Behold The Man -Turin Shroud Studies Confirm Image’s Unique Nature

FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif. — The Shroud of Turin is undoubtedly the most famous relic in Christendom — and the best loved.

During those rare times when it is displayed, millions of pilgrims travel from all over the world to see the purported burial cloth of Jesus Christ, a piece of linen 3 feet 7 inches-by-14 feet 3 inches that bears the detailed front and back images of a man who was crucified in a manner identical to that of Jesus of Nazareth as described in the Scriptures.

In 1978, more than 3.5 million people stood in line for up to 16 hours for a brief glimpse. Twenty years later, another 3 million filed past when it was displayed as part of the celebration of Turin cathedral’s 500th anniversary.

So why do so many people care so much about a relic that according to available records was first displayed in the French village of Lirey in 1357 and was supposedly “proven” by Carbon-14 dating done in 1988 to have been created somewhere between 1260 and 1390?

Beyond the compelling attraction of the image itself, the answer lies in part with the dozens of men and women around the world, experts and amateurs working in a wide range of unrelated disciplines who spend their free time studying the Shroud.

They have uncovered enough anomalies and unexplained phenomena to be certain of one thing: Whatever the Shroud may be, it clearly is no run-of-the-mill medieval forgery.

One such researcher is Dr. August Accetta, an obstetrician-gynecologist from southern California, husband and father of three daughters and founder of the Shroud Center of Southern California (Shroudcentersocal.com).

First opened in 1996, the center is dedicated to discovering the truths within the Shroud.

While appreciating the importance of the work done by researchers seeking to confirm the date of the artifact — for instance, three years ago Dr. Ray Rogers showed that the 1988 Carbon-14 dating was not done on the original burial cloth, but rather on a Shroud patch that in the Middle Ages had been cleverly re-woven into the border area — Accetta focuses on uncovering the mysteries that lie within the Shroud itself.
Image of Suffering

Accetta is particularly interested in the image’s photographic aspects, including its three-dimensional qualities and its human anatomical features. He has published four peer-reviewed papers on the Shroud in the area of nuclear imaging.

The doctor’s work with nuclear imaging demonstrates that in terms of the Shroud’s inverse color intensity (often described as being like a photographic negative, but actually a mere reversal of light and dark), the image encodes only about the top 1.5 inches of the face and body in three dimensions.

“It’s like a relief sculpture,” he said, “sort of like when Han Solo was frozen in carbon in" Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

Of equal interest to Accetta is the X-ray-like imaging upon the Shroud; the image reveals the roots of several upper teeth, the metacarpal bones in the left wrist and the femur under the left hand.

Furthermore, the image reveals bruising on the cheek just below the left eye. Bruising, according to Accetta, is completely part of the body image, not at all like the bleeding wounds that left blood residue on the surface of the Shroud.

It is a natural mistake to assume the image on the Shroud resulted from visible light emitting from the body, Accetta said. But even if light had streamed from the body’s surface any resultant image would have been as flat as a photograph, possessing no 3-D information.

Instead, Accetta has shown by injecting nuclear isotopes into his own bloodstream that he can produce a similar image, complete with 3-D information, in photos taken by the gamma camera doctors use to make images of internal organs.

“The amount of radiation in the skin and bones,” Accetta said, “correlates to the number of pixels on the Shroud.”

Nevertheless, exactly how the image was imprinted on cloth remains a mystery that, so far as anyone knows, has never been repeated.

Studies by other scientists have shown that the actual image — which lies on the very surface of the linen fibers at a depth less than 100 times as thick as a human hair — is the result, not of paint or any sort of pigment, but of rapid dehydration of the natural cellulose present in the fibers accomplished without heat.

Shroud investigators stress that while relics like the Shroud are not central to belief in the divinity and salvific mission of Christ, they can serve as powerful aids to developing a working faith.

“It’s silly to suggest that evidence like the Shroud should play no role in undergirding our faith,” said Gary Habermas, chairman of the department of philosophy and theology at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., and co-author of two books on the Shroud. “Jesus himself said if people could not simply believe what he said, then ‘at least believe on the evidence of the miracles themselves’” (John 14:11).

As an evangelical Christian, Habermas is careful to separate his own appreciation for the Shroud — “There’s a good chance it is authentic,” he says — from his worship of the living Christ. Still, for him the Shroud is nothing less than a pictorial Gospel.

“It’s all there: deity, death and resurrection,” he said. “The Shroud shows that he’s dead, but that there’s something happening to bring him to life.”

He also suggested the evidence of Jesus’ awful suffering imprinted on the Shroud should cause every Christian to re-examine his commitment to the faith.

“A university student once said to me that it removes the flippant approach,” he recalled. “You know how some people talk, ‘Yeah, Christ died for my sins. Hey, you wanna get a burger?’”

For his part, Accetta grew up Catholic but left the Church as an agnostic in his youth, convinced that belief in God was “pretty much just a way to deal with mortality.”

In spite of his skepticism, he was intrigued by a radio talk on the Shroud in 1992 by Dr. Alan Whanger, professor emeritus at Duke University and chief researcher for the Council for Study of the Shroud of Turin (duke.edu/~adw2/shroud). He met with Whanger and began to collect information, enthralled by the “clarity” of the materials available.

Nevertheless, it was not the Shroud itself but his study of it that made Accetta a believer, he stressed. To know more about the Shroud, he had to study Scripture and Tradition.

To learn about the cloth’s early history, Accetta had to research the Church Fathers. “Somewhere in 1997,” he said, “I realized my data had changed and that I was now a believer.” But not, at that point, a convinced Catholic. That quickly changed and Accetta came back to the Church of his childhood as he read the Ante-Nicene Fathers and understood their emphasis on sacramental theology.

“The Shroud became the fulcrum that turned my life in a new direction,” said Accetta. “The Christian faith had been a puzzle, but as I studied the faith in order to understand the Shroud the pieces fell into place.”

Here is a specific accounting of the Rogers tests and conclusions:

Chemist and pyrologist Raymond N. Rogers, (Sandia National Laboratory, University of California) and, independently, Dr. John L. Brown, (former Principal Research Scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute's Energy and Materials Sciences Laboratory, Georgia Institute of Technology), have done other research and tests and presented evidence in peer reviewed scientific journals that proved that:

The 1988 Carbon 14 Tests were accurate at the current state of the art - on what they tested.
The established, agreed sampling protocols were violated. This is well documented and is beyond contention. The sample cut from the Shroud came from only one area in contravention of the previously agreed protocols which required 8 samples from 8 areas. Instead a single sample from a single area was taken.
The sample that was taken was also taken from the one area all involved scientists had agreed should be avoided as it showed the most dirt and handling damage.
Another reason the area had been excluded as a sampling area was that it was the one area of the Shroud that generally fluoresced under ultra-violet light, indicating a non-similarity to the main body of the shroud which did not fluoresce.
The sample was cut from the corner of the Shroud where the "Raes sample" had been cut 14 years before.
The sample was approximately 1 cm by 7 cm in length and was cut parallel to the long side of the Shroud.
Approximately “…1 cm of the new sample had to be discarded because of the presence of different colored threads that were not similar to the main body of the shroud.” (Where did these foreign threads, interwoven into the sample, come from? - Swordmaker)
Five sub-samples of approximately 1cm x 1cm were cut from the remains of the single original sample cut from the shroud. (For clarity and understanding, let's designate them A to E alphabetically, from the selvage toward the center of the shroud).
The primary sample and the sub-samples were micro-photographed before being packaged and sent for testing.
Sub-samples A and E were sent to the Arizona C14 Lab, B went to Oxford, D to Zurich, and C was retained as a control for future investigation and was untested.
The sub-samples, although chemically cleaned were not microscopically examined or chemically tested, nor were the fibers compared to fibers from other areas of the Shroud by any of the labs.
The C14 Tests were completed and returned results that suggested an origin date for the flax that was in the cloth of 1260 to 1390 AD, with a degree of accuracy of plus or minus ~25 years on each sample.
This spread of possible origin dates of 180 years (1260 minus 25 to 1390 plus 25) should have raised a red flag as the material was supposed to be homogenous and should have all tested within a plus or minus ~75 year spread. In fact, none of the samples' range of confidence overlapped the range of confidence of another in a manner that statistically would indicate the samples were homogenous. This strongly suggested that the samples were, in fact, not homogenous.
Sample A tested younger than sample B which tested younger than Sample D which tested younger than Sample E. The closer the sample was to the center of the Shroud, away from the selvage, the older it tested.
Sample A and Sample E, the samples with both the youngest and oldest reported ages were both tested by the Arizona Lab.
Post C-14 testing and examination of microphotographs of the Primary sample showed a faint demarcation area running somewhat diagonally from the right side of the selvage end (A) to the leftward side of the sample closest to the main body of the shroud (E).
Examination of threads from the retained sample (C) show that threads on the left side of the sample have an "S" twist.
Examination of threads from sample (C) show that threads on the Right side of the sample have a "Z" twist.
Examination of threads taken from main body of the Shroud all have a "Z" twist.
Examination of threads from sample (C) show that threads on the left side of the sample are somewhat (3-5%) thinner in diameter, on average, than threads from the average thread thickness of sample's right half or from the body of the Shroud.
Examination of threads from sample (C) show that threads on the left side of the sample have Cotton intertwined with the Flax.
Examination of threads from right half of the sample (C) and from the main body of the Shroud have no Cotton intertwined with the Flax.
Examination of threads from the retained sample (C) show that threads on the Left side of the sample are encrusted with a plant gum containing alizarin dye extracted from Madder Root, a technique developed in 16th Century France.
Examination of threads from sample (C) show that threads on the Right side of the sample and from the main body of the Shroud are not encrusted with the dyestuff.
Examination of threads from sample (C) show that threads on the Left side of the sample contains up to 2% Aluminum. Chemical testing shows this Aluminum is from Alum (hydrous aluminum oxide), used after the 16th Century as a mordant, a drying agent for retting of cloth.
Examination of threads from sample (C) show that threads on the Right side of the sample and threads from the main body of the Shroud contain no Aluminum.
Chemical testing of threads from sample (C) show that threads on the Left side of the sample Flax's Lignin shows significant levels of Vanillin (> 40%).
Chemical testing of threads from sample (C) show that threads on the Right side of the sample and threads from the main body of the Shroud contain no Vanillin... indicating an age greater than 1300 years.

From an article in Thermochimica Acta: "A linen produced in A.D. 1260 would have retained about 37% of its vanillin in 1978. The Raes threads, the Holland cloth [the shroud's backing cloth], and all other medieval linens gave {positive results from] the test for vanillin wherever lignin could be observed on growth nodes. The disappearance of all traces of vanillin from the lignin in the shroud indicates a much older age than the radiocarbon laboratories reported."
Microscopic examination of the slightly diagonal demarcation area of the sample (C) shows spliced threads, clearly delineating the changes from Left to Right sides of the sample.
Skillful weavers in Europe in the 16th Century used a technique now called French Invisible Reweaving to repair tapestries and arras cloths. Contemporary reports state the method was close to "magical" in the ability to repair damaged cloth. This technique involved spinning and dying thread to closely match the original, splicing the new threads into old threads on the cloth, and reweaving the newly extended threads into the material to match the weaving of the original.
The diagonal demarcation line on the original sample is located so that sample (A)'s suspect (non-similar) threads compose approximately 60% of the sample material. Sample (B)'s suspect (non-similar) threads compose approximately 55% of the sample material. Sample (C)'s, 50% (non-similar) observed and tested. Sample (D)'s, 45%. And Sample (E)'s, (non-similar) 40%. Conversely, threads similar to the main body compose the following approximate percentages of the samples from A to E: 40%, 45%, 50%, 55%, and 60%.
The Shroud underwent repairs after the severe damage from the fire in 1532. Perhaps the corner where the Raes and 1988 C14 test samples were taken was also repaired.
Harry Gove, the inventor of the nuclear accelerator technique that was used to carbon date the Shroud, when asked "How old would a the polluting material have to be to skew the C-14 date of material known to be 1530 AD to show an tested age of 1350 if the polluting material composed 50% of the sample by weight?" He did some calculations and stated, "First Century, give or take 100 years."

The conclusion of the peer reviewed article in Thermochimica Acta states:

"The combined evidence from chemical kinetics, analytical chemistry, cotton content, and pyrolysis/ms proves that the material from the radiocarbon area of the shroud is significantly different from that of the main cloth. The radiocarbon sample was thus not part of the original cloth and is invalid for determining the age of the shroud."

Thus, the 1988 Carbon 14 Testing has been invalidated because the person who took the sample, literally, at the last hour, changed the agreed sampling protocols and took the sample from an area that had been patched, probably in 1532, with contemporary prepared linen thread that had been spun on a spinning wheel that had also spun cotton, then retted with alum, and dyed with alizarin dye from madder root, all done with 15th century technology. The tests were accurate for what they tested: a melange of old and newer material that gave. The reported a date that is inaccurate for both the old and the new. It is merely coincidence that the false date of the combined old and new happened to coincide with the first display of the Shroud in Lirey France. The repaired area is not the same as the main body of the shroud and tests are invalid.

New C14 testing should be allowed because there are now a lot of loose samples available since the ill advised "restoration" where they cut away the burned edges around the scorches from the 1532 fire.

I can tell you that there was an unauthorized C-14 test done on one of the threads taken during the 1978 STURP examination and the results were 1st Century, with a degree of confidence of 50 years because the sample was so small.

Do some reading of the peer reviewed scientific and scholarly articles on the Shroud? They are mostly available from Barrie Schwortz's website Shroud.com. Barrie was the official photographer of STURP... and he is Jewish. Daniel Porter has put together some of the best and current data in a good popularization of the Shroud information which is more accessible than the scientific papers. Daniel Porter is Freeper Shroudie, and his series of Websites, including Shroudforum.com, Shroud Facts Check, and Shroud Story are an excellent resource based on the latest science...

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