Is the Shroud of Turin authentic?

1. The Shroud of Turin is probably the most famous supposed relic in existence. It is a 4.4-meter-long linen shroud bearing the image of a crucified man. Supporters of the shroud claim that it is the actual burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth and that the image on the shroud is the true image of Jesus, created at the moment of his resurrection. It is easy to see why this idea is so appealing. If the shroud were authentic, it would be a remarkable source of information about Jesus the human being. Unfortunately, we can be virtually certain that the Shroud of Turin is a hoax that was originally created in France in around the 1350s AD by an artist trained in the Gothic figurative style as part of a faith-healing scam. We know this primarily because there is no definitive record of the shroud prior to the fourteenth century and the earliest definitive record of the shroud is a letter recording that the forger who made it had confessed, but also because of a wide array of other factors. For instance, the shroud doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings that were used in the Judaea in the first-century AD or the specific description of Jesus’s funerary wrappings given in the Gospel of John. The fabric of the shroud has also been conclusively radiocarbon dated to the Late Middle Ages.
2. Additionally, the proportions of the figure on the shroud are anatomically incorrect, but they closely match the proportions of figures in Gothic art of the fourteenth-century. The bloodstains on the shroud are not consistent with how blood flows naturally, which suggests the stains have been painted on. Finally, the fabric of the shroud was made using a complex weave that was common in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles but was not used for burial shrouds in the time of Jesus.
3. Evidence #1: The Shroud of Turin has no reliable provenance prior to the fourteenth century.
4. If the actual burial shroud of Jesus had survived and it really had a spectacular image of Jesus himself miraculously imprinted on it, we would expect to find mentions of it all over the place in early Christian writings. Instead, we have absolutely no mention of any object identifiable as being the Shroud of Turin in any surviving early Christian text and the earliest definitive mention of the Shroud of Turin comes from fourteenth-century France. Supporters of the shroud have tried very hard to invent a provenance for it. For instance, some supporters of the shroud have tried to give the Shroud of Turin a history by identifying it with the Mandylion, or Image of Edessa, a small, rectangular piece of cloth that was held in the city of Edessa in the Byzantine Empire that was said to bear the miraculous image of Jesus’s face. The earliest surviving source that mentions the Image of Edessa as having ever existed is the Doctrine of Addai, a Syriac Christian text written in around the late fourth century AD or early fifth century AD, which says that the Image of Edessa was painted by an artist sent to meet with Jesus while he was alive by King Abgar of Edessa. The text claims that the artist painted a portrait of Jesus’s face and brought it back to show to King Abgar. This text, however, says nothing about the Image of Edessa still existing in the author’s own time or about anyone alive in the author’s own time having seen it.
5. The earliest surviving mention of the Mandylion as having existed in the author’s own time comes from the early Christian historian Evagrios Scholastikos (lived c. 539 – c. 594 AD). The fact that we have no record of the Mandylion having ever been created at all until the late fourth century AD at the earliest and we have no mention of anyone alive having seen the Mandylion until the late sixth century casts serious doubts on the Mandylion’s own authenticity. It doesn’t really matter for our purposes, though, whether the Mandylion was authentic or not because the Mandylion and the Shroud of Turin are certainly not the same object. According to virtually all accounts, the Mandylion was a much smaller piece of cloth than the Shroud of Turin and it only had Jesus’s face on it—not any other part of his body. Also, it did not depict Jesus as beaten and bloody, but rather alive and healthy. We know all of this because we have surviving descriptions of the Mandylion and even surviving depictions of it in art. For instance, there is a surviving tenth-century AD Byzantine encaustic painting, which clearly shows the Mandylion as a small piece of cloth bearing only Jesus’s face.

1. Some supporters of the Shroud of Turin have tried to claim that the Mandylion must have been the Shroud of Turin folded in such a way so that only Jesus’s face was visible and the rest of his body was hidden. In support of this view, supporters of the shroud like to cite Codex Vossianus Latinus Q 69, a tenth-century codex currently held in the Vatican Library that contains an eighth-century Latin account claiming that the Mandylion of Edessa bore not only the image of Jesus’s face, but the image of Jesus’s entire body. This is, however, the only surviving account that describes the Mandylion of Edessa as bearing the image of Jesus’s whole body. It is far more likely that the author of this account never saw the Mandylion personally and simply imagined that it showed Jesus’s entire body than it is that the Mandylion was actually the Shroud of Turin folded so as to hide the rest of the body from view. Furthermore, this explanation fails to account for the fact that surviving depictions of the Mandylion all show it depicting a clear image of a living and healthy Jesus with his eyes open—not a ghostly image of a dead and bloody Jesus with his eyes closed. Also, surviving depictions of the Mandylion, such as the encaustic painting of King Abgar receiving it, show it with simply a blank space beneath Jesus’s neck and no continuation.
2. Finally, the Mandylion is never described in any surviving source as having ever been viewed by anyone as having been Jesus’s burial shroud. There are several different stories about exactly how the Mandylion originated. The earliest version of the story, found in the Doctrine of Addai, holds that it was painted by an artist sent to meet with Jesus by King Abgar of Edessa. The most popular version of the story in later times, though, held that Jesus himself pressed his face against the cloth and the image was miraculously created. This version of the story claims that Jesus sent the cloth to King Abgar of Edessa as a miraculous cure for illness. In other words, the only things that the Shroud of Turin and the Mandylion have in common is that they are both pieces of cloth said to bear some form of miraculous image of Jesus.
3. Now, supporters of the Shroud of Turin also like to cite a report from Robert de Clari, a knight from Picardy who participated in the Fourth Crusade, as well as the Crusaders’ brutal sack of the city of Constantinople in 1204. Robert de Clari wrote a detailed account in Old French of the sack of Constantinople titled The Conquest of Constantinople. In his account, Robert de Clari mentions that, before the city was sacked, the Church of Blachernai contained a piece of cloth that was claimed to be the very burial shroud of Jesus Christ himself. Robert further claims that this shroud miraculously elevated every Friday to reveal the image of Jesus. Robert says that no one knows what happened to the shroud after the city was sacked. Robert de Clari, however, is the only existing source that claims that there was a shroud in Constantinople with the image of Jesus on it, so we have no way of independently confirming his story. Furthermore, even if Robert de Clari really did see a shroud in Constantinople with the image of Jesus on it, there is no good reason to suppose that the shroud he saw was the Turin Shroud at all, since there have been many other shrouds that have been claimed to be the burial shroud of Jesus, many of which have borne images on them, and there is nothing about Robert’s account to indicate that the shroud he saw is the same one now held in Turin.
4. Finally, even if the shroud allegedly seen by Robert de Clari in Constantinople was really the Shroud of Turin, that certainly wouldn’t make the Shroud of Turin authentic; Robert de Clari was writing nearly 1,100 years after Jesus’s death, but only around 150 years before the first definitive mention of the Shroud of Turin. In other words, he was writing far closer to the time when the Shroud of Turin first appears in the historical record than he was to the time of Jesus. If Robert de Clari really saw the Shroud of Turin in Constantinople in around 1203 AD, that would only make the shroud about 150 years older than it is otherwise known to have been; it certainly wouldn’t prove the shroud authentic by any stretch of the imagination.
5. Evidence #2: We have the documented confession of the forger who created the Shroud of Turin.
6. The earliest definitive mention of the Shroud of Turin in any written document is a letter written in 1389 by Pierre d’Arcis, the bishop of the city of Troyes to the Avignon Antipope Clement VII. In the letter, Pierre states that the shroud was being used as part of an elaborate faith-healing scam. He reports that the local experts on theology easily recognized the shroud as a hoax because none of the gospels made any mention of the image of Jesus being imprinted on his shroud. Pierre describes how his predecessor, Bishop Henri de Poitiers, set out on a mission to find out where the shroud had come from. After much inquiry, Henri managed to track down the original forger who had made the shroud, who confessed to him that he had created the shroud as a deliberate hoax and even showed Henri exactly how he had done it. Henri, having obtained this confession, ordered that the shroud be put away and that no one be permitted to venerate it. Here is the relevant portion of Pierre d’Arcis’s actual letter, as translated from Latin into English by Reverend Herbert Thurston:
7. “The case, Holy Father, stands thus. Some time since in this diocese of Troyes the Dean of a certain collegiate church, to wit, that of Lirey, falsely and deceitfully, being consumed with the passion of avarice, and not from any motive of devotion but only of gain, procured for his church a certain cloth cunningly painted, upon which by a clever sleight of hand was depicted the twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and front, he falsely declaring and pretending that this was the actual shroud in which our Saviour Jesus Christ was enfolded in the tomb, and upon which the whole likeness of the Saviour had remained thus impressed together with the wounds which He bore.” “This story was put about not only in the kingdom of France, but, so to speak, throughout the world, so that from all parts people came together to view it. And further to attract the multitude so that money might cunningly be wrung from them, pretended miracles were worked, certain men being hired to represent themselves as healed at the moment of the exhibition of the shroud, which all believed to the shroud of our Lord. The Lord Henry of Poitiers, of pious memory, then Bishop of Troyes, becoming aware of this, and urged by many prudent persons to take action, as indeed was his duty in the exercise of his ordinary jurisdiction, set himself earnestly to work to fathom the truth of this matter.”
8. “For many theologians and other wise persons declared that this could not be the real shroud of our Lord having the Saviour’s likeness thus imprinted upon it, since the holy Gospel made no mention of any such imprint, while, if it had been true, it was quite unlikely that the holy Evangelists would have omitted to record it, or that the fact should have remained hidden until the present time. Eventually, after diligent inquiry and examination, he discovered the fraud and how the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed.” “Accordingly, after taking mature counsel with wise theologians and men of the law, seeing that he neither ought nor could allow the matter to pass, he began to institute formal proceedings against the said Dean and his accomplices in order to root out this false persuasion. They, seeing their wickedness discovered, hid away the said cloth so that the Ordinary could not find it, and they kept it hidden afterwards for thirty-four years or thereabouts down to the present year.”(edited)
9. The forger himself literally confessed. You can’t get any better proof than that.

1. ABOVE: Manuscript illustration dating to 1379, depicting Antipope Clement VII, the addressee of Pierre d’Arcis’s letter describing how his predecessor Henri de Pontiers had obtained the confession of the original forger who made the Shroud of Turin.
2. Evidence #3: The Shroud of Turin doesn’t match the kinds of shrouds that were actually used in Judaea during Jesus’s time or the description of Jesus’s shroud given in the Gospel of John.
3. Maybe, even though we have a confession, you’re still not convinced that the Shroud of Turin is a hoax. Well, that’s fine, because we have even more evidence that it is a hoax aside from just the confession. Even if we ignore the confession altogether and just look at the shroud itself, it is evident that it is a fourteenth-century forgery. The evidence is written all over the shroud itself. Quite simply, the shroud doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings that were used in Judaea in Jesus’s time. In Judaea during the first century AD, people did not normally wrap whole bodies in a single rectangular piece of linen; instead, people wrapped the body in strips of linen and wrapped the head separately from the body using its own piece of linen. The Gospel of John 20:6–7 actually explicitly describes Jesus’s head and body having been wrapped separately in precisely this manner. The Greek text of the gospel reads: “ἔρχεται οὗν καὶ σίμων πέτρος ἀκολουθῶν αὐτῶ, καὶ εἰσῆλθεν εἰς τὸ μνημεῖον· καὶ θεωρεῖ τὰ ὀθόνια κείμενα, καὶ τὸ σουδάριον, ὃ ἦν ἐπὶ τῆς κεφαλῆς αὐτοῦ, οὐ μετὰ τῶν ὀθονίων κείμενον ἀλλὰ χωρὶς ἐντετυλιγμένον εἰς ἕνα τόπον.”
4. or:
5. “Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself.”
6. The Greek word that is used to describe the wrappings that covered Jesus’s body in this passage is ὀθόνια (othónia), which means “bandages made of fine linen.” The word used to describe the cloth that covered Jesus’s face is σουδάριον (soudárion), which means “a headcloth for the deceased.” No matter how you interpret this passage, it is definitely not describing a single-piece, full-body shroud like the Shroud of Turin.
7. There are other passages in the gospels that reference Jesus’s body having been wrapped in linen, but none of them give anywhere near as much detail as that passage I just quoted from the Gospel of John. For instance, the Greek text of the Gospel of Mark 15:46 reads as follows:
8. “καὶ ἀγοράσας σινδόνα καθελὼν αὐτὸν ἐνείλησεν τῇ σινδόνι καὶ ἔθηκεν αὐτὸν ἐν μνημείῳ ὃ ἦν λελατομημένον ἐκ πέτρας, καὶ προσεκύλισεν λίθον ἐπὶ τὴν θύραν τοῦ μνημείου.”
9. or:
10. “So Joseph [of Arimathea] bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb.”
11. The Greek word in this passage that the NRSV translates as “linen cloth” is σινδών (sindṓn). Some supporters of the Shroud of Turin claim that this word actually refers to a single, full-body shroud. The NRSV’s translation, however, is completely correct in this case; σινδών just means “fine linen cloth,” without any implication of this cloth being in the specific form of a full-body shroud.
12. At the very least, the Gospel of John’s description of Jesus’s funerary wrappings is an accurate description of how bodies in Judaea in the first century AD were normally wrapped. Nonetheless, because single shrouds for both the head and the body became common in western Europe during the Middle Ages, most western depictions of Jesus’s shroud depict it as a single piece of cloth covering both the head and the body.
13. Evidence #4: The Turin Shroud was radiocarbon dated and the material definitively dates to sometime between c. 1260 and c. 1390:
14. In 1988, three teams of scientists working independently in three different laboratories located in Oxford, Tucson, and Zürich conducted radiocarbon dating tests on three different samples of the linen from the Shroud of Turin. All three teams of researchers found that the cloth dated to sometime between c. 1260 and c. 1390 AD. These estimates correspond exactly to the time when the Turin Shroud first enters the historical record. Defenders of the Turin Shroud have tried to insist that, maybe, the corner of the shroud that the samples that the experts conducted radiocarbon dating tests on came from had been “invisibly” repaired in the Middle Ages and that the rest of the Turin Shroud might be much older. There is, however, currently absolutely no evidence to suggest that the corner of the shroud that the samples were taken from had been repaired at a later date. If the samples had been repaired, the researchers would have been able to detect signs of the repairs when they examined the fabric under a microscope, but they didn’t detect any such signs of repairs. Furthermore, before the researchers in the Oxford team conducted the radiocarbon dating tests, they consulted textile experts from a laboratory in Derbyshire, England, who did their own examinations of the cloth to make sure they weren’t testing using material that had been added to the shroud later. The textile experts identified a few stray bits of cotton fiber mixed in with the linen. They concluded that either the loom used to make the linen had been previously used for cotton and the fibers had been introduced when the shroud was woven or that the cotton fibers had been introduced to the shroud at a later date. The cotton fibers of unknown origin were sorted out and only the linen fibers making up the bulk of the shroud were used for testing.
15. In other words, not only is there no evidence that the parts of the shroud being tested had been introduced due to later repairs, but the researchers were consciously making efforts to ensure that the material they were testing was original to the shroud itself. For a more thorough debunking of the claim that the Shroud of Turin might have been repaired, you can read this article, written by Dr. Steven D. Schafersman, which debunks claims made on the subject. http://llanoestacado.org/freeinquiry/skeptic/shroud/articles/rogers-ta-response.htm
16. Evidence #5: The image on the Turin Shroud has unrealistic anatomical features that are consistent with Gothic artwork, but not with real human anatomy:
17. The figure depicted in the Turin Shroud doesn’t have realistic human anatomical features. Let’s start by looking at the face. The forehead is too small and the lower part of the face too large. On a living human human, the forehead (i.e. the space from the top of the head to the eyes) normally takes up about half the face; on the Turin Shroud, though, the forehead takes up just a little over a third of the face. To illustrate just how weird the proportions are on the face from the Turin Shroud, below is a comparison of the face from the Turin Shroud with the face of Diogo Morgado, the real, human actor who played Jesus in the 2013 History Channel television series The Bible as well the 2014 film Son of God. The comparison is obviously imperfect because the top of Diogo’s head is cropped in the image that I found on the internet, but you can still see very clearly that Diogo’s forehead occupies a vastly greater proportion of his face than the forehead of the face on the Turin Shroud.

1. 
   If we assume that the image on the Turin Shroud is an accurate representation of how Jesus really looked, we are at a loss to explain why his forehead was so tiny. Instead of coming up excuses, like that maybe Jesus had a deformity, I think we should look at works of Gothic art that were made around the time the Shroud of Turin first appears in the historical record. It was common for Gothic artists in France in the fourteenth century to portray humans with unrealistically small foreheads and unrealistically long lower faces. The proportions of the face on the Turin Shroud, then, are more consistent with the proportions of faces in Gothic art than the proportions of a real human being. This strongly suggests that the Turin Shroud was created by a Gothic artist. Now let’s look at the body of the figure. We immediately notice that the body itself is disproportionately elongated. The legs and torso are all unnaturally long and thin. This tall, thin quality is highly characteristic of how figures were normally represented in the Gothic art style. Gothic artists intentionally made their figures look this way in effort to make them seem more imposing. If we look at the figure’s arms, we find that, just like the legs and torso, the arms of the figure on the Turin Shroud are too long to be realistic. Once again, though, we find that figures in Gothic art often have disproportionately long arms—just like the figure on the Turin Shroud. The exact same thing is true for the fingers of the figure; they’re too long and thin to be natural, but they align exactly with the way figures were portrayed in Gothic art. Indeed, everything about the proportions of the figure on the Shroud of Turin points to the conclusion that it was created by a Gothic artist.

1. notice the Gothic features
2. What’s even more interesting is that the arms of the figure on the Turin Shroud are also different lengths. The right forearm is noticeably longer than the left forearm. The fact that the arms aren’t the same length is almost a dead giveaway that we’re looking at an image created by an artist and not the exact likeness of a real human being. Real human beings virtually always have arms of the same length, but it is really easy for an artist to mess up and make arms that aren’t the same length. Finally, we have a smoking gun: the front side of the figure on the shroud doesn’t match the back side of the figure. In fact, the two figures aren’t even the same length; the front side of the figure on the shroud is 1.95 meters long, but the figure on the back of the shroud is 2.02 meters long! This is absolutely a dead giveaway that we’re looking at the work of an artist. It’s easy to see how an artist could have painted the figures separately and accidentally made the back side of the figure longer than the front side, but it is hard to see how, if the shroud were authentic, Jesus’s back could have been longer than his front. That in itself would take some kind of miracle.

1. The full-length negatives of the front and back of the Turin Shroud. Pay attention to the arms, which are of differing lengths and too long to be anatomical. Also notice that the image on the back is longer than the one on the front.
2. Evidence #6: The blood stains on the Turin Shroud are not consistent with how blood naturally flows and the stains instead appear to have been painted on:

1. Researchers have repeatedly conducted experiments and found that the bloodstains on the Turin Shroud are not consistent with how blood naturally flows. In 2018, a group of researchers conducted experiments in which they applied blood to a live volunteer and to a mannequin to mimic the wounds sustained by Jesus on the cross in order to see how the blood would run on human bodies in various positions. They then compared the actual blood patterns with the bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin. Two short trails of blood on the back of the left hand of the figure on the Shroud of Turin were found to be only plausible if the man was holding his arms at a forty-five degree angle, but bloodstains on the forearm were only plausible if the man was holding his arms vertically or nearly vertically. Since a man can’t hold his arms in both positions at once, clearly the bloodstains weren’t natural. The bloodstains on the front chest of the figure were consistent with the pattern one would expect from a spear wound in the side, but the bloodstains on the back, which supposedly came from the same spear wound, weren’t consistent with the supposed injury. In other words, this is another case of the back side of the figure on the shroud not matching the front. Matteo Borrini, the leader of the research team and a forensic anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University, stated in an interview with LiveScience, “…these cannot be real bloodstains from a person who was crucified and then put into a grave, but actually handmade by the artist that created the shroud.” In other words, the bloodstains were painted on.
2. https://www.livescience.com/63093-shroud-of-turin-is-fake-bloodstains.html
3. Evidence #7: The fabric of the Shroud of Turin uses a herringbone twill weave, which is a kind of complex weave that was used in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles, but is not known to have been used for burial shrouds in the first century AD:
4. The Shroud of Turin is made of linen fibers woven using a three-to-one herringbone twill weave, which is a kind of highly complex weave that was used in the Late Middle Ages for high-quality textiles. Although the herringbone twill weave did exist in the ancient Roman world, we have no evidence that it was ever used for burial shrouds. Fragments of a number of burial shrouds have been recovered from tombs near Jerusalem dating to the same time period as Jesus and all of them use a plain two-way weave; none of them use a herringbone twill weave. Even if we imagine that the herringbone twill weave was used for burial shrouds in Roman Judaea and we just don’t have any evidence for this, it almost certainly would not have been used for the burial shroud of a crucified Jewish criminal, since it is a very complex weave that takes much greater skill and effort to produce than a plain weave. As such, any fabric made using this weave in Jesus’s time would have certainly been very expensive. The burial shroud fragments that have been recovered from the tombs near Jerusalem, however, include fragments from shrouds that certainly belonged to extremely elite individuals and all of them use the much simpler two-way weave. It is hard to imagine that a high priest or wealthy aristocrat would have been buried with a relatively cheap shroud made with a simple weave, but a crucified criminal would have been buried with a more expensive herringbone twill shroud.

1. Photograph from Wikimedia Commons depicting a modern example of herringbone twill weave. This kind of weave was used for expensive fabrics in the Late Middle Ages, but not for burial shrouds in Judaea in the first century AD.
2. Conclusion
3. 1. We have no reliable documentation of the Shroud of Turin’s existence until the fourteenth century. 2. The forger who made the Shroud of Turin confessed and the earliest definitive mention of the shroud in any historical source is a record of his confession. 3. The Shroud of Turin doesn’t match the kinds of funerary wrappings used in Judaea in the time of Jesus or the description of Jesus’s own funerary wrappings given in the Gospel of John. 4. The linen of the Shroud of Turin has been securely dated using radiocarbon dating to between c. 1260 and c. 1390 AD—well over a millennium after Jesus’s death. 5. The figure on the Shroud of Turin does not have anatomically correct proportions and much more closely resembles figures in fourteenth-century Gothic art than a real human being. 6. The bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin are not consistent with how blood actually flows naturally and they instead appear to have been painted on. 7. The fabric of the Shroud of Turin is made with a kind of weave that is known to have been commonly used during the Late Middle Ages, but does not seem to have been used for burial shrouds in Judaea in the first century AD.

Taylor, R.E. and Bar-Yosef date it to the 14th century.

Radiocarbon dating by three different laboratories established that the shroud’s linen material was produced between the years 1260 and 1390 (to a 95% confidence level)

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0168583X87902333?via%3Dihub This paper suggests a third alternative, that it is an icon dating from the 11th century (W. S. A. Dale).

1. According to microchemist Dr. Walter McCrone,
2. The suggestion that the 1532 Chambery fire changed the date of the cloth is ludicrous. Samples for C-dating are routinely and completely burned to CO2 as part of a well-tested purification procedure. The suggestions that modern biological contaminants were sufficient to modernize the date are also ridiculous. A weight of 20th century carbon equaling nearly two times the weight of the Shroud carbon itself would be required to change a 1st century date to the 14th century (see Carbon 14 graph). Besides this, the linen cloth samples were very carefully cleaned before analysis at each of the C-dating laboratories.*

1. In 1543, John Calvin, in his book Treatise on Relics, explained the reason why the Shroud cannot be genuine:
2. In all the places where they pretend to have the graveclothes, they show a large piece of linen by which the whole body, including the head, was covered, and, accordingly, the figure exhibited is that of an entire body. But the Evangelist John relates that Christ was buried, “as is the manner of the Jews to bury.” What that manner was may be learned, not only from the Jews, by whom it is still observed, but also from their books, which explain what the ancient practice was. It was this: The body was wrapped up by itself as far as the shoulders, and then the head by itself was bound round with a napkin, tied by the four corners, into a knot. And this is expressed by the Evangelist, when he says that Peter saw the linen clothes in which the body had been wrapped lying in one place, and the napkin which had been wrapped about the head lying in another. The term napkin may mean either a handkerchief employed to wipe the face, or it may mean a shawl, but never means a large piece of linen in which the whole body may be wrapped. I have, however, used the term in the sense which they improperly give to it. On the whole, either the Evangelist John must have given a false account, or every one of them must be convicted of falsehood, thus making it manifest that they have too impudently imposed on the unlearned.
3. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ar00171a004

1. McCrone concluded that the Shroud’s body image had been painted with a dilute pigment of red ochre (a form of iron oxide) in a collagen tempera (i.e., gelatin) medium, using a technique similar to the grisaille employed in the 14th century by Simone Martini and other European artists. McCrone also found that the “bloodstains” in the image had been highlighted with vermilion (a bright red pigment made from mercury sulfide), also in a collagen tempera medium. McCrone reported that no actual blood was present in the samples taken from the Shroud.
2. Apparently, the first historical mention of the shroud as the “shroud of Turin” is in the late 16th century when it was brought to the cathedral in that city, though it was allegedly discovered in Turkey during one of the so-called “Holy” Crusades in the so-called “Middle” Ages. In 1988, the Vatican allowed the shroud to be dated by three independent sources–Oxford University, the University of Arizona, and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology–and each of them dated the cloth as originating in medieval times, around 1350.

The case for the forged shroud is made most forcefully by Joe Nickell in his Inquest On The Shroud Of Turin, which was written in collaboration with a panel of scientific and technical experts. The author claims that historical, iconographic, pathological, physical, and chemical evidence points to its inauthenticity. The shroud is a 14th century painting, not a 2000-year-old cloth with Jesus’s image. McCrone’s theory is that “a male model was daubed with paint and wrapped in the sheet to create the shadowy figure of Jesus.” The model was covered in red ochre, “a pigment found in earth and widely used in Italy during the Middle Ages, and pressed his forehead, cheekbones and other parts of his head and body on to the linen to create the image that exists today. Vermilion paint, made from mercuric sulphide, was then splashed onto the image’s wrists, feet and body to represent blood.” McCrone analyzed the shroud and found traces of chemicals that were used in “two common artist’s pigments of the 14th century, red ochre and vermilion, with a collagen (gelatin) tempera binder” (McCrone 1998). He makes his complete case that the shroud is a medieval painting in Judgment Day for the Shroud of Turin (March 1999). For his work, McCrone was awarded the American Chemical Society’s Award in Analytical Chemistry in 2000.