A Brief Review of the Recent CNN Documentary and (its) Medieval Photograph Theory

A Brief Review of the Recent CNN Documentary and Further Comments on the Medieval Photograph Theory

I personally hate to write reviews of television programs and usually leave them for others to do, but after weeks of media hype and the controversy created after this program aired, I felt compelled to write a brief review of CNN’s latest “docudrama” on the Shroud of Turin, which premiered Sunday, March 1, 2015, as the first episode in their six part “Finding Jesus” series. For the sake of transparency, I should first disclose that STERA, Inc. was paid a modest licensing fee by the producers for the use of thirteen of our photographs in the program. However, we had absolutely no involvement in the content itself.

I felt compelled to write this review because of the avalanche of e-mails and phone calls I received starting before the program even ended and which continued until today! But most importantly, because once again the so-called proto-photography theory was pulled out and dusted off to confuse the issue of the Shroud even further, and that topic happens to be well within my own area of expertise. But more about that later. First, let’s start with the program itself.

My first impression was that the program’s content was more superficial than the image on the Shroud! Considerable screen time was spent showing us historical reenactments of scenes of the Passion (and even those were not necessarily accurate). I am sure this was done for dramatic effect, but it took far more time than was necessary and consequently, left little time to answer the more important questions about the Shroud. The program would have undoubtedly been much better if the producers had included less drama and more documentary. There were also a number of errors in the discussion of the historical, scientific, medical and forensic evidence, but that was not really a surprise to me. See my comments on the general lack of accuracy in Shroud documentaries, which I posted on the Late Breaking Website News page and in the comments on our Facebook page before the program aired.

It was also interesting to see who the producers considered to be Shroud “experts.” It was good to see a few familiar faces, like Dr. John Jackson and Mark Guscin, who both appear in the program and who are well known as credible Shroud scholars. (Although Russ Breault was originally interviewed for the program, his comments were not included in the final edited version). However, most of the other “experts” were unfamiliar to me and I could find no evidence that any of them ever actually studied the Shroud themselves. Unfortunately, that happens frequently in Shroud documentaries.

Even more frustrating, when discussing the radiocarbon dating, absolutely no mention was made by anyone of the credible scientific data that exists indicating the single sample chosen for dating was anomalous and not necessarily representative of the entire Shroud. Although that theory is controversial and not accepted by everyone, it was in fact the first research to challenge the radiocarbon dating in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Simply ignoring it does a great disservice to those who dedicated themselves to doing credible scientific research on the Shroud and it certainly makes it more difficult for those who are not as well versed to understand what we truly know. Based on all the e-mails and calls I received, its absence was certainly obvious to most of the viewers of this website, since that was the question they asked me the most.

But the most frustrating part of the program for me was the considerable time spent resurrecting the long ago discarded proto-photography theory presented by South African art historian Nicholas Allen, who claims the Shroud is a medieval photograph. In 2000, I presented a paper at the Sindone 2000 Shroud Conference in Orvieto, Italy, titled, “Is The Shroud of Turin a Medieval Photograph? A Critical Examination of the Theory” that addressed Allen’s conclusions directly and presented a side-by-side comparison of his results to the image on the Shroud (something Allen never did). I then pointed out the dramatic differences between the two images and you can see them for yourself at the above link.

In the new CNN program, Allen used his medieval techniques to create a negative photographic image on a sheet of linen and claimed his results had exactly the same properties as the Shroud. He apparently does not understand that when you claim you have duplicated the Shroud image, you are obligated to match ALL of the chemical and physical properties of the Shroud. Not just one or two.

Allen applied light sensitive silver salts to a linen sheet (in liquid form so they soaked into the cloth) and exposed this “film” using a camera obscura and a medieval lens. Each exposure took 3 or 4 days so he used a statue as his model. He never addressed the issue of decomposition that a body would undergo while hanging in front of his camera obscura for days on end in the bright sun. He then applied an interesting choice of chemicals to “fix” the image and make it permanent on the cloth: his own urine! (The shroud of urine)? And he claimed that this treatment removed ALL of the silver on the cloth.

I agree that the uric acid and ammonia in urine could remove some of the unused silver, but significant silver would remain in all the image areas since the silver is what creates a photographic image in the first place! And without doubt, there would also be some silver trapped deep within the weave of the cloth that could never be removed. When STURP performed their spectral analysis on the Shroud in 1978, silver was one of the elements they were looking for. Yet absolutely no silver was found anywhere on the Shroud. That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.

Allen never really addressed the bloodstains on the Shroud and simply dismissed them as painted onto the cloth after the image was produced. He completely ignores the fact that the medical and forensic experts that have studied the Shroud directly state the bloodstains are not painted on and soaked into the cloth in a natural manner. They concluded that the bloodstains are forensically accurate and the result of direct contact with a human body. Finally, STURP observed that no image appears under the bloodstains on the Shroud, implying that they were on the cloth before the image was formed and possibly inhibited image formation. So our imaginary medieval photographer would have to put forensically accurate bloodstains onto his cloth before creating the image!

After devoting a good portion of screen time to demonstrating Allen’s theory, there followed a very brief rebuttal by a gentleman who suggested that if photography were truly a medieval invention, where are all the other medieval photographs? There would be lots of them. That is a correct and fair statement, but still a rather weak rebuttal to the lengthy and detailed on-camera demonstration afforded Allen. In the end, the producers probably included this theory because it is highly visual in its own right so it makes for interesting television. It apparently didn’t matter to them that there is strong scientific evidence against it and that virtually none of that evidence was presented in the program.

Unfortunately, what could have been a truly informative program became just another “show,” heavy on the dramatics and very light on content. Frankly, it doesn’t give me much confidence in the five remaining upcoming programs in the series. Yet in spite of all these shortcomings, the program still garnered a very large audience and the highest ratings of any network in its time slot. That translates to a lot of people that received inaccurate information about the Shroud of Turin!

Finally, I once again feel obliged to remind everyone that television documentaries about the Shroud of Turin are rarely satisfying to those who know anything about it and highly misleading to those who don’t. They should be regarded first as entertainment, not science, and are certainly not the best place to obtain accurate information about the Shroud. Consider your sources carefully and do some homework before drawing your own conclusions.

Another review by researcher and author Robert Wilcox:

CNN JESUS SERIES PREMIERS WITH THE SHROUD
By Robert K. Wilcox
5 Mar 2015 - If you watched closely the premier episode of CNN’s new series, “Finding Jesus,” which examined the Shroud of Turin, the alleged burial cloth of Christ, you basically left with the right idea: The shroud is still a mystery – that despite suspect carbon 14 dating which deemed it a medieval fake and media ignorance and bias against what the relic might purport.
The somewhat badly-acted docudrama did try to give both sides - and in that vein was mostly even handed. The problem was that the episode omitted key facts and mysteries about the cloth which has images of a crucified corpse on it matching the wounds of Jesus’ scourging and crucifixion. The phrase “the devil is in the details” comes to mind. But in this case, the missing details might reveal God or at least the historical Jesus.
They are that important.
Here is what “Finding Jesus” left out:
First, there is a strong and logical history to the shroud taking it back to the tomb outside Jerusalem prior to its arrival in France in 1354 where “Finding Jesus” begins the cloth’s history. There are gaps in this circumstantial walk back but it is supported by documents, artifacts, and logic. It involves the early Christians understandably saving the cloth, its subsequent incredible survival and display through floods, fires, massacres, Moslem-Christian warring and sacking, and its rescue by the Knights Templar, fierce Crusader-monks who are believed to have smuggled it to France.
Significantly missing in terms of the shroud’s mystery was the nature of the image itself. “Finding Jesus” made a fleeting reference to the image being made of “individually colored fibers” then forgot it. But how the complex image was created is the central scientific mystery of the shroud. Despite over 100 years of study of the relic by mostly scientists - not religionists - not one person has ever satisfactorily explained how the images formed in terms of known and accepted science.
“Finding Jesus” dutifully gave a significant section of its episode to South African art historian Nicholas Allen’s “camera obscura” theory. The first ever camera, a crude 16th Century device, he says, created the images. How? The shroud image can’t be duplicated today. It is so unique that using precise mathematical values read from the image by a computer, scientists can make a three-dimensional hologram of the man-in-the-shroud. That’s a picture that can be viewed and manipulated in space from all angles. No surface image on earth can give that kind of information – not photos. drawings or paintings. They are all two-dimensional.
And what happened to this miracle machine and artist? If it could do something not even doable today, it was certainly a gold mine then. But it disappeared, as did the artist. Why had he done it? To make money? To prove he had an authentic Jesus shroud? Then his depiction would have followed convention. But the shroud image defies convention. The nails are in the wrists, not in the hands. The crown is not a conventional wreathlet as shown in “Finding Jesus” but a full cap or miter, like actually used in the Middle East. Bloodstains on the head show this. The man-in-the-shroud is naked, although his hands cover embarrassment. Anyone hoping to impress the Medieval faithful would not have created a naked Jesus.
There are so many other important details like this that defy the idea that a Medieval forger made the image – too many to get into here. (Read my latest book on the shroud, http://tinyurl.com/lupnepc ). Perhaps most significant recently are the startling details of those “individually colored fibers” glossed over in “Finding Jesus.” What scientists who have studied the actual cloth say is that it is unquestionably not a painting. There is not a hint of brush stroke and anyway no artist could have brushed in the images. The “coloring” is not really color per se but a strange “change” in each individual fiber. Each is changed on the outside but not inside as a liquid would do. And they are changed in exactly the same way. It is this precision that allows a computer to make a hologram. The change is akin to what might happen if heat was applied.
The show also did not do justice to the controversy over the 1988 Carbon 14 tests. They made it seem the tests were definitive and objections were only by die-hard faithful. That’s not true. Former skeptics like Los Alamos scientist Ray Rogers reversed his quite vociferous condemnation of Carbon 14 deniers when he did his own tests on a piece of the shroud, surreptitiously gotten, that the testers had used. He believed with a growing number of others that the reason the test showed a Medieval date was that the piece taken from the shroud was from a Medieval patch sewn into it.
There were other valid objections too. Bacteria and centuries of pollutants contaminated the cloth. The labs themselves, it has been charged, did not maintain “blind” protocol, as is required in such tests. These are all very valid criticisms of the Carbon 14 tests which absolutely are in question.
To its credit, “Finding Jesus” ended with throwing the whole question back into mystery by featuring the little known Oviedo, Spain, cloth. This purports to be a cloth mentioned in the New Testament that draped over Jesus’s face after the crucifixion. It has a documented history all the way back to early centuries after Christ. What is so impressive about it is that the many blood stains on it precisely match the blood stains on the face and head of the man-in-the-shroud. This has the potential to positively date the shroud to around the 5th or 6th Century.
Won’t that liven up the debate?

I don't agree with all of Wilcox's commentary, for example I would not even bring up the "Bacteria and centuries of pollutants contaminated the cloth" as "valid objections" to the C-14 test's validity. For any contamination from either of those sources, they would have to make up more than 50% of the material being tested to skew the dating into the 14th Century from a 1st Century date and it is easy to see they just are not there. As for bacteria, assuming it were there at all, it would have had to consume the original linen of the Shroud and would therefore any bacterial excrement and dead bodies would have the same Carbon source as the original Linen. . . and therefore date to the 1st Century of its food source, the Linen it is eating, regardless of when the bacteria lived and died. Ergo, no effect on the dating. — Swordmaker

This link goes to a very long scholarly rebuttal of some of the so-called "experts" claims of in-authenticity for the Shroud of Turin from CNN's documentary. There are excellent photographs on this review and rebuttal that make it an excellent read.

CNN's Finding Jesus loses Him.— by John C. Klotz, author of "The Coming of the Quantum Christ"

I found one comment from this rebuttal review quite interesting:

"On December 9, 2014, Pam Moon published her own paper as a follow-up to Campbell's. In it she documents the extensive repairs that Blessed Sebastian Valfre made to the Shroud circa 1694. To the consternation of the Poor Nuns of St. Clare who assisted him, he used black thread to secure the repairs. Black thread was found in the Oxford carbon dating sample.
In The Sign Thomas de Wesselow wrote:

"The carbon dating of the Shroud will probably go down in history as one of the greatest fiascos in the history of science. It would make an excellent case study for any sociologist interested in exploring the ways in which science is affected by professional biases, prejudices and ambitions, not to mention religious (and irreligious) beliefs." (Emphasis added)

"Fiasco" is an understatement.

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