Forensic Science CSI to Explain the Pictures of Jesus on the Shroud of Turin

The Forensic Science CSI Quest for the Historical Jesus
The Longest Running Forensic Science CSI in History

Sometimes the CSI evidence doesn't make sense even to the best CSI or CSI fan. It is like finding the body of a scuba diver in a tree in the desert outside Las Vegas.

CSI? Was a crime committed? If the Shroud of Turin is fake, then many centuries ago someone forged these pictures of Jesus on the cloth and we should be able to figure out how it was done. If the Shroud is the real burial cloth of Jesus, as many believe it is, we should be able to figure out how the pictures of Jesus came to be on this cloth?

Is it fair to call the images pictures of Jesus? If the Shroud of Turin is fake, then certainly the forger intended us to think of the images as pictures of Jesus. We can call them pictures of Jesus just as we do for any artistic picture of Jesus. If the pictures are a natural phenomenon, as some scientists believe, or if they are miraculous pictures, then we are on safe ground calling them pictures of Jesus.

This site is not about religion. It is about CSI methods, Crime Scene Investigation thinking. It's about forensic science applied to solving the enigma of these pictures of Jesus. The term CSI is used as a shorthand expression for forensic science explanations. 

It's important because, frankly, millions of people believe the Shroud is genuine and the pictures are really of Jesus. But it is also important because millions of others think it is a fake. Until recently the prima facie case for forgery seemed strong. Now, for the first time, we have some new CSI data. Much of it didn't come to light until 2004. And because of this new information, the enigma of the pictures of Jesus on the Shroud of Turin becomes even more intriguing and perhaps more difficult to solve. The fan of CSI, the student of forensic science, and all of us should be challenged to try and figure out what is going on here.

Let's be clear. Let's be clear in forensic science CSI terms. No one has figured out how these pictures came to be on the cloth; not if it was faked and not if it is real.  

The prima facie case was:

The Big CSI Picture - Pictures of Jesus on the Shroud

Look carefully at the following picture. You will notice two pictures of Jesus on a fourteen-foot long piece of linen. They are ghostlike pictures lying head-to-head with the top picture upside down.

 The Shroud of Turin pictures of Jesus


 

The 2004 Forensic Science CSI Bombshell - The Second Face Picture

Computer enhanced picture of the second face on the Shroud of TurinWhen, in April 2004, the peer-reviewed, scientific Journal of Optics reported the discovery of a second face on the back of the Shroud it caused a firestorm of new interest in the Shroud. The Associated Press, the BBC and CNN fed the story around the world and newspapers wrote stories about it.

The big CSI question was how did the picture get there. It is in perfect registry with face picture on the front of the Shroud. What that means is that if you push a pin through some specific part of the face, it will emerge on the other side in the same part of the face. But if you take that pin and pull back some of the fibers in the thread, you will not find any image on those fibers. The pictures of Jesus are on the surface only. Nothing had soaked through to form the picture on the back of the cloth. In CSI terms: the pictures are superficial.

We need to look a bit closer at the fibers to see if there is a clue.

 

A CSI Microscopic Picture of the Fibers

CSI forensic science picture from the picture of Jesus on the Shroud of TurinAs the forensic scientist notices, the cellulose fibers that make up the yarn (thread) are from the woody stems of flax plants. The fibers are about about 15 microns thick. By comparison, a typical human hair is about 100 microns in diameter. About 70 to 120 fibers are spun together to make the linen yarn used to weave the cloth. You can clearly see the fibers, the yarn, and the weave of the cloth in this picture.

Notice that some of the fibers have a golden, caramel color. It is this color that actually produces the pictures of Jesus that we see on the Turin Shroud. The big forensic science CSI question: what is that caramel colored stuff? 

It should be noted that, mistakenly, at different times during the last 25 years, different forensic science researchers have assumed that it was either a change of color to the fibers themselves or a pigment that coated the fibers. But those CSI assumptions have been proven wrong.

 

Another CSI Picture - Phase-Contrast Microscopic View

A phase-contrast microscope view of a fiber from the Shroud of Turin picture of JesusIt turns out that a very thin, clear film coats some of the fibers. And in some places, and only in some places, this film has changed color.

Spectral analysis and wet chemistry, typical tools of the forensic science CSI, reveal that it is comprised of starch fractions and saccharides.

The coating is only between 200 and 600 nanometers thick. That is thinner than the invisible anti-glare coating on modern eyeglasses. It is as thin as the wall of a soap bubble.

This chemical film, where it has changed color, is consistent with a melanoidin, something that is produced by an amino/carbonyl reaction. It seems to be the same chemistry; the same browning process that give baked cookies and beer their brownish color. 

The film, whether clear or colored, is only found on the outermost fibers of the thread and only on the sides of the thread that face outward on both sides of the cloth.

Another important fact is that this carbohydrate film can be removed from the fibers by reducing it with diimide or by pulling it away with adhesive tape. When the coating is removed, the fibers are clear (or at least as clear as ancient cellulose fibers can be). The forensic science CSI conclusion must be that the pictures of Jesus are contained in the coating.

Throughout the centuries, as the Shroud of Turin was unfurled for public display and folded or rolled up for storage, microscopic bits of the filmy substance certainly must have flaked away. And that can be seen in the picture above. In fact, when the Shroud was examined in 1978, pieces of the coating, pieces of the picture of Jesus, were pulled away when adhesive tape was rubbed on the Shroud to collect particulate samples for forensic science research. Today, countless tiny bits of these pictures of Jesus, even whole fibers of the Shroud's cloth, are on microscope slides in laboratories around the world.

 

The Filmy Substance of the Pictures of Jesus

This coating was not applied mechanically. There is little question about that. If it were applied as a thick, viscous liquid, there would be a thick coating, just as if the pictures were painted with an oil paint. If it was applied as a thin liquid, the liquid would have soaked into the thread. Capillary action would moved the carbohydrate solution deep into the thread.

There is, however, a way to apply this coating to the cloth so that it only coats the outermost fibers at the crowns of the yarn. By washing the cloth in water that contains trace amounts of starch and various saccharides and then allowing it to dry, just such a coating will form.

It turns out that the distribution of the carbohydrate substance found on the Shroud of Turin fits an evaporation-deposit model.

Interestingly, this fits a description, right out of history, of how linen was made in the first century. Pliny the Elder tells us that during weaving, threads on the loom were lubricated with crude starch to make weaving easier and to prevent fraying. The starch was then washed out by rinsing it in suds from the Soapwort plant and the linen cloth was spread out across bushes to dry.

Even with rinsing, trace amounts of starch and the numerous saccharides found in Saponaria officinalis (Soapwort) would have remained in the wet cloth. As the cloth dried, moisture would wick its way to the surface carrying with it dissolved starch and saccharides. The dissolved material would concentrate at the surface and remains on the outermost fibers as the moisture evaporated into the air.

It is important to further note that during drying, the side of the cloth that faces sun and gets more air circulation will have a greater concentration of starch and saccharides and this may be important information in understanding the very faint second face on the backside of the cloth.

Raymond Rogers, a Fellow of the University of California, Los Alamos National Laboratory, a charter member of the Coalition for Excellence in Science Education and a chemist who has published many scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, has tested this concept. Using primitive linen (not modern linen which has been sized) he applied crude starch (not modern refined starch) and washed it in Saponaria officinalis. He dried it flat just as linen would have been dried in Pliny's time. He was able to duplicate the type of coating found on the Shroud's fibers.

 

Pictures of Jesus Formed by Browning

Ray Rogers with Anna Arnoldi of the University of Milan have hypothesized that a complex but well documented, naturally occurring chemical reaction may explain all of the known image chemistry of the Shroud of Turin. They have documented this in the scientific, peer-reviewed journal Melanoidins (Vol. 4, Ames J.M. ed., Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg, 2003, pp.106-113, "The Shroud of Turin: An Amino-Carbonyl Reaction (Maillard Reaction) May Explain The Image Formation").

In summary, Rogers and Arnoldi have suggested a reaction in which a carbonyl group of saccharides reacts with an amino group producing N-substituted glycosylamine. The unstable glycosylamine undergoes Amadori rearrangement, forming ketosamines, which then form nitrogenous polymers and melanoidins.

Rogers has conducted numerous experiments to show that this would work. Additional papers by Rogers in support of this include: "The Chemistry of Autocatalytic Processes in the Context of the Shroud of Turin," "Pyrolysis/Mass Spectrometry Applied to the Shroud of Turin" and "Scientific Method Applied to the Shroud of Turin: A Review (with Arnoldi)."
 

Why This Picture Forming Idea Might Work

Slowly, two ghostlike, bleary pictures would almost certainly take form if this is really a burial cloth. Shortly after death amine vapors of cadaverine and putrescine would come forth from the body and react with the coating on the fibers if that coating was in fact there. The pictures might not be visible right away. They might for some time be only latent pictures that would emerged later as chemical reactions ran their coarse over time. It all depends on many factors including ambient temperature, humidity, the concentration levels of starch and saccharides, the body chemistry of the deceased person, timing (how soon after death was the person buried in a shroud), body washing, etc. But some form of Maillard browning would occur. 

The amine vapors would also diffuse through the cloth and come in contact with the evaporation surface coating on the other side of the cloth. And this may help us further understand the picture of a second face on the back of the cloth.

But this is not a tidy explanation. For one thing, vapors coming off of a body will diffuse and go off in all directions. Yet we have, at least on the front of the cloth, very distinct, properly focused, properly exposed pictures. This is a problem if we imagine that the pictures were formed by gaseous emissions. We'll examine this problem shortly.

The chemical process, that would certainly occur, would continue until the reactants were exhausted or until the body and the cloth were separated. And that is the other part of the problem. We can assume that the cloth and the body were separated at some time. How can we not assume this. But we must also realize that it must have happened soon, before fluidic bodily decomposition products formed and ravaged the pictures and the cloth. Soon after exposure to decomposition products, the cloth would rot away along with the body.

This raises another interesting problem. The chemical reaction needed to be long enough for a picture to form and not so long that the picture was oversaturated. In photographic parlance, we have a picture that is not underexposed or overexposed. How likely is that?

 

Patterns of Discontinuity in the Jesus Pictures

If we look at the pattern of the brownish color in the pictures of Jesus we notice that it is not uniform. There are distinct discontinuities. Along any single fiber there may be a stretch of color, then a clear stretch, and then some more color. Moreover, one fiber may have color while the one next to it may not; and so forth in alternating or seemingly erratic patterns.

In looking at the Shroud, if we step back from the pattern of discontinuous bits of caramel-brown, our eyes see average colors. Where there are many bits of color we see a darker shade. Where there are fewer bits we see a lighter shade. While we can understand how this visual blending works, just as we know how pictures are formed from pixels in newspapers (halftone) and inkjet printers and computer screens, it is hard to understand how a chemical reaction from diffusing vapors could produce this visual (so-called) pixelated (and ironically pixilated) characteristic.

Step back farther and a bleary, ghostlike picture of Jesus appears on the Shroud.

 

The Beginning of the Forensic Science CSI of The Shroud, Before We Called it Forensic Science and When Sherlock Holmes Defined CSI

In 1898, an amateur photographer, Secondo Pia, took a picture of the Shroud with a large wooden box camera. Back in his darkroom, he examined the glass-plate negative by holding it up to the light. He was so startled by what he saw that he almost dropped to negative, which would certainly have shattered thus losing one of the greatest pictures ever taken. What Pia saw was a positive, realistic looking picture of a man. Pia's negative was a positive and the Shroud, or so it seemed, was a negative.

The ghostlike picture on the left show how the picture of Jesus appears on the Shroud. When photographed with a film camera something quite startling emerges. If we look at negative before making a print we see a realistic picture of a man. 

Thus began the longest running Forensic Science CSI in history: how to explain these pictures of Jesus on the Shroud of Turin. From that day three schools of thought emerged. Then, as now, those schools of thought persist. Forensic science has yet to fully explain these enigmatic pictures. They are:

We will examine the first two possibilities:


If We Wish to Think These Are Fake Pictures of Jesus

If we want to believe that the Shroud is not genuine then we have to consider some basic questions. How did the faker of relics accomplish this and produce these pictures of Jesus.

1) How did a faker of relics alter the chemical properties of the carbohydrate coating to create the color and how did he do so with such artistic precision -- on both sides of the cloth?

2) The history of art is the story of the evolution of styles, techniques, methods and technology. Every work of art and fakery is no exception. Every form of art and craft has its precedents. When a new technique is discovered it is exploited. Over time every worthwhile technique is refined and improved. Where are the precedents for pictures such as those that we find on the Shroud? Where are the other works in this once-upon-a-time new-found technology? Are we to imagine that some genius invented a new way to create pictures and that a single picture was made and the technology was lost to history?

3) How did  a faker of pictures create a suitable negative picture hundreds of years before the discovery of photographic negativity? How did he know that he had it right? How, without a camera and film, could he test his work? The negativity is extraordinarily precise and correct. Was he simply lucky?

The bigger question is why? What was his purpose? What was his motive? If we are to ask why he created an extraordinarily complex chemical picture, in negative, we must ask some other questions.

Despite many attempts to do so, no one has found or invented an artistic or crafty technique that can reproduce even a few of the characteristics of the pictures. That does not mean, that in the future, someone will not find a method to create such pictures. But even if someone does so, the tenacious question will remain: How likely is it that there would be such a one-of-a-kind work of art for which there are no known precedents; created by methods that were never again exploited?

Any method that might be devised must be scientifically credulous, fit into the history of art, and conform to the cultural expectations in which the technology was supposedly employed. If not, it will be seen as newly invented art designed to mimic an otherwise unexplained natural process or a supernatural event. The skeptic has a dilemma. To believe that the Shroud is fakery he or she must rely on an underlying belief that transcends forensic science as we know it today.
 

Are They Natural Pictures of Jesus? The Forensic Science CSI Must Consider the Problem of Chiaroscuro

Lean over and look down into a perfectly still, smooth-surfaced pool of water and you will see a perfectly formed picture of yourself. But drop a pebble into the water, or wait for a breeze to ripple the surface, and the picture becomes indistinct, fuzzy and unclear.

The image in the pool of water, when rippled, looks like an out-of-focus photograph. But that really isn't the case. In a naturally reflected picture, your eyes are the lenses that provide focus. The reflection surface is wrinkled and causes reflected light to go off in different directions. It distorts the resolution of the image but it doesn't defocus it. While the analogy is not a perfect one it suggests a potential problem for a natural image explanation.

The pictures on the Shroud are not only very well focused but highly resolved. It is almost certain that in the first century a piece of linen was naturally wrinkled, that it even had creases from folding. This is something that would certainly distort the resolution of the image.

A reflecting pool was certainly mankind’s first mirror.  Eventually man would learn to make other mirrors, first by polishing stone or metal and eventually by fixing metals such as mercury, tin or silver to pieces of glass. Of course, the glass had to be smooth and flat. If the glass was wavy or curved, any reflected picture would be highly distorted. We see this when we look into the special mirrors in carnival funhouses. Again there is an analogy that relates to the pictures on the Shroud of Turin. It is hard to imagine how any process could form an essentially undistorted image if the cloth was draped across a human form.

What assumption can we make about how Jesus’ body was positioned on the limestone shelf in the tomb? How flat was the shelf? Was it smooth or rough-hewn? We don’t know. Was the cloth smoothed out?

In placing Jesus’ body on the shelf was the cloth pulled about, rippled in places and even creased in places? We can’t know. How closely did the cloth follow the contour of Jesus’ body? Was it pulled like a bed sheet? Did loving hands smooth it across the body? Did it stick in places to still wet blood or to remaining water from some washing? Were there flowers resting on the cloth weighing it down or under the cloth propping it up?

Image analysts and forensic pathologists argue that the image on the cloth is of a man with his knees bent slightly and with his head tilted forward as though resting on a pillow that was under the cloth. Assumptions about the shape of the cloth and how closely it followed the contours of Jesus’ body are difficult if not impossible to make. If wrapped closely, wide and grotesque distortion would result. But even if draped loosely, the distortion caused by the surface terrain of the cloth should be evident.

It becomes extremely difficult to imagine an image that was not very much distorted by shapes and wrinkles no matter how the image was formed. This is perhaps the most intuitively strong argument for thinking the image is the work of an artist. It would be a powerful argument were it not for the chemistry of the image and some of the other rather odd qualities of the pictures.

There is another problem that we must consider. Scientists refer to it as saturation. In the parlance of photography we might say that the pictures of Jesus are surprisingly not underexposed or overexposed. This means if the pictures are the product of a chemical reaction, the reaction ran long enough but not too long. What stopped the reaction at just the right time, everywhere on the pictures?

There would need to be sufficient chemical reaction time and concentrations of reactants to cause highly discernable pictures. Similarly the reaction must end sufficiently early to avoid over saturation which would washout image detail. Computerized image analysis shows no saturation plateaus or washout anywhere in the image. In simple terms, the chemical process ended late enough to form a discernable image and early enough so it was not ruined.

Reactant exhaustion is one thing that would have ended the process. Another would have been separation of Jesus’ body from the cloth at just the right time. And we do know that if a natural process formed the pictures, the cloth at sometime had to have been separated from the body.

Another problem is diffusion. If we accept the hypothesis that chemical changes to the carbohydrate coating on the Shroud’s fibers was caused by amine vapors, we must recognize that vapors diffuse and scatter when they come off of a body. Heavy amines molecules do not diffuse as greatly as those of lighter gases. Nonetheless they go isotropically in different directions. So precise are some of the features on the Shroud’s pictures that one pundit likened vaporous formation to painting a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa with aerosol spray paint.

Chiaroscuro

The pictures seem spectacularly like chiaroscuro images; pictures created by reflected light. When we look at the pictures on the Shroud, and particularly the face, we see seemingly three-dimensional pictures on a flat two-dimensional plane, much as we do when we look at a photograph or a conventional painting of a person -- and just as we do when we look at a reflection in a smooth pond or a flat mirror. The cheeks, as they curve around from the front of the face, seem to recede into shade. The hollows of the eyes are evident from their darker tones. The tip of the nose is white and stands out. This is how reflected light works on the human face. Unless we are an artist or a photographer, we probably don’t think about the patterns of light in pictures. But our mind nonetheless puts it all together for us when we look at a person or a picture of a person. And the Shroud, to our way of perceiving pictures, to our anthropic bias, does look like a picture of reflected light.

How do we imagine that given so many chemical reaction variables . . .

. . . that nature will be so kind as to produce such near perfect chiaroscuro pictures of Jesus quite by accident -- pictures of arguably the most important person in history?

Thus the forensic science CSI to explain the pictures of Jesus on the Shroud of Turin continues.

 

Please give a link to this web site:

Title: A Forensic Science CSI to Explain the Pictures of Jesus on the Shroud of Turin

URL: http://www.historicaljesusquest.com

Thank you.

 

 Shroud of Turin Pictures of Jesus
 The Shroud of Turin Story

© 2004 Daniel R. Porter, Bronxville, New York

Forensic science

Carbon 14 Challenge

Shroud Description

  • The cloth

    The Shroud is a single piece of linen cloth measuring about 14 feet by 3½ feet. The weave is a 3 over 1 herringbone weave. It is bloodstained and shows faint ventral and dorsal images of a man who, by the wounds that are visible, appears to have been crucified. He seems to be in burial repose.

    The bloodstains

    The bloodstains on the Shroud are composed of hemoglobin and give a positive test for serum albumin. Numerous tests confirm this.

    The images

    The Shroud's images are superficial and fully contained within a thin layer of starch fractions and saccharides that coats the outermost fibers of the Shroud. The coloration is a caramel-like product or the product of an amino/carbonyl reaction. Where there is no image, the carbohydrate coating is clear. There is also a very faint image of the face on the reverse side of the Shroud which lines up with the image on the front of the cloth. There is no image content between the two superficial image layers indicating that nothing soaked through to form the image on the other side.

    Until recently, it was widely believed that the images on the Shroud of Turin were produced by something which resulted in oxidation, dehydration and conjugation of the polysaccharide structure of the fibers of the linen itself. This has been shown to be incorrect. The coating, whether imaged or clear, can be reduced with diimide or removed with adhesive leaving clear cellulose fiber.

    The images as they appear on the Shroud are said to be negative because when photographed the resulting negative is a positive image.

    The Turin Shroud was examined with visible and ultraviolet spectrometry, infrared spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, thermography, pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry, laser­microprobe Raman analyses, and microchemical testing. No evidence for pigments (paint, dye or stains) or artist's media was found anywhere on the Shroud.

 

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