SHROUD OF
DARKNESS
Turin Shroud is not a Miracle
Jesus was allegedly wrapped
in the Shroud of
Index for
this Web Page
INTRODUCTION
INEXPLICABLE DOES
NOT SPELL MIRACLE
REASONS FOR
DOUBTING THE SHROUD
WHY THE BLOOD WAS
PRINTED/PAINTED ON
THE SHROUD COULD
BE A PAINTING
Turin Shroud
'confirmed as fake'
INTRODUCTION
In the Cathedral of Turin what many people hold to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ is enshrined. The Shroud is around fourteen feet by three and a half feet. It is a sheet of linen. It looks like a big strip that covered the back and front of a man completely. Age seems to have turned it yellow. One would think God could preserve it better than that for the image it bears is supposed to be the imprint of the dead wounded and bloody body of Jesus his son. There are about forty other Shrouds supposed to be that of Jesus. What makes this one so special is the fact that it is so mysterious and superficially convincing and has baffled some scientists for decades and still continues to do so. The image on the cloth is faint but it is a negative like the negatives you have with a photograph. The image is very plain in the negative or the quasi-negative as I should say.
The Shroud of Turin seems to have sceptics up against a brick wall and unable to go any further. In fact, it is not the great challenge to scepticism and anti-religionism that it appears to be or is made out to be.
For one thing, there is unmistakeable evidence that the apostles did not believe in a Jesus who was crucified in the first century but in one who only appeared then as a risen being. The testimony of the earliest Church proves that the Shroud is not genuine even if it is a first century artefact. Testimony like that comes before the Shroud’s evidence for why would they lie?
There is no evidence from history that the carbon dating of 1988 which found that the Shroud was made between 1260 and 1390 AD is wrong. But the fact remains, even if the Shroud is much older than that as many religious fantasists say, it is still not a miracle and it is still not proof that Jesus existed and was buried in it. http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/shroud.html shows how believers even try to pretend that the samples of the shroud used in the carbon dating were from the mended area of the cloth! Their lies are exposed.
INEXPLICABLE DOES
NOT SPELL MIRACLE
The Turin Shroud is one of the strangest things on earth. We cannot start holding that everything strange that comes along is a miracle. We do not regard the inexplicable Siberian fireball of 1908 as a miracle. The Cottingley Fairies photographs were considered inexplicable and miraculous for nearly seven decades and were verified as inexplicable by many scientific experts until the two young girls who created them confessed the truth which was that the fairies in the pictures were just drawings and cut-outs. And it should be easier to tell if photos have something dodgy about them than it should be for the Turin Shroud for nobody knows which of countless chemical combinations and reactions could have created it.
The real Shroud would have been seized by the Romans, who were investigating the empty tomb, and then destroyed. The Gospels do not say that the cloth would have been there at that time. John only says linens were lying there but if there was a shroud he gives no indication that it was still there or that anybody cared if it were there or not.
The Shroud is impossible to reconcile with the New Testament accounts. The Shroud attacks the validity of the only thing that could have a chance at verifying the claims made for Jesus so in doing so it shows itself to be just another piece of strange cloth. The Shroud contradicts the gospels. After all how could we even think that the Shroud could bear the image of Christ without the New Testament gospels?
REASONS FOR DOUBTING
THE SHROUD
There are sound reasons for believing that the Shroud is a clever forgery.
The Shroud man was bleeding too
much to have been dead which indicates some kind of a hoax. Whoever forged the Shroud wanted to
discredit the resurrection. Plus the vaporographic theory of Professor Paul Vignon proved that the Shroud image could have been made
by sweat and vapours coming from a dead body and that the blood marks were
set by the materials Jesus was covered in for burial. The theory was rejected in 1933 because a
corpse could not make the image but a living body could for a corpse does not
sweat or emit heat. So the theory was
rejected just because it did not fit the consensus that Jesus died on the
cross (page 159, Jesus Lived in India). The vaporographic
theory is not the only possible explanation for the image but if it works
then it shows that a living man was used to create the Shroud and if Jesus
did die on the cross the man was not Jesus.
The man must have had a huge temperature and been far from dying when
he created that image. Joe Nickell rejects the vaporographic
theory for vapours go in all directions while in the case of the Shroud they
would have had to project up from the body vertically and straight. His experiments verified this (page 23, Looking
for a Miracle). The theory would
work if it had not been for that. So
whatever the truth is it is clear that if we want a miracle then the vapours
are it and what they show is that Jesus did not die on the cross.
Just putting a man into a sheet and not binding him up inside it is an odd way of burying anybody. We know that nobody was bound up inside it for there is no evidence of creases. The creases would cause the image to be full of blank bits and a good bit distorted. Even if the burial was done in a hurry and meant to have been completed later on Jesus would have been bound up. It only took a minute. There should be fragmented images on the back of the image for wrinkles in the cloth are inevitable when a corpse is laid down and covered loosely in a cloth.
The shadows on the Shroud are not right. The print of the start of the neck at the collar bone shows puts the black bit between this area and the beard outside the boundaries of reason unless it is a forgery. The cloth when it was touching the neck should show the print of the rest of the neck. It is as if there is no neck. The division between the buttocks is too wide. The split would be very narrow if this man was laid on a surface which would have pushed the buttocks together reducing it. We would expect a pile of blood to be there having made its course from the back along the furrow where the spine is and run down after mixing with a lot of sweat. But there is none. This proves that the blood did not come from the body. Some would think that somebody left an image of themselves on the cloth and somebody decided to turn it into a relic of Jesus.
The hair and the beard hang down as if the man was standing up in the shroud. The hair would not be doing that if the man was lying down and the beard would have been pushed against the chin and the throat. The idea from The Second Messiah that the man lay in the Shroud in a very soft mattress (page 205) so that it made the hair frame the face is partly wrong. It would have caused great distortion in the picture of the back of the head. Why is the hair so tidy in the front? It just hangs down and the man was supposed to be lying down and it is so tidy as if the man was tidied up for the display! And the man would only have been in a mattress if he were meant to survive. The idea of him lying in sand is wrong for it is not soft enough. If the man was laid out in a mattress or on sand when dead men like Jesus were put on stone shelves in tombs it is grounds for suspicion that the man was not Jesus.
The Shroud man’s hair at the back was laid out perfectly and it tapered into a point at the bottom. Why would the people who buried Jesus have been so careful with his hair? This indicates that the image was intended for display and was not the real Shroud. If the head were cut off as many things indicate, it would have been more likely for the hair to be laid out properly before the body was laid in the Shroud.
The hair would not be hanging down if the man was lying down and the beard would have been pushed against the chin and throat. The Christians object that the hair and beard were stiff with dried blood so they stayed in the position they were in when he was upright on the cross. But the hair is still too straight for Jesus would have hung his head down at times and rested it on the left shoulder and on the right shoulder which would change the way the hair would set. And the hair on the Shroud man just has specks of blood on it and is not matted with blood. Close up the hairs look mostly clean. They look like they don’t have a crusted cover of blood over them. The lies the Christians tell to support the Shroud are truly tiresome. The hair proves the man on the cloth was not Jesus Christ.
The excuse for the hair hanging down is conclusively disproved by the fact that the hair was laid out and tapered at the back and tidied up. This manipulating of the hair showed that it would have been made manageable. Those who buried the man were anxious to have his hair right. They were not the burial party of the gospels who buried Jesus nearby for they were in a hurry as the day of rest was imminent. The Shroud man was buried by people who had plenty of time.
The blood would have been washed out of the hair by the heavy rain gushing out of the heavens when Jesus was on the cross. The gospels say there was climatic upheaval at that time such as earthquakes and darkness so we can safely infer that if we asked the gospellers if there was rain they would say there was. The blood blots around the head are not watery from the rain at all which adds weight to the cloth being a forgery. The hair would have been tossed by the wind. It is just too tidy.
The Second Messiah holds that the man lay in the Shroud on the mattress and the mattress rose higher than his nose all around his body so that the Shroud lay flat on top of him and the forces that put the image on it shot up straight from the body in a vertical fashion meaning that an image with only slight distortion appeared. I would add that if this happened the man was not in the Shroud. When the front image was projected they turned him on his belly in the mattress and put the cloth over him as before to get the back image except they turned the unmarked part of the cloth to get the back image on it. Just like some people give off strange electric shocks this could have been a man with a mutant chemistry that was known to make images so he was used for the purpose of forging the Shroud. Some say the blood could have been put on simply by carefully pressing the cloth over the body in such a way that it would look anatomically correct. They then took care to make sure the image of the body would match the position of the blood. But that was too difficult. Even if it did happen it still shows the Shroud was meant for deliberate display. It was a forgery.
The Shroud was intended for display when the face is clearer than the rest of it and so its clearer than it should be and the hands cross the genitals where they would not stay if the man were really a corpse.
The Catholic scholar, Dr Raymond Brown, wrote that since the buttocks are faint and the navel and genitals are hidden it appears that the Shroud is a forgery (page 150, Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine). The artist would not like to represent Jesus as a sexual being. The face is clearest because that is what people would most want to see. “Wild notes that the body image in the Shroud is portrayed as relaxed in death, but in a relaxed position a man’s joined hands will not cover his genitals if he lies on his back. Either the body has to be tilted forward and the arms stretched downward, or the elbows have to be propped up on the side and the wrists drawn together to hold the hands in place over the genital area. In the Shroud image also, the right arm is exceedingly long and the fingers of the right hand almost disproportionate, in order to allow the modest covering” (page 152). This too makes Brown suspicious. To be, the man must have been alive to hold his hands like that.
When a man was nailed through the wrists the thumbs would contract into the palms of the hand. The man on the Shroud is said to show no thumbs. But there are vague spots that may be the thumbs. If the thumbs were in the palms the left hand which is crossed over the right should be up very high leaving a big blank gap where the cloth didn’t touch anything. There is no such blank bit meaning that the thumbs were not in the palms meaning that the man was not crucified or that the image is a forgery. Perhaps the man tucked the thumb of the top hand into the lower one which held it to make it easier to keep the hands together? This would explain the gap but then the top hand covers the wrist of the lower hand and the fingers of the latter are seen entirely which you will see does not happen if you hold your thumb the way the Shroud man might have done.
There is a thin line where we would expect to see the thumb of the top hand – a trace of the thumb?
The Turin Shroud can’t be authentic even if it dates from the first century and even if it can’t be explained.
Top of the Document
MIGHT IT BE A FAKE?
The Shroud might be a fake and depict somebody other than Jesus.
The Second Messiah says there are signs that the man in the Shroud was nailed to a doorframe for one arm was nailed straight up and the other was nailed to the side. It observes that the Inquisition often nailed people up as a form of torture. The man was not nailed to a cross in the eyes of this book and it sees the blood flow as backing this up (page 223). The blood flow then would mean that the man was not Jesus for the man was not nailed to a cross and could indicate that the man was nailed up on purpose for making the Shroud.
Brown says, “It should be noted
that those opposed to Christians sometimes “obliged” Christians by executing
them in the manner of Jesus. P.A. Gramaglia has argued that between A.D. 540 and 640
funeral wrappings from
The Shroud is made of linen. People who won’t get their facts straight say it must be the winding sheet of Christ when it never rotted. But we have linen dating from 2000 BC. Keeping linen dry is the secret.
Hoare in The Turin Shroud is Genuine made objections to the idea that the Shroud man is somebody other than Jesus. Let us examine them.
He says the Arabs would not have mocked Christianity by killing anybody the way Jesus was killed for they thought of Jesus as a great prophet. But they were not mocking Jesus but a story about Jesus that they considered to be blasphemous lies for they held that Jesus was not crucified or killed. A Christian will say that the Jesus of the Mormons who was not God but an exalted man with many wives who was born of a sexual union between God and Mary and who died on the cross to atone for Adam’s sin alone is not his Jesus following the logic in 2 Corinthians 11:4 and so could mock and blaspheme the Mormon Jesus. Arabs sometimes use the same logic.
He says nailing to wood would have sufficed but a burial was necessary to mock the resurrection which the Arabs would have despised more than the crucifixion for the Christians upheld it as the supreme refutation of other religions.
Hoare says they wouldn’t have known to use a sedile or to nail through the wrists. They would soon have learned to if they had crucified a few people. The sedile would have been needed when they nailed the hands and was carried over when wrists were used just in case.
What about the use of the expensive burial cloth? The size matching the ancient standard 8 by 2 cubits is no miracle for a feasible Shroud in one piece had to be about that anyway. The Christians probably provided the Shroud in an attempt to create a new relic and it turned out to be more successful than they ever could have expected.
The three dimensional elements of the Shroud means nothing more than that the parts of the image that stick out most like the nose and forehead and chest and toes are better imaged for they were closer to the cloth. The three-dimensional aspect of the Shroud has got much exploration from many experts using different computer systems and instruments. Needless to say the results are seldom similar. It depends on how the programs are set. One school will make dramatic claims that another will dispute and on it goes. But the only reliable instrument is the human eye. We can see the three dimensional aspects for ourselves. The problem for shroudies is that anybody at all can make something that has the same effect with pencil and paper. It is a mistake to emphasise the three-dimensionalism because it would only prove at most that the Shroud is a strange picture not that there was a body inside it. The three-dimension aspect is in every photograph and image we have – it is just that it is more obvious in some images. For the Shroud to have the three dimensional effect implies that the Shroud floated flat above the body without touching it to make the image which is very strange. For if it touched the body it would be cleaving into the groves on the body so it wouldn’t make any difference if one part of the body were higher up off the ground than another. The Shroud would be unable to give out such realistic three-dimensional images assuming these tests are trustworthy. The floating could not have happened because the front image of the head and the back image of the head nearly meet in the middle of the cloth so there was not enough cloth for the top to float above the man lying in the Shroud implying there never had been a man in the Shroud. So the front image was made by being suspended over the front of the body without touching it and when that was done they turned the man over to get the back image on. The floating idea suggests the Shroud is not the relic of Jesus but was deliberately created. The strongest evidence, the evidence that we can see and sense, tells us so.
The image was intended for display for the cloth had to be loose to get the right print off the body if it was ever on a body.
The Status of Research into the Authenticity of the Shroud by Niccolo Caldararo
http://www.freeinquiry.com/skeptic,shroud/as/caldararo.html is a good site to read. This outlines the fact that the computer testing on the Shroud to test the three-dimensional effect is wanting in many respects. Most damning of all is the fact that it is not the Shroud itself that is used in these tests but a picture of the Shroud! The tests boast of finding no brushstrokes on the Shroud though the same tests can find no brushstrokes on Leonardo’s paintings! The fact medieval artists could sometimes paint without drawing the shapes to be painted in so that no lines show up is ignored. The 3D element is plainly far from supernatural because the back image has little of this 3D quality.
The three dimensional effect would necessarily come from the image on the cloth getting the lighter the closer it gets to the skin supposing a body was in it. But the fact that there was no body in the shroud can be shown from the fact that this rule is often broken by the shroud. For example, the neck shows up well meaning the cloth would have been pushed down into it but then why is the beard hanging down undisturbed? It was long enough to have been pushed into another position. It should look flat with the cloth pressing against it and should be pushed under the chin but it isn’t. And why does the Shroud tuck into the neck and not touch the legs between the feet and the knees? It should have sunk down. Why does it sink down and touch the hair down past the neck when the hair should have been lying flat down and out of reach? Those who use the three-dimensional evidence to support the Shroud are being selective.
The Shroud is certainly no miracle. If it could not be explained by science then it would have to be the product of alien technology for it isn’t from God. And to ascribe it to Satan would be to insult his intelligence. If Jesus was a long unnaturally thin alien we could say that the image was distorted though it looks human. It is certain that if everything on the Shroud is genuine then his body was not human for it does things that human beings cannot do. For example, the continued and profuse bleeding from certain parts and not others.
It has been suggested that the Shroud man had Marfan’s Syndrome which gives a person very long arms and legs (page 26, Looking for a Miracle). If Jesus had this disease we would be reading in the gospels how the Jews were saying his healings were faked for he couldn’t heal himself. Anyway, the image looks like an example of the gothic painting style of making Jesus look unnaturally elongated more than somebody with Marfan’s Syndrome. This is an indication of a medieval origin (page 24,26, Looking for a Miracle).
BLOOD OR NOT?
Is the red stuff on the Shroud really blood? It isn’t easy to think that it is for it has remained red. The blood on Jesus would have dried fast in the warm climate and little of it would have transferred to the cloth but the shroud man has plenty of fresh blood!
The proshroud site http://www.skepticalspectacle.com explains that the linen was starched on the loom and then washed in suds of a plant called Soapwort. This soap contains haemolytic chemicals which keep blood red. The blood on the shroud it says contains loads of bilirubin which is a bile pigment produced by a body that had undergone a severe physical trauma. This pigment is red and doesn’t lose its redness. So the believers have two explanations for the blood being red. The site, thank goodness, says that the Shroud is natural and denies that radiation from the resurrection put the image on for radiation can’t do that. At least it disposes a lot of the nonsense spouted by scientists who are more concerned with promoting fake incentives to Christian belief than the truth. It says the shroud is a photograph but rejects this on the basis that nobody could have made one like it long ago and because a second face has been found on the cloth – the latter is inconclusive. We can take this admission to be very significant and we will see why later.
We must remember that whoever made the Shroud did a lot of experimenting and probably tried to make a shroud image from a pierced body. He would have known about the bilirubin thing and may have used real blood with some additives in it. If the Shroud was starched then how did it fit into the contours of the body so well to pick up images and blood?
A test was administered by Alan Adler who tested the “blood” on a fibril of the linen in a protease to see if the protein would dissolve to see if it really was blood. It did but other organic substances can do the same so it proves nothing (page 193, Turin Shroud). Also, no image was found underneath when the blood was gone. This test also fails to prove that there really is no image underneath the blood.
Since many fibres of the cloth don’t have the image though surrounded by ones that have, nobody knows for sure if the image exists under the blood marks. The iron and the DNA on the Shroud can be accounted for without it necessarily being blood. It is safe to assert that the presence of blood has not been proven and is very unlikely. It is possible and feasible that the pious rich people who had the Shroud in the past might have put some of their own blood on it thinking that part of them would be close to and mingle with the blood of Jesus.
If the Shroud is a photograph the blood could have been painted or printed or both on first and the light reflected on it to make an image to fit the wounds. The Shroud is most probably a photo of a statue and maybe the blood could have helped position where the image was going to be projected on to so that both picture and blood would be positioned right. The image was then projected over the blood to match their position. This would leave no image behind the blood which is what we find on the Shroud – a real miracle would be able to project the image behind the blood marks. They say that if this happened we would be saying the image was painted first so that the painter would know exactly where to put the blood. But then God could always find something in the complicated world of chemistry to puzzle us.
All tests showed that it was not blood (page 49, Free Inquiry, Vol 18:2). Two scientists tested the “blood” and found that it was blood but their conclusion was invalidated by the fact that tempera paint could still explain the characteristics they associated with real blood (ibid, page 49). These guys were not qualified for making this analysis (page 27, Looking for a Miracle). At least the Shroudie, Ian Wilson, tells us that there is no proof for blood on the cloth (page 109, The Blood and the Shroud). There is DNA on the cloth but it was touched a lot over the years and cells are always being left behind on the touched item. And if I were going to forge a Turin Shroud I would use some blood in the pain to give it greater authenticity. I think there is blood on the cloth but then our modern science would be able to prove it if there were. Perhaps the amount of blood is so small that tempera paint is the main body of the blood marks.
WHY THE BLOOD WAS
PRINTED/PAINTED ON
The prints of blood on the Turin Shroud were made on the cloth before the image of the body appeared (page 153, Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine). The blood did not come from a body in the Shroud. The reason is, it is on all the points that you would expect to see it if the image were a painting. If some force shot straight up out of the body onto the cloth to make a mirror-image of the man that has no distortion then the blood images should come from the contact between body and cloth resulting in the blood being positioned away from the cuts on the body they allegedly emerged from. For example, the bleeding from the crown of thorns should be across and off the image of the head going too far on each side. Brown believes that the blood was painted on the image of the Shroud man (page 153, Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine,). If a Shroud image were made by pure luck a forger would have bought it to create the greatest relic of all time.
If you smear paint all over a statue and then wrap it in a cloth the image will be distorted as in being wider than the statue. This is the kind of image the Shroud would bear if it were genuine. God had no need to miraculously make the image undistorted. That would have been an absurd miracle and giving a reason for scepticism. If God does such miracles then we can trust nothing.
The wounds on the head and arms shed the blood down the body indicating that the Shroud print was not made when the man was lying down but when he was held up straight (page 152, Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine). The feet and the side contradict this for they make the blood flow as if the body were lying down. Somebody had been painting and/or printing blood on the Shroud with blood. And had been printing it on as well from a body or something. The positions tell us it was made deliberately.
There are long trickles of unsmudged blood that flowed about the lumber arch in the back. These rivers are inexplicable or the blood should have made a pool and then short trickles when the pool is too full and there is no pool. And the trickles would not be so clear and stringy – most of them are like lines – for blood soaks into cloth leaving wide stains. The blood was painted or printed on.
Some think the blood should have ran along the linen fibres if it were liquid and soaked into the cloth. But that could indicate that it was mixed with something – paint or a chemical? That would alter its molecular structure and behaviour.
The blood should be smudged on the back but it is not. It would have been if there had been a bleeding man lying on top of it. The blood was liquid enough to make an image according to the Shroud and there is just no way smearing and smudging could have been avoided. The body was not carried from the cross to the tomb in the Turin Shroud for the movement of the people carrying it would have caused the corpse to rub a lot inside the cloth and cause lots of smears. The blood contradicts the gospel account that Jesus was borne to the tomb in his winding-sheet or whatever. The gospels, terrible and all as they are, have more weight than a piece of cloth that cannot be conclusively traced back to Jesus’ demise.
Now, the Shroud tells us that the man it depicts was never carried in it for there is no smearing. But he had to have been laid in the cloth and being a big man and heavy he had to be positioned on the cloth so that there would be enough to fold over the top of him. The shroud is fake for there is no evidence of this positioning.
Brown cannot believe that the Shroud could be real when there is no smudging (Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, page 152). Some say that there was no smudging because Jesus was taken to the tomb without being removed from the patibilum, the part of the cross that the arms are nailed to. This is extremely unlikely. It is gruesome and frivolous and unnecessary and besides the Romans needed the patibilum to nail others to. It would be easier to get Jesus to the tomb without it and the longer his arms were kept outstretched the more likely they could have stiffened into that position. The Shroud must be a forgery when it requires such a daft explanation for the absence of smudging.
Blood that should have been dried like the scourge wounds and many others should not be on the cloth and certainly not on it so clearly.
If the blood did come from a body then the Shroud man was nailed up and crowned with thorns and scourged about one time and then fired into the cloth. Brown sees that there is nothing to show that the blood came out at different times but the wounds seemed to have been inflicted at the one time (page 152). Thus, he could not have been Christ. He would only have been treated that way to get the blood on the cloth in a convincing way. He would only have been treated that way if the cloth were a fake.
The Holy Shroud and Four Visions maintains that dried blood can transfer if there is plenty of sweat or the relevant chemicals that compose sweat in the blood. But that transference takes time but waiting too long is as bad as not waiting long enough. But when the image is ready the cloth has to be removed slowly and with extra-caution from the blood and no folding must take place for a long time so that the image is not damaged (page 13). This would suggest that somebody had been experimenting years ago to learn this in order to make the Turin Shroud. Some would say it means that Jesus’ body just gently dematerialised inside the cloth resulting in an undamaged image. Experts deny that Jesus would have produced enough sweat. He wouldn’t even take a drink so he had no liquid in him.
The Jesus Conspiracy says that there are three lines of blood relating to the wrist wound and tries to argue that two of them dried up and were made liquid again by the oils in the cloth because the outline is not as sharp as that of the third. But if you look at photograph no 57 some parts of the two traces in question have just as much lack of outline as the third.
The blood on the Shroud did not behave like ordinary blood so it tells us that the cloth is a fake.
God forbade all kinds of religious fraud in Deuteronomy 18. He said that it was not to be tolerated and that occult items and pagan idols were to be destroyed. In the past before science got to the level of seeing that the Shroud was very strange indeed, Catholics on seeing the red blood on the Shroud would have perceived that it had to be a painting for blood that old should not be that colour. They might have put this out of their minds but their duty was to destroy it. The Shroud opposes God’s law and so it is not the winding sheet of Jesus at all.
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THE SHROUD COULD BE A
PAINTING
STURP, the main researchers of the Shroud, say they think the whole image is not a painting chiefly. But they tell us they are not ruling it out once and for all and many researchers believe that the pigment that makes the image goes around the fibres like a kind of watercolour. If the image is a painting the blood is possibly paint as well and perhaps the paint was mixed with blood.
Believers make several excuses for denying the image is a painting. One argument is from the style which shows no thumbs and very elongated fingers.
There was a tradition of painting shrouds in Egypt and some of these revealed the fashion of not showing thumbs and making the fingers longer just like we have it in the Turin Shroud. Plus there are loads of ancient images that have a strong photographic negative effect despite the claim that the Shroud having this effect is a miracle. The precise truth about the negative image on the Shroud is that it is a quasi-negative. It’s like a bad negative. Its not a miracle when it was an attempt to be a good negative but fell short. It is easier to forge a bad negative than a good one.
Another excuse for denying it could be a painting is the absence of brushstrokes and sketching on the cloth.
It has been established that
Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece, The Last Supper,
and another, his John the Baptist, show no evidence of sketching being done
before the painting which has been verified by tests involving x-rays. Leonardo painted them without guidance and
without brushstrokes being visible.
That is why they cannot be copied.
Thus we see Leonardo by unknown and yet natural means managed to stamp
these pictures with the three very reasons that the
Yet another excuse is that the cloth does not look like a painting for it is too subtle and nobody paints what can hardly be seen. But many in medieval times would have been sick of shrouds and prints of the face of Jesus that were too obviously painted. This would have made the artists among them go for a subtle image if they wanted to forge a shroud and say it was that of Jesus. The emphasis was on the blood. An image that contained blood would be expected to be revered more for its blood than its picture. The shroud could have been meant to be taken to be a vague image of Jesus caused by his dirty sweat. It could have been intended to be revered for what it supposedly was rather than what it looked like. You don’t try to create the supreme relic that contains fluids from the Lord’s body and make it look like a painting. Those who say there is no painting like the Shroud so it’s not a painting of any kind are missing the point. Its meant to be a forged relic not a work of art.
The Shroud need not have been painted using brushes nor need it have been created using pure paints. It could have been created with paint mixed with something else. Perhaps the paint came off and left oxidation on the cloth to make the body image. The blood was mixed with something else for it has remained red over the centuries.
The Shroud need not have been created by one process which is something that all the people arguing about it forget. For example, there are those who point to things they say indicate that the image is not a painting and so they say it is not a painting. But what about the things that make it possible that it was at least partially a painting?
The research of Walter McCrone has shown that the cloth is a painting but it seems that McCrone MAY have been too keen to refute the authenticity of the Shroud. His tests showed the presence of a lot of paint on the cloth. He found the blood to have the pigment red ochre and could not find it outside the image proving that the claim of believers that this pigment came of pictures and paintings placed on the Shroud to make them relics is nonsense (page 27, Looking for a Miracle). The poker holes on the cloth proved that it was not immune to damage. There was no way then that people would have been allowed to put damp pictures on the cloth and the practice of the Church usually was to create relics just by touching a cloth or item to a holy object. Relics of St Padre Pio are just touched to his tomb.
There was no need for laying out the Shroud on an altar and putting something all over it. Painted copies of the shroud that were touched to it didn’t have enough paint on them to come off to leave a significant reading of the presence of paints on the Shroud. You can see snaps of them in Ian Wilson’s The Blood and the Shroud.
McCrone also found evidence that people had been working on the image to preserve it and make it seem more miraculous during the previous two hundred years (page 48, The Turin Shroud is Genuine). He found that iron particles were being added to make the blood. We will see that this idea of interference with the Shroud is backed up by other pieces of evidence. It may be possible that the Shroud was originally a faint painting but was turned into a kind of photograph in the nineteenth century. We must remember that it was never photographed until 1898 when its properties as a negative were first discovered.
WHY IS THE IMAGE SUBTLE?
Believers claim that the Shroud is too faint to be a fake and not a painting because nobody could have known that photography would come in and make the image plainer. They say that no artist puts details on a painting that only a science he can never imagine coming in could show up. But if the Shroud is a photograph from medieval times or if it is a bad photo that was touched up with some paint the person creating it knew that one day science would be able to see all the details. When an artist discovers a photographic technique he knows that one day there will be people who will be able to do better than him. He might have been excited at the thought of how people in centuries to come would be mystified. It made him feel important.
Perhaps a lot of experimentation was done on the Shroud which is why it bears images that have only been found in recent years. The forger might have been trying different things with the cloth. The fact that the other images are very hard to make out and many believe they are just imagined might show that the forger had much bad luck. It doesn’t make any sense that these images should be so vague that they are hardly there at all. What they show was that there were many failed attempts to fix images on the cloth except the forger didn’t quite fail as badly as he thought!
Perhaps the image was vague because the forgers thought they could do better and make a plainer image. If they used materials and a dead crucified body which could be hard to get it was understandable that they might make do with the Shroud rather than attempt another.
Perhaps the image was originally plainer and after a few decades started to fade.
Perhaps the image was made so subtle to keep the Church wondering what it was to give it a chance of becoming popular enough so that the Church would have to come to terms with the existence of the cloth. Otherwise the Church would have come down too hard too soon and the Shroud would have ended up on a pyre.
The Shroud is a photograph negative. I think because photography would have been considered to have been alchemist black magic or supernatural that the forgers chose this method to create the image because they thought it was occult and therefore a true image of Jesus. It may be they never intended to be forgers but to use supernatural forces or what they thought to be supernatural forces to capture the image of Christ. Maybe they intended to create not a fake burial cloth of Jesus but a copy of what Jesus looked like in the tomb. The miracle of the image was what mattered to them not how unimpressive it was with the naked eye. Maybe they thought the occult powers needed the image of a body and face to focus their energies so that the image was not that of what they photographed but of the real Jesus.
Perhaps the image was fairly vague because if it was too distinct people might recognise whose face it really bore! The face is plain enough when looked at with the naked eye. The face was the most important part and was plain enough so the subtlety cannot be used then as an argument for the Shroud being real. The rest of the body was not important. What was most important probably, was the blood on the cloth which made it appear to hold the magical saving blood of Jesus Christ.
Despite reason, believers continually tout the image’s subtlety as an argument for its authenticity!
HOW TO MAKE A TURIN
Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince wrote a book called Turin Shroud – in Whose Image showing that there was nothing miraculous about the image and the face on it was the face of the man who had forged it – Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and the body belonged to somebody else. Whether or not the face was his, it is clear that it is not proof of the existence of miracles or Jesus. It is hard to believe that Leo would have created such a bad forgery but then again it is good in the sense that it appears to be so baffling and was even more so in the past and that was what was important to him. And the objection of many that Leonardo never hinted that he was making a Shroud is silly for he couldn’t say if he was. If Leonardo didn’t make the Shroud maybe an associate of his did behind his back.
The book says the Shroud is a kind of photograph and explains that Leonardo had the knowledge and ability and motive to make it. What helps support the view that Leonardo created the Shroud is that many of his paintings were created without using drawings on the surface he was painting on as guidance. He had the genius to paint the Shroud and the skill to paint without leaving brushmarks. But it seems the Shroud is a crude photograph.
The authors made an image like
the Shroud image and it is admitted even by critics that the chemical
solution the book says Leonardo used to make the snap could have been
available to Leonardo (www.unisa.ac.za/dept/press/dearte/52/shroud2.html How Leonardo Did not Fake the Shroud of
Turin, Nicholas Legh Allen). But they think the formula was not likely
to have been used even if somebody was making photos in the middle ages. This is silly for it is like somebody
finding a photograph allegedly from the thirteenth century and dismissing it
as a forgery just because photography was not invented until the 19th
century. The truth is we only think
photography was first invented then and if we ignore the photo we could be
ignoring the thing that proves us wrong.
We know Leonardo read ancient texts about photosensitive
chemicals. He designed camera obscuras and it has been found (Nicholas Allen) that a
tower in Fontanellato in
Photography could have been invented before the 19th century because the images it made like the Shroud were too vague and nobody, apart from an unusual few, was that interested in it. Plus the Church would have seen it as alchemy which was forbidden under grave penalties.
Some object that Leonardo needed to look like a Jew and have his face beaten to a pulp to make the image. But this ignores the fact that he would have used a bust not his actual face to put his face on the image. Leonardo could not have directly used his own face to make the picture for that would entail sitting a long time and being burned to a crisp by the sun. The book contains a picture that reveals that Leonardo and the Shroud man were dead ringers and both had long hair and strong beards. You don’t have to be a Jew to look like a Jew.
The claim of many believers that the Shroud man’s nose was broken is a lie. There is no evidence and many experts say as much. And if his nose was broken then how do you know it was broken during the Passion? It may have been misshapen from an earlier injury. Yet this lie about the broken nose is used by many to ridicule the hypothesis that the face of the Shroud man is Leonardo da Vinci who was possibly the creator of the Shroud. They jeer, “So we are supposed to believe that Leonardo had his nose broken to make the Shroud?” As we said, Leonardo was an artist and could have used materials to make his face or the bust with his face look injured.
Nicholas Allen has produced cloths exactly like the Shroud of Turin. When they are all shown in the negative you can see huge blotches and variations in shading in the background. This effect also appears in the Turin Shroud. If the Shroud were a miracle this would not be happening for God would not need or desire that effect. Worse if he did then why does the background not capture the image of the stone or whatever Jesus was laid out on? Allen used materials and devices that were certainly available in medieval times. His work then is better than that of Picknett and Prince in that respect.
It has been demonstrated beyond doubt that even in 1280 AD it was possible to make a photograph on linen to make the Shroud. Using a plaster cast of Jesus and silver nitrate solution and ammonia solution (human or animal urine will do) on linen which contains chemicals itself that can help form an image plus a plain old magnifying glass or a natural quartz crystal with the same ability can form a Shroud image with the help of a very strong sun and it helps a lot of the cast is painted white (www.petech.ac.za/shroud/is the.htm). You need a cast for the process is slow. The fact that the sun would have been used to provide the light source for making the Shroud is betrayed by the fact that the Shroud man’s body parts that are prominent are the brightest for the sun would reflect off them the most. This has been tested in experiments and faint yellow images that are in the negative and which rest on the upper fibres of the linen cloth have been made thus replicating the features of the Turin Shroud and showing it is no miracle. It is better to believe that some medieval genius stumbled on the secret of photography than to hold the Shroud up as a miracle for the first is naturally possible. When the Shroud is a photo it cannot be the image of Jesus at all because photography could not go back to his day. The medieval alchemists who experimented in everything could have developed some crude form of photography.
The Shroud created by Nicholas Allen matches the claims made for the Turin Shroud, that there is no pigment or dye used, that there is no sign of directionality, heat and water don’t harm the image, the image sits just on the top of the fibres of the cloth and does not penetrate and shows up best in the negative image and is very subtle in the positive image.
The blood might not have been painted on but rubbed on first. Perhaps it was dabbed on with a tiny sponge and then the image was imposed on top of it. This would explain why there is no image beneath the blood. The makers of the Shroud wanted to give the impression that the blood when on before the image which is what you would expect.
But we must remember that thought there is no image below the blood now that proves nothing. The forgers expected the blood to flake off in time so they had to be careful and perhaps take preventative measures. It could be that the blood contained chemicals that dissolved the image underneath. Another possibility is that the blood was put on when the image had started to form. A chemical reaction could have removed the image under the treated blood. The image under the blood would have been very weak to start with anyway.
Perhaps the blood being put on by sponges or whatever led to the Shroud being classed as a painting in the mid-thirteen hundreds when it seems to have first appeared. So the photo theory fits what the sceptical bishops back then said about the cloth being a painting and that they knew the artist. The blood is the most visible part of the image and it would have been daubed or dribbled on and would classify the cloth as a painting. The Shroudies object that the image is too vague to be just for display. But what right have they to say that when they don’t know the circumstances in which it was produced? Perhaps the Church stole it from the makers before it was finished. Anything could have happened. And the image can be seen okay if you stand far from it so it sufficed as a display of Jesus. It might have been the best the forgers could do. If it had been too plain to the sight it would have been harder to palm off as a real relic for it would have seemed too much like an artwork or a drawing. The vagueness of the image close up adds to its attractiveness and mystery.
The image does not go down further than the top threads of the cloth which suggests it was burnt on by the sun and is a kind of scorched photograph. Using a hot metal relief image to scorch it on is a possibility. Washing the image would have ensured in either case that the strongest image would have been on the surface fibres of the cloth and the weakest would have been underneath and been washed away or faded away.
It is claimed that burns fluoresce unlike the image of the Shroud indicating that it is not a scorch mark. Chemical by-products cause this but these could have been washed out of the Shroud. Plus when the image is so faint it would be hard to tell if the image could or could not fluoresce.
It is agreed that since the back image of the Shroud is not denser than the front that there was no body inside the cloth for a body lying in it would make the back image the clearest due to the pressure of it being on the cloth.
www.shroud.com by Linda Moulton Howe says that the Volkinger Effect, when leaves pressed between the pages of a book for many years leave an image of themselves on the pages, is the same as what happened with the Shroud for a three-D image was made and the characteristics of oxidation are shared by both. Why she does not argue that the image was made by cutting up leaves and making an image of Jesus on the cloth is a mystery to me. She chooses to say that this cannot happen except miraculously with a body and takes a long time while the Shroud man’s image was made quickly. Here she says that a natural explanation is possible and she turns it into a miracle. That is totally against the rules. Her natural explanation proves that the Shroud man is not Jesus Christ. It proves that there was no body in the cloth for the natural and simple possibility comes first.
Later we read that scientists cannot explain the image as if there are no scientists who say they can! Of course there are.
Then we are told that the image was produced by sweat oxidising. Somebody could have discovered that this can be done by accident and then painted the Shroud with light paint to see what he was doing with loads of sweat in it and years later the image was washed to get rid of the paint and leave only the print. This would have been done in order to make the image seem to hold not only the blood but the sweat of Christ. The result could have been worth a huge fortune. It was worth the effort. The blood was put on according to a diagram of what the result should look like and was put on after the image had formed.
Sweat mixed with streptococci
bacteria which exists on the skin could have created the image for pro-shroud
expert Professor Stephen Mattingly has created images this way which
duplicate all the features of the shroud. He denies that there is anything miraculous
about the image. This bacteria is
what makes the yellow marks on the collars of white shirts and the
Joe Nickell created images like the Shroud by rubbing with pigment using a bas relief that avoided distortion and the result had an image that sat on top of the fibres of the linen, had 3-d qualities, and was a quasi-negative like the Shroud that was vague and subtle when looked at in the light of day (page 28, Looking for a Miracle). This could be described as painting in the common tongue so is that is what the bishop, D’Arcis, who first exposed the Shroud soon after its first appearance as a fake in the 1300's meant when he said it was painted by cunning methods to which the artist confessed? Other methods have involved using a bas relief and heating it and laying it in linen. The result in many cases was identical to the Shroud which is also a scorched image.
In The Skeptic’s Guide to the Paranormal pages 29-31, several points are made that refute the Shroud.
The shroud is a negative
image. Such images can be created by
bass relief rubbing. The blood has a
chemical composition matching paint.
The iron oxide used to make the red colour has turned yellow in many
places. The irons and proteins found
in the “blood” were also available in medieval pigments. Mercuric sulphide used in pigments is also
easily found on the shroud image.
Sodium and potassium are present in real bloodstains but are absent
from the bloodstains on the cloth. The
blood is paint. The weave of the linen
was not used in first century
Turin
From: http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15693406-401,00.html
See also http://www.physorg.com/news4652.html
From correspondents in Paris
June 22, 2005
From: Agence France-Presse
A FRENCH magazine has said it had carried out experiments that proved the
Shroud of Turin, believed by some Christians to be their religion's holiest
relic, was a fraud.
"A medieval technique helped us to make a Shroud," Science &
Vie (Science and Life) said in its July issue.
The Shroud is claimed by its defenders to be the cloth in which the body of
Jesus Christ was wrapped after his crucifixion.
It bears the faint image of a blood-covered man with holes in his hand and
wounds in his body and head, the apparent result of being crucified, stabbed
by a Roman spear and forced to wear a crown of thorns.
In 1988, scientists carried out carbon-14 dating of the delicate linen cloth
and concluded that the material was made some time between 1260 and 1390. Their
study prompted the then archbishop of
Drawing on a method previously used by sceptics to attack authenticity claims
about the Shroud, the magazine got an artist to do a bas-relief - a sculpture
that stands out from the surrounding background - of a Christ-like face.
A scientist then laid out a damp linen sheet over the bas-relief and let it
dry, so that the thin cloth was moulded onto the face.
Using cotton wool, he then carefully dabbed ferric oxide, mixed with
gelatine, onto the cloth to make blood-like marks. When the cloth was turned
inside-out, the reversed marks resulted in the famous image of the crucified
Christ.
Gelatine, an animal by-product rich in collagen, was frequently used by
Middle Age painters as a fixative to bind pigments to canvas or wood.
The imprinted image turned out to be wash-resistant, impervious to
temperatures of 250 C (482 F) and was undamaged by exposure to a range of
harsh chemicals, including bisulphite which, without the help of the
gelatine, would normally have degraded ferric oxide to the compound ferrous
oxide.
The experiments, said the magazine, answer several claims made by the pro-Shroud
camp, which says the marks could not have been painted onto the cloth.
CONCLUSION
The Turin Shroud is not the winding sheet of Jesus Christ and is a warning to the world that what cannot be explained is not necessarily a miracle. The Shroud is a relic of evil for it is used by many to scare people into accepting a faith that is bad for them. For example, we know how the faith of the pope commands that we force people to spread AIDS by depriving them of condoms and that we terrify children by telling them that Hell exists. The Shroud also tells us that God can let terrible things be done to a man without sin, if he needed to suffer then how much do we need to suffer. The Shroud is evil and was once under the control of occultists in the Knights Templar so believers in black magic can speculate if that had something to do with its production.
BOOKS CONSULTED
Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Roberts and Donaldson, T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1870
Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, Raymond E Brown, Paulist Press,
Free Inquiry, Spring 1998, Vol 18, No 2, Article by Joe Nickell,
Council for Secular Humanism,
From Fasting Saints to Anorexic
Girls, Walter Vandereycken and Ron van Deth, Athlone Press,
Holy Faces, Secret Places, Ian
Wilson, Corgi,
Inquest on the Shroud of
Jesus Lived in
Looking for a Miracle, Joe Nickell, Prometheus Books,
Miracles, Ronald A Knox, Catholic Truth Society,
Sceptical Inquirer 9/10 2001 Vol 25, No 5, Article by Joe Nickell,
CSIOCP,
Relics, The Society for Irish
Church Missions, Bachelor’s Walk,
The Blood and The Shroud, Ian
Wilson, Orion,
The Book of Miracles, Stuart Gordon, Headline,
The Divine Deception, Keith Laidler, Headline,
The DNA of God?, Leoncio A Garza-Valdes, Doubleday, 1999
The Holy Shroud and Four Visions, Rev Patrick O Connell
and Rev Charles Carty, TAN,
The Holy Shroud and the Visions of Maria Valtorta, Msgr Vincenzo Celli, Kolbe Publications Inc.,
The Image on the Shroud, Nello Ballosino, St Paul’s,
The Jesus Conspiracy, Holger Kersten amd Elmar R Gruber, Element,
The Jesus Relics, From the Holy Grail to the Turin Shroud, Joe Nickell, The History Press, Gloucestershire, 2008
The Second Messiah, Christopher
Knight and Robert Lomas, Arrow,
The Skeptic’s Guide to the
Paranormal, Lynne Kelly,
The Turin Shroud is Genuine, Rodney Hoare, Souvenir Press,
The
The Unauthorized Version, Robin Lane Fox, Penguin, Middlesex, 1992
Verdict on the Shroud, Kenneth
E Stevenson and Gary R Habermas, Servant
Publications, Ann Arbour,
WEB
FAQ on the Shroud of
www.mcri.org/Shroudupdate.html
Latest Shroud Update
This site gives close up pictures of the blood on the Shroud to demonstrate that it has to be paint not blood.
www.petech.ac.za/shroud/is the.htm
Is the Shroud of
http://skeptic.com/Comments/turincom.html
Shroud of
http://skepdic.com/refuge/bunk13.html
The Skeptic’s Dictionary by Robert Todd Carroll
www.unisa.ac.za/dept/press/dearte/52/shroud2.html
How Leonardo Did not Fake the Shroud of Turin, Nicholas Legh Allen
www.appollonius.net/bust-shroud.html
Apollonius of Tyana & the Shroud of
This page gives some good factual material but as for its attempt to support the authenticity of the Shroud it is bad and twisted in the extreme. How twisted this Christian fanatic is we shall soon see.
She argues that if the Shroud really shows that Jesus never died on the cross it would not be among us. That is like Mormons saying that if the Book of Mormon was a fake they would not be believing in it. She perversely argues that Leonardo wrote down everything he got and never mentioned the Shroud as if he would!
She says that the creator of the Shroud did not use a camera obscura for though the camera was used by the Romans it was reinvented after the Turin Shroud was made. She should not dare to be so dogmatic. She should be starting with proving the Shroud is not a photograph rather than making assumptions like that.
She says the man in the cloth was laid out with his legs hunched up. Sounds like he was laid out on a soft bed to me. Clearly he could not have been Jesus who was supposed to be too dead to need any medical attention.
The lady knows that the Shroud
might not be supernatural for a key in 1896 in
www.straightdope.com/classics/92_275.html
Did Jesus Really Exist? And What’s With the Shroud of Turin?
This page tells us that it was found to be possible that
somebody lightly painted the image on and whatever substance they used made
the fibres under the paint oxidise and age rapidly so when the paint was
washed off a faded copy of the image was found underneath it. The objection to this is that this
technique was not used until the 19th century. Joe Nickell
claims it was used in the 12th century and anyway it could have been
discovered by alchemists by chance. It could have happened to the Shroud by
accident. The Shroud had been washed a
few times to see if the image would come off which might mean that the
original was a painting and what we see now is what was left when the paint
came off. Perhaps the paints were
chemically altered over time and by the fires the Shroud had been exposed to
and they created an inexplicable image.
(That happened to a fresco in