"The Shroud is not a fake" (Scientists say there is no way to falsify or duplicate it)

Enea, the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, has published a report on five years of experiments conducted in the ENEA center of Frascati on the “shroud-like coloring of linen fabrics by far ultraviolet radiation”. “Simply put: we tried to understand how the Shroud of Turin was imprinted by an image so special that it constitutes its charm, and poses a great and very radical challenge, "to identify the physical and chemical processes capable of generating a color similar to that of the image on the Shroud. "

Scientists (Di Lazzaro, Murra, Santoni, Nichelatti and Baldacchini) start from the last (and only) comprehensive interdisciplinary exam of the sheet, completed in 1978 by a team of American scientists from Sturp (Shroud of Turin Research Project). A starting point which all too often those who write about and dissect the Shroud prefer not to take into account, in spite what is evidenced by available information verified by an accurate control on “peer reviewed” journals, that is, approved by other scientists in objective and independent ways. The Enea report, with a lot of fair play and almost "en passant", very clearly refutes the hypothesis that the Shroud of Turin might be the work of a medieval forger. The hypothesis was supported – against many weighted arguments – by the results of the disputable and probably biased - C14 measurements; a test whose credibility has been rendered very fragile not only by objective difficulties (the possibility that the fabric is contaminated is very high, especially since its historical journey is only partially known), but also from proven factual errors of calculation and the inability to obtain “raw data” from the laboratories for the necessary controls. In spite of repeated requests. An omission which in itself can throw a heavy shadow over the scientific accuracy of the episode.

The report notes: “The double image (front and back) of a scourged and crucified man, barely visible on the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin has many physical and chemical characteristics that are so particular that the staining which is identical in all its facets, would be impossible to obtain today in a laboratory, as discussed in numerous articles listed in the references. This inability to repeat (and therefore falsify) the image on the Shroud makes it impossible to formulate a reliable hypothesis on how the impression was made.

In fact, today Science is still not able to explain how the body image was formed on the Shroud. As a partial justification, Scientists complain that it is impossible to take direct measurements on the Shroud cloth. In fact, the latest in situ experimental analysis of the physical and chemical properties of the body image of the Shroud was carried out in 1978 by a group of 31 scientists under the aegis of the Shroud of Turin Research Project, Inc. (STURP). The scientists used modern equipment for the time, made available by several manufacturers for a market value of two and a half million dollars, and took a number of non-destructive infrared spectroscopy measurements, visible and ultraviolet, X-ray fluorescence, thermograph, pyrolysis, mass spectrometry, micro-Raman analysis, transmission photograph, microscopy, removal of fibrils and micro-chemical tests”. The analysis carried out on the Shroud did not find significant amounts of pigments (dyes, paints) nor traces of designs. Based on the results of dozens of measurements, the STURP researchers concluded that the body image is not painted nor printed, nor obtained by heating. Furthermore, the color of the image resides on the outer surface of the fibrils that make up the threads of the cloth, and recent measurements of fragments of the Shroud show that the thickness of staining is extremely thin, around 200 nm = 200 billionths of a meter, or one fifth of a thousandth of a millimeter, which corresponds to the thickness of the primary cell wall of the so-called single linen fiber. We recall that a single linen thread is made up of about 200 fibrils.

Other important information derived from the results of the STURP measurements are as follows: The blood is human, and there is no image beneath the bloodstains; the gradient color contains three-dimensional information of the body; colored fibers (image) are more fragile than undyed fibers; surface staining of the fibrils of the image derive from an unknown process that caused oxidation, dehydration and conjugation in the structure of the cellulose of the linen”. In other words, the color is a result of an accelerated linen aging process”.

As already mentioned, until now all attempts to reproduce an image on linen with the same characteristics have failed. Some researchers have obtained images with a similar appearance to the image of the Shroud, but nobody has been able to simultaneously reproduce all microscopic and macroscopic characteristics. “In this sense, the origin of the Shroud image is still unknown. This seems to be the core of the so-called “mystery of the Shroud”: regardless of the age the Shroud, whether it is medieval (1260 - 1390) as shown by the controversial dating by radiocarbon, or older as indicated by other investigations, and regardless of the actual importance of controversial historical documents on the existence of the Shroud in the years preceding 1260, the most important question, the “question of questions” remains the same: how did that body image appear on the Shroud?”.

There are two possibilities, the scientists write, on how the sheet of the Shroud was placed around the corpse: placed above and below (not in full contact with the whole body stiffened by rigor mortis) or pressed on the body and tied in order to be in contact with almost the entire body surface.

“The first method is supported by the fact that there is a precise relationship between the intensity (gradient) of the image and the distance between the body and the cloth. Furthermore, the image is also present in areas of the body not in contact with the cloth, such as immediately above and below the hands, and around the tip of the nose. The second method is less likely because the typical geometric deformations of a three dimension body brought into contact in two dimension sheet are missing. Moreover, there is no imprint of body hips. Consequently, we can deduce that the image was not formed by contact between linen and body”.

It is this observation, “coupled with the extreme superficiality of the coloring and the lack of pigments” that “makes it extremely unlikely that a shroud-like picture was obtained using a chemical contact method, both in a modern laboratory and even more so by a hypothetical medieval forger”. “There is no image beneath the blood stains. This means that the traces of blood deposited before the image was. Therefore, the image was formed after the corpse was laid down. Furthermore, all the blood stains have well-defined edges, no burrs, so it can be assumed that the corpse was not removed from the sheet. “There are no signs of putrefaction near the orifices, which usually occur around 40 hours after death. Consequently, the image is not the result of putrefaction gases and the corpse was not left in the sheet for more than two days”.

One of the assumptions related to the formation of the image was that regarding some form of electromagnetic energy (such as a flash of light at short wavelength), which could fit the requirements for reproducing the main features of the Shroud image, such as superficiality of color, color gradient, the image also in areas of the body not in contact with the cloth and the absence of pigment on the sheet. The first attempts made to reproduce the face on the Shroud by radiation, used a CO2 laser which produced an image on a linen fabric that is similar at a macroscopic level. However, microscopic analysis showed a coloring that is too deep and many charred linen threads, features that are incompatible with the Shroud image. Instead, the results of ENEA “show that a short and intense burst of VUV directional radiation can color a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin, including shades of color, the surface color of the fibrils of the outer linen fabric, and the absence of fluorescence”.

“However, Enea scientists warn, "it should be noted that the total power of VUV radiations required to instantly color the surface of linen that corresponds to a human of average height, body surface area equal to = 2000 MW/cm2 17000 cm2 = 34 thousand billion watts makes it impractical today to reproduce the entire Shroud image using a single laser excimer, since this power cannot be produced by any VUV light source built to date (the most powerful available on the market come to several billion watts )”.

However the Shroud image “has some features that we are not yet able to reproduce – they admit - for example, the gradient of the image caused by a different concentration of yellow colored fibrils that alternate with unstained fibrils”. And they warn: “We are not at the conclusion, we are composing pieces of a fascinating and complex scientific puzzle”. The enigma of the image of the Shroud of Turin is still “a challenge for intelligence”, as John Paul II said.

But there are serious problems with the view that this is the burial cloth of Christ, even if we ignore carbon dating tests in 1988 that showed the cloth may be only 600 or 700 years old.

The 1988 Carbon dating tests have been invalidated. The sample has been proved to have been a PATCHED area of the shroud. It was taken in violation of the protocols established by the STURP team, from an area they identified as not homogenous with the main body of the Shroud in that it seemed to be chemically different from the main body (it fluoresced differently, had somewhat different properties than the rest of the Shroud).

In 2005, it was shown that the sample was cut from an area that had been REWOVEN in the 15-16 Century to repair a frayed area using a skilled technique called French Invisible Reweaving in which new threads were skillfully rewoven into the old threads after being artfully dyed to match the old.

In fact, the C14 test ACCURATELY dated a melange of old, original Shroud FLAXEN LINEN of unknown age mixed with NEWLY added 15th or 16th Century dyed COTTON threads... in a varied proportion, depending on which sub sample was burned of between 40% new to 60% new threads... which skewed the dating severely. In fact, they skewed the dates so much that the resulting tests reported AT THE TIME fell outside the range of confidence of the test between the samples! THE TESTING SCIENTISTS SHOULD HAVE KNOWN THE SAMPLES WERE NOT HOMOGENOUS!!!! In fact, the difference in the reported dating was proportionate to the proportion of the newer material in the subsample.

Harry Gove, the inventor of the C14 testing system used to date the Shroud, when asked "How old would the original material had to have been, given a known date of 15-16th Century and a 40-60% contamination to skew the date to the amount the final tests reported?" He did some calculations and said "Give or take 100 years, 1st Century!"

Three independent researchers approaching the matter using three different methods, reported the findings in peer-reviewed journals. The samples taken from the shroud and tested in 1988 from the ONE SITE the STURP scientists agree should be avoided, were corrupted by 16th century repairs. . . The C14 tests of 1988 are totally invalid! This is now settled science.

Only the skeptics keep pointing to invalid science and ignoring that science has moved on in the 23 years since a mistake was made... because sloppy science was done.

In December 2009, archaeologists announced the discovery of a shroud-like cloth in a cave in Jerusalem that dated to the time of Christ. Unfortunately, it was made with a simple two-way weave — not the twill weave used on the Turin Shroud, which textile experts say was introduced more than 1000 years after Christ lived.

MORE BS! The Egyptians had three over 1 twill used in their mummies' inner wrappings... It is just a finer quality cloth! Rich people could afford to buy better weaves. That is another red herring raised by the skeptics, and it is a lie. There were cloths made of Byssus, too... a transparent cloth that we have difficulty making today... it's made from the hairs from a very rare sea urchin... and is far finer than silk.That doesn't mean our ancestors couldn't weave it. In other words, there were many variations in the quality of cloth 2000 years ago. It all wasn't one over one weave. The Shroud was woven on a wall loom... something that was no longer being used in Europe or the eastern Mediterranean after about the fifth century... But that doesn't mean someone MIGHT have been using one all the way to the thirteenth century. You still see examples of them in use in Africa today. That means nothing too. But there are MANY three over one twill cloths from the first century and before that survive. What's more important is the method of bleaching that was used... it fell out of practice almost world wide in the fifth century. How would a medieval forger know that?

The Jewish burial practices were WRITTEN down... just as much of the obligations of Jewish life were written down... and we KNOW what they were. A sindon was used if you could afford one... a sindon was a large Single cloth, a shroud. Joseph of Arimathea was a wealthy man. The bible says he bought one... read the original GREEK... a "fine Linen cloth," a sindon. The greek verb "entulisso" includes a definition "to enwrap" which is what a Shroud does... and it also means to twist and wind the cloth around itself... which is what one does when one takes a flat cloth and twists it into a rope like kerchief to make a long narrow strip to bind something that needs tying. Jewish tradition required that the dead be bound at the jaw, wrists and ankles with STRIPS of cloth to prevent the mouth from gaping open and limbs from flopping akimbo. THERE are your strips of linen. They were NOT bound like egyptian mummies. NO Jewish burial has ever been found so bound in multiple swaddling strips. They HAVE been found with wound cloth wrapped around the ankles and wrists and a similar binding circling the skull.

A year after a burial, the family would return to the tomb, collect the bones and place them in the central pit, the ossuary, amassing them with the ancestors bones. This would be much complicated if the body were entangled in a mass of rotting cloth.

The facecloth exists to this day... but it did NOT cover the face... it wrapped "around" the face. It was twisted into a long rope like kerchief and was used to tie the jaw closed, passing under the jaw, around the face, behind the ears, under the beard, and tied at the crown of the head to keep the mouth closed. It is called the Sudarium (sweat cloth) of Oviedo and is kept in the Cathedral at Oviedo Spain. It bears matching blood stains with the Shroud, a bloody hand print where it was used to cover the head of Jesus when he was on the Shroud and carried to the tomb, then taken off, rolled into the binding, which is obvious by the blood stains, and then tied around the face. This is the cloth that was found apart from the burial clothes... just as if Jesus got up... walked a ways and then pulled it from around his face and dropped it.

Then bible may be "authoritative" but it is NOT exhaustive. There are many things done in Jewish burial practices that were not listed in the Bible that were done to Jesus... We know they had to be done... but they were glossed over in a few words of "in the manner of the Jews."

Walter C. McCrone, head of a Chicago research institute and a specialist in authenticating art objects, examined the shroud. He found a pale, gelatin-based substance speckled with particles of red ochre on fibres from the part of the cloth that supposedly showed the figure of Christ. He also found that fibers from the “wounds” had stains, not of blood, but of particles of a synthetic vermilion developed in the Middle Ages. He said the practice of painting linen with gelatin-based temperas began in the late thirteenth century and was common in the fourteenth.

Walter C. McCrone is the ONLY researcher of the Shroud who REFUSED to have his work peer-reviewed despite his agreement to do so in order to be given samples. His ONLY publications on the Shroud were in his own vanity press magazine The Microscopist published by McCrone Research Inc., and sometimes edited by Walter C. McCrone. His findings (the shroud was painted with vermilion [HgS] and red ochre/iron oxide [Fe₂O₃] paint in a dilute egg albumin solution) have been completely DISPROVED in peer-reviewed scientific journals by scientists using far more sensitive instruments than McCrone's optical and polarized light microscopes.

NOT ONE other researcher, and there have been hundreds, looking at what McCrone looked at has seen what McCrone claims to have seen. While there are scattered Fe₂O₃ and HgS particles on the shroud, they are randomly scattered, contaminating both image and non-image areas. At no time are there sufficient concentrations of either to rise to visibility.

McCrone sees the image is formed with quot;paint". This cannot possibly be in agreement with what we now KNOW forms the image:

The substance is a dried carbohydrate mixture of starch fractions and various saccharides (sugars). It is as thin (180 to 600 nanometers) as the wall of a soap bubble. It is thinner than the invisible glare proof coating on modern eyeglasses. . . In some places the coating has turned a golden brown. This is the result of a chemical change: the formation of a complex carbon-carbon double molecular bond within the coating. There are two ways this could have happened chemically: 1) caramelization, whereby heat caused molecular breakdown into other volatile compounds and 2) a Maillard reaction in which a carbonyl group of sugars reacted with an amino group producing N-substituted glycosylamine. An unstable glycosylamine undergoes Amadori rearrangement, forming ketosamines, which then form nitrogenous polymers and melanoidins. Voila, pictures of Jesus.
There is a problem with caramelization. The amount of heat required for browning would also heat the cellulose fiber sufficiently to change its crystalline structure and cause it to change color as well. That has not happened. Where a picture bearing bit of coating is removed, either with adhesive or with a reducing agent such as diimide, the fiber beneath is clear and un-ablated.
A Maillard reaction seems more promising because of the presence of amines needed for a Maillard reaction. Of course, it didn't need to be Jesus; at least chemically. It could have been any recently deceased person.

Ergo, NO paint! This alone COMPLETELY discredits McCrone.

Microscopist McCrone claims "No Blood on the Shroud" McCrone goes further and baldly states the "blood stains" are merely a Vermillion (HgS) and Iron Oxide paint mixture. He also states categorically that the Iron Oxide is "earthen" in nature and could not come from blood. Yet world renowned experts on blood, blood fractions, blood remnants, and forensic blood disagree.

Let's look at other tests done by scientists who don't rely on what they can see through a microscope, say the pyrolysis mass spectrometer tests, much more discriminating that what can be seen through a light microscope, that show that what vermillion (HgS) exists on the shroud is again, random, insufficient to be visible, and not at all associated with the blood stains.

Instead of discredited McCrone, take the testimony of chemist Dr. Alan Adler and biophysicist Dr. John Heller, experts on blood and blood fractions, who state categorically in peer-reviewed scientific Journals, that the blood stains consist of hemoglobin and its derivatives. Aside from light microscopy, Heller and Adler tested for hemochromagen (positive), cyanmethemoglobin (positive), bile pigment bilirubin (positive), and proteolytic enzymes (positive), human specific protein albumin (positive), presence of serum halos around stains (positive), and immunological determination that the blood is of primate origin. Perhaps we should look at Yale University's Dr. Joseph Gall's spectrophotometer tests that showed the blood absorbing light in 410 nanometers... a test that he states is "specific" for blood as "nothing in nature that absorbs light at four hundred ten nanometers that strongly". Or perhaps we should accept the word of Dr. Bruce Cameron, whose "double doctorate is dedicated to hemoglobin in all its many forms", who on reviewing the test results stated "You both should know what it is. It's old acid methemoglobin." (a remnant compound of aged blood.)

Ergo, according to some of the world's top experts on blood, the blood stains on the Shroud of Turin, are exactly that... blood stains. Again McCrone's bald statements are refuted. I could also go into McCrone's attempts to sabotage other researcher's work including preventing his own colleagues from having access to the samples of Shroud threads he had.

You want sources?

Adler, Alan. "The origin and nature of blood on the Turin Shroud" in Turin Shroud - Image of Christ? William Meacham, ed. (Hong Kong: Turin Shroud Photographic Exhibition Organising Committee, 1987), 57-9.
Adler, Alan." Updating Recent Studies on the Shroud of Turin" Archaeological Chemistry: Organic, Inorganic, and Biochemical Analysis, American Chemical Society Symposium Series No. 625, Chapter 17 (1996), 223-8.
Ford, David. "The Shroud of Turin 'Blood' Images: Blood or Paint? A History of Science Inquiry" University of Maryland Baltimore (2000), PDF file, "http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/ford1.pdf", 2/17/2005. Heller, J.H. and A.D. Adler, "Blood on the Shroud of Turin", Applied Optics 19:2742-4 (1980).
Heller, J.H. and A.D. Adler, "A Chemical Investigation of the Shroud of Turin", Canadian Society of Forensic Sciences Journal 14: 81-103 (1981).
Porter, Daniel. "The Chemical Nature of the Shroud" http://www.shroudstory.com/faq-chemistry.htm/ (2005), 2/17/2005.
Rogers, Raymond N. "New Tests Prove 1988 Carbon 14 Dating Invalid: Shroud of Turin Shown to be Much Older". Thermochimica ActaVolume 425: 189-194, (2005).

In the 1980s, Jesuit priest Robert A. Wild expressed surprise that the bloodstains showed no trace of smearing after all the movement and transport the body would have endured. Wild also noted that the hands of the body masked the genitals. He said this couldn’t be right. No matter how you arrange a body after rigor mortis, he said, the hands cannot cover the genitals unless you prop up the elbows on the body and bind the hands tightly in place. Yet this is not what the shroud’s image shows.

As mentioned, the hands ARE bound in place... and, ReMomof7, Barrie Schwortz, the principal light photographer of the 1978 STURP project has told me that under extreme computer enhancement, the genitals of the man on the shroud are just barely discernible, not completely covered... and he was circumcised. The genitals are just at the extreme edge of the range of the terrain map data.

Barrie is Jewish, and maintains the primary Shroud.com archive site where all of the scientific and scholarly papers are kept and available for people to see. He took most of the photographs you see of the scientists working on the Shroud in 1978, and the photos of the Shroud that are published on the Web... from that examination. He is in a position to know what computer enhancement has shown.

Interestingly, this date accords with the carbon-14 tests, which dated the shroud to about the first quarter of the 1300s — although some information suggests that this is the date the cloth was repaired, and the repaired cloth was the part that was carbon-dated. The date agrees with art expert Walter McCrone’s estimate of the age based on known painting styles (see 6th point above).

As to "Painting styles" of the 14th Century... that is BS too. No one in the 14th century was painting ANYTHING in this style. NOTHING. period. Many art experts have looked for anything even remotely similar and have found not one similar work. Not one. Jesus was never portrayed nude. Realism of this nature was not a stylistic of the period. So that was more bunk in this article you are citing. There are hundreds of scholars who will call that claim BS. I challenge anyone to come up with a painting from the period that matches the "painting style" of the Shroud from the period. This is just another one of the lies of the skeptics used to rope in the ignorant.

In 2005, N.D. Wilson, a fellow of literature at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, showed it would have been easy for a medieval to create a 3-D photonegative. Wilson painted faces on glass, put the painted panes on linen, and left it in the sun for various lengths of time. The images Wilson produced look remarkably similar to the Shroud of Turin, although Wilson was the first to admit that this in itself did not disprove the Shroud’s authenticity.

Sorry, Wilson's image was NOT 3D... it was a flat photograph. and had no 3D qualities at all. It also faded quite rapidly with exposure to the sun as the rest of the linen quickly starched to match the rest of the unexposed linen. His work was crude and lacked many of the criteria for "duplicating" the Shroud. It had all been done before in the 1930s, as well. . . and was debunked then. Wilson was also working with a FOREKNOWLEDGE of negative methodology, something a medieval artisan would not have... and was working from a photo negative, duplicating a negative photograph to get his results. Again, a medieval forger would not have had an exemplar to work with. And, again, the Shroud does not fade with exposure to light. Ergo, it was not made this way. We KNOW what the image is made from... and it is NOT a light photograph. So these skeptics are merely dancing, trying to find a way to explain it away.

The brilliant blood shrouds were most likely one or another of the copies of the Shroud that were made by pious artists... there are 27 known copies in existence and some of them, to this day, have brilliant "blood stains" on them, due to artistic license. These ARE painted with red ocher and vermilion. These copies were made, and after drying, were pressed to the Shroud of Turin to give them "sanctity" (this is thought to be the source of the randomly scattered flecks of red ochre and vermilion on the Shroud that is to little to rise to visibility) and then taken out and displayed. Ignorant observers often thought they were seeing the real one... and reported what they saw.

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New research from ENEA on the sacred Linen kept in Turin