his is an 
extraordinar
y scientif
ic myste
ry!
This is an
extraordinary scientific mystery!
How thin are these p
ictures?
Picture this: Slice a human hair
lengthwise, from end to end, into 100 long thin slices, each slice
a tenth of the width of a single red 
blood cell. The pictures of Jesus on the
Shroud, at their thickest, are this thin. In fact, these pictures of
Jesus are thinner than most bacteria.
Writing in the December 2004 issue of Christianity Today, evidence reopens debate about the controversial Shroud of Turin.
Hardly! The debate has been raging for years, unabated. What the second face picture does is clarify what scientists having been saying lately about how the pictures may have been formed. It supports scientific hypothesis being discussed in other peer-reviewed scientific journals.
| In this clarification of the Christianity Today article, the pictures are called pictures of Jesus. Is it fair to say these ghost-like pictures are pictures of Jesus? Yes! If they are fake, then certainly the faker intended them to be pictures of Jesus. In this sense they are pictures of Jesus just as if painted by a legitimate artist. If the pictures are an accidental product of nature, as some scientists argue, then we can't know for certain that the man pictured is Jesus. But who else? If not Jesus, why was the burial shroud saved? And if the pictures of Jesus are miracle pictures, then we are on fairly safe ground if we say that Jesus is pictured on the Shroud Turin. |
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 pictures of Jesus were recorded on the cloth whether by God, a faker of relics or by an accident of nature. Look carefully at the picture shown here. This is a single thread from the Shroud of Turin. The fibers are cellulose vegetable matter from a flax plant. It is on their surface that the pictures are stored.
Notice a golden caramel color on some of the fibers in the adjacent 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 had 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 pictures of Jesus. The pictures on the Shroud of Turin are chemical pictures -- plural because there are two pictures: one of Jesus' front and one of Jesus' backside.
Two pictures
of Jesus on the Shroud of Turin
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. It is thinner 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 pictures -- were pulled away when adhesive tape was rubbed on the Shroud to collect particulate samples for research. Today, countless tiny bits of these pictures 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 the starch 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. This is certainly how the coating formed on only the outermost fibers.