bloodstains

The Medically Accurate Images

The ever so medically accurate images have convinced many people that the shroud cannot be a forgery. There are just too many details to reasonably imagine that a medieval forger, without a modern knowledge of forensic pathology could have created the shroud images including the bloodstains, unless, as Crossan supposes, he had an actual victim. But it had to be more than a victim to use as a model because some of the details are invisible without modern technology. Fred Zugibe tells us:

Under ultraviolet fluorescent photography, all of the wounds show a serum retraction ring of albumin around them that would have been completely unknown to an artist forger. It is very important to note that no image is present wherever blood is present, indicating that the image formation occurred after the blood staining and that the presence of blood prevented image formation in those areas. Although this is not discernable with. the naked eye, this was demonstrated by Adler [Professor Emeritus at Western Connecticut State University and one of the world’s leading authorities on the chemistry of blood] who removed blood from several fibers in image areas by subjecting them to proteolytic enzymatic hydrolysis (which removes blood). No image was present on the fibers that contained blood. If this were done by human hands, the artist would have had to paint all of the bloodstains with the albumin halos in all of the wounds and blood flows, including the blood of the scourge marks, using human blood and then paint the body image around them in their precise locations and eliminate images wherever there was blood. A complicated process, indeed.

Several forensic pathologists have examined the details of the images and the peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals. The conclusions are always the same. This is the image of a man who died of crucifixion, who is in a medically accurate state of rigor mortis, with medically precise wounds. The images are far too accurate to have been the product of anyone with only a medieval knowledge of anatomy or medicine. The blood is real human blood and it could only have come to be on the cloth by contact with real wounds.

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.

Bloodstains  

There are a number of very noticeable bloodstains on the cloth. They are particularly pronounced around the top of the head, on one visible wrist and on the man’s arms and feet. There is a distinct and large bloodstain on the side of the man’s chest. Where the backside image appears on the cloth, near the small of the man’s back, there is a large bloodstain that looks like a puddle. It looks like, and it may well be, that blood from the chest wound ran around the side of the body and pooled on the cloth.

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 Real Sudarium?

We can imagine that there may have been several cloths: the shroud, the face cloth or sudarium, a chin band, a strip of cloth to tie the wrists together and perhaps a similar strip for the feet. It was, however, the sudarium, the towel that was being mentioned in Constantinople. Was it real, as well?

There is a contender for the real deal, one that has an uncanny and astonishing relationship to the shroud that is in Turin. It is the Sudarium of Oviedo. This piece of cloth was never in Edessa or Constantinople. But if the historical record is correct, it was in Jerusalem. If the shroud is genuine, it was in Jerusalem at the same time as the shroud.

In the city of Oviedo, in northern Spain, in a small chapel attached to the city’s cathedral, there is a small bloodstained dishcloth size piece of linen that some believe is one of the burial cloths mentioned in John’s Gospel. Tradition has it that this cloth was used to cover Jesus’ bloodied face following his death on the cross. Forensic analysis of the bloodstains suggests strongly that both the Sudarium and the shroud covered the same human head at closely different times. Bloodstain patterns show that the Sudarium was placed about a man’s head while he was in a vertical position. If we assume that the man was a crucifixion victim then we can presume that this was while he was still on the cross. It was then removed before the shroud was placed over the man’s face. 

The Sudarium, unquestionably, has been in Oviedo since the eighth century and in Spain since the seventh century.

Documents in the late Roman period and the early middle ages are often sketchy and prone to chronological mistakes, and those pertaining to the Sudarium are no exception. But from a multiplicity of sources, scholars have extracted core elements of historical certainty and plausibility sufficient for a fair degree of historical reconstruction. We can be confident that the Sudarium came to Oviedo from Jerusalem.

The Sudarium was Carbon Dated

There is a problem. The Sudarium was carbon dated and it came up short. It appears to be cloth that was produced about A.D. 700 plus or minus about 50 years, which coincides with the time the cloth appeared in Spain. If those tests are accurate and meaningful then the Sudarium cannot be authentic. There are some concerns about the quality of the tests that arise and a substantive lack of quality sampling, the provenance of the samples themselves, etc. Even Joe Nickell, its primary skeptic agrees:

It the tests were properly done on samples taken from the Oviedo cloth—an uncertainty, at this point—the cloth appears to date from circa 695, not long before the cloth was reportedly taken to Oviedo in 718. (32)

If those tests are accurate, how do we explain the extraordinary symmetry between the bloodstains on the Sudarium and those on the shroud. Do we simply decide that one is to be trusted and the other not.

Thanks to Nicholas Allan

Fortunately, Nicholas Allan did build a gigantic camera and created a life-size image on cloth of a life-size statue, he created an amazing photograph. It looked quite realistic. But when attempts are made to see if it is anything like a height-field it fails. Allan’s photograph is a 3D representation in a 2D field. The shroud images are height-fields from which a 3D representation in a 2D field can be derived.

In the case of the shroud we don’t get a perfect three-dimensional rendering for many reasons: If, as scientists suspect, what is encoded on the shroud 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. We don’t know how fading of the images and the aging of the cloth might have altered the accuracy of height-field data. There are bloodstains and dirt that cause distortions.

The negativity and the so-called 3D encoding hardly cover the mystery of the images’ properties.

Mind Numbing Realism

It is hard to imagine how a forger achieved such realism as we see was in light of what was known about human anatomy and forensic pathology by the Middle Ages. Many skeptics of the shroud’s authenticity focus their and our attention only on the arguments that support medieval origin and shy from the mind-numbing realism found in the shroud images, realism that was almost imperceptible in a negative image. Some, such a John Dominic Crossan, seem to be more realistic and recognize the near to sheer impossibility of this.

Part of the realism is in the bloodstains. As forensic scientists and chemists now know, the stains are from real human or at least primate blood. Immunological, fluorescence and spectrographic tests reveal this. ABO typing of blood antigens suggests that the blood is type AB. However, there is considerable doubt that blood typing is accurate for old blood for various reasons. The stains are from real bleeding from real wounds on a real human body that came into direct contact with the cloth. There is no doubt about that. 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 serum retraction ring.

Pathological Detail

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.

Wrist Wounds

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.

Garza-Valdes and the Mayan Jade Artifact

In 1983, Leoncio Garza-Valdes, a medical doctor in San Antonio, Texas, and an amateur archaeologist, was examining a Mayan jade artifact that was assumed to be modern forgery. He was puzzled by lacquer-like coating on the object that he speculated might have been produced by bacteria. Garza-Valdes took the artifact to the radiocarbon dating lab at the University of Arizona. Scientists there were able to scrape off enough of the coating, as well as some bloodstains on the object, to give a date of about A.D. 400. The carving style suggested that the age should have been about 200 B.C.. However, if the bioplastic-polymer, for that is what it seemed to be, had been forming over the centuries, it would be a mixture of older and newer material. So perhaps the object really was 600 years older.

Following the carbon dating of the shroud, it occurred to Garza-Valdes that perhaps the fibers of the shroud were also coated with a bioplastic coating. And perhaps this also affected the carbon dating of mummy 1770. If ancient linen was subject to such a coating, then all bets were off on the carbon dating of the shroud until it was examined.

Garza-Valdes managed to inspect *** in Turin. Stephen Mattingly ****

Miracle or not

n many ways a naturalistic explanation for the images is most satisfying. Like the stained patterns of leaf on a stone, like a fossil in clay of a prehistoric creature and like jagged tracing of lightening on the trunk of a tree, these sort of images can be explained scientifically. They are perfectly natural. We could then certainly say the images on the Shroud are images of a real man. And because of the wounds and the accompanying bloodstains forensic pathologists can see that the images are of a man who was scourged and crucified.

Is it Jesus? The wounds are consistent with the biblical narratives. Some wounds, like the whip marks, are consistent with a Roman flagrum, a whip with bits of iron or bone attached to thongs of leather. Crucifixion victims were regularly scourged. But the puncture wound to one side of the chest and the numerous small puncture wounds about the man's head—suggestive of a crown of thorns—are probably uncommon but consistent with the gospels.

Was the Body Stolen?

One possibility, the oldest one, is that the body was stolen. If the Shroud is genuine that seems unlikely. Would Jesus' followers have taken the naked body covered in blood without also taking the cloth that wrapped it? We must consider the Jewish beliefs of ritual impurity from contact with corpses. Blood shed in death was considered sacrosanct. If Jesus' very Jewish disciples had stolen the body, they almost certainly would have taken the bloody shroud along for internment. This would be so even if it was for burial in a charnel pit, the common grave of non-wealthy Jews in ancient Jerusalem. We must consider, as well, that observationally (forensically) the bloodstains appear unmolested.  Dried blood should have cracked and broken apart if the body was removed. And any blood that was still moist should have smeared if the body was unwrapped. 

Wild Speculation

This is speculation. Yet it resonates with the collimated appearance of the images and the topographical spatial information that can be plotted as three-dimensional images. It is also consistent with something that forensic experts tell us. The body images show no visible signs of decomposition and the linen fabric is not damaged by any bodily decomposition products. It is also consistent with a baffling observation about the bloodstains. Dried blood, in acting like weak glue between body and cloth, should have cracked and broken apart if the body was unwrapped by convention physical means. Small fibers of blood-soaked linen should have pulled apart. Yet this isnot observed in the bloodstains.

A highly imaginative suggestion of how mechanical transparency might work is that somehow, no method known to science, the strong nuclear force that holds together the subatomic particles of the nucleus was turned off while electromagnetism and gravity remained in effect. When that happened the images were impressed on the cloth as it passed through the body, perhaps by the impact of elementary particles let loose in the process.

Gary Viken

We intuitively trusted Biblical Archeological Review, when in the November-December 1998 issue; it carried two articles on the shroud. One by Walter McCrone merely restated his findings of paint particles and his conclusion that it was a painting. The other by Gary Vikan, the Director of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland, revisited the carbon 14 dating, the d’Arcis Memorandum, and argued that the shroud was produced for the lay brotherhoods of Francis of Assisi . . .

 . . . that his piety and his cult of self-mortification engendered. These Christians appreciated and understood Jesus’ wounds in a very physical way. This is the world of the holy shroud; these are the people for whom it would have held special meaning; and these, certainly, are the people for whom it was made . . . these medieval Christians would have understood that the nails must have gone through Jesus’ wrists in order to hold the body to the cross (although in medieval art these wounds are invariably in the palms). And their cult images would match this physical understanding of crucifixion, even to the point of adding human blood . . .  All of which is to say that the indication of nail holes in the wrists and what some claim is the presence of blood on the linen need not add up to a miracle.

Is there any basis for this claim? The best Vikan can do is to assume that medieval penitents are comparable to modern-day Spanish American Catholic penitents in New Mexico who practice self-mortification and self-crucifixion, very much incorrectly. He also claims in his article that there are many images like those of the shroud. That is true if we allow for paintings that are not negatives, are not height-fields that produce 3D representations in 2D space.  Vikan is right if we also ignore the medically accurate bloodstains and images resulting from inexplicably caused chemical changes to the linen.

Biblical Archeological Review

It is interesting to note that in a preface to the Vikan article, the editors of Biblical Archeological Review acknowledged the problem with the mysterious images and some of the forensic pathology. They wrote:

. . . although radiocarbon tests have dated the shroud to 1260-1390 A. D., no one has been able to account for the shadowy image of a naked 6-foot-tall man that appears on the shroud. With bloodstains on the back, wrists, feet, side and head the image appears to be that of a crucified man. The details - the direction of the flow of blood from the wounds, the placement of the nails through the wrists rather than the palms - displays a knowledge of crucifixion that seems too accurate to have been that of a medieval artist.

The real keystone of Vikan’s argument was a simple appeal to common sense. And because it may resonate with our worldview, we intuitively trust his polemics. He imaginatively and fictively quotes students of the shroud and then interprets what they think:

 ‘It doesn’t look like any known work of art,’ they say. The implication is that its creation was somehow miraculous, perhaps caused by a sudden burst of cosmic energy as the cloth came into contact with the dead body of Jesus.

We intuitively trust him though there is no truth in this statement. In fact, most shroud researchers, to their credit, avoid metaphysical or supernatural interpretations and stress the point that science and objective history cannot provide such explanations. Most students of the shroud are highly critical of those few who posit unfounded hypotheses to support a miracle.

Looking At Evidence that Contradicts Worldview

If we are to truly understand this historical artifact, we must look at the preponderance of evidence that contradicts worldview assumptions. We must consider all of it. We must weigh its significance. We must look for patterns of corroboration and examine all problems with any of the evidence. As I said at the beginning of this book, there has been a paucity of fact-embracing skepticism on the shroud. The skeptics are selective with the evidence and generally will not go beyond the carbon 14 testing, the d’Arcis memorandum and McCrone’s finding of paint pigments. They may, like Vikan, offer speculative explanations but they don’t address the contradictions. That is regrettable. The crime against Galileo was not that he was arrested or silenced. It was that his evidence, his contradictions, his conclusions were dismissed for no other reason than that they were incredulous to a prevailing worldview. Crossan took a step in the right direction in acknowledging the problem of the realism in the bloodstains and the images.

The shroud is important because it challenges worldview thinking. It challenges what we may think we know historically about the passion sequence, Jesus’ crucifixion and his burial. It potentially challenges what we may think about the resurrection. It challenges biblical scholarship and our modern day distrust of the Gospel accounts. It challenges two centuries of progress in the scholarly quest for the historical Jesus. It challenges the discourse on science and religion. And as Pope John Paul II states — a man keenly aware of intellectual dilemma — the Shroud of Turin “challenges our intelligence.” 

It may turn out that the shroud is a medieval relic-forgery, as Crossan supposes. It may be that the shroud is authentic and that a perfectly natural explanation for the images eludes us for now. Absent such explanations, we may wonder: did something happen in the tomb? Did something happen within that linen shroud? Did something happen that was so powerful that an image was translated to the cloth?

Fred Zugibe

Under ultraviolet fluorescent photography, all of the wounds show a serum retraction ring of albumin around them that would have been completely un-known to an artist forger. It is very important to note that no image is present wherever blood is present, in-dicating that the image formation occurred after the blood staining and that the presence of blood prevented image formation in those areas. Although this is not discernable with. the naked eye, this was demonstrated by Adler [Professor Emeritus at Western Connecticut State University and one of the world’s leading authorities on the chemistry of blood] who removed blood from several fibers in image areas by subjecting them to proteolytic enzymatic hydrolysis (which removes blood). No image was present on the fibers that contained blood. If this were done by human hands, the artist would have had to paint all of the bloodstains with the albumin halos in all of the wounds and blood flows, including the blood of the scourge marks, using human blood and then paint the body image around them in their precise locations and eliminate images wherever there was blood. A complicated process, indeed.