Return to Forensic Science CSI and the Quest for the Historical Jesus

"Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed."

John 20:8 (NRSV)

Was Christianity born at that moment?

If we define Christianity as believing that Jesus is the Christ and if the account of the other disciple's Easter moment is accurate, the contention is fair. That simple passage from The Gospel According to John may be the first instance of Christianity. 

If this account of other disciple's Easter moment is at all accurate (humor me if you are not a literalist -- I am not either) then he "saw and believed" before Mary saw Jesus and mistook him for the gardener, before the others encountered him on the road to Emmaus or in the locked room. The Beloved Disciple may not have been the first to see the risen Christ but he was the first to see and believe. Christianity, the belief that Jesus is the Christ, was born when the first person saw and believed.

Scholars will argue. Of course they will: Christianity, some will say, was born as the realization evolved that Jesus had overcome death. Or Christianity was born by the planting of churches by Paul and others. Or Christianity was born when the leaders of the Jesus movement began to define what it was and was not. Certainly, the word Christian only came into use later. The beloved disciple, that Easter morning, would not have called himself a Christian on that day or called what he believed, Christianity.

But he saw and believed and hence Christianity, in the heart and mind of at least one man, was born that day.

But what did he see? John's Gospel is not at all clear. It may be the most enigmatic passage in all the scriptures and documents of early Christianity.

We now know enough about the chemistry of burial cloths used in the late-Second temple period to know that amino/carbonyl images would have formed on them within just a matter of hours -- brownish, ghostly images, like stains. Linen has been made in laboratories exactly as Pliny the Elder (23 to 77 CE) tells us it was made and images have been produced from amines similar to the cadaverine and putrescine that comes forth from a body shortly after death. And we have a piece of cloth that matches, perfectly.

Did the Beloved Disciple simply see an empty tomb and the linen wrappings? Read John 20 carefully. There is something missing. 

Is it possible that he saw a brownish stain on Jesus' burial shroud? In fact, there may have been images like the one on the Turin Shroud on on the shrouds of thousands of people buried as the Jews were buried in the late-Second Temple period. We don't have any other archeological samples because there were no other tombs that were open before bodily decomposition; and no shrouds separated from the bodies they enveloped.

If the Shroud of Turin is genuine and if the image is an image of Jesus, we may have a powerful clue into understanding Christianity. There is something here for the literalist and for the modern day revisionist and for the rest of us between these polarities. 

The following is adapted from Pictures of Jesus on the Shroud of Turin

Christianity's Enigmatic Images

When the cloth was made, fibers, one-fifth the thickness of human hair, were hand-spun together into linen thread. These fibers, scientists now know, hold the key to how images of Jesus were recorded on the cloth whether by God, a faker of relics or mother nature. Look carefully at the picture shown here. This is a thread from the Shroud of Turin. The fibers are cellulose vegetable matter from a flax plant. It is on their surface that the images are stored.

Notice a golden caramel color on some of the fibers in the above picture. That color is a tiny bit of a picture of Jesus. It is not paint, dye or stain. That is a proven fact. So what is it?

Since 1978, it was widely reported that the change of color was a change within the fiber; that somehow part of the fiber has turned brown. That isn't the case. Instead, it is a change of color, in various places, to a thin filmy substance that coats some of the fibers. To drive home two important points: 1) the filmy substance only coats some of the fibers and 2) only in some places has the substance changed color.

Chemists know what this filmy substance is. And they also know what chemistry is needed to cause it to change color. The change, visual bits of color, here and there, when viewed at a distance are images of Jesus.  The images on the Shroud of Turin are chemical images -- plural because there are two images: one of Jesus' front and one of Jesus' backside.

Two images of Jesus on the Shroud of Turin

The Filmy Substance That Holds the Images of Jesus

The substance is a dried carbohydrate mixture of starch fractions and various saccharides (sugars). It is as thin (180 to 600 nanometers) as the wall of a soap bubble -- thinner even than the invisible glare proof coating on modern eyeglasses.

The coating is only found on the outermost fibers of the thread. In fact, it is only found where the fibers are close to the surface of the Shroud's cloth. In other words, the fibers inside the thread, deep in the cloth, do not have this filmy substance.

Another important fact is that the carbohydrate coating can be removed by scraping or by pulling it away with adhesive tape. Over the years, as the Shroud of Turin was folded and unfolded, rolled up and unrolled and spread out across rough surfaces, microscopic bits of the filmy substance certainly flaked away. In fact, when the Shroud was examined in 1978, pieces of the substance -- pieces of the images -- were pulled away when adhesive tape was rubbed on the Shroud to collect particulate samples for research. Today, countless tiny bits of these images of Jesus, even whole fibers of the Shroud's cloth, are stuck to microscope slides and sampling tapes in laboratories in the United States.

Scientist have a pretty good idea about how the the coating got there. It wasn't brushed on or wiped on as one might apply sizing to a canvas before painting. Had that been the case, the starch and sugar mixture would have soaked at least part of the way through the Shroud. Fibers inside the thread would have been coated. Capillary action would have pulled the mixture into the middle of the threads. 

So how did the coating get onto the fibers? It turns out that the distribution of the carbohydrate substance fits an evaporation-deposit model. Interestingly, this model dovetails exactly with the way linen was made during Jesus' era as described by Pliny the Elder (23 to 77 AD).

If the cloth  was rinsed in a solution that contained dissolved starch and saccharides, and if the cloth was then dried in the air, the coating we find on the Shroud of Turin would have formed just as it is. We know from Pliny 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. But it wouldn't have been washed out completely. Trace amounts of both starch and the numerous saccharides found in the natural soap would have remained in the wet cloth. As the cloth dried, moisture wicked its way to the surface carrying with it starch and saccharide molecules. The dissolved material would have concentrated at the surface and remained on the fibers as the moisture evaporated into the air.

Browning

In some places the coating has turned a golden brown. This is the result of a chemical change: the formation of a complex carbon-carbon double molecular bond within the coating. There are two ways this could have happened chemically: 1) caramelization, whereby heat causes molecular breakdown into other volatile compounds and 2) a Maillard reaction in which a carbonyl group of sugars reacts with an amino group producing N-substituted glycosylamine. The unstable glycosylamine undergoes Amadori rearrangement, forming ketosamines, which then form nitrogenous polymers and melanoidins. Voila, images of Jesus.

There is a problem with caramelization. The amount of heat required for browning would also heat the cellulose fiber sufficiently to change its crystalline structure and cause it also to change color. That has not happened. Where a picture bearing bit of coating is removed, either with adhesive or with a reducing agent such as diimide, the fiber beneath is clear and un-ablated.

A Maillard reaction seems more promising because of the presence of amines needed for a Maillard reaction. Of course, it didn't need to be Jesus; at least chemically. It could have been any recently deceased person.

Patterns of Discontinuity

The pattern of the brown color is not uniform. Scientist refer to the way the brownish tint is distributed in the images as discontinuities of color. Along a single fiber there may be a stretch of color, then a clear stretch, and then some more color. Moreover, one fiber may have color, 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 an average color. Where there are many bits of color we see a darker color. Where there are fewer bits we see a lighter color. We can see this effect by looking at this graphic-picture from across the room.

Step back farther and a bleary, ghostlike picture of Jesus appears on the Shroud. This is exactly how the picture of Jesus is recorded (the picture on the left is as it appears on the Shroud).

Then, with a film camera, we photograph the ghostlike picture. If we look at negative before making a print we see a startling, realistic picture of a man (as we see in the picture on the right).

An interest theory about how some bits of melanoidins from a chemical reaction formed into a picture of Jesus is an essay, The Shroud of Caiaphas at The Shroud of Turin Story.

Picture of Jesus Number 3

The peer-reviewed, secular scientific Journal of Optics of the  Institute of Physics recently reported that a faint picture of a second face was discovered on the back of the Shroud of Turin (April 14, 2004). This reinforced the hypothesis that the images on the Shroud are the result of a very natural, complex chemical reaction such as a Maillard reaction.

It is important to note that there will be two evaporation-model chemical coatings on the cloth. The side of the cloth that faced the sun and dried the fastest will have a dominant coating of starch fractions and saccharides from the soap. The other side will have a lesser coating. Both sides will react to amines since some of the vapors will diffuse through the cloth. Indeed, we should expect to have a more distinct image on one side of the cloth and a less distinct image on the other. And we do! That is the significance of the discovery of a second facial image on the Shroud: picture number 3.

Fake Picture 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.

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?

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, has precedents. When a new technique is discovered it is exploited; and over time it 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 new-found technology? Are we to imagine that some genius invented a new way to create pictures, that one picture was made, and the technology was lost to history?

How did  he 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.

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

Why did he go against conventional expectations of his era? Why did he create a picture with wound from nails that went through Jesus' wrists? All art and all expectation throughout medieval Europe showed Jesus nailed to his cross through the palms of his hands. Why is Jesus shown completely naked, unlike in all artistic depictions everywhere in every era?

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 images. But that does not mean, that in the future, someone will not find a method to create such images. But if someone does so, a 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 scientific fact.

Chiaroscuro Images of Jesus

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 allow a breeze to ripple the surface and the image becomes indistinct, fuzzy and unclear. It looks like an out-of-focus photograph. But the focus is not really off. 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. While the analogy is not a perfect one it suggests a potential problem for a natural image explanation. (It is no less a problem for those who advance theories about radiation or some mysterious force leaving a picture on the cloth as a body miraculously passes through the cloth).

The images 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 would affect picture resolution.

A reflecting pool was certainly mankind’s first mirror. The images of reflected light, and that is what they were, must have seemed miraculous or magical. 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 images 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 polished 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, even creased in places? We can’t know. How closely did the cloth follow the contour of Jesus’ body? Was it pulled smooth? Did loving hands, in places, 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 or under the cloth? 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. 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 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 images.

There is another problem that we must consider. Scientists refer to it as saturation. In the parlance of photography we might say that the images of Jesus are surprisingly not underexposed or overexposed. This means if the images 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 images? There would need to be sufficient chemical reaction time and concentrations of reactants to cause highly discernable images. Similarly the reaction must end sufficiently early to avoid over saturation which would washout image detail. Computerized image analysis shows no saturation plateaus anywhere in the image. We can see this by looking at 3D plot of the images and noticing that there are no plateaus. 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.

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 images that one pundit likened vaporous formation to painting a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa with aerosol spray paint.

The pictures seem spectacularly like chiaroscuro ( k-är-skr   or  key-are-ah-sue-row) images; pictures created by reflected light. When we look at the images on the Shroud, and particularly the face, we see seemingly three-dimensional images 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 -- wrinkles, the shape of the cloth, diffusion, along with some factors not addressed in this essay including ambient temperatures, humidity, body chemistry, a likely uneven distribution of evaporation-model coating, other trace impurities, etc. – that nature will be so kind as to produce such near perfect chiaroscuro pictures of Jesus, quite by accident; a picture of arguably most important person in history?

Also see, The Shroud of Caiaphas for another perspective on these images of Jesus.