right foot, seemingly soaked in blood, and with the uncanny appearance of the sort of mark someone
might leave if he stepped on a wet flagstone. Anatomically, pathologists and other medical men have noted
to -this image a very definite concavity corresponding to the foot's plantar arch, also a dark, rectangular
stain between what would seem to have been the second and the third metatarsal bones, seemingly the
nail's entry point. Since only an almost indistinguishable smudge is visible for the left foot, it has been
argued that on the cross the right foot overlaid this, with a single nail impaling the two. From the ankle, a rill
of blood appears to have broken away directly onto the cloth, and it is the seemingly post-mortem nature of
this that has caused most interest. While all previously discussed bloodstains have theoretically flowed
while the body was upright on the cross, dried on the body, then somehow become transferred after death,
this ankle rill must have been of a different nature, presumably an accidental spillage as the body was laid on
the cloth for burial. There is even a counterimpression where the cloth would appear to have been slightly
wrinkled at the time." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.22,24)
7/07/2007
"The fifth and final of the Shroud's visible injury groups is indicated by an elliptical wound 4.4 centimeters
wide immediately adjacent to one of the 1532 fire patches and, on the body of the man of the Shroud,
locatable in the right side. Even to the layman this looks obvious as the entry point of some spear, from
which blood appears to have flowed for some 15 centimeters while the body hung upright on the cross. But
it is inevitably the pathologists for whom, again, the injury is most meaningful. There is general agreement
that the exact point of injury would have been in the fifth intercostal space, immediately above the sixth rib,
and it is to be noted that the wound is angled perfectly for such a between-the-ribs location. Some
investigators even see slight interruptions in the flow of the blood downward exactly corresponding to the
spacings of the middle ribs. The most dramatic aspect of this injury is that, as in the case of the foot wound,
there is a post-mortem spillage associated with it, in this instance in the form of a copious and intricate
splashing of blood visible right across the small of the back on the dorsal image, extending out to each side.
Among the pathologists, there is general agreement that this spillage would have occurred as the heavy
body was inevitably heaved onto the cloth at the time of burial." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud,"
Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.25-26)
7/07/2007
"If the Shroud is genuine, obviously such a dramatic chest injury must have been caused by a blow
intended to cause death. But, quite aside from this, doctors and pathologists have pointed to other evidence
that the man of the Shroud was indeed dead when laid in the cloth. As Professor James Cameron of the
London Hospital has observed, if the man of the Shroud had been still breathing when laid in the cloth, the
natural effect of his inhalations would have been to suck the linen into his mouth and nostrils, as indeed
occurred in one modern case which Cameron was called upon to examine. This would inevitably have
distorted the Shroud facial image; yet it shows no sign of this. Cameron also interprets the already noted
stiffness of the arms in the burial position as due to rigor mortis. He argues that the arms had become fixed
in the attitude of their suspension on the cross, and those who took the body down therefore had forcibly
to break this rigor at the shoulders in order to place the arms in the burial position. Cameron also offers an
interesting explanation for the oddly skeletal appearance of the hands. He points out that a nail through the
wrist would be likely to hit not only the median nerve but also the main artery, thereby partially draining the
hands of blood and creating an early post-mortem tissue-drying effect he refers to as `de-gloving.'" (Wilson,
I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.25-26)
7/07/2007
"The single most overriding feature from the evidence of the pathologists is, however, their unanimity that
what they see of wounds and physiological features on the Shroud makes perfect medical sense. The
behavior of the blood flows, irrespective of whatever process might have transferred them to the cloth, is in
precise accord with the observed injuries. ... The essential issue is that the entire corpus of medieval and
subsequent art can be scoured in vain for the work of any painter whose depiction of injuries even remotely
approaches the realism of those visible on the Shroud. " (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild
Publishing: London, 1986, pp.26,29)
7/07/2007
"The scientific evidence found on the cloth itself gives a good deal of information about its images, in
particular that they appear to have resulted from some type of radiation. The first indications of this can be
found by comparing the body images with the scorch marks found on the Shroud. Both are stable in water,
neither impeding its flow on the cloth nor being altered by it. Both are also stable to further heating and do
not change color up to temperatures and times that would produce equivalent scorches. [Schwalbe, L.A. &
Rogers, R.N., "Physics and Chemistry of the Shroud of Turin," Analytica Chimica Acta Vol. 135, 1982,
pp.3-49] Neither the scorch marks nor the body images have faded with time, and neither were caused by
foreign materials or particulates. Also, neither the chemical components of the scorch marks nor the body
image are soluble in acetic acid, redox, or organic solvents. [Schwalbe & Rogers, Ibid] The translucent fibers
from the lightly scorched areas on the Shroud closely resemble the Shroud's body image fibers. [Schwalbe &
Rogers, Ibid] The body image fibers are also similar to a light scorch chemistry in their microscopically
corroded appearance and their lower tensile strength. [Jumper, E.J., et all., "A Comprehensive Examination of
the Various Stains and Images on the Shroud of Turin," in Lambert, J.B., ed., "Archaeological Chemistry,
III," American Chemical Society: Washington DC, 1984, pp.447-476] This similarity between the body images
and the light scorches can be further observed with ultraviolet visible and reflectance spectra. The relative
spectral reflectance curves for the light scorches were also very similar to those of the body images on the
Shroud. [Gilbert, R., Jr. & Gilbert, M.M., "Ultraviolet-Visible Reflectance and Fluorescence Spectra of the
Shroud of Turin," Applied Optics, Vol. 19, No. 12, June 1980, pp.1930-1936] The spectrophotometric
examination further reported that the light scorch areas of the Shroud reduced the background fluorescence,
as did the body image. [Gilbert & Gilbert, Ibid] With controlled timing and heat, superficial scorches (similar
to the Shroud body images) can also be produced on cloth without affecting its gross mechanical
properties. [Schwalbe & Rogers, Ibid]" (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific,
Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, pp.211-212)
7/07/2007
"Another indication of the cause of the body image formations can be found by analyzing the cloth's
coloration. The Shroud, like all linen, has yellowed or darkened with age. As we saw earlier, when a Shroud
fibril is cut in half, its original white color can be seen on the inside. However, the body images have
yellowed faster and darker than the background or non-image areas on the Shroud. The body image fibrils
are more chemically degraded than the background fibers; their cellulose has been chemically altered and
consists of structures formed by dehydration, oxidation, and conjugation products of the linen itself.
[Jumper, E.J., et all., "A Comprehensive Examination of the Various Stains and Images on the Shroud of
Turin," in Lambert, J.B., ed., "Archaeological Chemistry, III," American Chemical Society: Washington DC,
1984, pp.447-476] Normal darkening and degradation of cellulose (the main component of linen) occurs
through gradual oxidation and loss of water-by exposure to heat and light. [Pellicori, S. & Evans, M., "The
Shroud of Turin Through the Microscope," Archaeology, Vol. 34, 1981, pp.34-43] Scientists who have
studied the full-length Shroud and its samples note that "the body image is due to a more advanced
decomposition process than the normal aging rate of the background linen itself" (italics added). [Jumper, et
al., Ibid, p.456] Scientists have also established that the application of either light or heat to cellulose will
artificially darken it in what amounts to a rapid simulation of the aging process.[Pellicori, & Evans, Ibid] It
should be noted that laboratory simulations by scientists using such controlled, accelerated aging
processes produce the same overall properties, as well as spectral reflectance curves, as the body image and
background areas on the Shroud. [Pellicori, S.F., "Spectral Properties of the Shroud of Turin," Applied
Optics, June 15 1980, pp.1913-1920]. The body images on the Shroud appear to have been exposed to more
light or heat than the rest of the cloth and to have aged, decomposed, or degraded at a faster rate than the
background." (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological
Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, p.212)
7/07/2007
"For these and many other reasons, most scientists, as well as other Shroud experts, have concluded that
some form of light or heat (or radiation) caused the images on the Shroud. However, the absence of pyrolitic
compounds or products expected from high-temperature cellulose degradation indicates that the image-
forming process took place at a fairly low temperature. This type of low-temperature radiation would not
leave any residue on the cloth, as is the case with the Shroud's body images. Neither would it leave any
directionality across the width or length of the image. In addition, radiation is an agent that can operate on
skin, hair, coins, or flowers, and can uniformly encode the fibers on a cloth. It is extremely difficult to imagine
how the subtle shades of light and dark on the Shroud's body images could possibly have been obtained
without using light or radiation. These body images are not saturated or diffused. The edges of the man's
body at the sides, top, and bottom break off sharply. Furthermore, the agent, acting at a distance, barely
penetrated the cloth. As one noted scientist who has studied the Shroud for more than two decades
observed, "An agent acting at a distance with decreasing intensity is, almost by definition, radiation. The
limitation of the cloth darkening to the outermost surface pointed to a non-penetrating, non-diffusing agent,
like radiant energy ..... [Gonella, L., "Scientific Investigation of the Shroud of Turin: Problems, Results and
Methodological Lessons," in "Turin Shroud-Image of Christ?," Cosmos: Hong Kong, 1987, pp.29-40, p.31]"
(Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M.
Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, p.212)
7/07/2007
"A vertical beam or beams of light or radiation also best explains how the Shroud's body image was encoded
through space in a straight line from the body to the cloth. STURP scientist John Heller stated, "It is as if
every pore and every hair of the body contained a microminiature laser." [Heller, J., in McDonald, W.,
"Science and the Shroud," The World and I, October 1986, pp.420-428, p.426] This vertical directionality
of the Shroud body image has only been accounted for by methods involving radiation. As scientist Luigi
Gonella explained, "Whatever the mechanism might be, it must be such to yield effects as if it were a burst of
collimated radiant energy." [Gonella, L., "Scientific Investigation of the Shroud of Turin: Problems, Results
and Methodological Lessons," in "Turin Shroud-Image of Christ?," Cosmos: Hong Kong, 1987, pp.29-40,
p.31]" (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence,"
M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, p.213)
7/07/2007
"We also saw earlier how the various shades of light and dark on the cloth's frontal image directly correlate
to the various distances that they were from the underlying body. This ratio exists throughout the length of
the body image, even in places where the cloth could not have been touching the body, resulting in an
image that contains precisely encoded, three-dimensional information. Such a precisely encoded correlation
over such a distance could seemingly only be achieved by radiation. The Shroud's highly resolved image is
also difficult to imagine unless light or radiation coming from the body is somehow directed onto the cloth."
(Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M.
Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, p.213)
7/07/2007
"All of the evidence points to a very unique occurrence that caused the images on the Shroud, something
that could never have been created by the technology of the medieval ages (or even by the technology of
today). Only through simulation have today's scientists been able to come close to the Shroud's three-
dimensionality, vertical directionality, and finely resolved and highly focused image; their simulation
achieved by a mechanism in which light was attenuated in a liquid, then traveled in a vertical, straight-line
direction from the plaster reference face while it was being focused in a camera. [Jackson, J.P. & Jumper, E.J.
& Ercoline, W R., "Correlation of Image Intensity on the Turin Shroud with the 3-D Structure of a Human
Body Shape," Applied Optics, Vol. 23, No. 14, July 1984, pp.2244-2270]." (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of
the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000,
p.213)
7/07/2007
"Dr. Giles Carter, Professor Emeritus, Eastern Michigan University, has conducted years of experiments with
X rays. He has noted that cloth samples placed in an X ray beam and exposed to low-energy, long-wave X
rays for different periods of time will produce superficial, straw-yellow discoloration like that found on the
Shroud body images. [Carter, G.E., "Formation of the Image on the Shroud of Turin by X Rays: A New
Hypothesis," in Lambert, J.B., ed., "Archaeological Chemistry, III," American Chemical Society:
Washington DC, 1984, pp.425-446] He also noted that these same types of X rays are easily absorbed in air.
Because of this absorption or attenuating quality Carter stated that X rays given off by the body would also
convey three-dimensional information onto the cloth. [Carter, Ibid. p.435]. Dr. Carter first suggested in 1984
that the finger bones are visible on the photographic negative images of the man in the Shroud. In addition,
he noted that the bones extending into the hand, over the wrist, could also be visible, helping to explain why
the man's fingers appeared so long. Since then, other scientists and physicians have confirmed the
identification of these finger and hand bones. [Accetta, A.D., "Experiments with Radiation as an Image
Formation Mechanism," Shroud of Turin International Research Conference, Richmond VA, June 18-20,
1999] Carter stated that these `images may be due at least in part to x-rays emanating from the bones in the
body.' [Carter, Ibid. p431] Scientists and physicians have identified other possible internal skeletal features
on the man in the Shroud. Dr. Jackson has noted that part of the skull at the forehead may be visible on the
man. Surgeon Alan Whanger, utilizing his modified Polarized Image Overlay Technique with the Shroud's
negative and positive images, has also identified features from the skull, as have Dr. Carter and Dr. August
Accetta. [Whanger, M. & A., "The Shroud of Turin," Providence House Publishers, Franklin TN, 1998,
pp.116-117; Carter, Ibid. p.433; Accetta, Ibid]" (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific,
Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, p.213)
7/07/2007
"Dr. Accetta, a physician, has also conducted experiments concerning radiation-imaging of skeletal and
other bodily features. Dr. Jackson and Dr. Accetta have further identified faint images of the curved and
inverted thumb under the man's left palm. [Accetta, A.D., "Experiments with Radiation as an Image
Formation Mechanism," Shroud of Turin International Research Conference, Richmond VA, June 18-20,
1999; Jackson, J.P., "An Unconventional Hypothesis to Explain All Image Characteristics Found on the
Shroud Image," in Berard, A., ed., "History, Science, Theology and the Shroud," Richard Nieman: St. Louis
MO, 1991, pp.325-344, pp. 333-335] Carter, Whanger, and Accetta have stated that images of the man's teeth
could be partially visible, especially on the right side of the man's mouth. [Carter, G.E., "Formation of the
Image on the Shroud of Turin by X Rays: A New Hypothesis," in Lambert, J.B., ed., "Archaeological
Chemistry, III," American Chemical Society: Washington DC, 1984, pp.433-434; Whanger, M. & A., "The
Shroud of Turin," Providence House Publishers, Franklin TN, 1998, pp.117-118; Dr. A. Accetta, Personal
communication, August 9, 1999]. Dr. Carter also first stated that, `Part of the backbone may be visible on the
dorsal image ...' of the man in the Shroud. [Carter, Ibid., p.433] This identification has also been confirmed by
Dr. Whanger. [Whanger, Ibid., p.118] Recently I enlisted the services of Dr. Joseph Gerard and Dr. Cheri
Ellis, who, in their profession as chiropractic physicians, make and view more X-ray images of the spinal
column than almost any other profession. After studying quality photographic negatives of the dorsal area,
they were able to specifically identify numerous vertebrae in the neck and backbone (and even a few
pedicles of the vertebrae with disc spaces prevalent). All these skeletal features lie near the surfaces of the
frontal or dorsal sides of the man in the Shroud. All are encoded correctly, and none were visible for
hundreds of years-until the development of modern technology. The existence of just some of these
features shows not only that the radiation came from the body, but that it resembled or had qualities
analogous to X rays." (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and
Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, pp.213-214)
7/07/2007
"Since we know the Shroud contained a body, the fact that both the frontal and dorsal images are contained
on the inside of it is an indication that the body wrapped within was the source of radiation. We also saw
that the reason a truly proportional three-dimensional image resulted was because the lightness or darkness
of the image on the cloth correlated to the distance that it was from the body. Since the various degrees of
the body image's lightness are all contained on the Shroud's surface, and the cloth itself received this
information indicating the corresponding distances between it and the body below, the light had to have
come from the body. In fact, all the numerous body image features, that are encoded over the entire lengths
and widths of both the frontal and dorsal body images, indicate that the radiation emanated throughout the
length and width of the body. Having studied the various features of the Shroud body image that have been
discovered since its first extensive scientific examination in 1978, physicist Kitty Little wrote: `It was already
known that the image was inside the Shroud and not on the outside. With this further examination it became
certain that the source of the illumination that had formed the image came from within-that is, from the body-
and that whatever caused it had a range of about four centimetres ... [with] the "illumination" coming from
the body as a whole.' [Little, K., "The Holy Shroud and the Miracle of the Resurrection," Christian Order,
April 1994, pp.218-231]" (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and
Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, p.214)
7/07/2007
"That the light or radiation came from the body is apparent not only from the body image surface features,
but also from the various internal or skeletal features. Normally, magnification or enlargement of the body's
bones, ligaments, and skin occurs when X rays are made. That is because the rays leave an external tube
before hitting a part of a person's body and being recorded on film. The degree of magnification will vary
with the degree of distance. For the short distances that existed between the Shroud cloth and the
underlying body, extensive magnification would have clearly been present if the source of radiation came
from outside the body. However, the Shroud's body image clearly lacks any such magnification. According
to Gerard and Ellis, this is one further indication that the source of light came from under the cloth or film-
from the body itself. [Accetta, A.D., "Experiments with Radiation as an Image Formation Mechanism,"
Shroud of Turin International Research Conference, Richmond VA, June 18-20, 1999]" (Antonacci, M.,
"The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New
York NY, 2000, pp.214-215)
8/07/2007
"At Albuquerque spectroscopy's relevance was brilliantly demonstrated by Dr. John Jackson. He took an
ordinary color photograph of the Shroud supplied to him by Father Otterbein and had this color-scanned in
Don Lynn's laboratory to isolate the simple proportions of blue, red, and green present in the different
physical features of the image. He gave all these features-the burn marks, the body images, the blood, the
hair, etc., different symbols and plotted on a graph their different color intensities compared with their
neutral densities as shown up by micro-densitometer scanning. The result was remarkable.
Spectroscopically `body,' `blood,' and burn-mark features all recorded the same intensity. Although Jackson
was the first to acknowledge that the data he was dealing with were far from ideal, the implication for future
research was self-evident-the Shroud image had pronounced similarities to a scorch. The obvious question
is how a genuine dead body, cold in the tomb, could produce some kind of burning or radiance sufficient to
scorch cloth, acting in so controlled a manner that it dissolved and fused blood flows onto the cloth, yet
created at the same time the perfect impression of a human body? The concept is mind-boggling. Yet, if the
evidence already presented for the Shroud's authenticity is to be believed, something along these lines
appears to be the only explanation." (Wilson, I., "The Turin Shroud," Book Club Associates: London, 1978,
pp.208-209. Emphasis original)
8/07/2007
"Nevertheless the impression is inescapable that, rather than a substance, some kind of force seems to have
been responsible for the image. This is suggested by the information in the 1973 commission's report that
the image affected only the topmost surface of the fibers, and whatever created it had neither seeped nor
penetrated the fibers and was insoluble and resistant to acids. Whatever formed the image was powerful
enough to project it onto the linen from a distance of up to four centimeters (according to Jumper and
Jackson), yet gentle enough not to cause distortion in areas where there would have been direct contact.
This factor is particularly obvious on the dorsal image, where the cloth would have received the full weight
of the body." (Wilson, I., "The Turin Shroud," Book Club Associates: London, 1978, pp.209-210)
8/07/2007
"The concept of a force is implicit from the manner in which the image seems to have been created with a
marked upward/downward directionality, without any diffusion, and leaving no imprint of the sides of the
body or the top of the head. Also the image-forming process seems to have shown no discrimination
between registering the body surface, the hair, the blood, and even inanimate objects-i.e., the two coins
discovered by Jackson and Jumper. All would seem to have been imprinted on the cloth with the same even
intensity, and with only the most minor color variation in the case of the blood." (Wilson, I., "The Turin
Shroud," Book Club Associates: London, 1978, p.210)
8/07/2007
"The idea, then, of some form of thermonuclear flash being the force in question is obviously more than idle
speculation. Dr. Jumper certainly treated it seriously, arguing that, as any diffusion process would have
involved penetration of the fibers, and as any remotely lingering laser beam would have caused destruction,
whatever created the image must have been some extremely high intensity, short duration burst, acting
evenly upward and downward. Thermal chemist Ray Rogers of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, who
attended the conference, said very much the same thing, using the words `flash photolysis,' and speaking of
a mere millisecond of time." (Wilson, I., "The Turin Shroud," Book Club Associates: London, 1978, p.210)
8/07/2007
"Even from the limited available information, a hypothetical glimpse of the power operating at the moment of
creation of the Shroud's image may be ventured. In the darkness of the Jerusalem tomb the dead body of
Jesus lay, unwashed, covered in blood, on a stone slab. Suddenly, there is a burst of mysterious power from
it. In that instant the blood dematerializes, dissolved perhaps by the flash, while its image and that of the
body becomes indelibly fused onto the cloth, preserving for posterity a literal `snapshot' of the
Resurrection." (Wilson, I., "The Turin Shroud," Book Club Associates: London, 1978, p.210).
9/07/2007
"Only during the Renaissance did there begin even the glimmerings of a serious interest in archaeology. In
the Middle Ages, artists usually had so little historical sense that they unhesitatingly clothed biblical
characters in the costume of the artists' own time and set them amid Gothic architecture. A typical example is
Flemish artist Dirk Bouts's Arrest of Jesus, painted about the middle of the fifteenth century. The soldiers
arresting Jesus carry a most interesting selection of weapons: a spiky mace, a halberd; a pike, and a couple
of variations on a spear-all of them thoroughly medieval. In Gerard David's The Supper at Cana, painted
about fifty years later, we are offered a fascinating tableau of contemporary tableware, costume, wall
hangings, and architecture; contemporary, that is, for David's Bruges, not for Jesus' Jerusalem. It is therefore
yet another fascinating feature of the Shroud that if its image is the work of an artist, he made no such
normal artists' mistakes. As will be recalled from the discussion in the previous chapter concerning the whip
injuries, each of these exhibits a specific, characteristic shape best described as like a dumbbell. So precise
are these markings that where they fell true they even have identical dimensions, enabling a reconstruction
of the device that theoretically originally caused them. They match the twin pellets of metal (or sometimes
bone) typically affixed to the ends of the thongs of the Roman scourge, or flagrum, a particularly brutal,
two- or three-thonged whip, of which examples have been excavated at Herculaneum. The Gospels, of
course, specifically state a scourging was carried out on Jesus. If the Shroud image is the work of an artist,
his archaeology was faultless." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986,
p.31)
9/07/2007
"A similar situation is to be found in the already noted location of the crucifixion nail in the wrist. Although,
as already discussed, the wrist has seemed medically the logical point for suspending a body from a cross,
until very recently there was no archaeological evidence to which anyone could look for independent
corroboration. Although, for slaves and rebels, crucifixion was a common enough form of execution in
antiquity, there was also a popular notion that the nails from such punishments were good for curing such
varied disorders as epilepsy and bee stings. As a result, they would seem generally to have been removed
from the body, leaving any subsequently excavated skeletons without obvious clues as to the cause of
death. Accordingly, of unusual interest in relation to the Shroud was the discovery, in 1968, of the first
known actual skeletal remains of a crucifixion victim, found during excavation of a New Testament-period
Jewish cemetery at Giv'at ha-Mivtar, just outside Jerusalem. As Israeli archaeologists opened one of this
cemetery's ossuaries, or bone boxes, the first clue confronting them was a 17-to-18-centimeter-long iron nail
transfixing the ankle bones of the skeleton of a young adult male. In a manner not dissimilar to the
controversies surrounding the Shroud, the archaeologists and anatomists interpreting this skeleton have
not agreed with each other concerning exactly how this victim was suspended on the cross. .. This is not
surprising, as Roman crucifixions are known to have varied according to the whims of the local execution
squad, St. Peter having been crucified upside down, and the legs broken of the robbers crucified with Jesus.
But what is important about the Giv'at ha-Mivtar victim is that, exactly as in the case of the man of the
Shroud, he was suspended by the wrists. An unmistakable scratch on the radius bone shows that the nail
must have been driven in at the wrist end of the radius and ulna bones, the very location favored in respect
of the Shroud by New York's Dr. Anthony Sava. And if arguments for the platform mode of ankle nailing are
accepted, then this would accord very well with the reconstruction of the foot-nailing of the man of the
Shroud suggested by Philadelphia's Dr. Joseph Gambescia." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud,"
Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.31,32)
9/07/2007
"Still in the field of archaeology, another feature of some interest is the chest wound. As already mentioned,
this has a very clear elliptical shape, and the dimensions are easily determinable: 4.4 centimeters long by
approximately 1.1 centimeters wide. Such an injury corresponds very well to what might be expected from
the Roman lancea, an elliptically bladed weapon intended for continuous use, such as by legionaries on a
garrison posting. According to investigations made by U.S. researcher Paul Maloney of the Biblical
Archaeologist, some surviving specimens of the Roman lancea, seen in cross section, match perfectly
the dimensions of the Shroud wound. It is to be noted that it is quite specifically a lancea, the Greek form
of which is logche, which the author of John's gospel describes as having been plunged into the side of
Jesus as a check that he was dead. [Jn 19:34]" (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing:
London, 1986, pp.32-33)
10/07/2007
"With all this in mind, Adler and I began a gedankenexperiment [thought-experiment] to see what would be
required of an artist. As mentioned earlier, you cannot see the man in the Shroud unless you are one or two
meters away. An artist cannot paint if he cannot see what effect his brush is producing. Our putative artist,
then, must have had a paintbrush one to two meters long. It must have consisted of a single bristle, since it
painted single fibrils that were 10 to 15 microns in diameter. The finest paintbrush bristles I know of are
sable, and a sable hair is vast in diameter compared with a linen fibril. In addition, the artist would have had
to figure out a paint medium that had no oil or water, because there were no indications of capillarity. Now,
to see what he was painting he would have needed a microscope with an enormous focal length that would
permit the brush to operate under it. The physics of optics preclude such a device, unless it is attached to a
television set. In this case, it would have had to be a color TV, for the straw-yellow is too faint to register on
black and white. Another constraint the artist must have-dealt with is the limit of the human nervous system.
No one can hold so long a brush steady enough to paint the top of a fibril. One would need a twentieth-
century micromanipulator, which would have to work hydraulically at a distance of one to two meters. It
would have to be rigged to a device called a waldo, which is an invention of the atomic era. Also, the artist
would have to know how many fibrils to paint quantitatively, and do the whole thing in reverse, like a
negative." (Heller, J.H., "Report on the Shroud of Turin," Houghton Mifflin Co: Boston MA, 1983, p.202)
11/07/2007
"If this facet is hotly debated, so is the presence of yet another item of surface debris, the pollen, as
collected by Dr Frei. It was in 1973, on his being invited to Turin to notarise the genuineness of colour
photographs of the Shroud taken in 1969, that Frei happened to notice the amount of dust on the cloth's
surface, and asked if he could take some sticky-tape samples of this. His request was granted and Frei took
twelve tapes of this kind, which he studied under the microscope in his Zurich laboratory. As Frei expected,
the tapes bore microscopic debris from the very same cross-section of materials we have just discussed -
e.g. ash, metal fragments, fabric fragments. But what he was particularly looking for, because as a botanist
by training it was the area of his greatest expertise, were grains of pollen. For as he knew, every pollen grain,
although so minute, has a very hard outer shell, the exine, which can survive literally tens of thousands of
years. And as he also knew, each grain differs quite markedly from the next according to the type of plant it
has come from. This means that if you can identify the type of plant from which a pollen has originated you
can tell at least something of the terrain in which it grew, be it temperate, desert or tropical. In his
criminological work Frei routinely used analysis of pollen on a suspect's clothing to assess whether he
might or might not have been at a particular scene of crime. But with the Shroud, if he could make a really
thorough analysis of its pollens, then he might be able to throw some light on the different terrain to which it
had been exposed in the course of its history. Thus, if its pollens were only of flora typical of France and
Italy, the only two countries within which it has moved during its known history from the fourteenth century
to our own time, then of course this would suggest that it had never been outside those countries, strongly
reinforcing the argument for it having been forged. Conversely, if pollens from more Eastern climes were
found, while this would not prove the Shroud genuine, it would at least show that the forger, in addition to
all his other `cunning', went to the lengths of obtaining a non-European piece of cloth for his purpose."
(Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon &
Schuster: New York NY, 1998, pp.98-99. Emphasis original)
11/07/2007
"As Frei painstakingly manipulated the tiny pollens to facilitate studying them under the microscope, he
evolved certain important rules for himself. For instance, he needed to be careful not to impart any
significance to the finding of something like cedar of Lebanon pollen. This tree has been planted in far too
many European parks and gardens for it and others like it to be regarded as having any significance. But as
he steadily identified one pollen after another, many of these either of native European varieties, or popular
imports, so there began emerging certain specimens that had to be of import ... . In particular, he found
himself identifying pollens from halophytes, that is, from plants typical of the desert regions around the
Jordan valley and specifically adapted to live in soils with the high salt content found almost exclusively
around the Dead Sea. In his own words: `These plants are of great diagnostic value for our geographical
studies as identical desert plants are missing in all the other countries where the Shroud is believed to have
been exposed to the open air. Consequently a forgery, produced somewhere in France during the Middle
Ages in a country lacking these typical halophytes, could not contain such characteristic pollen grains from
the desert regions of Palestine.' [Frei, M., Report to film producer David Rolfe, January 1977]" (Wilson, I.,
"The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster:
New York NY, 1998, pp.99-100. Emphasis original)
11/07/2007
"Frei also found pollens from plants that he identified as indicating that the Shroud had spent some time in a
terrain with steppe-plan vegetation. This seemed to suggest to him Turkey, and particularly the more
easterly parts of the Anatolian region. However, in order to assemble a really conclusive argument to pin-
point the Shroud to these places Frei needed more data, as a result of which he made a second sticky-tape
sampling during the 1978 examination, followed by five more years of researches, including field trips to
Turkey and Israel, all with the aim of publishing a fully definitive book on his findings. Then, in January 1983
he died, before being able to complete any of this." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence
that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.100)
11/07/2007
"Working alongside Frei in 1978, they [STURP] observed with no little horror his seemingly amateurish
method of obtaining sticky-tape samples. Unlike the pressure-sensitive `torque applicator' and specially
formulated Mylar tape that they had brought with them from the USA ... Frei, ... took out of his pocket the
sort of Scotch tape dispenser that can be purchased in any supermarket and proceeded to press pieces from
this into the Shroud with what seemed quite inordinate vigour ... . When it came to the examination of their
sticky tapes, the STURP team found that on all the thirty-four they had taken there was but one pollen, from
a ragweed which grows in considerable profusion around Turin. So how had Frei managed to collect so
many specimens on his mere twelve tapes? ... whereas STURP's specially formulated Mylar sticky tape
proved unsuitable for microscopic use because of its anisotropic characteristics, this was not the case with
Frei's 'dime-store' variety. Also, whereas the STURP torque applicator extracted so little pollen precisely
because of its scientifically controlled light pressure, Frei, the professional criminologist, quite deliberately
pressed his thumb hard into the linen in order to obtain the most deep-seated, and thereby arguably most
original, materials. That Frei genuinely obtained hundreds of pollens with this `amateurish' method is
beyond doubt. When in July 1988, thanks to the generous cooperation of his widow Gertrud, his collection
was acquired by the US-based pro-Shroud group ASSIST [Association of Scientists and Scholars
International for the Shroud of Turin], Dr Walter McCrone was invited to attend a special workshop of
study of the pollen at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, chaired by the Academy's head of
botany, Dr Benjamin Stone. All present at this meeting were able to view what was on each slide via a
microscope specially linked to two video monitors, and not only did there emerge on these much of the same
detritus as on the STURP tapes, but also hundreds of pollens. ASSIST's Paul Maloney, who subsequently
attempted to inventorise these, observed: `For example on the tape which Frei took from the bloodflow from
the heel I have made a quick count of at least seven pollen. And seven were found in a quick count of the
tape from the bloodflow across the back. But such quick counts do not really tell the story. My nearly
completed photo inventory of a tape from the dorsal 'side-strip', and the one from the bloodflow down the
anatomical left arm, holds more than 160, and one from near the forehead of the man of the Shroud shows
more than 275 pollen. [Maloney, P., "The Current Status of Pollen Research and Prospects for the Future,"
Symposium Scientifique International sur le Linceul de Turin' 7-8 September 1989, p.10]" (Wilson, I., "The
Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New
York NY, 1998, pp.101,103)
11/07/2007
"As Walter McCrone, for-one, was bound to concede, Max Frei had quite genuinely obtained the pollen he
claimed. The one serious question raised by professional pollen analysts was whether he really could make
the identification of the individual grains down to species level that he appeared to have done in a list of
fifty-eight different plant species, all apparently identified by him, as published by an associate after his
death.... Dr Oliver Rackham of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, although not a pollen analyst himself,
works with them and knows their methods. He has commented to me of this list: `Conventional pollen
analysts can make most identifications only to genus (e.g. Pistacia), or even to family (Chenopodiaccae).
They use terms like 'Ranunculus-type' or `Quercus-cerris-type' for a group of species, all with the same
type of pollen, for which no closer identification is possible. Of Dr Frei's fifty-eight identifications, fifty-six
are to species; only twice does he identify no more closely than to a genus, and he never uses the `-type'
expression. I am suspicious of such great precision of identification. If it is true, then Frei made a very
considerable advance at the frontier of what palynology is capable of doing. Maybe he did, but he never
explained how he did it. Species, rather than genus or family, identifications are crucial to his argument.'
[Rackham, O., Letter to John Ray of Selwyn College, Cambridge, 19 October 1996]. What is known of Max
Frei is that his as yet unpublished manuscript ... includes description by him of a special procedure that he
had developed for removing pollen grains from sticky tapes, apparently enabling him to study individual
specimens in much greater detail, and with much greater ease, than had hitherto been possible. ... Also
worth noting is that the leading Israeli pollen analyst Dr Aharon Horowitz, having studied Frei's list of Israel
plant pollens, has expressed his view that the list convincingly established that the Shroud must have been
in Israel some time in its history. Dr Avinoam Danin of the Hebrew University's Department of Botany has
even pointed to the Shroud pollen demonstrating an itinerary from Israel's Negev desert northwards to the
Lebanon highlands. [Private correspondence between Paul Maloney and Horowitz and Danin]" (Wilson, I.,
"The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster:
New York NY, 1998, pp.103-104. Emphasis original)
11/07/2007
"It is quite certain that the figures on the Shroud are not paintings of the 14th Century. There are many
representations of Christ, notably the image of Edessa which could have been derived only from the Shroud.
A careful study of these copies, which I completed recently, shows that the present Shroud of Turin was in
Constantinople during the 12th Century, and that the face visible upon it served as a model for artists as
early as the 5th. The artists did not copy slavishly, but tried to interpret the face; translating the mask-like
features into a living portrait, which was still recognizable copy of the original. This disposes of the only
positive objection ever brought forward in the name of history." (Vignon, P., "The problem of the Holy
Shroud," Scientific American, Vol. 156, 1937, pp.162-164, p.162)
11/07/2007
"The figures on the Shroud, in fact, are not paintings at all. As already stated, they are negative images; and
the idea of a negative became known only through the invention of photography in the 19th Century. No
artist of any earlier period, therefore, (certainly none of the 14th Century and, above all, none before the 5th),
could have conceived the idea of painting a negative. The figures, moreover, are very exact negatives.
When they are photographed, they appear on the film with the natural proportions of a full-grown man, with
a true perspective, with a noble, impressive countenance, and with a minute fidelity to nature even in minor
details. Each one of these points involves principles of science and of art which were unknown or poorly
grasped until comparatively modern times. It is hard enough to carry out these principles in an ordinary
positive painting, in which the lights and shades have their normal values. On the Shroud, they are perfectly
illustrated with the lights and shades reversed, though it takes a photograph to reveal the fact. Even today
no artist can paint so exact a negative. No artist, in fact, has yet succeeded in making an exact copy of the
negative figures on the Shroud, though competent artists have made the attempt." (Vignon, P., "The
problem of the Holy Shroud," Scientific American, Vol. 156, 1937, pp.162-164, p.162)
11/07/2007
"Our hypothetical artist obviously must have used blood - both pre-mortem and post-mortem. And he had
to paint with serum albumin alongside the edges of the scourge marks. Since serum albumin is visible only
under ultraviolet, not white light, he had to paint with an invisible medium. If an artist had painted the
Shroud, the blood must have been put on after the images. We decided to check that point. We took some
blood- and serum-covered fibrils from a body image area. If the images were there before the blood, and if we
removed the blood, we could expect to see straw-yellow image fibers. We prepared a mixture of enzymes that
digest blood and its proteins. When all the blood and protein were gone, the underlying fibrils were not
straw-yellow; they were ordinary background fibrils. This was strong evidence that the blood had gone on
before the images. It suggested that blood had protected the linen from the image-making process. Surely
this was a weird way to paint a picture." (Heller, J.H., "Report on the Shroud of Turin," Houghton Mifflin Co:
Boston MA, 1983, pp.202-203)
11/07/2007
"Finally, I told Adler that, ignoring whatever artistic method might have been used, the artist would have
had to crucify somebody to get the pathophysiology just right. Emperor Constantine had outlawed
crucifixion in the fourth century. Western and Byzantine art depictions of crucifixions are medically
incorrect. Our presumptive artist, however, knew what was correct, and outside of crucifying a few people to
get the anatomy and pathophysiology right, he could hardly have come by this arcane knowledge. I
recognize that human capability can incise a page of text on the head of a pin, that Michelangelo painted the
Sistine Chapel, probably on his back by candlelight, and that man can accomplish extraordinary works of
genius. But these works have to be within the limits set by the laws of physics and chemistry. How could a
man create reversed, monochrome images with numerical data encoded with acid or heat?" (Heller, J.H.,
"Report on the Shroud of Turin," Houghton Mifflin Co: Boston MA, 1983, pp.203-204)
12/07/2007
"The idea that the Shroud is a primitive photograph was further explored by Nicholas Allen, dean of the
Faculty of Art and Design at Port Elizabeth Technikon, in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Allen proposed that
the Shroud could have been created in the fourteenth century by an artist who used: (1) rock crystal; (2)
silver salts; and (3) salt of ammonia (found in urine), all of which would have been available at the time. In
his article entitled `Verification of the Nature and Causes of the Photo-negative Images on the Shroud of
Lirey-Chambery-Turin' he argued that the Shroud `could have been' produced by a form of primitive
photography. This `hypothetical photographic technique,' Allen insisted `... is the only plausible
explanation for the image formation on the Shroud ... and indicates that people in the late thirteenth and
fourteenth century were indeed privy to a photographic technology which was previously thought to be
unknown.' The South-African scholar constructed a device known as a camera obscura. The size of a
typical living room, it was built so that no light could get in except through a small opening for a rock crystal
lens. He closed this opening and prepared a cloth made to the same dimensions of the Shroud, and, folding
it once across its width and soaking it in light-sensitive silver nitrate, hung it up inside the camera
obscura fifteen feet from the lens. When the cloth dried it became a sort of unexposed film. Next he made a
plastic cast of a living man of roughly the same size and shape of the man of the Shroud. Allen then
suspended the statue in the sunlight fifteen feet in front of the lens. His object was to project the image of
the statue through the lens onto the cloth. After several days the reflection of the statue imprinted a
negative onto the cloth. Allen then closed his improvised shutter and turned the statue around so that the
back faced the lens, which he opened for several more days in order to create a front and back image similar
to that of the Shroud. So that the negative would not fade from exposure to light, Allen washed it in a
solution of ammonia salts. Although the process devised by Professor Allen produced an image with many
characteristics of that of the Shroud of Turin, some have questioned whether it really could have been
carried out in the Middle Ages. Wilson questioned whether medieval artists could have created a body cast
of the quality devised by Allen, and why, if they could, someone would have gone to the trouble and
expense to produce a negative image that could not be fully appreciated - even to its creator - for another
five centuries and at a time when `a large proportion of the populace would have been very easily duped by
a feather of the Archangel Gabriel or a phial of the last breath of St. Joseph?' [Wilson, I., "The Blood and the
Shroud," 1998, pp.59-60] Isabel Piczek rejected Allen's hypothesis. First of all, she argued, the camera
obscura that figured prominently in both the theories of Allen and of Picknett and Prince was not a
primitive photo camera, but a device used by artists to aid in representing buildings and open space in
perspective. Although it was used by the Greeks and the Romans, it was not used in the Middle Ages.
While Allen argued that all the materials needed for making a photograph were available by the thirteenth
century, Piczek pointed out that at the time the chemical properties of silver nitrate were unknown, and there
was no knowledge of optics `or the properties of light employing a bi-convex, finely ground quartz lens.' The
medieval photographer would have had to know the properties of ultraviolet radiation `before
electromagnetism was known at all' and he would have had to known how to stabilize his image through the
use of ammonia. Since it was unlikely that medieval technicians could produce a body cast of the quality
Allen devised, a real corpse would have been required, and would have to hang in the sun for fourteen
days. Piczek pointed out that the image on the Shroud is of a corpse in a state of rigor mortis and the fact is
that `corpses do not maintain rigor mortis [and] cannot hang fourteen days in the sun, or else you would not
care to see what the camera obscura would bring in onto your canvas,' [Piczek, I., "Alice in Wonderland
and the Shroud of Turin?," Holy Shroud Seminar Retreat at Mount Esopus, New York, August 24, 1996, pp.
8-9] (Ruffin, C.B., "The Shroud of Turin: The Most Up-To-Date Analysis of All the Facts Regarding the Church's
Controversial Relic," Our Sunday Visitor: Huntington IN, 1999, pp.140-142)
12/07/2007
"Yet none of this, of course, means that the Shroud cannot be the work of a `cunning' mediaeval forger.
Perhaps, whoever he was, this individual enjoyed such power that he could arrange for a six-foot man,
possibly some prisoner, to be crucified in the exact manner of Jesus Christ? Perhaps he was able to obtain
authentic ancient weaponry for the carrying out of details such as the scourging? Perhaps, given that Jews
were well established throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, he knew the special burial requirements
that pertained to those of this religion who had died a bloody death and arranged for an all-enveloping cloth
accordingly? Of course, even if he had managed all this, how he managed to get the image onto the cloth
still remains unexplained. Also is it not rather incredible that this unknown individual should have gone to
so much trouble and effort to deceive in an age in which, as twentieth-century journalists have reminded us,
a large proportion of the populace would have been very easily duped by a feather of the Archangel Gabriel
or a phial of the last breath of St Joseph?" (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the
World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, pp.58-60)
12/07/2007
"camera obscura ... ancestor of the photographic camera. The Latin name means `dark chamber,' and the
earliest versions, dating to antiquity, consisted of small darkened rooms with light admitted through a single
tiny hole. The result was that an inverted image of the outside scene was cast on the opposite wall, which
was usually whitened. For centuries the technique was used for viewing eclipses of the Sun without
endangering the eyes and, by the 16th century, as an aid to drawing; the subject was posed outside and the
image reflected on a piece of drawing paper for the artist to trace. Portable versions were built, followed by
smaller and even pocket models; the interior of the box was painted black and the image reflected by an
angled mirror so that it could be viewed right side up. The introduction of a light-sensitive plate by J.-N.
Niepce created photography." ("camera obscura," Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Accessed 12 July 2007)
12/07/2007
"photography, history of: antecedents ... The forerunner of the camera was the camera obscura, a dark
chamber or room with a hole (later a lens) in one wall, through which images of objects outside the room
were projected on the opposite wall. The principle was probably known to the Chinese and to ancient
Greeks such as Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago. Late in the 16th century, the Italian scientist and writer
Giambattista della Porta demonstrated and described in detail the use of a camera obscura with a lens. While
artists in subsequent centuries commonly used variations on the camera obscura to create images they
could trace, the results from these devices depended on the artist's drawing skills, and so scientists
continued to search for a method to reproduce images completely mechanically. In 1727 the German
professor of anatomy Johann Heinrich Schulze proved that the darkening of silver salts, a phenomenon
known since the 16th century and possibly earlier, was caused by light and not heat. He demonstrated the
fact by using sunlight to record words on the salts, but he made no attempt to preserve the images
permanently. His discovery, in combination with the camera obscura, provided the basic technology
necessary for photography. It was not until the early 19th century, however, that photography actually
came into being. ("photography, history of: antecedents," Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Accessed 12
July 2007)
12/07/2007
"The Camera-Obscura Theory In 1995 a theory that the Shroud image might have been created through
the application of an early, crude form of photography known as camera-obscura - supposed to have been
utilised in the Middle Ages - was tested by Professor Nicholas Allen, a dean of the Faculty of Art and
Design at the Port Elizabeth Technikon in South Africa. [Allen, N., "Verification of the nature and causes of
the photo-negative images on the Shroud of Lirey-Chambery-Turin, De Arte, April 1995, pp.31-34] Allen
knew that the image on the Shroud was not a painting, and was aware that in medieval Europe, Italy in
particular, there existed knowledge of the use of quartz for making lenses for magnification purposes. He
was also aware that at that time there was knowledge of silver salts, which had the properties required for
converting into light-sensitive chemicals. To test his theory Allen constructed a camera obscura in the form
of a room that was totally dark except for an aperture in the front wall, in which he set a type of rock-crystal
lens that he believed could have existed in the Middle Ages. He soaked a shroud-like cloth in light-sensitive
silver nitrate, folded it in half across the middle, and installed it vertically in the middle of the room, some 5
metres from the aperture, while it was closed. For the subject to be `photographed' he made a plaster cast
from a naked and bearded male life-model who had stood in a death-like pose, as similar as possible to that
of the man of the Shroud. He suspended the plaster cast vertically in full sunlight, about 5 metres in front of
the aperture outside the room, having precalculated that at this distance from the lens the subject's image
would be exposed on the light-sensitive cloth life-size and upside-down. He opened the aperture and kept it
open for several days, during which the plaster cast remained exposed to sunlight. The result was a
`negative' exposure of the front of the cast-image on the cloth. To produce a double image, front and back,
he repeated the process, closing the aperture, turning both the plaster cast and the folded cloth around,
then opening the aperture for several more days. To complete his experiment he had the cloth washed in a
solution of ammonia salts to remove the silver salts, thus `fixing' the exposures. The entire experiment was
conducted according to his hypothesis that he had replicated a form of photography believed to have been
known in some scientific circles in medieval Europe." (Whiting, B., "The Shroud Story," Harbour Publishing:
Strathfield NSW, Australia, 2006, pp.158-160. Emphasis original)
12/07/2007
"The result was images which bore a number of similarities to the Shroud image when viewed by the naked
eye. The cloth had developed a straw-yellow discoloration of its surface fibrils, and faint evidence of an
image of the plaster-cast was apparent when the cloth was viewed from about 2 metre's distance. The most
telling effect became evident when he photographed his cloth with a modern camera, using black-and-white
film, and examined the negative. It revealed a `positive' image of the subject. While his experiment might
have supported his conclusion, `that people in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century were privy to a
photographic technology which was previously thought to be unknown before the beginning of the
nineteenth century' [Allen, N., "Verification of the nature and causes of the photo-negative images on the
Shroud of Lirey-Chambery-Turin, De Arte, April 1995, pp.31-34, p.34], it would be an extreme
interpretation of his work for him or anyone to claim that the Shroud images could have been created in a
similar way. Not only would it have required the procurement of a Jewish male corpse, crucified in the same
way as Jesus, with the nail and lance wounds, and for it to be suspended for several days in sunshine,
facing the aperture, then for several days more with its back facing the aperture, without displaying any sign
of decay, and also produce subtle photographic details, like scourge wounds and bloodstains, all from a
total distance of 10 metres. To have fulfilled such onerous requirements is beyond belief. Yet, in attempting
to dispel disbelief that the Shroud image could have been formed in this way Allen wrote: `The stigmata and
other areas of the blood of the Shroud were probably added with the aid of a paintbrush and real blood, after
the negative image had been obtained'. This was not possible, for the simple reason that scientists have
discovered there are no signs of any body image beneath the bloodstains, meaning that the blood wounds
penetrated the fibres before the image appeared on the cloth. With all photography the choice of film and
the purity of the developing emulsions define the degree of sharpness and clarity of a photographic image.
The fact that no museum or library in the world possesses a medieval camera-obscura photograph or even a
crude pre-1800 photograph is sufficient evidence that no one had produced one before the invention of
photography." (Whiting, B., "The Shroud Story," Harbour Publishing: Strathfield NSW, Australia, 2006,
pp.160-161)
13/07/2007
"It is obvious from the chart that painting or application of some foreign substance appeared to be the
least likely explanation for the Shroud image. An artist could have painted a negative image, and it is
possible that he used materials that would be stable over time and stable in water. Although it is highly
unlikely, perhaps he could have applied pigment or dye with such fine brush strokes that computer analysis
could not detect the pattern of his hand movements. On all other counts, however, the forgery theory falls
short. Pigment would have penetrated past the superficial layers of the fibers. An artist could not have
painted the image in such detail, paint would have been noticeably affected by the 1532 fire, and an artist
could not have encoded three-dimensional information in his picture. Most paints would not be stable in
heat and chemical solvents." (Stevenson, K.E.* & Habermas, G.R.*, "Verdict on the Shroud: Evidence for the
Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ," Servant Books: Ann Arbor MI, 1981, pp.67,69. Emphasis original)
13/07/2007
"Another theory which did not seem to fit scientific observations is that of direct contact with the body.
It had been suggested that the Shroud image was caused by a chemical reaction between the cloth and a
real corpse in a real tomb, or by a clever forger who threw a cloth over a corpse, a treated statue, or a hot
statue. An image produced by direct contact could have been directionless, stable in water, formed without
pigment (if it was not forged), and possibly negative in nature. But a contact image would have been grossly
distorted. You can verify this by smearing your face with charcoal and then pressing a cloth against it. The
resulting image will not be a recognizable representation of your face. It certainly will not contain any three-
dimensional information or the kind of detail the Shroud image contains. Neither would a direct contact
image be a superficial image, and it also seemed to be eliminated on the same chemical and thermal grounds
as a pigment or dye forgery; the organic molecules which would compose such an image would have been
noticeably affected by the fire in 1532. Furthermore, every attempt to experimentally create an acceptable
image by the use of direct contact between a body or statue has failed. It seemed to be impossible to create
an acceptable impression of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface." (Stevenson, K.E.* &
Habermas, G.R.*, "Verdict on the Shroud: Evidence for the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ," Servant
Books: Ann Arbor MI, 1981, p.69. Emphasis original)
13/07/2007
"Paul Vignon's vaporgraph theory suffers from most of the same weaknesses as forgery and direct
contact: Vignon, one will recall, suggested that the body projected an image of itself onto the Shroud by a
chemical reaction between ammonia in the body sweat and a mixture of aloes and olive oil on the burial
shroud. But an image formed this way would have reacted in some noticeable way to the fire and water of
the 1532 fire. Neither would a vaporgraph image be superficial, detailed, or three-dimensional." (Stevenson,
K.E.* & Habermas, G.R.*, "Verdict on the Shroud: Evidence for the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ,"
Servant Books: Ann Arbor MI, 1981, pp.69-70. Emphasis original)
13/07/2007
"A combination of effects such as direct contact and vapors would not account for the image either. Eric
Jumper conducted experiments to test this hypothesis, and found the results unacceptable .l2 He said that
the direct-contact/vapor process did not produce any clear image at all. Jumper also found that the stain
produced in his experiments penetrated the entire thread of the linen samples, and was therefore not
superficial. There is also the matter of the objects which appear to lie on the eyes of the man in the Shroud.
If the image was caused by vapors, how were the images of coins formed? Finally, such a combination
would still not yield a three-dimensional image either." (Stevenson, K.E.* & Habermas, G.R.*, "Verdict on the
Shroud: Evidence for the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ," Servant Books: Ann Arbor MI, 1981,
p.69. Emphasis original)
13/07/2007
"Enter the scorch theory. This hypothesis was first advanced in 1966 by Geoffrey Ashe, a British author
who produced an image resembling that of the Shroud by exposing a piece of linen to radiant heat. [Ashe,
G., "What Sort of Picture?" Sindon, 1966, pp. 15-19 ] To the naked eye, the experimental scorch of a piece
of linen seemed to resemble the color of the image on the Shroud. The Shroud image is sepia-colored; sepia
is the color of linen when it undergoes the first stages of burning. John Jackson, the Air Force physicist,
realized that a ready-made test of the scorch hypothesis lay close at hand. The Shroud had been burned and
scorched in the fire in 1532. If the color of the image areas of the Shroud resembled the color of the scorched
areas, that would be an indication that the image might be a scorch. This, in fact, is what Jackson found
when he analyzed a color photograph of the Shroud with a microdensitometer, an instrument that measures
the densities of an image on a photographic film or plate. The instrument could detect no differences
between the color of the Shroud image and the color of scorched areas. This suggested that the image on
the Shroud could well be some kind of a scorch. Jackson pointed out that he used a photograph, not the
Shroud itself, and that the photograph had not been taken for scientific purposes. Thus his findings had to
be tentative until more exact scientific studies could be conducted. [Jackson, J.P., "Color Analysis of the Turin
Shroud: A Preliminary Study," in Stevenson, K.E.*, ed., "Proceedings of the 1977 United States Conference
on the Shroud of Turin," Holy Shroud Guild: Bronx NY, 1977, pp. 190-195] Nevertheless, the scorch
hypothesis became the most likely theory of how the image on the Shroud was formed. At the scientific
conference in 1977, Ray Rogers summed up the arguments for a scorch. He noted Jackson's finding that the
color of the image area resembled the color of the heat damaged area. He pointed out that the image seemed
to exist only on one side of the cloth. He cited another factor: the image density seemed to be related to the
distance between the body and the cloth-the famous three-dimensional quality of the image. All this, Rogers
said, suggests `rapid heating as the cause of the image.' He said that if future testing did not identify any
pigment on the cloth, and if no one found an organic stain that could have stained the cloth naturally, then
the scorch theory was the only hypothesis left." (Stevenson, K.E.* & Habermas, G.R.*, "Verdict on the
Shroud: Evidence for the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ," Servant Books: Ann Arbor MI, 1981,
pp.70-71. Emphasis original)
13/07/2007
"Eric Jumper, another Air Force physicist, thought that if the Shroud had been scorched, it would have to
have been a very short burst of high energy radiation. He and John Jackson ran some experiments in which
they scorched pieces of linen with lasers. Within a short time, an image appeared on the reverse side of the
cloth almost as dark as the one on the front. Jumper thought that this ruled out any plausible forgery using a
scorch. A forger could have heated a bronze statue or a flat plate and thrown a piece of linen over it, but the
image this process produced would also be present on the back of the cloth. By contrast, their experiments
showed that the radiation process would have to be very quick and very intense in order to scorch only the
topmost layer of the linen fibers. [Jumper, E., "Considerations of Molecular Diffusion and Radiation as an
Image Formation Process on the Shroud," in Stevenson, K.E.*, ed., "Proceedings of the 1977 United States
Conference on the Shroud of Turin," Holy Shroud Guild: Bronx NY, 1977, p.187]" (Stevenson, K.E.* &
Habermas, G.R.*, "Verdict on the Shroud: Evidence for the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ," Servant
Books: Ann Arbor MI, 1981, pp.71-72)
13/07/2007
"John Jackson pointed out another problem with various theories of image formation. Employing
sophisticated mathematical analysis, he showed that no reasonable physical mechanism could produce an
image which was both three-dimensional and highly detailed. To achieve clarity, three-dimensionality had
to be sacrificed. To produce an image that contained three dimensional data, the image would not have been
as detailed as the Shroud image is. Jackson thought his findings made it unlikely that the Shroud image was
formed by some natural process involving diffusion of chemicals. He also said that a simple scorch caused
by exposing the cloth to thermal radiation could not have produced a clear three-dimensional image either.
However, Jackson said a scorch was still a possible explanation for the image because it could have been
caused in some way other than by thermal radiation. [Jackson, J.P., "Problem of Resolution Posed by the
Existence of a Three-Dimensional Image on the Shroud," in Stevenson, K.E.*, ed., "Proceedings of the 1977
United States Conference on the Shroud of Turin," Holy Shroud Guild: Bronx NY, 1977, pp. 223-33]"
(Stevenson, K.E.* & Habermas, G.R.*, "Verdict on the Shroud: Evidence for the Death and Resurrection of
Jesus Christ," Servant Books: Ann Arbor MI, 1981, p.72. Emphasis original)
13/07/2007
"These pre-1978 scientific studies of the Shroud seemed to be identifying a mystery. The scorch theory
seemed to be the most plausible hypothesis for the formation of the image. But, if the image is a scorch, then
it is unique. Scientists could not explain how the Shroud could have been scorched this way. Hence, while
the scorch theory seemed to be the best, it was not totally without problems. The most significant of these
problems was the absence of a natural formation process. However, since there are still many energy forms
that are not yet fully understood, the issue was not closed. Nevertheless, scorch would account for the vast
majority of the known characteristics of the Shroud image much better than any other theory. (Stevenson,
K.E.* & Habermas, G.R.*, "Verdict on the Shroud: Evidence for the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ,"
Servant Books: Ann Arbor MI, 1981, p.72)
13/07/2007
"In particular, in the wake of the findings of Drs. Heller and Adler, intensified efforts have been made to try
to understand what might have been responsible for the observed cellulose-degradation-type character of
the image. Back in 1978, arising from firsthand observations of the Shroud body image's similarity to some of
the scorches from the 1532 fire, there was much discussion that the image might have been created by a
scorch, perhaps from some searing flash of light at the very moment of Jesus' Resurrection. During the
1970s, an English author, Geoffrey Ashe, had created Shroud-like scorch pictures by applying a heated
brass ornament to damp linen. But, as established by the 1978 ultraviolet fluorescence photography, there is
a marked qualitative difference between the body image and the scorches. The 1532 fire scorches fluoresce
red when irradiated with ultraviolet light, whereas the body images do not." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of
the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.125-126)
13/07/2007
"But as Dr. Jackson demonstrated, the Shroud image is three-dimensionally `consistent with a body shape
covered with a naturally draping cloth and which can be derived from a single, global mapping function
relating image shading with distance between these two surfaces.' [Jackson, J.P. & Ercoline, W.R., "The
Three-Dimensional Characteristics of the Shroud Image," IEEE 1982 Proceedings of the International
Conference on Cybernetics and Society, October 1982, p.573] In short, though none of the Shroud
opponents would willingly concede this point, the three-dimensional effect is the Waterloo for all artistic
theories. That same effect has been scientifically demonstrated and subjected to the best peer review. And it
still stands. Also, this same characteristic proves to be the acid test for all the image formation theories Dr.
Jackson tried regardless of how well they met or failed to meet the other known Shroud image
characteristics. A catalog of ruled-out theories includes the following: direct contact, diffusion, lab-induced
radiation from a body shape, engraving, powdered bas-reliefs, electrostatic imaging, phosphorescent
statues, hot statues or hot bas-reliefs." (Stevenson, K.E.* & Habermas, G.R.*, "The Shroud and the
Controversy," Thomas Nelson: Nashville TN, 1990, pp.32-33)
13/07/2007
"The last theory, hot bas-relief, has been advanced as the solution to the Shroud question by a relative
newcomer to sindonology, Father Robert A. Wild, S.J. In his Biblical Archaeology Review article, Father
Wild incorrectly asserted that statue-scorching is rejected only because of the problem of burn through and
that such a technique would be three-dimensional like the Shroud: `Those who reject the "scorching" theory
argue that a statue, when heated enough to scorch a piece of cloth will burn holes in the fabric where raised
portions like the nose touch it. If the scorching theory is correct, we would have to reply that modern
experimenters-and there have not been many-have simply not yet mastered a technique that was available to
some medieval craftsman.' [Wild, R.A., "The Shroud of Turin: Probably the Work of a 14th-Century Artist or
Forger," Biblical Archaeology Review, Vol. 10, No. 2, March/April 1984, p.46] Not only do these remarks
show little understanding of the issues involved an confirming any Shroud hypothesis, but they do a great
disservice to the many sindonologists who have attempted various scorching mechanisms since 1978. ...
Nevertheless, statue-scorching is one scorch theory that cannot be accepted. It fails in regard to three-
dimensionality, fluorescence, and a host of other difficulties. One researcher summarized the problems this
way: `Jackson has done both theoretical and experimental work to address three-dimensional hot-statue
hypotheses. He found that a simple isotropic radiation source could not yield the observed Shroud-image
shading and resolution ... (even allowing attenuation) the resulting directionality of the radiation would
introduce an unacceptable distortion of the image... ." [Schwalbe, L.A. & Rogers, R.N., "Physics and
Chemistry of the Shroud of Turin: A Summary of the 1978 Investigation," Elsevier Scientific Publishing Co:
Amsterdam, 1982, p.28] The conclusion, at least in so far as known forms of scorching are concerned,
brings the entire "scorch" theory into question. (Stevenson, K.E.* & Habermas, G.R.*, "The Shroud and the
Controversy," Thomas Nelson: Nashville TN, 1990, pp.33-34. Emphasis original)
13/07/2007
"But while we are still considering the Shroud as the work of an artist, we should also take account of the
idea that rather than using a paintbrush the mediaeval faker may cleverly have deployed some life-sized
statue of Jesus in a manner so as to transfer its image to a piece of linen. Professor Hall, while generally
shunning taking a serious interest in how the Shroud's image might have been made, told me during our July
1988 meeting in Oxford that the one idea he did favour was this so-called `hot statue' theory. The simple
principle behind this is that a forger heated a metal statue of Jesus, then quickly wrapped a length of plain
linen around it, thereby scorching the `body' image onto it rather in the manner of a branding iron. It is an
idea that has circulated for some while, having been demonstrated as early as the 1970s by the English
author Geoffrey Ashe [Ashe, G., "What Sort of Picture," Sindon, 1966, pp.15-19], who for his 'statue'
simply heated a brass ornament (one used to decorate the trappings of horses) and applied it to a piece of
linen he had dampened. Even though the effect, home-spun as it was, was far from totally convincing, it was
actually rather more Shroud-like than anything we have seen from either McCrone or Craig and Bresee. Even
so the `hot statue' theory suffers from the serious problem that it demands the existence, back in the
fourteenth century, of a life-size, anatomically convincing and totally nude statue of a recumbent Jesus,
made in metal, that someone managed to heat to just the right temperature and manipulate so that a
fourteen-foot length of linen could be wrapped all round it. ... None the less even if we could accept that a
mediaeval sculptor had created such a statue, in doing so he would then have had to paint in the wounds
not with whole blood, but in the mode of bloodclot transfers - so realistically that they fooled dozens of
twentieth-century doctors and pathologists. And this is aside from all his other accuracies and the evidence
we have seen for the existence of something like our Shroud well before the Middle Ages. Further
contradicting any such `scorch' theory is the fact that the STURP team's ultraviolet fluorescence
photography of 1978 revealed that whereas the cloth's scorches from the 1532 fire fluoresce red when
irradiated with ultraviolet light, the body images do not. This argues strongly against the Shroud's body
image having been created in some conventional scorch-like manner." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the
Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998,
pp.203-204. Emphasis original)
13/07/2007
"The number of theories advanced and experiments undertaken to try to explain this have been legion. In
the 1960s the British author Geoffrey Ashe, noting the Shroud image's scorch-like appearance, tried heating
an ornamental brass and placing it close to a piece of linen, to create a passably convincing scorch imprint.
At first sight this might suggest that the imprint could have been created from some super-heated statue, a
hypothesis actually favoured by the Oxford laboratory's Prof Hall. [Remark by Professor Hall to Ian Wilson,
July 1988] However, it must be noted that the STURP scientific findings of 1978 conclusively showed that
the Shroud imprint cannot be a simple scorch, since the indisputable scorch marks from the 1532 fire
fluoresce whereas the body imprint does not." (Wilson, I. & Schwortz, B., "The Turin Shroud: The
Illustrated Evidence," Michael O'Mara: London, 2000, p.128)
13/07/2007
"Max Frei-Sulzer issued an independent report. Professor of criminology at the University of Zurich and a
police investigator, he ... was also a botanist and an amateur student of palynology, or the study of pollens.
.... The Swiss scientist took twelve samples of dust from the Shroud, using a sticky tape that he applied to
the surface of the cloth. In that way he was able to pick up `microtraces' without damaging the cloth After
several years of study, Frei announced that he had found spores from bacteria, mosses, and fungi, as well as
plant fibers, fragments of insects, and pollen grains. He identified the pollen of fifty-seven different plants.
Twelve were common to France and Italy. Six grew predominantly in Turkey (where Constantinople and
Edessa were). Sixteen were Mediterranean plants, found both in southern Europe and the Middle East.
Seven grew primarily in Israel and other Middle Eastern countries. The remaining sixteen species were desert
plants that grow almost exclusively in Israel. [Borkan, M., "Ecce Homo?: Science and the Authenticity of the
Turin Shroud," Vertices, Duke University, Winter 1995, p.21] Thus Frei concluded that the Shroud had
resided at one time in what is now Israel and also for a time in what is now Turkey, as well as in southern
Europe. Answering the anticipated objection that the wind might have carried pollen from the Middle East to
Europe, Frei pointed out that ninety-five percent of the pollen of any plant is deposited within a radius of
about one hundred meters around it, and the rest reaches `at most a few tens of kilometers.' He felt it was
impossible for a substantial amount of pollen to be carried twenty-five hundred kilometers in the wind from
Palestine to southern Europe. [Petrosillo, O. & Marinelli, E., "The Enigma of the Shroud: Challenge to
Science," Publishers Enterprises Group: San Gwann, Malta, 1996. p. 203] Besides, the transport of pollen in
this direction would be counter to the prevailing pattern of winds, which blow from west to east. `The
heterogeneous quality and amount of pollen present cannot therefore be explained as a result of accidental
contaminations,' [Maloney, P., "The Current Status of Pollen Research and Prospects for the Future," The
ASSIST Newsletter, June, 1990, p.8] Frei contended. Max Frei died in 1983, before he could publish a final
assessment." (Ruffin, C.B., "The Shroud of Turin: The Most Up-To-Date Analysis of All the Facts
Regarding the Church's Controversial Relic," Our Sunday Visitor: Huntington IN, 1999, pp.76-77)
13/07/2007
"On the other hand, Frei's conclusions were essentially supported by Aharon Horowitz, an Israeli
palynologist, and Avinoam Danin, a botanist from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Danin wrote that it
was possible to demonstrate that the Shroud had at one time been taken through the Negev desert area to
the Lebanese highlands. [Petrosillo, O. & Marinelli, E., "The Enigma of the Shroud: Challenge to Science,"
Publishers Enterprises Group: San Gwann, Malta, 1996. p. 204.] Orville Dahl, who taught palynology both at
the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Stockholm (in Sweden), maintained that more than half
of the Shroud pollens come from flowers pollinated by insect, and supported Frei in his claim that the pollen
on the Shroud-with its origin in the Middle East - could not have been transported to Europe by the wind,
because the pollen of flowers does not carry in the air. [Ibid., p.205] Frei's collections were eventually
obtained by Alan Whanger, professor of psychiatry at Duke University, who dedicated many years to study
of the Shroud. He submitted the material for study to microscopists from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation, who also generally upheld Frei's conclusions. [Adler, A.D., Telephone interview, August 15,
1997]" (Ruffin, C.B., "The Shroud of Turin: The Most Up-To-Date Analysis of All the Facts Regarding the
Church's Controversial Relic," Our Sunday Visitor: Huntington IN, 1999, p.77)
13/07/2007
"The modest study of 1973, which seemed to raise more questions than it answered, aroused new interest in
the Shroud on the part of the general public, and other researchers became involved, trying different
approaches to explaining the cloth. One of them was Joe Nickell, then a twenty-eight-year-old instructor of
English at the University of Kentucky, who had worked as a private investigator and was also a member of
the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of the Claims of the Paranormal. He tried to reproduce the
Shroud by taking a statue, covering the face with a wet linen, then molding it to the contours of the head,
using a powder-puff to apply a light cover of jeweler's rouge, then removing the damp cloth from the face
and flattening it. He obtained an image that looked somewhat like that of the Shroud, but much more crude
and distorted. There was another difference, too. On the Shroud, the blood-like material has seeped through
the cloth, but the image appears only on the surface fibers. However, the image Nickell created with jeweler's
rouge did not confine itself to the surface, but permeated the cloth. [Scavone, D., "The Shroud of Turin:
Opposing Viewpoints," Greenhaven Press: Farmington Hills MI, 1989, p.35]" (Ruffin, C.B., "The Shroud of
Turin: The Most Up-To-Date Analysis of All the Facts Regarding the Church's Controversial Relic," Our
Sunday Visitor: Huntington IN, 1999, p.77-78)
13/07/2007
"Around 1976 the idea of conducting scientific tests on the Shroud caught the attention of Dr. John P.
Jackson, a thirty-year-old physicist and Air Force officer who worked at the Weapons Laboratory in
Albuquerque, New Mexico. Along with his colleague at the Weapons Lab, Dr. Eric Jumper, an engineer and
thermodynamicist who was of the same age, he constructed a full-sized, carefully marked replica of the
Shroud so that they could perform experiments in hopes of learning how the curious image was formed.
Studying existing photographs of the Shroud, he theorized that if the cloth actually covered a human body,
the linen would have had direct contact with certain parts of the body, such as the forehead, nose, and chin,
while other areas, like the eye sockets and ears, would have not been touched by the cloth. In collaboration
with Bill Mottern, an industrial radiographer at the Sandia Scientific Laboratories of Albuquerque, Jackson
and Jumper made use of two devices, the microdensitometer and the VP-8 analyzer, which had recently been
used to construct a three-dimensional model of the surface of the planet Mars from photographs transmitted
by a satellite. The researchers believed that if the density of the image were measured, and if the image was,
in fact, produced by covering a real body, the parts of the body in close contact with the Shroud should
appear more dense and those further away should appear more faint. ...They analyzed the photographs of
the Shroud and fed the resulting numbers into the VP-8 image analyzer, which converted the numbers to
vertical relief. In other words, the parts of the body that were close to the cloth should have shown darker
than the ones that were farther from the fabric, and so, if the Shroud had actually covered a real body, the
machine would be able to map its contours. This would not have been the case if the image were painted on.
When Jackson, Jumper, and Mottern ran their tests, they found that the process resulted in a perfect three-
dimensional model. It could even be turned sideways so that the face could be seen in profile. [Scavone, D.,
"The Shroud of Turin: Opposing Viewpoints," Greenhaven Press: Farmington Hills MI, 1989, p.39] When
subjected to the microdensitometer and the VP-8 image analyzer, the images created by Nickell did not show
the perfect three-dimensionality that the Shroud did, [Scavone, Ibid. p. 40] and produced the same sort of
distorted reliefs that paintings, drawings, and ordinary photographs generate when subjected to the same
process. [Borkan, M., "Ecce Homo?: Science and the Authenticity of the Turin Shroud," Vertices, Duke
University, Winter 1995, p.22.]" (Ruffin, C.B., "The Shroud of Turin: The Most Up-To-Date Analysis of All
the Facts Regarding the Church's Controversial Relic," Our Sunday Visitor: Huntington IN, 1999, pp.78-79)
14/07/2007
"Whatever the answer, here we have at least a plausible explanation for how our Shroud, whether brought
to Edessa in the reign of Abgar V or Abgar VIII, might have been rediscovered in the sixth century in the
manner described in the last chapter. As a result of which, instead of there being absolutely no record of our
Shroud before the 1350s, as is so often contended, we have been able historically to trace an object that
sounds and looks most uncannily like it, almost all the way back to the very time of Jesus himself. The idea
of the Shroud having been located in Edessa and Constantinople for its first 1200 years checks out perfectly
with a significant number of Dr Max Frei's pollens indicating that it spent some time in an Anatolian
environment .... And this is in addition to our having found, earlier in this book, so much compelling
evidence for the Shroud being an actual gravecloth of a Jew crucified in the manner of Jesus, including
many suggestions that it originated in Jesus's time." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence
that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.174)
14/07/2007
"All this inevitably gives rise to the question, can anyone any longer be quite so sure of radiocarbon
dating's claim `conclusively' to have proved the Shroud a mediaeval fake? Can we really still believe in a
mediaeval forger? Of course, it may still be difficult to conceive that the radiocarbon dating of 1988, as
conducted by three internationally respected scientific laboratories, could have erred by as much as 1300
years. But is it not time, now, to look just a little more critically at the technique's own credibility when its
scientists so confidently claim `accuracies' to within a hundred years or so?" (Wilson, I., "The Blood and
the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY,
1998, p.174-175)
14/07/2007
"Otherwise, most developments reported in the press during the run-up to the Expositions do not seem to
contribute significantly to any greater understanding of the Shroud mystery. For instance, the American
psychiatrist Dr Alan Whanger, supported by the highly respected Israeli botanist Dr Avinoam Danin, has
identified the images of twenty-eight different species of flowers in the Shroud, all but one of which grow
within a few miles of Jerusalem. Also, according to researchers at an optical laboratory in Paris, all around
the face of the man of the Shroud there are words written in ancient Latin and Greek, including `Jesus' and
`Nazareth'. While there can be absolutely no doubting the sincerity of those who make these claims, the
great danger of such arguments is that researchers may `see' merely what their minds trick them into thinking
is there." (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is
Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, p.242)
17/07/2007
"Was this really Jesus' very burial wrapping, incredibly preserved through nearly two thousand years, or
was it, like so many other Christian relics, simply another cynical forgery? As becomes obvious to anyone
who seriously studies the Shroud, the question admits no easy answer. If the Shroud and what it bears is
the work of some forger or hoaxer, it is not by one who skimped his task. The physical length sprawls a
generous four and a half meters, with a width of one and one tenth meters. Eight centimeters from one edge,
a mysterious seam runs the full length of the cloth, apparently joining-on a strip of the same fabric. From this
strip, a pocket-handkerchief-size piece appears missing at each end. The fabric, in a fine, tightly woven
herringbone twill, is in surprisingly good condition, soft and pliable, and just a little heavier than shirt
cloth." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.1-2)
17/07/2007
"A painting of 1516 shows four sets of holes in the Shroud, each set comprising three main holes with
peripheral surrounding damage ... . These holes are still identifiable, and reconstruction of their original
arrangement suggests that at one stage the cloth was folded in four and deliberately run through three times
with something like a red-hot poker. Exactly why and when someone inflicted such damage has gone
unrecorded." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.3-4)
17/07/2007
"Undoubtedly the Shroud's most fascinating feature, however, lies between the fire marks, in the form of
what appear to be impressions of the back and front of a full-size human figure ... . The color of the
impressions is a uniform sepia, or yellow-brown, very shadowy in character, with, particularly unmistakably,
a mask-like bearded face with seemingly owlish, staring eyes and skeletal-looking hands crossed over the
loins. The obvious theory behind the imprints is that a body was laid on one half of the linen, the other half
of the cloth being drawn over the head and down to the feet, thus creating two head-to-head images. A gap
between the front- and the back-of-the-body images corresponds with what would have been the top of the
head. Parts of the body that would have been farthest from contact with the cloth, such as the fronts of the
shoulders and the backs of the knees appropriately fail to register. As another convincing-looking touch,
the front of the body image stops short at the ankles, suggesting that not quite enough length was allowed
for this half of the cloth to cover the feet ... Conveying the idea that this was a victim of crucifixion are
intricate, carmine-colored splashes resembling bloodstains at the arms, feet, and chest and across the small
of the back. The whole effect is eerie, ephemeral. Only at a distance do the images make some sort of sense.
Viewed in close-up, the body features become incomprehensible, because of their faintness seeming to
disappear into the cloth. Seen under a magnifying glass, the image areas appear totally lacking in substance
such as paint or pigments. To the whole there is not the slightest semblance of an artist's style of any
historical period." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, p.4)
17/07/2007
"Pilgrim's medallion of the Shroud exhibited at Lirey, ca. 1357. The first known representation of the Shroud
entirely full length, i.e., with both frontal and dorsal images visible. The shields are the arms of Geoffrey de
Charny on the left and his second wife and subsequent widow, Jeanne de Vergy, on the right. The roundel
in the center represents the Empty Tomb. From a damaged amulet found in the Seine by the Pont au Change
and now in the Musee de Cluny, Paris." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing:
London, 1986, p.5)
17/07/2007
"Of extraordinary interest, therefore, is what happens to the Shroud's image when it is reversed by black-
and-white photography into a photographic negative.... The now famous discovery associated with this
took place in the year 1898, at the time of one of the rare expositions, when a prominent Turin councillor,
Secondo Pia, was asked to make the first-ever official photograph of the Shroud. Photography was still a
relatively new science at this time, and for Pia the assignment presented some special difficulties. ... After an
abortive attempt on May 25, the night of May 28, Pia successfully took two exposures on large glass
negative plates customary for the photography of the time, then hurried back to his darkroom to develop
them. Because of the already shadowy and ghostlike nature of the Shroud image, Pia expected that anything
he had managed to capture on the photographic negative plate, itself invariably a ghost of the original,
would be even more difficult to distinguish. Nothing, therefore, prepared him for the shock that awaited him
that night. As under the developer recognizable features of the Shroud began to appear, the cloth now
black, the dark scorch marks from the 1532 fire showing up white, he observed an extraordinary change in
the Shroud's double-figure image. For the first time visible in natural relief, with lifelike highlights and
shadows as on a real photograph, the body could be seen to be well-proportioned and of an impressive
build. The apparent bloodstains, showing up white, similarly took on a striking realism as injuries to the
hands, feet, chest, and crown of the head. Instead of the owlish, mask-like face, the photographic negative
revealed a hauntingly majestic countenance, with eves closed in death ... . As Pia came to believe that
moment and for the rest of his life, the image on the negative must be the actual appearance of the body of
Christ when laid in the tomb. Somehow the Shroud itself was a kind of photographic negative, which became
positive when reversed by the camera." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing:
London, 1986, pp.4,10)
17/07/2007
"Whatever the validity of such an interpretation, incontrovertibly Pia's discovery was no nineteenth-
century hoax or once-in-a-lifetime freak. In 1931, Italian professional photographer Giuseppe Enrie took a
new and far more definitive set of photographs, including details of the face and close-ups of the
bloodstains. In 1969 and 1973, more photographs were taken, and in 1978 literally millions of visitors to the
expositions of that year were freely allowed to use their cameras. Every technical advance in black-and-white
photography has revealed the negative characteristics in greater clarity. The question that obviously arises
is whether any forger, centuries before the age of photography, could really have managed to create such
an extraordinary image, working in negative, yet without any means of checking his work." (Wilson, I., "The
Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.10-11. Emphasis original)
17/07/2007
"One suggestion was that a medieval artist used an actual human corpse, perhaps even crucifying this to
obtain the correct blood images. ... This idea is perhaps the least acceptable. Use of corpses for experiment
or dissection was expressly forbidden by the Church during the Middle Ages, and special permission had to
be given in the case of the rare exceptions to this. More pertinently, numerous modern experiments have
indicated that ordinary contact impressions of a body on cloth, whatever pigment this is coated with, fail to
produce the delicate gradations of tone that are so fundamental a feature of the Shroud image." (Wilson, I.,
"The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, p.66)
17/07/2007
"Another popular concept has been that, instead of a body, a lifesize statue or relief was employed. Prior to
1978 there was considerable interest in the Shroud body image's similarity to the scorches from the 1532 fire.
It was theorized that someone in the Middle Ages had produced the Shroud's delicate gradations by
wrapping the cloth around a heated metal statue, the linen receiving scorches proportionately more intense
according to the cloth's distance from any one part of the hot statue. Cogent as this idea might seem, in the
light of the 1978 testing it has attracted enthusiasm from neither the STURP team nor Dr. McCrone.
According to STURP members, scorches fluoresce under ultraviolet light, and while the Shroud's scorches
from the 1532 fire indeed do so, the body image does not. findings and the statue theory, Joe Nickell, an
experimenter at the University of Kentucky, has produced what he argues to be a good simulation by
pressing a hot-water-soaked cloth over a bas-relief statue, then daubing on an iron-oxide pigment.
According to Nickell, his process produces `a true negative image.' The image will be a delicate sepia in
tone; it will appear to have been created without `pigment' and show no brush marks; the stain will not
penetrate the fibers of the cloth but will remain a `purely surface phenomenon'-all these characteristics
theoretically matching the body image on the Shroud." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild
Publishing: London, 1986, pp.66,68)
17/07/2007
"But, according to McCrone, even this theory and others like it are really quite unnecessary. He regards the
Shroud as essentially a conventional painting, its lack of apparent brush marks being merely because the
artist used a lot of water to apply his pigment. He fails to be impressed by the negativity characteristics,
dismissing these as deriving from the way an artist might have thought out the sort of contact points a body
would create on a cloth wrapping. He regards the three-dimensionality as mere coincidence. McCrone's
approach is, then, a refreshingly straightforward one. But can it be sustained? It is, for instance, very
surprising that some unknown artist, in addition to all his other cleverness, should have displayed the
subtlety and depth of anatomical knowledge displayed on the Shroud. No amount of poring through the art
of the Middle Ages reveals anyone who worked even remotely in this way." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of
the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, p.68)
17/07/2007
"If I had known Stewart would need a profile of the man in the shroud, I would have brought along the
photographs made by Leo Vala, a photographer of British royalty and a pioneer in the development of the
3D visual process and cinemascope movie screens. By manipulating light through photo transparencies, he
produced an image on a normal screen that enabled sculptors to make a three-dimensional model which
could then be photographed in profile or indeed from any other angle. In perfecting the process Vala had
selected the shroud face as a subject `because it's such a beautiful image.' After publishing the results of his
experimentation in the March 8, 1967 issue of Amateur Photographer, he became an outspoken critic of
anyone who thought the image could have been produced by human hands either through artistry or
technology. `I've been involved in the invention of many complicated visual processes, and I can tell you
that no one could have faked that image. No one could do it today with all the technology we have. It's a
perfect negative. It has a photographic quality that is extremely precise.'" (Wilcox, R.K., "Shroud,"
Macmillan: New York NY, 1977, pp.130-131) ) also (Wilcox, R.K., "The Truth About the Shroud of Turin:
Solving the Mystery," Regnery: Washington DC, 2010, pp.145-146)
17/07/2007
"Back in 1978, arising from firsthand observations of the Shroud body image's similarity to some of the
scorches from the 1532 fire, there was much discussion that the image might have been created by a scorch,
perhaps from some searing flash of light at the very moment of Jesus' Resurrection. During the 1970s, an
English author, Geoffrey Ashe, had created Shroud-like scorch pictures by applying a heated brass
ornament to damp linen. But, as established by the 1978 ultraviolet fluorescence photography, there is a
marked qualitative difference between the body image and the scorches. The 1532 fire scorches fluoresce
red when irradiated with ultraviolet light, whereas the body images do not. ... Attempts to simulate some
aspects of such a process have been made by Drs. Jackson and Jumper and colleagues in a comprehensive
review of the comparative plausibility of every conceivable variety of image-forming process. But although
images were produced, as in so many other experiments, these fell far short of the photographic realism of
the Shroud." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.125-126)
17/07/2007
"Nonetheless a quite new and in its own way remarkably revelatory achievement has been made in the
course of other studies by Jackson, this time working with Bill Ercoline. As has long been recognized,
during whatever image forming process occurred the Shroud must have been draped, as opposed to being
flat, over the body it wrapped. This should have caused lateral distortions in the image large enough to
exceed natural variations in human anatomy. Ercoline and Jackson determined these, then plotted the actual
distortions that would occur with the natural drape of a cloth over a body laid out in the manner indicated
on the Shroud. They found good correlation. The effect of this research is to demand that if the Shroud is
the work of an artist, he took account of the effects of cloth drape among his many other intricate
calculations. Super artist, or supernormal event, consistently these have proved the only two alternatives in
the midst of all the many facets of Shroud research." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild
Publishing: London, 1986, p.126)
18/07/2007
"Despite what was a far more credulous era than our own, it is apparent that many of the earliest outsiders
who viewed the Shroud at this time took a far more skeptical view of it than some quite hard-headed
scientists of today. Obviously unimpressed were the two Troyes bishops, Pierre d'Arcis and Henry of
Poitiers, who unhesitatingly called the Shroud `cunningly painted,' condemning it as a forgery in the very
earliest years after its inception. Equally unimpressed nearly a century later was Benedictine priest Cornelius
Zantiflet. In 1449, Zantiflet watched the elderly Margaret de Charny exhibit the Shroud at Liege, in Belgium,
and dismissed what he saw as no more than `... a certain sheet on which the shape of the body of our Lord
Jesus Christ has been skilfully painted with remarkable artistry ...' Is it not strange, therefore, that little more
than fifty years after Zantiflet's comment, and without any obvious resolution of the forgery charges, Pope
Julius II, at the behest of the Duke of Savoy, granted the Shroud official status as one of the holiest relics of
Christendom, complete with its own feast day? The day chosen for the feast was May 4, immediately after
that of the discovery of the True Cross. What could have happened so decisively to change attitudes?"
(Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.77-78)
18/07/2007
"A third possibility is perhaps the most intriguing of all. As we have already remarked, the Shroud
mysteriously bears four sets of triple holes, which have the appearance of the cloth's having been run
through three times with a red-hot poker. An unmistakable feature of this damage is that it looks deliberate-
the holes occur in the dead center of the arrangement by which the cloth must have been folded at the time-
and STURP's Dr. Ray Rogers has noted what appears to be pitch in close association with the damage. No
one knows when the damage occurred, except that it must have been before 1516, because the marks appear
in a painted copy of that year, but it was a favorite medieval practice to use pitch-soaked pokers and the like
as `trial by fire' truth devices. Accordingly, of no little interest to the mystery is a statement by French
aristocrat Antoine de Lalaing relating to an exposition of the Shroud he observed at Bourg-en-Bresse on the
Good Friday of the year 1503. After describing the image on the Shroud `stained with the most precious
blood of Jesus, our Saviour,' Lalaing went on to say that the Shroud had been `... boiled in oil, tried
[boute] by fire and steamed many times, without either effacing or altering the said imprint and figure.'
Now unfortunately, Lalaing did not say when the incident occurred, and his reference to such boiling in oil
has always been regarded with some skepticism in view of the blackening this would almost certainly have
caused, of which the Shroud shows no sign. But what his information does suggest is that some form of
testing was carried out on the Shroud not long before the year 1503, possibly as a legally required
preliminary to the institution of the full Holy Shroud cult in 1506." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the
Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.78,81. Emphasis original)
18/07/2007
"If, for instance, Geoffrey II de Charny really believed the cloth he was exhibiting was no more than an image
or representation of the sort used in the annual Easter Sepulchre ceremony, why did he go to the elaborate
lengths Bishop d'Arcis accuses him of in presenting the cloth with all the ritual and ceremonial of a true
relic? Why did he appeal so vigorously against his local bishop's attempts to stop the expositions? And
why did the Pope of the time align himself not with Bishop d'Arcis but with Geoffrey de Charny, D'Arcis'
concern to protect his see from fraudulent relicry being rewarded with a curt demand for "perpetual silence"
on the matter' There seems peculiarly to have been more to the affair than any of the documents tell us."
(Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, pp.81-82. Emphasis original)
18/07/2007
"A further difficulty is one of determining, if we are dealing with an artist of the time of the De Charnys, who
that artist might have been. ... the Shroud, certainly as it appears today, has no similarity to the work of any
known artist either of the Gothic period or any other time ... All that can be said is that if the Shroud is the
work of an artist, whoever he was and wherever he worked, his approach to the task was one of the most
remarkable skill and inventiveness. If, for instance, as McCrone has suggested, he simply thought out the
Shroud's negativity as a pattern of contact points, his subtlety and accuracy with no means of checking his
work is well-nigh incredible. His differentness is quite clear from scrutiny of the artists' copies that have
since been made of the Shroud, not one of which manages to look anything but the work of a human hand.
A similar comparison with conventional artists' works is worthwhile in respect of the Shroud's scourge
marks and blood flows. Plenty of artists have depicted Jesus being savagely scourged, his body covered
with wounds. But not one has tried to think out a patterning as complex as that on the Shroud, the fanning
out of the scourge's thongs, the paired fall of the pellets; not one has depicted wounds with such
gravitational logic or such a convincingly trickled appearance. A further difficulty in terms of the actual
execution of the Shroud is how ... the artist was able to see what he was doing when creating the Shroud
image. If working up close, he would have had the greatest difficulty seeing the overall effect he was
creating. If working at a distance, he would have needed something like a twelve-foot paintbrush! Even if
the Shroud is the work of an artist, there are, then, considerable difficulties understanding this and setting it
in a proper historical context. " (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986,
pp.82-83. Emphasis original)
18/07/2007
"Nickell Powder-Rubbing Method Joe Nickell, a former stage magician and amateur detective, has
experimented with a proposed technique of image encoding. Nickell's technique involved conforming wet
linen to a bas-relief while impressing all the relief's features onto the cloth. After the cloth dried, he used a
cotton dauber covered with cloth to rub powdered pigment onto the impressions left on the linen. [Nickell,
J., "Inquest on the Shroud of Turin," Prometheus Books, 1987] The results obtained by such a technique ...
show what happened when STURP members tested Nickell's theory. As is evident in the VP-8 photograph,
Nickell's powder-rubbing method does not produce a true three-dimensional image. A powdered bas-relief
technique would involve the application of a substance to the Shroud. As discussed earlier, all the extensive
scientific examinations of the cloth indicate that no powdered particles or foreign materials of any kind have
been added to the body-image fibrils that could account for the coloring-and therefore visibility-of the
image. Specifically, magnified photographs of the body image threads do not reveal any sort of applied
particles or staining substance. The `natural experiment,' arising from the fire of 1532, also disproves
Nickell's theory, as it did the painting theory. Nickell promulgates that the powdered pigments used were
iron oxide, myrrh, or aloes. Yet if organic substances such as these had been used to encode the Shroud
image, they would have been altered or decomposed during the fire, depending on their distance from the
hottest areas of the cloth. However, no such alteration in the body image can be found on the Shroud when
those image areas nearer the burn marks are compared to those areas farther away." (Antonacci, M.,
"The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New
York NY, 2000, pp.73-74. Emphasis original)
18/07/2007
"Nickell contends that his powder-rubbing method produces a superficial image. However, when STURP
scientists reproduced his experiment using linen with a herringbone weave that simulates the Shroud's
weave, large quantities of powder fell through the weave of the cloth and accumulated on the reverse side.
Shroud researcher and archaeologist Paul Maloney even tried using a piece of linen with a box weave, which
is the tightest linen weave known. Maloney found that powdered particles still penetrated through to the
back of the cloth. Obviously, Nickell's technique fails to meet the requirement of image superficiality.
Nickell's theory seems far-fetched for other reasons. The Shroud contains, conservatively, thousands of
individual body-image fibrils, but each fibril is encoded with a uniform intensity of color. Someone applying
powdered pigment onto a cloth with a hand-held dauber and/or rubbing powder on woven linen could never
achieve this uniform intensity on all image fibrils. In fact, experiments involving powder rubbing have shown
that a uniform application of powder cannot be obtained on even one fibril." (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection
of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000,
p.74)
18/07/2007
"Nickell theorizes that a likely powder pigment used to produce the Shroud body image was a form of iron
oxide derived from heating ferrous sulfate (green vitriol). When a substance such as ferrous sulfate is
`calcined,' it is heated to a high temperature (but below the boiling point). This process, which causes the
substance to lose moisture and oxidize, produces a powder or ash. Although Nickell believes such heating
of ferrous sulfate explains the presence of iron oxide on the Shroud, the evidence proves him wrong.
Whenever green vitriol is calcined, the contaminants of manganese, nickel, and cobalt are also produced as
by-products. While the process of heating may reduce these contaminants somewhat, they can always be
detected with a mineral-associated iron such as iron oxide. Intensive chemical examination of the cloth by
STURP scientists revealed that neither manganese, nickel, nor cobalt is found in association with the iron
oxide on the Shroud. Instead, the iron oxide is pure. The chemical tests performed on the Shroud could
detect any impurities above one percent. Moreover, the electron microprobe used to study the linen fibrils
can detect impurities on the order of parts per thousand. None of these examinations revealed any such
impurities. Calcined green vitriol produced in the fourteenth century could never be so pure as the iron oxide
on the Shroud. (In the last chapter, we saw that pure forms of iron resulted from the retting process and from
the water used to douse the fire of 1532." (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific,
Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, pp.74-75)
18/07/2007
"Nickell's theory is disproved by other evidence. His powder-rubbing method calls for wetting a cloth,
conforming it to a bas-relief, and then letting the cloth dry before applying the powdered particles. However,
the act of molding the cloth to the bas-relief would produce tension forces that would alter the cloth's
configuration by stressing and elongating the linen fibrils at those points where the cloth was conformed to
the bas-relief. This would happen because the cellulose comprising the fibrils is composed of molecular
chains; when the fibrils are stretched or straightened, the molecular side bonds between the chains become
deformed and broken; these chains then adopt new configurations. The presence of moisture disrupts the
molecular side bonds even more. If a wetted cloth (as proposed by Nickell) were conformed to a bas-relief,
the fibrils would become elongated wherever the cloth was molded to the shape of the relief. Distorted fibril
configurations, or fold marks, would be evident at those locations. The process producing these elongated
fibrils or fold marks would be irreversible-and, therefore, make these fold marks detectable-unless the fibrils
were subjected to further stress, moisture, or temperature changes. Although the Shroud was doused with
water to put out the fire of 1532, the water seems to have affected only small areas of the body image, most
notably the chest and knee regions. Yet the fibrils in these areas are no differently configured than those
elsewhere." (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological
Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, p.75)
18/07/2007
"Photographic examinations of the Shroud done with X ray, reflectance, and raking light (light directed at
the cloth at a grazing angle) revealed various horizontal fold marks. (Due to the angle of illumination used in
the raking-light study, vertical fold marks would not be visible.) The locations of these horizontal fold marks
are consistent with the fold configuration in which the Shroud is believed to have been stored more than a
thousand years ago ... If Nickell's powder-rubbing method were responsible for the image on the Shroud,
evidence of fold marks should also be evident at such places as the top of the head, eyebrow area, nose,
lips, chin, hands, feet, et cetera-everywhere the linen would have been molded to an underlying bas-relief.
However, no fold marks in these areas can be found on the Turin Shroud." (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of
the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000,
p.75)
18/07/2007
"Some obvious practical flaws are also inherent in Nickell's theory. For example, no historical evidence exists
to suggest that powder-rubbing was used by artists before the nineteenth century. Because Nickell used a
bas-relief and not a full three-dimensional figure such as a body or statue, his technique cannot yield the
types of subtle lateral distortions found on the Shroud, although this might be possible if the bas-relief itself
was distorted. That a medieval artisan would accidentally use a figure that happened to be distorted exactly
right is quite improbable. It's even more improbable that he would know how to distort the figure correctly or
think of doing so in the first place. Yet even if an artist anticipated the need to distort the bas-relief laterally
in order to encode certain deformations found on the Shroud, the artist would probably have had to sacrifice
the distance information as revealed by the lightness and darkness of the body image itself. Moreover, the
Shroud's frontal image was encoded in a vertical straight-line direction from the supine body to the cloth
draped over it. Nickell's method inherently fails to encode the frontal image in such a direction." (Antonacci,
M., "The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co:
New York NY, 2000, pp.75-76)
18/07/2007
"Nickell's attempts to reproduce blood images were as unsuccessful as his body image efforts. He asserts
that the blood marks were made by tempera paint, but this assertion conflicts with the evidence showing
that the blood marks were made by actual whole blood. Tempera paint cannot chemically pass for primate or
human blood. In addition, the application of tempera paint could not begin to account for the serum halos
surrounding the edges of the wounds covering the man in the Shroud." (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of
the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000,
p.76)
18/07/2007
"Nickell has never submitted his experimental cloth to scientists for verification, but he has presented
photographs showing the results of his powder-rubbing technique. On these photos his painted `blood'
does not begin to approach the realism of the wounds found on the Shroud. They also do not have the
shape or appearance of actual wounds that have formed and bled on human skin. The actual blood marks
evident on the Shroud are mirror images on cloth of how actual wounds appear on skin. The deficiencies of
Nickell's method become even more apparent when one considers the smaller wounds on the Shroud, such
as the scourge marks. The slightly depressed centers and raised edges of these scourge marks have been
encoded on the cloth in such a way that their characteristics are not even visible unless one examines
photographs that have been enlarged and then magnified under a microscope. The fluorescing borders,
composed of actual serum, around the scourge marks are also invisible until observed under ultraviolet light,
as are the scourged areas that consist of only scratches or lines. None of these characteristics of the blood,
serum, or scourge marks can be encoded, or duplicated, by Nickell's proposed application of tempera paint."
(Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M.
Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, p.76)
18/07/2007
"Heated Bas-Relief/Scorch Theory Another possible image-forming mechanism similar to that proposed
by Nickell involves pressing a stretched cloth over a heated bas-relief. Such an idea was first proposed in
1961 and tested, with limited success, by placing a white handkerchief on top of a heated small medallion
that bore a carving of a horse. [ Ashe, G., "What Sort of Picture?" Sindon, 1966, pp.15-19] This theory is
more intriguing than most because the Shroud image does appear to have many of the physical and
chemical properties of a light scorch. [Schwalbe, L.A. & Rogers, R.N., "Physics and Chemistry of the Shroud
of Turin," Analytica Chimica Acta, 135, 1982.] STURP scientists Jackson, Jumper, and Ercoline tried to
duplicate the image on the Shroud by testing the scorch hypothesis more fully. To accomplish this, they
heated a full-size bas-relief model of a face and stretched over it a linen cloth of a thickness similar to the
Shroud. [Jumper, E.J., et al., "A Comprehensive Examination of the Various Stains and Images on the Shroud
of Turin," in Lambert, J.B., ed., "Archaeological Chemistry, III," American Chemical Society: Washington
DC, 1984, pp.447-476 & Jackson, J.P., et al., "Three Dimensional Characteristics of the Shroud Image," IEEE
1982 Proceedings of the International Conference on Cybernetics and Society, October 1982, pp.559-575]
The ... resulting image lacks the high resolution and sharp focus found on the Shroud. While the bas-relief
method seemingly yields a respectable three-dimensional image, problems are evident in the accompanying
VP-8 relief of this image. Hollow spots below the eyes, next to the bridge of the nose, below the lips, in the
beard, and on the forehead are all noticeable in figure 51. Further, a slight plateau is visible on the high spots
of the VP-8 relief, similar to those produced in VP-8 analysis of results from experiments with direct-contact
methods." (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological
Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, pp.77-78. Emphasis original)
18/07/2007
"Even though the heated bas-relief produced better three-dimensional information than other methods,
Jackson and colleagues concluded that this process could not encode many of the necessary Shroud image
characteristics. For example, regardless of the temperature of the bas-relief, thermal discoloration appeared
on the back side of the test cloth within several seconds after being placed on the hot bas-relief. Thus, the
superficiality characteristic is violated because the image could not be encoded only on the topmost fibrils
of the linen. The researchers tried to circumvent this problem by wetting the cloth, thereby extending the
scorch time. When this technique was tried, new problems appeared. The image's contrast was reduced,
causing more severe distortions in the three-dimensional analysis and resembling images obtained from
direct-contact techniques ... In addition, because the cloth was essentially flat when the image was encoded,
tests of this image-forming method failed to generate an image that contains the subtle lateral distortions
that are consistent with the cloth-drape effects found on the Shroud." (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the
Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, pp.78-
79)
18/07/2007
"Another flaw with the heated bas-relief image-forming method is that a body image discoloration should be
produced wherever the body and cloth touched. The blood mark behind the man's right elbow near the
triceps was transferred to the cloth, but no body-image discoloration representing this part of the arm was
encoded on the Shroud. It is incomprehensible that a forger/artist would think to encode this blood mark
from the arm without also encoding a body image from the same area." (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the
Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, pp.78-
79)
18/07/2007
"Microscopic and ultraviolet examinations of the Shroud indicate that the blood images were transferred to
the cloth before the body image. [Jumper, E.J., et al., "A Comprehensive Examination of the Various Stains
and Images on the Shroud of Turin," in Lambert, J.B., ed., "Archaeological Chemistry, III," American
Chemical Society: Washington DC, 1984, pp.447-476 & Jackson, J.P., et al., "Three Dimensional
Characteristics of the Shroud Image," IEEE 1982 Proceedings of the International Conference on
Cybernetics and Society, October 1982, pp.559-575] If the body image were encoded through contact with
a hot surface, thermal discoloration or degradation of bloodied fibrils would be evident because the blood
images would have been in direct contact with the bas-relief heated to temperatures high enough to scorch
linen. Indeed, this effect appeared in the experimental testing of this technique [Jackson, Ibid.]. Microscopic
study of the bloodstains on the Shroud, however, reveals no thermal discoloration or fusing (except in areas
where the fire marks of 1532 intersected bloodstains). Furthermore, a heated bas-relief could not produce the
many other aforementioned unique features of the blood on the Shroud." (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the
Shroud: New Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, p.79)
18/07/2007
"[Leonardo da Vinci (1452-]1519) was undoubtedly the first person to describe in anatomical terms a smile
on its way to happening. ... His ''smile'' description and drawings are only one of many anatomical firsts for
the artist. ... He made mistakes, too, but in his inimitable hand, they are also beautifully drawn. The show
begins with two views of the body, done a decade apart, that reveal Leonardo's progress. The first, from the
1490's, was taken from a medieval representation, and is an inexact attempt to show internal organs and the
main arteries. The second, made 10 years later and infinitely more detailed, is still wrong in a few areas, but
shows an incredible mastery at rendering even the most obscure parts of the body's internal structure and
their interrelationships." (Glueck, G., "Art: Anatomy Lessons By Leonardo," The New York Times,
January 20, 1984)
19/07/2007
"Mindful, though, of Bill Meacham's words describing contamination as : `a very serious problem in
interpreting the results of radiocarbon measurement' [Meacham, W., "On Carbon Dating the Turin Shroud,"
Shroud Spectrum. International, Vol. 19, June 1986, pp.15-25], I did begin to look out for examples of
radiocarbon-dating anomalies in the case of other objects. And to my genuine surprise, these proved rather
more frequent than I had expected, and often very difficult for the radiocarbon-dating scientists to explain
away. For instance, a classic example, which arose even before the Shroud dating, concerned Lindow Man,
an ancient British human sacrifice victim whose remarkably preserved body was found in 1984 at Lindow
Moss, a Cheshire peat bog. From samples taken from Lindow Man's tissues, and also from the peat
immediately surrounding him, Dr Bob Otlet's highly experienced Harwell laboratory consistently dated him
to c. AD 500. Professor Hall's Oxford laboratory, on the other hand, consistently dated his tissues to c. AD
100, and Dr Michael Tite's British Museum laboratory dated him to c. 300 BC. Despite each laboratory
claiming that its findings were accurate to within a hundred years or so, even after they swapped samples
with each other and cross-checked, each stuck to its own guns, insisting that it was right and the others
wrong. As the journal Current Archaeology commented at the time: `The archaeological world waits with
bated breath to see how this problem is resolved.' ["The British Museum Exhibition," Current
Archaeology, August 1986, p.163] Yet the plain fact is that in all the years since, the problem never has
been resolved." (Wilson, I. & Schwortz, B., "The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence," Michael O'Mara:
London, 2000, p.97)
19/07/2007
"A similar case, this time particularly pertinent to the suitability of linen for radiocarbon dating, concerns the
Manchester Museum's Egyptian mummy number 1770, that of a girl in her early teens. Because 1770's
provenance and dating were largely unknown to the Museum's curators, and her condition was relatively
poor, she was chosen in the late 1970s as an ideal candidate for a scientific examination that was intended to
be the most exhaustive ever carried out on an Egyptian mummy. As part of this exercise, in the early 1980s
Manchester's head of Egyptology, Dr Rosalie David, took samples from 1770's body tissues and linen
bandages and submitted them to Dr Michael Tite's British Museum radiocarbon-dating laboratory. When
the result came back, to everyone's astonishment it showed that her linen wrappings were apparently eight
hundred to a thousand years younger than her body [David, R., "Mysteries of the Mummies: The Story of
the Manchester University Investigation," Cassell: London, 1978]. This gave rise essentially to two
alternative explanations. Either mummy 1770 (so far as anyone is aware, a girl of no special status), was
specially rewrapped in fresh bandages some time up to a thousand years after she was first mummified, or
there was something about her linen bandages that skewed the radiocarbon-dating reading. And even the
scientifically cautious Dr David has never been particularly inclined towards the former view." (Wilson, I. &
Schwortz, B., "The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence," Michael O'Mara: London, 2000, pp.97-98)
19/07/2007
"Be this as it may, this does not, of course, represent proof that it was by contamination of this kind that the
Shroud radiocarbon dating actually was skewed (if it was skewed), although certainly amongst
microbiologists the possibility is now beginning to be considered very seriously indeed. This is particularly
true in explaining how some of the other radiocarbon dating anomalies, apart from that of the Shroud, came
to occur. In a pilot experiment using the mummy of an ancient Egyptian ibis (a creature which, though sacred
to the Egyptians, it is most unlikely that anyone would have rewrapped), Garza-Valdes first studied the
microbiological film coating the mummy's wrappings. Noting that this was significantly thinner than that on
the Shroud, he predicted that in any radiocarbon dating the discrepancy between the mummy body and its
wrappings was likely to be around five hundred years. When the mummy and its wrappings were
independently radiocarbon dated, the reading for the wrappings proved to be 550 years younger than that
for the mummy. To Garza-Valdes this, on top of his previous findings, all but proved his biofilm hypothesis."
(Wilson, I. & Schwortz, B., "The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence," Michael O'Mara Books: London,
2000, pp.100,102)
19/07/2007
"Hot Statue Method Just as the heated bas-relief method cannot account for all the Shroud image
characteristics, neither can the hot statue technique, which involves laying cloth over a full-size three-
dimensional hot statue. A hot statue would produce an isotropic radiation source, which means the heat
radiates the same in all directions. This type of uniform radiation could not produce the subtle cloth-drape
distortions found on the Shroud because the distance information encoded onto the cloth would not be
transferred along vertical, straight-line paths; [Jackson, J.P., "A Problem of Resolution Posed By The
Existence of a Three Dimensional Image on the Shroud," in Stevenson, K.E., ed., "Proceedings of the 1977
United States Conference of Research on The Shroud of Turin," Holy Shroud Guild: Bronx NY, 1977, pp.223-
233] instead, the heat would travel in all directions and produce a blurred image. Thus the three-dimensional
shading and high resolution of the Shroud image could not be encoded simultaneously if this image-forming
method were used. [Jackson, personal communication, February 1, 1988] Furthermore, the hot statue
technique would scorch the image into multiple layers of the linen's threads, which means the image could
not be superficial and confined to only the topmost fibrils of the cloth. [Jumper, E.J., "Considerations of
Molecular Diffusion and Radiation as an Image Formation Process on the Shroud," in Stevenson, Ibid.,
pp.182-188] The many characteristics of the blood and serum marks also could not be reproduced with a
draped hot statue. In particular, the blood marks would undergo thermal degradation as a result of their
contact with a hot surface (as discussed above). Another objection to the hot statue method lies in the
inevitable creation of `hot spots' or well-defined regions of enhanced image density at points where the
statue touched the cloth. Such spots would necessarily result from thermal conduction, [Schwalbe, L.A. &
Rogers, R.N., "Physics and Chemistry of the Shroud of Turin," Analytica Chimica Acta Vol. 135, 1982,
pp.3-49, p.28] yet no such regions are present on the Shroud body image. As discussed in chapter 3, the
entire image contains the same density of coloration." (Antonacci, M., "The Resurrection of the Shroud: New
Scientific, Medical, and Archeological Evidence," M. Evans & Co: New York NY, 2000, pp.78-79. Emphasis
original)
20/07/2007
"Its startling simplicity was the most formidable obstacle that the selection theory had to overcome.
Students of the phenomena of life found it undignified to explain progress, adaptation, and design in nature
in so mechanistic a manner. `How can the beauty and harmony of the universe have evolved by accident?'
they asked, in spite of Darwin's careful proof that survival depends not on accident but on genetic
properties. For Darwin had pointed out patiently that only some individuals in every population reproduce
(fewer than one in a million, in the case of the spat of oysters and the offspring of large trees), that they all
differ in their genetic properties, and that the probability (not certainty) of their reproductive success
depends on these genetic properties. The next generation will be enriched by the characteristics of
`favored' individuals, and thus the adjustment to the environment will be improved from generation to
generation. In this way Darwin solved the problem of teleology, a problem that had occupied the best minds
for the 2000 years since Aristotle." (Mayr, E.W., "Introduction," Darwin, C.R., "On the Origin of Species: A
Facsimile of the First Edition," Harvard University Press: Cambridge MA, 1975, p.xviii)
20/07/2007
"Following Ashe [Ashe, G., Sindon, 1966, pp.15-19] and in direct response to the article by Culliton
[Culliton, B.J., Science, 201, 1978, pp.235-239], there has been increased speculation about the so-called
`hot-statue' hypotheses [Drakoff, R., Science, 201, 1978, p.774; Graham, B., Science, 201, 1978, p.774].
Generally these arguments are based on the known 14th-century existence of full-sized statues in either
stone or metal. They postulate that one of these statues was heated and then pressed or tented with the
cloth. Hot-statue hypotheses have the image scorched by radiant energy and the contour information
recorded on the cloth as different scorch densities in different locations depending upon the respective
distances from the cloth to the heated statue surface. Jackson has done both theoretical [Jackson, J P. in
Stevenson, K., ed., "Proceedings of the 1977 United States Conference of Research on the Shroud of Turin,"
1977, p.223] and experimental work to address three-dimensional hot-statue hypotheses. He found that a
simple isotropic radiation source could not yield the observed Shroud-image shading and resolution ...
although it could be obtained if emission (or cloth absorption) anisotropies were assumed or if significant
attenuation were present in the intervening medium. However, in these cases the resulting directionality of
the radiation normal to the surface of the hot statue would introduce an unacceptable distortion of the image
on the cloth. Moreover, at cloth-contact points one would expect to see `hot spots' or well-defined regions
of enhanced image density that result from thermal conduction. No evidence for `hot spots' in the Shroud
image has been found." (Schwalbe, L.A. & Rogers, R.N., "Physics and Chemistry of the Shroud of Turin:
Summary of the 1978 Investigation," Reprinted from Analytica Chimica Acta, Vol. 135, No. 1, 1982, pp.349,
Elsevier Scientific Publishing Co: Amsterdam, 1982, pp.27-28)
22/07/2007
"Wilson's early script also challenged modern science to settle once and for all the genuineness of this
mysterious relic. Science, of course, cannot actually authenticate such an object. It can only set a series of
tests, failure at any one of which demolishes its claims. Success proves only that it has passed untarnished
this - single examination - tomorrow's quite different analysis may prove it spurious. All one can say is
that, with each successive positive result, the likelihood of authenticity becomes greater." (Brent, P. & Rolfe,
D., "The Silent Witness: The Mysteries of the Turin Shroud Revealed," Futura Publications: London, 1978,
p.17. Emphasis original)
22/07/2007
"Dr Frei turned his wide biological knowledge and his skill with the microscope into a major branch of
criminology. ... Under the microscope Frei discovered in his samples all the debris he had come to expect.
Most were of no immediate use: very little can be made of tiny mineral particles or shreds of plant fibre.
What he isolated and concentrated on were the spores of pollen that he found. Making sense of these was
first a question of identification and then one of statistics. Once it was known which spores were present,
their numbers became significant. A single spore might mean no more than that a freak wind long ago had
carried it an unexpected distance; several, and of several geographically related varieties, pointed to
exposure in a particular location and, if the vegetation had altered, at a particular time. For under the electron
microscope, pollen spores from different plant varieties prove to have absolutely distinct characteristics, as
individual as crystal structures or fingerprints. They do not deteriorate with age, their outer skins being so
resistant that they can survive over thousands, even millions of years. For the investigator, their only
drawback is their small size - down to 1/100th of a millimeter. With this problem Frei had learned to cope,
partly by devising new techniques of his own. His discoveries were not, in the first months of 1976, by any
means complete. There were many varieties of pollen that he had not been able to identify, others which
took the known story no further-those the Shroud would have picked up during its exposures in France and
Italy - and others again that might have meant something two thousand years ago, when the species they
derived from had been confined to particular localities, but which have today been spread by Man to many
different parts of the world. Nevertheless, his early results were encouraging. He had found pollens that
belonged in Asia Minor, and one or two specimens from the Holy Land. What he wanted to do now was to
travel to those places and examine the local plants in order to see how many of the unidentified pollens fell
into these Eastern Mediterranean categories." (Brent, P. & Rolfe, D., "The Silent Witness: The Mysteries of
the Turin Shroud Revealed," Futura Publications: London, 1978, pp.25-27)
22/07/2007
"It was, in fact, Delage who had first showed Vignon the photographs of the Shroud. Both men were excited
by them and uncertain what to think. None of the available explanations seemed quite adequate. It was
because of this sense of intellectual unease that Vignon decided to investigate further: if the Shroud were
not authentic, he was confident that he would be able to demonstrate how the forger had created it. Sensibly
beginning with the basic facts, he travelled to Turin and spoke with Secondo Pia. His impressions of that
lawyer-photographer, and one or two corroborative prints of pictures taken more recently by other people,
convinced him that the photographs were genuine. If there had been a forger at work, it had not been Pia.
Vignon would be able to rely on the photographs, at least. The most important fact about the photographs
was their demonstration that the Shroud image was a negative. The second most important fact was the
amount of detail they showed. Vignon put these two together. If the artist, the `forger', had in fact painted
the image in negative, he would in a sense have been working blind. He would not have been able to see
what he was doing. How then could he have included so much fine detail? It would have been a
superhuman task." (Brent, P. & Rolfe, D., "The Silent Witness: The Mysteries of the Turin Shroud
Revealed," Futura Publications: London, 1978, p.36)
22/07/2007
"It was Vignon who first noted the correspondences between the story suggested by the image and that to
be found in the Gospels. The Biblical account told that `one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and
forthwith came there out blood and water'; below the ribs, sure enough, one could see signs of that wound.
St Mark describes how the soldiers - or perhaps the Hebrew crowd - `plaited a crown of thorns, and put it
about his head'; on the scalp of the Shroud figure were the lacerations one might have expected. Above all,
there were the wounds of the crucifixion itself-although the man of the Shroud had been nailed, not through
the palms as so many paintings had over the centuries demonstrated, but through the wrists. It was Vignon
who first pointed out that the hands would never bear the weight of the whole body: anyone thus nailed up
would simply tear the flesh from the metal. Despite the artistic tradition, it was the Shroud's nails through the
wrist that made the only anatomical sense. It was Vignon, too, who first made a close examination of the
marks of flagellation that scored the figure's back, buttocks and legs. He asserted that no painter, and no
forger either, could have produced such a complex network of injuries. As to the scars themselves, he
matched enough of them to the lashes of a Roman flagrum to show how they must have been inflicted."
(Brent, P. & Rolfe, D., "The Silent Witness: The Mysteries of the Turin Shroud Revealed," Futura
Publications: London, 1978, p.40)
22/07/2007
"Vignon produced at this stage two further arguments against the figure's having been the creation of a
mediaeval painter. The first was the man's nudity. No painter, or even forger, in the fourteenth century
would have depicted Jesus without clothes. Representations of the Shroud itself falsify the figure by
wrapping it in a loincloth. And then there was the other factor - the man can have lain in the cloth for only a
short while. There were no signs of physical corruption. In that Middle Eastern climate, even in spring, it is
often fairly warm. No body would last, in fact, for more than a very few days. Whoever had been wrapped in
that length of linen had not remained very long where he was. This matched the Bible story: if it were to be
believed, Jesus's corpse had vanished over the Passover weekend." (Brent, P. & Rolfe, D., "The Silent
Witness: The Mysteries of the Turin Shroud Revealed," Futura Publications: London, 1978, p.41)
22/07/2007
"It was Delage, the senior of the two men, who presented these findings to the French Academy. Vignon
was among the two hundred people who crowded into the hall to hear the dissertation. Under the ceiling
where the voices of the famous dead still faintly reverberated - Daguerre introducing photography, Pasteur
his vaccines - Delage laid out the results of the long, painstaking investigation he and, more especially,
Vignon had undertaken. At the end of his lecture he stated unequivocally, `The man of the Shroud is the
Christ!' In England, the Lancet seemed to accept this thesis, as did the Times. Nature wrote a neutral
piece on the research, and Scientific American copied the article. Yet there were many of his colleagues who
openly jeered at Delage and the conclusions he had endorsed. They accused him of not behaving
scientifically. Knowing he had always been at most an agnostic, and probably an atheist, they said that now
he had had a sudden rush of religion to the head. They said that the work he and Vignon had done was very
far from being conclusive. Delage replied with a statement that remains relevant, both to Shroud studies and
all similar specialities. `I willingly recognise that none of these arguments offer the features of an irrefutable
demonstration; but it must be recognised that their whole constitutes a bundle of imposing probabilities,
some of which are very near to being proven.' He complained that religion was being confused with science,
`with the result that feelings have run high and reason has been led astray. If, instead of Christ, there were a
question of someone like a Sargon, an Achilles or one of the Pharaohs, no one would have thought of
making any objection.'" (Brent, P. & Rolfe, D., "The Silent Witness: The Mysteries of the Turin Shroud
Revealed," Futura Publications: London, 1978, pp.41-42)
22/07/2007
"Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, had made a previous foray into nonsense (1994) with the claim that
Leonardo had created the Shroud of Turin, even though the shroud appeared a century before the birth of
Leonardo (1452-1519). The duo believe the image on the cloth (actually the work of a confessed forger of the
mid-1350s [Nickell 1998])-was produced for two reasons. It represented both `an innovative technique'
(Leonardo, they suggest, invented photography to create the image!) and `an encoded heretical belief' (he
supposedly faked blood on the image as still flowing so as to indicate that Jesus did not die on the cross)
(Picknett and Prince 1998, 25, 289)." (Nickell, J., "Deciphering Da Vinci's Real Codes," Skeptical Inquirer,
May/Jun 2007)
24/07/2007
"In the light of subsequent discoveries, it is interesting to look again at Delage's refutation of the forgery
charge . `As the shroud is authenticated since the fourteenth century, if the image is a faked painting, there
must at this epoch, have existed an artist-who has remained unknown-capable of executing a work hardly
within the power of the greatest Renaissance painters. While this is already very difficult to admit for an
image painted as a positive, it becomes quite incredible in the case of a negative image, which lacks all
aesthetic character in this form and assumes its value only when the lights and shades are reversed, while
strictly respecting their contours and values. Such an operation would be almost impossible except by
photography, an art unknown in the fourteenth century. The forger, while painting a negative, would have
to know how to distribute light and shade so that after reversal they would give the figure which he
attributed to Christ, and that with perfect precision; ... I add this argument whose force will be felt on
reflection: Why should this forger have taken the trouble to realise a beauty not visible in his work and
discernible only after reversal which was only later made possible?'- five centuries later! `He would be
working for his contemporaries and not for the twentieth century and the Academy of Sciences.' Delage
points out that in various ways the forger has deliberately flouted the susceptibilities of his contemporaries.
`The hands are pierced through the wrist and not through the palm, in conformity with the anatomical
requirements and against tradition.' Of the nakedness of the image, he writes, `the shroud destined to
enflame the zeal of the faithful should not at the same time shock their feelings or scandalise them. This is so
true that the loincloth has been added to certain copies'. [Delage, Y., "Communication to Academie des
Sciences, Revue Scientifique, 31 May 1902]" (Green, M., "Enshrouded in Silence: In search of the First
Millennium of the Holy Shroud," Ampleforth Journal, Vol. 74, Autumn 1969, pp.319-345)
24/07/2007
"Paul Vignon has made a detailed study of the Image, comparing every feature with the details of the mask
of the Turin Shroud. Since the chief characteristic of the Mandylions is their lack of neck and shoulders, it is
probable that they derived this peculiarity from the Image of Edessa. Otherwise, they belong to the same
family as the typical Christs of the normal Byzantine icons. Their faces are of the same type, as can be seen
from a comparison between them ... and the Early Portraits ... As we have seen, this type of Christ appeared
in the sixth century with the Edessan Image as the most famous, and perhaps the earliest, of the miraculous
Mandylions. Art historians associate this long-haired Christ with the forked beard and staring eyes with
Syria rather than with Greece or Rome. None have been able to explain its origin nor its immediate
acceptance as the true type as against the Greco-Roman Christ. Only Paul Vignon and his followers have
noticed certain peculiarities of the Syro-Byzantine Christs which, when taken in conjunction with their
generally accepted characteristics, seem to pin-point their origin. ... The forehead marks of these Christs, for
instance, are real disfigurements, as if their artists had deliberately accentuated one Byzantine method of
emphasising eyebrows till their portraits seem to be branded for identification purposes. Were they driven
by some remote model that they could not escape?" (Green, M., "Enshrouded in Silence: In search of the
First Millennium of the Holy Shroud," Ampleforth Journal, Vol. 74, Autumn 1969, pp.319-345. References
omitted)
24/07/2007
"The forehead marks are also found on portraits of Apostles, Saints and Emperors, but are rarely given to
lesser mortals. The best example is the mosaic in Sancta Sophia, Istanbul, which shows the Emperors
Constantine and Justinian presenting their gifts, Constantinople and Sancta Sophia, to the Virgin and Child.
Across their foreheads are strong horizontal lines surmounting three sides of a square, more emphatic even
than the branding of the Christ of St Pontianus..., whilst Jesus has a rounded mark beneath the line in
keeping with his child's face. The iconographic evidence so far accumulated gives the impression that these
marks are reserved for Christ and his close friends, just as Byzantine artists frequently give Apostles and
Emperors the same cast of feature as the Christs depicted with them. This facial resemblance suggests a
concern to express physically the spiritual likeness to Christ ..." (Green, M., "Enshrouded in Silence: In
search of the First Millennium of the Holy Shroud," Ampleforth Journal, Vol. 74, Autumn 1969, pp.319-
345. References omitted)
24/07/2007
"If the archives of Edessa and Constantinople had not been so thoroughly destroyed or lost, we might be
able to tie down this `icon-shroud' hypothesis with more documentary evidence. In default of this, Vignon
has highlighted evidence of another kind-the hundreds of icons and Mandylions that strongly indicate the
presence of the Shroud in the East from the sixth century. This is the earliest we can expect to hear of it in
view of a long sequence of events and universal attitudes hostile to its disclosure and compelling its
guardians to keep it a close secret: the Jewish horror of `impure' burial linens combined with the Jewish and
Roman persecutions; the Christian shrinking from crucifixion and its detailed portrayal in art, an attitude that
lasted many centuries; and the continuous quarrels about sacred images, both affecting and affected by the
Christological controversies, from the earliest times to the final defeat of Iconoclasm. The late B. G.
Sandhurst [pen-name of Green's father-SEJ] called these images of Christ `the Silent Witnesses' which
steadfastly direct our attention to the Shroud. How do they do this? They point silently with the strange
anomalies or disfigurements with which their artists felt compelled to adorn them. All these anomalies are to
be found on the Turin Shroud ..., where they were produced either by the wounds and bruises of the Man of
the Shroud or by faults in the linen accentuated by the stains of the imprint." (Green, M., "Enshrouded in
Silence: In search of the First Millennium of the Holy Shroud," Ampleforth Journal, Vol. 74, Autumn 1969,
pp.319-345. References omitted)
24/07/2007
"None of the artists reproduce all the anomalies, but all feel bound to show some. This may have been due
to the Byzantine canons of art, their books of instruction laying down strict rules of convention to be
observed by religious artists. The Byzantine strait-jacket, though it did not rob artists of their individual
inspiration, led to centuries of copying accepted models, of which Edessa was the most notable. In the first
instance probably a very few artists actually saw the death mask of the Shroud but they seem to have
reproduced its anomalies and mistakes so faithfully that subsequent artists felt bound to copy them. A
careful study of the characteristics and anomalies common to the Mandylions ..., Byzantine Christs ... and
the Shroud ... will reveal what Vignon, Wuenschel and Sandhurst mean when they say that the Turin Shroud
is the prototype of the Byzantine Christ and indeed the more remote origin of his traditional likeness in every
school of art down to the present day." (Green, M., "Enshrouded in Silence: In search of the First
Millennium of the Holy Shroud," Ampleforth Journal, Vol. 74, Autumn 1969, pp.319-345. References
omitted)
24/07/2007
"A most striking confirmation of this theory can be experienced by the reader. Let him show a positive
photograph of the Face of the Shroud to someone who has never seen it nor heard of the Shroud, and ask
him whose image it is. He will get only one answer. The only explanation I can see for this recurrent
phenomenon is that the ancient artists who copied the negative of the Shroud and gave us our traditional
Christ, did their job so well that when the camera revealed the secret of its mysterious mask the resemblance
was obvious. They did, up to a point, transpose negative details, e.g. the nose, so dark in the Shroud image,
becomes of natural tone in the pictures. Other points, however, were not recognised, e.g. the dark-coloured
closed eyelids are copied as wide open eyes; the drawing of the mouth is badly affected by the lack of
understanding just where the lights and darks are inverted in the Shroud image." (Green, M., "Enshrouded
in Silence: In search of the First Millennium of the Holy Shroud," Ampleforth Journal, Vol. 74, Autumn
1969, pp.319-345. References omitted)
24/07/2007
"A special feature of this iconographic evidence is the evident likeness of the isolated head of the Shroud to
the Mandylions. With long hair, staring eyes and absence of neck, it almost seems to be their negative.
Could this similarity, coupled with the anomalies common to both, give us the moral certainty that the
Shroud was the unique acheiropoietos, kept, as Vignon believed, in some monastery easily accessible to
the theologians and artists of Edessa? For centuries it was a holy, but mysterious and embarrassing relic;
suddenly, under pressure from the Monophysites, the Orthodox Clergy realise the role that could be played
by a copy of the Face of the Shroud, if turned into a living portrait of Christ. The climate was right in the
sixth century with the decline of relics in favour of icons. The Abgar legend with Ananias' role as painter
was to hand. All that had to be done was to have a copy made on cloth, `process' it by incubation, give it a
plausible miraculous origin and the desired weapon was there to confound the Monophysites, put the
Persians to flight and become in course of time the most holy Mandylion. Have we here then the unique
source of all `true likenesses', Veronicas, Epitaphioi and the `figured shrouds' of the West?" (Green, M.,
"Enshrouded in Silence: In search of the First Millennium of the Holy Shroud," Ampleforth Journal, Vol.
74, Autumn 1969, pp.319-345. References omitted)
24/07/2007
"Even without such identification I believe that we have already sufficient evidence to indicate beyond
reasonable doubt that, whatever its whereabouts, the Turin Shroud was in existence at least from the sixth
century on, and by implication dates therefrom back to the time of Christ. I submit that this would appear
eminently acceptable to the ordinary canons of the history of art, were it not for the fact that the Shroud of
Turin is so unusual a document. As was the case with Delage's medico-legal evidence, so it is, or has been,
with the Shroud's historical and artistic claims. What he wrote of the reaction of his scientific colleagues in
1902, applies with equal force to the attitude prevailing in some circles today. `If they [the hypotheses that
he had put before the Academy of Sciences] have not received from certain people the welcome they
deserved, the sole reason is that there has been unfairly grafted on to this scientific question a religious
issue which has excited men's minds and misled right reason. If not Christ but Sargon or Achilles or one of
the Pharaohs had been involved, no one would have any objection. I consider Christ as an historical person,
and I see no reason why people should be scandalised if there exists a material trace of his existence.'
Perhaps Delage would allow us to add: Nor should we be surprised if strangely compelling artistic witnesses
and certain documents urge us to look again at the baffling claims of that material trace." [Delage, Y.,
"Communication to Academie des Sciences, Revue Scientifique, 31 May 1902]" (Green, M., "Enshrouded
in Silence: In search of the First Millennium of the Holy Shroud," Ampleforth Journal, Vol. 74, Autumn
1969, pp.319-345)
28/07/2007
"Forensic palynology is the study of modern and fossil spores, pollen and other acid resistant micro-
plant remains in a legal context. It is not a new science; as a forensic tool, it has been sparingly used
since at least the 1950s [Frei, M., "Nine years of palynological studies on the Shroud," Shroud
Spectrum International, Vol. 3, 1982, pp.3-7] and probably well before that, but without documentation
or publicity. More recently, forensic palynology has been used regularly as evidence in criminal trials in
Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, in particular, and probably far more sparingly
elsewhere. Not only are modern pollen used, but in a number of cases, the presence of fossil pollen in
association with a criminal action has also been useful in determining what happened and where it
occurred." (Mildenhall, D.C., Wiltshire, P.E.J. & Bryant, V.M., "Forensic palynology: Why do it and
how it works," Forensic Science International, Vol. 163, No. 3, 22 November 2006, pp.163-172, p.163)
29/07/2007
"Since the eighth century, there is, in the Cathedral in Oviedo, Spain, the Sagrado Rostro or Holy
Face, a face-cloth (83 x 53 cm.) also known as the Cloth of Oviedo (Sudarium Christi d'Oviedo).
Located in Jerusalem until 614, it was moved to North Africa and then Spain to protect it from the
advancing Moslems. The first historical information we have about. it after the year 614 goes back to
1075 when Alphonsus VI of Leon recognized it as one of the relics in the Arca Santa or Holy Ark, a
wooden reliquary which had housed the sudarium in Carthage, North Africa, and Monsagro and
Toledo, Spain. Franca Pastore Trossello, a forensic scientist from the University of Turin, conducted a
comparative study of the fabrics of the Shroud and the Cloth of Oviedo and found them to be of the
same weave and texture. Dr. Alan Whanger studied the cloth and is convinced that it touched the face
of Jesus. Dr. Max Frei matched at least four pollen on the Cloth of Oviedo with four pollen from the
Shroud. Whanger found at least seventy matches between a polarized image overlay of the blood
stains of the Shroud and those found on the Cloth of Oviedo. Further computerized comparative
studies by Nello Balossino of the University of Turin, indicated that the traces of blood present on the
two pieces of cloth matched perfectly." (Iannone, J.C., "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New
Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY, 1998, p.91)
29/07/2007
"It is fitting that the daddy of all reputed religious relics is a shroud. For the Shroud of Turin is itself
enveloped - in eternal controversy over its authenticity. And if you think it odd that the man who has
become the shroud's modern advocate is Jewish - well so does he. American photographer Barrie Schwortz
... is a believer. But he wasn't always - he was raised in an orthodox Jewish family, and Jews don't believe
Jesus was the son of God. In 1978 he was invited to photograph the investigations of a non-partisan group
of scientists embarking on an unprecedented five-day study of the shroud, in its home in the Cathedral of St
John the Baptist in Turin, Italy. `I was convinced that I was going to get to Turin and take a close look and
see the paint and the brushstrokes and come home,' Schwortz says. He and the scientists assembled in
Turin and the shroud was brought in and laid on a table. `And I leaned over it, probably with my nose just a
few centimetres from the cloth, and I looked at it. And after about a minute or so I stood up and I thought,
"well, I'm going to have to rethink my thinking on this, because it's obviously not a painting". `Up close it's
almost invisible. One needs to stand back probably 3m before you can get a sense of where the image is and
it becomes coherent to you because it is so subtle.' ... `And yet, the irony of my life is how much time I
spend, as a Jew, trying to educate Christians that this could well be a relic of Jesus.' Schwortz runs a website
- www.shroud.com - that has become an international focal point for the debate over the shroud's
authenticity. He also lectures on the topic ... The History and Science of The Shroud of Turin. Its
centrepiece is an actual-size replica of the shroud, from the photographs he took in 1978. ... Schwortz ...
doesn't accept the results of radiocarbon dating of a small section of the shroud in 1988 in which three
scientific laboratories independently concluded the cloth was created in medieval times. `They only took
one sample, from one little corner and divided that in thirds. Good science requires multiple samples from
multiple sites. That's no way to date anything.' `I mean, if someone wanted to date a vehicle, and they took
the paint from one fender, what if that fender had been repaired from a crash, and would be newer paint -
would that tell us how old the vehicle was? No. That's the best analogy I can think of for what happened
with the shroud.'" (Sell, B., "Doubt about shroud turns to faith," The New Zealand Herald, May 07,
2005)
30/07/2007
"What exactly is the Sudarium of Oviedo? First of all, it can be said that it is an ancient linen cloth that has
been in Spain since the seventh century and venerated in Oviedo for more than 1,200 years. It was originally
a white linen cloth with a taffeta texture, now stained, dirty, and wrinkled. It is rectangular, somewhat
irregular, and measures approximately 34 by 21 inches [855 x 526 mm]. The principal bloodstains clearly form
a mirror image along the axis formed by a fold that is still present. They are fundamentally light brown in
color, in varying degrees of intensity. Although the linen has been traditionally called the `Holy Sudarium'
or `Holy Face,' there is no visible image of a face on the relic, only blood that is believed to be that of Jesus
of Nazareth. The cloth has always been known as the Sudarium Domini, or the Sudarium of the Lord ..."
(Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of
the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, p.13)
30/07/2007
"In the case of the Sudarium of Oviedo, scientists have indeed been able to determine important information
contained on the cloth, such as its age, the route it followed to Spain, the cause of death of the person
whose face it covered, how soon after death it was applied and when it was removed, how it was wrapped
on the head, the position of the deceased when it was positioned on the head, all subsequent moves of the
body, foreign objects that came into contact with it, and substances that were applied to the cloth. While
this may not constitute `proof ' for some people in the case of a religious relic believed to contain the actual
blood of Jesus of Nazareth, one must remember that this type of information is sufficient in our society to
convict a murderer for life. It is hard evidence that cannot be falsified. The information contained on the
cloth has accumulated from the moment it was made until the present day; it only remains to conduct a
thorough analysis of every aspect of the cloth, which is precisely what the investigative team of CES
[Spanish Centre for Sindonology] is in the process of doing." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The
Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San
Francisco CA, 2001, pp.64-65)
30/07/2007
"If the Oviedo cloth had been saturated with the blood of a pig, for example, it would have already been
exposed as a fraud. In the unlikely event that, as some suggest, the shroud and the sudarium had been
falsified by deliberately crucifying an innocent victim, the mathematical odds are astronomically small that all
of the circumstances would match what we know about the death of Jesus, and that an image would have
been obtained in the case of the Shroud of Turin. The two cloths could not have been falsified at the same
time. How, for example, could the position of the puncture wounds on the back of the neck match on both
cloths? How could the blood type, as well as every major bloodstain and every wound correspond? On the
contrary, after more than ten years of painstaking analysis by a group of about forty scientists, nothing has
been found that would indicate that the Sudarium of Oviedo is not authentic." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood,
Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius
Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, pp.64-65)
30/07/2007
"The results of every test undertaken, with the possible exception of one, carbon dating, are completely
compatible with Biblical accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth. As EDICES [Investigation Team of
the Spanish Centre for Sindonology] expressed it, if a scientist has the results of 99 tests which are in favor
of authenticity, and only one which is not, he would not throw out the 99 and accept the one, but would
examine the one which is not in favor to determine the possibility of error. In the case of carbon 14 and the
Shroud of Turin, this is exactly what scientists have been doing for the past 12 years, and in the process
have contributed a wealth of valuable information about the testing process and the particular problems
involved in determining the age of linen cloth. Nevertheless, as will be discussed later, the results of the
carbon 14 testing that were supposedly carried out on the Sudarium cannot be considered as a relevant
factor, due to a multitude of errors, contradictions, and doubts that it was ever performed." (Bennett, J.,
"Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud of
Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, pp.65-66)
30/07/2007
"These bloodstains have a washed-out appearance, and this has been determined to be due to the fact that
the stains are a mixture of blood and water, produced by the pulmonary edema that is characteristic of
crucifixion victims. John mentions this in his account of the death of Jesus, that when one soldier thrust his
lance into his side, `immediately blood and water flowed out.' Although some may believe that this reference
is purely symbolic, the blood and the water are apparent on the cloth of Oviedo, a testimony of the manner
of death as well as of its reality, which refutes the heresies that deny that Jesus died on the cross. John
knew nothing about pulmonary edema as the cause of death of crucifixion victims; he was only testifying to
what he saw, which has been proved by science to be accurate." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image:
The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San
Francisco CA, 2001, pp.66-67)
30/07/2007
"Using a variety of techniques, EDICES has done a thorough textile study of the cloth. Some of these
include: a) Conventional photography, which has allowed morphological studies of the stains to be carried
out, as well as anthropological studies, medical-forensic studies, and detailed studies of the diverse
materials adhered to the linen, b) Infrared reflection photography, to detect inscriptions or other marks
hidden from the naked eye, c) Photography with ultraviolet light, to identify the different concentrations of
blood and to detect substances that would otherwise remain invisible, d) Transparency photography, to
study the texture and lack of uniformity of the cloth, and to help determine how the stains were formed, e)
Photography with lateral illumination, to enhance the wrinkles and folds that are not noticeable with frontal
illumination, and f) Electronic treatment of the image, in order to study the negative images, assign false
colors to the levels of gray, and give three-dimensional effects." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image:
The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San
Francisco CA, 2001, p.67)
30/07/2007
"The morphology of the linen As previously mentioned, the Sudarium of Oviedo is a rectangular cloth,
85.5 x 52.6 cm (about 34 x 21 inches), with irregular edges due to the handling it has received through the
centuries. The cloth does not have selvages on any of its edges, or any dyes. There is a small tear, about 5.5
cm. long, in the upper right quadrant, and an oval hole is evident in the central part (12.4 x 19.6 cm). The
linen is composed of taffeta ligaments, with the threads twisted in the form of a Z, the simplest form of
weave. This type of twisting is not the most common among the weaves of linen produced in the Orient
before the Middle Ages, which was normally a twist in the form of an S. The Z twist was most frequently
used in the weaves of the Roman Empire. Of the 33 cloths found in the caves of Qumran, only one is woven
in a Z, while the rest have an S weave, but these cloths are much thicker than the Sudarium. The Oviedo
cloth also has an appreciable number of defects that can be placed in three categories: loops, basting
stitches due to a lack of tension, and the crossing of parallel and adjacent threads, a mistake that has been
found in Danish cloths made on vertical looms with weights, from 400 BC to 500 AD. The data point to the
fact that the Sudarium is an ancient linen cloth, possibly made on a vertical loom with weights. Its origin
could be in the Roman Empire. The presence of other natural fibers such as cotton or wool has not been
detected, nor any type of printing. It was also a fairly coarse, inexpensive cloth, unlike the linen of the
Shroud of Turin, which was quite expensive." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of
Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001,
pp.67-68. Emphasis original)
30/07/2007
"Pollen and other substances Collecting samples of the dust on the cloth by means of an adjustable
pump with slight suction, the palynologists of EDICES have indicated the presence, among other things, of
pollen of three fundamental types: Quercus (oak), Pistacia palestina (mastic tree, terebinth tree), and
Tamarix (tamarind tree, salt cedar), as possible geographical indicators of the presence of the Sudarium in
Palestine. The other pollens that have been identified clearly indicate a flora characteristic of the
Mediterranean region. A total of 141 pollens and 10 spores include such types as alder, juniper, oak, olive,
pine, black poplars, sagebrush, nettle, terebinth, bramble, tamarind, salt cedar, thistle, clover, garlic, chestnut
and willow. It is considered that 99% of the taxons correspond to Mediterranean vegetation, including
Palestine, and 1% to Atlantic vegetation. It has therefore been concluded that the route followed by the
Sudarium is clearly through the Mediterranean region, whose typical forest is composed of oak or scrub oak.
The traditional odyssey of the cloth, as mentioned in the first part of the book, was first from Jerusalem to
Alexandria, and then across the Mediterranean Sea to Spain, a voyage that corresponds perfectly to the
pollens found on the relic. The vegetation in Palestine is typically Mediterranean; the Palestinian thicket has
the name of `batha,' with the presence of the kermes oak accompanied by the terebinth tree. Certain trees
and bushes, such as the pines, poplars, alders, savins and junipers, are all Mediterranean and also found in
Palestine. The willows are trees and bushes typical of the corridor forests that border the rivers and are
widely cultivated in gardens and used since ancient times to make different types of baskets. The chestnut
belongs to the Atlantic vegetation, found in Spain in the humid northern zone. Its presence on the cloth
indicates its safekeeping once in Oviedo." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of
Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001,
pp.68-69. Emphasis original)
30/07/2007
"The presence of aloe and myrrh has been positively identified on the cloth, as well as residues of beeswax,
vegetal wax, and conifer resin. The aloe appears in greatest quantity in the areas in which there is more
blood, and appears on top of this blood, which means that it was applied to the cloth after the stains were
formed. Aloe and myrrh are aromatic substances that, as will be discussed later, were believed to be capable
of preserving the body after death. They were used in the burial rituals of first century Palestine, and John
mentions that Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes to the tomb to anoint Jesus (Jn 19:39)."
(Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of
the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, p.69)
30/07/2007
"The comparative study of the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo shows that the frontal stains on
the sudarium have seventy points of coincidence with the Shroud, according to the image overlay technique
used by Dr. Alan Whanger. He has concluded that both cloths covered the face of the same person. It
should be remembered that the first person to notice the similarities of both cloths was Monsignor Ricci."
(Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of
the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, p.84)
30/07/2007
"The comparative study of the two cloths can be summarized as follows. The weave. The linen of Oviedo
has a taffeta weave, while the Shroud is a linen weave of serge or herringbone. This means that the linen of
Oviedo is coarser and was probably used for domestic purposes, as a cloth to wipe the sweat from the face,
to wear on the head as a turban, or possibly as a scarf or towel. The Shroud, on the other hand, is a more
expensive cloth that probably came from Syria, specifically from the oasis around the city of Palmyra, and
was the type of weave used for the shrouding of the diseased." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image:
The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San
Francisco CA, 2001, p.84. Emphasis original)
30/07/2007
"Blood type. The blood of both cloths is type AB, a blood group common in the Middle East and rare in
Europe." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the
Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, p.84. Emphasis original)
30/07/2007
"Facial characteristics. a) The nose on both the Shroud and the Sudarium has been measured at eight
centimeters, or a little more than three inches. The nasal area on both cloths contains a high degree of dirt
and dust. The nose is swollen in the middle of the right side and is somewhat displaced to the right. This
was typical of crucifixion victims, because the horizontal bar of the cross was placed across the back of the
neck and was possibly even tied to the arms. When the person fell, which was frequent due to his weakened
condition after the scourging, he was not able to protect his face from the impact of the fall. b) The right
cheek is not represented on either cloth due to the contusion that can be seen in this area, while the area of
the right cheek is completely bloody on both cloths. c) Correspondence can be seen between the point of
the nose and nasal cavities, the position and size of the mouth, the chin, and the shape of the beard."
(Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of
the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, pp.84-85. Emphasis original)
30/07/2007
"Bloodstains. The bloodstains have geometrically compatible sizes and have very similar positions on
both linens. The stains are of human blood of the group AB. A DNA study is pending analysis on both
cloths, due to the difficulties caused by ancient blood and scarce cellularity. The stains produced from vital
blood, those produced by the puncture wounds at the back of the neck, are the same on both linens.
Remember that the linen of Oviedo was fastened to the head in the back with sharply pointed objects,
perhaps thorns. The cloth fell on the left shoulder and upper part of the back of the person, and wrapped the
left part of the face. This entire area that was touched by the cloth was completely bloody before blood
flowed from the nose and mouth after death had occurred. There is a notable similarity between both linens
in the back part of the head, which match essentially in size, position, and genesis, which means that both
contain vital blood, or blood which flowed before the death of the victim. In addition, the blood stains on
the back of both linens correspond, found on the two right and left lower corners on the Oviedo cloth."
(Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of
the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, p.85. Emphasis original)
30/07/2007
"Other similarities. The Shroud wrapped the body of a man who was crucified after having been scourged
and crowned with thorns. The Sudarium of Oviedo also wrapped the body of a person whose death is
perfectly compatible with crucifixion, scourging, and crowning with thorns. Both deaths, then, are
completely analogous, and while the scourging was normal procedure for crucifixion victims, the crowning
with thorns was not. The only mention of a crowning with thorns is that found in the Biblical accounts of
the passion of Jesus of Nazareth." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New
Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, p.85.
Emphasis original)
30/07/2007
"The Shroud completely wrapped the body of a man, including the head. The Sudarium of Oviedo
completely wrapped the head of a man, lightly resting on the shoulders, especially the left one, and on the
back. There is a nearly identical match between the stains of blood on the Shroud with those on the
Sudarium, keeping in mind that there is a lateral displacement on the Shroud, which has been described by
Dr. John Jackson. This will be discussed further ... but here it is sufficient to say that this displacement
becomes greater the farther the stains are from the middle plane of the face, and cannot be explained in terms
of current scientific knowledge." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New
Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, pp.85-86)
30/07/2007
"Conclusions Based on the marked similarity between the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo, it
can be said the probability that they did not cover the same person is extremely small. According to EDICES
[Investigation Team of the Spanish Centre for Sindonology], what probability exists that both formations of
stains, generated by chance and at different times with different subjects, would be able to demonstrate this
much similarity? If one adds to the physical and geometrical similarities those such as the similarities in how
long it took the stains to form, as well as historical considerations, one would be left with only one
explanation: that both linens were placed on the same person, and that that person was Jesus of Nazareth, a
Jew crucified at noon in Jerusalem during the rule of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, and who died three
hours later." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the
Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, p.86. Emphasis original)
30/07/2007
"As will be seen in the next chapter about Jewish burial ritual, cultural considerations also point to the same
conclusion. The possibility that the relic was falsified would be remote, illogical, against the ideas of the
epoch, and quite impossible due to the lack of knowledge about physio-pathological processes. For the
benefit of those who still believe in the possibility that some unscrupulous people could indeed have either
found the grave cloths of another victim of crucifixion or deliberately crucified someone in order to obtain
fraudulent relics, I would like to point out just how impossible this would be. First of all, crucifixion was a
Roman method of punishment, and their victims were left on the cross for days, often until the body began
to rot. The legs were normally broken (Jn 19:32), and the bodies were then thrown into mass graves, without
a proper burial and certainly without the use of a shroud, sudarium, and other burial cloths. Jesus was an
exception, and if not the only crucified man to be granted a proper Jewish burial in a tomb, He was certainly
one of few. He was also the only victim mentioned who was crowned with thorns, which was really a cap of
thorns placed on His head in order to mock the claim that He was the Messiah. Crucifixion was banned in
the year 313 by the Emperor Constantine, long before the medieval falsification of relics." (Bennett, J.,
"Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud of
Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, pp.86-87)
30/07/2007
"The demand for relics was a phenomenon of the Middle Ages, due to the expectation of miracles
associated with these objects, as well as an increased devotion to the saints. The Sudarium, however, was
already in Oviedo and had been for several centuries. Most of the falsification was being done with types of
relics that lent themselves easily to this sort of thing: thorns, nails, hair, bones, tears, the Virgin's milk, bread
from the Last Supper and Jesus' miracle, bits of fabric, wood from the manger, stones from the tomb, Calvary,
or other important places, earth that Jesus had stepped upon, manna from the desert, and even such unlikely
things as the mud God used to create Adam, or the feathers of angels. There are also copies of the Turin
Shroud, and innumerable veils of Veronica; these are quite easy to distinguish as being artistic
representations, however, and none has merited serious study. Nevertheless, along with the questionable
relics exist those that are indeed authentic. It is unlikely that anyone would have taken great pains to falsify
a relic when it was so easy to paint an image on cloth, or present bread, stones, feathers and mud as being
authentic and religiously significant for the unsophisticated and rather gullible populace of the medieval
world. If anyone had dared to falsify a blood relic of Jesus, it would have just as effective to saturate a cloth
with the blood of an animal, because the world was not capable of distinguishing the difference. Why would
anyone actually crucify someone when scientific methodology at that time was practically non-existent? It
was certainly not known that some day in the future scientists would be capable of DNA, pollen, and other
testing that could determine authenticity. It is absurd to think that the Templars or other Christians would
have resorted to murder, especially when it was not necessary." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image:
The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San
Francisco CA, 2001, pp.86-87)
30/07/2007
"Once again, it is quite certain that the authentic Sudarium and Shroud of Jesus would have been
safeguarded by the apostles and other disciples. If, in the highly unlikely scenario that they had lost them, it
would have been impossible to find similar cloths, and, furthermore, would have been completely contrary to
their mentality. It is impossible to imagine the disciples of Jesus spending their time rummaging through
tombs in the futile hope of finding the bloodstained burial cloths of another crucifixion victim who had been
exempted from the Roman regulations. They would have been arrested and Christianity would never have
survived. Nor would these cloths have had any significance for Christians. It appears that the Shroud and
the Sudarium were not exposed for veneration by the faithful for many hundreds of years, and only on rare
occasions, so there would be no reason to fabricate these relics in order to attract pilgrims." (Bennett, J.,
"Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud of
Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, pp.87-88)
30/07/2007
"The Sudarium and the Shroud were saved and venerated only because they contained the sacred blood
and the sacred image of Christ. It is not logical to assume that the early Christians would have preserved the
blood-soaked burial cloths of a common criminal, saving them from the Persians and later from the Arabs. It
defies explanation how they would have been able to find a shroud with an image of the historical Jesus
when scientists today are unable to duplicate it. Mark Guscin also points out that the idea that Christians
would have deliberately crucified someone in direct imitation of Jesus would have been sacrilegious to the
medieval mind, not to mention the blasphemy of then placing the `relics' thus obtained in cathedrals for
public veneration. The naked image that appears on the Shroud of Turin was in violation of the ethics of the
time, and the bloody forms found on the Sudarium of Oviedo were hardly suitable for veneration." (Bennett,
J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the Authenticity of the Shroud
of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, p.88)
30/07/2007
"Furthermore, as Guscin points out, the idea that someone could have found unused ancient burial cloths,
taken them through all of the countries in which the real relics had been in order to obtain the proper mix of
pollens, crucified a victim with Semitic features who happened to cooperate by dying in exactly the same
manner and time frame as Christ, and then successfully obtained an image either during the burial process or
from an artist that would continue to defy scientific explanation in the 21st century is ludicrous. This
`crucifixion' also would have had to be carried out in utmost secrecy, in order to avoid historical mention of
such a fraudulent and horrific endeavor. While some may continue to believe that people were capable of
this sort of fraud, it was not only unnecessary, but also impossible according to science, nature, and
history." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the
Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, pp.88-89)
30/07/2007
"There is one more consideration. That is that the Shroud of Turin was supposedly `dated' to the thirteenth
century, while the Sudarium of Oviedo has been in Spain since the seventh century. This means, of course,
that the so-called fraud would have had to have occurred twice, and that the wounds, facial characteristics,
manner of death, pollen, and other evidence on both relics would have to match exactly. This, quite frankly,
would be impossible, since the Sudarium of Oviedo was not removed from its chest in the thirteenth century,
not even for kings, not to mention the fact that its use was unknown at that time. Blood typing, forensic
medicine, pollen identification, the electronic scan microscope, photography, and all of the other scientific
means at our disposal today did not exist. Microscopic information cannot be falsified, and it is for that
reason that criminals are convicted today on the basis of DNA, fibers, and other evidence, because it is
indisputable." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the
Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, p.89)
30/07/2007
"It appears to be evident that the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium of Oviedo, although separated for most
of their history, had been placed on the same human victim of crucifixion. The bloodstains, blood type,
manner of death, facial characteristics and other considerations not only match on both cloths, but are also
consistent with the Biblical accounts of the passion, death, and burial of Jesus. Their study has engaged the
efforts of more than forty dedicated and reputable scientists for many, many years, who have not been able
to find a single piece of evidence that would prove the invalidity of the cloths, not even the radiocarbon
testing, due to the many problems already mentioned. In fact, the image on the Shroud of Turin continues to
be an enigma in an age that claims to be able to accomplish almost anything, from travel in outer space to
the cloning of animals. Nevertheless, in an otherwise intelligent and sophisticated society, the idea of
medieval falsification keeps resurfacing, based not on science, logic, and reason, but rather on the inability
to believe." (Bennett, J., "Sacred Blood, Sacred Image: The Sudarium of Oviedo: New Evidence for the
Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin," Ignatius Press: San Francisco CA, 2001, p.89)
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Copyright © 2007-2012, by Stephen E. Jones. All rights reserved. These my quotes may be used
for non-commercial purposes only and may not be used in a book, ebook, CD, DVD, or any other
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Created: 22 August, 2007. Updated: 19 March, 2012.