Open Letter to John Dominic Crossan

For More Information See: Shroud of Turin Story
 

An Open Letter to John Dominic Crossan

Dear John, What Were You Thinking?

In daily life, we assume as certain many things which, on a closer scrutiny, are found to be so full of apparent contradictions that only a great amount of thought enables us to know what it is that we really may believe. In the search for certainty, it is natural to begin with our present experiences, and in some sense, no doubt, knowledge is to be derived from them. But any statement as to what it is that our immediate experiences make us know is very likely to be wrong.
▬ Bertrand Russell, Problems of Philosophy

ear Dom: Not long ago, on an Internet forum, someone asked you about the Shroud of Turin. When I read your answer, my first reaction was amazement.  I might have thought that you answered carelessly were it not for two things: Your answer echoed, almost word for word, something you said in a television documentary. And, your analyses and historical reconstructions are always meticulously researched, complex and organized. – even as disturbing as some of them may be, as when you posit that Jesus was not even buried and possibly eaten by dogs and crows. Thus, I really did wonder (in a non-pejorative sense) what were you thinking. You had written in Beliefnet:

Crossan:  My best understanding is that the Shroud of Turin is a medieval relic-forgery. I wonder whether it was done from a crucified dead body or from a crucified living body. That is the rather horrible question once you accept it as a forgery.

Given the scarcity of articulate, fact-embracing perspectives that the Shroud is a medieval forgery and not the genuine burial Shroud of Jesus, your comment was intriguing. For you recognized both the prima facie case for the Shroud’s medieval provenance and the contradiction of the horrific and chilling realism; the forensically

correct bloodstains and the medically accurate images of a naked, much wounded, crucified man in burial repose. It is a contradiction because it is hard to imagine how such realism was achieved in light of what was known about human pathology in the Middle Ages. Others, who are skeptical of the Shroud’s authenticity, usually focus only on the arguments that support medieval origin and shy from the mind-numbing realism and other evidence that seems to contradict that possibility. If I understand you correctly, your hypothesis is that a crafter of fake relics used a newly crucified man to achieve medically accurate realism. There is, however, much new information, some of it very recent, that makes me wonder if what you wonder is plausible.

The bloodstains, as forensic scientists and chemists now know, are from real human blood. Moreover, the stains are from real human bleeding from real wounds on a real human body that came into direct contact with the cloth. Immunological, fluorescence and spectrographic tests as well as Rh and ABO typing of blood antigens reveal that the stains are from Type-AB human blood. When the stains formed, the man was lying on his back with his feet near one end of the fourteen foot long, banner shaped piece of cloth. The cloth was drawn over the top of his head and loosely draped over his face and the full length of his body down to his feet. Many of the stains have the distinctive forensic signature of clotting with red corpuscles about the edge of the clot and a clear yellowish halo of serum. The forensic experts are also able to identify that some of the blood flow was venous and some was arterial. Most of the blood flowed while the man was alive and it remained on his body. There is some blood that clearly oozed from a dead body, as was the case for stains resulting from a wound in the man’s chest. Here, the blood, with a deeper color and more viscous consistency, as is the case for blood from a postmortem wound, ran from a chest wound, flowed around the side of the body and formed a puddle about the man’s lower back.   Mingled with these large bloodstains are stains from a clear bodily fluid, perhaps pericardial fluid or fluid from the pleural sac or pleural cavity.  This suggests that the man received a postmortem stabbing wound in the vicinity of the heart.

Blood that flowed along once-outstretched arms emanate from the victim’s wrists and course their way downward along the forearm, past the elbow and onto the back of the upper arm. Near the man’s armpit the blood pooled and likely dripped to the ground. So much blood flowed along his outstretched arms that several rivulets of blood, pulled by gravity, ran straight down. It seems likely that blood dripped all along the man’s arms like rain drips from a tree branch in a storm. From the angles of the flows and rivulets, forensic experts have determined that this blood flowed while the man was upright with his arms at angles like the hands of a clock at ten minutes before two. They can also see from changes in bloodstream angles that the man must have pulled himself up repeatedly, perhaps raising himself up to relieve the weight on his nailed feet, perhaps to relieve the pressure on his chest that he might breathe.

The clots, the serum separations, the mingling of body fluids, the directionality of the flows, and all other medically expected attributes would have been nearly impossible to create by brushing or daubing or pouring human blood onto the cloth. The blood, rich in the bilirubin, a bile pigment that the body produces under extreme trauma, is unquestionably the blood of the man whose lifeless, crucified body was enshrouded in the cloth; even if only for the purpose of crafting a relic-forgery in medieval times.

The faint shadowy images of the man on the Shroud are a bit more problematic. No one knows how these images were formed. They were not painted as some suppose. The chemistry and physics of the image chromophore – that which gives visible image – are now well understood even though the method by which the images were created remains a mystery. The images are the result of a selective, color producing chemical change to discreet lengths of some cellulous fibers of the linen. Chemists describe the chemical change as an oxidation, dehydration and conjugation of the polysaccharide (long-chain sugar molecular) structure of the fibrils. Direct microscopic examination reveals that the image producing color is superficial to the top one or two fibrils of the topmost threads of the cloth. There is no evidence of any matting, capillarity, wicking, or penetration expected from liquids. The images could not have been created with paint, dye, stain or liquid chemical. Numerous tests including visible, ultraviolet and infrared light spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, and direct microscopic viewing of the Shroud confirm that the images were not painted.  Other tests on particle samples collected from the Shroud’s surface including microchemistry analysis, pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry, and laser-microprobe Raman analyses, further confirm this.

The images, closely examined with the aid of microscopes and microphotography, are similar to halftone images. Simply, this means that all the different shades of color are derived from the number and size of pixels of a single color in any given area of the image. A pixel (picture element) can be a dot, a short line or, as with the Shroud, a discrete length of fiber colored by the chemical alteration of the cellulose. Halftone is the method used to print black and white photographs in magazines and newspapers. Look closely at a picture in a newspaper and you will see that all the shades of gray are achieved with dots of only black ink. Halftone is also the way black and white pictures are printed on inkjet printers connected to home computers. With such printers, every shade of gray is produced by minuscule droplets of black ink. Where there are more droplets of ink the printed image is darker; where there are fewer droplets the image is lighter.

The images on the Shroud are not black and white, but they are monochromatic. That is, they are of a single color. The color is often described as sepia or straw yellow. The color produced by the chemical change to the fibers is constant and the various darker and lighter tones of color we perceive are the result of the density of the altered fibers. It is interesting to note that on a high quality inkjet printer (1200 dots per inch), the ink droplets are about 60 microns across, whereas on the Shroud, the image-bearing fibrils are only about 15 microns thick or about one fifth the thickness of typical human hair.  

Another interesting attribute of the images is that they are negative images; that is with dark and lighter tones of color reversed. In that sense, the images on the Shroud are like photographic negatives. This attribute was discovered more than a century ago, when in 1898, a photographer named Secondo Pia took the first-ever photographs of the Shroud with a large box camera. While developing his photographs he discovered that images that appeared on the glass plate negatives were positive images, startling in clarity and realistic appearance. For the first time people could see the amazing detail in the Shroud’s images. It is not that the detail wasn’t there on the Shroud. It was. But our minds are not well adapted to interpreting negative images.  What for centuries had appeared only as ghostlike images now appeared to be graphically remarkable front and back pictures of the man on the Shroud. 

But they may not be pictures at all but something else. At least they are not pictures of a human face or body in a traditional sense. When we look at a picture of a person we are looking at a representation of what we see with our eyes. What we see with our eyes is the light reflected from the face or the body. We may see shape but that is only a consequence of seeing reflected light. Light, in all its colors and varying intensities, is all that our eyes can detect. Drawings by children and simple cartoons may only show outlines and features, and we are left to imagine depth. But any picture that tries to convey a sense of dimensionality always shows how light is reflected from objects, faces, and bodies. This is true whether this picture is a drawing, painting, mosaic, photograph or any other form of two-dimensional art. While the face on the Shroud, in fact both body images, look like pictures of reflected light, image analysts tell us they are not.

Artists use many techniques to convey the sense of three-dimensionality into a painting: faces turned at angles, parts of an object or body protruding outward, placement of objects in front of other objects, perspective in which objects appear to become smaller as they recede into the distance, and the play of light on shapes and surfaces (as in Carvaggio’s famous Supper at Emmaus).  Of all of these, the play of light – showing highlights, lowlights and cast-shadows – is the most important method for conveying depth in a human face. We seem to see this in the face of the man of the Shroud. But on close examination we see that what appears to be the play of light is not light at all.

Light, in order to produce highlights, lowlights and cast-shadows, must have direction. While light may come from many directions, bouncing off of walls and objects and diffusing in the air as it does, it must nonetheless have a primary direction. If it does not, there is no way to convey a sense of depth.  Look at a picture of a globe or the earth. Without the play of light on its surface, without highlights and lowlights it will look like a flat round surface. By having directionality, light enables us to see the earth is spherical. We can say that light is what the artist encodes on his canvas. Light is also what the photographer’s camera encodes on film.

When we look at the face of the man of the Shroud, we certainly seem to see depth from the play of light. Look at the tip of the nose, at the sides of the cheeks and the recesses of the eyes. But where is the light coming from? What is its direction?  Image analysts, using computerized tools, tell us there is no light directionality at all. It doesn’t come from the left or the right, from above or below, or from the front. That is because the images we see on the Shroud are not representations of reflected light. The areas of dark and light are not encoded light. They are not pictures by the hand and eyes of an artist. Nor are they some form of medieval proto-photography as some have suggested in a vague attempt to explain the images’ photographic-like negativity.

It turns out that the Shroud images are terrain maps. What is encoded onto the Shroud is a terrain map of a man’s head and body. Both the front side and the backside images are this. With space-age image analysis equipment or off-the-shelf graphics software running on a home computer we can plot this encoded information and produce a realistic isometric plot, an angular view of a three-dimensional shape. The hazy donut shape shown above is an example of a terrain map for the crater rendered as a three-dimensional shape. In the case of the Shroud we do get a perfect three-dimensional rendering for many reasons: If, as scientists suspect, what is encoded on the Shroud, as data, is the distance between any point on the man’s body and the cloth loosely draped about him, then the distance will be distorted by the drape of the cloth. We can assume it is not perfectly flat. Physicists have estimated that the maximum distance represented is about 3 or 4 centimeters, but we don’t know how linear the scale might be in the image formation process. We might know that if we knew how the images were created, but we don’t. The image is very old, medieval if you are right Dom; possibly even older then that. We don’t know how fading or maturing of the images and the aging of the cloth might have altered the accuracy of the distance that is encoded. Finally there are bloodstains and dirt that cause distortions. That there is a distance encoded representation at all is amazing.

It is important to point out that no identified works of art, no known artifacts or relics of any kind will produce a 3D plot like the one produced by the Shroud. Researchers have tried every imaginable artistic method including bas-relief rubbings, scorching with hot statues, daubing the surface with pigment dust, and image transfer rubbings. Nothing does or can be expected to produce a 3D plot.

Some researchers have suggested that the images might have been formed by some perfectly natural process such as a chemical reaction between funerary spices and bodily fluids. Even chemicals used on the linen cloth for softening, whitening, or preserving might have induced images. The working premise for a naturalistic explanation has generally been that the Shroud may be the authentic burial cloth of the historical Jesus but that the images are not necessarily supernatural in nature; that is they are not divinely wrought or the accidental byproduct of a miracle.

Nothing has been found that works. So far, no method has been found that will produce the chemical change to the cloth’s fibrils, produce the negative image, and produce a spatially encoded terrain map.

The images pick up where the bloodstains leave off in revealing even more chilling, horrific pathological detail. Within those unexplained body images, the details of piercing wounds, lacerations, bruises, contusions, and abrasions are medically accurate. The man’s once-outstretched arms are modestly folded at the wrists. It is on the images of the arms that we see the rivulets of blood. It is on the man’s chest, between the fifth and sixth ribs that we see an elliptical gash from which the blood flowed under the man’s lower back. We see the horrific wounds where the man was nailed to the cross. So accurate are the details, medical experts realize they demonstrate knowledge of pathology that was not understood in the Middle Ages; not by artists, not by crafters of fake relics, and not by the best medical minds of that age. How did this relic forger translate such medically accurate detail, both front and back images, onto the long piece of linen cloth?

What emerges from the cloth is an epic story, a reenactment of the passion sequence from the scourging, the walk to Calvary, the crucifixion, and the burial. The man of the Shroud was savagely flogged. Whatever was used, it is consistent with a Roman flagrum, a whip of short leather thongs tipped with bits of lead, bronze or bone which tore into flesh and muscle. There are dozens upon dozens of dumbbell shaped welts and contusions, the type of wound that the flagellum would have caused. There is blood from the flagellation and even a bit of tissue thought by medical experts to be a torn-out bit of muscle. From the angles of attack – the way the marks fall on the man’s back, buttocks, and legs – it seems that man was whipped by two men, one taller than the other, who stood on either side of him.

At some time, the man may have been forced to wear a crown of thorns. That seems to be a logical explanation for the numerous puncture wounds about the top of his head. But from the wounds and drops of blood, it seems to have been more like a rough bunch of thorns, or a cap of thorns, and not like the wreath shaped crown of thorns so common in artistic depictions. There are details on the shroud that suggest both a beating and falling: a severely bruised left kneecap, a dislocated or possibly broken nasal cartilage, a large swelling around the right eye socket and cheekbone. There is, too, the puzzling fact that there are significant abrasions on both shoulders. On the shoulders, welts from the apparent scourging are abraded as though rubbed over. Might this be from carrying the patibulum, the crossbeam of the cross, across both shoulders?

What is most interesting is that the man of the Shroud was crucified with large spikes driven through his wrists and not through the palms of his hands, something which contradicts all iconography of medieval and pre-medieval periods. This is evidenced by both the image and the bloodstains. This is, of course, more historically and medically plausible. It was not before the first part of the 20^th century, that medical experts first realized that nails driven through a man’s palms would not support a his weight – even if his feet were nailed or supported – and that the nails would tear out. That the Romans did crucify victims by driving nails through the wrist area of the forearm was confirmed by the 1968 archeological discovery of a crucifixion victim, named Johanan ben Ha-galgol, found near Jerusalem at Giv’at ha-Mivtar. If indeed the Shroud is a medieval forged relic, the craftsman who produced it knew how to do it right even if the nailing, the scalp wounds, and the man’s nakedness defied the sensibilities of the time. 

The Shroud is more mind-numbing than all other depictions ever made; from the earliest carvings of the crucifixion on 5^th century coffins; from the wall painting of the passion so prominent in old English parish churches; from the imaginative grandeur of paintings by Rubens, Raphael, El Greco, and Velazquez; and from the spiritual visualizations of Salvador Dali. It stirs our imagination more than the drama of medieval mystery plays still performed in York or modern Broadway musicals and movies. It evokes more emotion than the great moving hymns “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” or “O Sacred Head, Sore Wounded.” It is, in the story it tells of the passion sequence, a picture not of a thousand words but a million.

Are we to imagine that a medieval craftsman knew of some method for producing the images, unknown or unrecognized by modern science? Whatever it was it seems to be without precedent in the arts, among other known relics, and among other artifacts of history. Whatever process a medieval craftsman might have used, it seems never to have been exploited since.

There is, of course, another possibility. Perhaps the crafter of relics was surprised to find images after he laid a bloody, crucified corpse onto his cloth. Perhaps, some unexplained chemical reaction occurred that formed the images. Perhaps the images were an accident in the process of forging a blood-only relic. We might think this possible, were it not for many other factors which must be considered. But first, let’s look at the prima facie case for medieval provenance.