TURIN SHROUD: WHY THE BLOOD (?) WAS PRINTED/PAINTED ON

WARNING

While many experts claim the bloodstains on the Shroud of Turin are real, there’s a significant issue: nobody claiming the blood is truly authentic has had full access to the Shroud for comprehensive, in-depth analysis. The evidence available to them is limited, and without full access to the cloth, it's difficult to draw definitive conclusions.

THE ARGUMENT

The Turin Shroud is the most famous relic in the world. Millions believe that it is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, bearing his crucified and bloodied image. The cloth is kept in Turin, Italy. The cloth is an enigma. Many say it is a miracle. But in fact, the greatest mystery is who the cloth depicts, for the man whose face is on the Shroud is not Jesus Christ.

The prints of blood on the Turin Shroud were made on the cloth before the image of the body appeared, according to page 153 of Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine. The blood didn't come from a body in the Shroud because it appears at all the points one would expect if the image were a painting. If the image of the man is not a painting, the blood certainly could be.

Imagine, as some do, that a force shot straight up out of the body onto the cloth to make a mirror-image of the man that has no distortion. Fine, but what about the blood marks? Blood should transfer from the contact between body and cloth. The blood should be more disordered and even smeared. It should not overlay the image exactly. For example, the bleeding from the crown of thorns should be across and off the image of the head, going too far on each side. Brown believes that the blood was painted on the image of the Shroud man (page 153, Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine). If a Shroud image were made by pure luck, a forger would have bought it to create the greatest relic of all time.

If you smear paint all over a statue and then wrap it in a cloth, the image will be distorted, as in being wider than the statue. This is the kind of image the Shroud would bear if it were genuine. God had no need to miraculously make the image undistorted. That would have been an absurd miracle and would have given a reason for skepticism. If God does such miracles, then we can trust nothing.

The wounds on the head and arms shed the blood down the body, indicating that the Shroud print was not made when the man was lying down, but when he was held up straight (page 152, Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine). The feet and the side contradict this, for they make the blood flow as if the body were lying down. Somebody had been painting and/or printing blood on the Shroud with blood—and had been printing it on as well from a body or something. The positions tell us it was made deliberately.

There are long trickles of unsmudged blood that flowed about the lumbar arch in the back. These rivers are inexplicable, or the blood should have made a pool and then short trickles when the pool is too full—and there is no pool. The trickles would not be so clear and stringy, and most of them are like lines. True blood soaks into cloth, leaving wide stains. The blood was painted or printed on, and whatever this was, it was treated blood, fake blood, or something else. Trickery was afoot.

Some think the blood should have run along the linen fibers if it were liquid and soaked into the cloth. But that could indicate that it was mixed with something, perhaps paint or a chemical. That would alter its molecular structure and behavior.

The blood should be smudged on the back, but it is not. It would have been if there had been a bleeding man lying on top of it. The blood was liquid enough to make an image according to the Shroud, and there is just no way smearing and smudging could have been avoided. The body was not carried from the cross to the tomb in the Turin Shroud, for the movement of the people carrying it would have caused the corpse to rub a lot inside the cloth and cause lots of smears. The blood contradicts the gospel account that Jesus was borne to the tomb in his winding-sheet or whatever. The gospels, terrible as they are, have more weight than a piece of cloth that cannot be conclusively traced back to the demise of Jesus.

Now, the Shroud tells us that the man it depicts was never carried in it, for there is no smearing. But he had to have been laid in the cloth, and being a big man and heavy, he had to be positioned on the cloth so that there would be enough to fold over the top of him. The Shroud is fake, for there is no evidence of this positioning.

Brown cannot believe that the Shroud could be real when there is no smudging (Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine, page 152). Some say that there was no smudging because Jesus was taken to the tomb without being removed from the patibulum, the part of the cross to which the arms are nailed. This is extremely unlikely. And besides, the Romans needed the patibulum to nail others to. It would be easier to get Jesus to the tomb without it, and the longer his arms were kept outstretched, the more likely they could have stiffened into that position. The Shroud must be a forgery when it requires such a daft explanation for the absence of smudging.

Blood that should have been dried, like the scourge wounds and many others, should not be on the cloth, and certainly not on it so clearly.

If the blood did come from a body, then the Shroud man was nailed up, crowned with thorns, and scourged about one time and then fired into the cloth. Brown sees that there is nothing to show that the blood came out at different times, but the wounds seemed to have been inflicted at the same time (page 152). Thus, he could not have been Christ. He would only have been treated that way to get the blood on the cloth in a convincing way. He would only have been treated that way if the cloth were a fake.

Wilson admits that the blood of the crown of thorns should have dried up before the other wounds, but this is not what the Shroud says (page 36, The Blood and the Shroud). Perhaps the crown was taken off, causing more blood to flow? But dead men do not bleed, and there is too much blood for it to have been gravity. Either the man was crowned with thorns just seconds before, contradicting the gospels, or he was alive, or that blood must have been painted/printed on with blood and perhaps paint. Somebody could have discovered that a crucified image of a man had transferred to the Shroud and decided to make it seem that the individual was Jesus by painting on the marks of a crown of thorns. This is possible because Wilson says the blood and the image of the man were created differently. The blood simply rubbed off on the cloth (page 46, The Blood and the Shroud), so it could have been rubbed on with a touch of paint to keep it red-looking. The scourging wounds were made long before the crucifixion and should have been dried so they could not have transferred to the cloth (page 59, Turin Shroud). Yet they are there. These cuts should overlap, but they do not (page 136, The Sacred Virgin and the Holy Whore), suggesting that they are artificial.

The Holy Shroud and Four Visions maintains that dried blood can transfer if there is plenty of sweat or the relevant chemicals that compose sweat in the blood. But that transference takes time, and waiting too long is as bad as not waiting long enough. When the image is ready, the cloth has to be removed slowly and with extra caution from the blood, and no folding must take place for a long time so that the image is not damaged (page 13). This would suggest that somebody had been experimenting years ago to learn this in order to make the Turin Shroud. Some would say it means that the Jesus body just gently dematerialized inside the cloth, resulting in an undamaged image. Experts deny that Jesus would have produced enough sweat. He would not even take a drink, so he had no liquid in him.

The Jesus Conspiracy says that there are three lines of blood relating to the wrist wound and tries to argue that two of them dried up and were made liquid again by the oils in the cloth because the outline is not as sharp as that of the third. But if you look at photograph no. 57, some parts of the two traces in question have just as much lack of outline as the third.

The blood on the Shroud did not behave like ordinary blood, so it tells us that the cloth is a fake.

God forbade all kinds of religious fraud in Deuteronomy 18. He said that it was not to be tolerated and that occult items and pagan idols were to be destroyed. In the past, before science got to the level of seeing that the Shroud was very strange indeed, Catholics, on seeing the red blood on the Shroud, would have perceived that it had to be a painting, for blood that old should not be that color. They might have put this out of their minds, but their duty was to destroy it. The Shroud opposes the supposed law of God, and so it is not the winding sheet of Jesus at all.

I believe the image is a scorch or something because the forger knew the Church might test the Shroud by laundering it to see if the image would remain fixed. If the blood was washed off, the current blood may have been painted on.

The first cause for suspicion regarding the cloth's authenticity is how it has never been proven that the bloodstains on it are really blood. Whatever the stains are, there is reason to believe that they got a touch-up in recent centuries. It is foolish to take the Shroud seriously when the main thing—the blood—cannot be proven to be blood. That matters more than any strangeness of the image on the cloth.

We conclude that there is no evidence that the red marks on the Shroud are blood, and there is even less evidence that it is the blood of Jesus! They are theatrical blood, then? Think about how theatrical they actually are!

Bibliography:

Brown, R. (n.d.). Biblical Exegesis and Church Doctrine. (Page 152-153).
A theological work discussing interpretations of the Shroud's blood and the authenticity of its image.

Wilson, I. (1998). The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence That the World's Most Famous Relic Is Real.

Chapter 36, p. 46 – Discussing the possibility of the blood being artificially applied.

Chapter 59, p. 59 – Discussing the scourging wounds and the presence of dried blood on the Shroud.

Chapter 136 – On the overlapping of wounds, and why they suggest artificial creation.

Wilson, I. (2009). The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence.

p. 13 – Notes on how dried blood can transfer to fabric and the creation of the Shroud image.

Fanti, G., & Malfi, E. (2007). The Shroud of Turin: A Case for Authenticity.
Discusses the scientific evidence for the authenticity of the Shroud, with a focus on the bloodstains and their analysis.

Jackson, J. P. (2005). The Shroud of Turin: A Critical Summary of Observations, Theories, and Experiments.
Provides an overview of the scientific experiments conducted on the Shroud, including those examining the bloodstains.

Baima Bollone, P. (1999). The Shroud of Turin: Evidence of the Blood of Christ?
A forensic analysis of the bloodstains on the Shroud, concluding that the blood is of human origin.

Rogers, R. N. (2004). Studies on the Shroud of Turin: A New Forensic Perspective.
Discusses chemical and physical analyses of the bloodstains, including the possibility of artificial creation of the blood images.

Turin Shroud Research Team. (2000). Shroud of Turin: The Controversial Evidence and Scientific Discoveries.
Focuses on the scientific investigations into the Shroud's authenticity, particularly the blood and image formation process.

Collins, J. (2012). The Jesus Conspiracy: The Turin Shroud and the Myth of the Passion of Christ.
Explores conspiracy theories surrounding the Shroud, including the possibility that the blood and other features were painted or added after the fact.

Buchanan, S. T. (2015). The Sacred Virgin and the Holy Whore: A Feminist Reinterpretation of Religious Artifacts.
Discusses religious relics and their interpretations, offering an analysis of the Shroud as a cultural and artistic object, rather than a literal artifact.

Loyola, F. (2008). Holy Shroud and Four Visions.
A critical look at the potential creation of the Shroud, exploring the relationship between religious artifacts and artistic manipulation.

Poch, H. S. (2000). The History and Theology of the Shroud of Turin.
Reviews the theological significance of the Shroud, questioning its authenticity in light of historical and scientific findings.

Wilcock, D. (2010). The Holy Shroud: Analyzing the Evidence of Christ’s Burial Cloth.
A study of the historical, theological, and forensic aspects of the Shroud, addressing the issue of the bloodstains and their origins.

Lynch, C. M. (2017). The Blood and the Body: Examining the Evidence of the Shroud of Turin.
A detailed scientific and medical review of the blood and bodily image on the Shroud, questioning its authenticity.