Critical Review of ‘A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin’

by Mark Thomas Walker

Introduction For many years one of the strongest parts of the case for the authenticity of the Turin Shroud has been the impressive consensus amongst medical experts who have closely studied the image on the cloth that it displays in convincingly flawless detail, beyond the capacity of human art or artifice to have rendered, the injuries and wounds of a crucified man – albeit that they have often disagreed about the explanation of various aspects of that image.i Not surprisingly then, the Blood Pattern Analysis challenge to this consensus recently mounted by Matteo Borrini and Luigi Garlaschelli (henceforth ‘B&G’) in ‘A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin’ (Journal of Forensic Sciences July, 2018) has elicited a highly critical reaction from pro-authenticists.ii I believe that this reaction has been largely justified. Indeed, the conclusions arrived at in B&G’s paper go so far beyond anything remotely warranted by the tests it describes that one struggles to comprehend how it could have been accepted for publication in a reputable scientific journal without, at least, requests for further revision (one gathers from a footnote that the version published last year is itself already a revision of presentations to the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 2014 and 2015). It is in any case a poor specimen of a scientific paper, quite apart from the flawed inferences eventually drawn in it. The authors do not specify adequately the hypotheses their experiments are designed to test; they offer virtually no defence of the experimental assumptions implicit in the methods and materials they use, despite the fact that many of these assumptions seem questionable; they frequently fail to enlarge upon points crying out for clarification; and their account of relevant previous forensic research is sloppy (Barbet investigated the Shroud in the XXth century, not the XIXth); perfunctory; patchy; insufficiently focused; and at one point highly misleading, for, contrary to the impression given by B&G’s claim on p.1 that Gilbert Lavoie, “tracing the Shrouds [sic.] blood rivulets onto paper and wrapping it around a real body, was not able to find a natural explanation

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for their shape and position”, it was Lavoie’s contention in the article referenced by B&G that the apparent blood marks on the Shroud can be naturally explained as the result of contact with a crucified body, while the body-image cannot. iii Furthermore, Lavoie expresses no puzzlement regarding how the patterns in question could be consistent with blood rivulets that flowed in the course of crucifixion. Even if B&G are justified in thinking he was not able to find a good account of how such matching flows were caused in this way, they might at least have made it clearer that Lavoie did not think he was unable to do so.iv All that said, however, the paper may have value as a preliminary study that highlights the need for further testing of broadly the kind attempted by its authors if the forensic case for or against the Shroud’s authenticity (at least in the minimal sense of its image having resulted from interaction with a crucified man) is to be made as convincing as possible; and it may also help to sharpen awareness of the issues involved in refining the experimental techniques used by B&G, so as to find more reliable methods, within the obvious ethical constraints imposed upon possible simulations of crucifixion and burial, of determining more precisely what the death and burial of a real “Shroud Man” would probably have involved. Some of the relevant possibilities here, which seem to have been overlooked by B&G, have been outlined in the rebuttals of their work that have already been forthcoming (see again n.2); and my justification for adding to these now is partly just that there seems scope to fill out these possibilities a bit more persuasively, in the context of a more direct, thorough and systematic appraisal of B&G’s paper itself, and as a whole, than anything I have so far been able to find in print or online – an appraisal which, furthermore, avoids certain unfair and ill-conceived criticisms that have been leveled at the paper, sometimes by those also making the more effective points. For instance, some defenders of the Shroud’s authenticity, apparently not noticing the troubling implications for their own position, have sought to call in question the techniques of BPA itself, invoking a 2009 report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences which concluded that “with the exception of nuclear DNA analysis,…no forensic method has been rigorously shown to have the capacity to consistently, and with a high degree of certainty, demonstrate a connection between evidence and a specific individual or source."v But if that is automatically taken to cast significant

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doubt on every example of BPA, as opposed to indicating the need for more consistent practice for legal purposes, it inevitably raises questions about aspects of the case for the Shroud’s authenticity, given the big contribution to that case by forensic pathologists. In any event, no pronouncement from on high can absolve us of the responsibility to evaluate on its own merits any particular application of BPA. Then there have been ad hominem attacks, impugning the motivations and professional qualifications of B&G by pointing out that one of them (Garlaschelli) is an avowed atheist and long-time sceptic about the Shroud;vi that both of them are members of an Italian organization called CICAP (Comitato Italiano per il Controllo delle Affirmazioni sulle Pseudoscienze, or in English, Committee for the Investigation of Claims of the Pseudosciences) affiliated to the European Council of Sceptical Organizations, and are therefore guilty of a naturalistic or anti-religious bias which is somehow bound to discredit their work; and that neither of them are physicians or forensic pathologists (Professor Borrini is a forensic archaeologist and forensic anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University, U.K. and Professor Garlaschelli is an organic chemist at the University of Pavia in Italy).vii Regarding B&G’s credentials, I can only say that if these are good enough for the Journal of Forensic Sciences, then they have to be assumed to be good enough.viii Complaints about motivation, background philosophical belief or prejudice, and related affiliation, are simply irrelevant to the intrinsic merits of a case, and threaten in this instance once more to boomerang badly on some of those making them. Again, it has been claimed that B&G’s paper “totally ignored all of the peer reviewed science published in the literature based on direct examination of the Shroud that challenged their conclusions”. ix Unfortunately this overstates the important point that had B&G paid due attention to the full range of hypotheses advanced in the relevant literature already available before they embarked upon their BPA research, and some of which they themselves cite in their rushed review of that literature, then they might have been saved from premature confidence about the broader bearing of their results, and they might given more thought instead to conducting a more thorough and meaningful set of tests. But as should already be evident they do not totally ignore that literature (as well as Lavoie 2010, they cite in the course of their brief literature review at the start of the paper: Barbet 1950,

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1953 and 1963; Ricci 1977; Zugibe 1988, 1989 and 2005; Bevilacqua et al. 2014; and Svensson 2008). In particular, they do not ignore the work of Pierre Barbet in the way implied by some critics who appear to think that one of B&G’s experimental results can be refuted by either just recapitulating, or reproducing a drawing that illustrates, Barbet’s calculations of the angles of the arms necessary for forearm and wrist rivulets like those on the Shroud to have flowed at the same time and from the same wound at the back of the left hand (that is, what would be the left hand of a body covered by the Shroud, corresponding to the right hand in its frontal image). On the contrary, B&G describe Barbet’s investigation in some detail, broadly agreeing with his calculations regarding the arm-angles required to produce blood flows like those on the back of a left hand or wrist corresponding to the right hand in the Shroud image, disagreeing only with the arm-angles he postulated to explain the flows on a forearm corresponding to that in the image, and specifically noting that Barbet himself actually “did not let any liquid drip from the wounds [of the cadaver he had nailed to a cross] to verify his calculations” (B&G, p.5). Thus their reported disconfirmation of his calculated angles for the forearm stains, following the very tests they say Barbet failed to conduct, can hardly be rejected by invoking Barbet at this point without flagrantly begging the question.x If anything, it will emerge later that far from ignoring Barbet, they seem to have been so fixated on his account of the Shroud’s wrist and forearm stains that they neglected other ways in which those stains might reflect blood flows originating in a real crucifixion. Nor, as we shall see, is it even strictly accurate to say that B&G totally ignore “all of the peer-reviewed science” that conflicts with the wider claims about the Shroud’s authenticity and likely provenance they make in the final paragraph of their paper on the basis of the conclusion proper they draw in their penultimate paragraph, which states what they take to be the direct implication of their own work. The references they give in support of these wider claims are undoubtedly misleadingly selective in failing to mention many important peer-reviewed scientific articles which explicitly or implicitly challenge those claims. However, the “direct examination of the Shroud” upon which many of those articles are based has no obvious bearing upon the specific kind of study B&G are attempting, which, as they emphasize early on in their paper, is indeed only a blood pattern analysis;

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and one which, moreover, concerns what might be described as the “macro-aspects” of only some of the more easily visible apparent blood patterns on the Shroud – aspects which can be sufficiently well appreciated on the photographs of it taken in 1931 by Guiseppe Enrie that were used by B&G (at least, none of the rebuttals of their work explain exactly how use of the more specialist or high-definition photographs taken subsequently, or access to the Shroud itself, would have pre-empted the specifically BPA-based claims they make). Therefore, while the ignored science certainly has a bearing upon their wider claims, it is unclear how it could refute their conclusion proper. Equally though, as should emerge in what follows, no great scientific expertise is needed to see that neither that conclusion nor the wider claims B&G base upon it follow from the evidence they present.

Figure 1. Shroud of Turin: front/ventral image (before the restoration of 2002). The large dark stain on the torso (next to one of the pair of patched triangular burn-holes caused by damage from the fire of 1532 when the cloth was in Chambéry, France) is alleged to have flowed from a chest wound made by a Roman lancea which had a leaf-shaped metal pointed head fitting the dimensions of the ellipse visible at the top of the stain

Figure 1

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Figure 2: Close up of forearms and “right” hand (which, allowing for reversal, would correspond to the left hand of a body wrapped in the cloth) Figure 3: Dorsal image showing apparent blood belt between the uppermost pair of large burn-holes corresponding to those roughly level with the alleged chest wound stain on front imag Summary of B&G’s paper

Figure 2

Figure 3

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The aim of the investigation was “to understand the flowing of the blood on the body of a crucified man and its possible compatibility with the image on the Shroud.” (p.2) More specifically, six experiments were conducted to test, in effect, the following two hypotheses:xi (A): that a single process of bleeding produced both the two short rivulets apparently issuing from a nail wound visible in the wrist/upper right hand area of the Shroud’s frontal image and the longer rivulets on the outside of the right (in the image) forearm; (B): that blood flow from an alleged spear wound on the right side of the chest of a posited Shroud Man was responsible for an apparent blood belt across the lower part of the back displayed on the dorsal image. Test 1 was performed as a preliminary to the direct testing of (A), “to simulate bleeding in contact with a wood surface like the patibulum [the crossbar], in order to investigate the shape of the nail wound on the hand and the two short rivulets” (p.2; my interpolation). It involved applying “a circular stain of 0.3 mL of synthetic blood… onto the back of the hand of a living volunteer to simulate a puncture-type injury” by pressing “pieces of wood with different textures (from bark to smooth finish)… on the hand for 10 sec…” (p.2) The results of this test are reported as having been “not conclusive” (ibid.). Test 2 attempted to determine the way blood trickles down the forearm from a wound at the back of a left hand at various forearm-to-body angles (taking the body to be vertical, as in a standing subject), by taping a cannula attached to a transfusion bag filled with donated, whole human blood containing anticoagulant and preservative, to the back of the left hand of a living volunteer, with its aperture fixed first at Destot’s space (bounded by carpal bones in the wrist and situated towards the little finger side), then closer to the knuckles and finally on the wrist nearer the forearm (see B&G 2018, p.3, Fig.3). The forearm-to-body angles required to produce the angles of the two short rivulets visible on the back of the hand in relation to the middle line of the forearm were the subject of Test 4. Test 3 was performed upon “a supine subject, with hands on the groin, in order to verify the likeliness of a post-mortem flow” (p.2) from the back of the hand along the forearm matching the pattern visible on the Shroud. Tests 3 and 4 used the same materials as Test 2.

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According to the authors, neither the Shroud’s right (in the image) forearm blood marks, nor the shorter stains on the wrist/back of the hand, could be simulated by Test 3. The outcome of Test 2 indicated that a forearm must be almost vertical (more precisely, greater than 80˚ from horizontal) in order for longer forearm rivulets consistent with those on the Shroud to flow from the hand/wrist wound; while Test 4 indicated that that to reproduce the 50˚ rivulet-to-mid-line-of-forearm angle of the Shroud’s proximal short wrist rivulet (closest to the hand) requires a forearm-to-body angle of approximately 45˚, and to reproduce the 40˚ rivulet-to-mid-line angle of the wrist’s distal rivulet requires a forearm-to-body angle of 50˚. B&G infer that if these various wrist and forearm stains on the Shroud “are from a bleeding wound, then they could not have occurred at the same moment and with the body in the same position, but would represent the results of two different unknown events.” (p.5). Let us call this Conclusion A. To explore the likely blood flow from a Shroud-like chest wound, Test 5 involved pressing a thin wooden plank against a sponge (soaked in synthetic blood) on the upper right torso of a plastic mannequin in a fully upright position. The result of this procedure (illustrated in Fig.7 of the paper) was, in the authors’ words, a flow of “vertical rivulets…only on the front of the torso, in a direction congruent with the Shroud image” and “consistent with the general interpretation that the Man on the Shroud was pierced with the spear while hanging from the cross.” (p.5) Test 6 “was performed using the same process as experiment number 5, but with the mannequin torso lying on a flat surface covered with fabric” (p.5), then with the surface tilted 5˚ both clockwise and counterclockwise” (ibid.) and finally with “the mannequin in supine position after the vertical bleeding” (ibid.). In none of these sub-tests were the authors able to generate “the so-called “blood belt” as multiple winding lines across the lumbar region” (ibid.). Placing the model in a supine position after vertical bleeding yielded “no stains…on the dorsal side”, while the rivulets flowing directly from the simulated chest wound of the model in that position, tilted or flat, continued not to the lower back but “sideways and posteriorly to the scapular region where they create a single large pool absorbed by the fabric and a corresponding imprint on the body” (ibid.). According to B&G, the upshot of Tests 5 and 6 taken together is that “If the rivulets on the frontal image are roughly consistent with bleeding in a standing position, the hypothesis

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of a post mortem bleeding [from the chest wound] to generate the lines on the lumbar area… seems to be unrealistic” (p.6; my interpolation). Let us call this Conclusion B. In the penultimate paragraph of the paper Conclusions A and B are amalgamated to yield the following summary conclusion (what I referred to earlier as B&G’s “conclusion proper”): “Assuming that the red stains on the Turin linen are actually blood from the crucifixion wounds, the results of the experiments demonstrate that the alleged flowing patterns from different areas of the body are not consistent with each other.” (p.6)xii Finally, a number of wider claims are made on the basis of this summary conclusion: “The inconsistencies identified by the authors seem not only to point against their own reality [sic.], but against the authenticity of the Shroud itself, suggesting that the Turin linen was an artistic or “didactic” representation from the XIV century. This new Blood-stain Pattern Analysis supports the historical records…, the radiocarbon dating …, and the chemical analysis...” (p.6; the references in the second sentence which are omitted in this quotation will be discussed in due course below). B&G do not distinguish in the paper between the Shroud’s “authenticity” as meaning just that its markings resulted from its having wrapped a crucified body, or more precisely, from its having wrapped the crucified body of Jesus of Nazareth; but it is clear, from the fact they take their conclusion to suggest the Shroud’s provenance as an artistic or didactic representation, that they regard it as telling against the Shroud’s authenticity in the first sense, and therefore against its authenticity in the stronger sense as well. Three cautionary comments (1) B&G say little about the inconclusive result they report for Test 1, beyond remarking that it “underlines how difficult it is to speculate on the real location of the nail’s exit-wound based on the imprint on the Turin Shroud.” (B&G, p.2)xiii Be that as it may, the result might seem to cast doubt on the realism of the bifurcated and comparatively well-defined wrist/hand mark on the Shroud inasmuch insofar as this differs from the rather smudged, undifferentiated oval stain produced by hand-wood contact in the experiment (see B&G p.2 and also Fig.2 on p.3). So it may be worth noting that, quite apart from the question of whether “a circular stain of 0.3 mL of synthetic blood” (B&G, p.2) on the back of an

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uninjured hand really does accurately simulate a “puncture-type injury” (ibid.) of the kind that would be produced by, say, a Roman crucifixion nail, Test 1 appears to embody the assumption, nowhere justified by the authors, that the Shroud Man was facing away from the cross. xiv Moreover, supposing there were grounds to discount that possibility, it is not clear why it should be assumed that the relevant part of the back of the hand/wrist would at all times during the crucifixion be in such close contact with the wood as to preclude a fair measure of unimpeded bleeding around the nail wound. Finally, there is also the possibility (not addressed by B&G) that the wrist/hand rivulets resulted from the extraction of the nail when the hand lacked all contact with the patibulum. Why might that have happened? In the context of speculation about the identity of a crucified Shroud Man, the presence on the image of apparent blood marks suggesting a crown of thorns is alone enough to make the obvious candidate Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew put to death in Jerusalem. Maybe, then, by leaving the nail in the hand after extraction from the wood more blood could be kept dammed up until the forearm was positioned more vertically (see Scenario 5 below), at which point extraction of the nail would have been less likely to risk spillage of post-mortem blood onto the wood or into the earth, but would keep it on the forearm, in line with the strictures of Jewish Law to preserve the “life-blood” of the deceased – a Jewish term for the blood which flows from a body at death – to ensure its burial with the body. This might, in addition, explain why not all the Shroud Man’s bloodstains were washed away after burial, leaving post-mortem blood on the body which became imprinted on the Shroud.xv (2) At the end of their report on Test 4 the authors say “It is not pointless to add, regarding this analysis, that the short trickles on the back of the hand and the longer ones on the outside of the forearm are unconnected”. However, they do not spell out the point of this remark. Taken alone, it might just be a reminder that hypothesis (A) – or more precisely, the version of that hypothesis which would postulate a single bleed from the back-of-hand nail wound as the source of both the wrist and the forearm rivuletsxvi – is indeed, strictly, just as much a hypothesis as hypothesis (B), insofar as it affirms that there was originally a blood flow connection on a body wrapped in the Shroud which is not actually visible

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on the Shroud itself. To that extent the authors might, at this juncture, be interpreted as cautioning us not to take the failure of a “bleeding along back of forearm from back of left hand” hypothesis as automatically undermining the authenticity of the Shroud. More likely though, in view of their eventual verdict, which appears to presuppose that the Shroud’s authenticity depends upon the viability of this particular A-hypothesis, is that they cite the absence of a visible connection in order to prime us for their subsequent rejection of that hypothesis. If so, they ought at least to have considered that the disconnections occur on both arms precisely at those areas above the wrist where one might expect them to have been held by someone placing the left arm over the right in the groin area during burial, exactly as we see on the Shroud; xvii or alternatively, as Wilson (1987, p.39) has suggested, perhaps a “binding cloth or cord at this point…would have been functionally necessary to counteract the effects of rigor mortis, which, according to some medical opinion would have tended to return the arms to the original crucifixion position.” (2) While the result of Test 5 as shown in Fig.7 of B&G’s paper was, as they say, a flow of blood from a simulated chest wound “in a direction congruent with the Shroud image”, the latter therefore portraying a flow “roughly consistent with bleeding in a standing position”, it is nonetheless unclear why B&G claim, in their Abstract, that “The BPA of blood visible on the frontal side of the chest (the lance wound) shows that the Shroud represents the bleeding in a realistic manner for a standing position.” After all, what we see in B&G’s photograph of the test (Fig.7) is, as Rucker 2018 (p.7) notes, “that the blood runs down in several streams –down to the groin and down the leg past the bottom of the plastic mannequin torso. The blood on the Shroud indicates that the blood only traveled inches from the side wound. For it to be concluded … that the experiments indicate “that the Shroud represents the bleeding in a realistic manner” requires the authors to disregard the results of their own experiment. They evidently recognized that their experimental procedures were so inadequate that the experimental results could be ignored for the side wound. This should have been recognized for the other experiments as well.”

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At the very least, this is yet another occasion (the previous two concerning their remarks discussed in (1) and (2) above) where some elaboration would have been appropriate which B&G fail to offer. Why, then, do they draw back here from pressing home a criticism of the realism of the Shroud image that would apply immediately to the apparent chest wound it presents taken alone, unlike their more indirect contention about the supposed impossibility of a connection between that wound and the Shroud’s dorsal “blood belt”? Is this really a sign that they lack confidence in their own experiments? Have they, on the contrary, simply overlooked an opportunity to score a direct hit on the Shroud’s authenticity? I think we can we find some justification for B&G’s caution here that would not in itself tend to impugn the reliability of their “other experiments as well”. This is perhaps easiest to see with respect to the first of the two discrepancies cited by Rucker, which relates to the splitting of the simulated blood flow into a number of distinct streams, unlike the single broad, oblong marking below the elliptical wound under the right breast of the hypothetical Shroud man (allowing for the ventral image reversal), though there is some indication that B&G regard this as a possible problem for the authenticity of the image, since after in effect conceding that it is “roughly” realistic, they do end their report on the outcome of Test 5 with an “however” concerning the fact that “the rivulets obtained during the experiment run independently, without creating a large, filled stain as seen in the Shroud.” That they do not push too hard on this point presumably reflects their primary interest in testing only for the likely general direction or trend of a given blood flow, in conjunction, perhaps, with their awareness that such features as stream splitting could depend largely on aspects of their experimental procedure which depart from the reality they are attempting to simulate. For instance, a sponge located on the outside of a plastic torso, filled with anticoagulant containing synthetic blood, and then pressed by the relatively broad (when compared to a lance) edge of a wooden plank, seems likely to be susceptible to a sort of squirting dispersal effect that would not apply if a Roman lancea were to pierce the right auricle of the heart (to consider only Barbet’s hypothesis in Barbet 1963 (orig.1953) ch.5), filled at this point with heavier, more solid and viscous post-mortem blood, which could be expected flow more slowly over a surface reflecting sweat dampened skin, as well as muscle and bone that might easily constitute a structure which helped to

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contain a more unified flow. An artificial squirt dispersal effect seems especially likely to account for the two outermost of the four distinct streams visible on B&G’s Fig.7, and most clearly in the case of the stream that tracks diagonally towards the groin. A particularly telling feature of this rivulet in the simulation, incidentally, is the way it suddenly forks, for no very obvious reason, towards the end, sending a sub-rivulet towards the pubic area. This demonstrates that even small changes of contour on the surface of a body can significantly divert or re-direct a blood stream, so that likely differences between their mannequin and a crucified Shroud Man’s posture and morphology (bearing in mind the effect on the contours of the latter’s upper torso of hanging on a cross with arms extended upwards and/or outwards) might well act to contain the flow from a chest wound in the way we observe on the Shroud, or send its main flow further to the side than is observable in B&G’s simulation (and which we would not actually be able to see now on the Shroud, even if it had once been evident there, because of the patching of the holes from the fire of 1532?) But what of the difference between the length of the vertical flow on the Shroud Man’s chest and that of B&G’s simulated flow, which extends in an unbroken stream vertically and right down the front of the torso on the right side of the stomach as far as the right thigh (and possibly beyond), as portrayed also, for example, in a number of mid-to-late XVth century paintings, such as the ‘Mystical Crucifixion’ of the Spanish artist Joan Rosato (formerly attributed to Matteo di Giovanni), which dates to the 1450s and is currently held in Princeton University Art Museum, and the Mantegna Crucifixion from the same period mentioned by B&G?xviii Why do, or at least why should, B&G not make more of this discrepancy? Perhaps because, for one thing, it is debatable whether there is any real discrepancy here. Contrary to Rucker’s claim that “the blood on the Shroud indicates that the blood only traveled inches from the side wound” what the Shroud actually shows us is only a mark on the cloth that ends at a point which may well be compatible with a continuing real flow on the body that failed to register on the linen simply because contact with the body was broken at the point where the blood flow shown on the image terminates. Everything would then depend upon the possibility of tamping down the sheet between the right breast and the right upper arm so as to register on

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the cloth the flow we now see, in a circumstance where a raised and expanded rib-cage, fixed in rigor mortis, together with an abnormally distended abdomen, would accentuate the concavity created by the sloping away of the belly on the right in such a way as to create a bridge of cloth between the lower edge of the oblong flow and the forearm over the right hip. The enhanced viscosity of the postmortem blood could then be invoked to explain why clotting eventually ensured the termination of the stream prior to its emergence from under the area obscured by the right forearm to any point on the right thigh that would have been in contact with the cloth.xix Alternatively, and eschewing any special assumptions about how draping might have created such a cloth-body gap between the right hand front of the torso and the right forearm, it is possible to maintain that the lower edge of the flow that shows on the cloth does mark the real termination of the flow if we suppose that the body was somewhat inclined to the right in such a fashion as to ensure that the main flow occurred further round the side of the body (now obscured by the fire damage) than in B&G’s simulation. Two sub-possibilities might then be considered. First, that the angling of the torso to the right permitted a flow down the surface of the right side of the body that missed any part of the front of the stomach or thigh, and in a way which would have been prevented from registering on the cloth by the placing of the right arm in the burial position, the more frontal part of this flow still visible being the result of a spreading round towards the front of the chest that was sufficiently controlled and channeled by the protruding ribs and muscles to break any further vertical impetus.xx Second, the angling to the right may have been sufficiently pronounced to ensure that almost all of the blood from the initial flow fell directly to the ground, without touching any part of the body, so that the mark we now see was the result of a later, weaker flow when the body (either during deposition or when being place on the cloth or carried to burial), while not horizontal, was no longer as quite as vertical as it was when the wound was inflicted.xxi These various possibilities will be reflected in the scenarios constructed below with a view to testing B&G’s claims about the implications of their experiments. Critical comments

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(4) The derivation of the paper’s main wider supposed implication, namely that the Shroud is not authentic, from its summary conclusion is a glaring non sequitur. B&G at least tone down their language at this point (final paragraph of the paper), saying only that that their conclusion “points against” the Shroud’s authenticity and “suggests” its “artistic or didactic” provenance, by contrast with the “demonstration” of the conclusion itself they take themselves (in the preceding paragraph) to have provided. But even if, for the sake of argument, that conclusion is granted, it does not even point to the Shroud’s non-authenticity. It could only do so if there were prior reason to connect the cloth’s authenticity with the truth of hypotheses (A) and (B) in a way which suggests the unlikelihood of alternative hypotheses compatible with treating their test results as probative. But B&G offer no such reason, nor even the faintest hint of such a reason. In other words, they say nothing to rule out as particularly far-fetched or unlikely any of the following four scenarios for a crucified Shroud Man, in which the fours stains discussed by B&G would have been produced by four separate bleeding events, and thus in a way which is perfectly consistent with their summary conclusion:-xxii Scenario 1 When the Shroud Man was on the cross, with his forearms at angles 45˚ to 50˚ from horizontal, bleeding from the nail wounds produced the two short wrist rivulets whose imprint we see on the Shroud. The chest stains on the Shroud’s frontal image were produced by a spear wound, also while the body was still hanging on the cross. No blood or other liquid from this wound flowed to the lower back. Deposition then occurred by removing the patibulum from the shaft (stipes) and then laying the victim on his back, after which the nails were extracted. The longer rivulets on both forearms were formed by blood flows from the wrists when the arms were more vertically positioned in relation to the still supine body, immediately after the nails had been extracted from the hands/wrists. The blood belt was formed following deposition after the hands had been crossed over the groin, as a result of the forearm blood flows having previously travelled to the elbows, whence they dripped down both sides of the body to the small of the back. The thin meandering rivulets were formed by the rocking of the bier on which the body was carried to its tomb as the blood followed certain folds and creases in the cloth.xxiii

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Scenario 2 As in Scenario 1 regarding the chest wound, the blood belt and the forearm stains; but no short wrist rivulets flowed while the body was on the cross. Instead, at that stage there was only a smudge on the back of the hand. This and a similar smudge on the back of the right hand were later washed off, since they were regarded by the body’s Jewish attendants as pre-mortem blood. However, the pressure applied during washing, when the forearm was held up at an angle of ca. 45˚, brought forth an oozing from the dorsal hand wound which produced the shorter wrist rivulet. Liquid from this washing also travelled down both forearms to the elbows and then to the lower dorsal area on each side of the body, thus contributing to the formation of the blood belt.xxiv Scenario 3 As in Scenario 1 regarding the chest wound and blood belt, and as in Scenario 2 regarding the wrist rivulets; but the crucified man’s arms were nailed overhead, at just over 80˚ from horizontal, leading to flows along both forearms from the wrist wounds while the Shroud Man was hanging on the cross. Scenario 4 As in Scenario 1 regarding the chest wound and blood belt, but due to a difference in the nailing of the Shroud Man’s feet, the right foot was entirely immobilized by two nails, one going though its ankle and heel and the other going first through the centre of the left foot and thence also through the right, so that the left leg and left hip were pulled further down than the right. This caused a difference in the angle of the arms, the left being pulled down more tautly causing it to approximate more to an angle of 45˚, whereas the right tended to bend in a way which frequently positioned the right forearm more vertically than the left forearm, leading to the more unified, parallel and co-axial right forearm stains visible on the Shroud image, which flowed when the victim was still alive on the cross, but no left forearm stains at this stage. Movement up and down to prevent asphyxiation consequently depended upon a swivelling of the left foot which involved the left arm oscillating between two different angles (more horizontally when the body was raised to breath, less so when it slumped down due to muscular fatigue in the legs and arms) leading to the two different vertically flowing left-wrist rivulets visible on the frontal half of the Shroud. During deposition, with the

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patibulum still attached to the stipes, the right arm was the first to be detached, and then the left arm, when trailing much more vertically (in the manner portrayed by Rubens, Rembrandt and the deposition painting in the Chapel of Saint Barbara in Velika Mlaka, Croatia); at which stage, blood flowed down the left forearm from the exit-wound at the back of the hand/wrist. Because the blood along the outside of the right forearm had been deposited for a longer time, it was drier than the blood that had more recently flowed along the left forearm. Consequently the changing angles of the right forearm during deposition and the breaking of rigor mortis to tuck the arms into the side prior to entombment, led to less perturbation of the right forearm stream than occurred with the left. In addition, though someone continued to hold the left arm up immediately after the nail had been extracted, in this case the greater downward pressure from the changed weight distribution caused some stumbling and fumbling on the part of those holding the body, who were distraught Jewish attendants unused to this grisly task. As a consequence of sudden jerky re-adjustments involving some sideways movement, rotation and slippage of the arm, its forearm stains became even more broken and fragmentary than those on the right forearm.xxv

Peter Paul Rubens: ‘The Descent from the Cross’ (1612-14)

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Presumably in an attempt to pre-empt consideration of scenarios like these the authors add, immediately after the presentation of their summary conclusion, that:- Even supposing possible different episodes of bleeding (e.g., movements of the body, postmortem bleeding), these are not only nondocumented, but also, as for the lumbar stains, they appear to be unrealistic. (p.6) But this will not do at all. For one thing, there seems to be some suggestion here that the lumbar stains on the Shroud are themselves unrealistic. Yet B&G nowhere produce any evidence for this claim, having argued instead only that those stains could not in reality have been produced by blood issuing from the right chest wound and flowing round one side of the lower back (as claimed by hypothesis (B)). If, on the other hand, they just mean (as seems more likely) that the alternative hypotheses involved in Scenarios 1-4 are no more realistic than hypothesis B, then they have no right to that claim, having only tested hypotheses A and B – which, incidentally, are just as un-documented as those alternative hypotheses. Indeed, restriction only to the consideration of what has been documented would preclude any investigation designed to “help to understand how this ancient death penalty practice — of which almost nothing is known – was performed”, which is how the authors at one point (B&G, p.1) describe one of the aims of their own research. Such a restriction would drastically limit archaeology to the business of underwriting existing historical documentation, leaving no possibility of using it sometimes to correct, illuminate or motivate the search for such documentation or to make entirely undocumented discoveries. And it would certainly debar B&G’s “suggestion” of an artistic or didactic origin of the image on the Shroud, unless one treats as reliable documentation for this wider claim an allegation, made by a Bishop of Troyes in the so-called ‘D’Arcis Memorandum’ of 1389, that the Shroud had been “cunningly painted” over thirty years before – despite the fact that the alleged cunning painter is not named, and the allegation is unsubstantiated by any other documentation of a kind the

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context would lead us to expect, to name only two of the many other reasons to treat it as untrustworthy.xxvi It may be worth emphasizing here that there is nothing at all unscientifically “imaginary” about introducing scenarios like those just described. Indeed, the best science positively demands the exercise of imagination in framing possible hypotheses for testing (even though we may not always be in a position actually to test them at a given stage in our enquiries). In this context, when evaluating the proposition that the image on the Shroud resulted from its having wrapped a crucifixion victim, obviously one cannot reasonably refuse to consider the possible “movements of the body” that must, at the very least, have been involved its deposition and burial. Furthermore, the same logic that leads one, on the basis of the superficial appearance of the Shroud, to consider these associated possibilities, also requires one to take seriously the possibility that the victim in question was Jesus of Nazareth (the apparent crown of thorns alone forces that hypothesis upon our serious attention, if we are bothering to attend at all). So any possibilities compatible with our knowledge of Jewish and Roman practices in first century Palestine are especially relevant. To object that, nonetheless, some of the elaborate details involved in these scenarios (especially the second one) are blatantly ad hoc, would be to miss the point that that they are included here merely to highlight the many ways small, unknown and irretrievable events in the distant past may account for puzzling features of any given surviving object or document – in this case, say, the fact that the left forearm stains of the Shroud image are more interrupted and irregular than those on the right forearm (maybe, instead, a Roman soldier callously wiped the bloodied left-hand nail on the left forearm, or a Jewish follower of the victim reverently did so). Archaeologists are under no obligation to produce a certifiable explanation for every single oddity of a find before they are entitled to pronounce it authentic, as long as those oddities may reasonably be attributed to the sort of accidental or imponderable occurrence that routinely intrudes in the messy circumstances of real life and is, precisely for that reason, usually unremarked, forgotten and undocumented.

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Of course, Scenarios 1-4 cannot all be true, not just because they differ in their details, but because they involve inconsistent implications concerning when and how much bleeding would have occurred from the wrists of the Shroud Man when nailed and after nail extraction, and concerning whether and to what extent his body would have been washed. However, the guarantee that at least one of the scenarios must involve something purely fictional is irrelevant. What matters is whether each scenario taken individually is internally consistent and consistent with what we currently know about such matters. Indeed, regarding the questions just raised about the amount of bleeding to be expected from a nailed wrist, the claim made by B&G in connection with the result of Test 1, that there is some uncertainty about the exact location of the relevant exit-wound, only underlines not just our right but also our obligation to allow for a range of possibilities within the broader hypothesis of authenticity – possibilities going well beyond those excluded by their summary conclusion. The truth of that conclusion, therefore, does not even point to the falsity of that broader hypothesis. (5) The summary conclusion is in any case not “demonstrated”, nor even supported by, the reported experiments. More strongly, as we shall shortly see, Test 5 may actually point to the truth of hypothesis (B). Before claims about the experimental “demonstration” of the falsehood of a given hypothesis or hypotheses can be even entertained, some defence ought to be offered of any apparently questionable assumptions pre-supposed by the materials and methods employed by the experiment(s). In this case, it is far from obvious that the materials and methods used by the authors were appropriate for the investigation of the hypotheses they were testing. For it is not obvious that the way healthy donated (or synthetic) blood flows on the smooth surface of a plastic mannequin or on the hands and forearms of an uninjured, untraumatized, living human body can adequately model the flow of (probably more dehydrated and viscous) pre-mortem or post-mortem blood on the tensed, pain-racked, probably contorted and/or moving, dirt-smeared, sweatier, possibly more hirsute body of a crucified Shroud man. This thicker blood would have issued from real wounds that do not seem to be well simulated in the reported experiments. Can a circular stain of blood

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on the back of a hand (Test 1) or blood issuing from a cannula taped there (Tests 2, 3 and 4) reliably reproduce the way blood behaves when emerging around a crucifixion nail? And, to repeat a concern voiced earlier specifically about Test 5, can pressing the thin end of a plank of wood against a sponge filled with synthetic blood and attached to a plastic model really simulate the piercing of a real human chest with a lance? Nowhere in their paper do B&G answer or pre-empt any of these points and queries.xxvii Perhaps they would counter that the differences just alluded to are irrelevant to their purpose, which required testing only for the likely general trend of the relevant blood flows; and they might urge that the interplay of gravity with surface tension can be expected to determine such a trend for a liquid like blood, regardless of its precise chemical constitution or of details pertaining to the surface(s) over which it flows. In which case, at the very least they ought to have been more explicit in the paper itself about the basis of their confidence in these claims.xxviii Supposing some such defence of their experimental assumptions could convincingly be offered, however, B&G’s tests still do not demonstrate the falsehood of hypotheses (A) and (B), nor do they even reduce the plausibility of those hypotheses. To do so, those tests would, at the very least, have to render improbable the following scenario: Scenario 5 The crucifixion victim slumped slightly to the right after death, leading to a more vertical positioning of the right forearm, but there was no significant bleeding from either hand/wrist wound while the living body was hanging on the cross, since the nails sealed in the blood. With the body in the death position the chest was pierced on the right side. A resulting effusion of blood, together with more watery looking pleural and pericardial fluid, formed the large filled bloodstain imprinted on the upper torso of the Shroud image, then continued down the side of the torso, accumulating round the right hip next to the lumbar region. Deposition then proceeded as in Scenario 1, and blood flowed from both wrist wounds as the forearms were raised to a vertical position, running first (at least in the case of the left forearm) around the two sides of the ulnar styloid protuberance (the bump on the little

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finger side of the wrist) to produce the two short rivulets visible on the Shroud, and thence as the arm became more vertical, down the forearm, to produce the longer rivulets. These various rivulets on the arms were thus produced by a single process of bleeding and to that extent were part of the same event, even though in a certain sense they (necessarily) occurred at slightly different times. It was also during deposition, when the body was at one stage briefly tilted leftwards to prevent any of the postmortem flow from the spear wound on its right side from dripping to the ground, that the blood and serum from that wound began to spread across the lower back, and was then channeled as in Scenario 1.xxix Scenario 6 As in Scenario 5, except that the increased weight on the right forearm after death opened up the right hand wrist wound sufficiently to permit blood flows from that wound along both the inner and outer sides of that forearm, which did not occur in the case of the nail wound at the left wrist. These flows led to blood dripping off the right elbow and, when the arms were crossed over the supine body after deposition, joining the flow from the spear wound on the right side to contribute to the formation of the dorsal blood belt.xxx

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Wooden sculpture designed by Monsignor Giulio Ricci (see Ricci 1981, p.184) in light of research on the Shroud (see Ricci 1981, p.184), illustrating a final crucifixion posture like those described in Scenarios 5,6 and 7; a blood flow from the right wrist as described in Scenarios 4 and 6; and flows from both wrists matching Scenario 4. I have not described a scenario which would account for all of the wounds and blood flows depicted here mainly because of doubts about matching the flow shown on the sculpture from the spear wound with the absence of blood on the Shroud Man’s right thigh, given, as explained earlier under comment (3), the unlikelihood that this absence could be due to the prior absorption of such a flow by a loincloth.xxxi Scenario 7 As in Scenario 5 for the left forearm and wrist streams, but the postmortem slump to the right was sufficiently pronounced to create a blood flow from the right wrist wound as in Scenario 6, and also to ensure that the flow from

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the spear wound fell directly off the chest to the ground. It was only during deposition that a further flow from the chest wound was caused by moving the body when the torso was still angled fairly vertically. Some of this flow (the initial part visible now under the right breast of the Shroud Man) was then channeled by the upper right arm down towards the lower right side after the arms had been crossed over the body; and finally, when the body was tilted leftwards before transfer to the Shroud as in Scenario 5 (in order to safeguard against any of this flow dripping off the side under the right forearm at a gap near the elbow) the blood and serum ran across the lower back as in Scenario 1.xxxii In these scenarios hypotheses (A) and (B) would be true in a way which is perfectly compatible with the result of Tests 2 and 4 (relating to the former) and Tests 5 and 6 (relating to the latter). Perhaps in the case of Tests 2 and 4, B&G were able to overlook the possibility of alternative forms of hypothesis (A) by persistently misrepresenting the results of the tests as requiring a “standing subject” (see, for instance, their Abstract which summarizes the upshot of Test 2 as being that “The two short rivulets on the back of the left hand of the Shroud are only consistent with a standing subject with arms at a ca 45°angle” and of Test 4 as being that the forearm stains “require nearly vertical arms for a standing subject”). Yet whether the subject is standing, sitting or lying flat on the floor is irrelevant to these tests, the results of which depend solely on the angle of the forearm itself in relation to a purely notional “standing” or perfectly upright body which defines the “forearm-to-body” angles B&G were measuring. Tests 5, on the other hand, can at best only tell us about the likely blood flow from a chest wound in a subject whose torso is perfectly vertical, while Test 6 assumes a supine position for the torso, albeit slightly tilted in some of the sub-tests. Therefore neither test tells us what happens to the downwards blood flow when the upright torso is angled to one side. Indeed, there are two features of the result for Test 5 which actually point to the need to consider such a possibility when investigating hypothesis (B). One concerns the thin trickle nearest the right shoulder flowing down the mannequin’s side in such a way as almost to disappear round the back of the right hip (see B&G, Fig.7). Since this nearly occurs even when the torso of the mannequin is perfectly vertical, albeit possibly as an experimentally induced dispersal effect as suggested earlier, it looks likely that a slight

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rightwards tilt and/or rearwards twist might equally well, in lieu of that artificial effect, send some of the flow towards the lumbar region. Secondly, as we also saw earlier, the fact that most of the blood in this test continued to flow down the stomach and onto the right thigh of the mannequin, contrary to what can be observed on the Shroud (where the frontal blood flow from the chest wound falls no further than the upper chest), suggests that the Shroud Man was leaning to the right when the spear wound was inflicted. The point was strikingly anticipated over thirty years ago by Rodney Hoare when reporting on the results of an experiment he ran at what was then Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University, England) primarily to investigate the genesis of the longer rivulets on both forearms of the Shroud image and what he describes as the “V-shaped blood-marks” (1994 [orig.1984], p.80) on the back of the left wrist. Hoare proposed a rightwards slump in the course of his account for these various marks, and believed that this slump would have occurred when the victim was unconscious, and sitting on a sedile (a sort of projecting peg affixed to the stipes). Be this particular suggestion about the sedile as it may, here is the further deduction he made about the chest wound inflicted on a real Shroud Man in this position: “If his body had been symmetrical when this wound was made, the blood would have dripped down his stomach and right leg and the marks of it would have been visible along the cloth. This is not the case, and no blood can be seen below the chest. If the man was stabbed in the unconscious position on the sedile, the blood would have flowed down his side and so would not have been shown on the cloth.” (ibid. pp.81-2)xxxiii While Hoare did not provide any empirical confirmation of this deduction (by which I take it he means only that the blood from the chest wound which flowed down the side of the body would not show on the cloth given the

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entombment position of the right arm interposing between it and side blood marks, not that the predominantly side flow would be incompatible with the frontal oblong we do see on the cloth), it seems plausible enough (as long as the slump to the right was not too pronounced) to warrant testing. At the very least, it deserves more attention than it was evidently given by B&G, who don’t even consider it in their paper.xxxiv It follows that, granting their experimental assumptions, the most their tests could reasonably be taken to have demonstrated is the falsehood of two specific versions of hypothesis (A) and (B), according to which, in the first case, there was a blood flow from the nail wound at the back of the left wrist of a postulated Shroud Man when hanging on the cross which produced both the V-shaped marks on the wrist and the rivulets on the left forearm (as proposed by Barbet 1963 [orig.1953],ch.5); and in the second case, a flow from the chest wound which travelled down the side of the body to the lower thoracic region on the back either when the victim’s torso was symmetrically upright on the cross or (again as proposed by Barbet ibid., p.142) during or following deposition when the body “was being carried, horizontally, to the tomb”. Charity therefore may suggest that it was only ever these two specific hypotheses that B&G intended to test, and not, as I have been assuming, the more general hypotheses (A) and (B) just as such. But if that was their intention – if by “the alleged flowing patterns from different parts of the body” mentioned in their summary conclusion they really meant just those much more specific blood flow connections – then it should be even clearer that their summary conclusion is an utterly insufficient basis for the first of their wider claims, concerning the non-authenticity of the Shroud. (6) As for the second of those wider claims, namely that B&G's BPA suggests that “the Turin linen was an artistic or “didactic” representation from the XIVth century,” this is simply bizarre. If one were trying to date the Shroud as an artistic or didactic representation solely on the basis of the patterns displayed by its apparent blood markings, as opposed to the possible iconographic significance of the presence of those markings on the cloth, the last period one should think of is any time during the Middle Ages.xxxv To quote the art historian Thomas de Wesselow: As far as I am aware, medieval artists never depicted such blood flows on the body

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of the dead Christ. They imagined blood dribbling from the hand wounds, but left the forearms clean xxxvi …Moreover the irregular, asymmetrical character of the blood flows is unlike anything a medieval artist might have imagined, and their fragmented appearance would have seemed quite illogical to medieval minds. (Compare the the continuous trickles of blood depicted on Christ’s side in the Parement de Narbonne). The likelihood that the forearm stains are the work of a medieval painter is virtually nil. (2012, p.121)xxxvii More specifically on the (supposed) representation of short streams of blood apparently issuing from a wound the back of the left hand: Because of the vagueness of the body-image, it is impossible to be sure exactly where this wound is located, but it is clearly in the region of the wrist, rather than the centre of the hand. This casts doubt on the idea that it was painted by a medieval artist, for in the art of that period the wounds are conventionally depicted in the centre of Christ’s hands, never in the wrists…this convention mattered. Today, it might seem unimportant whether the hands or the wrists were pierced, but in those days there was intense devotional interest in Christ’s wounds and they had to be depicted correctly, i.e., according to the traditional understanding. If the blood-image were the work of a medieval painter, then, the wound would almost certainly have

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been located in the back of the hand. (ibid, p.119; perhaps this is why B&G persist in describing its location as being in the “back of the hand” and not the “wrist”. But in case it seems that they are right to do so, and de Wesselow wrong to place the exit-wound specifically at the back of the wrist, his main point, which is surely sound, is just that a medieval artist would have placed it further down the back of the hand towards the fingers where it would more unequivocally match an entrance wound in the centre of the palm, as conventionally portrayed at this period.) And, finally, in response to the view of Joe Nickell (not a professional art historian) that the blood belt resembles the blood rivulets in medieval paintings and was “a clever touch by a shrewd artist anxious to impart “realism”,xxxviii de Wesselow writes: No medieval artist ever painted anything resembling the dorsal pools on the Shroud. Suppose some out-of-time genius had come up with this ‘clever touch’: it would have been utterly lost on his contemporaries, who had no idea that the body of Jesus had been washed and would hardly have been able to reconstruct the hypothetical process that resulted in the stains. Moreover, the concept of ‘realism’ that Nickell invokes did not exist in the fourteenth century. In the Middle Ages, the ‘real’ was the realm of abstract ideas thought to be behind and above the transient, perceptible world, and paintings seemed more ‘real’, therefore, the better they expressed that

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ideal realm. Christ was a manifestation of the divine on earth, and no one would have represented his Holy Blood as a messy puddle, unconnected with his wounds, in order to indicate an incidental fact about his burial. More than any other mark on the cloth, the blood and water across the back are inconceivable as part of a medieval forgery. (ibid. p.131) By the same token, neither this mark nor the others discussed by de Wesselow, are easily conceivable as part of an honest medieval religious “didactic” representation of a non-artistic or semi-artistic kind involving the deliberate wounding of a dead body or the living body of a willing emulator of Christ, in what would have been a very literal and extreme anticipation of Thomas à Kempis’s early fifteenth century work, De Imitatione Christi [The Imitation of Christ]. That a Shroud already in existence, and with a claimed or secretly known line of descent lost to us now, should have been accepted as authentic by some people in the XIVth century (though by no means all, as the D’Arcis Memorandum itself bears witness), does not significantly diminish the implausibility of supposing that such an image was at that time deliberately created out of whole cloth (as it were) with a didactic intention. (7) Since, in itself, the BPA conducted by B&G fails to suggest that the Turin Shroud’s is non-authentic, let alone that it is an artistic or didactic representation from the fourteenth century, neither can it offer any independent support to “the historical records, the radiocarbon dating, and the chemical analysis”, contrary to the third and last of their wider claims. Rather, one is forced to suspect, it is only because B&G evidently already think the historical records, the 1988 C-14 dating, and the chemical analysis of the stains, support a conclusion of non-authenticity that they are so ready to misinterpret their own research as adding support to that conclusion. The case for the non-authenticity of the Shroud remains no stronger than it was before their BPA. How strong was that?

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Judging by what B&G say, not very. Under the heading of “historical records” they refer us to a single work, published in 1903 and edited by Canon Ulysse Chevalier, one of a number by him (see also Chevalier 1899 and 1900) in which his denial of the Shroud’s authenticity draws heavily upon the aforementioned D’Arcis Memorandum. They fail to reference any of the subsequent historical research that has cast doubt (to put it mildly) upon the reliability of the allegation of forgery in this document, upon Chevalier’s editing of it, and upon the argumentum ex silencio according to which there is a 1300 year gap in the historical records that would surely never have arisen had the Shroud of Turin once wrapped the crucified body of Jesus Christ.xxxix On the “chemical analysis” B&G take to support the non-authenticity of the Shroud, they reference two papers jointly written in 1980 and 1981 by biophysicist John Heller and blood-chemist Alan Adler, and three papers by the microscopist Walter McCrone published in 1980, 1987 and 1990, plus his 1997 book Judgement Day for the Turin Shroud, in all of which he maintained that both the blood-image and the body-image on the Shroud were painted, contrary to Heller and Adler’s claim to have “identified the presence of blood in the alleged blood areas of the Shroud” (Abstract, 1980) and to their conclusion that “There is no chemical evidence of any pigments, stains or dyes on the cloth to produce the image thereon” (Abstract, 1981). Leaving aside the somewhat skewed and unrepresentative character of this list (which makes it seem that no other serious scientific publications have supported Heller and Adler’s view, and that they themselves had no response to McCrone’s later work) xl one can only marvel that these references should be invoked to ground the claim that chemical analysis finds against the Shroud’s authenticity – as though McCrone’s work could be treated as straightforwardly dispositive.xli Unless, perhaps, B&G are viewing disputes about the chemical analysis in light of their acceptance of the 1988 radiocarbon dating of “the Shroud” to sometime between 1260 and 1390 – actually a C-14 dating of one tiny strip of the cloth taken from a corner which some experts had repeatedly warned beforehand could well be unrepresentative of the whole.xlii That concern has

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only been amplified by subsequent research, published in reputable peer-reviewed journals, yet not mentioned by B&G alongside their single reference to the 1989 Nature article reporting the results of the dating.xliii The issue is further complicated by the fact that C-14 dating is by no means the infallible procedure it is popularly held to be, its results being not infrequently rejected as anomalous by archaeologists and curators. One of the many factors feeding into the case for treating the C-14 dating of the Shroud as anomalous is the verdict of the overwhelming majority of medical doctors, surgeons and forensic pathologists who have concluded that its image is far too subtly realistic to be the work of an artist or forger of any period, let alone the Middle Ages. The BPA performed by B&G in no way undermines that verdict – a verdict which, given the implausibility of a non-artistic didactic origin of the Shroud noted earlier (under comment (6)), in effect leaves the defender of the radiocarbon dating result committed also to defending the uncomfortable position that the image on the Shroud was the unforeseen and subsequently misunderstood or misrepresented result of an undocumented crucifixion-type event and burial, presumably religiously inspired, which took place sometime between roughly 1260 and 1390. To draw out the full implausibility of that implication here would be otiose, since even if the implausibility were swallowed, it would involve only denying the Shroud’s “authenticity” in the stronger of the two senses outlined earlier, namely as the genuine burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, whereas, to repeat the point made earlier, B&G themselves evidently take their BPA to cast significant doubt on the claim that its apparent blood marks result from contact with any crucified body. Conclusion Borrini and Garlaschelli claim to have provided experimental evidence that some of the apparent bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin are inconsistent

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with one another in a way which undermines its authenticity. But even granting the assumptions presupposed by the methods and materials used in their tests, the most they have shown is that the markings they discuss cannot result from certain very specific blood flows. Other flows of blood consistent with their BPA may well have occurred in the course of the crucifixion and burial of someone once enfolded in the cloth, and whose sufferings are still recorded on its surface. May 2019 References Adler, Alan. 2002. The Orphaned Manuscript – A Gathering of Publications on the Shroud of Turin, ed. Dorothy Crispino; Turin: Effata. Allen, Nicholas P.L. 2002. ‘Dating the Manufacture of the Shroud of Turin: An exercise in basic iconography’, South African Journal of Art History, Vol.16 Antonacci, Mark. 2000. The Resurrection of the Shroud: new scientific, medical and archaeological evidence, New York. -----2015. Test the Shroud at the Atomic and Molecular Levels, Forefront Publishing Co. -----2018. ‘An Unrealistic Approach and Analysis of the Blood Flows on the Shroud of Turin’, www.shroud.com/latebrak.htm#debunk Barbet, Pierre. 1950 [orig.1935]. Les cinq plaies du Christ [The five wounds of Christ], 2nd edn. Paris France: Procure du Carmel de l’Action de Graces. -----1963. [orig.1953; written 1950] A Doctor at Calvary - the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ as Described by a Surgeon, New York, NY: Image Books. This is an English translation of La Passion de Jésus Christ selon le chirugien Paris, France: Dillen, 1950.

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Benford M. Sue, Marino Joseph G. 2002a. ‘Textile evidence supports skewed radiocarbon date of Shroud of Turin. www.shroud.com/library/pdfs/textevid/pdf -----2002b. ‘Historical Support of a 16th Century Restoration in the Shroud C-14 Sample Area. www. shroud.com/pdfs/histsupt.pdf -----2005. ‘New Historical Evidence Explaining the ‘Invisible Patch’ in the 1988 C-14 Sample Area of the Turin Shroud’, September. From the Third International Dallas Conference. www.shroud.com/library.htm#papers. Baima Bollone, P.L., et al. 1981. ‘La Dimonstrazione della presenza di trace di sangue umano sulla Sindone’ [Demontration of the presence of traces of human blood on the Shroud], Sindon 30: 5-8 (1981). Baima Bollone, P.L. 1990. Sindone o no [Shroud or not]. Societá Editrice Internazionale. -----2000. ‘The Forensic Characteristics of the Blood Marks’, in The Turin Shroud: Past, Present, and Future, ed. S. Scannerini and P. Savarino; International Scientific Symposium, Torino, Mar. 2-5, 2000], 125-135. Torino, Italy: Effata Editrice . Borrini Matteo, Garlaschelli Luigi. 2018. ‘A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin’, Journal of Forensic Sciences, July 10; presented at the 66th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, February 17-22, 2014, in Seattle, WA; and the 67th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, February 16-21, 2015, in Orlando, FL. -----2014. ‘A BPA approach to the Shroud of Turin: a preliminary examination of the left forearm to reconstruct the crucifixion practice’. Proceedings of the 66th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, Feb 17-22; Seattle WA. Colorado Springs, CO: American Academy of Forensic Sciences, 2014. Bevilacqua M., Fanti G., D’Arienzo M., Porzionato A., Macchi V., De Caro R. 2014. ‘How was the Turin Shroud Man crucified?’ Injury; 45(S6):S142–8

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Bevilacqua M, FAnti G, D’Arienzo M. 2017. ‘New Light on the Sufferings and the Burial of the Turin Shroud Man’, Peertechz Open Journal of Trauma, May 19. Chevalier, U. 1899. Le Saint Suaire de Turin: est-il original ou une copie?[The Holy Shroud of Turin: is it the original or a copy?], Chambéry. -----1900. Étude critique sur l’origine du Saint-suarie de Lirey-Chambéry-Turin, Paris. ----- ed. 1903. Autour des origines du suaire de Lirey [Around the shroud origins of Lirey]. Paris, France: Picard. Committee on Identifying the Needs of the Forensic Sciences Community, National Research Council. 2009. Strengthening Forensic Science in the United States: A Path Forward, www.nap.edu/catalog/12589.htm Damon, P.E. et al., 1989. ‘Radiocarbon dating the Shroud of Turin’, Nature, 337, 611-15. De Wesselow, Thomas. 2012. The Sign - The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection, Viking (Penguin). Di Lazzaro, Paolo. 2018. ‘Shroud: Blood Pattern Analyses are not accurate and require new studies’. www.shroud.com/pdfs/CIS Reply.pdf. Garlaschelli, Luigi. 2010. ‘Life-size Reproduction of the Shroud of Turin and its Image’, journal of Imaging Science and Technology. July/August. 54(4). Heimburger, Thibault. 2008. ‘A Detailed Critical Review of the Chemical Studies on the Turin Shroud: Facts and Intepretations’, www.shroud.com/library.htm#papers -----2009. ‘Comments About the Recent Experiment of Professor Luigi Garlascelli’, www.shroud.com/library.htm#papers

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Heller, John. 1983. Report on the Shroud of Turin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Heller John, Adler Alan. 1980. ‘Blood on the Shroud of Turin’. Applied Optics, 19; 2742-44. -----1981. ‘A chemical investigation of the Shroud of Turin’. Journal of the Canadian Society Forensic Science; 14(3):81–103. Hermosilla, A.S. 2018. ‘Answer to the Article “A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin”’ www.shroud.com/pdfs/Hermosilla EN.pdf Hoare, Rodney. 1994 [orig.1984]. The Turin Shroud is Genuine, Souvenir Press. (This is an amended and enlarged version of A Piece of Cloth, Aquarius Press, 1984).

Jones, Stephen E. 2018. ‘My critique of Borrini, M. & Garlaschelli, L., 2018, "A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin," Journal of Forensic Sciences, 10 July’. theshroudofturinblogspot.com/2018/08/my-critique-of-borrini-m-garlaschelli-l.

Jumper E., Alder A.D., Jackson J.P., Pellicori S.F., Heller J.H., Druzik J.R. 1984. ‘A Comprehensive examination of various stains and images on the Shroud of Turin’, Archaeological Chemistry II, ACS Advances in Chemistry, 205; 446-476. Lavoie, Gilbert R. 1998. Unlocking the Secrets of the Shroud, Allen, Texas. -----2010. ‘Turin Shroud: a medical forensic study of its bloodmarks and image’, in Di Lazzaro ed. Proceedings of the International Workshop on Scientific Approach to the Acheiropoietos Images; May 4-6; Frascati, Italy: ENEA, 2010. Lavoie B., Lavoie G., Klutstein D., Regan J. 1982. ‘In Accordance with Jewish Burial Custom, the Body of Jesus Was Not Washed’, Shroud Spectrum International, 3; June.

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Maloney, Paul, C. 2012-2014. ‘Joseph M. Gambescia, M.D. and the Position of the Feet on the Shroud of Turin. The History of an Investigation’, www.shroud.com/pdfs/stlmaloneypaper.pdf Markwardt, Jack. 2014. ‘Modern Scholarship and the History of the Turin Shroud’. www.shroud.com/pdfs/stlmarkwardtpaper.pdf McCrone, Walter. 1987. ‘Microscopical study of the Turin “Shroud”.’ Wiener Berichte über Naturwissenschaft in der Kunst; 4:50-61 ------1990 ‘The Shroud of Turin: blood or artist’s pigment?’ Acc Chem Res; 23(3):77–83. ------1997 Judgment Day for the Turin Shroud. Chicago, IL: Microscope Publications. McCrone W., Skirius C. 1980. Light microscopical study of the Turin Shroud (I). Microscope 1980; 28:105–12 Meacham, William. 1983. ‘The authentication of the Turin Shroud: an issue in archaeological epistemology.’ Current Anthropology 24(3): 283-295 and Reply 305-309. -----2005. The Rape of the Turin Shroud: How Christinaity’s most precious relic was wrongly condemned, and violated, lulu.com. Miller Vernon D., and Pellicori Samuel F. 1981. ‘Ultraviolet fluorescence photography of the Shroud of Turin’, Journal of Biological Photography, 49(3); 71-85. Nickell, J. 1998. Inquest on the Shroud of Turin, New York. Pellicori Samuel F. 1980. ‘Spectral Properties of the Shroud of Turin’, Applied Optics 19(12); 1913-20. Pellicori Samuel F., Evans Mark S., 1981. ‘The Shroud of Turin through the microscope’, Archaelogy, 34; 34-43 Riani M, Atkinson A C, Fanti G, Crossida F. 2012. ‘Regression analysis with partially labeled regressors: carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin’. Statistics and Computing, 23(4) 551-561. Ricci, G. 1977. ‘Historical, medical and physical study of the Holy Shroud’, Proceedings of the 1977 United States Conference of Research on the Shroud of Turin; 1977 Mar 23-24; Albuquerque, NM. Bronx, NY: Holy Shroud Guild, 1977.

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-----1981. The Holy Shroud, Center for the Study of the Passion of Christ and the Holy Shroud. Rome: Tipar. Rogers, Ray. 2005. ‘Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin’, Thermochimica Acta, 435: 189-194. Rucker, Robert A. 2018. ‘Evaluation of “A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin”’. www.shroud.com/latebrak.htm#debunk Schwalbe L.A., Rogers R.N. 1982. ‘Physics and Chemistry of the Shroud of Turin’, Analytica Chimica Acta 135: 3-49. Schwortz, Barrie M. 2000. ‘Is the Shroud of Turin a Medieval Photograph? A Critical Examination of the Theory’, Sindone 2000 Orvieto Worldwide Congress, (shroud.com/pdfs/orvieto.pdf) Svensson N. 2010. ‘Medical and forensic aspects of the Man depicted on theTurin Shroud’ in Di Lazzaro P, editor. Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Scientific Approach to the Acheiropoietos Images; 2010 May 4-6; Frascati, Italy. Frascati, Italy: ENEA, 2010 Sudies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin’. Svensson, N., Heimbruger T. 2012. ‘Forensic aspects and blood chemistry of the Turin Shroud Man’, Academic Journals, Scientific and Essays, 7(29) 2513-255. Thurston, Herbert. 1903. ‘The Holy Shroud and the verdict of history’, The Month 101: 17-29. Van der Hoeven, Adrie. 2015. ‘Cold Acid Postmortem Blood Most Probably Formed Pinkish-Red Heme-Madder Lake on Madder-Dyed Shroud of Turin’, Open Journal of Applied Sciences, November, 5, 705-746. Van Haelst, Remi. 2000’The Shroud of Turin and the reliability of the 95% error confidence interval’, in Proceedings of the Turin International

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Research Conference, Richmond, Virginia. Edited by Bryan J. Walsh. Richmond: Magisterium. Walsh, Bryan. 2000. ‘The 1988 Shroud of Turin radiocarbon tests reconsidered’, in Proceedings of the 1999 Shroud of Turin International Research Conference, Richmond Virginia. Edited by Bryan J. Walsh. Richmond: Magisterium Wilson Ian. 1998. The Blood and the Shroud, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London. -----2010. The Shroud – the 2000-year-old mystery solved, Bantam Press. Wuenschel, E.A. 1954. Self-portrait of Christ: the Holy Shroud of Turin, New York. Zugibe, F.T. 1989. ‘The Man of the Shroud was washed’, crucifixion.shroud.com. -----2005. The crucifixion of Jesus: a forensic enquiry. New York, NY: M. Evans and Company Inc.

Endnotes

i The experts in question include Yves Delage, Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at the Sorbonne from 1902 and discoverer of the equilibrium-stabilizing function of the semi-circular canals in the inner ear; biologist Paul Vignon, Delages’s assistant at the Sorbonne, who undertook the first major scientific study of the Shroud in the early years of the XXth century, and was from1924 Professor of the Philosophy of Zoology and Biology at the Institut Catholique de Paris until his death in 1943; Pierre Barbet, Chief Surgeon at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Paris from 1932 (d.1961); Robert Bucklin, M.D J.D, with over fifty years of experience as a medical examiner in Texas, Nevada and California (d.1993); James Cameron, Professor of Forensic Medicine at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical College from 1973-1992 (d.2003); Frederik Zugibe, Chief Medical Examiner of Rockland County, New York from 1969-2002 (d.2013); and Pierluigi Baima Bollone, currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Turin, where he taught forensic medicine in the Faculty of Medicine and Law for over forty years. These, and 17 other notable doctors, surgeons and forensic pathologists who, after in-

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depth investigation, have been persuaded of the Shroud’s authenticity, are listed in Antonacci 2000, pp.15-16. As noted by De Wesselow 2012, p368, not included in Antonacci’s list are the names of Vincent Donnet (Marseilles), Ruggero Romanese (Director of the Institute of Legal Medicine at the University of turin), Niccolante Rodinò (Medical Officer of the Italian Army) and Tomàs Lerga Luna (Professor of Legal Medicine at the University of Saragossa), mentioned by Wuenschel 1954, p.34. ii Some predictably ludicrous media hype followed the paper’s publication on July 10. The most preposterous headlines included: ‘628-year fake news: scientists prove Turin Shroud not genuine (again)’ in the Independent (UK), July 16; ‘CSI Study of Shroud of Turin Proves Again: Jesus Relic is Fake’, Haaretz, July 19; ‘Scientists Debunk Blood of Jesus Found on the Shroud of Turin’, Tech Times, July 16. ‘The Blood Stains on the Shroud of Turin Seem Totally Fake, Study Claims’, Science Alert, July 16. B&G themselves wisely refrain from such sweeping claims in their paper. Replies to it in the same month came from Alfonso Sànchez Hermosilla (a forensic doctor and forensic anthropologist), posted initially in Spanish on the La Sindone en Canarias website, then on July 21 in English as ‘Answer to the Article ‘A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin’’ in the online Shroud Science Group (SSG) along with the official response of the International Centre of Sindonology (in Turin) by its vice-president, physicist Paolo di Lazzaro, entitled ‘Shroud; blood pattern analyses are not accurate and require new studies’. Together with Marc Antonacci’s ‘An Unrealistic Approach and Analysis of the Blood Flows on the Shroud of Turin’, posted to the SSG on July 27, these appeared in the October 8 update of Barrie Schwortz’s shroud.com website, in the section ‘Debunking the Debunkers’ which also includes links to various press articles, to Robert A. Rucker’s ‘Evaluation of “A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin”’, posted to the SSG on October 4, and to B&G’s paper itself. iii Lavoie 2010. Page numbers in my references to B&G’s paper are to the Wiley Online library pdf available at https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.13867 iv See Lavoie 1998, pp.84-85. Another highly misleading claim about Lavoie is contained in a report in the New Scientist (‘Shroud of Turin depicts Y-shaped crucifixion’, April 2, 2014) about B&G’s preliminary 2014 study focusing just on the forearm rivulets in the Shroud image. The report claims that their results “confirm earlier experiments by Gilbert Lavoie, a Massachusetts-based doctor, that suggested a Y-shaped crucifixion. “The blood-flow is absolutely consistent with what you see on the Shroud,” Lavoie says. He described his studies in Unlocking the Secrets of the Shroud.” Where did this quote come from? An interview with Lavoie? Is it maybe paraphrasing certain remarks he makes in the passage from his 1998 book which I just referenced? But nowhere there does he commit himself to a so-called “Y-shaped crucifixion” in which the arms would be angled much more steeply towards a vertical or overhead position than in traditional depictions. True, the photograph which Lavoie supplies of his experiment does suggest quite a high angle for the forearms, but nothing like the near vertical angle B&G argue for, both in their 2014

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study, and in the later development of that study which is the subject of this critical review. v See, for example, the remarks of Baima Bollone, Honorary President of the International Centre of Sindonology (Turin), reported in the Daily Express (U.K.), July 19, 2018; and the critique of B&G’s paper by Stephen Jones on his website the shroudofturin.blogspot.com, August 2108. vi See Garlaschelli 2010 for his claim to have reproduced, as the title of the article puts it, a “Life-Size Reproduction of the Shroud of Turin and Its Image”, using methods available in the Middle Ages. For criticism of this claim see Heimburger 2009 and Antonacci 2015 (Appendix D). vii See again the references for Bollone and Jones in n.4 above, the comments by Emanuela Marinelli reported in the Express piece mentioned in n.4, and those by Barrie Schwortz at a Press Conference on August 3rd reported that day in the Independent and other newspapers around the world. viii Of those mentioned in n.2,5 and 7above who have commented adversely on B&G’s paper, the only ones with forensic qualifications matching (indeed exceeding) Borrini’s and Garlaschelli’s, are Baima Bollone and Hermosilla. Antonacci is an attorney; Di Lazzaro is a physicist; Jones, according to the personal profile on his website, is “retired”; Marinelli has degrees in “Natural and Geographical Sciences”; Rucker is a nuclear engineer; Schwortz is a photographer. ix See the introduction to the ‘Debunking the Debunkers’ section of the October 8 update at shroud.com x See the pieces by Antonacci and Jones cited in n.4 above. Antonacci, after summarizing B&G’s claims about the different arm- angles necessary to produce Shroud-like blood streams at the wrist and on the forearm, then simply asserts that “These two streams are seen on both forearms of the man in the Shroud and are quite realistic with the positions that a victim would be in during a crucifixion” (ibid., p.1) following up with what, in effect, is a summary of the very account they are challenging, i.e., Barbet’s – and managing in the process to confuse matters with his “these two streams”, which appears at first to be referring to the wrist and forearm streams that B&G find puzzling, but then is apparently referring only to the left and right forearm streams (there are no wrist streams visible on the right arm of the Shroud image, in which the right wrist is underneath, and so obscured by, the left hand). Jones apparently supposes that a drawing Ian Wilson includes in his 1978 book The Shroud of Turin (Plate 12, following p.50) to illustrate Barbet’s empirically unconfirmed hypothesis about the forearm stains is sufficient to discredit B&G’s experimentally-based rejection of that hypothesis.

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xi I say “in effect” because one has to work out their target hypotheses from B&G’s account of the details of the tests they performed and the results of those tests. The possibility that they meant to test hypotheses more specific than those I call (A) and (B) is discussed later. xii It is not altogether clear who B&G think has “alleged” the flowing patterns they refer to (Barbet must surely be among them), nor, for the reason given in the previous footnote, exactly what “flowing patterns” they mean, but I think hypotheses (A) and (B) capture what they intend to be denying here. The possibility that it is something more precise will be discussed in due course. xiii This wound is, at least, easier to locate than the wounds in the feet and some of those in the head, inasmuch as it looks to be in the wrist, where the two short rivulets join. There is a further question about exactly where in the wrist that would be, but it is not clear how the result of Test 1 underlines the difficulty in answering that question, since it seems harder to locate a wound point within the large, undifferentiated and somewhat smudged oval stain shown in Fig.2 of B&G’s paper, than within the smaller circle at the apex of the more defined, bifurcated stain on the left “hand” of the Shroud. xiv See Hoare 1994 (orig. 1984) ch.5 for an argument that the Shroud Man must have faced the cross, and also the more tentative case for this made by Wilson 1998 (pp.48-53). xv Caution is appropriate here. Firstly, it cannot be assumed that Jewish witnesses or followers of Jesus had any involvement in the deposition or even any influence upon the way it was conducted. Secondly, students of the Shroud have disagreed concerning what Jewish burial codes and customs at the time of Jesus would have ordained regarding the washing and burial of someone suffering a violent and bloody death; concerning whether and to what extent the Shroud Man was washed; and concerning whether, if he was not, this would have been mainly because of the imminence of the Sabbath at the time he died, or because of prohibitions on disturbing life-blood and “mingled blood” (that is, life-blood mixed with pre-mortem blood). For a sense of the range of views taken on these issues see Zugibe 1989, Lavoie 2005, ch.4. and Bevilacqua et al. 2017, ‘Concluding Remarks’, 11. However, these caveats hardly entitle us to dismiss outright the possibility that key aspects of the deposition were governed by a Jewish concern to ensure that as much as possible of the victim’s lifeblood was buried with the body, preferably by keeping it on the body itself, or at least preserved on the burial cloth or cloths. If the idea of the nails being extracted from the victim’s body some time later than their extraction from the cross (and not as part of a single process) seems too far-fetched to be taken seriously it may be worth bearing in mind that a nail remains to this day in the ankle bones of the only known skeleton of an ancient crucifixion victim, that of a young man called Jehohanan who lived close to the time of Jesus, whose ossuary was discovered in 1968 in the Jewish cemetery at Giv’at ha Mivtar in north Jerusalem.

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xvi Another version of hypothesis (A), floated by Rucker 2018, pp.2-3, is that while the short wrist streams came from the exit-wound caused by the nail, the streams on the back of the forearms might at the same time have flowed partly (or wholly?) from the corresponding entrance wounds. Certainly it seems plausible that a vertical flow from a frontal hand or wrist wound, with arms at an angle of ca.45˚, would travel vertically down the inside of the forearm and then round to the side. For such a flow to reach to back of the forearms in the way visible on the Shroud seems much more of a stretch, though definitely worth investigating. xvii As suggested by Antonacci 2018. p.2 xviii A ‘Crucifixion with Two Sinners’ from 1450 by the Florentine painter Andrea del Castagno (in the National Gallery, London) shows the flow from the chest wound reaching the lower stomach. xix Bearing in mind the standard portrayal of the crucifixion by artists, who have Christ swathed in a loincloth when on the cross, one may be tempted to suggest the possibility that such a cloth would have intercepted any flow of blood from the chest or side wound. It could have done so either by directly blocking any further progress of a stream down to the thighs (contrary to what is depicted by Rosato and Mantegna, who both have the stream implausibly continuing unimpeded and undeflected in any way by the thin loincloth it passes through on its way to a point below the right knee in the case of the Rosato and mid-thigh in the case of the Mantegna); or by absorbing any drops that fell directly from the chest wound or from its pooling under the right breast, so that these would not have registered later when the naked body was eventually draped in the Shroud. The problem with this suggestion, though, is that it is hard to see why the loincloth would have been removed before entombment, as the Shroud image of a naked figure suggests it would have to have been. According to some studies, Jewish Law would have dictated that “If a man dies a violent death and blood is shed, the blood is not washed from the body. He is simply buried in a white linen sheet with the clothes not removed for fear of losing blood that has flowed from the man at the time of death” (Lavoie et al, 1982, p.15). Still, since, as noted earlier (see n.15), there is some controversy about this, it is to that extent possible that if Jesus had been wearing a loincloth when on the cross, then this would have been removed during the initial entombment on the eve of the Sabbath and Passover, as part of the preparations for a ritual washing intended to be completed later. xx This appears to have been the view of Hoare (see work and chapter cited above, n.14), as we shall see below. xxi Barbet 1963 (orig. 1953) p.133, says “There must clearly have been at this spot an important flow of blood, of which a large part would have fallen to the ground, and the rest would have coagulated on contact with, in successive layers the skin”. Also on p.144

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ibid. he says of “the wound in the heart, which must on two occasions [the second being, Barbet supposes, when the body was being carried horizontally to the tomb] have emptied out all the blood in the great veins” that “It is certain that a large part of this blood must have dropped to the ground”, and “That which remained and formed the two stains, both in front and behind [he means by the latter the dorsal blood belt along the lower part of the thorax] was merely the small amount which coagulated on the skin, to which it adhered owing to its viscous quality”; but he gives no indication of supposing, more specifically, that the blood from the spear wound would have mostly fallen directly to the ground, let alone of attributing this to any rightward inclination of the torso. Perhaps, having located the chest wound “on the side of the thorax, clearly behind the forward sterno costal surface” he would have considered this location sufficient to account for why most of the flow would have missed the front of the body. Since he regarded this chest flow of blood as post-mortem (and thus not driven by a beating heart) he would surely have rejected as physiologically impossible the sort of dramatic parabolic spurts out from the side which one often finds in crucifixion scenes of the Siennese School from the first part of the XIVth century (when the Shroud’s first publicly appeared in Western Europe). While Barbet proposed that it was a later post-deposition flow from the chest which travelled round the side to produce the dorsal blood belt, as in the second of the two sub-possibilities I outline, he thought this occurred when the body was horizontal, leading at that juncture, as far as I understand him, to a flow down the side and thence to the lumbar region. One assumes that it is this account of the genesis of the blood belt that B&G take to be undermined by their Test 6 result. In any event, Barbet seems to have attributed the apparent blood marking visible under the right breast of the Shroud Man to an initial flow from the lance wound which did not itself extend to the formation of the dorsal belt. xxii It may help, when considering these scenarios, to bear in mind that dead bodies can bleed (especially as a result of being moved, or after wounds have been washed), contrary to the surprisingly still quite common belief to the contrary. B&G nowhere challenge the possibility of post-mortem bleeding per se; and even though they are deny that a post-mortem bleed from a chest wound could have caused the dorsal blood belt, they neither affirm or deny that bleeding from a chest wound in the position of that on the Shroud would be post-mortem bleeding. Nor do they say anything to rule out the possibility of post-mortem bleeding from a wrist (or back of hand) wound. xxiii This scenario owes something to Zugibe 2005, p.223 and Bevilacqua et al, 2017, regarding production of the forearm rivulets by blood flow following nail extraction, but follows de Wesselow 2012, p.121 and Bevilacqua et al. 2017 on the position of the body at that point. The account of the blood belt owes most de Wesselow ibid., pp.128-130 and Bevilacqua et al. ibid., though the idea that only water flowing from the upper arms contributed to this is my own, and is intended to allow for the possibility that the forearms were not washed, either because they carried post-mortem blood or because the washing was not completed because of the approach of the Sabbath. The suggestion that the thin

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meandering rivulets in the small of the back resulted from the rocking motion of a bier as the blood traversed folds in the cloth under the small of the back is in Van der Hoeven, 2015, p.713. Wuenschel 1954, p.46 suggests both that “a second flow from the wound in the side when the body was laid on the Shroud… accounts for the two meandering streams that extend across the loins in the dorsal image” and suggests that “these seem to have flowed directly upon the Shroud under the arched loins”. xxiv Zugibe 2005 maintains that neither the forearm nor the wrist rivulets would have flowed when the Shroud Man was on the Cross, contrary to Barbet 1963 [orig. 1953] who thought both issued from the wrist wounds at this stage. xxv This scenario builds on Paul Maloney’s development of an idea about the nailing of the feet deriving from Joseph Gambescia (see Maloney 2014). Rubens’s ‘Descent from the Cross’ (1612-14) is in the Cathedral of Our Lady in Antwerp and Rembrandt’s (1634) is in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg. I have been unable to discover who painted the Croatian deposition scene or whether the artist was influenced by Rubens or Rembrandt. xxvi For a recent presentation of the case against trusting the D’Arcis Memorandum’s allegation of forgery see Antonacci 2015, pp.227-230. Meacham 2005, pp.21-22 (the first 31 pages being a reprint of his classic 1983 article in Current Anthropology) is a useful short summary of the case against regarding the image on the Shroud as a “medieval painting, rubbing, scorch, or other work of art”. xxvii Most, and in some cases all, of which are made in each of the responses to the paper mentioned above in n.1 and n.6. xxviii Equally though, to recall n.4 above, those objecting to the design of B&G’s experiments must have known about their approach to the simulation of Shroud-like forearm blood marks for four years, yet no-one to my knowledge has in that time actually disconfirmed these findings with the more accurate tests that have been called for. xxix Key parts of this scenario are anticipated by Hoare 1994 (orig.1984), ch.8, though unlike his account it does not specify that the crucifixion victim was facing the cross. Interestingly, in view of B&G’s subsequent questioning of the left forearm stains, while Hoare is confident that “The blood on the right arm [in the Shroud image] issued from the wrist wound” he expresses some puzzlement about the other arm, asking “but what caused the blood trickles coming from points on the left? They flow across the arm only. What could have caused those sharp wounds in the man’s arm shortly before he fell to the right, unconscious?” (ibid., p.81) He offers no suggestions, but just moves on at this point. According to St. John’s Gospel (20: 34), “blood and water” flowed from Christ’s “side” when it was pieced by a spear towards the end of his crucifixion. Zugibe 2005 (chs.2 and 10) argues that this came from a hemothorax (filling of the lung sac with blood as a result of fracture to the ribs inflicted by a scourging) when whole blood separates out by gravity

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into two layers, one of which is serum of low viscosity. Barbet (1963, ch.7) thought it was due to a rupture of the heart leading to an effusion of post-mortem blood and more serous perdicardial fluid. Svensson and Heimburger 2012, pp.2522-3 think that the “blood and water” might have involved blood and serum resulting from both a puncture to the lungs and a rupture of the heart. The suggestion that the bifurcation of the short back of hand streams resulted from them flowing round the ulnar styloid protuberance after burial washing is Zugibe’s (1989). The suggested reason for a leftwards sideways tilt of the body that would account for a flow across the lumbar region of the back stemming ultimately from the spear wound is my own and is intended to address an explanatory deficit in the literature. For instance, Wuenschel 1954 p.46 speculates that blood from the side flowed across the back as a result of the way the body was laid on the Shroud, but does not say why it would have been tilting significantly to the left when it was so laid. Again, according to Maloney 2012-14 pp.71-72 the blood on the side of the body from the spear wound “went down for a distance to reach the point where the corpse had been turned on its side so that the…serum and blood could flow across the back (preserved for us on the dorsal end of the Shroud)” but he does not say why the corpse would have been turned in this way. xxx Strictly speaking a flow from the elbow contributing to the formation of the dorsal belt would not constitute a realization of hypothesis (B), if this is taken to specify that the dorsal blood belt stemmed solely from the chest wound, but postulating such a flow may nonetheless provide a more plausible authenticist account of that belt than the explanation implied by Scenario 5 alone. A final refinement, adding a contribution to the formation of that belt drip from the left elbow, as also in Scenario 1, may be worth considering as adding further plausibility to that account. xxxi There is also some question about how realistically this sculpture depicts the blood flow that would ensue from a spear wound inflicted in the posture shown. Would this not have been more likely to drip directly onto the right thigh, rather than travelling down the slope from that wound to the belly and thence to the thigh? xxxii The suggestion that the proximity of the right arm to the torso (absent from B&G’s Test 6) might thus have channelled the flow from the chest wound is made in Rucker 2018, p.6. xxxiii It is also worth noting the possibility of a laterally symmetrical posture that would have led to a direct flow of blood from the chest wound to the ground. Maloney 2012-14 p.73 claims that if the victim’s body had been bowed out from the cross (with the belly at the furthest point from the stipes) as in the illustration on the front of the first edition (1981) of Zugibe’s book The Cross and the Shroud: A Medical Inquiry into the Crucifixion (New York, NY: Paragon House Publishers), then there would have been no blood flow from the spear wound visible on any part of the front of the body.

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xxxiv Antonacci 2018 includes an anecdotal report that STURP [Shroud of Turin Research Project] scientists “once poured water down the right side of a young man who was voluntarily suspended in the vertical position” and that “the water not only ran down the front of the volunteer’s right side, but that it curved when it got to the narrower lower part of his front hip and went around to his lower back.” While neither Antonacci nor (from anything Antonacci says) Don Lynn, the STURP member who told him of it, make/made any great claims for the significance of this unofficial experiment (Antonacci says it “indicates” how it “could have happened” that “post-mortem fluids ran across the back of the man in the Shroud”), it does at least suggest the need for further testing on a real human being, both in a perfectly vertical position and in the leaning posture proposed by Hoare. xxxv The strongest case for a medieval provenance of the Shroud, independent of the 1988 radiocarbon dating which claimed to place its origin with 95% certainty between 1260 and 1390, derives from the sheer fact that it does display the wounds and bleedings associated with the crucifixion, together with the fact that its first appearance can only definitely be traced back to the 1350’s in France, a period when there was a new artistic emphasis especially in Western Europe upon portraying the details of Christ’s sufferings and stigmata. This was a continuation of a trend which saw the rise of the Franciscan order in the XIIth century – a point well urged by Nicholas Allen in his (oddly neglected) 2002 (orig.1999) paper ‘Dating the Manufacture of the Shroud of Turin: An exercise in basic iconography”. However, insofar as this iconographic congruence concerns merely the content of what is “depicted” on the Shroud, that is, what would be the subject-matter of the cloth’s image if viewed as some kind of artwork, it seems in itself a quite insufficient basis for an independent dating of its provenance. For that one would need the sort of stylistic evidence which pertains to the patterning of the blood markings in conjunction with the styling of the body image, and here Allen himself is clear that this image is “styleless” (ibid. p.102). He attributes this to its “naturalistic” origin as a medieval photograph, a hypothesis whose implausibility has been amply spelled out elsewhere (see, e.g., Schwortz 2000). Besides, even from a purely iconographic point of view, the case for regarding the Shroud image as a XIVth century artwork or photographic artefact is weakened by the fact that a dorsal “blood belt” is portrayed nowhere else at this time, as de Wesselow notes in a passage quoted below. xxxvi De Wesselow exaggerates, inasmuch as there are medieval depictions of the crucifixion showing flows of blood along the underside of Christ’s forearms, as in the famous San Damiano cross in Assisi, reputed to have inspired St.Francis, and in the crucifixion scenes by Giotto (now in the Alte Pinakothek, Munich) and by Pietro Lorenzetti (Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art), both from the early 1320s – Giotto’s showing an extension of the flow to the elbows from which large drops of blood drip to the floor. Similar drips falling right along the forearms to the elbows are portrayed in the illustrations of the crucifixion in the Holkham Bible from England, which may date from the late 1320s (and also portrays a naked Christ, contrary to the claim one often encounters that this would have been morally unthinkable in the Middle Ages, though the

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possibility that the artist in this case had seen or heard about the Shroud before its first public showing in Lirey cannot be discounted, especially since such a portrayal is uncommon, though not absolutely unprecedented, in the medieval period prior to that showing). Indeed, Allen 1994 (p.101) goes out of his way to remark upon the “specific interest shown [on the Shroud] in depicting blood as it flows along the forearms, starting at the nail wound site and ending at the elbow. This latter feature seems to be largely absent from images before c. 1200CE”. Hence, he takes the forearm blood flows on the Shroud to support of its later medieval origin, in line with the 1988 radiocarbon dating. However, with the exception of artworks clearly influenced by the Shroud itself (such as the Man of Sorrows portrayed by Jean Colombe in the late XIVth century Trés Riches Heures du Duc de Berry) I know of no medieval painting or illustration (whether of the crucifixion, deposition or entombment) which clearly shows such flows on the outsides (or “backs”) of the forearms, and none depicting flows of such a fragmentary and unsymmetrical character as those on the Shroud. xxxvii In their preliminary 2014 study B&G suggested that the Shroud’s forearm blood marks reflected a medieval torture practice of tying victims to a beam from which their arms were vertically suspended. But even artists who, like the XVIIth century Flemish painters Rubens and Jordaens, sometimes portray Christ with his arms much more vertically inclined than usual (in the so-called “Y-shape”), more often than not depict little, if any, blood flows from the wrist wounds, and certainly nothing like the somewhat jagged and broken rivulets on the outside of the left forearm in the Shroud image (or, indeed, like the long, more unbroken but still irregular rivulet on the right forearm of that image). If this is true of the greatest painters of later, more “realistic” schools of art, it seems unlikely that that a medieval artist would have proceeded differently; and even more unlikely that some unknown genius from that period, having come up with the innovation of depicting on the outsides of the forearms a vertical flow from the wrists, would then have deliberately broken up that flow in the way discussed in comment (2) above (and which as far as I am aware, would be artistically unique). xxxviii Nickell 1998, p.67 xxxix The mere fact that the Shroud’s history cannot be reliably traced prior to its appearance in Lirey near the French city of Troyes ca.1356 in itself shows nothing. As de Wesselow notes, the British Museum’s Portland Vase can only be documented back to the collection of an Italian Cardinal in 1600-1, yet “scholars are sure, none the less, that it is a genuine Roman treasure, not a Renaissance forgery” (ibid. p.184); and “the Egyptian Shroud in the Metropolitan Museum of Art…turned up out of the blue in the hands of a Cairo antiquities dealer in the early twentieth century, but no one doubts that it is an authentic, second-century artifact.” (ibid.) The argument from silence is, rather, that in this case, given the importance of the artifact in question, it is highly unlikely that there would be a blank in the record, yet there is such a blank. But, in addition to the works cited in n.26 above, see Wilson 2010, Markwardt 2014 and de Wesselow 2012 ch.14, on

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why the supposed silence of history about the Shroud prior to the 1350s may be far less extensive than it seemed to Chevalier and to Thurston 1903, and how the gaps in the record that remain can be accounted for plausibly, and indeed, where they indisputably occur, could be expected precisely because of the Shroud’s religious significance. xl A by no means comprehensive list of work by others directly or indirectly supporting the 1980 and 1981 chemical analyses of Heller and Adler, would include: Pellicori 1980; Pellicori and Evans 1981; Miller and Pellicori 1981; Schwalbe and Rogers 1982; Jumper et al. 1984; Bollone et al. 1981; Bollone 1990 and 2000. Adler’s later work is gathered together in his posthumously published 2002 (ed. D. Crispino). See also Heller 1983. xli For a detailed adjudication of the issues dividing Heller and Adler from McCrone, see Heimburger 2008, which finds in favour of Heller and Adler. xlii In the words of Meacham 2000 (p.449) “Alan Adler and I urged, pleaded, cajoled and literally begged…for at least two sites on the Shroud to be sampled.” His 2005 book The Rape of the Shroud is a compelling, if depressing, account of how “faulty procedures, arrogance, Byzantine intrigues, Machiavellian scheming and influence peddling” ensured that the C-14 dating of the Shroud was a “fiasco” (ibid. p.53). xliii See especially Rogers 2005, according to which the loss of vanillin from the lignin on the linen indicates “a much older age for the cloth than the radiocarbon analysis” (Abstract). This paper also lends support to the theory of Benford and Marino (2002a, 2002b and 2005) that the corner of the cloth C-14 dated in 1988 did not belong to its original fabric but was part of a repair made “invisible” by use of a XVIth century technique known as “French weaving”. While both the “re-weave” hypothesis, and Rogers’s vanillin-dating claims remain highly controversial, close statistical analysis of the C-14 results from the three different AMS labs involved in the dating (as reported by Damon 1989), suggests that these do not pass the Chi Square Test for expected homogeneity, but reveal a linear trend showing higher C-14 content in proportion to distance from the edge of the cloth (see Walsh 2000, Van Haelst 2000 and Riani et al.2012). Whether this reflects a change in weave pattern and fibre density, as claimed by Benford and Marino, or constitutes a thermal gradient measuring proximity to the area most damaged in the documented fire of 1532, or even a “neutron gradient” measuring proximity to an unprecedented radioactive event involving the transformation of the body buried in the Shroud, as claimed by Antonacci 2015 and others cited by him, it does seem to corroborate concerns about contamination of the tested samples that would have survived the pre-treatment cleaning procedures used by the labs.