The Turin Shroud, bearing the image of Jesus as a crucified man, is a fake—but unsurprisingly, since it is centuries old, nobody can say for sure how the body print was made. You can be sure that the method has been found, but because of time, alterations in the Shroud's turbulent and hostile environment, and its having been cooked in a fire, it cannot be proven.
The Turin Shroud has marks and blotches that are not part of the main image, yet they show that the image is nothing special. Researchers usually try to ignore them, as they do not fit the miracle narrative. These blotches are formless versions of the man’s image. Oddly, the top of the man’s head is missing, and nobody seems concerned that an image should be there—there is only empty space! An amazing image is less amazing when bits are missing that should be present.
Image Creation – Josh McDowell, Christian Writer
The transference of the image to the cloth is an important step in explaining whether the cloth is the result of a miracle and in fact the burial cloth of Jesus. If there were no doubt that the cloth was beyond natural means, it would be a miracle—and therefore the cloth of Christ. It is admitted by both sides of this argument that the image is patterned after Christ’s crucifixion.
The methods proposed for transferring the image to the cloth are:
Vaporography
Scorching and radiation
Thermography
Vaporography is a process in which a mixture of spices, aloes, and oils reacts with the ammonia (urea) in a man’s sweat in the form of vapors to form an image on the cloth. The only requirement of physics is that the vapors travel in straight lines to form the image. The problem with this theory is that not all chemists believe vapors can travel in exact linear paths from their points of origin.
O’Gorman wrote in 1931 that a possible way for a vapograph to take place would involve adding a radioactive substance to the spices or the body of Christ Himself—but this must be recognized as speculation of the highest order.
Another method gaining popularity, discussed in the Proceedings, is “scorching”—the process of a body releasing radiation sufficient to burn the image onto the cloth. This theory was challenged by the testimony of two scientists, Wade Patterson and Dave S. Myers of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. They stated they saw no way the Shroud images could have been produced naturally by ionizing or high-energy radiation, nuclear or otherwise. X-rays and gamma rays are among the principal ionizing rays, but the images could not have been produced by either: high-voltage machines are required to generate X-rays, and natural gamma rays come only from radioactive substances like uranium. Furthermore, X-rays and gamma rays are highly penetrating and would pass through the Shroud rather than marking it.
Even if, by some unlikely chance, the body had been radioactive and emanating X-rays or gamma rays, the Shroud images would still not match the types of images these radiations would produce. X-rays and gamma rays are absorbed more strongly by bones, meaning bones—not skin—would be the most visible part of the image. Even with radioactive substances like uranium smeared on the body, the resulting image would at best be a silhouette. Additionally, there is no known technique to sensitize cloth to register high-energy radiation like X-rays. An atomic blast over Jerusalem would have produced enough radiation to etch the images but would have destroyed the Shroud itself.
Thermography is a third proposed method, using a lower form of radiation in the form of heat. Drs. Jackson and Jumper favor this as the most probable method. Using computers to analyze photographic data, they concluded that the image was uniformly lighter or darker in proportion to the distance between the body and the cloth, suggesting a physical process—likely heat—rather than human artistry.
However, Dr. Ernest Wood of the Neurological Institute of New York raised doubts. Thermography, which grew out of infrared photography developed in World War II, requires sophisticated machines to magnify body heat by about one million times to produce a visible image—and this would likely destroy cloth. Proponents claim sweat could act as a lens to focus radiation, but Dr. Mueller points out that hundreds of lenses would be required to cover the body—sweat simply wouldn’t do it. Moreover, the proposed radiation would only work at very close distances, yet the Shroud image spans greater distances. The radiation-scorch mechanism remains entirely speculative.
Dr. Marvin Mueller, formerly of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, critiqued the STURP (Shroud of Turin Research Project) claims. He wrote that the assertions that the Shroud image could only be produced by a short burst of radiation are based on wishful thinking. STURP did not demonstrate that the image was a scorch or that it was transferred from body to cloth by radiation or any other agent. Correlation between image density and cloth-to-body distances does not imply causality. A variety of artistic techniques, such as rubbing, could also explain the “three-dimensional” aspects of the image. Therefore, claims of miraculous authenticity are premature and, according to Mueller, ludicrous.
Christian Book Quote – Methods of Fabrication
Craig and Randall Bresee, both scientists, demonstrated a method for fabricating the Shroud image. They created a carbon-dust drawing of a Jesus-like face using collagen dust on newsprint paper simulating 13th–14th century paper. They then placed linen over it and rubbed the surfaces with a wooden spoon, producing a reddish-brown image with three-dimensional quality, with no brush strokes or signs of painting.
Another method uses a bas-relief, a sculpture in which forms extend only slightly from the background. Jacques di Costanzo demonstrated this by creating a bas-relief of a Jesus-like face, covering it with wet linen, and applying a mixture of ferric oxide and gelatin. The resulting image closely resembled the Shroud image and was resistant to washing, heat, and harsh chemicals. Similar experiments confirmed these results.
Other suggested methods include scorching with a hot metal bas-relief or the Maillard reaction, where cellulose fibers are coated with sugars and starch fractions. These methods could plausibly produce the Shroud image.
These experiments are documented in The Shroud of Turin: Is it Genuine or is it a Forgery? (Dr. Johnson C. Philip, Dr. Saneesh Cherian, ed. Gregory Anderson, 2014, Creative Commons).
Invisible Ink?
Some suggest invisible ink could have been used, but this is unlikely because painting a large, detailed image with it would be extremely difficult. Baking the cloth might have revealed the image, and lemon juice has been suggested as a painting medium—but this is speculative. Clive Prince and Lynn Picknett suggest block printing as a possibility.
Another Quote
“Before his death in 2005, STURP’s Ray Rogers dismissed the more extreme claims about the Shroud, including the burst-of-radiant-energy theory. He concluded that the image was likely the result of decomposition products of a rotting body, requiring no miracles or painters. However, the lack of wraparound distortions and the presence of pigments and paint make the rotting-body hypothesis unlikely.”
My point is that perhaps the paint was not what we expect—maybe rotting body fluids were involved. Whoever created the Shroud had to consider using a body in some way—or did they?