The Pantocrator with the Virgin, Angels, and Saints
Apse mosaic, late 12th C, royal church of Monreale, Sicily

The Shroud: Physical Evidence

The Vignon Markings

Researcher Paul Vignon, noticed "on the forehead between the eyebrows of this work a starkly geometrical |_| shape....When he turned to the equivalent point the Shroud face, there was the same feature, equally as geometric, and equally as unnatural because it appeared to have noting to do with the image itself....Other Byzantine Christ portraits were found to exhibit he same marking. The eleventh-century Daphni Pantocrator, the tenth-century Sant'Angelo in Formis fresco, the tenth-century Hagia Sophia marthex mosaic, and an eleventh-century portable mosaic from Berlin are typical of many Byzantine works featuring the same peculiar-shaped brow, general more stylized, but still suggestive of the same derivation."

Twenty oddities in all in all were identified "originating from some accidental imperfection in the Shroud image or weave, and repeated time and again in paintings, frescoes, and mosaic of the Byzantine period, even though artistically they made no sense."
     - Ian Wilson, The Shroud of Turin - The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ? (1978)

"Artists have copied certain characteristic details, technically known as Vignon markings, after the scientist who analyzed fifteen of them, such as a transverse steak across the forehead of the Shroud image, a V-shape at the bridge of the nose, two curling stands of hair in the middle of the forehead, a hairless area between the lower lip and the beard, and so forth. In some of the earliest copies...as many as thirteen of the fifteen details are discernible."
     - Noel Currer-Briggs, The Shroud and the Grail - A Modern Quest for the True Grail (1987)

"Typically, the pictures (like the Shroud) show an absence of ears, neck, and shoulders. Two blood rivulets on the forehead are incorporated as curls. A cloth wrinkle across the middle of the forehead is included as if it were a scar. A bruised left eyebrow is shown with twice the vertical dimension as the right eyebrow." The artists "also made the eyes far too large, not realizing that the lids are closed - that their pattern was in fact a death mask."
     - Frank C. Tribbe, Portrait of Jesus? (1983)

"...The sources of the eighth to the tenth centuries speak of the 'blood-sweat' of Jesus, visible on the Edessa Portrait, so evidently a careful observer could clearly see that blood was included in the cloth picture. but even if the copyist had erred and taken the blood mark for a look of hair, the short strands leading form the top of the head of the Christ portraits would be impermissible, and inexplicable extras. The picture ought rather to show a long, conspicuous lock on the left of the forehead, running to the eyebrow, but I have not come across a single image of Jesus of this kind."
"The most likely solution is that an exact copy was commissioned, but what I would like to term 'theologically edited'."
     - Holger Kersten & Elmar R. Gruber, The Jesus Conspiracy - The Turin Shroud & The Truth About the Resurrection (1992)

The bloodied marks of the Passion would not be in accord with the Byzantine ideal of the Pantrocrator - the radiant, triumphant God.

"Heaven is my throne, and earth is my footstool...saith the Lord."
     - Isaiah 66:1

Vignon markings are at best a questional means of comparison. Many features identified by Vignon would have been virtually indistinguishable before the advent of photographic fine analysis.

In addition there are a number of "portraits which display a high degree of similarity [with the Shroud] even though they do not represent Jesus. There are some quite astonishing examples here, such as the ceramic icon of St. Theodore (ninth or tenth century) at Preslav in Bulgaria; the apostle Paul on a manuscript of the homilies of St John Chrysostom (end of the ninth century) in the National Library at Athens; and John the Baptist on the mosaic on the church of Hosius-Luke in Central Greece (c. 1000)."
"The unusually long nose...is indeed a striking characteristic. Everyone who sees the Shroud for the first time immediately notices it. It is in a sense the distinguishing physiognomic feature par excellence. On post-Justinian Jesus portraits it appears correspondingly long and narrow, often unusually so. The prominent nose served the Byzantine iconographers as a measure for building up the facial proportions for Jesus: the head was framed from two circles, one and two nose-lengths in radius....The center of the composition was also the center of the circles: the base of the nose between the eyes. This is thought to be the reason why the base of the nose was emphasized n a special manner in Byzantine art (with points, circles V-shapes, triangles etc.) This manner of construction, with the emphasis on the base of the nose, was justified because the point was understood to be the center of the head, the seat of wisdom."
     - Holger Kersten & Elmar R. Gruber, The Jesus Conspiracy - The Turin Shroud & The Truth About the Resurrection (1992)

Physical Analysis of the Shroud

(1) Carbon Dating

In 1988, small samples of cloth from the Turin Shroud were subjected to Carbon-14 testing at three independent laboratories.

"...All three laboratories - the University of Arizona, the Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, and the Oxford University Research Laboratory for Archaeology quite independently placed the age of the linen in the same period of medieval history, namely between AD 1000 and AD 1500 at the outside. The test allowed for a margin of error on only 100 years either way, and it was claimed that it was 95 percent certain that the cloth was from between 1260 and 1390."
     - Noek Curer-Briggs, Shroud Mafia - The Creation of a Relic

"After months examining microscopic samples, the team [Leoncio A. Garza-Valdes, MD, adjunct professor of microbiology, and Stephen J. Mattingly, PhD, professor of microbiology] concluded in January [1996] that the Shroud of Turin is centuries older than its carbon date. Dr. Garza said the shroud's fibers are coated with bacteria and fungi that have grown for centuries. Carbon dating, he said, had sampled the contaminants as well as the fibers' cellulose."
"In May 1993, Dr. Garza traveled to Turin, and examined a shroud sample with the approval of Catholic authorities. 'As soon as I looked at a segment in the microscope, I knew it was heavily contaminated,' Dr. Garza said. 'I knew that what had been radiocarbon dated was a mixture of linen and the bacteria and fungi and bioplastic coating that had grown on the fibers for centuries. We had not dated the linen itself.'"
     - Jim Barrett, "Microbiology meets archaeology in a renewed quest for answers" (1996)

"Predictably, the radiocarbon-dating crowd is dubious about Garza-Valdes' claims regarding the bioplastic film. Although he and Mattingly have reported on the topic itself, they have never published a peer-reviewed paper on their shroud work. 'The only people who have ever seen these bacteria are Drs. Mattingly and Garza-Valdes,' says Arizona's Timothy Jull. 'In my opinion, our sample of the shroud was very clean, and there was no evidence of any coating.' Even if the hypothetical varnish existed, Jull adds, the amount necessary to throw off the dating by 1,300 years would have been visible to the naked eye. Snipes U.C. Riverside's Taylor: 'At the present time, the 'bioplastic theory' has many of the characteristics of cold fusion,' the here-one-day-ridiculed-the-next physics fiasco of 1989."
     - Time Magazine, April 20, 1998 Vol. 151 No. 15

Other experts have argued that fire damage may have contaminated the Carbon-14 results. Some, such as Picknett and Prince (Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled), have criticized these results as a deliberately planned deception.

(2) Distinctive Characteristics

"Interestingly the size of the Turin cloth matches precisely the unit of measurement which was used in Palestine at the time of Jesus, the philetaric cubit. This means the cloth which Joseph ordered was of a standard size. The philetaric cubit was about 53 cm. If one starts with the assumption that the cloth has stretched a little in the course of the centuries, the size is exactly 2 cubits wide by 8 cubits long."
     - Holger Kersten & Elmar R. Gruber, The Jesus Conspiracy - The Turin Shroud & The Truth About the Resurrection (1992)

French aristocrat Antoine de Lalaing "related to an exposition of the Shroud he observed at Bourg-en-Bresse on the Good Friday of the year 1503. After describing the image on the Shroud 'stained with the most precious blood of Jesus, our Savior', Lalaing went on to say that the Shroud had been

'Boiled in oil, tried [boute] by fire and steamed many times, without either effacing or altering the said imprint and figure.'"

Characteristics of the Shroud image include:

· "CLEAR IMAGE. The body image is so well resolved that even features as detailed as the lips are discernible. This remarkable property revealed by photography is way beyond all attempts at artistic imitation or laboratory reconstitution.
· SUPERFICIAL IMAGE. The body image penetrates the cloth no more than a few fibrils and is limited to the crowns of the threads. The body image fibrils are individually colored but their coloring does not follow the bends or crevices connected with the intersecting threads of the weave. Furthermore, the fibrils are not cemented and there is no additional pigment to account for the macroscopic image color.
· THREE DIMENSIONAL IMAGE. The intensity of the frontal body image correlates overall with expected separation distances between an assumed body and the enveloping cloth. This correlation is independent of implied body surface composition such as the skin, hair, etc.
· ABSENCE OF SIDE IMAGES. There are no side images to be seen surrounding the front and back body images, not even in the region the two heads.
· OXIDATION. The chemical formation of the body image is due to a change in the cellulose of the cloth, in particular a conjugated carbonyl structure associated with dehydration.
· BLOOD. The red image stains are formed of blood and/or blood derivatives.
· VERTICAL ALIGNMENT OF THE IMAGE. The Shroud is draped naturally over a body lying horizontally, but the frontal body image aligns vertically over corresponding features on that body.
· WEIGHTLESSNESS. Maximum intensities of the front and back images are practically equal."
     - Bruno Bonnet-Eymard, "Physics and Chemistry of A Glorious Body and of A Glorious Blood"

"The arms would be too long if the Shroud Man would be flatly reclining. The arms, however are entirely parallel with the surface of the Shroud and we see them in linear full length. The torso, the thighs, the lower legs on the other hand we see shortened by geometric perspective and not in full length. They stand at an angle to the surface. "
     - Isabel Piczek, "Is the Shroud of Turin a Painting?"

Height calculations of the figure on the Shroud vary greatly due to the difficulty of taking into account factors such as the foreshortening of the legs, the extended position of the feet, and any possible stretching in the cloth. The most common estimate is ft 11 in. Proportionately, however, the head on the Shroud is 1/9 of the body instead of the average 1/8. Using this as a basis for estimation of height, Picknett and Prince concluded:

"Our calculations put the height of the man on the Shroud - at the front - at 203cm...Put in imperial measurements we calculate that the front image is 6ft 8in and the back 6ft 10in."
     - Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)

If Jesus was treated according to Jewish burial practices, "signs of the bandages around the hands, feed and head ought to appear on the Turin Shroud.
"They do not. If the shroud had been tied down there would be clear crease marks, which there are not. It did not fall closely over the sides of the body, and this agrees with the temporary nature of Joseph's and Nicodemus' attentions, for they expected the final burial to be make after the Passover. Then the body would have been more securely wrapped."
     - Alan Millard, Discoveries From the Time of Jesus

(2) The Case For the Shroud as a Painting

"Viewed microscopically, the shroud image is seen to be composed of yellowed fibers, sparsely coated with iron oxide particles. This oxide, according to a distinguished microanalyst [Walter McCrone], has properties identical with an artists' pigment generally known as red ochre or Venetian Red. He concluded the yellow staining was due to a tempera medium that had yellowed with age, but other tests show that a more likely explanation is cellulose degradation."
     -Joe Nickell, Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (1987)

"Dr. McCrone determined this by polarized light microscopy in 1979. This included careful inspection of thousands of linen fibers from 32 different areas (Shroud and sample points), characterization of the only colored image-forming particles by color, refractive indices, polarized light microscopy, size, shape, and microchemical tests for iron, mercury, and body fluids. The paint pigments were dispersed in a collagen tempera (produced in medieval times, perhaps, from parchment). It is chemically distinctly different in composition from blood but readily detected and identified microscopically by microchemical staining reactions. Forensic tests for blood were uniformly negative on fibers from the blood-image tapes.
"There is no blood in any image area, only red ochre and vermilion in a collagen tempera medium. The red ochre is present on 20 of both body- and blood-image tapes; the vermilion only on 11 blood-image tapes. Both pigments are absent on the 12 non-image tape fibers."

"The Electron Optics Group at McCrone Associates (John Gavrilovic, Anna Teetsov, Mark Andersen, Ralph Hinsch, Howard Humecki, Betty Majewski, and Deborah Piper) in 1980 used electron and x-ray diffraction and found red ochre (iron oxide, hematite) and vermilion (mercuric sulfide); their electron microprobe analyzer found iron, mercury, and sulfur on a dozen of the blood-image area samples. The results fully confirmed Dr. McCrone's results and further proved the image was painted twice-once with red ochre, followed by vermilion to enhance the blood-image areas."
     - "Research at McCrone Research Institute"

(3) The Case Against the Shroud as a Painting

"X-ray fluorescence scans during the 1978 tests had revealed traces of iron, but there was no detectable difference in its density between the image and the non-image areas - although there was more in the bloodstains."
     - Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)

"Ian Wilson in The Mysterious Shroud , New York: Doubleday, 1986, sums up (p. 91) the work done by Drs. John Heller and Allan Adler, reported in Heller's 1984 book and several Journals including the Canadian Journal of Forensic Science, showing that the iron oxide in the form it appears is clearly ONLY from the process of 'retting' the flax to make the linen. Moreover, Wilson also described in full detail the process by which the two along with Dr. Joseph Gall, showed the bood was human."
     - Tom Simms (CrossTalk)

Dr. John Heller and Doctor Alan Adler "argue that the Shroud blood images are determinable as genuine blood by no less than twelve independent indications: their forensic appearance. their microscopic appearance, the microspectrophotometry, reflection spectrometry, the presence of bile pigments, the presence of protein, the presence of albumin, positive protease tests, positive hemochromogen tests, positive cyanmethemoglobin tests, chemical generation of characteristic phorphyrin fluorescence, and...X-ray fluorescence detection of slightly higher levels of iron in blood image areas."
     - Ian Wilson, The Mysterious Shroud (1986)

"While it is possible that there are traces of pigment on the shroud, says historian Wilson, they are most likely flakes from copies of the image that were pressed onto the shroud in an attempt to rub off some of its sanctity."
     - Time Magazine, April 20, 1998 Vol. 151 No. 15

"...Adler, a recognized expert on certain molecules found in blood, notes emphatically of the crimson stains and rivulets that ornament the shroud, 'The blood is blood, and it came from a man who died a traumatic death.' In fact, he says, both chemical analyses and a telltale yellow-green fluorescence under ultraviolet light indicate the presence of remains of a slightly different substance: the fluid exuded from blood clots. That substance and its invisible-to-the-naked-eye manifestation, he says, were unknown until the 20th century, so if a medieval artist did create the image, 'he must have been a genius.'"
     - Time Magazine, April 20, 1998 Vol. 151 No. 15

3"x3" "test pieces were painted with art historic techniques used in early Christian, Byzantine and medieval times, also some renaissance and baroque techniques. The paints used were a yellow oxide, a calcined iron oxide, and vermilion. The painted samples, after the paints dried well on them, were touched to clean samples and these clean samples were photomicrographed....The test even proved that they were the early copies painted in Byzantine and medieval times, which deposited most of the paint particles."
     - Isabel Piczek, "Is the Shroud of Turin a Painting?"

"...There are good logical reasons against the Shroud being a painting. For example, the 1532 fire would have made the paint crack and the subsequent dousing it received would have caused water damage that could be compared to that of other paintings. History has shown that the image, unlike any known painting, is not changed by either fire or water."
     - Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)

"The aqueous mediums used before the thermoplastic mediums were introduced in the high renaissance, did not have the flexibility to apply them directly to unstretched canvas without a gesso ground. Medieval paintings were carefully prepared with a gesso ground and even then could not be folded or rolled without serious damage. We neither see a gesso ground underneath the Shroud image nor the typical damages which folding and rolling caused to aqueous paints."
     - Isabel Piczek, "Is the Shroud of Turin a Painting?"

"Another curious feature of the image is the total lack of outline; the legs on the frontal image and the greater part of the dorsal are indefinite and fade away in a blur, quite unlike a painting. The same blurred effect applies also to the apparent blood and sweat stains."
     - Noek Curer-Briggs, Shroud Mafia - The Creation of a Relic

"...Definite perspective and foreshortening exists both, on the frontal and the dorsal image, which seems to respect the laws of geometrical optics, the rules of image forming properties ordinarily relying on light.
Foreshortening, however, was not understood by artists until the 15th century. It was introduced through the work of Piero della Francesca (1418-1492) and Albrecht Durer (1471-1528)....In 1356, at the time of the first recorded exhibition of this object, artists did not have any knowledge of anatomical foreshortening, let alone the paradox of a focusless foreshortening. "
     - Isabel Piczek, "Is the Shroud of Turin a Painting?"

(4) The Bloodstains

"Victor V. Tryon, PhD, assistant professor in microbiology and director of the university's Center for Advanced DNA Technologies, examined the DNA of one so-called 'blood glob' from two separate microscopic shroud samples. He reported isolating signals from three different human genes by employing polymerase chain reaction, which can detect pieces of double-stranded DNA."
     - Jim Barrett, "Microbiology meets archaeology in a renewed quest for answers" (1996)

The DNA was reportedly found in a highly degraded state, but contained genes from a human male. These results have been questioned. Cardinal Giovanni Saldarini of Turin stated on Italian television that "there is no certainty that the material belongs to the shroud so that the Holy See and the custodian declare that they cannot recognize the results of the claimed experiments." Experts state that at least twelve samples of "blood" from different parts of the shroud would have to be analyzed to rule out contamination from centuries of contact from worshippers.

Pierluigi Baima Bollone, Professor of Forensic Medicine at Turin University [The Shroud: The Proof (Sindone: La Prova), has reported that the stains were human blood from blood group AB.

Professor Bollone, who heads the International Centre of Sindonology in Turin, "said it was striking that there was no image beneath the blood stains, 'from which we can deduce that the image was formed after the bleeding occurred'. This would bolster the theory that the man bled because he was 'subjected to a series of traumas which caused his death'. In the case of Jesus, flagellation was followed by the Crucifixion."
     - Richard Owen, The Times, April 11, 1998

A herring-bone linen "placed on fresh blood clots within thirty minutes of the vein being punctured. A stain can be obtained but of no precise shape and it will easily flake when the cloth is handled. Beyond this lapse of time, no impression can be made not even in a stream saturated humid atmosphere."
     - Doctor Pierre Merat, "The Blood Stains Bear Witness" (1991)

"The bloodstains are just too perfect. Yes, they behave exactly as one would expect, given the nature of the wounds, but what state would the blood have been in when the image was formed? If the blood had congealed, then it could hardly have been somehow transferred to the cloth. On the other hand, if it was liquid, it would have soaked into the cloth and run along the fibers And it certainly would not be so sharply defined in the way that has impressed - and puzzled - the forensic scientists."
     - Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)

According to Dr. Gilbert Lavoie "the Shroud bloodstains make good sense once they are considered impressions from blood that has clotted for a certain period of time....At least an hour's nondisturbance is needed for the most Shroud-like results. And this very same process also provided Adler with the key to the Shroud blood images' unusual reddish color. In Lavoie's reconstruction, the red cells, the very elements familiarly known to flake off, do not transfer to the cloth. It is the oozed serum which transfers to the cloth, its chief constituents the brownish methemoglobin and albumin, with which the greatly increased proportion of the red-dish pigment bilirubin would have formed a natural bond."
     - Ian Wilson, The Mysterious Shroud (1986)

An experiment in which the doctor was wrapped "showed me that it is strictly impossible for body images to have been transferred onto the cloth by contact. The images I obtained with reagents that change color on contact with skin are relatively possible to read and interpret along the body`s axis line, that is to say, the forehead, nose and mouth. Outside this median line, such distortions appear that make it absolutely impossible to recognize the features of the face or even the main lines."
The blood stain from the right elbow lies outside the impression of the body image which "stops at the contour of the forearm, of the elbow and the lower part of the arm."
"These two experiments of wrapping the elbow and the face prove that the impression of the bloodstains was made on a cloth enveloping a body, whilst the impression of the body silhouette was made at another time, on this same cloth 'stretched out flat', transferring the bloodstains outside their real position: on the hair, away from the face strictly speaking, and at the elbow away from the body image."

"If we consider once more the Shroud as a whole, we notice the extreme precision of all the 'signs' to be observed. The outline of the silhouette has the definition of an excellent photograph on fine grained paper. The form of the blood stains enables us to measure angles and to determine relationships with the bone structure. Over the whole body, we can count the scourge marks..."
     - Doctor Pierre Merat, "The Blood Stains Bear Witness" (1991)

(5) An Image of the Passion

"In analyzing the Shroud and Shroud pictures through microscopes, scientists have counted at least 120 blows with the two-tailed lashes. Each tail had a barbell-shaped metal flagrum (tip) that fell on the Man of the Shroud; scientists have found there were more than 220 flagrum bruises that broke the skin. Jewish law permitted flogging only to a maximum of forty lashes, and the Pharisees in their piety reduced that number to thirty-nine. Roman law and practice knew no limitation in this respect, and so we can be sure it was a Roman scourging inflicted on a non-Roman; it was against the law to scourge a Roman citizen."
     - Frank C. Tribbe, Portrait of Jesus? (1983)

The flagellants appeared at the height of the Black Death that carried away a third of the population of Europe. Their scourging differed little from the Roman flagrum.

"They were men who did public penance and scourged themselves with whips of hard knotted leather with little iron spikes. some make themselves bleed very badly between the shoulder blades, and some foolish women had cloths ready to catch the blood and smear it on their eyes, saying it was miraculous blood."
     - Jean Froissart, Chronicles

"American pathologist Robert Bucklin examined the Shroud while in Turin and concluded that abrasions over both shoulder blades could have been made by carrying a heavy object, such as the horizontal bar of a cross; he estimates that the object might have weighed 80 to 100 pounds."
     - Frank C. Tribbe, Portrait of Jesus? (1983)

"Whereas a body bruised in this way from head to foot should be smeared with illegible traces of blood, we find on the Shroud a word for word description of the Passion of Jesus Christ according to the four Evangelists."
     - Doctor Pierre Merat, "The Blood Stains Bear Witness" (1991)

"...There is not the slightest sign on the Shroud of smearing of any of the bloodstains - each bloodstain is precise and unsmeared. Now, in taking Jesus' body down from the cross, and extracting the spikes, the soldiers certainly would have taken no special care or precautions in handling the body. The spear-thrust must have resulted in one or more quarts of blood flowing down the side of the abdomen, thigh, calf and foot. The body must have been so bloody from head to foot that it would be very difficult to handle it at all. Regardless of what preparations Joseph and Nicodemus had made, doubtless it would have been necessary for them to carry the body (weighing approximately 170 pounds, scientists have estimated) in their arms for fifty to a hundred yards, over possibly rough and rocky ground. At most, they might have had a temporary shroud to cover the naked body at the cross, to soak up some blood, and make the carrying a bit easier."
"The actions of Joseph and Nicodemus of washing the body may have caused a pool of blood to collect at Jesus' side under the spear wound and at the feet. Those are the only bloodstains that show on the Shroud of Turin that might have been formed after he was taken from the cross. No other blood flows on the Shroud run toward the sides of the body, as if he were lying on his back as the blood flowed. Instead, all of he other blood flows run approximately from head to foot, as gravity would take the blood as he hung on the cross..."
     - Frank C. Tribbe, Portrait of Jesus? (1983)

"However, as recently pointed out by London University Jewish scholar Victory Tunkel, if a first-century Jew died a bloody death, such as from crucifixion, the body would quite specifically not have been washed, in order to keep the life-blood with the body in preparation for the anticipated physical resurrection - striking evidence in favor of the Shroud's authentic Jewishness."
     - Ian Wilson, Jesus, The Evidence (1984)

Dr.Allan Mills, Senior Lecturer in the Dept of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leicester has note that singlet oxygen is released by the cells of a traumatised plant. This gas creates brownish images observed of the Volckringer effect botanical specimens and could have been responsible for the image on the Shroud.

"Although images of this nature associated with botanical specimens pressed on paper are not uncommon, that on the shroud of Turin appears to be unique because of the need for a highly unlikely combination of circumstances that are not individually demanding, namely: (1) a long shroud woven from fine linen (2) its hurried draping over the recently deceased (unwashed?) body of a tortured man in a sealed, thermally stable place (3) removal after some 30 hours; (4) storage in a dry, dark place for decades or centuries."
     - Dr.Allan Mills, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews

Reproducing the Results

Kersten and Gruber theorize that Jesus was still alive when he was taken down from the cross. In the sepulcher he was wrapped in a sweat cloth packed with myrrh and aloe to resuscitate him.

"We can be grateful that Joseph of Arimathea and his helpers did not wash the body of Jesus for medical reasons, because this allowed the traces of coagulated blood to be imprinted on the cloth. Two different types of bleeding can be clearly distinguished. Firstly there is the dried blood which came from the whipping, the crowning with thorns, the side wound and from the nails fixing the body to the Cross. Secondly there is the fresh blood which flowed when Jesus was already lying horizontally in the cloth. The fabric quickly became saturated with the resinous aloe, and was thoroughly impregnated with it. This meant that most of the blood was not absorbed into the cloth, but just spread out over the surface. This would explain the surprising fact, observed by modern researchers, that most of the blood marks cannot be seen on the reverse side even though the material is quite thin. The careful treatment with the herbal solution also had the effect of resoftening the coagulated areas of blood, so that they too were transferred on to the cloth."
     - Holger Kersten & Elmar R. Gruber, The Jesus Conspiracy - The Turin Shroud & The Truth About the Resurrection (1992)

The blood surrounds and serum surrounds from the large mark on the forehead, the flow from the nail wounds on the hands and feet, the steamlets from the cut in the side and the conspicous trace running transversely across the back could only have been formed by the activity of fibrin present in fresh blood.

According to Prof Bronte:
"To my mind the pattern which is actually found suggests that the person concerned was wrapped in the cloth only at the entombment, and this most probably by first laying the body flat on the cloth and then placing the other half of the cloth over the body. I cannot see how a passive emission of larger quantities of blood could happened during this operation of laying out the body."
     - Holger Kersten & Elmar R. Gruber, The Jesus Conspiracy - The Turin Shroud & The Truth About the Resurrection (1992)

Kersten and Gruber's attempts to produce a shroud-like image by wrapping a body in an untreated, hand-worked linen fabric coated with an aloe and myrrh tincture were unsatisfactory. The contours were reproduced clearly but were distorted with no gradated shading as in the Shroud picture. (The head was not wrapped in this experiment.) Holger Kersten, the subject, was able to remain lying in a sweat without moving for only thirty-five minutes, however, before the trapped heat began to induce circulatory collapse. The authors suggest the unconscious Jesus lay in the Shroud for a much longer period of time and evaporation played a crucial role. It must be pointed out at this point that according to the Gospels, Jesus had been able to survive considerable physical hardship, having fasted forty days (which, in the Middle East meant "a long time").

"One can assume that some time elapsed before the herbal mixture was applied, covering the entire body of Jesus, including the head...The tincture had probably already dried on the body when Jesus was wrapped in the sheet. Due to the febrile process the tincture was gradually dampened again in the sweat. During evaporation, molecules of the herbal mixture may thus have been transported on to the cloth with the perspiration....This would be a suitable explanation for the kind of image on the Turin cloth, because fluid vapors tend to rise vertically during evaporation. Thus we would expect a direct projection for the picture rather than a distorted image."
"The picture on the Turin cloth is only visible at places where it was directly in contact with the surface of the body or only millimeters from the skin. Where the fabric was further off, no coloration can be see; for example none of the whip marks were transferred. The process we have suggested here also explains why the picture is not sharply outlined, why the borders slowly merge with the color of the surrounding cloth."
     - Holger Kersten & Elmar R. Gruber, The Jesus Conspiracy - The Turin Shroud & The Truth About the Resurrection (1992)

J. H. Heller (The Report On The Shroud of Turin, Boston: Houghton Miflin, 1984., pp. 199-200) attributes the discoloration of the cloth to contact with a hot, sweaty human.
"I have seen reports from Italy of a creating of an image using a hot, sweaty tennis player. I've seen no conmfirmation of this, but I know of attempts with undersized dummies that have yielded results encouraging enough to suggest full sized tries."
     - Tom Simms (CrossTalk)

"Throwing microbes into the mix would actually ease the production of an image. Says microbiologist Mattingly: 'Imagine you've just come back from jogging and you're all sweaty, and you gently press a towel against your face. Now instead of throwing it into a corner, you set it carefully aside for several months. When you wiped your face, you transferred to the towel sweat, detritus and microbes that will grow and eventually form the image of a face.'"
     - Time Magazine, April 20, 1998 Vol. 151 No. 15

(2) Daubing or Burning the Image

"The image's most likely origin is an oxidation process akin to the natural aging of linen, but somehow accelerated in the fibers composing the 'picture.' Some have suggested that an enterprising artist could have created the image of a crucified man by daubing an acidic liquid (everything from sweat to lemon juice to sulfuric acid) on the cloth in the appropriate places and then exposing the material to heat. To attain a three-dimensional look, several investigators have suggested that a wet cloth was put over a bas-relief of a man and then burnished with iron oxides."
     - Time Magazine, April 20, 1998 Vol. 151 No. 15

While "the image in the shroud is strikingly 3-dimensional...one can only produce such an impression in a 2D medium like cloth by NOT molding the cloth to the face. Cloth that has been contoured to a nose, when laid flat, will invariably yield a distorted impression of a nose that is much broader than it appears from a frontal view. As a result the image of the person's face in the cloth looks like the image taken with a fish-eye camera or in a fun-house mirror. The nose would appear to spread from one side of the face to the other. Moreover, if the cloth actually covered the front and side of the face then the resultant image would be distorted to appear much wider than the face actually is, as in the so-called Agammemnon mask or in a Picasso cubist painting that presents both the front and side view of a person's face simultanteously on the canvas. Since this is not the case with the image in the shroud, I am led to conclude that that facial image was NOT formed by the cloth coming in direct contact with a 3 dimensional human face.
Linen is a relatively course cloth and this particular piece of linen does not appear to be of the finest grade that the queen would have on her table. The weave is plainly visible in any close-up view of the face...Such cloth does not mold exactly to human features even if saturated in liquid. (In making life masks one uses strips of the finest gauze to insure capturing every contour of the face). A linen cloth covering the face would normally come in direct contact with the brow, the ridge of the nose, the cheek bones, the chin, perhaps the tip (but not the sides) of the lower lip and not much else. In a male with mustache and beard the lips would probably not come into contact with the cloth at all." On the Shroud, however is" a beautifully detailed image of a human mouth in 2D frontal view, with all the shading needed to give the impression of a mouth in 3D. I see delicately shaded closed eyelids where I would expect to find blanks like empty skull sockets. I see a touchingly serene facial impression, a handsome tragic face (which Richard Shand has restored to life through the magic of computer reconstruction), not the sketchy, imperfect, distorted image a person who was just died in agony. I see a 3D human image that has been projected into a flat piece of cloth, rather than physical evidence of cloth that has been laid across a human corpse. In short I see an image that was design for pious meditation rather than a realistic impression of the face of one who has just been taken from a cross."
     - Mahlon Smith (CrossTalk)

"I employed an available, small, portrait bas-relief, to which I carefully molded wet cloth and allowed it to dry. Then, using a dauber, I rubbed on powered pigment. (Originally I used a mixture of myrrh and aloes; I have since switched to a mineral pigment consistent with the findings of the recent miroscopic tests on the shoud...)."
"Such a rubbing technique automatically produces monochromatic negative images, and virtually guarantees that the photo-reversal positive will be of excellent quality. It possesses the requisite 'inherent edge-blurring properties' and can give visually proper tonal gradations. Additionally, it yields images that are superficial (remain on the topmost fibers), highly resolved, and fire-stable. The images are - like those of the shroud - relatively undistorted, are 'directionless' (that is, without brush marks), and characterized by 'blank spaces' surrounding the forms. There is no cementing of the fibers, and everywhere the threads show clearly through the light-toned stain."
     -Joe Nickell, Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (1987)

"It must be said that Nickell's results, like those produced by Walter Sanford under McCrone's direction - although more recognizable in negative - are nowhere near as impressive as the Shroud, even though both attempts were produced by modern artists deliberately trying to create a negative image. Although they were much more familiar with negatives than any medieval artist would have been, the hypothetical early hoaxer managed to outdo them."
     - Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)

"Chemist Alan Adler...doubts that the oxidation was humanly induced. For one thing, the image is only one fiber deep. 'If you lift a crossing fiber, you won't find any discoloration below,' he says. The application of acids would not achieve such delicacy. Similarly, the fiber-by-microscopic-fiber gradations, even within a single thread, that make up the figure's exquisite 'shading' would defy a human hand, were it engaged in either the application of acid or a rubbing process."
     - Time Magazine, April 20, 1998 Vol. 151 No. 15

A better result, as demonstrated by Richard Besett, can be produced by making a "dust drawing" - blowing powdered aloe to create a portrait. Gradations in the thickness of the powder create a striking 3D photo-negative effect.

"Although microscopic examination of the Shroud shows that the image does not consist of powdered pigments, any of a number of cellulose-sensitizing materials could have been used instead. One may postulate that the image was developed as the deformed cloth material was ironed flat, baked, or exposed to the sun for some period of time."
     - S.F. Pelllicori and R.A. Chandos, "Portable Unit Permits UV/Vis Study of 'Shroud'," Industrial Research & Development (Feb' 81), 189

"Are we looking at an image, not burned by heat into a cloth, but almost washed out of it?"
     - David Sox, The Image on the Shroud

"Evidence that suggests that the Shroud has altered in appearance over the centuries comes from the records of Cornelius Zantvliet, a Benedictine monk....Zantvliet does not describe any details of the Shroud he saw, but...he does complement it as being 'admirably depicted'. We must remember that we can only appreciate the full glory of the image in photographic negative: in his day what is today's Turin Shroud would have seemed pale and lack-luster to the naked eye. By no stretch of the imagination could it have been called 'an admirable depiction' of the crucified Jesus."
     - Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)

It is possible that the Shroud image was more vivid in 1449 when Zantvliet viewed it. (The Mandylion, however, was a faint image.) Washing or ferous-salt-containing ferric oxide pigment acting as an acid could produce the weakened, degraded, yellow fibers on the linen. Washing would also account for the faintness of the image which would occur as larger particles were removed from the Shroud. It is instructive to remember the boiling in oil and steaming of the Shroud as described by Antoine de Lalaing in 1503 (although Lalaing said the figure was not effaced or altered.)

(3) Camera Obscura

"The intensity of the image varies according to the distance of the body from the cloth, strongly suggesting that the body did not in fact come into direct contact with the Shroud. The mathematical ratio is so precise that Jackson and Jumper were able to create a three-dimensional replica from the image."
     - Nicholas P L Allen, "Verification of the Nature and Causes of the Photo-negative Images on the Shroud of Lirey-Chambˇry-Turin"

"The most significant problem was the lack of distortion of the image. No attempt to explain the image - be it contact with the body, heating a metal statue or even the nuclear flash theory - would provide a totally undistorted image. And why do we see only the front and back of the body, not the top of the head or the sides? The inescapable conclusion is that the Shroud has never been draped around a body, living or dead. However the image may have been formed, the cloth had to have been perfectly flat at the time."
     - Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)

"....Australian Dr. Nicholas Allen, chair of fine arts at the University of Port Elizabeth, published his Shroud-as-photograph theory in 1995 that, consonant with the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud, his 'photo' was made before 1356. Allen notes that all the ingredients were available in the 14th c., and all one had to do was suspend the corpse(!) for three to four days in sunlight, at the proper focusing distance from the fourteen-foot cloth that has been treated with silver nitrate or silver sulphate, outside a large camera obscura whose aperture contains a double convex quartz crystal lens fifteen centimeters in diameter and seven milimeters thick, then fix the negative image with ammonia; but urine would do."
     - Professor Daniel C. Scavone, "Book Review of The Turin Shroud: In Whose Image?"

Picknett and Prince theorize that Leonardo da Vinci created the current shroud of Turin, which was switched with the previous version in the early 1490's. The method supposedly used to create the image was a camera obscura.
"When light shines through a small hole into a dark chamber, pictures of things outside - upside down and in mirror image - are projected onto the opposite wall. Artistotle wrote of it in the fourth century BC, as did the Arab philosopher Ibn al Haitam in the eleventh century, and it is known that a description of a camera obscura was given in 1279 by an English alchemist, John Peckham.
Leonardo's "Codex Atlanticus contains a diagram that shows the workings of the camera obscura (which Leonardo called the oculus artificialis, the artificial eye)..."
     - Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)

"You will catch these pictures on a piece of white paper, which is placed vertically in the room not far from that opening...the paper should be very thin and must be viewed from the back."
     - Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Atlanticus (1502)

The darkening of silver chloride on exposure to light was well known to Leonardo.
"The great eighth-century alchemist Jabir-ibn-Hayyan, commonly known as Geber, is reputed to have used silver nitrate, although the earliest known copoy of De Inventiones Veritatis, a work ascribed to him in wich this is mentioned, dates form only the mid-1500s. Albertus Magnus (1193-1280) knew that silver nitrate turned black with exposure to light. Other alchemitst who were known to have worked with silver salts are Angeleo Sala and Hohann Glauber in the 1600s. Robert Boyle (allegedly one of the Priory's grand Masters) experimented with the effects of light on silver chloride. The response to light of iron salts was also known by them.
"Another vitally important process to nineteenth-century photographers, the production of silver chloride from a solution of silver nitrate using sodium chloride, was known to alchemists from at lest the early 1400s....Perhaps the most significant of all was the discovery that has been hailed as 'the beginning of photography' - the first scientific description of the light sensitivity of silver salts, by Johann Heinrich Schulze in 1727...He made this breakthrough while trying to replicate an alchemical experiment..."
     - Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)

Using a white-glossed plaster head for a model and a focusing lens (which Leonardo could have ground) a good, life-size image, could be projected onto a linen cloth stretched over a wood frame. An emulsion of egg white and bichromate salts that had been applied to the linen hardened where the image fell after 6-12 hours of exposure. The unexposed areas, which were soft and still soluble, were then washed out and the cloth heated to char the egg white that remained. (The most Shroud-like results were obtained with adding urine to the mixture to allow it to scorch at a lower temperature.) The resulting brownish image had a fish-eye distortion which foreshortened the center of the face and left a distinct small circle of light at the focal point. The ears and much of the hair disappeared.

Picknett and Prince theorize that the head on the Shroud was created separately from the body, and that a deformation on the bridge of the nose can be best explained by the circle of light effect. The hair was retouched later by painting, resulting in a stiff, artificial appearance.

"The authors further believe that the face of the man on the Shroud is a self-photograph of Leonardo, one that closely resembles his well known self-portrait in red chalk with only the salient highlights of his features sketched in. Meanwhile, they suggest that the body on the Shroud is that of a crucified cadaver studied by Leonardo."
     - Professor Daniel C. Scavone, "Book Review of The Turin Shroud: In Whose Image?"

"Taken together with the foreshortening - the reduction of the forehead and the straightening of the sides of the face, making the ears disappear - we saw that at long last we had proof positive that the face of the man on the Shroud had been created using a lens. Nothing else explains these features."
     - Lynn Picknett & Clive Prince, Turin Shroud - In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994)

The fish-eye lens effect reported by Picknett and Prince is not readily apparent on my enhancement of the shroud image, although the long "broken nose" and absence of visible ears could be taken as support of their theory.

"The argument that history's proto-photo was a life- sized photo(!) on a fourteen-foot cloth(!) that was a composite(!): double corpse with daubed-on blood and, in separate processes, Leonardo's own head front and back, is a priori far-fetched. The premise is more demanding of faith than is the authenticity of the Shroud. I am led to ask why Leonardo has left us his self-portrait in red chalk and not his photo, and why he would use another body when Vasari notes that his own physique was near-perfect, and everybody knows his exorbitant vanity."
     - Professor Daniel C. Scavone, "Book Review of The Turin Shroud: In Whose Image?"

Hyperlinks

• The Image of Edessa
  
• History of the Shoud of Turin