Father Brown Fakes the Shroud
Start with a piece of glass and some white oil paint.
by N. D. Wilson

1.
I am not an expert on the Shroud of Turin. But then what would it mean to be an expert on the Shroud? Spending months firing gamma rays at linen? Attempting the discoloration of linen through a controlled release of gases? I have not done these things, nor have I paid too much mind to those who have. I am not a scientist at all. I am not even an expert in hagiography and relics. I have not received a single grant or spent a dime on Shroud research that wasn't taken directly out of my wife's shopping budget. What I am, is an outlier. And, as luck would have it, I was reading the right collection of short stories at the right time. I am as unqualified to work on such a mysterious cloth as any medieval forger. And yet, like that unknown, unwashed villain of the past, I can place an image on linen using such sophisticated tools as glass and sunlight.

*
Sometime in 2000 I sat in a graduate school classroom at Liberty University and watched an amazing slide show on the Shroud. Dr. Gary Habermas presented what he knew about the sacred cloth—which was a lot. I would have liked to simply brush the issue of the Shroud aside, laugh and wonder why time was being wasted on the subject, but that was impossible. The Shroud was too complex, and there was too much weirdness surrounding it to be casually dismissed.

Habermas was careful to point out that he had not landed on one side or the other of the authenticity debate (nor did he think that he could). No one had ever shown how an image like this could be produced, and yet science had weighed in with carbon dating placing the Shroud firmly in the twelve to thirteen hundreds, a date overwhelmingly considered legitimate until very recently.

The image on the Shroud is of a man of moderate height. He is neither small nor large. The entirety of the man's front and back are shown on the same side of the cloth. The cloth is of a fine herringbone weave and is about 14 ft. 3 in. long by 3 ft. 7 in. wide. The man on the cloth has been crucified and the locations of his wounds are shown with a liberal use of human blood. He bears the stigmata, though the nail holes are not located in his iconic palms, but in his more anatomically correct wrists. His brow bears the blood resultant from the placement of a crown of thorns, there is a spear wound in his side, his face has been beaten, his nose broken (cartilage separated from the bone for Bible-believing Shroud proponents [John 19:36]), and his back has been mercilessly torn and beaten with a flail. The wounds from his whipping run all the way from his heels to the back of his scalp. He is bearded; his countenance is noble and looks much like many medieval icons of Christ.

These are all the details needed to convince some of the faithful. But scientists, never willing to take religion lying down, needed more than this to impress them.

In 1898 the House of Savoy of Italy put the Shroud on Exposition. They were then the owners of the relic, and they granted a lawyer named Secondo Pia permission to photograph it for the first time. What followed could only be called a buzz. It was found that the image on the Shroud was actually a photographic negative. Pia's negatives displayed the positive image of the man in the Shroud lying in death, a spooky white on a dark background. Of course, we were only just learning of the existence of photo negativity—surely no medieval forger would have been aware of such images, let alone been able to produce one on cloth. The existence of the Shroud officially became an affront to Science and has annoyed her ever since.

Pia had only been able to photograph the entire Shroud while it was framed beneath glass and hanging high on a wall. His plates were soon thought to be insufficient and a second photographer was allowed to work much more freely. But this did not happen until 1931.

*
Pollen in the cloth, bugs, burial aloes, human blood (type AB as allegedly determined in 1982), anatomical wound accuracy, but above all, the image of the man, somehow represented in photo negative on linen. �?Dr. Habermas had firmly planted the splinter of the Shroud in my brain.

Not long after my first Shroud encounter I flew home from Virginia to visit my parents in Idaho. The Shroud traveled with me. It rankled. As it has for many people before me, it became a personal problem of my own. Not because its authenticity would overthrow my entire worldview, as it would for a secularist, but because it smelled false. The blood was wrong, somehow coagulated unnaturally. The face looked nothing like the pumpkin that we see in the Death Mask of Agamemmnon. Somehow the cloth would have to have been stretched flat to receive the three dimensional head on a two dimensional surface. Despite all of its complexity it felt very off. Impressive, inexplicable, but off.

I woke on my first morning back in Idaho and went and sat in my parent's living room. My mother was around, in and out of the room, talking to me. I don't think I was very responsive. The Shroud weighed on me. The centuries old puzzle sat there, staring me in the face, and, well, puzzled me. I responded to its challenge by achieving near motionlessness, a thoroughly shanghaied mind.

*
The second photographer chosen was Commander Giuseppe Enrie. Unlike Pia, he was given much freer rein with the cloth, but also unlike Pia, he had to deal with (it is said) hundreds of dignitaries, experts and scholars watching his every move. A special commission of photographers watched every stage of his work and issued a notarized statement affirming that his work was free of retouching. He eventually developed three photos of the entire Shroud, and nine details, the most famous of which is an image of the Man in the Shroud's face, which he was able to take close up, free of glass, and life-size while archbishop Cardinal Fossati smoothed the linen. The Shroud has been photographed many times since 1931, by professionals and otherwise, but in every case, the white, positive face emerges in the negative. It seemed far more reasonable to most people to assume (as it still does to many) that the Shroud was authentic than to think that some medieval relic forger could have created such a striking image, and one that would not even be visible to any man until some six or seven centuries later with the invention of photography. In 1898 two artists were commissioned to produce detailed reproductions of the Shroud. Reffo and Cussetti worked with the Shroud in front of them. The clunkiness of their productions affirms the impossibility of the forger's task. Photo negatives of their work bear no resemblance to reality.

The production of a photo negative by an artist is so counter intuitive to our nature and experience that professional artists cannot even accurately make a copy of a negative that sits before them. It is on this fact that proponents of the Shroud's authenticity pitch their tents and camp. The carbon dating results cannot be accurate, they argue, until it can be shown that such an image could have been produced by medieval man.

2.
My mother had recently given me a collection of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories. She knew that I had begun reading the Catholic apologist and was thoroughly enjoying him. Reading him is more like eating sausage and drinking thick beer at a circus than it is like reading philosophy of religion—just how he wanted it. Chesterton disliked his Father Brown stories, though they are perhaps what he is best known for (in secular circles). So it always seems to go. A. A. Milne wanted to write mysteries, but is stuck with Christopher Robin going hoppity-hoppity-hop. I can understand why GKC deprecated his Father Brown stories. They are repetitive. His love of paradox repeats itself again and again, and the same themes run through every story. Taken individually each story can be enjoyable, but most people find them too homogenous to take in too many at one go. I had read his entire collection straight through—the literary equivalent of eating three packs of Oreos as an after-school snack—and somehow, still enjoyed them. They made me smarter, for the time being.

Fresh off my Chestertonian binge, the Shroud hijacked my thoughts, and my mind focused on picking at its mystery. This has to be much simpler than it seems, I thought. The complexity is deceptive. It may be complex now, but it must have been quite simply produced. The forger cannot have been aware of the completeness of his art. The situation was too tangled, too much to wade through. As is always the case, the facts, the data, the evidence, testimonies, witnesses, were all piling up. They would achieve critical mass and shift into Gordian knot status. Once there, all the complexity would simply get hacked through, suddenly falling away in the face of some new explanation. That is what always happens. Turns out the sun is at the center. All the planetary epicycles disappear. Easy enough. So where was the simple explanation hiding? Under which rock, and how was I going to find it?

I am not a scientist, but I am a writer, and Chesterton is predictable. I knew what wisdom he would give his gumshoe priest. Couldn't I just stick the whole thing into some Father Brown dialog and have him solve it for me? Let Chesterton's mind cut through the tangle. He's not a Protestant, so the pope will mind less.

True paradigm shifts involve a questioning of first assumptions. First assumptions are frequently so ingrained that we are unaware of their existence. They are the assumptions, in story after story, that only Father Brown identifies and doubts. Once doubt arises, a revolution is possible.

Thomas Kuhn (enter stage left).

*
The VP-8 Image Analyzer did not simplify things. In 1976 one of Enrie's photos was run through the Analyzer at Los Alamos National Laboratories. The VP-8 is an analog device originally designed in the 1960s to map portions of the moon through converting image density into three-dimensional relief. A normal two-dimensional photo will translate into a jumble when scanned thus (even if recognizable), as the lights and darks in a photo have no correspondence with the distance of the object from the camera. This is not what happened with a photo of the Shroud. Instead, what was produced has been called an accurate relief of a human body. A picture of a man in 3-D. This discovery has had the same effect as Pia's first photo negatives. The Las Vegas odds of this image on linen having been created by some unwashed medieval had gotten much longer. A man (the assumption is always male) with none of the technological advantages that we have, was able to do what we cannot. Without using any of our photo chemicals, he has placed a negative, three-dimensional image of a crucified Christ onto linen. And he can't have known that he did.

1969 saw the first scientists examining the cloth beneath microscopes. 1973 saw the first samples of the Shroud taken for microscopic ultrastructural and haematological research. Nine threads and six thread fragments were taken. In 1978, the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), a team of scientists formed after the VP-8 find, began a barrage of tests involving x-rays, infrared, light spectrum, dust sampling, microscopic photography, etc. In 1981, traces of burial aloes were verified, and in 1982 blood type ab was announced.

*
The group, all summoned to the library, bent over the photo on the table. The small figure of the priest stood in the corner.

"Why do you believe the image has been placed on the cloth at all?" asked Father Brown quietly. "Why should you want to think that?"

"Well, what do you think?" asked the cheery John.

"I think," said Father Brown, "that it never was put on the cloth."

"Why," demanded Carver, "What's the good of talking in the air like that? We've all seen the thing before our very eyes."

"I've seen a good many things before my eyes that I didn't believe in," replied the priest. "So have you."

"Father Brown," said Devine, with a certain impatience in his tone, "will you tell us why you do not believe your eyes?"

"Yes, I will try to tell you," answered the priest. Then he said gently: "You know what I am and what we are. �? Of course Chesterton always drags these things out a bit. Requirements of the medium, etc. There is the requisite confusion among the extras and a small homily of some sort before the priest gets to even the beginning of an explanation. "It's not that the image isn't there now. It is there quite emphatically. I did not say it wasn't there. I said I did not believe it had been placed there."

"Well, what then," asked Carver, completely out of patience.

"I do not believe it has been placed there," Father Brown repeated, "so much as everything else having been taken off." There would be more dialogue beyond this revelation. More confused questioning, more explanations, more moral lessons. But with only this much story, something has already happened: the first hack at the huge knot of complexities. With such questioning a second possible paradigm emerges. The mystery of the Shroud has always been the difficulty involved in imposing a photo-negative dark image on light linen. It now becomes (potentially), how to lighten linen in such a way that would leave only a dark image behind.

Ian Wilson, former chairman of the British Society for the Turin Shroud, was on hand on November 22, 1973, when a televised exposition of the Shroud was to begin. He and others were allowed to view the Shroud prior to the exposition, without a glass barrier and with their own cameras. In his 1978 book, The Shroud of Turin, Wilson describes the Shroud more helpfully (in some ways) than a photograph can. "There, like a shadow cast on the cloth, is the faint imprint of the back and front of a powerfully built man with beard and long hair, laid out in the attitude of death. �?The astonishing aspect of seeing the Shroud itself rather than a photograph is discovering how pale and subtle the image appears. �?the closer one tries to examine it, the more it melts away like mist." The image on the Shroud has long been considered faint and superficial, though at least one recent study now contests this. I have heard the image described as no more than half a linen fiber deep, and if this is not completely accurate, it is at the very least faint to the human eye. Photography—with contrasts heightened in development—always accentuates.

*
Father Brown had asked the right question, successfully removed an old paradigm full of apparent complexities and provided room enough for a new theory. And Ian Wilson, without being aware of having done so, has named the theory better than I ever could have: the Shadow Theory "Like a shadow cast on the cloth."

3.
Why do we assume that the image was placed on the cloth at all? Because that is the most immediately intuitive explanation available to our subconscious. But do we have any reason to believe that to be the case? All this paradigm gives us are complications and impossibilities. Perhaps the image is actually closer to the original color of the cloth and everything else has been removed. Would this way of seeing it simplify anything, or merely compound all preexisting complications?

On April 22, 1988 a sample of the Shroud was removed for the purposes of Carbon 14 dating. The piece, when fraying was removed, only measured about 7cm by 1cm. This was cut in half. One half was kept, the other half divided into thirds. There were seven universities under consideration, but the three selected were Oxford University, the University of Arizona, and Zurich Polytechnik. Each received little more than one square centimeter of the actual Shroud along with three anonymous samples of linen, which (every Shroud proponent will tell you) were very easy to tell apart. Michael Tite from the British Museum coordinated the tests.

Six months later, on October 13, Cardinal Anastasio Ballestero held a press conference in his official capacity of Archbishop of Turin and Pontifical Custodian of the Shroud. He read a statement to a packed room of journalists that placed the date of the cloth between 1260 and 1390. He was asked why the church had allowed science to speak on the Shroud. He is reported to have said, "To let science have its say seems to me to have been the Christian thing to do. �?The Church is calm, has been and remains firm in insisting that the cult of the Holy Shroud will go on and that veneration for this sacred linen will remain one of the treasures of our Church. �?Science must speak as it finds; it is all too clear that what it has said is far from being the last word about this enigmatic sheet which evokes the face of Christ."

Objections were very quickly raised against the three different institutions that performed the tests, but those objections have only just gained definite credibility. Raymond Rogers, a retired fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and an original member of the STURP team, published a study entitled "Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin" on January 20, 2005, seventeen years after the original carbon dating. In his study, which appeared in the journal Thermochimica Acta, Rogers persuasively argues that the three laboratories accurately dated the portions of the cloth submitted for testing, but that the samples had been cut from a rewoven portion of the Shroud and not the original. Flatly, the date range announced in 1988 by Cardinal Ballestero seems to have belonged to repair work and not to the original cloth. Rogers further argues that the original must be far older than previously estimated, a claim that will stand or fall with future testing.

*
The most immediate problems for me were the photo negativity of the image (and the impossibility of a medieval painting one) and the three-dimensionality of the image. First, the linen must have been of a darker color than we thought. It is not an issue of dark placed on light, but of light replacing dark. The most obvious method for lightening linen is the one housewives have used to bleach tablecloths for centuries and, more likely, millennia. Put the cloth outside beneath the sun.

If a face were painted onto a piece of glass, placed over the linen and left in the sun, the painting would cast a shadow on the cloth. Where the shadow lay, the cloth would remain dark. Everything else would bleach light.

The painting of a photo negative is obviously counterintuitive to any human. However, in this scenario, if a paint lighter in color than the linen were used, then what would be painted on the glass would be somewhat similar in appearance to the negative photos of the Shroud. In other words, if an artist were to paint a positive image of Christ on the glass using a white paint, the color of the linen would be used as shading. All the shadows would be free of paint while the lights had been painted over. This sort of painting would not be counterintuitive at all and would translate, through bleaching, into an apparent photo negative. Whatever had been painted white would remain dark beneath, while what had been left dark would bleach light.

If linen were placed beneath painted glass and bleached in the sun, the image produced would be three dimensional. The sun, in its course of rising and setting, would expose the linen beneath the glass from roughly 180 degrees. The edges would be softened and rounded and the image would achieve a depth not present in the two-dimensional original. In addition to this, the sun's course would also blur and spread all brush strokes and firm outlines—all small signs of an artist—leaving only a subtle combination of the painting's shadows throughout the days exposed.

Hypothesis: A medieval could readily place a three-dimensional photo negative on linen with nothing more than glass and some white paint.