The Shroud of Turin Is Definitely a Hoax

The Shroud of Turin is probably the most famous supposed relic in existence. It is a 4.4-meter-long linen shroud bearing the image of a crucified man. Supporters of the shroud claim that it is the actual burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth and that the image on the shroud is the true image of Jesus, created at the moment of his resurrection.

It is easy to see why this idea is so appealing. If the shroud were authentic, it would be a remarkable source of information about Jesus the human being. Unfortunately, we can be virtually certain that the Shroud of Turin is a hoax that was originally created in France in around the 1350s AD by an artist trained in the Gothic figurative style as part of a faith-healing scam.

We know this primarily because there is no definitive record of the shroud prior to the fourteenth century and the earliest definitive record of the shroud is a letter recording that the forger who made it had confessed, but also because of a wide array of other factors. For instance, the shroud doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings that were used in the Judaea in the first-century AD or the specific description of Jesus’s funerary wrappings given in the Gospel of John. The fabric of the shroud has also been conclusively radiocarbon dated to the Late Middle Ages.

Additionally, the proportions of the figure on the shroud are anatomically incorrect, but they closely match the proportions of figures in Gothic art of the fourteenth-century. The bloodstains on the shroud are not consistent with how blood flows naturally, which suggests the stains have been painted on. Finally, the fabric of the shroud was made using a complex weave that was common in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles but was not used for burial shrouds in the time of Jesus.

Evidence #1: The Shroud of Turin has no reliable provenance prior to the fourteenth century.

If the actual burial shroud of Jesus had survived and it really had a spectacular image of Jesus himself miraculously imprinted on it, we would expect to find mentions of it all over the place in early Christian writings. Instead, we have absolutely no mention of any object identifiable as being the Shroud of Turin in any surviving early Christian text and the earliest definitive mention of the Shroud of Turin comes from fourteenth-century France.

Supporters of the shroud have tried very hard to invent a provenance for it. For instance, some supporters of the shroud have tried to give the Shroud of Turin a history by identifying it with the Mandylion, or Image of Edessa, a small, rectangular piece of cloth that was held in the city of Edessa in the Byzantine Empire that was said to bear the miraculous image of Jesus’s face.

The earliest surviving source that mentions the Image of Edessa as having ever existed is the Doctrine of Addai, a Syriac Christian text written in around the late fourth century AD or early fifth century AD, which says that the Image of Edessa was painted by an artist sent to meet with Jesus while he was alive by King Abgar of Edessa. The text claims that the artist painted a portrait of Jesus’s face and brought it back to show to King Abgar. This text, however, says nothing about the Image of Edessa still existing in the author’s own time or about anyone alive in the author’s own time having seen it.

The earliest surviving mention of the Mandylion as having existed in the author’s own time comes from the early Christian historian Evagrios Scholastikos (lived c. 539 – c. 594 AD). The fact that we have no record of the Mandylion having ever been created at all until the late fourth century AD at the earliest and we have no mention of anyone alive having seen the Mandylion until the late sixth century casts serious doubts on the Mandylion’s own authenticity.

It doesn’t really matter for our purposes, though, whether the Mandylion was authentic or not because the Mandylion and the Shroud of Turin are certainly not the same object. According to virtually all accounts, the Mandylion was a much smaller piece of cloth than the Shroud of Turin and it only had Jesus’s face on it—not any other part of his body. Also, it did not depict Jesus as beaten and bloody, but rather alive and healthy.

We know all of this because we have surviving descriptions of the Mandylion and even surviving depictions of it in art. For instance, there is a surviving tenth-century AD Byzantine encaustic painting, which clearly shows the Mandylion as a small piece of cloth bearing only Jesus’s face.

ABOVE: Tenth-century AD Byzantine encaustic painting from Saint Catharine’s Monastery, Mount Sinai, depicting King Abgar bearing the Mandylion of Edessa with the face of Jesus on it

Some supporters of the Shroud of Turin have tried to claim that the Mandylion must have been the Shroud of Turin folded in such a way so that only Jesus’s face was visible and the rest of his body was hidden. In support of this view, supporters of the shroud like to cite Codex Vossianus Latinus Q 69, a tenth-century codex currently held in the Vatican Library that contains an eighth-century Latin account claiming that the Mandylion of Edessa bore not only the image of Jesus’s face, but the image of Jesus’s entire body.

This is, however, the only surviving account that describes the Mandylion of Edessa as bearing the image of Jesus’s whole body. It is far more likely that the author of this account never saw the Mandylion personally and simply imagined that it showed Jesus’s entire body than it is that the Mandylion was actually the Shroud of Turin folded so as to hide the rest of the body from view.

Furthermore, this explanation fails to account for the fact that surviving depictions of the Mandylion all show it depicting a clear image of a living and healthy Jesus with his eyes open—not a ghostly image of a dead and bloody Jesus with his eyes closed. Also, surviving depictions of the Mandylion, such as the encaustic painting of King Abgar receiving it, show it with simply a blank space beneath Jesus’s neck and no continuation.

Finally, the Mandylion is never described in any surviving source as having ever been viewed by anyone as having been Jesus’s burial shroud. There are several different stories about exactly how the Mandylion originated. The earliest version of the story, found in the Doctrine of Addai, holds that it was painted by an artist sent to meet with Jesus by King Abgar of Edessa.

The most popular version of the story in later times, though, held that Jesus himself pressed his face against the cloth and the image was miraculously created. This version of the story claims that Jesus sent the cloth to King Abgar of Edessa as a miraculous cure for illness.

In other words, the only things that the Shroud of Turin and the Mandylion have in common is that they are both pieces of cloth said to bear some form of miraculous image of Jesus.

ABOVE: Anonymous twelfth-century icon of the Mandylion of Edessa from Novgorod

Now, supporters of the Shroud of Turin also like to cite a report from Robert de Clari, a knight from Picardy who participated in the Fourth Crusade, as well as the Crusaders’ brutal sack of the city of Constantinople in 1204. Robert de Clari wrote a detailed account in Old French of the sack of Constantinople titled The Conquest of Constantinople.

In his account, Robert de Clari mentions that, before the city was sacked, the Church of Blachernai contained a piece of cloth that was claimed to be the very burial shroud of Jesus Christ himself. Robert further claims that this shroud miraculously elevated every Friday to reveal the image of Jesus. Robert says that no one knows what happened to the shroud after the city was sacked.

Robert de Clari, however, is the only existing source that claims that there was a shroud in Constantinople with the image of Jesus on it, so we have no way of independently confirming his story. Furthermore, even if Robert de Clari really did see a shroud in Constantinople with the image of Jesus on it, there is no good reason to suppose that the shroud he saw was the Turin Shroud at all, since there have been many other shrouds that have been claimed to be the burial shroud of Jesus, many of which have borne images on them, and there is nothing about Robert’s account to indicate that the shroud he saw is the same one now held in Turin.

Finally, even if the shroud allegedly seen by Robert de Clari in Constantinople was really the Shroud of Turin, that certainly wouldn’t make the Shroud of Turin authentic; Robert de Clari was writing nearly 1,100 years after Jesus’s death, but only around 150 years before the first definitive mention of the Shroud of Turin. In other words, he was writing far closer to the time when the Shroud of Turin first appears in the historical record than he was to the time of Jesus.

If Robert de Clari really saw the Shroud of Turin in Constantinople in around 1203 AD, that would only make the shroud about 150 years older than it is otherwise known to have been; it certainly wouldn’t prove the shroud authentic by any stretch of the imagination.

ABOVE: The Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople, painted in 1840 by the French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix

Evidence #2: We have the documented confession of the forger who created the Shroud of Turin.

The earliest definitive mention of the Shroud of Turin in any written document is a letter written in 1389 by Pierre d’Arcis, the bishop of the city of Troyes to the Avignon Antipope Clement VII. In the letter, Pierre states that the shroud was being used as part of an elaborate faith-healing scam. He reports that the local experts on theology easily recognized the shroud as a hoax because none of the gospels made any mention of the image of Jesus being imprinted on his shroud.

Pierre describes how his predecessor, Bishop Henri de Poitiers, set out on a mission to find out where the shroud had come from. After much inquiry, Henri managed to track down the original forger who had made the shroud, who confessed to him that he had created the shroud as a deliberate hoax and even showed Henri exactly how he had done it. Henri, having obtained this confession, ordered that the shroud be put away and that no one be permitted to venerate it.

Here is the relevant portion of Pierre d’Arcis’s actual letter, as translated from Latin into English by Reverend Herbert Thurston:

“The case, Holy Father, stands thus. Some time since in this diocese of Troyes the Dean of a certain collegiate church, to wit, that of Lirey, falsely and deceitfully, being consumed with the passion of avarice, and not from any motive of devotion but only of gain, procured for his church a certain cloth cunningly painted, upon which by a clever sleight of hand was depicted the twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and front, he falsely declaring and pretending that this was the actual shroud in which our Saviour Jesus Christ was enfolded in the tomb, and upon which the whole likeness of the Saviour had remained thus impressed together with the wounds which He bore.”

“This story was put about not only in the kingdom of France, but, so to speak, throughout the world, so that from all parts people came together to view it. And further to attract the multitude so that money might cunningly be wrung from them, pretended miracles were worked, certain men being hired to represent themselves as healed at the moment of the exhibition of the shroud, which all believed to the shroud of our Lord. The Lord Henry of Poitiers, of pious memory, then Bishop of Troyes, becoming aware of this, and urged by many prudent persons to take action, as indeed was his duty in the exercise of his ordinary jurisdiction, set himself earnestly to work to fathom the truth of this matter.”

“For many theologians and other wise persons declared that this could not be the real shroud of our Lord having the Saviour’s likeness thus imprinted upon it, since the holy Gospel made no mention of any such imprint, while, if it had been true, it was quite unlikely that the holy Evangelists would have omitted to record it, or that the fact should have remained hidden until the present time. Eventually, after diligent inquiry and examination, he discovered the fraud and how the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed.”

“Accordingly, after taking mature counsel with wise theologians and men of the law, seeing that he neither ought nor could allow the matter to pass, he began to institute formal proceedings against the said Dean and his accomplices in order to root out this false persuasion. They, seeing their wickedness discovered, hid away the said cloth so that the Ordinary could not find it, and they kept it hidden afterwards for thirty-four years or thereabouts down to the present year.”

The forger himself literally confessed. You can’t get any better proof than that.

ABOVE: Manuscript illustration dating to 1379, depicting Antipope Clement VII, the addressee of Pierre d’Arcis’s letter describing how his predecessor Henri de Pontiers had obtained the confession of the original forger who made the Shroud of Turin

Evidence #3: The Shroud of Turin doesn’t match the kinds of shrouds that were actually used in Judaea during Jesus’s time or the description of Jesus’s shroud given in the Gospel of John.

Maybe, even though we have a confession, you’re still not convinced that the Shroud of Turin is a hoax. Well, that’s fine, because we have even more evidence that it is a hoax aside from just the confession. Even if we ignore the confession altogether and just look at the shroud itself, it is evident that it is a fourteenth-century forgery. The evidence is written all over the shroud itself.

Quite simply, the shroud doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings that were used in Judaea in Jesus’s time. In Judaea during the first century AD, people did not normally wrap whole bodies in a single rectangular piece of linen; instead, people wrapped the body in strips of linen and wrapped the head separately from the body using its own piece of linen. The Gospel of John 20:6–7 actually explicitly describes Jesus’s head and body having been wrapped separately in precisely this manner. The Greek text of the gospel reads:

“ἔρχεται οὗν καὶ σίμων πέτρος ἀκολουθῶν αὐτῶ, καὶ εἰσῆλθεν εἰς τὸ μνημεῖον· καὶ θεωρεῖ τὰ ὀθόνια κείμενα, καὶ τὸ σουδάριον, ὃ ἦν ἐπὶ τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτοῦ, οὐ μετὰ τῶν ὀθονίων κείμενον ἀλλὰ χωρὶς ἐντετυλιγμένον εἰς ἕνα τόπον.”

Here is the same passage, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):

“Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself.”

The Greek word that is used to describe the wrappings that covered Jesus’s body in this passage is ὀθόνια (othónia), which means “bandages made of fine linen.” The word used to describe the cloth that covered Jesus’s face is σουδάριον (soudárion), which means “a headcloth for the deceased.” No matter how you interpret this passage, it is definitely not describing a single-piece, full-body shroud like the Shroud of Turin.

There are other passages in the gospels that reference Jesus’s body having been wrapped in linen, but none of them give anywhere near as much detail as that passage I just quoted from the Gospel of John. For instance, the Greek text of the Gospel of Mark 15:46 reads as follows:

“καὶ ἀγοράσας σινδόνα καθελὼν αὐτὸν ἐνείλησεν τῇ σινδόνι καὶ ἔθηκεν αὐτὸν ἐν μνημείῳ ὃ ἦν λελατομημένον ἐκ πέτρας, καὶ προσεκύλισεν λίθον ἐπὶ τὴν θύραν τοῦ μνημείου.”

Here is the same passage, as translated in the NRSV:

“So Joseph [of Arimathea] bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb.”

The Greek word in this passage that the NRSV translates as “linen cloth” is σινδών (sindṓn). Some supporters of the Shroud of Turin claim that this word actually refers to a single, full-body shroud. The NRSV’s translation, however, is completely correct in this case; σινδών just means “fine linen cloth,” without any implication of this cloth being in the specific form of a full-body shroud.

At the very least, the Gospel of John’s description of Jesus’s funerary wrappings is an accurate description of how bodies in Judaea in the first century AD were normally wrapped. Nonetheless, because single shrouds for both the head and the body became common in western Europe during the Middle Ages, most western depictions of Jesus’s shroud depict it as a single piece of cloth covering both the head and the body.

ABOVE: Eastern Orthodox mosaic from near the Stone of the Unction in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem depicting Jesus being borne into his tomb, correctly showing his head not wrapped in the same cloth as his body

Evidence #4: The Turin Shroud was radiocarbon dated and the material definitively dates to sometime between c. 1260 and c. 1390.

In 1988, three teams of scientists working independently in three different laboratories located in Oxford, Tucson, and Zürich conducted radiocarbon dating tests on three different samples of the linen from the Shroud of Turin. All three teams of researchers found that the cloth dated to sometime between c. 1260 and c. 1390 AD. These estimates correspond exactly to the time when the Turin Shroud first enters the historical record.

Defenders of the Turin Shroud have tried to insist that, maybe, the corner of the shroud that the samples that the experts conducted radiocarbon dating tests on came from had been “invisibly” repaired in the Middle Ages and that the rest of the Turin Shroud might be much older.

There is, however, currently absolutely no evidence to suggest that the corner of the shroud that the samples were taken from had been repaired at a later date. If the samples had been repaired, the researchers would have been able to detect signs of the repairs when they examined the fabric under a microscope, but they didn’t detect any such signs of repairs.

Furthermore, before the researchers in the Oxford team conducted the radiocarbon dating tests, they consulted textile experts from a laboratory in Derbyshire, England, who did their own examinations of the cloth to make sure they weren’t testing using material that had been added to the shroud later.

The textile experts identified a few stray bits of cotton fiber mixed in with the linen. They concluded that either the loom used to make the linen had been previously used for cotton and the fibers had been introduced when the shroud was woven or that the cotton fibers had been introduced to the shroud at a later date. The cotton fibers of unknown origin were sorted out and only the linen fibers making up the bulk of the shroud were used for testing.

In other words, not only is there no evidence that the parts of the shroud being tested had been introduced due to later repairs, but the researchers were consciously making efforts to ensure that the material they were testing was original to the shroud itself. For a more thorough debunking of the claim that the Shroud of Turin might have been repaired, you can read this article, written by Dr. Steven D. Schafersman, which debunks claims made on the subject.

ABOVE: Newspaper photograph taken on 13 October 1988 of Edward T. Hall, Michael Tite, and R. E. M. Hedges at a press conference at the British Museum announcing that the Turin Shroud had been radiocarbon dated to between c. 1260 and c. 1390 AD

Evidence #5: The image on the Turin Shroud has unrealistic anatomical features that are consistent with Gothic artwork, but not with real human anatomy.

The figure depicted in the Turin Shroud doesn’t have realistic human anatomical features. Let’s start by looking at the face. The forehead is too small and the lower part of the face too large. On a living human human, the forehead (i.e. the space from the top of the head to the eyes) normally takes up about half the face; on the Turin Shroud, though, the forehead takes up just a little over a third of the face.

To illustrate just how weird the proportions are on the face from the Turin Shroud, below is a comparison of the face from the Turin Shroud with the face of Diogo Morgado, the real, human actor who played Jesus in the 2013 History Channel television series The Bible as well the 2014 film Son of God.

The comparison is obviously imperfect because the top of Diogo’s head is cropped in the image that I found on the internet, but you can still see very clearly that Diogo’s forehead occupies a vastly greater proportion of his face than the forehead of the face on the Turin Shroud.

ABOVE: A comparison of the proportions of the negative of the face from the Turin Shroud (left) with the proportions of the face of Diogo Morgado, a real, human actor who portrayed Jesus in the 2014 film Son of God

If we assume that the image on the Turin Shroud is an accurate representation of how Jesus really looked, we are at a loss to explain why his forehead was so tiny. Instead of coming up excuses, like that maybe Jesus had a deformity, I think we should look at works of Gothic art that were made around the time the Shroud of Turin first appears in the historical record.

It was common for Gothic artists in France in the fourteenth century to portray humans with unrealistically small foreheads and unrealistically long lower faces. The proportions of the face on the Turin Shroud, then, are more consistent with the proportions of faces in Gothic art than the proportions of a real human being. This strongly suggests that the Turin Shroud was created by a Gothic artist.

Now let’s look at the body of the figure. We immediately notice that the body itself is disproportionately elongated. The legs and torso are all unnaturally long and thin. This tall, thin quality is highly characteristic of how figures were normally represented in the Gothic art style. Gothic artists intentionally made their figures look this way in effort to make them seem more imposing.

If we look at the figure’s arms, we find that, just like the legs and torso, the arms of the figure on the Turin Shroud are too long to be realistic. Once again, though, we find that figures in Gothic art often have disproportionately long arms—just like the figure on the Turin Shroud.

The exact same thing is true for the fingers of the figure; they’re too long and thin to be natural, but they align exactly with the way figures were portrayed in Gothic art. Indeed, everything about the proportions of the figure on the Shroud of Turin points to the conclusion that it was created by a Gothic artist.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Gothic figures from the western portal of Chartres Cathedral, dating to c. 1145. Notice the small foreheads, long lower faces, long arms, and long bodies—all features of Gothic art that are found in the Turin Shroud.

What’s even more interesting is that the arms of the figure on the Turin Shroud are also different lengths. The right forearm is noticeably longer than the left forearm. The fact that the arms aren’t the same length is almost a dead giveaway that we’re looking at an image created by an artist and not the exact likeness of a real human being. Real human beings virtually always have arms of the same length, but it is really easy for an artist to mess up and make arms that aren’t the same length.

Finally, we have a smoking gun: the front side of the figure on the shroud doesn’t match the back side of the figure. In fact, the two figures aren’t even the same length; the front side of the figure on the shroud is 1.95 meters long, but the figure on the back of the shroud is 2.02 meters long!

This is absolutely a dead giveaway that we’re looking at the work of an artist. It’s easy to see how an artist could have painted the figures separately and accidentally made the back side of the figure longer than the front side, but it is hard to see how, if the shroud were authentic, Jesus’s back could have been longer than his front. That in itself would take some kind of miracle.

ABOVE: The full-length negatives of the front and back of the Turin Shroud. Pay attention to the arms, which are of differing lengths and too long to be anatomical. Also notice that the image on the back is longer than the one on the front.

Evidence #6: The blood stains on the Turin Shroud are not consistent with how blood naturally flows and the stains instead appear to have been painted on.

Researchers have repeatedly conducted experiments and found that the bloodstains on the Turin Shroud are not consistent with how blood naturally flows. In 2018, a group of researchers conducted experiments in which they applied blood to a live volunteer and to a mannequin to mimic the wounds sustained by Jesus on the cross in order to see how the blood would run on human bodies in various positions. They then compared the actual blood patterns with the bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin.

Two short trails of blood on the back of the left hand of the figure on the Shroud of Turin were found to be only plausible if the man was holding his arms at a forty-five degree angle, but bloodstains on the forearm were only plausible if the man was holding his arms vertically or nearly vertically. Since a man can’t hold his arms in both positions at once, clearly the bloodstains weren’t natural.

The bloodstains on the front chest of the figure were consistent with the pattern one would expect from a spear wound in the side, but the bloodstains on the back, which supposedly came from the same spear wound, weren’t consistent with the supposed injury. In other words, this is another case of the back side of the figure on the shroud not matching the front.

Matteo Borrini, the leader of the research team and a forensic anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University, stated in an interview with LiveScience, “…these cannot be real bloodstains from a person who was crucified and then put into a grave, but actually handmade by the artist that created the shroud.” In other words, the bloodstains were painted on.

ABOVE: Christ Crucified, painted c. 1632 by the Spanish painter Diego Velázquez

Evidence #7: The fabric of the Shroud of Turin uses a herringbone twill weave, which is a kind of complex weave that was used in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles, but is not known to have been used for burial shrouds in the first century AD.

The Shroud of Turin is made of linen fibers woven using a three-to-one herringbone twill weave, which is a kind of highly complex weave that was used in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles. Although the herringbone twill weave did exist in the ancient Roman world, we have no evidence that it was ever used for burial shrouds.

Fragments of a number of burial shrouds have been recovered from tombs near Jerusalem dating to the same time period as Jesus and all of them use a plain two-way weave; none of them use a herringbone twill weave.

Even if we imagine that the herringbone twill weave was used for burial shrouds in Roman Judaea and we just don’t have any evidence for this, it almost certainly would not have been used for the burial shroud of a crucified Jewish criminal, since it is a very complex weave that takes much greater skill and effort to produce than a plain weave. As such, any fabric made using this weave in Jesus’s time would have certainly been very expensive.

The burial shroud fragments that have been recovered from the tombs near Jerusalem, however, include fragments from shrouds that certainly belonged to extremely elite individuals and all of them use the much simpler two-way weave. It is hard to imagine that a high priest or wealthy aristocrat would have been buried with a relatively cheap shroud made with a simple weave, but a crucified criminal would have been buried with a more expensive herringbone twill shroud.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons depicting a modern example of herringbone twill weave. This kind of weave was used for expensive fabrics in the Late Middle Ages, but not for burial shrouds in Judaea in the first century AD.

Conclusion

So, here’s the evidence I have presented for why the Shroud of Turin is clearly a hoax:

  • We have no reliable documentation of the Shroud of Turin’s existence until the fourteenth century.
  • The forger who made the Shroud of Turin confessed and the earliest definitive mention of the shroud in any historical source is a record of his confession.
  • The Shroud of Turin doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings used in Judaea in the time of Jesus or the description of Jesus’s own funerary wrappings given in the Gospel of John.
  • The linen of the Shroud of Turin has been securely dated using radiocarbon dating to between c. 1260 and c. 1390 AD—well over a millennium after Jesus’s death.
  • The figure on the Shroud of Turin does not have anatomically correct proportions and much more closely resembles figures in fourteenth-century Gothic art than a real human being.
  • The bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin are not consistent with how blood actually flows naturally and they instead appear to have been painted on.
  • The fabric of the Shroud of Turin is made with a kind of weave that is known to have been commonly used during the Late Middle Ages, but does not seem to have been used for burial shrouds in Judaea in the first century AD.

All the evidence points to the inexorable conclusion that the Shroud of Turin is a late medieval hoax.

The fact that the Shroud of Turin is a hoax doesn’t make it any less interesting as a historical artifact; it may be a hoax, but it is still an extremely famous hoax that is probably around seven hundred years old and that can reveal a lot about the nature of religious hoaxes in late medieval France. The Shroud of Turin is worth studying, then, not as an authentic ancient relic, but rather as an authentic medieval religious artifact. It has historical value, just not the particular kind of historical value that some people think it has.

Since I’m debunking misconceptions about Jesus, I should probably also note that Jesus almost certainly wasn’t married to Mary Magdalene, he definitely wasn’t copied off the Egyptian god Horus or the Greek god Dionysos, and he almost certainly wasn’t really born on December 25th either.

Author: Spencer McDaniel

Hello! I am an aspiring historian mainly interested in ancient Greek cultural and social history. Some of my main historical interests include ancient religion, mythology, and folklore; gender and sexuality; ethnicity; and interactions between Greek cultures and cultures they viewed as foreign. I graduated with high distinction from Indiana University Bloomington in May 2022 with a BA in history and classical studies (Ancient Greek and Latin languages), with departmental honors in history. I am currently a student in the MA program in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at Brandeis University.

104 thoughts on “The Shroud of Turin Is Definitely a Hoax”

  1. The analysis presented is for me too superficial to reach a conclusive result. After more than 20 years of studies on this Relic, I know that the Shroud wrapperd the corpse of the Resurrected jesus Christ.
    Please read:

    – Fanti G. “Why is the Turin Shroud Authentic?”. Glob J Arch & Anthropol. 2018; 7(2): 555707,
    https://juniperpublishers.com/gjaa/pdf/GJAA.MS.ID.555707.pdf

    – Fanti G. “Why is the Turin Shroud Not Fake?”, Glob J Arch & Anthropol. 2018: 7(3),
    https://juniperpublishers.com/gjaa/pdf/GJAA.MS.ID.555715.pdf

    – Fanti G. “Science and Christian Faith: The Example of the Turin Shroud”, Glob J Arch & Anthropol. 2018: 7(3),
    https://juniperpublishers.com/gjaa/pdf/GJAA.MS.ID.555726.pdf

    1. I will simply note here that “Juniper Publishers” is a fake academic publisher. They publish all kinds of unscientific nonsense. Andres Washington, one of the supposed members of the editorial board for the Journal of Forensic Sciences and Criminal Investigation, published by Juniper Publishers, is said to specialize in the study of “the correlation between the elevation of the mental manifestation and the phenomenon of the dermal ridge arrangements” (i.e. phrenology).

      Meanwhile, the “Associate Editor” of Juniper Publishers’ Global Journal of Addiction and Rehabilitation Medicine is a certain “Dr. Olivia Doll,” who is actually not a doctor or even a human being at all, but rather a literal pit bull. Publishing articles in any “journal” published by Juniper Publishers does not in any way make you seem even remotely more credible. If anything, it makes you seem far less credible.

      1. It is a good work and creditable even Columbo would be envious of your work!

        To help:

        Excluding all the possibilities known by the science and take into consideration of the experiments, examinations on the shroud, there are two possibilities according to my knowledge and my imagination:
        1. UV
        2. Alpha particles
        (0. the chemical agent was excluded as I know even it would leave similar imprint as it would have made effect on that parts of the shroud that connected the skin of the body(or an other e.g. a sculpture)
        1. In case of UV it is very hard to imagine a situation in which the UV light can make these types of spots resembling Jesus. A situation would be if there was a sheet, the shroud, on a wall in a church and some UV got through a tainted glass window showing Jesus…But it is very unlikely as the picture should have be very detailed, the rays would be very convergent, and the main, in that old days just the sunlight could cause this as the only UV source existed. But sunlight is travelling, moving as day goes on, so did not make any picture. And not to mention glass retard back the UV almost perfectly. I can imagine an other situation in which the shroud was in a room on the wall. There is a hole in the wall to face, and outside the room there is a picture of Jesus dead body shone by the sun to get UV. And like in case of camera obscura, the light of that picture through the hole shone the picture on the shroud. But in that case the picture should be very different from that usual pictures we know(much like similar the shroud imprint). And much much much time needed to got the UV to change the material as the light scattering on picture is small in quantity not to mention that it goes through the hole that is small had to be to get relatively sharp picture, so it is very tiny amount of light. And also the absorption coefficients for UV of that paint is also questionable. So this is unlikely. I dismiss the UV theory…BUT…not to mention cheating, yes, in case of cheating, one can put the shroud outside on the sun, cover it with, e.g. I do not know, something, the main is that in a way that process will resembles Jesus after a perhaps a summer spent on the sun. It can be easily done. But it is cheating. The effect of the threads, the tar like painting molecules found and as I know the soot like substance, and also the effect of the darkening of one side of the threads and also the covering effect that one thread covers the other and the other darkened not on that spot, so all these can be explained by the UV. But not accidentally, but by intentional cheating. But if anybody can find out a situation in which the picture appears and later nobody can, or in that old times could say why? Please write down, thanks! And yes, even Jesus body could emit UV rays. And yes, even a dead body that was a follower of Jesus and crucified in the same way as Jesus could be covered with that shroud. I did not want to say what happened. I just want to point out what could happened, or in other term, how could we make similar effects on a shroud?
        To mention, UV does not leave any nuclear changes in the material, so later isotpeexamination does not show any evidence the early presence of UV.
        Note: It is possible that the molecules causing the darkening of the threads are characteristic of UV, as some binding energy tends to tear more likely than others, I mean smaller binding energy means more are torn from that, stronger, less. It could be a base of examination e.g. with mass spectrometer.
        2.
        2. As I read your writings something get into my mind, a nail:). I can say Heureka! The alpha particles are emitted by materials usually found in granite, sandstone. As I know the standstone was a very common material in the gothic era to make sculptures. It can be easily carved and mildly can stand the weather. Ok. The sandstones usually containing minor traces of nuclear materials e.g. Th, U, and the elements of their decay chain. Why is it important?
        If there was a sculpture made by that materials above and that sculpture was placed in a dry store and covered a shroud to save from damages, that shroud would got enough dose of radiation to change. The radiation tore the bonds of the chemicals of the threads making tar-like materials, and veryvery fine soot particles, and yes, they are darker than the original material. Similar to the UV process above.
        The neutron, gamma, and beta radiations are negligible regarding the dose. But if they dose were not negligible, they also have the same properties: go through the shroud like knife on butter and leave any effect. But even they radiated the whole material with enough dose to darken, even in that case the whole material, or nearly the whole would had the same darkening, or nearly the same. As these radiations goes through the airgap without any significant changes in amount between the shroud and the body(or sculpture). So do not imprint the body on to the shroud.
        BUT!
        In case of alpha rays, yes, they print the body on the shroud.
        Why?
        The alpha particle, that is ionized helium, has high energy, some MeV(million electron-volt) that is million times higher than the energy of chemical bonds, what is typically electron volt. One alpha particle can tear up millions of bonds. And in this process the free ionized atoms, and ionized molecules, radicals are making new molecules. Yes. Tar-like molecules. And yes, if most of the hydrogen goes out form molecules then they tends to form nano-particle-like soot by carbon-carbon bindings.
        So, for the sake of high energy, MeV, and low binding energy, electron-volt, small amount of alpha particle, so small amount of isotope in the stone would have been enough to make relatively large changes on the shroud. And. The alpha emitters are long living isotopes as the nucleus needs to get high energy state to release the alpha particle, so they are very long living isotopes, hundreds of thousands and hundreds of millions of years. What does it mean? They can substantially give a large dose to a material during long time vithout any (or veryvery minor) change in the intensity of the emitting, irradiance. E.g. In case of ten years they emitts about eighty-thousand times more alpha particles on that material than e.g. during an hour. And yes, it makes around eighty-thousand times more molecules changint. And the shroud was darkened. And to mention the patches on shroud is very faint, so it got not “large dose”. So needed not so much time. To better quantification experiments and calculations needed, I just showed out the ratios, the tendencies, and they show it could happened in this way.
        And if this is not enough.
        And this is the main:
        As the alpha particle is ionized, and has large mass, it slows down very quickly in the material. In case of solid state material the mean path is some tens of micrometer. It is below the diameter of a thread. What does it mean? If alpha particle irradiates the shroud, then the threads seem to be darken only one side, the side where the radiation come. And also the crossed threads are shadowing each other!
        But if it is not enough.
        And this is responsible for the printing the body on the shroud:)
        The alpha particles loose their energy in some cm of air. And some cm would have been the typical distance between the shroud and Jesus dead(or any, or sculpture) body where the shroud not touched it.
        And in that areas the alpha particle does not reached the shroud or if reached, it reached with less energy and made less effect, meaning much less dakening!
        And this process based on the absorption in the air and also in the shroud made the print of the body.
        Or.
        If a body was covered alpha emitters the similar could happen. Not so uncommon, e.g. uranium dioxide was used in painting of ceramic wares in that old days. Perhaps the myrrh covered Jesus’ body contained that material or similar to color the skin after the torture. In this case the dose is a bit questionable as Jesus spent three days in the tomb acc. to Bible.
        Or perhaps an other body wearing the same symptoms was the object.
        And.
        Not to mention that alpha particles leave any or nothing nuclear effect after the irradiation of the material as alpha particles hardly change the nucleus of the atoms(in this case of the threads). Rutherford collision.
        Likely, the imprint on shroud come from sculpture.

        So, to summarized:
        Alpha particles coming from alpha emitters, typically U, Th and the elements of theirs decay chain caused a darkening effect based on irradiation effects.
        The imprint was made by the phenomena of the absorption of the alpha particles in the airgap between the body or sculpture and the shroud.
        Conclusion:
        A dead body covered this type of material see above was the cause of the imprint.
        Or most likely as reason of the different long arms, fingers, and so on, so most likely a sculpture containing this type of material was covered with the shroud for years or tens of years in a dry place even hundreds of years and the shroud got so much dose that it darkened on that places where the airgap between the sculpture and the shroud was small, typicall under a cm. And the shroud did not rotten in that dry place.
        But what happened? We do not know!
        We just know what we can repeat!
        To mention I measured terracotta wares, a cup, with yellow tainting, with alpha detector about twenty years ago during one of my studies. It emitted alpha rays. And also I measured alpha emitter radioactive samples, and they darken the hydro-carbon-like materials very quickly, e.g. the napkin they were placed on. Even with hand was not clever to touch even the skin shadows alpha particles, as it quickly rotten the skin and goes deeper, or even physically, thermally burn it.

        Note: The tissues at the backside are not deformed as the press of the weight of the body. Just try to lay down, water your body, lay a sheet on you…..and also lay on a sheet…..the sheet on you will resemble of your body, but the sheet bleow you……..try it. So this is not a body. This is a sculpture. And the darkening effect was caused by alpha-particles absorbed by the airgaps between the shroud and absorbed by the shroud. With great likelihood:)

        Theories. Sometimes experiments. And even in the best case we just get similar results. Perhaps it shows contradictions, and in that case………and show must go on.

        1. Alpha radiation has been considered as a possible image generator, by, for example Roberto Villarreal, of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in a paper called the Alpha Particle Irradiation Hypothesis, at shroud.com/pdfs/stlvillarrealppt1.pdf and Kitty Little, of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, UK, at shroud.com/bsts4607.htm. Although both scientists seem to think that alpha-radiation could have caused the image on the cloth, both were too strongly Christian and ‘miraculist’ to consider any other source of the radiation than the dead body of Jesus. The idea that a sculpture might be so radioactive as to leave an image on cloth is intriguing, but I am very doubtful if any sculptural material of the Middle Ages was sufficiently radioactive. Such studies as have been carried out on radioactive ceramics tend to concentrate on the modern glazes they are coloured with rather than the raw material. It is also not clear to me whether alpha radiation would be able to produce the definition of the facial features and fingers (and the lack of definition of any ‘sideways’ radiation) without being vertically collimated, a possible mechanism for which escapes me.

          1. It wouldn’t, to produce the kind of image on the shroud (baring access to a fourth or higher dimensional device) you need to either use an artistic technique of a to manually “paint” the image using a revolutionary medium that has yet to be identified, or you need to have plane of high energy pass over the 3D object to record the image, as with a modern photocopier. This means that our most probable cause are not mundane. As improbable as it may seem, if is unlikely that humans born in the last 3,000 years created image. They lack tools to do so. A more advance intelligence than that our our ancestors science is at work, be it extraterrestrial (aliens), extratemporal (time travelers), or extradimensional (supernatural beings). So far, we have no evidence to support a terrestrial, contemporary, and local dimensional source for the shrouds creation.

        2. I placed my arms the same way in the photo, and one of my arms can be placed looking as if one is longer than the other. Also, the scientists who did the carbon dating are atheists and wanted to prove the turin a fake. The tests proved the blood was in fact blood. Jesus’ body bled out before he died, and would therefore have shown little or few stains of blood. 3rd-The scientists also proved the turin to have dated as far back as 30-40 AD. The muslin cloth used was in fact the type of cloth used to wrap the dead in that era.

        3. Ummm, are you saying rigor mortis had no affect on the body? Was the Corpus Christi Delectae not affected by the chemical processes that take place in the human body when restrained in an upright stretched and stressful position for hours on end?

          Perhaps not; idk I wasn’t there, but maybe you can find the errors here https://www.peertechzpublications.com/articles/FST-4-110.php ?

      2. Spencer,
        Have you run across Thomas de Wesselow’s work? “Thomas de Wesselow studied art history at Edinburgh University and earned his MA and PhD at London’s Courtland Institute of Art. Since 2007 he has been researching the Shroud full-time. He lives in Cambridge, England. Book: The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection, Easter Book.” Google Books. The relic may have been the spark that put the idea of resurrection into the minds of Jesus’ followers, who were animists, eventually creating the Jesus Movement leading to the emergence of the church. I think that deWesselow may be an atheist, which would actually enhance his insights.

        1. I had not heard of Thomas de Wesselow until now, but I can say that anyone who think that the Turin Shroud is somehow the “spark that put the idea of resurrection into the minds of Jesus’ followers” and who thinks that Jesus’s original followers were “animists” clearly doesn’t know what he is talking about.

          Jesus’s earliest followers were first-century Galilean Jews living under Roman rule; they were monotheists or at least henotheists, not “animists.” Moreover, the Turin Shroud is never mentioned at all in any ancient Christian text, let alone in any of the earliest surviving texts. To argue that this shroud, which has no provenance whatsoever until the fourteenth century, is the “spark” that triggered Christian belief in the Resurrection of Jesus, you would need some truly compelling evidence. That evidence quite simply does not exist.

          1. Not to mention the fact that Jews would consider a bloody burial cloth to be unclean, no matter who was wrapped in it. To keep such a relic would place them in a perpetual state of ritual impurity, unable to enter the Temple. Everything they touched would be unclean. Each purification ritual with the red heifer ashes took 7 days. They would be in an endless loop of contamination and purification. Yet the book of Acts shows the disciples freely coming and going from the Temple. In addition, the shroud of Turin is an image–something no Jew would venerate. Its creation, if miraculous, would require God to violate His own law against such images.

          2. My man, no technology today can produce that. A body of a man was wrapped in cloth and a light so powerful came from that body it left that image. A light we cant even reproduce today. Also the carbon dating was don’t on fabric that was woven into the original cloth after a fire nearly destroyed it. Also that face is a Jewish face, the face of Christ.

          3. My man, no technology today can produce that. A body of a man was wrapped in cloth and a light so powerful came from that body it left that image. A light we cant even reproduce today. Also the carbon dating was done on fabric that was woven into the original cloth after a fire nearly destroyed it. Also that face is a Jewish face, the face of Christ. No artist can make it today, so how did they do it? You assume its not real even though your staring into the face of a crucified man. He loves you bro no matter what.

          4. You clearly have a disposition and your attempts to claim its a hoax with such fragile evidence, even as you stair into his face and know that no one can make that you don’t want to believe, but one day you will meet him.

        2. I don’t think Thomas de Wesselow has been researching the Shroud at all since 2012, let alone full-time. His book may have taken five years to write (it was published in 2012), but since then he has neither published nor contributed anything regarding the Shroud.

    3. Comment No.69

      Here’s what I added (as a late Introduction) to my the current posting on my own Turin Shroud website back in December of last year. It was regarding the first individual to comment on Spencer’s interesting (albeit questionable!) new-take posting, regarding the Professor’s alleged “scientific” credentials!

      Late insertion on my own site (Dec 20, 2020)

      “It’s now 6 months to the day since I added this Final Posting (last of some 370 over a 9 year period).

      Well well. There’s been total silence – or nearly so – from the world of authenticity -promoting Shroudology these last 6 months re my “FILM-SET” Model 10!

      Why? I think I’ve discovered why. One has only to look at the writings of the chief spokesperson for the so -called “Shroud Science Group” (Prof. Giulio Fanti of Padua University).

      Here’s the offending article: “A Dozen Years of the Shroud Science Group”, 2014.

      Here’s the particular passage, underlined in bright yellow – my addition – that leaves this scientist speechless:

      ( Sorry, the passage in question failed to copy/paste!)

      Giulio Fanti, chief spokesman of the so-called , self-styled “Shroud Science Group” (SSG) , is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Padua University, Italy.

      Yet here he is, telling the world what CANNOT be reproduced scientifically.

      What right does an engineer have to say what scientists, pursuing their own specialist creative ideas and hypothesis-testing methodologies, can or cannot be reproduced scientifically?

      What we see here is arrogance, sheer overweening arrogance.

      I say it’s time the SSG found themselves a new spokesperson. Either that, or change their name, omitting any reference to “science” in their present SSG title!

      The next step?

      There are two totally separate phases re model building.

      First, establish facts, then present one’s explanation, aka rationale,

      Second: then try to win over entrenched ideas.

      Be patient as regards the latter.”

  2. I read the list of reasons why the Shroud is fake here. Incredibly stupid arguments against authenticity. Not one is valid. That is the word skeptics like to use, Hoax and fake since they cannot explain that without sounding like a complete idiot . This post is no exception A fake?! A fake of what? A fake of Jesus right? According to forensic pathologists it is not fake, but very real. There is no conflicting expert witness testimony, The only credible testimony in this case comes from people who are qualified to make a determination of whether or not a real dead body was in that cloth and those people are forensic pathologists, they all were in 100% agreement the Shroud was authentic with certainty. Shroud fabric has severe radiation damage equal to that of the Dead Sea Scrolls we know are over 2000 years old. It is a scientific impossibility it comes from a Medieval time. coloring on Shroud is not due to adding material, but non material entity, like charged particle radiation or electromagnetic. It is not a painting, to believe so shows an incredible lack of intelligence.

    It is Syrian Weave Cloth of fine linen because Joseph of Arimathea bought it from a Sryian merchant selling his goods for the Passover outside the Damascus Gate. That is why the Shroud is Syrian weave cloth in Syrian cubits. 8 X 2 Cubits. That is also the reason the cloth has pollens on it from Syria, because it is from Syria. Jesus was buried with the rich at death, Shroud is proof of that.

    They carbon dated madder root dye and cotton in 1988 and told us what we already know by looking at the cloth with the naked eye. The corner is damaged and they did a repair there.
    Carbon dating people got nearly 2 million dollars to say fake. They were paid to say fake.

    There is a new teaching going on in the world today, “At the end of the day it is all about me and what I want” They want the Shroud to be fake. But it is not.

    I do not know who posted this, but I will quote Senator John Kennedy. “It must suck to be that dumb”

    Here is a suggestion for the up loader. Do some real research, we know how bad you want this to be fake but it is not. You will facing Jesus at judgement. A real meeting coming up with a real person and that person’s image is on the Shroud.

    1. I don’t believe that the Turin Shroud is a hoax because I want it to be; on the contrary, as far as my personal desires are concerned, I would much rather believe that it is authentic. As I note in my article above, if the shroud were authentic, then it would be an invaluable source of information about Jesus as a human being. The problem is that the evidence clearly points to the conclusion that the shroud is a fourteenth-century hoax. Unlike some people, I believe that it is important to follow the evidence wherever it may lead, even if the evidence goes against what I’d personally like to believe.

      You say that “forensic pathologists” are the only people who are qualified to make any kind of statement on the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. That’s a preposterous thing to say. You’re effectively saying that historians and archaeologists aren’t qualified to make any kind of statement pertaining to the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin because some of us might disagree with you. When you say, “Anyone who disagrees with me is unqualified and wrong,” you aren’t making a real argument. It’s also fascinating that about half of your comment here consists of petty insults about how “dumb” I supposedly am. Maybe I am dumb, but, even if I am, simply calling me dumb isn’t a rebuttal.

      Likewise, you insist that the experts who conducted the carbon dating tests on the Turin Shroud in 1988 must have been paid to say the shroud was fake, but you present no evidence to support this contention. You simply assume that they must have been bribed to say that the shroud was fake because you are so personally convinced of the shroud’s authenticity that you can’t imagine any qualified expert saying it is fake unless they were bribed. That’s actually a very cynical attitude.

      Finally, I will note that it’s mighty forward of you to assume that I must be an atheist and a mythicist just because I dispute the authenticity of one relic. You’ll notice that I never said anything at all in this article about the existence of God or the existence of Jesus as a human being; all I argue in this article is that the Shroud of Turin is not Jesus’s authentic burial shroud. Apparently, in your view, all of Christianity hinges on belief in the authenticity of the Turin Shroud. That’s a very twisted and reductive view of Christianity.

      Now, as it happens, I am an agnostic, but there was nothing in this article that could have reliably led you to that conclusion and I know you haven’t done any background research on me because you couldn’t even remember my name, which is given at the top of this article. Meanwhile, I do believe in the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth. In fact, I have written multiple articles defending the historicity of Jesus, which you can read here, here, and here.

      Ironically, the last time I had this much backlash to an article I had written, it was backlash by mythicists against my first article about the historicity of Jesus. Richard Carrier wrote a whole article attacking me in which he hurled at me many epithets quite similar to the ones you yourself are now hurling. It’s funny how, no matter what I say about Jesus, everyone always hates me for it.

      1. Just to preface this, I dont actually believe that the shroud is authentic. I am suspending judgment on that one for now. However I do want to play devils advocate and bring up some points :

        1) The head covering mentioned in John, believed to be the same covering in the Sudarium of Oviedo, contains a blood stain very similar to the one on the Shroud. The blood type is the same (AB) and when you compare the blood stain to the one on the shroud, it looks very similar.

        2) the image portrays blood stains where a person’s arms and feet are in a way that would resemble the way Romans crucified people (with a cross through their arms and not their hands, since it would support their weight better). This is very different from the imagery in medieval times when Jesus was depicted with a nail through the hands, not the arms, and through the front of the foot, not the side of the heal.

        3) we still dont understand exactly how this shroud was made.How did the artist make a fake that has no brush strokes?

        4) I have heard a theory that the reason the shroud has such a unique image is that there was an earthquake around the time jesus was buried and the release of radiation caused this type of image on the shroud, as well as a distortion of the carbon dating. Im not sure if this is physically possible. Have you heard of this theory and what do you think of it?

        5) also the cubits thing Page mentioned. This one I think isnt that incredible since someone could have ordered a cloth be made that was in cubits to make it seem more authentic. I have no doubt that the artist could have known about cubits. Perhaps they were a student of history themselves.

        1. Hi Steven,

          Playing Devil’s Advocate is one of the most important things any scientist ought to do for himself throughout his investigation, so comments such as yours are well worth while, regardless whether they come from an authenticist, a medievalist, or a sindolological agnostic. Occasionally they introduce something the researcher has not considered himself, and even if not, they help him to clarify and crystallise his own understanding.

          1) The blood on the Sudarium consists of large, irregular splodges, and a few small and fairly precise concentrated dots.

          The two bigger splodges appear to be mirror images of each other, so it is assumed that the Sudarium was folded in two before being applied to a face. Having done this, we can see that the darkest area seems more or less to correspond with the mouth area of a human head, and is connected via an ‘isthmus’ to the lightest area which corresponds to one side of the forehead. There is almost no blood on the Shroud at any of these points, and the large mark on the Sudarium cannot be matched to the very few blood stains that there are. It is not surmised, even by those who think the two are from the body of Jesus, that the blood on the Sudarium is from the same source as the blood on the Shroud. The Shroud marks are supposed to be from flows from puncture wounds, while the Sudarium marks are supposed to be from inside the chest of the dead body, emitted through the mouth as it was manipulated from its position on the cross towards the tomb. They are distinguished by evidence of three or four distinct and superimposed fringes, as if a previous blood flow had dried before a subsequent one occurred. This is accounted for by Jesus having been left still in successive places for half-an-hour at a time, in order to give one layer time to dry before a subsequent one was emitted over it. Neither the blood mark on the Sudarium nor the image of the Shroud is sufficiently precise for any specific dimensions to be made of either – both of them fit a man’s face, sure, but to claim that they match so exactly that they must have derived from the same man is unsupportable.

          The smaller blood marks on the Sudarium are more precise and look as if they may have derived from puncture wounds, as do the blood marks on the back of the head of the Shroud. However, attempts to pin-point the location of the puncture wounds show that they do not match precisely, and again, their generic similarity is insufficient for a claim that they must have come from the same man to be unassailable.

          2) Whenever an authenticist claims that medieval artists differ from the Shroud image in placing the nails through the wrists, not the palms, they invariably refer to images of the crucifixion, which do not show the backs of the hands. I do not think I have ever seen an authenticists referring to images of depositions or lamentations, which do occasionally show the back of the hands. Although I do not think that medieval artists used a protractor, it is instructive to measure the angle between the two lines connecting the nail wound to the outer knuckles, which can be measured on both the Shroud and other medieval paintings. It is between about 50-70 degrees in almost all cases, showing that the mark on the Shroud is entirely in keeping with medieval convention. Whether it conforms to Roman crucifixion practices is irrelevant.

          The blood on the feet of the Shroud image is too indistinct for any wound-hole to be reliably identified at any location.

          It should be mentioned here that we have vanishingly little evidence for what ‘normal’ Roman crucifixions consisted of, whether there were local variations in different parts of the empire, and how far even crucifixions at the same place and time might differ from each other. Two heel-bones and one graffito cannot be considered definitive evidence of invariable paractice.

          3) There are no brush strokes on the Shroud because the artist didn’t use a brush. He probably smeared his colouring agent over a woodblock bas relief and unrolled the cloth over the top.

          4) There is considerable evidence of electromagnetic disturbance associated with seismic activity, but owing to the unreliability of earthquake occurrence this has been little investigated. However, it seems to be a particular feature of igneous geology, and does not occur in limestone areas such as Jerusalem. The ‘earthquake hypothesis’ such as it is, suggests that during an earthquake a voltage can be established between two horizontal layers of rock separated by a space, across which space there would be an electrical discharge. This would be emitted from the upper surface of the lower stratum, or in this case a body lying on it, and jump vertically to the lower surface of the upper stratum, in this case the roof of the burial chamber, and the energy of the discharge might discolour any linen that happened to get in the way. Unfortunately there is no evidence that this actually occurs, no evidence of an earthquake of sufficient magnitude at the right place and time to have generated such energy, and no evidence that the geology of Jerusalem can support such a hypothesis.

          5) The idea that the measurements of the Shroud might correspond to some kind of cubit was quite sensible, but it is impossible to say whether it does or not. All cubits referred to in the bible, or derived from archaeological Roman or Jewish remains of the time of Jesus, are far too small. Eventually someone discovered a paper deriving an ancient Assyrian cubit, from a few stone plaques from 700 years before the time of Christ and 600 miles away. This was arbitrarily assumed to be “the international standard of measurement” for first century Judea, which is nonsense. The fact is that cloth has been woven in widths of just over a metre (as well as other widths) all over the world throughout time, and no particular specimen, especially one which has had a strip cut off and resewn, can be attributed to any particular time or place on its dimensions alone.

          So there we have it. Keep em coming!

          2. Hi Jet,

            Thanks for your enquiry. The article you cite is quite long, and all the points it makes – with which I disagree – have been addressed in my previous comments here, my academia.edu papers (The Medieval Shroud, The Medieval Shroud 2 and The Medieval Shroud 3, and my blog postings at medieval shroud.com.

            If you would like to discuss a specific topic, by all means let me know which, and I’ll be happy to address it in greater detail.

            Best wishes,
            Hugh

      2. Blah blah blah is a sign of one who projects himself to be knowledgeable. Your argument leads everyone to believe one of two things; your rantings are simply to sound intelligent while getting people to understand your rants and from your perspective become theirs.

        Or…start an argument with those who believe the turin is real.

        The only important thing you need to truly know is that Jesus died for you as well. If you have already accepted Him as your Lord, then there is hope for you. If not, then pray that when judgment day comes He will look beyond your idiosyncrasies and have mercy on your soul.

        1. Blah, blah, blah is a sign from someone who recognizes word salad nonsense when he reads it. I don’t really care what you believe to be true. I want to know what is objectively true and so should you. Jesus did not die for me because he is a fictional character and never actually lived. No one needs to die for me or you as I did not do anything wrong and am not guilty of what you call original sin. I am not guilty of others supposed transgressions. My parents had sex and I was born. No free will or choice in the matter. Any god that made me, you or anyone else for that matter, to be born in a way that is not to his/her/its liking is an a-hole. How wise and loving (not) this creature must be to give the following ultimatum. “Choose to love me on my terms or your will suffer for all of eternity. ” No thanks, I’ll pass. As I stated in an earlier reply. Spending eternity in your imaginary heaven with people of your ilk is my definition of hell. The real original sin is that you were taught this from birth and have accepted it as fact without evidence or critical thought. Just like language and virtually everything else that humans hold near and dear, it was taught. We are all brainwashed by our cultures from birth. You did not choose your beliefs any more than you chose your parents or the language you speak. Unlike you, I don’t claim to know what the real answer is. I am smart enough however to know that logic tells me a god of your design cannot possibly exist.

    2. I believe what you say and the Shroud is really Jesus, and it is carved in the cloth by radiation. I’m considering buying a picture to put with my other icons. When I first saw the picture, I was in awe. I I’ve had the near death experience. I prayed to Padre Pio to ask Jesus and I was healed from spinal meningitis. I couldn’t walk, could hardly see and was going blind, and couldn’t hear well. I know Padre Pio’s stigmata real!

    3. You’re passion is clear, but I don’t know that you point is going to be heard by anyone whom might want to connivence. I ask you to reconsider your methods, that you might be more enlightening to those in the darkness of ignorance.

    4. Blah, blah, blah. You are more likely to meet the easter bunny on your imaginary judgement day. The most famous “real”???? person in all of human history and no record of date of birth or date of death. Pretty important details that were never documented. The resurrection which is the lynchpin of christian doctrine is celebrated on a different date every year as determined by the interaction of the sun and moon. Pathetic. The bible and the beliefs it spawns are pure fiction. Adult fairy tales for people incapable of serious critical thinking. This is the reason I would never want to go to your imaginary heaven. I would have to live for all of eternity with people like you. That “IS” the definition of hell.

  3. Basically this person has listed the following for his or her “fake theory” This is a house of cards in which the foundation of fake was built upon a small piece of fabric about 3 centimeters long that was contaminated with cotton and madder root dye and carbon dated in 1988. 3 labs confirmed the sample was contaminated with foreign material. Once that is exposed the entire house of cards falls. Such is the case here.

    1 Bishops letter. This is an unsigned letter from 1390 that was never sent and is assumed to be written by a Bishop,( which probably is) that says a artist painted the Shroud when we know for a forensic fact the Shroud is not a painting . coloring is not due to adding material to the cloth but radiated energy, charged particle radiation or electromagnetic. You cannot hide paint from high powered microscopes, if it was a painting we would be able to make that determination in less than 60 seconds. Paint does not make up image. So much for that.

    2. Shroud is a Syrian weave cloth herringbone weave fine linen that was NOT available in Medieval times in Europe. It was only available in ancient times in Syria and Egypt. It does not take a rocket scientist to know the Shroud is a long sheet of fine linen as described in the Bible. John refers to them as “grave/linen clothes” Not linen cloths. That is a very recent change to the original translation from the Kings James Bible, changing linen clothes to linen cloths is misleading, deceptive and not accurate. The shroud could be called “grave clothes” although it is a bit vague it is an OK translation, that is what they were. John also mentions the head cloth, which is kept in Spain now. John mentions myrrh and aloes. There is myrrh and aloes on both Shroud and head cloth. I suppose that is an incredible coincidence right? Gospel of John is proof of authenticity! Up loader has it backwards.

    3. Shroud has pollens on it from Jerusalem up to 28 plants and pollens from Syria and Turkey up to 9 different plants but this comes from Europe right? Need more be said.

    4. Carbon dating?! They got paid 2 million dollars to say fake. They carbon dated a repaired corner area. 3 independent labs confirmed it. Sorry to burst any skeptics fantasy bubble of fake but it is not. It is real. Despite how badly they want it be fake.

    5 Shroud is forensically accurate, the skull is 9″ in length. Average human skull is about 8 and half inches. Up loader claims different, any person can go on Shroud scope and do measurements. Skeptics have now been reduced to bold faced liars, that is how desperate they are to say fake, this is their favorite word to describe things that threaten their fragile belief system. I will quote a battle field surgeon who measured every square inch of the anatomy. “The authenticity of the Shroud from the point of view of anatomy and physiology is a scientific fact” Yes that means it is a scientific fact the Shroud is authentic.

    6. Blood on the Shroud passed over a dozen tests to be genuine blood 4 times what is required by law, also confirmed by forensic pathologists and blood chemistry experts to be real human blood type AB, with elevated levels of bilirubin and was exposed to myrrh and aloes and pollens from a thorn plant from Jerusalem. I will let you all you skeptic forensic experts out their figure out the rest, I just gave you the sum and a variable to mathematical question
    2 + ___= 4 Only 1 answer fits and fake does not fit in the empty spot. However fits in extremely well, in fact is the only name that does. I wonder why?

    In closing comments we live in a day and age where people are being taught, “At the end of the day it is all about you and what you want” “The truth is what you want it to be that agrees with your lifestyle and make you feel comfortable”

    But that is not what the truth is. It is not what we want it to be. It is what it is.
    In this case the truth is in plain sight.

    If one wants to build a solid case you need a solid foundation to build that case on. Building a case with the foundation of “fake” based on a single test, a small piece of contaminated fabric is not intelligent. It is only a matter of time before it collapses. And it has collapsed, The legs that support the table of fake is the carbon dating test. A very flimsy and unstable foundation When the legs of that table collapse everything built on that table collapses as well, such as what we have witnessed here. A good lesson for future lawyers

    The foundation for the case for authenticity of the Shroud is solid, based on the testimony of over a dozen medical experts, forensic pathologists. It is not based on a single witness.

  4. I would like to address “Evidence #3: The Turin Shroud was radiocarbon dated and the material definitively dates to sometime between c. 1260 and c. 1390”. This is probably the most often expressed objection to the Shroud’s authenticity, but after years of studying the issue, I have come to the conclusion that the data published in Damon, et al. (Ref. 1) indicates just the opposite, i.e. that the Shroud is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus. The problem is twofold: 1) The researchers that performed the 1988 carbon dating and the statistical analysis of the results had a presupposition that it was ludicrous to believe that Jesus was resurrected. As a result of this presupposition, they had to assume they could ignore the measurement uncertainties, so that they could assume that an unidentified factor had not altered the measurement values, so that the date could end up in agreement with a date of about 1355 for the Shroud being shown in Lirey, France. 2) People are not familiar with the statistical analysis of experimental data. Scientific equipment can give you a value, but you have no idea whether that value can be believed unless much work is done to determine the magnitude of various types of errors that can affect scientific measurements. I say this based on 38 years in the nuclear industry including several years leading a small group doing statistical analysis of scientific measurements. When they assumed that the measurement uncertainties could be ignored, they could no longer perform a proper statistical analysis of the data to determine whether something had altered the measured dates from the true date for the Shroud. But when the measurement uncertainties are believed, the statistical analysis proves that something had very likely altered all the measured dates from the true date for the Shroud. The result of this is that the 1260-1390 date for the Shroud should be rejected, i.e. given no credibility. I am trying to say this in a simple manner, avoiding all the technical concepts and jargon, so that non-technical people have a better chance of understanding it. The latest statistical analysis (Ref. 2 and 3) confirms that the Shroud samples were “heterogeneous” or “non-homogeneous”, i.e. basically different from each other, as though they came from three different pieces of cloth. This indicates that something very strange had happened so that the 1260-1390 date should be rejected. For further information on this important issue, please go to the research page of my website at http://www.shroudreserch.net and find my paper #25 “Understanding the 1988 Carbon Dating of the Shroud”. Robert A. Rucker

    References
    1. Damon, P. E. and D. J. Donahue, A. J. T. Jull, E. T. Hall, R. E. M. Hedges, M. S. Tite, et al. 1989. “Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin”, Nature, February 16, 1989.
    2. T. Casabianca, E. Marinelli, G. Pernagallo, and B. Torrisi, “Radiocarbon Dating of the Turin Shroud: New Evidence from Raw Data”, (2019), Archaeometry, 61(5), 1223-1231.
    3. Bryan Walsh, Larry Schwalbe, “An Instructive Inter-Laboratory Comparison: The 1988 Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin”, to be published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Volume 29, February 2020, This paper is now available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X19301865 .

  5. Hi Robert!

    I am one of those fairly certain that the Shroud is medieval. I have to say that your characterisation of the medieval viewpoint – “incredibly stupid”, “lack of intelligence”, “bold faced liars”, “It must suck to be that dumb” – is fairly typical of some authenticists, but does not come across as particularly worthy of debate. With that in mind, I will restrict myself.

    – The two most celebrated pathologists who were convinced that the Shroud was authentic were certainly not 100% in agreement. Fred Zugibe regarded Pierre Barbet with ill-disguised contempt, said that his knowledge of anatomy was poor, and disagreed with him regarding the posture of the body, the position of the nail holes and the cause of death. A paper published in the Journal of the Royal Medieval Society in 2006 listed ten pathologists, each of which proposed a different cause of death. A noted trauma surgeon from Chicago thinks that the image shows a living man. Clearly, the image on the Shroud is vague enough to be represented as almost anything.

    – The Shroud is most certainly not 8 x 2 Syrian cubits, and I’m afraid I do not believe you have any evidence that it is. Are you making your arguments up, by any chance?

    – Your idea that “clothes” is a better translation than “cloths” for what wrapped Jesus in the tomb is a little bizarre, if I may say so. The septuagint uses “othonia” which is never translated as any kind of garment. Perhaps you are not familiar with the fact that “clothes” was the normal English plural of “cloth” in the 17th century.

    – Nobody was “paid 2 million dollars to say fake.” What a scurrilous observation, for which you have no evidence at all. There are, I know, many serious and authoritative people who think the Shroud is authentic, but I fear that on forums like this, if you are the only spokesperson for authenticity, you do give that point of view a bad face.

    – Nobody has measured “every square inch of the anatomy” of the Shroud. Who is your alleged “battle-field surgeon”?

    If you would like to respond, please don’t do it with further abuse. I agree with you that “If one wants to build a solid case you need a solid foundation to build that case on.” Perhaps you could give us some of that “solid foundation”.

    1. I believe that the “battle-field surgeon” he is referring to is Pierre Barbet, a French physician who published a long study in 1950 titled A Doctor at Calvary in which he argued in favor of the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. Barbet’s study was later republished as a book in 1953. It is one of the classic works that defenders of the Shroud of Turin like to cite, despite the fact that Barbet seems to have clearly started out with the assumption that the shroud was genuine and then set out to prove his preexisting assumption.

  6. I would like to address your “Evidence #1: We have the documented confession of the forger who created the Shroud of Turin.” This refers to what is called the d’Archis Memorandum. This is an angry letter written in Latin by Pierre d’Archis, Bishop of Troyes, France, to Pope Clement VII in Avignon, France. It was probably written between August 4 and 15 of 1389, based on internal evidence. The English translation is about six typed pages long. Troyes is 12 miles from Lirey, France, where the Shroud of Turin was exhibited as the true burial cloth of Jesus by its owner, Geoffrey II de Charny, in about 1355 or 1356. In 1389 it was exhibited again with permission of Pope Clement VII. This angered Pierre d’Archis, because as Bishop of Troyes with authority over Lirey, his permission should have been required. Also, display of the Shroud in Lirey was bringing in significant donations to the small church in Lirey whereas his efforts to complete the cathedral in Troyes had a very significant lack of money. In the memorandum, Pierre d’Archis claimed that the previous Bishop in Troyes, Bishop Henry de Poitiers, investigated the Shroud when it was previously exhibited in Lirey 34 years earlier (1355 or 1356) and that Poitiers had found a painter who admitted to painting it. The reasons for rejecting this allegation in the d’Archis Memorandum are the following (page 37 of Ref. 1, pages 151 to 153 of Ref. 2, pages 100 to 104 of Ref. 3, and Ref. 4):

    • The document only exists in two draft editions consisting of a messy first draft (called Folio 138) and a neater second draft (called Folio 137), both found in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

    • If Bishop d’Archis had sent the memorandum to Pope Clement VII, then it would imply that Bishop d’Archis had great confidence in its accuracy, for he would surely not risk making an accusation that might be exposed as false and slanderous by a papal investigation. But there is no evidence that the memorandum was ever sent to Pope Clement VII. The memorandum has not been found in the Vatican Archives, the Troyes diocesan records, or anywhere else. It is also not referred to anywhere else. If it was ever sent to Pope Clement VII, it should have been in his records. Numerous subsequent documents by Pope Clement VII regarding the Shroud and its exhibition say nothing about a previous investigation or a communication from Bishop d’Archis. Both drafts of the memorandum were neither signed nor dated, and though the heading of the second draft makes it clear that it was intended to eventually go to Pope Clement VII, it was not addressed to him. Instead it was addressed to a scribe for editing, which was the common practice. But there is no evidence that it was ever sent to the scribe, and there is no evidence that Bishop d’Archis received an edited version back from the scribe. The fact that we only have two draft copies is important, because if a final edited version was received back from the scribe and sent to Pope Clement VII, then these two draft copies very likely would have been discarded. The existence of only these two draft copies indicates that very likely a final copy was never made or sent to Pope Clement VII. And without it being sent to the Pope, its historical importance is greatly diminished, for it may be little more than hearsay.

    • Pierre d’Archis does not reveal how he obtained his information. If there had been an investigation by his predecessor in Troyes, Bishop Henry de Poitiers, then the investigation would have been documented and this documentation would have been available to Bishop Pierre d’Archis in Troyes. Pierre d’Archis’ lack of making any reference to such documentation in his memorandum indicates that he could not find any documentation in Troyes, where it should have been. And no record of such an investigation has been found anywhere else. The memorandum gives no indication that Bishop Pierre d’Archis had any personal knowledge of this alleged previous investigation. He would have included a statement regarding this if he had any personal knowledge of it. Without documentation or personal knowledge of the investigation, he must have been depending on what other people told him, which may have been little better than rumor.

    • The essence of Bishop Pierre d’Archis’s evidence regarding the painter is found in only one sentence referring to his predecessor Bishop Henry de Poitiers: “Eventually, after diligent inquiry and examination, he discovered the fraud and how the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill …” (page 267 of Ref. 5). Notice that the memorandum does not indicate the painter’s name or any of his background, how he was found, under what circumstances he made his admission, how he painted the Shroud when there is nothing like it among all other paintings, or any details about his testimony. It also does not say when the investigation was done or who was involved in the investigation. This is all very odd since the painter’s statement is the only evidence for Bishop Pierre d’Archis’s claim that the Shroud is a painting.

    • In the best scenario, this is at least second level hearsay evidence, i.e. that someone who heard the painter 34 years earlier told Bishop d’Archis about it, who then referred to it in his memorandum. Hearsay evidence is second-hand information and is generally not admissible in trials because it prohibits the other side from cross-examination.

    • Even if there was an artist who 34 years earlier (1389 – 1355 = 34) admitted to painting the Shroud, he could have meant that he had painted a copy of the Shroud. This was frequently done in later years for devotional purposes for people at other locations. These copies were often partial size, often signed by the painter, and often dated. Over many centuries, many copies were made of what we now call the Shroud of Turin. But these many copies, by their contrast with the Shroud, only serve to identify the Shroud of Turin as Jesus’ true burial cloth. They show that the artistic techniques used by painters during this period could not have produced the characteristics of the Shroud of Turin. In fact, the characteristic of the Shroud of Turin could not have been produced by any technique existing in any era, past or present.

    • Pope Clement VII, based upon facts known to him ex certa Scientia (of certain or sure knowledge), sent a letter to Geoffrey II de Charny on July 28, 1389, permitting the display of the Shroud in Lirey, France, and stating that Bishop d’Archis must remain perpetually silent on the matter. Clement VII reiterated this in a letter to Bishop d’Archis dated January 6, 1390, in which Clement VII threatened to excommunicate d’Archis if he opposed the display of the Shroud.

    • D’Archis successor at Troyes, Bishop Louis Raguier, maintained that the Shroud that was shown in Lirey was genuine.

    • And most importantly, the Shroud of Turin has been scientifically proven to not be a painting. In 1978, the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STuRP) sent about 26 researchers from the US to Turin, Italy, to perform hands-on non-destructive testing of the Shroud for five days, 24 hours a day. Their main objective was to determine how the image was formed. Their experiments determined that the image on the Shroud contains no pigment, no carrier, no brush strokes, no clumping of anything between the fibers or threads, no capillarity (soaking up of a liquid), no cracking of the image along the fold lines, and no stiffening of the cloth. All these would be present if the image on the Shroud were a painting, yet none of them are present. Their experiments also proved that the image on the Shroud is not due to a liquid, a scorch, a photographic process, or any other process that the researchers could think of (Ref. 2, 6, and 7). Because of the detailed historical accounts that trace the cloth that was exhibited in Lirey, France, to where it is today in Turin, this proves that the Shroud that was exhibited in Lirey was also not a painting, contrary to the d’Archis Memorandum.

    The conclusion of this is that apparently “Pierre D’Archis, sentenced to perpetual silence and fearing that a papal investigation would prove his charges baseless, thought better of having his draft memorandum transcribed and then prudently discarded it.” (page 11 of Ref. 4). Thus, there is no reliable historical documentation to indicate that the Shroud of Turin was painted or originated in the 13th or 14th centuries.

    Robert A. Rucker, http://www.shroudresearch.net

    References
    1. John Jackson, PhD., and The Turin Shroud Center of Colorado, “The Shroud of Turin, A Critical Summary of Observations, Data, and Hypotheses”, Edition 1, 2017.
    2. Mark Antonacci, “The Resurrection of the Shroud”, 2000, 328 pages, M. Evans and Company, Inc., ISBN 0-87131-890-3
    3. Kenneth E. Stevenson and Gary R. Habermas, “Verdict on the Shroud, Evidence for the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ”, Servant Books, ISBN 0-89283-111-1
    4. Jack Markwardt, “The Conspiracy Against the Shroud”, British Society for the Turin Shroud (BSTS) Newsletter No. 55, June, 2002, also The 2nd International Conference on the Shroud of Turin, Dallas, 2001
    5. Ian Wilson, “The Shroud of Turin, The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ?”, 1979, Image Books, A division of Doubleday & Company, Inc., ISBN: 0-385-15042-3
    6. Mark Antonacci, “Test the Shroud”, 2015, 502 pages, LE Press, LLC, ISBN 978-0-9964300-1-2
    7. Robert A. Rucker, “Summary of Scientific Research on the Shroud of Turin”, Rev. 2, October 15, 2018.

  7. I would like to address your “Evidence #5: The blood stains on the Turin Shroud are not consistent with how blood naturally flows and the stains instead appear to have been painted on.” This objection to the authenticity of the Shroud is based on the paper by Matteo Borrini and Luigi Garlaschelli titled “A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin” (Ref. 1). This paper was published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences on July 10, 2018 documenting a Bloodstain Pattern Analysis (BPA) of the Shroud of Turin. Serious scientific research on the Shroud began in 1898 and for decades, the main object of research was the nature and meaning of the blood on the Shroud. Many very qualified people (Dr. Paul Vignon, Dr. Pierre Barbet, Dr. Robert Bucklin, Dr. Frederick Zugibe, Dr. Alan D. Adler, Dr. John Heller, etc.) investigated the blood and the bloodstain evidence on the Shroud for many years, even decades. Though certain questions may still remain, they generally concluded that the best evidence supports the belief that the blood on the Shroud came from the dead body of a crucified man who was wrapped within the Shroud.

    It is probably not possible to adequately model the blood flow from a crucified body due to unknown details of events and unique conditions of the blood and body. Many details of crucifixion followed by removal of the nails, lowering the body from the cross, possible massaging of the body to relax the effects of rigor mortis, transport of the body to the tomb, and burial in the tomb are not known. Thus, the positions and orientations of all parts of the body at all times cannot be determined. As shown on the Shroud, the conditions of the body are far from that of a normal man due to beatings to the head, puncture wounds in the scalp, severe flogging, carrying a rough heavy object across the shoulders, nails driven into the wrists and feet, and apparent falls. The extreme physical exertion of pushing up and down to breathe for hours while hanging with the feet nailed in a vertical position, and the accumulation of dirt, sweat, dried blood, and swelling of the body all add to the unique conditions. These conditions would have led to extreme dehydration causing significant changes in blood viscosity, and extreme effects on coagulation and rigor mortis. To properly model this situation would require real blood, without an anticoagulant, flowing at the correct rate over real human skin, both in the condition they would be in during and after crucifixion. Due to these extreme difficulties, any attempt to simulate the conditions of a body and its blood flow during and after crucifixion must be very approximate. The experimental procedures in Ref. 1 are a good example of this. The main problems with the procedures in the Ref. 1 are the following:

    1. Synthetic blood or human blood containing an anticoagulant and a preservative would not have the same viscosity, flow behavior, or coagulation rate as human blood during and after crucifixion. The BPA analysis in Ref. 1 used a plastic model of the upper body without arms and with an anticoagulant in the blood. The evidence on the Shroud indicates that the real blood, due to crucifixion and without an anticoagulant, is much more viscous than the blood used in the experiments, as shown in Figure 7 of Ref. 1. Blood flow on the clean smooth plastic of the mannequin would not properly simulate blood flow on human skin containing pores, hair, wrinkles, and swelling as well as the products of crucifixion such as sweat, dirt, and dried blood. This would especially apply to blood dripping off skin compared to plastic.
    2. The blood flow rates were not the same. Compressing a sponge onto the side of a plastic mannequin, with the blood containing an anticoagulant and a preservative, would not produce the same flow rate as a spear thrust into the side of a dead man.
    3. The angles were not correct. A hand flat on a table does not simulate a hand in a vertical position, and a person standing on the floor will not simulate the configuration of a person’s body during crucifixion due to the probable outward bow of the body.
    4. Regarding the nail through the wrist, only blood flow from the back or exit wound was considered. Blood flow from the front or entrance wound was not considered. Experiments were also not performed on blood flow from the head, the feet, or the scourge marks.
    5. The plastic mannequin torso had no arms, whereas the body as it was wrapped in the Shroud in the horizontal position had bare arms next to the side wound. In the tomb, the arms could have affected the blood flow from the side wound.

    The BPA in Ref. 1 identified two alleged inconsistencies between the results of the experiments and the blood on the Shroud. The blood on the left forearm was interpreted to contradict the blood flow on the back of the left wrist, but the blood on the left forearm may have come from the front of the left wrist combined with a body posture that is bowed out from the cross, thus changing the angle of the arms. The blood on the lower back was interpreted to contradict the location of the side wound, but the blood on the lower back may have been directed to that location by dried blood on the body while it was on the cross, or by clothing, or by the arms that were around the body in the tomb. It may have also resulted from blood dripping off the elbows if the shoulders were being massaged to overcome rigor mortis to bring the arms down into position over the groin. Several possibilities have been suggested (Ref. 2) to resolve these two alleged contradictions. Ref. 1 concluded that their experiment regarding the spear wound in the chest “shows that the Shroud represents the bleeding in a realistic manner”. But this conclusion contradicts the results of their experiment. Figure 7 in Ref. 1 shows that in their experiment #5, the blood ran down in several streams, down to the groin and down the leg past the bottom of the plastic mannequin torso, whereas the blood on the Shroud only traveled inches from the side wound. This shows how unrealistic the experiments were. Instead of using the alleged inconsistencies to argue that the Shroud is not authentic, it is more reasonable to conclude that these alleged inconsistencies indicate that we don’t understand the details of what happened during and after crucifixion, or that the experimental procedures were inadequate. To more fully understand why the experimental procedure and conclusions in Ref. 1 should be rejected, please go to the research page on http://www.shroudresearch.net to download Ref. 2.

    1. Matteo Borrini, Ph.D., and Luigi Garlaschelli, M. Sc., “A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin”, Journal of Forensic Sciences, July 10, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.13867.
    2. Robert A. Rucker, “Evaluation of ‘A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin’”, October 15, 2018

  8. I read an article a while ago that described an art historian who has been conducting research into a south European Easter Sunday tradition of recreating the tomb for the first Mass at dawn. He said they would decorate a section of the church with various things including a shroud and these things would be paraded through the town after the Mass.

    The shrouds were painted, so it is not unlikely some would be made in a realistic manner.

    Most of these cloths have been repurposed since this ceremony fell out of use, or they’ve been lost in other ways to time. But some have survived from just being stored away and forgotten.

    Unfortunately I’m unable to find a link to the article now, or recall where it was published.

  9. It’s funny to me how people will argue to the death about all the esoteric aspects like radio-carbon dating and blood tests of the stains and old letters written by anonymous confessors, etc., but so few people will acknowledge the basic, common-sense conclusion that it’s fake just by freakin’ LOOKING at it. Ha ha!

    Try this: go cut yourself until you bleed. Wait for a “rivulet.” Now wrap ANY piece of cloth around it. Do it multiple times with different cloths. Wait a couple of days and then remove your wrapping. What does it look like? A perfect, solid, pristine rivulet of blood like the shroud? Of course not. It’s going to be a smeared, indistinct blob. The cloth will soak up and spread the blood, and the act of wrapping it will smear it. Haven’t any of you ever used a band-aid? How precisely would you have to wrap an entire body and be sure to not move it an inch so you didn’t smear the blood that was coming out of the wounds? It doesn’t take rocket science or carbon dating to figure out how unlikely it is that you could wrap a bloody body in cloth without moving it enough to smear the blood all over the place. And what’s on the shroud… that’s just not how blood stains work.

    His body proportions are so far off as to be laughable. Argue about the face all you like, but try this: lie on the floor and try to cover your genitals with your right wrist — not your hand, your WRIST. It’s difficult even with your hand — and even that’s almost impossible at the angle it’s shown on the shroud. But it’s just hilarious that it’s his WRIST that’s covering the penis that’s so blasphemous to show. That’s just physically impossible and such an obvious tip of the hat to modesty.

    His right arm’s visibly and comically longer than his left, as the author stated. All the proportions are off, even just by looking at it casually for two seconds. It’s amazing to me that ANYONE, no matter how ignorant, can look at this artifact and believe that it’s the impression of a real human body with real blood stains. You don’t need ANY science to see that.

    I mean, I can’t believe there is even still debate about the authenticity of this so-called shroud. Forget about the in-depth analysis of the cloth and all that. Even a mentally deranged slime mold could look at this and see that it doesn’t match reality in any possible way.

    Not to mention that all the bona-fide scientific data are ALSO pretty irrefutable.

    I feel so sorry for all the people who are still so insecure about their faith that they HAVE to have some physical relic like this to cling to and argue about — and that they’ll concoct any conspiracy or invent any pseudoscience (sorry… fake news is the parlance these days, I believe?) to support their crumbling worldview. You see science and reason destroying more and more of your paper-thin sacred cows every day, and it must be terrifying. So you suspend all reason — at any cost — to hang on to your dwindling arguments for your ghost in the sky.

    I’d implore you all to shuffle off your religious shackles and taste the sweet freedom of reason and inquiry and the wonderment of astronomy and physics and biology and chemistry. But… alas… I know this is a futile effort. The intellectual capacity of the world’s populace seems to be declining at an alarming rate, and I’ve learned from personal experience that there’s no way to teach rocks to think (that’s a metaphor, by the way, just in case you didn’t grasp it). You’re all beyond the help of intellect, I’m afraid.

    One of my biggest disappointments in life is that you won’t even get to experience the abject disappointment of realizing your entire worldview was a sham when you die. My only comfort is that eventually, you WILL die, and maybe someone with less insecure animosity and more humanity and reason will take your place, and the world will be better off for it.

    Believe in your god if you like. Everyone should be free to believe what they like as long as they don’t force it on everyone around them or use it to do harm to others. But don’t be a complete moron. Science is responsible for the computers you type your backward opinions on, the medicines that let you live long enough to type them, the TVs you watch your Fox News on, and virtually every darn luxury that makes your lives easier. Try to show a little more respect and a little less hypocrisy for that.

    Have a wonderful day.

    1. I would like to respond to the above comments of Frank Naturalist. He gives three scientific arguments against the authenticity of the Shroud:

      Q1. How can it be authentic when there is “A perfect, solid, pristine rivulet of blood like on the Shroud?” If you put a piece of cloth on a bleeding wound, it going to produce “a smeared, indistinct blob. The cloth will soak up and spread the blood, and the act of wrapping it will smear it.”

      A1. The timing of events needs to be considered. The process of Jesus’ trials, scourging, and crucifixion took several hours, including perhaps three to four hours on the cross until his death and perhaps two or three hours on the cross after his death. This would have been plenty of time for blood to have dried, though his side wound and the nail wounds in the feet could have continued to slowly drain for additional time. Dried blood will not smear or be absorbed when a piece of cloth is put over it, yet the blood that would have been dried on the body is now on the Shroud. Consider the blood that was draining down the arms from the nail wounds in the wrists while he was alive. This blood would have dried before he was taken down from the cross. Also, there would not have been underlying wounds below this dried blood on the arms, yet this blood is now on the Shroud without being smeared but rather is “perfect” and “pristine”. How the dried blood that was on the body was transported to the Shroud is one of the main mysteries of the Shroud, together with how the image was formed and the question of the carbon dating. The best explanation must be developed by following the evidence on the Shroud where it leads, without religious or naturalistic presuppositions. My explanation is given in Ref. 1, where a single hypothesis is used to explain all three mysteries: how the image was formed, how the carbon date was shifted from about 33 AD to 1260-1390 AD, and how the dried blood was transferred from the body to the Shroud. This “best explanation” developed by following the evidence on the Shroud is that an extremely brief intense burst of vertically collimated radiation was emitted within the body. This radiation encoded the front and back images onto the Shroud, shifted the carbon date, and thrust the dried blood off the body and onto the Shroud by a process called radiation pressure. Since the radiation was vertically collimated, it would have resulted in blood that was “perfect” and “pristine” on the Shroud, without splattering or smearing.

      Q2. How can you believe the Shroud is authentic when its “physically impossible” for a man’s wrist to cover his genital area?

      A2. The position of the body in crucifixion needs to be considered. Upon death, the upper body and head would drop forward and rigor mortis would set in, stiffening the upper body and head in these positions. It is generally recognized that the front and back images on the Shroud show that the head was in a forward position, the legs were bent at the knees, and the feet were crossed over, all indicating the presence of rigor mortis. When I tried this position with the head forward and the shoulders curved forward, my wrists naturally covered my groin area. There was no problem. Crucifixion could also result in the arms being out of the sockets. This would allow additional flexibility for the position of the wrists.

      Q3. His left arm’s longer than his right.

      A3. To investigate this issue, I looked at the four-page fold out view of the Shroud in the June 1980 copy of National Geographic. What I see is that the fingers on his left hand have been left in the curved position that they would have been in on the cross, and in which they would have been stiffened into by rigor mortis. This allows the fingers of the left hand to curve around the right wrist to hold the arms together. The right hand was evidently massaged to relax the fingers so that they could be placed into a straighter position. This produces the appearance that the right arm is longer than the left arm. The right arm may also have been out to its socket due to the crucifixion, which could also relate to the apparent difference in the arm lengths.

      Q4. How can anyone believe that the Shroud is authentic when “His body proportions are so far off as to be laughable.”

      A4. If his body proportions were so obviously off, then why would an artist have produced such an obviously wrong image? I notice that Frank offers no explanation for how the image was formed. In simplistic terms, it is not a painting because the image is not caused by pigment, it is not a scorch from a hot object because the image does fluorescence under ultra-violet light, and it is not a photograph because the image contains 3D information contrary to all other photographs. This is the reason many and possibly most serious Shroud researchers have long believed that the best explanation for the unique characteristics of the image is that the fibers were discolored by radiation.

      I should also comment about the tone of Frank’s comments. I counted 23 examples of slurs and name calling against those who hold to a theistic worldview rather than his naturalistic worldview. This included “ignorant”, “complete moron”, “mentally derange slime mold”, culminating in “My only comfort is that eventually, you will die …”. I don’t know what painful experiences Frank has experienced that would cause him to respond this way, but he should understand that such comments indicate the weakness of his evidence against the authenticity of the Shroud, i.e. that his comments are based on emotion rather than thorough knowledge and impartial reasoning. We should commit ourselves to tolerance, which is showing kindness to those who disagree with us. My further response to the philosophy of naturalism is in Section 3 of Ref. 2. Robert A. Rucker, http://www.shroudresearch.net

      1. Robert A. Rucker, “Holistic Solution to the Mysteries of the Shroud of Turin”, Rev. 0, December 30, 2019. This is paper 25 on the research page of my website http://www.shroudresearch.net .
      2. Robert A. Rucker, “Status of Research on the Shroud of Turin”, Rev. 1, July 14, 2019. This is paper 19 on the research page of my website http://www.shroudresearch.net .

        1. The “radiation from an earthquake” notion is just an implausible excuse used by supporters of the shroud. We have no good evidence to suggest that an earthquake could have irradiated the shroud to simultaneously create an image of a crucified man on it and distort the carbon dating. Furthermore, the whole idea goes contrary to modern scientific understanding of physics. That isn’t how earthquakes work or how radiation works. Earthquakes are common enough that, if they could really do that, we would have objects just like the Shroud of Turin all over the world and they would be a well-document scientific phenomenon.

        2. The three main mysteries of the Shroud are how the image was formed, how the 1988 carbon dating could have produced a wrong conclusion, and how the blood could have been transferred to the Shroud. The main concepts for image formation are that the image is a painting, a scorch, a photograph, or the result of radiation. Briefly, it is not a painting because there is no pigment sufficient to cause an image, it is not a scorch from a hot object because it does not fluoresce under ultraviolet light, and it is not a photograph because it contains 3D information which no photograph does. In contrast to this, the image being the result of radiation is consistent with the absence of pigment, carrier, brush strokes, evidence of capillarity (soaking up of a liquid), and stiffening of the cloth. It is also consistent with only the top one or two layers of fibers in the thread being discolored, only the outer 0.2 micron layer being discolored on the fibers that have a diameter of about 15 microns, the discoloration in this thin layer being caused by a change in the atomic bonding from single to double electron bonds of the carbon atoms that were already in the cellulose molecules in the linen, the image being similar to a negative image, and the presence of 3D information in the image. This is why many if not most serious researchers of the Shroud believe that the image in some way was produced by radiation. This is the only conclusion that is consistent with the evidence on the Shroud. But to form the good resolution image on the Shroud, the radiation must be controlled by the information that defines the appearance of a naked crucified man. This is the problem with the radiation coming from the limestone due to either an earthquake or a close lightning strike. The information that defines the appearance of a crucified man was not in the limestone. This information was only inherent to the body that was wrapped within the Shroud. Thus, the radiation had to come from the body to communicate this required information from the body to the cloth. That the radiation came from the body is consistent with the images being on the sides of the cloth facing the body, consistent with non-discolored “shadows” formed below upper fibers and threads that block the radiation coming from the body, and consistent with the intensity of the radiation diminishing as it passes across the vertical air gap between the body and the cloth so that the intensity of the discoloration in the fibers decreases for larger body to cloth separation, so that 3D information related to the vertical gap distance could be encoded onto the Shroud. This concept of image formation is also consistent with the fibers being discolored even where the Shroud would not have been touching the body. I recommend reading my papers 6, 24, and 27 on the research page of my website http://www.shroudresearch.net . Robert A. Rucker

    2. Dear Frank your comments display more than your distaste for those of faith, assuming they can also not be believers in reason and evidence.
      “I’d implore you all to shuffle off your religious shackles and taste the sweet freedom of reason and inquiry and the wonderment of astronomy and physics and biology and chemistry. But… alas… I know this is a futile effort. The intellectual capacity of the world’s populace seems to be declining at an alarming rate, and I’ve learned from personal experience that there’s no way to teach rocks to think (that’s a metaphor, by the way, just in case you didn’t grasp it). You’re all beyond the help of intellect, I’m afraid.”
      You have completely missed the point that SCIENCE and the evidence gathered, points to the shroud’s authenticity NOT people’s faith. Slagging of Christian’s is not an argument.
      If you out right reject the evidence for a supernatural being or God, who designed our complex life and universe, beginning with the big bang, which did not and can not scientifically make itself, then you reject the evidence for God around you. You are free to do so. It’s free will. Atheism (a firm belief without proof that there is NOT a God), takes more faith than it does to be a Christian. Despite what you have been taught, atheism is a religion or faith, based on no proof, and is not a neutral scientific starting point but a very strong faith based belief system which denies evidence forGod’s existence.
      Did the universe make itself? No. Energy and matter can not come from nothing, therefore it was created and acted upon using intelligent design.

  10. The author states confidently …. “We can be virtually certain that the Shroud of Turin is a hoax that was originally created in France in around the 1350s AD by an artist trained in the Gothic figurative style as part of a faith-healing scam” evidence :

    – Before 14th C no definitive record of shroud except a letter from a forger confessed to painting it. ‘procured for his church a certain cloth cunningly painted,’ (Science has proved Its NOT PAINT – it is a non contract image, Christians were under persecution and hid their faith and precious objects and called them by code names….)
    – doesn’t match Judaea in the first-century AD (wrong it matches 1st C burial practices for Jews)
    – doesn’t match Jesus’s funerary wrappings given in the Gospel of John ‘describes Jesus’s head and body having been wrapped separately’ ( wrong, it does the cloth goes over and under the length of the body and a piece was torn from the side to bind the feet and hands and head as was customary. The face was covered in the event of a traumatic death and placed over the face. This is believed to be the Saudarium of Oviedo kept in Spain. Then the whole body was covered foot to head and back down to the feet. The face cloth was rolled up in a seperate place not next to the main shroud cloth, as explained in the gospel. They did not warp people like ancient mummies in bandages, the strips were used to keep hands and feet in place and keep the mouth closed, out of respect.)
    – the fabric has been conclusively radiocarbon dated to the Late Middle Ages. ‘no evidence to suggest that the corner of the shroud that the samples were taken from had been repaired at a later date’. ‘before the researchers in the Oxford team conducted the radiocarbon dating tests, they consulted textile experts from a laboratory in Derbyshire, England, who did their own examinations of the cloth to make sure they weren’t testing using material that had been added to the shroud later.’ (Wrong the radio carbon dating methods and data have been shown to be incorrect fro many reasons), including crucially a terrible sample source non representative go the whole shroud, cotton reweave not ancient linen was tested. The sample team did notice differences in the material and even chemical spectrum colours of the shroud materials and suggested avoiding the corner areas as they were non representative, but at the last minute the lead researcher broke several protocols and took the 1 sample from that exact , unusual; area, then cut that into three pieces to be tested across the world!) The shroud has good historical and physical evidence that it was reweave to the highest standards due to damage during the middle ages.)
    – The proportions of the figure on the shroud are anatomically incorrect, ‘The proportions of the face on the Turin Shroud, then, are more consistent with the proportions of faces in Gothic art than the proportions of a real human being. This strongly suggests that the Turin Shroud was created by a Gothic artist.’ (Incorrect the proportions and injuries of the man on the cloth have been scrutinised by top forensic pathologists and surgeons who note the complete accuracies of it not only being of a real dead human man, but illustrates the injuries and trauma that the person suffered, which exactly match Jesus during His torture and crucifixion. The shoulder was likely dislocated during the falls carrying the cross which accounts for the droop or arm length discussion. The body image is made up of millions of laser like light dots from UVB light and creates a 3-D like reverse image as a photo negative would. It is a non contact reverse image made from the body itself and can not be replicated today, we do not have the UV light making capability or machines to re create this image.)
    – The bloodstains on the shroud are not consistent with how blood flows naturally, which suggests the stains have been painted on. ‘the bloodstains were painted on.’ (Wrong, the blood is proven to be that of a real tortured man who underwent tremendous stress, the blood stains match exactly the wounds depicted in the gospel, including crown of thorns, nails in hands and feet, spear in the side, lacerations by whip. Some of the blood serum is invisible to the naked eye and can only be seen with UV light. The blood on the shroud came before the ‘rapid ageing – non contact image), suggesting that if fake the artist stated with the blood patterns then painted on a reverse negative full body , front and back image of a man, matching the wounds of Jesus, without using art materials or without touching the canvas. There are no brush strokes or evidence of human art processes of any kind).)
    – The complex weave that was common in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles but was not used for burial shrouds in the time of Jesus. ‘any fabric made using this weave in Jesus’s time would have certainly been very expensive.'(Wrong, the shroud uses a herringbone fine weave and matches the gospel description of a ‘fine linen’ cloth. Fibres from the linen part of the shroud, (not the cotton reweave area) were re tested and show they are 1st Century materials. Joseph of Aramathea was a wealthy man and secret supporter of Jesus and purchased the fine cloths as a mark of respect. It also fulfils biblical prophecy that the messiah would die with wicked but be buried as a King (summary only)
    – All the evidence points to the inexorable conclusion that the Shroud of Turin is a late medieval hoax. (Wrong, you can not claim that something is proved to be fact ‘middle ages art’ in the positive because you refute other parts off the evidence. This is not logical. There is NO hard or scientific evidence in the positive that the image and blood staines and cloth are the work of an artist in the gothic period. Who and how was it done springs to mind, but no attempt is made to create an argument for this statement. If it is nearly 700 years old, how was the hoax done? How did they make a double sided photographic image starting with real human blood from a tortured dead man and then adding the image in millions of dots of UVB light, in such a way that it creates depth and a holographic quality, and add invisible information only discovered with modern UV lighting and imaging equipment.)

    – THE BURDEN OF PRROF THAT THE SHROUD IS A FAKE LIES WITH SKEPTICS DUE TO THE MASSES OF SCIENTIFIC AND RIGOROUS TESTING DONE BY EXPERTS ACROSS DOZENS OF FIELDS.
    – check out shroud.com scientific data and a free PDF ‘The Shroud of Turin – A Critical Summary of Observations, Data and Hypotheses’ 2017 by Dr. John Jackson (Physicist on STURP team and colleagues. It has peer reviewed data around: Historical evidence, medical forensic evidence , *linen cloth and image characteristic evidence, image formation hypotheses. The shroud is not art and dates to 1st Century B.C. It has the pollen and soil samples that match the believed travels of the shroud. The negative photo image, was only discovered around 100 years ago showing the detailed face and body, meaning the an artist hid these details using an unknown method using U.V radiation or plasma to make the 3- D image. On top of the real blood of a dead and tortured human.)
    – Who is the artist you ask …. GOD, when was it made? Easter Sunday 33A.D, method miracle of the resurrection with light and heat. Why? to send the modern cynical world a message, a sign of the Truth of the good news of the gospel and God’s free gift of everlasting life if we trust in Jesus and turn from our sins.
    By R.Sutherland (lay shroud enthusiast) 25.4.20

  11. Dear Rachel,

    By the time we get to a ‘reply to a reply to a reply’, I think we need a little more than a ‘yes-it-is-no-it-isn’t’ kind of response, so at the risk of being dull, I hope you won’t mind my being a little academic. Your rebuttal ranges from the semi-scientific (which is fine) to statements of personal conviction (which are unlikely to convince people with their own, opposing, conviction), but more interestingly to me, demonstrate a typical authenticist propensity firmly to believe two directly contradictory positions at the same time.

    You begin by denying that the image is “not paint”, and claim that this is “proved.” ‘Proved’ is a dangerous word, and scientists do not use it. Mathematically, it only refers to the conclusion to a series of irrefutable steps based on axioms agreed on by all parties. Legally, of course, it refers to a flip-flop decision made by one or a tiny group of people on the basis of the evidence they hear in court. Neither of these is applicable to a scientific conclusion.

    That there is pigment on the Shroud is not denied. Photographs of the sticky-tape slides taken by the STuRP team show numerous particles. Some researchers claim that this is evidence that the image is at least partially made of particles, and others that these particles derive from painted copies of the Shroud, laid onto the original for religious purposes. However, almost all researchers agree that the pigment is not the primary colouring agent, even if the Shroud image is a painting, but that the colour is mostly found in a very thin layer on the surface of individual fibres. Ray Rogers, one of STuRP’s most respected members, thought that this layer was extraneous to the fibres themselves, resulting from the manufacturing process of the cloth, while Alan Adler, another of STuRP’s most respected members, thought that the layer was part of the original fibres, since identified as the primary cell wall. That discolouration of either of these layers is possible using an artificial process has been demonstrated using electromagnetic radiation of various wavelengths, including ultra violet, visible and infra-red, and by using chemical methods such as acid degradation or staining with dye.

    It has certainly been demonstrated that there are no outlines, indications of brush strokes, adherent medium, or capillarity visible, but none of these are necessarily relevant, and relate only to specific modes of depiction, or to adherent material, which are not, hardly surprisingly, considered as solutions to the problem by those who think the Shroud medieval.

    More importantly for my comment here, is your remark that the image is “non-contact”. [Actually you write ‘non-contract’, but I’m hoping that’s a typo.] A little further on you describe in some detail how the Shroud was closely wrapped and tied around the body, which must have entailed close contact in most places. These two positions are mutually exclusive, but I’ve no doubt you believe them both. You are not alone. Those who agree with you have supposed that the Shroud unwrapped itself and hovered above the body when it received the image. That being so, one could not, on the basis of the image itself, determine its first position, wrapped around the body. Further attempts to reconcile the dichotomy have used the blood-stains, in particular those on the face, showing that the dribbles apparently on the hair could have actually been on the cheeks – adhering while the cloth was closely wrapped, and when the Shroud unwrapped itself, were extended further apart, so that the image of the hair appears on top of them. Although this is quite ingenious, it does not explain why there are no similar ‘widened out’ bloodstains on the arms or legs, either on the front or the back of the body. Nevertheless, this does not deter many of the less discriminating authenticists, who really just want to believe all the evidence for authenticity at the same time, regardless of its mutual incompatibility.

    Moving on, you assert with some confidence some fairly precise knowledge of first century Jewish burial practices. This, I believe, is misguided. Very little is known of first century Jewish burial practices, except that the reamins of bodies were usually collected after they had decomposed to bones and placed in stone ossuaries. Such shreds of shrouds as remain archaeologically do not match the Shroud in material, and precise descriptions of the dimensions, methods of wrapping or any kinds of tying up are wholly suppositious.

    Like many authenticists, you are satisfied that the radiocarbon sample was taken from an area composed partially of original, and partly of later material. You will be aware that John Jackson, the leader of the STuRP team of scientists, rejects this hypothesis on the basis of his personal study of the area, the transmission photos taken by Barrie Schwortz and the X-rays of Bill Mottern. It was also rejected by Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, who was not only an expert textile restorer herself, but worked in close-up on that very area as she sewed on the new backing cloth as part of the restoration project in 2002.

    Whether the image on the Shroud is anatomically accurate depends entirely on our knowing how the alleged figure was posed (legs straight or bent, head lifted or flat, spine curved or straight, feet pointed or not), and how the Shroud was placed over it – wrapped, draped, or lying horizontal above it. By careful manipulation of both, almost any anatomical configuration can derived from it, as the ‘exact’ representations of John Jackson, Giulio Ricci and Giulio Fanti, all very different, demonstrate. They can’t all be correct, but are often all accepted as a kind of blanket ‘pathologists have shown’ endorsement .

    The blood on the Shroud has not, in any scientific sense, been “proven” to be anything. The evidence that it comes from a “tortured” man is particularly thin, which was one of the reasons why the paper claiming it to be so was retracted fron the journal in which it was published. Several attempts to demonstrate how blood flows from a crucified man, or can be transferred to a cloth after death, both by authenticists (such as Mark Antonacci and Arthur Lind) and medievalists (such as Matteo Borrini and Luigi Garlaschelli) have failed to achieve any convincing results.

    You seem to set some store by your claim that “the burden of proof” lies with “skeptics.” This too is a common claim by authenticists, and again, as so often, misrepresents scientific endeavour. There are those who think the evidence demonstrates authenticity, and others who think it demonstrates a medieval provenance. Both sides are skeptical of the others conclusions. “The burden of proof” is not a scientific concept, it is a legal one. But the Shroud is not on trial, and, unlike an accused man in a dock, will not become “authentic” or “medieval” on the basis of the decision of a jury.

  12. As of 4-30-2020, the main article “Sorry, the Shroud of Turin is Definitely a Hoax” lists the following evidence against the authenticity of the Shroud.

    #1: The Shroud of Turin has no reliable provenance prior to the fourteenth century.
    #2: We have the documented confession of the forger who created the Shroud of Turin.
    #3: The Shroud of Turin doesn’t match the kinds of shrouds that were actually used in Judaea during Jesus’s time or the description of Jesus’s shroud given in the Gospel of John.
    #4: The Turin Shroud was radiocarbon dated and the material definitively dates to sometime between c. 1260 and c. 1390.
    #5: The image on the Turin Shroud has unrealistic anatomical features that are consistent with Gothic artwork, but not with real human anatomy.
    #6: The blood stains on the Turin Shroud are not consistent with how blood naturally flows and the stains instead appear to have been painted on.
    #7: The fabric of the Shroud of Turin uses a herringbone twill weave, which is a kind of complex weave that was used in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles, but is not known to have been used for burial shrouds in the first century AD.

    This list is typical of arguments against the authenticity of the Shroud and have good counter arguments against them. I have already replied above in some detail to the carbon dating of the Shroud (evidence #4), to the supposed confession of the painter (evidence #2), and to the bloodstain pattern analysis of Garlaschelli and Borrini (evidence #6). I also responded to the extremely anti-Christian comments by Frank (the) Naturalist. Due to higher priorities, I don’t plan to write detailed responses to the other alleged evidence but my quick answers to all the above objections are as follows:

    #1: This is based on cherry picking the historical evidence, ignores evidence that many find very convincing, and even if it were true, does not prove that the Shroud did not exist long before the 14th century.
    #2: There is only two preliminary drafts of a document that refers to what is probably a rumor about events 33 years previously that an unknown man said he had painted it, which may have only meant that he had painted a copy of it, and the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) proved that the image is not the result of pigment, so the image is not a painting.
    #3. There were no “Shroud police” is assure that everyone could only use an authorized type of cloth for burial. There is enough flexibility in the interpretation of the Biblical account that would allow for the Shroud of Turin to be authentic.
    #4: Two recent papers concluded that a proper statistical analysis of the dates published in 1989 indicates that the data was not consistent with the measurement uncertainties so should be rejected, because a systematic error was probably present in the measured values which could have shifted the dates by an unknown amount.
    #5. This objection results from a failure to take into account the timing of events and possible positions of the body during the crucifixion and burial, the importance of the angle of viewing a person’s head given the rounded shape of the top of the head, and the convincing evidence for the Shroud’s long history.
    #6. The paper that came to this conclusion used only the torso of a plastic mannequin without arms to simulate a crucified man, and used artificial blood or human blood containing an anticoagulant, both of which would have a very low viscosity, to simulate human blood after crucifixion and death that would have a very high viscosity.
    #7. I believe there are examples of a herringbone twill weave being used much earlier than the Middle Ages, perhaps even in the first century, but there is no other example of it being used for burial. But Jesus was a unique person, so a special piece of cloth could have been used for his burial.

    Robert A. Rucker at robertarucker@yahoo.com, http://www.shroudresearch.net

    1. Many of Rob Rucker’s responses to the alleged evidence for the authenticity of the Shroud are entirely reasonable. However, I believe he is simplifying some of that evidence into easily-refutable packages, which do not reflect its totality.

      #1) The Shroud really does have no provenance prior to the 14th century. I think I have seen every alleged image, and read every alleged document, usually in its original language, adduced by authenticists in support of an early provenance, and found nothing to substantiate the Shroud. Acheiropoietic paintings and statues are mentioned, and burial cloths are mentioned, but there is never any suggestion that the burial cloths have images on them. If there is cherry picking, it is by the authenticists, who have to choose between stories locating either the burial cloths or the images in Jerusalem, Antioch and Edessa at the same time.

      #2) It is not disputed that in 1390, Pope Clement VII wrote formal bulls banning the acceptance of the Shroud as authentic, and insisted that when it was publicly displayed it be declared not to be authentic in a loud, clear voice (“alta et intelligibili voce”). Attempts to discredit Pierre d’Arcis, and whether he sent his memorandum or not, are irrelevant in this context. Medievalists should not claim that “we have the documented confession of the forger” because we don’t. We only have Bishop d’Arcis’s statement that a former Bishop of Troyes had spoken to the man who had “cunningly depicted” it. What sort of “cunning depiction” is not specified: however it does not necessarily contradict the findings of John Heller and Alan Adler, who, after thoroughly washing their samples with toluene, found that it had washed away almost everything that may have been adhering to the fibres they were studying. Those same samples, before being washed, have been observed to be associated with particulate matter.

      #3) Bob is perfectly correct that there is so little archaeological or documentary evidence about Jewish burial practices that any statement claiming that the Shroud matches, or does not match, any such practice is wholly unjustified. However, it is possible to claim that the Shroud does not look like any kind of shroud, ancient, medieval or modern that has ever been found or described.

      #4) Attempts to discredit the radiocarbon dating depend on establishing that the overall date eventually ascribed to the Shroud was statistically unsound. Whether this is true or not, the twelve little pieces of the cloth that were tested all gave a late medieval date. It seems likely that a chronological gradient can be established along the strip from which they were all cut, for which various explanations have been suggested, including residual contamination, interpolation with modern thread, and supernatural radiation. Evidence distinguishing which, if any, of these is the correct explanation is currently too disputed to be able to be considered definitive.

      #5) Prima facie the Shroud image has the long limbs of the Gothic style of painting, but numerous attempts have been made to demonstrate that, allowing for normal anatomical variation, and flexing of the body, or cloth, or both, the image can be made to conform with an undistorted human body. This has been achieved in so many ways that it is clear that the image is too indistinct for any precision on this subject at all.

      #6) The numerous blood flows on the Shroud have a noticeable generic similarity. They are approximately the same width, and show a sinuosity, down the back of the arms, across the back and in trickles down the front of the hair. While it is true that the experiments of Luigi Garlaschelli were too simplistic to demonstrate anything more than the fact that blood flow is determined by gravity, it is equally true that no better experiments have demonstrated that the blood flows are credible. There has been considerable dispute even among forensic pathologists as to where on the body the wounds were, the angle of the limbs when it flowed, whether the blood apparently from them emerged pre- or post-mortem, how viscous it was, whether it marked the Shroud in its original liquid state or had dried and been remoistened, or some state inbetween, and whether the body had been washed clear of some of the blood, among various other points of discussion.

      #7) The precise characteristics of the spinning and weaving of the Shroud (made of linen, 35-49 threads per centimetre, z-spun, 3/1 warp-faced chevron twill with 40 threads per run) are unmatched by any other piece of material from any time or place (except the piece I have on my desk!). There are many examples of individual characteristics from several times and places, and the task of the textile historian must be to assess, from his or her experience and extensive knowledge, the relative importance of these in terms of similar archaeological examples of both cloth and loom. There are several possible ways of weaving such material, but the size of the cloth and the weave-errors found on the Shroud narrow it down to a very few. Every such expert who has commented on the Shroud has considered a four-shaft treadle loom the most probable, first found in China, a century or so BC, and exclusively for silk, and arriving in the Middle East two or three hundred years later, still exclusively for silk. Making ell-wide twill in linen on such a loom does not seem possible in the Middle East or Europe until the 10th century or so. An alternative possibility, using a three-shaft warp-weighted loom, has also been considered, and appropriate twills in wool have been found in Northern Europe. However (and with respect to the imaginative reconstruction of the late Piero Vercelli), and in spite of extensive imagery, both painted and modelled, mostly found in Egyptian tombs, there is no evidence for such a loom, or any material which might have made on it, in the Middle East or Southern Europe at all.

  14. Have only just this minute come across this posting.

    How I’ve missed it up till now I’m not sure. Maybe it’s that dominant search engine that’s to blame (with its, less face it, distinctly pro-authenticity bias).

    First impression re this posting, its sentiments, its deployment of English language: brilliant, simply brilliant. Talk about a profound whiff of much-needed fresh air …

    I speak as someone who’s much acquainted already with the TS – nearly 9 years of research and experimental modelling – but will spare you the details for now.

    Let’s just say that the internet (and its major search engine) is less than ideal as a means of communicating data that defy and contradict vigorously-promulgated fixed mind-set propaganda – dare one say with a particular religious slant…

    Nuff said for now. Maybe more later…

    1. Hi Tom,

      I wonder who you are asking to “watch this.” I’ve no doubt that there will be many, including yourself, who can be convinced by Fr Spitzer’s enthusiasm, conviction, and apparent authority. However, almost nothing he says about the Shroud is true. The Shroud image does have some of the characteristics of a negative photograph, and can be mathematically converted to show some three-dimensional relief, but to claim, loudly and confidently, that it is a “perfect three dimensional photographic negative image” is quite obviously untrue. Secundo Pia did not take the first photograph in 1872. The STuRP team did not specify that seven different samples should be taken, nor did they make their radiocarbon proposal in 1978. The Shroud was not “caught in a fire in 1458.” The sample which was taken in 1988 was not from a controversial area; it came from an area specified by the STuRP team in 1984. (It has become controversial since, I grant.) It was not near an area allegedly damaged in the 1532 fire, nor near any of the patches sewn on by the Poor Clare nuns. The carbon dating did not say the Shroud came from the fifteenth century. The STuRP team did not take sticky tape samples from every square centimetre of the cloth, and no samples were taken of “the exact spot” of the carbon dating.

      And so on and so on. And I’m less than a third of the way through. Anybody who knows anything about the Shroud, as some of us do (surely you must have spotted this if you have read the comments above) will conclude, not that the Shroud is authentic, but that those who do have been deceived by the entirely fanciful constructions of the people from whom they received their information.

  16. Am pleased to see this posting showing renewed signs of life again (especially as Google failed to flag it up – see my earlier comment).

    I’m mentally composing a comment that I’d have placed, had I been aware of the posting sooner. It may take a little while to compose. Here for now is a brief foretaste of what it will say.

    Some 6 years ago I placed a posting on my generalist sciencebuzz site on the tragic Zane Gbangbola death in his home on the banks of the Thames (which also rendered his father wheelchair bound).

    https://colinb-sciencebuzz.blogspot.com/2014/10/sciencebod-says-it-was-more-likely.html

    I quickly contested the claim that hydrogen cyanide from a nearby gravel pit could have been responsible. I quickly had a Chief Reporter from the MSM (a major UK national newspaper no less) on the phone, taxing me on this and that chemical and medical detail.

    To cut a long story short, I correctly predicted the Coroner’s verdict, delivered several months later, namely that proposed killer hydrogen cyanide, HCN, leaking from a nearby standing body of water was NOT and COULD NOT have been the causative agent. (Carbon monoxide, CO, from an indoor water-pump, discharging flood water from the victims’ home was implicated instead).

    A while later, I re-contacted the same reporter and asked if he’d be willing to publicize my model for the Turin Shroud, based NOT on painting, but contact-imprinting. I set out with photographs the results obtained with small-scale figurines (plastic toys, brass crucifixes, my own hand and face etc).

    Reply? No, we’ll NOT publicize your model unless or until you demonstrate it with a real human being!

    I’ll spare you my reply (except to say I did not wish to have one or more naked male volunteers wandering round my living room while I decided how best to imprint and apply quality linen).

    Summary of this comment. Please, PLEASE pro-authenticity advocates – here and elsewhere – cease banging on about the TS not being a mere medieval painting.

    No, it’s an imprint, it’s almost certainly a CONTACT IMPRINT, obtained using an added component (maybe my suggested powder medium – namely white flour- with subsequent heating of the imprinted linen, maybe not).

    Regardless, MSM especially, stop expecting this retiree on a fixed income to do the confirmatory experiments on a whole-body scale.

    You do the necessary experiments please (or finance if MSM) . You collect the hard data needed to confirm or deny a model that (in my opinion) has delivered the goods, albeit on a small reduced modelling scale.

  17. In passing, your link Spencer between the image characteristics of the Turin Shroud and “Gothic art” (Gothic appearing 22 times no less!) is interesting , albeit a trifle over-adventurous in my view.

    There’s an axiom that appears at the fuzzy boundary line between science and statistics: “Correlation does not imply causation!”

    It’s a principle that gets forgotten time and time again in sindonology (hardly surprising perhaps when there’s only the one linen sheet from which to investigate the image in search of simple take-away all-embracing explanations.

    Why the resemblance with Gothic art and the several characteristics that you list? Answer: because the TS image is a contact imprint. But NO, not just any old slap-dash one. Oh no! The imprinters were keen to restrict the imprinting as much as possible to the frontal surfaces, scrupulously avoiding by one means or another the sides of a 3D template (whether a statue or real adult male). Thus the lack of sides generally (making a nonsense of the attempt to rule out contact imprinting through lacking so-called lateral distortion!). No sides excludes any and all possibility of lateral distortion entering the equation, rearing its ugly head!

    Much can be explained on that basis, namely partial and selective imprinting only – notably the thinness of the face with abrupt cut-off at both cheeks, skinniness of limbs etc. The face may also appear too long, thanks to chin/beard/neck running into each other (maybe even the some of the underside of the chin (nuff said)

    I disagree by the way with your claim that the “forehead” is too small as a proportion of the vertical dimensions of the face. Your measurements extend considerably higher than the forehead (as defined by my dictionary as extending up to the hairline only). Your ruler has reached higher than the hairline, up towards the hair-covered topmost part of the head. That’s where the “imprint” limitations kick-in, yet again, but I’ll spare you the details – there being complications as regards the “hair” and the precise manner in which it was image real or “fake”. All I would say is this: compare the vertical dimensions from eye -to-hairline only and you will find them roughly the same. Ignore horizontal dimensions that may seem to expand the forehead area – once again you are into imprinting-artefact area – to say nothing of a few liberties that seem to have been taken with that particular negative TS image which seems to me at any rate to have expanded the image sideways into the blank image-deficient zones between cheeks and hair.

    Despite that one reservation re “forehead” area, I have to say I am most impressed with your scholarship Spencer- to say nothing of your gift for clear exposition. I have no doubt whatsoever that you will gain that professorship that you state in your profile as your ultimate ambition!

    Link to my TS site:

    http://www.shroudofturinwithoutallthehype.wordpress.com

  18. ‘Tis such a shame – this site displaying as it does the most recent 5 comments only. Titles of old postings quickly disappear TOTALLY from sight.

    Result: attempts to resuscitate old postings with new comments, as I’ve tried to do – having arrived late on the scene – are invariably doomed to failure.

    My own TS website displays the 15 most recent comments , improving survival prospects 3-fold, hint, hint. 😉

    Who says maths cannot assist history (see Spencer’s gargantuan, albeit somewhat mind-blitzing new posting which appeared earlier today!)?

    Title: “No, History Doesn’t Need to be “Mathematized”

    Goodbye Spencer. Goodbye site. The latter’s clearly unlikely to become a permanent waterhole in the internet desert, not where that permanently so-called ‘enigmatic’ TS is concerned. 🙁

  19. Hi Spencer,

    I don’t know if you pick up comments from the distant past, but it occurs to me that your encyclopaedic knowledge of the classics might help with a word which appears only a few times, in an ancient (-ish) text, in connection with the legend of Abgar, and which is often used to help justify the idea that the Image of Edessa was the same artefact as the Shroud.

    It occurs in the 6th or 7th century Acts of Thaddaeus, where Jesus is given a “tetradiplon” to wipe his face with. This has been interpreted to mean that the cloth he was given was huge, that his whole image appeared on the cloth, twice, and that it was then refolded to show only his face, which then became the Image of Edessa and eventually the Mandylion. None of this is justified by the text of the Acts of Thaddaeus or any subsequent event or text, but it is a mainstay of the alleged historical justification of the antiquity of the Shroud.

    My question to you is: what, given the fact that ‘tetradiplon’ is a hapax legomenon and occurs nowhere else, might a ‘tetradiplon’ have been? Although usually translated as an adjective, it seems to be used in the text as a noun, rather as a carpenter might ask for a piece of “four-ply,” without specifying that he wanted a sheet of wood. It seems to me that the word might refer to a towel made of several layers, and it might be that although the word tetradipon does not appear elsewhere, a description of such cloth might do. Presumably there was an old Greek word for ‘towel,’ and nowadays, we can distinguish a towel from a bedsheet because of its texture, but before ‘towelling’ as a type of cloth was invented, how could you tell a towel from a sheet? Was it a layered cloth, so that it would be more absorbent of water? I’ve no idea, but you seem to be able to find obscure references to such things!

    The actual text is difficult to find, but here is one way of accessing it.
    archive.org/details/bub_gb_G4ydpWeFpdEC/page/n391/mode/2up?q=Thaddai

    It’s page 274, line 13 of the Acta Thaddaei. My Greek is just about adequate to find the word, but not to translate the passage!

    Best wishes,
    Hugh

  20. I skimmed your silly article. How foolish and blind you are! Nobody can create anything like this in OUR time. It certainly wasn’t CREATED as a fake a thousand years ago.

    1. Hi James,

      I can tell by your insults that you are a Christian! What a shame that abusive intolerance should so often be the chief distinguishing characteristic of my fellow followers of the Price of Peace. Nevertheless, in the hope of redressing the balance, and showing the non-Christians among Spencer’s readers that there are many rooms in our Father’s house, I would be very happy most carefully to read your objections to his article and respond to them, if you have any.

      For instance, the idea that nobody can create anything like the Shroud in our time is clearly mistaken, although I agree that so far, the materials required to be assembled to do so have not all been gathered in one place. This is, however, a question of expense, not a question of technology.

      Best wishes for the rest of the Easter Season,
      Hugh

  21. This article is a sum of cherrypicking, religious ignorance – with historical and archaelogical implications, i. e., errors – and pathetic comparisons.

    +Christus Vincit, Christus Regnat, Christus Imperat+

    1. Greetings, Joäo.

      I find almost nothing in the way of cherry-picking or religious ignorance in Spencer’s article, and I believe I have studied all the historical and archaeological implications. I can’t identify what you mean by pathetic comparisons. If you would care to be a little more explicit, I would be happy to debate your opinion.

      Best wishes,
      Hugh

      1. Greetings, Hugh.

        Let me explain.

        Cherry-picking: anything about STURP, or concerning the analysis of palynologists, or about the coins (with a minting error only recently discovered!) under the eyelids, for example. I only have read a lot of pseudo-arguments, already rebuted, to sustain the author’s hypothesis.

        Religious ignorance: Christ was not “buried as a criminal”, but as the true Messiah, the true God, by His disciples – one of them a rich man, Joseph of Arimathea, that could bought this rich shroud. Also, concerning the arms, Jesus had one of them stretched, according to Tradition – which appears in various narratives of the Passion from many saints – to be fixed by the nail in the Cross.

        Pathetic comparisions: everyone has a different face with diverse proportions. To compare the image on the Shroud to a random actor – which does not resembles Our Lord, by the way – is nonsense. Also, various studies from medical experts show that the Man on the Shroud is anatomically perfect. The presented image of Gothic sculpture is visually different from it.

        To conclude: you must have an enormous faith to deny the Shroud’s authenticy. It’s a conspiracy theory, like say that the Earth is flat.

        Regards,
        João

        1. Thank you, João, for responding. It is true that Spencer’s account was mostly historically based, and perhaps he should have mentioned STuRP. However I see this as omitting an entire branch of the cherry-tree, with good and bad fruit on it, rather than only selecting the ones to his own taste. He would have mentioned Heller and Adler’s conviction that the Shroud was not a painting, and also Walter McCrone’s finding that it was. He would have discussed their opinion that such iron oxide as there is on the Shroud does not correlate to image density, and compared that to the Gilberts’ finding that it does. He would no doubt have mentioned that the first book to describe STuRP’s work, by the “Recording Secretary and public relations officer”, declaring the Shroud to be miraculous, was repudiated by the rest of the members such that they refused even to be acknowledged in it. He might have mentioned that John Jackson’s “cloth collapse” hypothesis, especially when associated with radiation as an image forming mechanism, was comprehensively rejected by Ray Rogers, who was investigating some kind of vaporograph hypothesis before he died.

          Spencer might so have discussed the current leading “authenticist” hypotheses regarding the radiocarbon date, that it was grossly distorted by radiation or medieval interweaving, and compared them to the recent peer-reviewed paper by Bryan Walsh and Larry Schwalbe (STuRP), to the effect that minor contaminants may have shifted the date by only a few years.

          It is also true that Spencer omitted the work of “palynologists,” and I note your use of the plural. Max Frei-Sulzer, it is true, declared that pollen from the Middle East had been found on the Shroud, but three subsequent palynologists, and Israel’s foremost botanist, all found his findings either erroneous or suspect, even though they were all devout “authenticists: themselves.

          Similarly, Francis Filas’s hypothesis that there is are imprints from a first century coins on the eyelids, as well as the remarkable observations of Alan and Mary Whanger, involving flowers, nails, hammer, pliers, ropes, spears and all the other impedimenta of crucifixion, have now been so comprehensively discredited – by authenticists themselves – that few of the current front-runners in Shroud studies give them any credence at all.

          Whether Christ was buried as a criminal or as the “true God” is a moot point. I agree with you that neither Joseph of Arimathea, nor Nicodemus, nor his disciples, saw Jesus as a criminal, but on the other hand the people who released his body for burial probably did. However, nobody saw him, then, as the true God. Nobody, it seems from the Gospels, had any faith in the Resurrection until it had happened, so although I would agree that Jesus was buried with unusual respect, it was not because he was, at that time, considered either Messiah or God.

          Anatomically, the “physical perfection” of the body on the Shroud has received a lot of interpretation. From the plain, laid-out flat model used by John Jackson to the current most popular image by Sergio Rodella, via the lopsided crucifixions of Giulio Ricci and the artistic ‘foreshortening’ observed by Isabel Piczek, it is clear that numerous distortions, all different in detail, have been adduced to try to fit the shape on the cloth to a physically perfect man. His height has been guessed at differently, the extent and stiffness of his rigor mortis has been guessed at differently, the dislocation of various joints has been guessed at differently, and the disposition of the body in the tomb, together with the way the cloth “must have been” draped or wrapped around it; all these really amount to explanations of why the body as we see it is not physically perfect at all.

          Finally, Spencer is not the first to observe that in most full face portraits, the line of the eyes approximately bisects the shape of the head. The “random actor” could have been any of millions images demonstrating that. There cannot be any doubt that the distance between, the line of the eyes and the line of the mouth, on the Shroud, is long compared to, say, the line of the eyes and the hairline at the top of the brow, and it has been a topic of some discussion as to how a cloth draped around a head could have emerged with such proportions, although as far as I know no really satisfactory demonstration has yet been produced.

          Finally, I can see that you have some knowledge of the subject, and have read, no doubt, some of the many, many books that extol all the points you mention, but quietly omit the quite vigorous academic controversy that surrounds almost every one, among authenticists just as such as medievalists. If you want to explore the “other side” of the discussion, then The Medieval Shroud and The Medieval Shroud 2, both at academia.edu, will give you some interesting starting points. If, on the other hand, you only like to read things that support, rather than challenge, your faith (and there’s nothing wrong with that), then it’s probably better not to.

          1. Greetings, Hugh.

            Your answer is, no doubt, respectful and interesting. I read about your work and its truly a honor to me to discuss the Shroud here. I imagine that you have more years of study than I have of life, althrough I disagree with your conclusions. But, for sure, there are precious points in your comment and I will read about it. Really think that nor you, nor Spencer are evil-minded; your answer and the other articles by him show me that I’m correct. Sorry for any grammatical errors, I’m not a Native speaker.

            May God guide your studies.

            Regards,
            João

  22. P. S.: I don’t think that you are malicious. I skimmed other articles and admired your honesty, but this one really is not good. I suggest more research before posting about the Holy Shroud.

  23. I said a while ago that I would not place further comments on this site, given that new comments added to old postings disappear in the blink of an eye (given that a mere 5 “latest comments” are displayed.

    But I can’t resist placing one more. It’s to address the all-too-common assumption that anyone attempting to prove that an ancient artefact is a more recent forgery than is generally claimed (think Shroud of Turin – is it 1st or 14th century?) is required to produce an exact full-size replica.

    Sorry, I cannot agree. It’s asking too much to expect, given one can only guess at what was deployed by way of artistic ingredients.

    Any claims for uniqueness, non-forgeability etc, have to be based NOT on the production in its entirety, down to every last detail. They need merely to address any claims that the CHARACTER of the image or whatever is unique, non-forgeable etc, especially if attempting to invoke some miraculous intervention.

    Given that those who claim a unique 1st century creation of the TS body image invoke ‘supernatural photography’ while failing to state the chemical nature of the image chromophore, or who assume the chromophore to be chemically-modified linen cellulose (without a scrap of supporting evidence that I’m aware of) then I would simply say this.

    It’s sufficient to demonstrate that a highly-superficial yellow or yellow-brown image CAN be generated by forgery (as I consider I have done using white flour as the material used to imprint a body image onto wet linen), one that it is negative (i.e. light/dark tone-reversed), that has blurred edges, that is bleachable by chemical agents like diimide (NH=NH) that decolorize those conjugated -CH=CH-CH=CH- double bond-based chromophores etc etc.

    I maintain, yet again, that it’s the modern-day reproduction of the physical and chemical CHARACTER of the image that is the main task of those who reject notions of 1st century ‘ supernatural proto-photography’.

    It’s unreasonable to expect a carbon-copy of the entire artefact. That’s tantamount to requesting a double-forgery!

    I say the task is complete, at least where this retired science bod is concerned (whose now focused his attention on other enigmas, notably Stonehenge and Neolithic standing stones in general)!

    The TS-forgery technology can be summed up with 7 letters of the alphabet: O,F,C,L,H,S,B:

    Oil,
    Flour,
    Clay (slurry, for 1st stage biblically-consistent marker for Phase 1 “blood”),
    Linen (wet, impressed by hand over 3D body skin and contours),
    Heat (from red-hot charcoal embers or bread-making oven),
    Soap (for final wash to leave faint negative body image),
    Blood (Phase 2, real or resembling human blood, overlaid onto the heat-resistant clay-generated positional markers.

    Yes, laborious and detail-obsessed. But it’s those two inputs that are responsible in my humble view for the so-called Shroud “enigma” – read 14th century ingenuity, probably on the part of determined craftsmen of religious inclination to generate a one-off, claiming falsely a miraculous origin.

    Geoffroi de Charny’s little band of clerics employed at his monarch-financed private chapel, operating quietly on that remote estate, situated in an equally-remote tiny hamlet?

    Nuff said methinks.

  24. Reply to :

    João Carlos Bullasays:
    April 7, 2021 at 7:57 am

    “May God guide your studies”.

    If “God” (if not an entirely imaginary concept) had sent the Shroud of Turin as proof of the Resurrection, then why, pray tell me, did He allow state-of-the-art late 20th century radiocarbon dating to deliver as answer a 14th century as distinct from 1st century origin?

    Sorry to throw spanners into the works (while recognizing that those annoying tossed spanners – the scientific variety especially – can occasionally reveal the true answers to long-standing – dare-one-say – hugely time-embroidered enigmas!).

    Sorry. I previously said I’d done with this site !

    But maybe the TS conundrum is deservedly reappearing here in Comments after an (over?) long absence …

    Maybe a new updated posting is required, you oh-so-intellectually-gifted, enquiring mind Spencer?

  25. Thank you João, for your generous and understanding reply.

    The Shroud is a much debated topic, and as long as an opinion is based on a fair assessment of all the evidence, there can be no objection to anyone coming to an opposing conclusion to one’s own.

    In general, I do not call people who have come to a different conclusion from me silly, foolish or blind (as did James Dillner just before your comment), nor ignorant, erroneous or pathetic. I appreciate that they may not have had the opportunity to appreciate the weight of the counter-evidence, or even that, having read it, they still feel that on balance their opinion is correct. It will be a while yet before a universal consensus is achieved, but the way to the truth will be by working together, not rejecting those who differ out of hand.

    Please continue to explore the subject with an open mind, and continue to respect all those travelling along the road with you, even if their conclusions are not yours.

    Best wishes, Hugh

  26. Sorry Spencer – but I feel forced to repeat myself.

    There was a major error of interpretation in your posting -one that in my view needed a response from you – but which never came.

    At the very least, you should consider a follow-up posting to correct the record – whichever way you consider appropriate – and invite further comment and/or criticism.

    The nature of the error?

    Answer – a major one, if the truth be told. You interpreted the image on the Turin Shroud as one that might have been considered “artistic” in the medieval era, round about the era of the C-14 dating (mid 14th century).

    I challenged your view, saying NO, it was not an attempt to use then-current “Gothic art” (slimmed-down arms and legs etc) to display a make-believe image of the crucified Jesus.

    No. Far from it. It was a “non-artistic” attempt to SIMULATE ((forge?) the kind of image that might have been left on Joseph of Arimathea’s “fine linen”, used to transport the newly-crucified Jesus from cross to tomb.

    No, not an artistic presentation – far from it – but a simulated IMPRINT of a real newly-crucified body, seeping both sweat and blood simultaneously, the sweat being responsible after decades/centuries of drying. ageing and yellowing to to produce the faint wispy image we now see on the TS.

    No, not a Resurrectional “proto-photograph” on the Third Day, no, not a genuine image that could in theory have been left on J of A’s linen on the First Day (aka Good Friday) , but a mid-14th SIMULATION of a 1st century dual- imprint (sweat and blood) as distinct from any kind of artistic representation that deployed artist’s brush as distinct from actual body contact imprinting, claiming to be genuine, when in fact a simulated forgery.

    Sorry to repeat myself, Spencer, but I believe you flagged up a needless distraction, laudably admittedly anti-authenticity, but seriously misinterpreting the real nature of the TS – namely a medieval (“Gothic art”) attempt to forge a biblical scene – namely cross-to-tomb transport in J of A “fine linen”.

    No, not, repeat NOT an attempt to produce a “mere” religious work-of-art via your claim to it being a example of body-distorted “Gothic art” with slimmed-down arms, legs etc.

    I do believe you should re-post on the TS – and soon – stating what you consider (or hopefully reconsider) in the light of the comments attached to your previous posting.

    Please stay alert to feedback comments – this being the internet – this being a medium that is supposed to operate on a two-way basis.

    1. You seem awful worked up over an image produced with a medieval camera obscura. Back when we were taught to process our images in a dark room, we would make a camera obscura in class. According to my 8th grade photography instructor and college photojournalism professor, “the camera obscura process goes back to ancient Rome”.
      Maybe Spencer can do an article on it. If he hasn’t already done so. I personally wouldn’t use the word “ancient”. Evidence of the process came closer to the fall of Rome than the foundation.

      1. Hi Anthony,

        I fear your 8th grade photography instructor and college photojournalism professor was only half correct. Although it is not unlikely that some kind of temporary image may well have been observed on a wall by means of a small hole opposite, there is no evidence that any such image was ever preserved, nor that any means of preserving it was either known or even speculated upon. You may be thinking of the experiments carried out by Nicholas Allen, who suspended a statue in front of a pinhole for several days, and achieved quite a good photograph, but his idea that the photographer then took his chemical process to the grave with him is rather a weak explanation for why photography was not further developed for hundreds of years.

        There is nothing wrong with speculating, and then looking for evidence that supports your speculations, but it is never wise to be too dogmatic about statements that are little more than guesses. Further, it is a popular trope to claim that because something can be done in a particular way, therefore it must have been done that way, but that’s not a logical or scientific argument.

        1. Hello Hugh,

          I have no skin in the game either way. There are tiny pinhole type windows, or occuli in certain works of medieval architecture used to track Time. My research partner has dubbed them “Eyebrow Windows” for the pre-colonial Newport Tower.
          I have only found 1 pseudoscience writer to have written about them. He only focuses upon one symbolic occulus. These tiny oculi should work the same as a camera obscura especially around the Solstices when the sun rises in the exact same spot for three days. As far as anyone writing down the process, who’s to say no one didn’t. Could very easily be sitting in someone’s private collection or untranslated, and unrecognized in some public archive.

          I’ve been working with medieval cartography for the past several years. The skill level of medieval artists has gone unrecognized for far too long. Especially the Miniaturists. Any number of known and anonymous artists had the skill level to have created a shroud. I have been successfully doing a poor man’s version of multi-spectral imaging on medieval works of cartography which reveals their tremendous level of skill.

          I have added your site to my home screen. When I have time, I will read through all of your posts. I may come across something which could help me out with my process.

      2. Imagine the TS were a house, correction, ancient vicarage? Would it be recognizable as such?

        The driveway approach- to say nothing of frontage/back yard – would have masses of obsolete abandoned vehicles – dating back to Model T Fords and earlier.

        The grounds would be choc-a-bloc full of ancient discarded carpets, lino, curtains, bedding etc. The front door and windows would be invisible behind accumulations of old newspapers, books, magazines. There might even be a homemade pinhole camera rattling around somewhere in a bottom drawer.

        In fact it might be that without a chimney poking out the top of the accumulation of ancient add-ons, the place might not be recognizable as a dwelling at all – more a property with a permanently-sanctified Protection Order on anything and everything – with house-decluttering bin lorries banned from approaching within 5 miles.

        Yes, such is that meticulously-preserved relic known as the TS ( “Total Shambles”), one where everything is preserved, in some cases fossilized. Nothing is ever allowed to be discarded (unless having been earmarked for instant disposal in the 1981 STURP Summary).
        STURP = “Selectively Targeted Unmentionables – Requiring Prohibition”.

        1. “There might even be a homemade pinhole camera rattling around somewhere in a bottom drawer.”

          I doubt it. There are however dozens of structures with the same capabilities at least two days a year. This would even account for the distortions in the image. I would love to test it out personally but, no one is going to give me uninterrupted access to a Gothic Cathedral for a year.

          1. Some might consider pinhole cameras to have about as much relevance to the TS as Creationism – the latter arriving we’re told just a few millennia ago – relative to biological evolution over billions of years!

            Is there such a word as “de-supernaturalize”? When can we expect the TS to be “de-supernaturalized” ?

            Some might consider de-supernaturalization to be long overdue, now some 40 years post that essentially pro-authenticity agenda-pushing STURP.

            That was followed in turn a mere 10 years later by the (admittedly preliminary, peripheral one-patch) C-14 radiocarbon dating, establishing the TS as being of mid-14th century origin .

            The TS was almost certainly an attempt to reproduce a dual whole body front/back image in sweat and blood onto Joseph of Arimathea’s “fine linen” acquired during brief cross-to-tomb transport .How? Via direct linen-body contact-imprinting </b (not, repeat NOT, via photography, whether supernatural or via pinhole camera, the image-capturing photographic emulsion still unspecified.

          2. Should have stated two 3 day periods around each Solstice, NOT 2 days a year. The 3-day period around the Summer Solstice would likely produce the better image. One could always enhance the end result.

            This is an extremely interesting topic and I was unaware there were so many passionate people with varying ideas. I thought, I had heard it all. I stand corrected. Thank you Mr. Berry and Mr. Farey!

        2. Oops I omitted to mention the three wings added to the sides of “Total Shambles”, each made to look like a prestige research Institute.

          First, late 20th century, there was the John Jackson wing, home of the “IAAGBBAL” Institute, correction, Revered Institution (the initials standing for: “Imaging Across Air Gaps Between Body And Linen”).

          Then, early 21st century, there was the accompanying add-on, with a tunnel linking with the aforementioned, namely the Giulio Fanti/Shroud Science Group addition, the U-T PCWCBI Institute, correction, Even-More Revered Institution (the initials standing for: Ultra-Thin Primary Cell Wall-Confined Body Image).

          Then, thirdly, in late 2012, the biggest, flashiest add-on of them all, namely the Paolo Di Lazzaro “UVELYOMDL” Institute, (the initials standing for UV Excimer Laser-Yellowing Of Modern Day Linen”).

          One curious feature links all three additions – the deployment of bullet-proof glass on the entire exterior of each add-on. Apart from that one small detail, the original ancient vicarage now looks for all the world (well, certain true-believers folk at any rate) as a shining feature – one designed to dominate its entire surroundings, near and far.

          Just remember to speak in hallowed whispers should you ever try taking a closer look. The “Total Shambles” has now been renamed. It’s become the “Towering Supernatural “!

  27. Reply to “Avenging Son” (no Reply tab under any of the several comments he has just posted):

    You write:

    “A body of a man was wrapped in cloth and a light so powerful came from that body it left that image. A light we cant even reproduce today.”

    Even if one regards the TS as authentically post-Crucifixion, one simply cannot go referring to a flash of powerful light having produced a (proto-photographic) image.

    Why not? Answer: the quality nature of the linen, its up-and over use to capture both frontal and dorsal sides of a body should be sufficient in themselves to implicate (a) Joseph of Arimathea’s “fine linen” deployed in the first instance to receive a crucified body from a cross, and then to transport said body in a stretcher-like fashion from cross to tomb.

    Imprinting of blood AND body image (presumably via perspiration, aka sweat) provides an immediate explanation for the negative tone-reversed image, i.e. as the consequence of imprinting via direct cloth-body contact.

    Yes, I know that STURP in its 1981 Summary made no reference to Joseph of Arimathea, and tried to implicate imaging having occurred 2 days post Crucifixion, i.e. . as the result of ‘supernatural radiation’.

    But note the complete absence in that same report to “negative tone-reversed image” plus much supplementary information that was simply downright irrelevant, misleading or totally incorrect, notably that the 3D-ness of the body image in the VP-8 was “unique” to the TS.

    Not so! 3D-ness, whether in the VP-8 of the 70s, or more modern-day equivalent, e.g. ImageJ software is not, repeat NOT unique. It can be seen by simply inputting graphics with no original 3D-ness whatsoever, e.g. simple ones generated with MS-Paint, like superimposed solid colour figures with stepped image density gradations that result in conical end products.

    I say it’s high time that the TS image was demystified, that the radiocarbon dating was accepted, that the focus be placed on how 14th century technicians – swayed no doubt by their religious convictions – were able to SIMULATE J of A’s TRANSPORT LINEN in its Day 1 usage (i.e. immediately post-Crucifixion via CONTACT IMPRINTING while blood and body fluids could be represented as still moist and transferable). Considerable ingenuity was required, to say nothing of meticulous attention to detail!

    Please, PLEASE! , let’s dispense with those supernatural flashes of light, acting on a a surface with no known photosensitive medium for instant capture of negative tone-reversed images…

  28. A Summary of STURP’s 1981 Conclusions (my annotations being in plain font)

    No pigments, paints, dyes or stains have been found on the fibrils. X-ray, fluorescence and microchemistry on the fibrils preclude the possibility of paint being used as a method for creating the image. Ultra Violet and infrared evaluation confirm these studies.

    One hardly thinks that conventional artistic methods and materials would have been used on something that was intended to look like J of A’s “fine linen” etc. The investigation should have started with CONTACT IMPRINTING, especially as the latter was acknowledged – see below- for the blood, regardless of the otherwise uncertain nature of body image transfer mechanism.
    Added to which: how likely is it that one or more artists would have painted a tone-reversed negative if intended to represent an imprint (think muddy footprints on a white-tiled floor)? The question is especially pertinent given the two-sided image overall, on linen, not canvas, looking for all the world as an IMPRINT – not a conventional artistic creation. Contact imprinting should have REPLACED conventional artist’s pigments, artist’s brushwork etc. as prime initial focus. (Just as well, given that it would be near impossible to paint in in a manner intended to look as if acquired as a negative imprint akin to brass-rubbing!)

    Computer image enhancement and analysis by a device known as a VP-8 image analyzer show that the image has unique, three-dimensional information encoded in it.

    Wrong, wrong, wrong!!!!! There is nothing at all unique about the response of the TS body image to 3D-rendering computer software, whether the early VP-8 or the more modern day Image J etc. I have used the latter extensively to create 3D versions of graphics with no 3D history of their own whatsoever, e.g. generated using MS Office Paint. The manner in which the software works is no mystery. An image is scanned, converted to tiny square pixels. The image intensity of each pixel is determined, then raised proportionately on an entirely artificial, man-made third axis (so-called vertical “z”, as distinct from planar 2-dimensional “xy”). The resulting “needle forest” of pixels is then smoothed of by the same computer software to produce the “look” of a 3D object viewed from a distance with the naked eye. No magic, no miracles! It’s slick, certainly, but in reality mere digital processing of inputted data according to pre-programmed computer software.

    Microchemical evaluation has indicated no evidence of any spices, oils, or any biochemicals known to be produced by the body in life or in death.

    Yes, but that’s referring to a real body, coated in funeral lotions and/or generating its own secretions of blood and perspiration. There’s no reference been made to the substances that might be associated with a simulated victim of crucifixion, living (probably) or dead. In short, STURP’s 1981 record is seriously incomplete. Already we see a systematic drift towards an exclusively pro-authenticity-directed-cum- suspiciously slanted narrative.

    It is clear that there has been a direct contact of the Shroud with a body, which explains certain features such as scourge marks, as well as the blood.

    Yes, we see here a crucial acknowledgement of there having been at least some actual physical contact, if only to acquire the bloodstains (whether the latter be real or artificial).

    However, while this type of contact might explain some of the features of the torso, it is totally incapable of explaining the image of the face with the high resolution that has been amply demonstrated by photography.

    That’s yet another extraordinary observation to appear in a short Summary, making its claims: (a) that the facial image exhibits “high resolution” that has been displayed by photography, and then to claim: (b) that the image cannot therefore have been acquired via contact alone
    We have to remember that we are dealing with an unusual imaging situation – one in which a faint scarcely visible negative tone-reversed image has been acquired in the first instance, then, IMPORTANTLY, photo-processed to generate what we are supplied with finally.
    Note the initial step in making the negative image more easily visible, i.e. by using photographic technique to increase image density relative to white background. That alone should deter one from making “too good to be scientifically explicable” conclusions, even if that body torso fails to respond as well. Secondly, there’s the visual impact of converting an alien-looking reversed-tone negative into a more familiar-looking positive. Yes, the final image may look remarkably photograph-like after the two stage process. But that does not, repeat NOT make it an actual photograph (especially if it’s a comparison between response of torso versus that of face. (Who’s to say they weren’t simulated separately, using a more careful refined technique with face compared with torso and then added separately to the linen?).
    What we see is a distinctly unscientific attempt to cut corners in making that INTERNAL side-by-side comparison between relative definition of face and torso, failing to look at the situation from the wider perspective of real versus simulated body images, contact-imprints especially….

    The basic problem from a scientific point of view is that some explanations which might be tenable from a chemical point of view, are precluded by physics.

    Ho hum…

    Contrariwise, certain physical explanations which may be attractive are completely precluded by the chemistry.

    Ho hum…

    For an adequate explanation for the image of the Shroud, one must have an explanation which is scientifically sound, from a physical, chemical, biological and medical viewpoint.

    Ho hum…

    At the present, this type of solution does not appear to be obtainable by the best efforts of the members of the Shroud Team.

    Ho hum…

    Do tell us more…

    The scientific concensus (sic) is that the image was produced by something which resulted in oxidation, dehydration and conjugation of the polysaccharide structure of the microfibrils of the linen itself.

    Really? That’s news to me, even 40 years post the STURP Summary’s publication

    Such changes can be duplicated in the laboratory by certain chemical and physical processes.

    Really?

    A similar type of change in linen can be obtained by sulfuric acid or heat.

    The second of those two (“heat”) is indeed almost certainly relevant – highly so. But “sulfuric acid”? What possible relevance is that to the TS image? Which kind of H2SO4 are we referring to? The dilute bench acid – strong as acids goes – but non-dehydrating, generally without associated charring or browning on organic (carbon-based) chemicals? Or concentrated H2SO4 instead – an entirely different beast – beast being the operative word – one of the nastiest lab-based chemicals known to man (and thus of even less relevance to the TS!).

    However, there are no chemical or physical methods known which can account for the totality of the image, nor can any combination of physical, chemical, biological or medical circumstances explain the image adequately.

    Why should one expect to have a single item with a faint double-body image – with no record as to where it originated and/or how it was formed – and expect after a mere week or so of probing it in Turin, with mere stripping off of surface fibres with sticky tape- and expect to understand immediately the “totality of the image”? Pray tell us which planet were you living on, dear STURP?
    Maybe if you had focused on contact-imprinting, instead of dismissing it so summarily, you’d have gained some insights into the nature of the body image, even if failing to understand it in its “totality”. One step at a time please… It took this researcher a total of 10 models to decide how that body image was simulated (with Model 10 having much in common with starter Model 1 I later realized!).

    Thus, the answer to the question of how the image was produced or what produced the image remains, now, as it has in the past, a mystery.

    You are the main reason why the image remains a mystery, STURP. You failed to do your job properly and thoroughly, getting hung up on minor distractions, dead ends etc etc. In short, you failed to perform in the manner expected of broad, open-minded unbiased science, looking at a problem from as many possible angles simultaneously. I say we need a new STURP Mk 2.

    We can conclude for now that the Shroud image is that of a real human form of a scourged, crucified man. It is not the product of an artist.

    How can one conclude that the image is that of a real scourged man, given that scourge marks are represented in blood exclusively, with no visible signs in the body image? “Crucified”? Again, one sees bloodstains only at the supposed sites of crucifixion, etc – nothing in the body image per se!

    The blood stains are composed of hemoglobin and also give a positive test for serum albumin.

    Composed EXCUSIVELY of hemoglobin? Serum albumin of the right type, proportions etc? Why toss in this kind of questionable generalisation – right at the tail end of a so-called Summary?

    The image is an ongoing mystery and until further chemical studies are made, perhaps by this group of scientists, or perhaps by some scientists in the future, the problem remains unsolved.

    Yes, the problem remains unsolved. But who’s fault is that – primarily – given there’s been the one detailed look at detached fibres only (stripped off with contaminating sticky tape) -namely by STURP in 1978 – and the later radiocarbon dating ( some 10 years later, approx. 14th.century).

    (Apols for any typo, lapses in bolding, italics etc etc on my part which had to be configured manually – one at a time!)

    1. PS: I overlooked to mention one hugely important detail as regards that bizarre and obfuscating ’81 STURP Summary.

      Nowhere does it refer to the body image in the routinely expected shorthand as “negative” or “tone-reversed” – key descriptors introduced some 80 years earlier no less by Secondo Pia. Yes, the latter was a photographer – amateur as it happens- but negative images we know – or should know- are by no means confined to photographs. Think centuries-old brass rubbings and other simple contact-imprints – muddy footprints on white-tiled floors etc – whether accidental or, er, otherwise 😉

      An extraordinary semantic omission/oversight on STURP’s part – truly, truly extraordinary!

  29. The Shroud is a hoax because see John ch 19 and 20
    New International Version
    Taking Jesus’ body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen. This was in accordance with Jewish burial customs.

    New Living Translation
    Following Jewish burial custom, they wrapped Jesus’ body with the spices in long sheets of linen cloth.

    English Standard Version
    So they took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths with the spices, as is the burial custom of the Jews.

    Berean Study Bible
    So they took the body of Jesus and wrapped it in linen cloths with the spices, according to the Jewish burial custom.

    Berean Literal Bible
    So they took the body of Jesus and bound it in linen cloths, with the spices, as is the custom among the Jews to prepare for burial.

    King James Bible
    Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.

    Lewis
    Lewis
    11 minutes ago
    the pesky problem about the shroud is that the Bible proves the shroud is a fake!!!
    First, righteous Hebrews had short hair! It was an abomination for a man to have long hair!
    Next, Jesus head was wrapped in a napkin, a separate piece of cloth!
    Next, Jesus body was wrapped in strips of cloth wound like an Egyptian mummy!
    there was never any shroud!!! see John ch 20…another place says that Jesus was burried in the Egyptian manner! Note that Lazarus had to be UNTIED before he could walk! He hopped out of the tomb!!!

    Lewis Brackett

    1. Hi Lewis,

      You must have seen, before you commented on this site, that this topic is one which has invited intense study in many disparate disciplines, and that consensus is far from being achieved on the subject. If proving the Shroud a fake were simply a question of quoting the bible, it would have been discarded long ago. As it happens, I, like yourself, am quite sure the Shroud is medieval, but I don’t think your arguments from the bible are really good evidence against authenticity. There has been intense study of the words sindon and othonia, among others, as used in biblical and other contexts, and it is clear that they are not exclusive of an interpretation that includes a sheet of the Shroud’s proportions. There is nothing in the bible that speaks of Jesus being buried “in the Egyptian manner.”

      In quoting so extensively from John, I wonder why you have not seen fit to mention the other gospels, which do not refer to “strips of cloth,” but only one big sheet. Do you think they were wrong, and if so, why?

      In mentioning Paul’s injunction against long hair, I wonder if you have considered what he meant by “long.” Comparing traditional pictures of Jesus to hairstyles today, one might certainly consider that his hair was “long,” but in many times and traditions, such a length was normal for men, and the word “long” referred to hair down to below the shoulders or towards the waist, like that of some women today. St Paul is distinguishing between the normal length of hair for men, and the “long” length of hair for women. As usual with sindonological hermeneutics, his words do not unequivocally exclude the image on the Shroud.

      The Shroud is a fascinating object both of forensic study and religious contemplation, and I hope you will continue to admire it as a wonderful instrument for enriching your faith.

  30. On further reflection, I may have been a little hard on STURP and its suggested oversights/blind spots in my previous comment. Why? How?

    Answer: one might start by noting the negative tone-reversed image, and be ready in principle to flag it up prominently. By way of caution, one might go looking for signs of a visible external coating on threads and outermost fibres within those threads.

    But what if the expected sight never materialized? What if the expected feature was simply not visible? Might one then understandably hold off from making references to negative imprints if there was no discrete coating to be seen? Might one instead go looking more closely at threads and fibres under a microscope, as did STURP investigators – to determine precisely where the colour/chromophore was lurking, if not visible prominently at the surface?

    But suppose one then encounters the so-called half-tone and related effects (STURP’s Mark Evans) where the external fibres that are coloured all have the same colour intensity (allegedly) but are immediately adjacent to fibres that are uncoloured? Think “either/or” coloration at the microscopic level, implying what (for heaven’s sake)?

    Might that have been the trigger for STURP Summary writers to go putting “negative imprint” on the back burner, or indeed discarding it completely. Might they have started to buy instead into the idea that if the body image is (or cannot) be a surface imprint, visible as discrete coating, then, ipso facto, is had to be something entirely different, more subtle, diffused within the body of threads, penetrating between or even, perish the thought, within the interior fibres, not just on, but below that alleged closed-off barrier role of the outermost primary cell wall?

    Might that account for the failure of STURP to grasp any nettles – there being none of the proverbial sense to be seen, certainly not with the naked eye, not even under magnification ( except as an either/or coloration of fibres at or near the surface of threads, with nothing more distinct than that)?

    I’ll hold off from saying where I think the chromophore is located (while having speculated thereon in my Final Model 10, aka “FILM-SET”, i.e. Flour Imprinting, Liquid Migrating, Solid-Entrapping Threads).

    Suffice it to say that I consider the final step where simulation of J of A’s “fine linen’, deployed as a stretcher from cross-to-tomb. It was, I suggest, a crucial final wash with soap and water: it removed any and all impressions of a surface-located imprint, while allowing a trace of visible chromophore (yellow-brown) to lurk as a faintish blur beneath the surface of threads, embedded as a microcrystalline solid (probably) within or between surface fibres.

    Thus the incredible image subtlety, still considered a modern-day enigma, provoking talk of supernatural flashes of proto-photograph – generating radiation – despite being – I say – a surface-applied imprint in the first instance , merely the first of several steps intended to mimic/simulate J of A’s transport linen acquiring an incredibly faint and subtle body imprint as well as underlying bloodstains..

  31. Quickie reply to Anthony V. (re. his comment immediately-preceding this one).

    I’ll start by quoting you verbatim, Anthony, since there’s no Reply tab under your comment.

    You end by saying:

    “This is an extremely interesting topic and I was unaware there were so many passionate people with varying ideas. I thought, I had heard it all. I stand corrected. Thank you Mr. Berry and Mr. Farey!”

    Thank you for the appreciative comment!

    Might I use this opportunity to add something personal. While I gave up my modelling of the TS last year (having finally – after some 9 years – ticked most boxes to my own satisfaction with final Model 10) there was one remaining puzzle at the level of threads and their individual fibres – namely the so called “half-tone” effect, “image discontinuities” etc.

    I believe I finally hit on the answer just 5 minutes ago. It’s been staring me in the face (down a microscope). I’ll try to explain briefly should anyone be interested at this level of detail (largely ignored/neglected one has to say by pro-authenticity lobbyists – but is that surprising – given the non-stop love affair with supernatural photography -cum-snapshots- offering no obvious explanation that I’m aware of for either/or half-tone effects?)

    1. Nobody’s come back quickly for my experimental evidence- explaining (I believe) the otherwise mysterious TS half-tone effect, image discontinuities etc. as importantly flagged up by STURP’s Mark Evans way back in the late 70s!

      Apols if I plant a clue – obtained 5 years ago with an simple experiment – one where I monitored the penetration (via capillary migration) of a solution of blue dye into linen fibre and threads.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7APq01_H-tE

      Yes – posted to YouTube! As a video clip, taken through my cheapo home-based microscope. A solution of blue dye – migrating via capillary action into linen fabric via its individual threads! Note the sudden spurts (nuff said for now!)

      Forgive me if I say I think it explains the TS so-called ” superficial image” with its “half-tone effect” etc etc.

      No, that oh-so-faint near- invisible body image is not on the surface of the linen. Thanks to a final wash with soap/water, it’s within the fabric fibres (whether between fibres, inside fibres, or one or the other – still to be determined by careful professional ( not my amateurish) microscopy).

      Apols for interrupting Spencer’s current posting…

  32. Oops. Did I say something? Comments have suddenly ground to a halt on this site! Why one wonders?

    But here’s something worth flagging up.

    Try googling “shroud of turin” right now and you’ll find Spencer’s s single TS posting from well over a year ago – refreshingly original I say – albeit, er, a tiny bit flawed – now displayed midway down Page 3 of Google entries!

    Well done Spencer. I raise my hat to you (google.com being a bit of a law unto itself – best I say no more…)

  33. I shall now take my leave from this, Spencer’s interesting thus far one-off TS posting.

    Let’s hope that Spencer chooses to put up a follow-up posting in due course (given the present one’s current Page 3 Google ranking on a “shroud of turin ” search – as reported above ).

    This site looks distinctly promising as a new, sceptic-based internet take on the TS. Indeed, it’s much to be welcomed in view of the continuing ever-present drip-feed (Google- favoured) of pseudo-science promulgating, pro-authenticity lobbying.

    Let’s sit tight and see how things pan out..

    Lat’s take our time in arriving at a final decision. There’s no need to hurry …

    A single one-off image – with no accompanying explanation – does not demand instant explanations. It may take a few more decades (or centuries) to dot all i’s, cross all t’s…

    Bye for now.

  34. Wow, some undergrad at Indian U. is suddenly an expert of the Shroud, never having examined it and relying only on a few non-scientific articles. I guess the nine scientists who either found cotton fibers in the tested sample, or who noticed the 1988 tests lack consistency could have saved a lot of trouble by reading this! Or the dozen or so videos showing microscopic evidence you just ignore. Or the historical fabric expert who says the weave is characteristic of the mideast but NOT Europe. But nice publicity stunt kid. You’ll get some reads. Now go back and study.

    1. Hi Lauren,

      Leaving your abusive tone aside for the moment, it is not clear from your comment whether you have read any more than Spencer about this subject. I’m intrigued by the “nine scientists.” Can you name any of them?

      Actually, everybody who has studied the materials of the Shroud at sufficient magnification has found cotton fibres all over it. There has been considerable debate as to where they came from, which has not been well resolved. As far as I know, only three tiny fragments have been quantified; and their cotton proportions have been quoted as 5%, 25% and 100% (by Heimburger, Fanti, and Villarreal), which does not help us very much. Some claim that the cotton is adventitious to the fabric, some that it was incorporated in the spinning process, and some that it was incorporated in the weaving process. It is currently not possible on the basis of the presence of cotton to say whether the radiocarbon sample was an incorporated material or not.

      The 1988 radiocarbon tests certainly do lack consistency, a fact which has been addressed statistically in three peer-reviewed papers, all by sincere authenticists (Riani, Atkinson et al., Casabianca, and Schwalbe and Walsh). None has found that the evidence shows that the Shroud is not medieval, and the most recent, co-authored by a senior member of STuRP, suggests that the quoted date was perhaps 30 years off.

      Several historical fabric experts have spoken of the Shroud, and not one has claimed that the weave is “characteristic of of the mideast” – I don’t know where you got that from. The two most eminent researchers on the archaeological fabrics of the Romano-Judaeo Middle East, Hero Granger-Taylor and Orit Shamir, do not think the weave at all typical. Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, a medieval tapestry restorer, did think that some of the stitching resembled some stitching found at Masada, but it also resembles stitching found in every other era, so can hardly be considered either typical or exclusive.

      As to the “dozen or so videos showing microscopic evidence,” can it be that you are referring to popular accounts such as may be found on the YouTube? There are no videos of the Shroud material at the microscopic scale. The closest is some footage of the cloth shot by David Rolfe, but it does not show anything which cannot be seen by the naked eye.

      If you have any evidence that anything Spencer or I have said that is incorrect, then please point it out, and I will certainly give it consideration here for you. I will most certainly “go back and study.”
      However, I have to say that, if you are typical of the vast majority of authenticists (and from the intolerant and abusive tone of your comment it seems that you are a Christian – by their fruits I have come to know them, as the Prince of Peace has taught me!), then you do not have any evidence, and don’t actually want any. Still, the offer is open.

  35. Dear Spencer, I am a graduate of the University of Toronto Department of Applied Science and Engineering. The STURP team of 1978 was loaded with scientists who examined the cloth intensely.
    You can examine the list of 33 names on the shroud.com website. Every single one of your “evidences” as you cal it is a complete joke – they have all been proven wrong – and you present them as “evidences”.
    My advice to you is find another vocation that does not require the use of your brain.
    You are a total joke, man.
    –

    1. Hi Tony,

      I don’t suppose Spencer will reply to your abuse, but I am a prominent proponent of the medieval origin of the Shroud, and will happily debate your seriously erroneous opinions, if you could be a bit more specific. As a scientist yourself, you will know that a simple appeal to authority (your 33 scientists) is an inadequate justification for any scientific opinion, so perhaps you would care to present a few of the “evidences” you think is a “complete joke” which has been “proven wrong” and I will demonstrate to you that they haven’t. Just one would do if you’re a busy man.

      Best wishes,
      Hugh

      1. Well said Hugh.

        It’s all very well internet commentators lauding STURP’s “scientists”.

        But science has three major divisions – physics, chemistry and biology. It wasn’t just physics that dominated STURP’s final report in 1981, but a supernatural version thereof, one that relegated chemistry and (arguably) biology to the shadows.

        Let’s not forget either that most of STURP’s lab investigation was confined to individual fibres, stripped off with Rogers’ adhesive tape, as distinct from intact linen. Thus the inappropriate focus on “image superficiality” at the fibre level, failing to seek and explore possible/likely chromophore presence BETWEEN or even within individual fibres. Hat’s off to STURP’s micro-photographer Mark Evans for flagging up curious features that STURP overlooked to mention (image discontinuities, striations, and, especially, that bizarre “half-tone” effect (see my earlier comment).

        Yes, there was science in the STURP researches and findings. But the final ’81 report was hugely blinkered to say the least, uninformed, indeed misinformed by its lack of chemistry especially.

        STURP’s Ray Rogers made a later attempt to implicate an external additive (crude starch) as crucial to image chromophore production, albeit in a pro-authenticity context. Shame it never arrived in time for that mystique-mongering 1981 STURP Summary.

  36. The Shroud of Turin is definitely NOT a hoax!!! First of all, you said that the Shroud was Carbon-14 tested in 1988. Well, later, Russian scientists in Moscow and scientists at the University of Arizona conducted tests that concluded that the 1988 Carbon-14 tests were drastically flawed by approximately 1200 years, which means that the Shroud was really from the first century. And also, where are your sources? Are we supposed to just believe everything you’re saying here??? And how do you explain the imprinting of the man on the cloth?

    My sources: Sunfellow, David. “The Shroud of Turin”. Accessed: January 28, 2021.

    1. Hi Cat!

      Good to hear from you, and well done for at least attempting some kind of rational comment, even if your sources are a) secondary and b) nearly thirty years old. Honestly, Shroud research has moved on a long way since then.

      For example, your “Russian scientists in Moscow” – only one, actually, called Dmitry Kouznetsov – has been comprehensively discredited as a fraud, not least by devoted believers in the authenticity of the Shroud. He quotes fellow scientists who don’t exist, laboratories that don’t exist, and experiments that, in spite of serious attempts by people who wish he was correct, cannot be replicated. It is not true that this results were confirmed by “scientists at the University of Arizona ,” quite the reverse; they tried, but were unable to find any justification for them at all. See three papers at academia.edu called “Kouznetsov Dossier” by Gian Marco Rinaldi, and many articles at Shroud.com (just put Kousnetsov into the Shroud.com search box.)

      The Shroud is quite a complex topic, and in a blog like this, detailed enumeration of every source is often both tedious and irrelevant, but if you have read any of the comments here, you will know that some serious Shroud scholars have contributed, among which I humbly count myself. If you would like sources for any particular statement, Ill be very happy to supply them.

      “Are we supposed to just believe everything you’re saying here???” Certainly not. If there is anything you doubt, just mention it in a comment and I’ll explain where Spencer has got his information from (and if he’s got anything wrong, of course).

      “And how do you explain the imprinting of the man on the cloth?” I can’t speak for Spencer here, but the Shroud images were probably printed off a bas relief statue used for the Quem Quaeritis ritual in a large church somewhere in Europe. The bas relief was smeared with a viscous printing ink similar to the oak-gall ink used for hundreds of years, but, without the oak-gall itself to provide blackness, the imprint is yellow. More prominent parts of the bas relief were imprinted with greater pressure than the less prominent, giving the effect of shading. Note that the acidic ink reacts with and corrodes the cloth, any particulate pigment is minor and incidental. John Heller and Alan Adler described its effect in their “A Chemical Investigation of the Shroud of Turin” (at Shroud.com), in experiment to make ‘mineral khaki,’ but did not appreciate the real meaning of their work.

      Sadly, of David Sunfellow’s seventeen bullet points, not a single one is entirely true, and nearly all are almost entirely false. It would be tedious to go through them all here (although I will if you are interested), but I will finish by saying that almost everything asserted by Robert Bucklin, famous pathologist from Los Angeles and firm believer in the authenticity of the Shroud is firmly denied by Fred Zugibe, famous pathologist from New York and firm believer in the authenticity of the Shroud. Clearly the pathological evidence is not as clear as either of the eminent pathologists thought.

  37. “And how do you explain the imprinting of the man on the cloth?” I can’t speak for Spencer here, but the Shroud images were probably printed off a bas relief statue used for the Quem Quaeritis ritual in a large church somewhere in Europe. The bas relief was smeared with a viscous printing ink similar to the oak-gall ink used for hundreds of years, but, without the oak-gall itself to provide blackness, the imprint is yellow. ”

    Looks like a damage-limitation exercise in your above response to Cat, if you’ll forgive my saying HF. 😉

    The first recorded history of the TS (Lirey display, paying pilgrims, take-away souvenir medallions) has been airbrushed out. In its place is a particular liturgical ceremony at a “European church” (unnamed!).

    The body image chromophore has also been dismissed in the above comment as a simplified ink print – ignoring the early reports from senior clerics who interpreted the body image as a highly subtle sweat imprint. (Would they have done that if it had looked like familiar plain old oak gall ink- albeit minus one of its key ingredients (leaving what, one might ask? Mere ferrous iron solution? Iron, whether ferrous or ferric, pre/post atmospheric oxidation, was ruled out decades ago!).

    Sorry Hugh. We agree on the medieval fabrication, but not much else, I regret to say.

    A clever, credible reproduction of J of A’s “fine linen” – featuring “blood first, then body image” was surely intended to deceive – as maintained by that Bishop Henri de Poitiers – followed then by his banning further public display for some 30 years no less!

    Your attempt to give the TS a ‘clean bill of health’ do not succeed where this particular individual is concerned.

    I say it was a blatant mid-14th century attempt to deceive – garnering huge wads of pilgrim-visitor cash in the process!

    1. Hi Colin,

      Good to hear from you, and good points made: I can’t pretend I know anything for certain. However, I have been researching the other relics of Christ recently for a conference in Portugal in November (if), and am increasingly sure the Shroud wasn’t made as a relic. All possible relics of Christ, including many duplicates, and including several burial cloths, had been in place for a hundred years by the time the Shroud appeared, and even quite obvious fakes, such as the rush wreath that constitutes the ‘crown of thorns,’ had been authenticated not by their appearance, but by their certification. The Shroud had no precedence and no certification, and was furthermore, by its appearance instantly disqualified in many people’s eyes since there is no mention of images on burial shrouds anywhere in the bible or Christian literature. Among Christian social media commenters, this is still a major reason for rejection.

      My current chromophore of choice, as it were, is iron acetate made by soaking iron filings in vinegar, which seems to have been a common enough process throughout the Middle Ages, and is currently used today as a wood stain. Without laboratory precision, this can result not only in the ‘chelated’ iron which Heller and Adler claim to have found all over the cloth, but which Morris found correlated with image intensity, at least across the face; but also in excess acid and excess iron, which I think contributed to the particles McCrone found scattered about, and further degradation of the cellulose. My chemistry isn’t up to being at all precise here, and yours will be a great deal better, but there does seem to be iron on the Shroud in some abundance, and a proper quantification of exactly where, exactly how much, and in exactly what proportions of each form, has yet to be achieved. My own experiments show that a faint yellowish stain (‘sweat’ if you like) can easily be made, which does not appear on the back, and which is not removed by washing.

      Having a punt in the dark days after the Battle of Poitiers, I think the Dean and Chapter of Lirey attempted to repurpose a Quem Quaeritis cloth from somewhere else as a relic, and that was the fraud that Bishop Henry denounced. This “first recorded appearance” certainly hasn’t been air-brushed out by me; it is simply irrelevant to the first unrecorded appearance, which was both some time earlier, and somewhere else, and for a different purpose. It is certainly, and sadly, true that the place is ‘unnamed.’ Places like Avignon, Paris, Rheims, Cologne, Mainz and Hereford (and a couple of other English cathedrals) would fit the bill. The thirteenth/fourteenth centuries saw the decline of liturgical drama in favour of secular versions such as mystery plays, so that Quem Quaeritis ‘shrouds’ were redundant, and given away, or dumped.

      1. Is there such a word as “de-controversialize”? Let’s not mince our words: that’s what we see above – multi-faceted “de-controversialization”!

        Sorry, HF. I can’t and don’t buy into any argument that attempts to decontroversialize the TS – especially given the centuries of head-scratching that it has prompted.

        The TS remains an enigma – even now, despite of (or especially on account of ) the mid-14th century radiocarbon dating.

        TS a product perhaps, if truth be told, of mission-pursuing, detail-obsessed nerdiness ? Almost certainly YES!

        ‘Twas the kind of thing that a somewhat isolated band of Lirey-based clerics (with excess time on their hands) might have dreamt up and then proceeded to engineer: a simulation of J of A’s linen bearing a conjoint blood/body image, acquired en route from cross-to-tomb.

        Chief aims: imprint (probably) off a real adult male body. (No, don’t paint – paintings are generally instantly recognizable as such. Instead, simulate a SWEAT/blood imprint.)

        But don’t use a liquid medium for simulating a sweat imprint ( end-result too smudgy): deploy a powder instead, then apply follow-up treatment, e.g. heat, one that elicits/ generates a second-stage – albeit just visible – exceedingly faint yellow or brownish imprint, consistent with SWEAT (first dried in situ , then aged and yellowed over centuries …

        Probably (well, maybe) give a final wash with soap and water for additional faintness, subtlety, plus removal of obvious clues as to means of (ghostly) imprint production.

        I could be wrong of course! But then I’d be in somewhat crowded company where figuring out the nature and origin of the TS is concerned…

        1. De-controversialisation, if such a word there be, is the goal of all scientific investigation. Only when there is no controversy about something does it become part of mainstream ‘science.’ Finding out, and demonstrating, the best representation of truth that he can come up with, in such a way that there is no longer any controversy about it, is every scientist’s dream. If I, or Joe Marino, or Bob Rucker, or Giulio Fanti or John Jackson, or even you, I dare say, could achieve a description of the Shroud that was truly uncontroversial, we’d all be happy men!

          I don’t disagree that it is possible the Shroud was the result of “mission-pursuing, detail-obsessed nerdiness,” or that the image was made in the way you suggest. What I do disagree with is that the ‘mission’ was to make a fake relic. Anybody setting out to produce a fake relic from the tenth (say) to the fourteenth centuries would have focused on provenance and certification, not on the details of the artefact itself. Just the things which are most conspicuously lacking throughout the first hundred years of the Shroud’s existence.

          1. New chapters in science generally start with an experimentalist announcing that one or other new observed effect is simply not explainable with existing theory.

            This new phase of “controversialization” then generates more experimentation, more theorizing, finally (but not always) resulting in a rewriting of existing theory.

            Yes, consider that latter phase to be “de-controversialization”, though for how long that too goes unchallenged is anyone’s guess.

            So no, sorry HF, I don’t accept that science regards its role as serving systematically to “de-controversialize”. Indeed, far from it.

            Science operates via successive cycles of controversialization and decontroversialization, the latter often partial and/or temporary.

            Science starts by discovering flaws/shortcomings in existing theory.

            To rephrase: the intrinsic role of science is to go upsetting theoretically-suspect sub-standard apple carts – not worrying unduly if generating immediate ripples of controversy.

  38. Well, I think we agree, really; just that I, in common with most scientists I think, like my science to be a little less confrontational. Certainly a scientist may wish to point the apple cart in a different direction, but if possible, he’d like to do it without upsetting it as it turns! I think you’re more of a Galileo, and I more of a Darwin, in our approach. They both had revolutionary things to say, but Galileo expressed them as a dialogue between Clever (him) and Stupid (the Pope!), while Darwin’s opening paragraphs are as unconfrontational as he could possibly have made them.

  39. “upset the apple cart”

    Internet definition:

    “Spoil a plan or disturb the status quo “.

    As you see, HF, it’s a fairly broad definition.

    Yes, we scientists admittedly “disturb the status quo“. Some might say it’s a routine inescapable aspect of what we have been trained to do for a living…

    “Spoiling plans” is, I grant you, a more extreme fringe activity. It’s something I personally try to avoid doing – rarely more than 85% of the time …

  40. Afterthought:

    Still pursuing the apple cart analogy. Yes, it would be OK if said apple cart were stacked with lovely looking fruit that one could admire and choose from, if having the time to spare.

    But it’s a different matter altogether if, when walking by, one or more stall holders begin to toss fruit in one’s direction, saying “Hey you, how dare you ignore me. Kindly stop where you are. Come and see my offerings (ideally through rose-tinted spectacles). Come across and purchase my wholesome goods”.

    Provoking instance for some 10 years ago – headlined as coming from a prestigious Italian governmental institute – ENEA – no less! (One I hesitate to say that provoked my very first posting re TS!).

    https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/scientists-say-turin-shroud-supernatural-6279512.html

    And – you gaze down at your feet – and what do you see? A mix of those tossed apples.

    Yes, one or two sound, but an awful lot that, to put it baldly, are either bruised and mouldy on the outside – but several visibly rotten to the core.

    Yes, some apple carts deserve to be upset – or- at any rate, substantially disturbed.

    Forget the science mission as being one of ‘de-controversialization’ HF. It has no place whatsoever in the MO of science!

    Science operates with a big wooden spoon – designed to unsettle those poorly-based fixed certainties, to stir things up…

  41. Comment No.99 to this 16 month-old posting (worth making maybe, given Spencer’s site in general has lacked a single new comment in the last 50 hours or so!):

    Beware of attempts to simplify the TS enigma as a mere battle between authentic biblical era (1st century) and medieval (14th century) – the latter in accordance with the radiocarbon dating.

    That may have been the status quo 50 years ago, but the arrival of STURP (Shroud of Turin Research Project) drastically altered it.

    How? Why?

    Answer (telegraphic – an attempt to keep this comment brief):

    50 years ago, it was a case of choosing between a whole body imprint acquired immediately post-crucifixion onto Joseph of Arimathea’s “fine linen”, delivered to the cross OR a medieval simulation thereof, notably via artistic effort with a brush and paint pigments OR an actual non-artistic imprint.

    All that changed with the arrival of STURP and its prime mover, physicist John Jackson PhD.

    First, he claimed that the image could not be a simple contact imprint. Why? Because, he said, his modelling thereof had indicated imaging across air gaps. In other words, it was better described as some kind of captured proto-photograph.

    That was the first step in shifting the image-capture from the First Day (Crucifixion, “Good Friday”) to – wait for it – the THIRD DAY (“Resurrection”), from physical imprinting to supernatural ‘selfie’ image capture.

    Supporting evidence? Rarely articulated in bold headlines. but it’s there for all to see if one reads carefully.

    First, there’s the ‘blood story’. Crucifixion generated blood we’re told could not have imprinted on Day 1 – it would have had dried and clotted, being unable to imprint onto J of A’s linen.

    STURP’s Alan Adler/John Heller supplied an alternative Post Day 1 scenario. The blood clots would later have retracted, exuding a blood-coloured serum – that being the cause of the so-called “bloodstains”. Post First Day!!!!!!

    Then there was the alleged ultra-thin nature of the body image, allegedly a chemical alteration of the linen carbohydrate (despite near total absence of back-up for the latter). The image was merely a microscopic film on linen fibres, notably the outermost PCW (primary cell walls). But the latter had been stripped away from linen threads by STURP’s sticky tape, leaving one to guess what had been left behind – -like pigment chromophore lodged BETWEEN fibres (nuff said on that score for now).

    Finally, for now, there was the 2011 Italy-based ENEA claim that the image chromophore (despite being chemically unidentified) could be modelled by irradiating linen with ultraviolet pulses from an excimer laser. Ipso facto, it had more in common with a selfie photograph than with a physical imprint.

    Put all those points together (and a few more besides) and you have image capture moved from First to Third Day, from deposition into J of A’s linen for cross-to-tomb transport, to Resurrectional selfie-formation by a final flash of supernatural radiation.

    STURP has been held up by some as a model of scientific enterprise.

    I say it was pseudo-science from start to finish. Why? Because STURP spent scarcely any time exploring image-capture via contact imprinting. STURP leaders’ sight was fixed on Third Day Resurrectional image capture from the word go, taking inexcusable shortcuts to suggest that particular message, i.e. not just pro-authenticity, but pro-miraculous image capture.

    I say it’s time STURP was seen, nay denounced for what is was and still is – a pseudo-science – based dissemination of religion-promoting myth as distinct from hard science.

    Time I say for STURP Mark 2!

  42. Spencer, I am not convinced either way whether or not the shroud is fake or authentic, but a good question, have skillful artists or artisans been able to duplicate the shroud using 14th century methods? That would settle the question, as least in my mind.

    1. Hi Anthony,
      If anybody could conclusively duplicate the Shroud, using 14th century or natural methods, it might well settle the question, in the absence of which, the miraculists dance on their soapboxes singing “If it hasn’t been done, it can’t be done.”
      The trouble is that the Shroud has been insufficiently characterised, and those experts who have characterised it have come to conflicting conclusions. Imagine trying to bake a replica of a cake, when the only three people who have studied it say different things – “It’s chocolate!” It’s a sponge” “It’s a fruit cake!”
      Not only that, but we really don’t know how well the Shroud today resembles the Shroud when it was first made. Has the paint been washed away? Has the image developed over time? Alas, although there is a lot of nonsense written about the Shroud being the most studied object of all time, the truth is that it has scarcely been studied at all.

      1. Nice try, Hugh. The “paint” has not been washed away.

        “It’s chocolate!” It’s a sponge” “It’s a fruit cake!” LOL Very funny.

        Your obsession is showing. I guess it really does ruin your day that no explanation exists for how the image was created.

        1. Hi Matt,

          Nice to hear from you. How do you know that “the ‘paint’ has not been washed away”? Or, more generally, that the Shroud image looks now the same as it always has done? It would certainly help to narrow down our options if we knew. The trouble is that early descriptions of it suggest that it was clearer, brighter and redder than it is now. Should they be ignored, do you think?

          I can’t say that any of my days are ruined by my not being able to duplicate the process, but I’m happy to admit that I will die more content when we know how to!

  43. I tend more to believe the shroud is a fake but I am not absolutely sure, the image on the shroud looks to my untrained eye more like a photograph than a medieval painting. I have never been to Turin to see the shroud. As a Christian it has no effect on my faith either way but it could be a powerful evangelistic tool if it was proved to be genuine (unlikely).

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