Shroud of Turin...Forgery??

Question

If the Shroud of Turin is a forgery, then the forger would need to do the following 12 steps to pull off the greatest hoax of man kind.

1. The forger first painted the bloodstains before he painted the image.

2. The forger integrated forensic qualities to his image that would only be known 20th century science.

3. The forger duplicated blood flow patterns in perfect forensic agreement to blood flow from the wrists at 65° from vertical to suggest the exact crucifixion position of the arms.

4. The forger “painted” the blood flows with genuine group AB blood that he had “spiked” with excessive amounts of bilirubin since the forger knew that severe concussive scourging with a Roman flagrum would cause erythrocyte hemolysis and jaundice.

5. The forger “plotted” the scourge marks on the body of the “man in the shroud” to be consistent under forensic examination with two scourgers of varying height.

6. The forger, against all convention of medieval artistry, painted the body he was “hoaxing” as Jesus of Nazareth, nude to conform to genuine Roman crucifixions.

7. The forger, as the forensic genius he was, illustrated the nails of crucifixion accurately through the wrists rather than the hands as in all other conventional medieval representations. He also took into account that the thumbs of a crucified victim would rotate inward as a result of median nerve damage as the nails passed through the spaces of Destot.

8. The forger was clever enough to “salt” the linen with the pollens of plants indigenous only to the environs of Jerusalem in anticipation of 20th century palynological analysis.

9. The forger was able to paint this image with some unknown medium using an unknown technique, 30-40 feet away in order to discern the shadowy image as he continued.

10. The forger was clever enough to depict an adult with an unplaited pony-tail, sidelocks and a beard style consistent with a Jewish male of the 1st century.

11. The forger thought of such minute details as incorporating dirt from the bare feet of the “man in the shroud” consistent with the calcium carbonate soil of the environs of Jerusalem.

12. This forger was such an expert in 20th century biochemistry, medicine, forensic pathology and anatomy, botany, photography and 3-D computer analysis that he has foiled all the efforts of modern science. His unknown and historically unduplicated artistic technique surpasses all great historical artists, making the pale efforts of DaVinci, Michaelangelo, Raphael and Botticelli appear as infantile scribblings.

Isn’t that going a little to far there was a fire in the 15 centuary could it be possible that testing was flawed by extrinsic C14 accumulated over centuries of fungal growth, candle smoke and the intense heat of the fire of 1532?

I think its PAST hillarious that so many preach SCIENCE but when science doesn't side with them....they ignore the facts. That is called a " FOOL ".

man from utopia: you have no clue what you speak of for all this info is on my personal blog......YOU are the one that copys and pastes....and to blame is psychology 101 that you are just reflecting your own thoughts....try try try again my small minded one.

Answer 1

i didnt say be a porn star i said open an adult website

Answer 2

Yes, it is a fake. Making false relics was a big business during the 13th to the 18th century. There was big money to be made by attracting pilgrims.
The trade of section of "the real cross" used for the crucifixion was another very active industry. If all the sections were put together, the cross would be 900 meters (that's 2700 feet) long. Quite a miracle...

Answer 3

Shroud of Murine.

Sprinkled with eye drops.

Get real. If your cult is so lame that you need a phony old oil rag to legitimize your cult, then it's time for you to get a new cult!!

PS -- too bad the forger couldn't get it to carbon date to the proper time in history. it's off by more than a millenia. (oops...) nice try, though, phyllis!!

WOW. I just read Man from Utopia's reply. Excellent read, and he's absolutely correct. The person's head and eye placement, as depicted on the shroud (i looked up the shroud's image on-line) is totally off -- more of an artistic rendition than actual proportion allowing the proper cranial size. I hadn't noticed that before.

There's your answer. The Shroud is a fake.

And, i see the bitter, angry christians who cannot handle the truth are giving Utopia their little "thumbs down" nonsense.

Typical christian hatred...

Answer 4

It's an interesting topic. However, I believe the shroud has been barred from further testing. Furthermore, the image fades more and more over time. Eventually, it will disappear. Guess it will be a mystery for the ages.

Answer 5

Shroud of Turin
This page was created as a result of a conversation I had with Michael Martin in rec.music.christian. I mentioned a page I'd discovered some time ago which conclusively demonstrated that the image on the Shroud of Turin could not be that of an actual human being. Of course, when I went to find it again, I couldn't. Fortunately, the information it presented was very simple and available to all, so I decided to make my own version.

Yes, I said simple. The secret to the Shroud's authenticity lies not in carbon dating or chemical analysis, but in the image itself. It is quite simply not an image of a human being. Not an accurate one, anyway.


The human body has certain proportions which remain constant. One of these is the position of the eyes. As you can learn in any basic drawing lesson, the eyes of an adult human are positioned almost exactly in the center of the head. We get the impression that they are much higher due to the amount of attention we give to the lower half of the face, which includes important features such as the mouth.


This impression sometimes finds its way into artistic portrayals of the human form. Sometimes it's done intentionally, and sometimes it's simply the result of ignorance of human anatomy. The image on the Shroud of Turin is one of those portrayals. The distances marked by the arrows on the negative of the Shroud at left are equal. As you can see, the eyes of the face are not centered in the head. They are approximately 2/3rds of the way up, where the brows should be. The head would have to be quite a bit taller (as indicated by the top line) for the proportions to be correct.

As it is, the cranium of the person depicted in the Shroud would have to be abnormally small. I'll leave the obvious jokes at the expense of Christians as an exercise for the reader.


Let's compare this to a real human face, in this case, the lovely mug of one of my favorite actresses, Veronica Lake. Perfect. While some of that perfection can be attributed to Max Factor, his art did not extend to the skeletal structure of his subject. Veronica's face displays the proportions of a human face because it is a human face.

Something the image in the Shroud of Turin most definitely is not.

So why hasn't anyone noticed this before? The short answer to that is that somebody did. This observation doesn't originate with me. I stole it from Cliff Crawford. (Thanks to Troy Davis for re-discovering the page for me.)

As for why this has escaped the notice of the many scientists who have studied the Shroud, it isn't too surprising. Scientists are not omniscient, and often focus heavily on their own specialty to the exclusion of all else. A brilliant grasp of chemistry does not carry with it a knowledge of anatomy. Thanks to the optical illusion that causes artists to falsely exaggerate the size of the face, even someone trained in anatomy might overlook this.

On a slightly more cynical note, the possibility that the Shroud bears the image of the man known as Jesus Christ makes it very profitable. When it was first displayed in the 14th century, it was used as a fund-raiser for a new church. It's still making money for a lot of people in the form of tourism, book sales, and scientific grants. As just one example, in 1989, a one million pound donation was made to establish a chair of archaeological sciences at Oxford, specifically to study the Shroud.

How was the Shroud of Turin made?
As I told Michael, I'm not particularly interested in the Shroud of Turin. However, in the process of searching the web for material for this page, I discovered something interesting that deserves to be shared.

Most of the pro-authenticity pages out there go to great lengths to claim that the Shroud could not even be produced by modern technology, much less the technology of the 14th century. Presumably, we are meant to draw the conclusion that the Shroud could have only been the result of a miracle.


I was surprised as anyone to discover that not only can the Shroud be duplicated, it has been duplicated. The results are striking in their similarity to the original Shroud image, duplicating not only its superficial appearance, but also its microscopic and chemical properties. The process used does not even require modern technology. The techniques were known as early as the 4th century B.C.!

Yet this information has been largely ignored. This tells me that my cynical speculations were probably correct. There's more money to be made catering to ignorance and superstition than there is in providing intellectually satisfying answers to challenging questions.

Of course, making money was never my intention, so there's no reason I shouldn't point you toward real answers. "In Whose Image?" describes the basic process used to make the Shroud and its origins. The stunning results may be seen in "Verification of the Nature and Causes for the Photo-negative Images on the Shroud of Lirey-Chambéry-Turin" by Nicolas P. L. Allen.

Note that the proportion problems addressed above lead me believe that the source of the image was a mediocre sculpture rather than an actual corpse or a plaster model of a real human.

Copyright © 1999 by Jason Steiner.

Answer 6

It was a forgery to lure religious pilgrims to Turin.

Answer 7

whatever. the fact remains it dates to the 15th century.

Answer 8

Those artists are pretty skilled, ya know/