We finish the article started last week by Robert Rucker. This week we have learned of the death of Monsignor Giuseppe Ghiberti, a specialist in the Shroud and trainer of many scholars. A fundamental figure in Italy. To him we will dedicate the next entrie
7. Is it the Image of Jesus?
Experiments conducted by the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) in 1978 indicate the characteristics of the image are so unique it could not have been made by an artist or a forger. The only other option is the image was made in some way by the body wrapped within the Shroud. But who’s image is it? Could it be the image of Jesus? In a court of law, there are two general ways to determine the identity of a person – by eye-witness testimony based on how the person looks, and by circumstantial or physical evidence such as identification cards, DNA, fingerprints, shoe prints, pollen, fibers, etc. Consider application of these identification methods to the image on the Shroud.
When you look at the cloth, you see good-resolution front and back images of a crucified man: a severe flogging, a nail wound in the only wrist that is visible, blood running down the arms with the angles of blood flow consistent with crucifixion, and nail wounds in the feet. Additional aspects relate to how Jesus was specifically crucified: a cap of thorns that was beat into his scalp, a puncture wound in the side with a hole the size of a Roman thrusting spear, post-mortem (after death) blood running down from the side wound, and legs not broken. The image also indicates he was dead: the curvature of the feet due to rigor mortis, and blood from the side wound separated into its components, referred to as “blood and water” (John 19:34). Closer examination indicates swollen cheeks from a beating to the head, damaged nose from this beating or a fall, abrasions on both shoulders from carrying a rough heavy object, a section of his beard missing, and no body-decay products present, all consistent with the image being Jesus. Microscopic examination is also consistent with the image being Jesus: dirt was found in abrasions on the tip of his nose and on one knee consistent with a fall, there was pollen from Jerusalem on the Shroud and pollen around his head from a plant with long thorns, and there were small chips of limestone near the feet containing impurities that match limestone in Jerusalem. Chemical analysis indicates that what appears to be blood is consistent with real human blood and that it contains bilirubin, which would be made by the liver when it processed damaged red blood cells resulting from the severe flogging. The face on the Shroud also agrees with our concept of how Jesus looked. This is because our concept is based on the earliest paintings of Jesus (~ 550 AD) which were evidently based on the Shroud. All evidence is consistent with the image being Jesus.
No human body, alive or dead, has ever produced an image of itself on fabric. The only exception is the Shroud with its image of a crucified man. The two criteria to identity of this man are:
• Based on the nature of the blood on the Shroud (pristine appearance, intact edges, clear blood serum around the dried blood), the blood must have come from a real human body that was wrapped within the Shroud. Based on the image on the Shroud, the body wrapped within the Shroud was the dead body of a man that had been crucified.
• Based on the STURP analysis, the image on the Shroud is not due to paint, dye, stain, liquid, scorch, or a photographic process. Evidence (Ref. 16) indicates the image is due to radiation damage to the linen caused by a burst of radiation emitted from within the body that was wrapped within the cloth. We have no other example of this happening. It was evidently a unique event.
Thus, the question is, what man who died by crucifixion could have gone through a unique event in which his dead body emitted such a powerful burst of radiation that it encoded an image of itself onto the linen cloth in which it was wrapped? If one looks through all mankind’s historical records, only Jesus and his reported disappearance from within his burial shroud satisfy these two criteria. Thus, the most reasonable conclusion is that the image on the Shroud of Turin is Jesus.
8. Overview of Research on the Shroud
Research on the Shroud is summarized above. The front and back images of a crucified man can be seen on the Shroud of Turin because the information that defines the appearance of a crucified man has been encoded into the pattern of discolored fibers that make the image on the Shroud. This information was only inherent to the body that was wrapped within the Shroud and was not in the limestone or air in the tomb. Thus, this information had to be transported from the body to the cloth, where it had to be deposited. It had to be deposited on the cloth to control the mechanism that discolored the fibers, i.e. to control which fibers were discolored and the length of the discoloration on the fibers. Of the various ways that information can be communicated, only radiation could have transported the focused information from the body to the cloth required to form the good resolution front and back images on the Shroud. This radiation was probably emitted in an extremely brief intense burst from within the body to create the good resolution images on the Shroud, with their very unusual characteristics (Ref. 15, 16, and 20).
If neutrons were included in this burst of radiation from the body, a small fraction of them would have been absorbed in the trace amount of N14 in the cloth to create new C14 on the Shroud primarily by the [N14 + neutron → C14 + proton] reaction, thus explaining the 1988 carbon dating of the Shroud to 1260-1390 AD (Ref. 34 and 35). The C14 concentration at the 1988 sample location would have to be increased by only 16% to cause the carbon date to be changed from about 33 AD to 1260 AD. This 16% increase would result if only one neutron were emitted from the body for every ten billion that were in the body. This neutron absorption hypothesis is the only hypothesis that is consistent with the four things that we know about carbon dating as it relates to the Shroud of Turin – the date, the slope, and the range of the measurement data obtained in the 1988 carbon dating of the Shroud and the 700 AD carbon date for the Sudarium. The only person in all our historical records that was crucified exactly like Jesus and could have emitted a burst of radiation from his dead body that was sufficiently intense to create an image of his body on fabric is the historic Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, the evidence from the Shroud indicates that it is most reasonable to believe that it is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus.
References
1. Fanti, Giulio and Pierandrea Malfi. 2015. “The Shroud of Turin, First Century After Christ!”, Pan Stanford Publishing, ISBN 978-981-4669-12-2
2. Marinelli, Emanuela and Marco Fasol, 2017. “Light from the Sepulchre”, Gondolin Press, ISBN 978-1-945658-03-7
3. Di Lazzaro, Paolo. 2017. “Linen Coloration by Pulsed Radiation. A Review”, Slides of a presentation made at the International Conference on the Shroud of Turin, Pasco, Washington - July 19-22, 2017, https://www.shroud.com/library.htm#papers .
4. Jackson, John and The Turin Shroud Center of Colorado. 2017, “The Shroud of Turin, A critical Summary of Observations, Data, and Hypotheses”, ISBN 978-0-692-88573-4
5. Antonacci, Mark, 2000, “The Resurrection of the Shroud”, M. Evans and Company, ISBN 0-87131-890-3
6. Antonacci, Mark, 2015, “Test the Shroud”, Forefront Publishing Co., ISBN 978-0-99643000-1-2
7. Stevenson, Kenneth E. and Gary R. Habermas, 1981, “Verdict on the Shroud”, Servant Books, ISBN 0-89283-111-1
8. Stevenson, Kenneth E. and Gary R. Habermas, 1990, “The Shroud and the Controversy”, Thomas Nelson Publishers, ISBN 0-8407-7174-6
9. Heller, John H. 1983, “Report on the Shroud of Turin”, Houghton Mifflin Company, ISBN 0-395-33967-7
10. Wilson, Ian, 1998, “The Blood and the Shroud”, The Free Press, ISBN 0-684-85359-0
11. Wilson, Ian and Barrie Schwortz, 2000, “The Turin Shroud, the Illustrated Evidence”, Barnes & Noble, ISBN 0-7607-2245-5
12. Wilson, Ian, 2010, “The Shroud”, A Bantum Book: 9780553824223
13. Moreland, J. P., 2018, “Scientism and Secularism, Learning to Respond to a Dangerous Ideology”, Crossway, ISBN: 978-1-4335-5690-6
14. Markwardt, Jack. 2017. “Geoffrey de Charny’s Acquisition of the Shroud of Turin: Texts, Fictions, and Forgeries”, “The Simony Theory: The Passage of the Shroud of Turin from Constantinople to Lirey”, and “Avignon and the Shroud of Turin: Authenticity Confirmed”, Presentations made at the International Conference on the Shroud of Turin, Pasco, Washington - July 19-22, 2017, http://www.shroudresearch.net/conference-2017.html
15. Rucker, Robert A., "Information Content on the Shroud of Turin", October 11, 2016
16. Rucker, Robert A., “The Role of Radiation in Image Formation on the Shroud of Turin”, July 17, 2020
17. Donnet, C., J. Granier, G. Verge, Y., Bleu, S. Reynaud, and F. Vocanson, 2019, “2D Reproduction of the Face on the Turin Shroud by Infrared Femtosecond Pulse Laser Processing”, Applied Optics, March 20, 2019
18. Lind, Arthur C., “Image Formation by Protons”, Presented at the International Conference on the Shroud of Turin (ICST-2017) in Pasco, WA, July 19-22, 2017, www.shroudresearch.net/conference-2017.html
19. Rucker, Robert A., “Summary of Scientific Research on the Shroud of Turin”, November 14, 2018
20. Rucker, Robert A., “Image Formation on the Shroud of Turin”, July 14, 2019
21. Robert A. Rucker, “Holistic Solution to the Mysteries of the Shroud of Turin”, July 16, 2020
22. Robert A. Rucker, “Why we Can See the Image on the Shroud”, June 29, 2020
23. Robert A. Rucker, “How the Image Was Formed on the Shroud”, June 29, 2020
24. Damon, P. E. and D. J. Donahue, A. J. T. Jull, E. T. Hall, R. E. M. Hedges, M. S. Tite, et al. 1989. “Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin”, Nature, February 16, 1989.
25. Rucker, Robert A., “The Carbon Dating Problem for the Shroud of Turin, Part 1: Background”, Jan. 4, 2019
26. Rucker, Robert A., “The Carbon Dating Problem for the Shroud of Turin, Part 2: Statistical Analysis”, August 7, 2018
27. Remi Van Haelst, “Radiocarbon Dating the Shroud of Turin, A critical review of the Nature report (authored by Damon et al) with a complete unbiased statistical analysis”, Oct. 2002
28. Bryan J. Walsh, “The 1988 Shroud of Turin Radiocarbon Tests Reconsidered, Part 1”, 1999
29. Bryan J. Walsh, “The 1988 Shroud of Turin Radiocarbon Tests Reconsidered, Part 2”, 1999
30. Marco Riani, A. C. Atkinson, Giulio Fanti, Fabio Crosilla, “Carbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin: Partially Labelled Regressors and the Design of Experiments”, May 4, 2010
31. Marco Riani, A. C. Atkinson, Giulio Fanti, and Fabio Crosilla, “Regression Analysis with Partially Labelled Regressors: Carbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin”, Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, 23:551-561, 2013
32. T. Casabianca, E. Marinelli, G. Pernagallo, and B. Torrisi, “Radiocarbon Dating of the Turin Shroud: New Evidence from Raw Data”, (2019), Archaeometry, 61(5), 1223-1231.
33. Bryan Walsh, Larry Schwalbe, “An Instructive Inter-Laboratory Comparison: The 1988 Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin”, to be published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, Volume 29, February 2020, This paper is available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352409X19301865 .
34. Rucker, Robert A., “The Carbon Dating Problem for the Shroud of Turin, Part 3: The Neutron Absorption Hypothesis”, July 7, 2018
35. Rucker, Robert A., “Understanding the 1988 Carbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin”, July 16, 2020
36. Rucker, Robert A., “Carbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin to 1260-1390 AD is Not Explained by Normal Contamination”, August 9, 2019
37. Rucker, Robert A., “Evaluation of ‘A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin’”, Nov. 14, 2018
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