Filas, Francis

Francis Filas

Then in 1980, Francis Filas, S.J., of Loyola University in Chicago and Michael Marx, an expert in classical coins, examined the area over the right eye and detected patterns of what appeared to be the letters UCAI (from the middle of TIBERIOU CAISARUS). They also found a lituus design (an auger's staff). Filas concluded that this was a lituus lepton coin minted by Pontius Pilate between A.D. 29 and 32. Over the left eye, Filas also identified what he believed to be a Juolia lepton with a distinctive sheaf of barley design. The Juolia lepton was only struck in 29 in honor of Tiberius Caesar's wife, Julia.

Subsequent computerized image enhancement analysis at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University's Spatial Data Analysis Laboratory supports, though cautiously, the existence of the lituus lepton over the right eye and an outline of a coin over the left eye.

Barrie Schwortz on the Coins

Barrie Schwortz, a technical photographers who photographed the Shroud, questions the coin identification. Having studied numerous high quality negatives of the Shroud taken in 1978, he concludes:

My personal opinion, based on my photographic experience and my close examination of the Shroud itself, is that the weave of the cloth is far too coarse to resolve the rather subtle and very tiny inscription on a dime sized ancient coin...What he [Filas] saw as inscriptions, I saw as random shapes and noise. Such is the subjective nature of image analysis. For these reasons however, I cannot accept these coin "inscriptions" as viable evidence of a first century Shroud "date"...I do not argue that there appears to be something on the eyes of the man of the Shroud, and it may well be coins or potshards, since they were used in some first century burial rituals, but I do not believe we can resolve coin inscriptions.

There is no question that background noise is a severe problem for coin identification. Banding, both vertical and horizontal, encroaches on the area of the eyes, certainly adding anomalous data. Much of the fine detail claimed to be features of the coins probably comes from background noise.

Barrie Schwortz

My personal opinion, based on my photographic expe-rience and my close examination of the Shroud itself, is that the weave of the cloth is far too coarse to resolve the rather subtle and very tiny inscription on a dime sized ancient coin...What he [Filas] saw as inscriptions, I saw as random shapes and noise. Such is the subjective nature of image analysis. For these reasons however, I cannot accept these coin "inscriptions" as viable evidence of a first century Shroud "date"...I do not argue that there appears to be something on the eyes of the man of the Shroud, and it may well be coins or potshards, since they were used in some first century burial rituals, but I do not believe we can re-solve coin inscriptions.