Flower Images

Plant Images

The same is probably true of plant images and all manner of other things people see on the shroud. Now, I must admit that I see two images that look like petal-shaped flowers. One is fairly easy to see, the other more difficult. That doesn’t mean they are images of flowers. They seem more like a child’s Crayola drawings of a flower. They seem to be partly formed by those same dark and lighter lines that run through the cloth. Those two flower shapes, as it turns out, are important in understanding the history of the shroud.

In support of the observation of real plant images, pollen grains have been found imbedded in the cloth that match some of the plants that have been identified. Apparently, these plants only derive from the environs of Jerusalem. At first blush, it seems to be a powerful argument for authenticity. But is the identification of those pollens accurate? Are there really identifiable plant images on the cloth?

These questions, and discussion of other things that people think they see will be explored in due course. It is a fascinating topic.

Seven Physical Attributes

Seven physical attributes of the Shroud of Turin are particularly useful for examining historical records:

1)      the size of the cloth

2)      very faint images

3)      apparent bloodstains

4)      burn holes commonly known as the poker holes

5)      the weave of the cloth

6)      particular creases in the fabric

7)      two images that look like flowers with petals.

We need to know what the Shroud of Turin looks like, as well, because some of the ancient history is not written at all, but expressed in pictures. Pictures sometimes make for some of the best and most convincing history.

Apparent Flower Images

If you look very closely between the face and each of the upper corners you may notice two very faint shapes that look something like flowers. One is very distinct. The other is barely visible. They look like small circles with apparent petals about them—like a child’s drawing of flowers. They may be images of real flowers, as some contend, or they may simply be illusions, shapes of flowers caused by anomalies in the weave and coloration of the cloth. For our purposes it is only important to note that they look like flowers.

We will, when we examine the images in fuller detail, explore many other aspects of the images and the cloth, qualities and mysteries that will fascinate and challenge our intelligence. But for now, and to help us with history, we will focus on just these observations.

And so, with an understanding that the shroud that is in Turin is a large oblong three-over-one herringbone twill piece of linen with two life-sized images along with bloodstains, burn holes called poker holes, and persistent folding creases and patterns that look like flowers, we turn our attention to Edessa and then Constantinople.

The Flower Images and the Icon

There is another aspect to this icon that is fascinating and perhaps more convincing, the appearance petal-shaped flowers on the shroud. The St. Catherine Christ Pantocrator icon also has distinctive flower images in precisely the same relative positions. If the Shroud was the facial source for this icon as it seems to have been, then it is highly probable that the flower motif was also picked up from the shroud.

As we have noted, it is important to remember that the flower images on the Shroud of Turin may not be actual flower images. But for this argument that question is immaterial. If there are images that look like flowers, even if they are coincidental anomalies caused by background noise or weave irregularities, and they are in the same relative place as there are on the Pantocrator icon, then it does strengthen the argument that the icon was sourced from shroud.

We find this flower motif repeated elsewhere and frequently in pictures of Jesus from this time forward. We find it, commonly, in Byzantine epitaphioi a cloth with a full-length image of Jesus, frequently in burial repose used in Greek Orthodox liturgies for Good Friday.

Max Frei

Max Frei thought so. He thought pollen spores imbedded in the cloth might be used to determine where the cloth had been.

Frei was a highly respected criminalist who had headed up the Zurich Police Scientific Laboratory for many years. He retired in 1972 but continued to work as a consultant. The year after he retired and again in 1978, he was given the opportunity to take some sample dust from the surface of the shroud for examination. The dust was visible to the naked eye but it would take a microscope to see what was in that dust. Modern forensic science was about to meet the shroud, to look for trace evidence that might tell something of its provenance.

When Frei started his career shortly after World War II, police science labs were relatively new. Only sixteen years earlier, the United States Bureau of Investigation had set up a one-room technical laboratory in temporary space in Old Southern Railway Building in Washington, D.C. The lab’s one and only scientist, Special Agent Charles Appel, had equipped the lab with a microscope borrowed from Bausch and Lomb, an ultraviolet light for detecting blood, a special device for examining gun barrels and a small photographic darkroom setup that was less sophisticated then the home darkrooms of many pre-war hobbyists. In 1942, the same year that Max Frei started at the newly created Zurich lab, the U.S. Bureau of Investigation was renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the technical laboratory was christened the FBI Crime Laboratory. But it was still a small laboratory, one of very few labs in the newly evolving field of forensic science.

By 1973, forensics science was a well developed field with many specialties. Skilled technicians at the FBI lab were matching finger prints found at crime scenes to vast card files of fingerprint records.  They were matching typewriters to typed documents. They were matching teeth to dental records. Chemists were analyzing paper and ink, blood and all manner of substances. Microscopists were identifying trace evidence; tiny bits of plants and animals and minerals, bits of stuff so small that it could only be seen with optical microscopes or a relatively new device called the scanning electron microscope. The SEM scans tiny objects with a beam of electrons rather than by magnifying the light reflected from or passing through a specimen. A common method of collecting trace evidence was to use clear, adhesive tape pressed to a surface, a technique that the annals of forensic science usually credits to Max Frei in 1950.

Pollen Identification

One of the trace evidence specialties was pollen identification and Frei, trained as a biologist, was a renowned expert. He collected his samples from the shroud with sticky tape and then took them to his lab in Zurich. As historian Ian Wilson describes it:

Back in his laboratory in Zurich, Frei surveyed the dust he had collected under the microscope. His trained eye immediately identified mineral particles, fragments from hairs and fibers of plants, spores from bacteria and nonflowering plants such as mosses and fungi, and pollen grains from flowering plants-all consistent with the sort of microscopic debris the Shroud could be expected to have accumulated over the centuries. Being chiefly a botanist by training, Frei found the pollen to be of the greatest interest. As he was aware, pollen grains have an extremely resistant outer wall, the exine. Although so small as to be virtually invisible to the naked eye, these grains can and do retain their physical characteristics for literally hundreds of millions of years, being immune to almost any form of destruction. As Frei was also aware, when viewed under the [scanning] electron microscope pollen grains vary so considerably in physical characteristics that, thanks to careful classification of the different types over the years, it is possible to identify with certainty the precise genus of plant from which any grain has been derived. Frei realized that identification of the plants from which the pollen on the Shroud had been derived could lead to important deductions about the geographical regions in which the Shroud had been. (33)

Scanning Electron Microscope

But, as we now have come to realize, Frei may not have used the scanning electron microscope for identifying any of the pollen on the shroud. He never said that he did but implied it. Captions in photographs contained wording such as “pollen types found on the Shroud.” It is doubtful that there are any SEM photos of pollen actually found on the shroud. We have come to realize that some species that Frei identified, could not be identified with only an ordinary light microscope. It was a rhetorical sleight of hand.

What Frei reported was extraordinary. He identified fifty-eight different plants, many from the environs of Jerusalem and areas in Turkey that coincided nicely with Edessa and Constantinople. Those who were looking for confirmation of the shroud’s authenticity were ecstatic. Skeptics, on the other hand, were looking for holes.

One line of attack was to find fault, not with the science, but the man. Frei, it was reported, had made a mistake, a very embarrassing mistake that had absolutely nothing to do with the shroud or with pollen evidence.

Avinoam Danin and Uri Baruch

It would be up to Avinoam Danin, a botany professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Uri Baruch, a pollen specialist at the Israel Antiquities Authority, to try to salvage Frei's work. At a conference sponsored by the Missouri Botanical Society in St Louis, Missouri, Danin, speaking about the pollen evidence and floral images found on the shroud, reported that "In the light of our findings, it is highly probable that the shroud did in fact come from this part [the Jerusalem area] of the world."

But the problem was only compounded. The subject of floral images that Danin believed he saw on the shroud was being conflated with the Frei’s pollen observations because some of the plants were the same. That would be fine but many people doubted that Danin was really seeing these images of flowers. Danin wasn’t delusional. Others saw what seemed to be the same flowers.  But, as we will see later on when we have started to understand the shroud’s images better, they may simply appearances of flowers.

Baruch was Guarded

But Baruch was guarded in his reporting. He confirmed what Frei had observed but at the genus level and not a species level. That wasn’t very helpful for it greatly expanded the geographic area. A flower particular to a specific area in Frei’s interpretation might be found elsewhere in the world in places that even the greatest conspiracy theorists never thought to imagine that the shroud might have ever been.  Sadly, these concerns were ignored by many people who poured out web page after web page trying to prove that the shroud was real. Finally, in 1991, Danin clarified his position on the pollen evidence. It could not be used to show that the shroud had been in the Middle East. He did, however, argue that his identification of plant images on the shroud was sufficient. Was it?

I have yet to personally meet anyone who denies that there is an image of a man on the shroud. However, in cyberspace I have. One day I received an email from someone who claimed that what we think is an image is merely the happenstance accumulation of smudges and stains on the cloth. It was, he wrote, no different than an imaginary image of Jesus on a burned slice of toast or the Virgin Mary in the grain of a plank of wood. But, I wrote back, the image is too detailed, too realistic and too complex to be that. It is obviously an image of a man, whether real or fake.  But he persisted. His mind was made up. “You can’t prove it,” he wrote back. It could be pure coincidence. It raised an interesting question. Is there a threshold for perceiving an image?

Things People See on the Shroud

The images of a person, certainly a man if we look closely, exists on the shroud. And many of well pronounced features are part of that image. But there may be other parts of the images that some people claim to see that are pareidolic perceptions.

Takeo Watanabe’s views “that subliminally learning something ‘too well’” results in false positives may explain many reported images and features of the shroud image. A botanist may see images of flowers and plants. A numismaticist may see images of ancient coins. A dentist may see what looks like teeth. It would be totally unfair to say that this is what happened when such experts saw these things. But it would be unfair to you to not suggest the possibility.

Fluffy Shaped Sponge?

People have seen coins over the eyes; and not just coins but enough details to identify them as specific coins minted by Romans for Jewish use around the time of Jesus’ crucifixion. People have identified flowers and plants that are specific to the environs of Jerusalem. The list of things seen goes on and on. There are, supposedly, a hammer, a nail, a fluffy shaped sponge tied to a reed, a coil of rope, a pair of dice and part of a plaque with enough lettering in Greek, Latin and possibly Hebrew to identify it as saying, “Jesus of Nazareth.” But are these things really imaged on the cloth? Are there criteria for deciding?

Consensus among people who closely study the images is valid so long as that study is as completely objective as possible. Worldview nullification must be avoided at all cost. It is not proper to reject these images because you don’t believe the shroud is real. But it is fair to be skeptical, as in the case of the teeth (and for that matter the nail and lettering and other objects) because there is identifiable noise such as the banding.

It is my general impression that among most shroud researchers, but not all, that:

·         The evidence of scourging seen as various types of wounds is medically accurate and extraordinarily realistic. Those images are certainly there.

·         Many, if not most, and perhaps all objects are unconfirmed, unsubstantiated or suspect images; possibly pareidolia.

In the end, or sometime sooner or later, Frei’s work may be proven right after all, at least enough so to confirm the cloth’s journey from Jerusalem to Constantinople through the Anatolia. For now we must look at other evidence.

The Making of Linen

Here is roughly what we know: After harvesting flax plants, the long stems are threshed to remove seeds, leaves and roots so that only a stalk remains. In a step called retting, the stalks are then placed in pools of water or streams to rot away most of the stems while leaving the cellulose fibers intact.  The remaining material was then scotched, which means simply that it was scraped to remove remaining woody material from the stalk. Then it was hackled or combed to separate various grades of fibers. The finest, longest strands are used for what Pliny called bysus, a word derived from the biblical words bus and shesh, meaning fine linen. (Linen is also called peshet and pishta in the Old Testament and kittan in the 2^nd century Mishnah.)

Only two steps remain before weaving. The first is to twist or spin dozens of the fibers together into thread. The next is to bleach the thread, which is often tan or gray.  

Maillard Reaction

The other way is through and extraordinarily complex chemical reaction called a Maillard reaction. It takes place when amino acid reacts with sugar. It also produces chemical substances, melanoidins, that have a distinctive brownish or yellowish color similar to melanin.

Maillard reactions are also common in cooking when heat starts the reaction of amino compounds and sugars that are both together in a food. The brown color on toast is because of a Maillard reaction and not carmelization.

Eva Wittgenstein, a medical researcher at the University of Cincinnati discovered that a substance, dihydroxyacetone (DHA), caused darkening appearance on the skin. She had been experimenting with the substance, testing it as a pharmaceutical drug for treating a metabolism defect called Glycogen Storage Disease. The discovery that the drug darkened skin was accidental. In 1960, Coppertone, a manufacturer of protective suntan lotions, introduced Coppertone QT. The QT stood for Quick Tan, and their advertisements touted sunless  tans in three to five hours. It was DHA and it worked extraordinarily well if you wanted to be orange.

DHA, produced from sugar cane was not the only chemical that will react in this way with human amines. Erythrulose, a sugar syrup extracted from raspberries produces similar results but a less orange and more brownish color. Another chemical is Saponaria officinali. This a natural soap extracted from a wild perennial flower called Soapwort and Sweet William.

Carbon

Without carbon there would be no life as we know it. By that we don’t mean we wouldn’t have charcoal for Sunday barbeques or diamonds to wear on our fingers or graphite composite tennis rackets. We simply could not exist. Our bodies are made up of about 18% carbon in the form of carbon compounds. There are well over 10,000 carbon compounds including sugars and amino acids and DNA. We consume carbon in one form or another when we eat. We expel carbon dioxide when we breathe, which is a good thing because plants need it for photosynthesis. And that plants like it is a good thing because too much carbon dioxide is toxic. Nature, through metabolism, does an outstanding job of keeping carbon dioxide levels reasonable for the sustenance of life.

There are sixteen known types or isotopes of carbon but only three are thought to be naturally occurring on earth. They are known by the total number of protons and neutrons in the carbon atom. All forms of carbon have six protons, hence carbon 12 has six neutrons, carbon 13 has seven and carbon 14 has eight. Carbon 12 and carbon 13 are stable, meaning that short of being blown apart by an atom smasher or a nuclear reaction, they should last forever. Carbon 14, on the other hand, is not stable. It will, in time, if left alone, destroy itself all by itself.

The Making of Carbon 14

Our world is being constantly bombarded by tiny subatomic particles from outer space. Some of these particles come from our sun; others are from far away in our galaxy. Some even come from beyond our own galaxy, from the farthest reaches of the universe. These particles and may have travelled for millions and billions of years before entering our atmosphere where they collide with oxygen or nitrogen atoms. When they do they unleash a witch’s brew of new particles, which in turn smash into other atoms, unleashing even more particles. Some of these particles, either the ones from outer space or the ones produced in our atmosphere make it to the surface of the earth. Unless you are a speed reader, your body was struck by at least 100 of these particles by the time you finished this one sentence. Some like neutrinos may pass right through you, and then pass through the entire earth, then go off into space never to be heard from again. Some loosed particles, neutrons, interact with nitrogen atoms, specifically nitrogen 14, the most common form of nitrogen. When they do so they turn the nitrogen atom into a carbon 14 atom.

As it turns out, when carbon atoms meet oxygen atoms, and the circumstances are right, the atoms combine to form the chemical compound carbon dioxide (CO₂). The oxygen atoms are not all that fussy because they don’t care if the carbon atom is good old fashioned stable carbon or the radioactive variety. Then, because air in the atmosphere is always in motion, going sideways and up and down, the carbon dioxide with the unusual carbon 14 atom is fully mixed together with all other carbon dioxide molecules in the lower atmosphere. Plants use carbon dioxide in photosynthesis to create a host of organic compounds, mainly sugars; and some of those compounds have carbon 14 atoms. Animals eat plants or the eat the flesh of animals that eat plants and so those one-in-a-trillion carbon 14 atoms get spread around among all living things in very close to the same proportions found in the atmosphere. That means that one in every trillion of the trillions and trillions and trillions of carbon atoms that make up you and me, one in every trillion is a carbon 14 atom. That is true of everything inside the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich as well as the bread. Well, it is true if you eat the sandwich while it is fresh. But if you put it away and forget about it for a very long time—a very, very long time—it is not quite so true as it was when you made the sandwich. That is because carbon 14 atoms don’t stay around forever. As we said, they do destroy themselves.

5730

As soon as a plant dies it stops taking on carbon dioxide. And animals stop taking in any form of carbon. That means that the slices of tomato in your sandwich are only half as radioactive after 5730 years. That means that if we could count the regular carbon atoms and the carbon 14 atoms and calculate the ratio, we could figure out how old something is. And that means that means we should be able to figure out how old the shroud is because the linen cloth would have been made from newly harvested flax plants. That is, we could do so if we knew how much carbon 14 was produced year-by-year throughout history.

The astonishing thing is that the production of new carbon 14 atoms in the upper atmosphere and the decay of carbon 14 takes place at about the same rate. It’s uncanny. It is one of those amazing balancing acts that takes place in nature. In a sense, for every C14 atom that dies another one is born. It isn’t exact but it close enough. Scientists are quite certain that it has been this way for tens of thousands of years, perhaps millions of years. It does vary a bit year by year and estimated adjustments have been calculated by dating the rings of very old trees.  Well, that is until we started exploding nuclear bombs when we significantly upset this one of many, many balances of nature.

Chemograph

Is it serendipitous that the highlights and shadows of this chemograph (think photograph) appear as though created by reflected light? This visual quality is essential for our minds to be able to see the images as realistic pictures with perceived three-dimensionality?

Just as there is nothing like the Shroud's images in the world of art, there is nothing like them in nature; after all dead men do not normally leave images of themselves on burial cloths. Nature, of course, is filled with naturally formed images. There are petrified fossils and fossil molds. And sometimes when plants and animals are trapped between layers of rock and decompose, they leave carbon imprints on the rocks. The carbon is all that is left of them. We know of the ghastly thermal shadows of things and people from the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima. Leaves stain rocks and sidewalks but also when pressed between pages in a book for decades create highly detailed images of themselves.

But the Shroud images seem different. Except for part of a foot they are extraordinarily complete head to foot images. The part of the foot missing from the images may have been beyond the cloth. Another possibility, for which there is some anecdotal evidence, is that cloth was trimmed for bits of relic souvenirs.

Ian Wilson

Back in his laboratory in Zurich, Frei surveyed the dust he had collected under the microscope. His trained eye immediately identified mineral particles, fragments from hairs and fibers of plants, spores from bacteria and nonflowering plants such as mosses and fungi, and pollen grains from flowering plants-all consistent with the sort of microscopic debris the Shroud could be ex-pected to have accumulated over the centuries. Being chiefly a botanist by training, Frei found the pollen to be of the greatest interest. As he was aware, pollen grains have an extremely resistant outer wall, the exine. Although so small as to be virtually invisible to the naked eye, these grains can and do retain their physical characteristics for literally hundreds of millions of years, being immune to almost any form of destruction. As Frei was also aware, when viewed under the [scanning] electron microscope pollen grains vary so considerably in physical characteristics that, thanks to careful classification of the different types over the years, it is possible to identify with certainty the pre-cise genus of plant from which any grain has been de-rived. Frei realized that identification of the plants from which the pollen on the Shroud had been derived could lead to important deductions about the geographical regions in which the Shroud had been.