Science meets Religion:   Shroud of Turin

from Overcoming Prejudice in the Evolution Creation Debate by Dr R. Gary Chiang

4.1 The Shroud as a Painting

Some scientists insist that the image on the Shroud is a painting, and accuse those who think otherwise as being misled by their own presuppositions.   One such skeptic is Walter McCrone, president emeritus and founder of McCrone Research Institute.   McCrone was originally asked to be part of the STURP team which studied the Shroud in 1978, but he was not allowed to study the Shroud first hand.   Since the Shroud was to be exposed for a very short period of time, the privilege of touching the Shroud was restricted only to those scientists whose techniques required them to do so.   McCrone’s technique of polarized light microscopy was to be applied to fibers removed from the Shroud by other scientists working on the relic.   According to one account, when McCrone was informed that he would not have direct access to the Shroud, he became difficult to work with.   After receiving and keeping 32 sticky tape samples taken from the Shroud, he resigned from STURP stating the causes to be “strong divergences of opinion.”

These strong disagreements were clearly evident in McCrone’s interpretation of the results.   His conclusions ran totally opposite to the official statement of the STURP team, and in his writings, McCrone was very critical of all the other scientists of that team. One wonders if McCrone’s opinion of the STURP’s findings could have been triggered by STURP’s unwillingness to allow McCrone to view the Shroud directly.   It would be hoped that any responsible scientist would provide a fair judgement of the facts he uncovered rather than being influenced by his feelings of disappointment directed toward other scientists.   But the history of science has many situations where emotions, not reason, have led to contradictory conclusions.

From the minute samples given to McCrone to study, he published two papers identifying the Shroud to be a painting painted about 1355 AD.   He came to this conclusion because he discovered iron oxide in the fibers from the Shroud. Iron oxide is commonly used as a paint pigment, and for this reason, he concluded that the Shroud was a painting.   As noted above, this opinion goes against the opinion of all the other scientists who studied the Shroud back in 1978.   In a more recent article in American Laboratory, McCrone attacks these other scientists as “promoting bad science” and he goes as far as to say that they were using their “incompetence to support a falsehood.”

McCrone cannot accept the idea that this image was not made by human hands, and he adamantly defends the belief that it is the artwork of a painter during the Middle Ages.   Moreover, in his 1998 paper in American Laboratory, McCrone promotes the use of polarized light microscopy, and calls into question the far more advanced chemical and visual methods used by other members of STURP team.   As he states:

“If these techniques” (used by STURP) “do such a bad job on highly visible problems like the...Turin Shroud,...how many important industrial and medical problems are also mis-solved every day because the polarized light microscope was not used.”

Interestingly, McCrone’s scientific company makes its money with the use of polarized light microscopy.   One is forced to wonder whether McCrone’s opinion of the Shroud, which may have been tainted by his personal feelings toward the STURP team, was also influenced by monetary considerations.  

Despite McCrone’s insistence that the "Shroud" is a beautiful painting created to help a struggling church, this conclusion overlooks a number of questions regarding the ability of artists in Medieval Europe.   The actual image on the Shroud was made by burn marks at the surface of the uppermost fibers making up the cloth. These burn marks could have been created by applying, very delicately, an acidic solution with a very fine brush so that only the uppermost surface of individual strands of the cloth would be coated.   The burn does not extend into the fibers below the surface.   Assuming a Medieval painter did create this image by a technology yet to be developed by modern science, then this “gifted” artist was also able to complete a number of impossible tasks, some of which were:

1) He painted the bloodstains before painting the image.   At the microscopic level, the burn marks that create the image cover the blood stains.
2) He used genuine human blood having excessive amounts of bilirubin.   Modern forensics has demonstrated that severe scourging will cause the red blood cells to rupture releasing large amounts of bilirubin.   The artist not only knew this information, he also painted the Shroud knowing that one day the technology would be developed to reveal this information.
3) The artist painted Jesus as a nude.   Medieval paintings never depict a nude Christ, and even today, the image of a totally naked Christ would be very hard, if possible at all, to come by. On the other hand, a nude Christ conforms to genuine Roman crucifixions.
4) The artist placed the nail marks on the wrists, not in the hands.   This placement goes against medieval convention, but represents the actual place where the nails must be inserted in order for the body to hang on the cross without ripping away.
5) He painted an anatomically and photographically perfect human image in a photographic negative centuries before the science of photography was developed.

Moreover, since this “painting” agrees with all findings from modern biochemistry, medicine, forensic pathology and anatomy, botany, photography and 3-D computer analysis, the artist had to know enough of the effects of crucifixion on the body to avoid detection by all the efforts of modern science.   It might actually be easier to believe that the artist was capable of time travel, thus gaining information about the future, than to believe that such a person living in medieval times.   In addition to all these reasons to disregard the belief that the image was painted by a medieval painter, the image is such that it tells us the linen was draped, not wrapped, around the body.   In the middle ages, the only type of wrapping depicted in pictures was the mummy style.   It was unknown during medieval Europe that Jews at the time of Christ did not coil the cloth around the bodies.   It was not until the 20th century that archeologists discovered this form of wrapping.   Did the artist know that eventually people would discover this?   If so, the artist himself must have been divine.   If the Shroud of Turin is a forgery of the 14th century, as McCrone claims, and not a genuine artifact of the 1st century, the purported medieval forger must have been able to do all the impossible tasks noted above.