And you missed my point. The coin is a very small part of the overall evaluation, but let’s focus on it: a medieval forger decides that having a coin over the eye would be a nice touch. There in 14th century France, he happens to Know what a “wizard’s augur” coin which we now definitively know was minted during Pilate’s term as Procurator would look like, so he fakes one and uses it. We know from numerous examples that Pilate’s coins on the whole were poorly minted. Somehow the coin he faked is a replica of a subset (of which we have other extant examples today) that has a misspelling in the abbreviated name of the emperor. Even setting aside the issue of how advanced numismatics was in the Middle Ages (how would he know what he had?) all of this would need to be true in order for the coin image to be faked. FRiend, just slapping the “stuff can be faked” label on it doesn’t even come close to address this one little part of the overall constellation of issues with the shroud.
The question arises of why would a hypothetical forger feel the need to place a 29AD Pontius Pilate Caicaroc coin on the eye of the Man on the Shroud, somehow thinking that someday computerized enhancement of the image would bring out that image, validating it’s authenticity, 600 years later, is patently absurd.
In 1981, long after the coin on the Shroud was imaged, a genuine Pilate coin with the misspelling of Caesar name was found in a collection. Many shroud skeptics claimed the one in the collection was likely a fraud, a modern forgery intended to validate the image on the Shroud, ignoring that the collector’s coin had a provenance predating the imaging of the coin on the Shroud by decades. Some time after that another misspelled coin was excavated by a Jewish archaeologist in Jerusalem, proving the one in the collection was not a fraud made to validate the Shroud. More misspelled Pilate coins have been found extant in other collections since then.
Some skeptics also think this forger went to the additional prescient difficulty of acquiring some travertine aragonite limestone dust from outside the east gate of Jerusalem to place in the appropriate locations on the Shroud image, just to give it more verisimilitude, somehow knowing that some day a molecular geologist would find it and identify it. Apparently skeptics think this 14th century French polymath forger also found and collected the microscopic pollen from plants that only grew in the areas of Israel, including the pollen of one which went extinct circa 800AD, and placed those on the Shroud, knowing that Dr. Avanoim Danin, of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, one of the world’s foremost experts on the palynology of Levantine plants, who along with criminalist Dr. Max Frei who did his doctoral thesis on palynology, would find and identify them on the Shroud 600 years later?
At what point does all of this become beyond belief in the existence of a mythical 14th century, unknown, unsung artistic forger genius who knew everything there could possibly be known to be able to create this wonderous masterpiece work of art? At some point the Shroud becomes more of a miracle as a hoax than if it were really what it purports to be.