Reply #197: More on Antonacci's book, and the latest findings

[Stunster]

Incidentally, you can read all about the latest carbon-dating news
story at http://www.shroud.com/latebrak.htm#rogers

This is the no.1 Shroud website on the net, with loads of material,
from serious students of the Shroud, on all sides of the question.
Ray Rogers is the guy who has come out with the latest research
finding that questions the original carbon-dating test and reveals
that it was performed on the wrong piece of cloth, one that was
(incredibly) not part of the Shroud cloth, but an added patch.
Rogers is now saying that the Shroud itself is much older than the
original test placed it.

What is all the more remarkable about this is that Ray Rogers had
criticized aspects of Antonacci's book some time ago.

Antonacci wrote a response at that time which you can read here:
http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/antonaci.pdf

That Rogers should now be the one to confirm an older date for the
Shroud (including the possibility that it dates from the time of
Jesus) and to discredit the carbon-14 dating test is kind of
mind-blowing in itself.

Christian tradition and the Scriptures say that
Christ's bones were not broken, in fulfilment of
an Old Testament prophecy. In the Shroud image,
the hands are placed over the groin area, but the
thumbs are not visible. It looks as though the
thumbs must be folded underneath the palms. Why
would a painter/forger place them there, out of sight
so to speak? Note that the crucifixion nail holes
on the Shroud are in the wrists, not the hands.

Let me now quote Antonacci:

Some critics also doubted the Shroud's authenticity due to an Old
Testament passage that says, "A bone of him shall not be broken," and
the wrist area contains many small bones that could easily be broken.
However, medical experiments would also explain this concern as well
as answer, perhaps, the most puzzling feature of all concerning the
hands. This visible feature is the apparent absence of the man's
thumbs. When Dr Barbet Anatomy, St Joseph's Hospital, Paris, 1932-1961] conducted experiments
with cadavers to see what would happen when he drove a nail into the
exact wrist area indicated on the Shroud, he discovered that the nail
diverted upward into what is called the Space of Destot. When struck
with a few more blows, the nail pushed aside the four bones
surrounding the Space of Destot so the space widened and allowed the
nail to pass freely through the flesh without breaking any bones (fig.
20). Much to Barbet's surprise, driving the nail still further
caused the thumb to contract spontaneously inward toward the palm. He
found a simple explanation for this previously unknown physiological
phenomenon: When a nail is driven into the Space of Destot, the median
nerve controlling the thumb is injured and stimulated, automatically
causing the thumb to contract inward and lie across the palm. Injury
to the median nerve, then, would account for the anatomical reaction
visible on the Shroud.
When searching through centuries of artistic tradition, you might
find one or two portrayals of Jesus' crucifixion that show nails in
the wrist area, but no known work of art both depicts nails through
the wrists and the absence of thumbs. The image on the Shroud is
unique because the wrists and hands are anatomically precise in their
illustration of crucifixion wounds, even though knowledge of where
crucifixion victims were nailed and what would happen to their thumbs
was not known until this century. At minimum, these anatomical facts
are recognized by medical examiners to be the spontaneous and natural
reactions of a real human being who was crucified. Moreover, these
anatomical characteristics could be unique points of authenticity as
the image and burial garment of the historical Jesus Christ, for there
is no depiction or reference in all of history like this of Jesus, or
anyone else..... (pp. 24-25).

There is an important distinction between between arterial wounds and venous wounds. The way such wounds form blood flows is quite distinct.
Remarkably, this distinction is captured with exact medical precision on the Shroud image. Antonacci again:

Regardless of technique, no artist, especially one working in the
Middle Ages, has ever represented the distinction between venous and
arterial blood so accurately. In comparison to the Shroud's realism,
fig. 23, a medical illustration of wounds drawn in the 1400s, shows
how poorly blood flows were understood at that time. In fact, the
difference between arterial and venous blood was not even discovered
until 1593, more than 230 years after some allege that the Shroud
image was painted. (p. 26)

In the book, Antonacci utterly destroys the following theories: the Painting theory; the Vapograph (diffusion) theory; Direct-contact
theories; the Volkringer Method theory; the Singlet Oxygen theory; the Bacteria and fungi theories; the Nickell Powder-Rubbing theory; the Craig-Breese method theory; the heated bas-relief/scorch theory; the hot statue theory; the theories based on radiation and electrostatic fields (aka Kirlian Method or Corona Discharge theories); the Engraved lines theory; the Kersten and Gruber method theories; the medieval photography theory; and a bunch of other artistic theories and experiments.

It is impossible to do justice to the full range of extraordinariness of the scientific evidence regarding the Shroud in an email post. The above two examples are in fact relatively minor aspects of the evidence Antonacci presents. The full range of it is in fact much greater, and much more amazing, and is presented in rigorous detail in the book. The best I can do is reproduce Appendix J, COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF THE SHROUD'S UNIQUE CHARACTERISTICS:


Let's review the unusual characteristics that would have to have been
accounted for by a medieval forger in any credible explanation of how
the body images, blood marks, and other features were created on the
Shroud of Turin. Any forger responsible for the image would have to
have been able to:

-- Encode the image on only the most superficial fibrils of the
cloth's threads;
--Transfer an image so low in contrast that it fades into the
background when an observer stands within six feet of it;
--Create an image that is pressure-independent so that both the
frontal and dorsal body images are encoded with the same intensity,
even though the dorsal side of the cloth would have had the full
weight of a body lying on top of it;
--Use an image-forming mechanism that operates uniformly regardless of
what lies beneath it, i.e., over diverse substances such as skin,
hair, and, possibly, coins, flowers, teeth, and bones;
--Encode the thousands of body image fibrils with the same intensity;
--Create an image that is not composed of any particles or foreign
materials of any kinds, with the individual joints of its individual
fibrils remaining distinct and visible;
--Create an image that is not soluble in water, remains stable when
subjected to high temperatures, and does not demonstrate signs of
matting, capillarity, saturation or diffusion into the image-forming
fibrils;
--Encode an image that lacks any evidence of two-dimensional
directionality;
--Compose a yellowed body image out of chemically degraded cellulose
with conjugated carbonyls that has resulted from processes associated
with dehydration and oxidation;
--Encode the front and back full-length images on cloth of a real
human being in rigor mortis;
--Incorporate specific effects of a draped cloth that fell through a
body region---such as blood marks displaced into the hair, motion
blurs at the side of the face and in the neck/throat region and below
the hair, along wiht elongated fingers;
--Encode a superficial, resolved, and three-dimensional image of the
closed eye over the different and invisible features of a coin;
--Transfer the blood marks before encoding the body image, yet still
place them in the appropriate locations and ensure that the blood
marks are not altered when the body image is later transferred into
the cloth;
--Create actual blood marks with actual serum around the edges of the
various wounds;
--Reproduce blood marks incurred at different times with different
instruments that correspond with both arterial and venous bleeding'
--Encode blood marks on the cloth in exactly the form and shape that
develop from wounds on human skin;
--Embed into the cloth the various blood marks leaving the original
smooth surface between the skin and the blood intact;
--Remove the cloth from the body within two to three days without
breaking or smearing the numerous blood marks;
--Employ a mechanism that transfers distance information through space
in vertical, straight-line paths;
--Produce an image that is a vague negative when observed by the naked
eye, but with highly focused and finely resolved details that become
visible only when photographed, at which point the negative turns into
a positive image with light/dark and left/right reversed;
--Encode accurately proportioned, three-dimensional information on a
two-dimensional surface that directly corresponds to the distances
between a body and cloth;
--Include realistic details of scourge marks so minute that they are
invisible to the naked eye and can be seen only with cameras,
photographic enlargers, microscopes, and ultraviolet lighting;
--Encode a line representing the narrow lesion of the side wound that
corresponds to the shape of the lancea used by Roman executioners in
such a manner that the line would not be visible with the eye and
could not be seen until the development of computer imaging technology
600 years later;
--Distribute an array of pollens onto the Shroud beneath the linen's
threads and fibers that reflected its manufacture and history in
Jerusalem and Turkey. To do this successfully, the forger would have
to not only be a pollen expert, but also anticipate development of the
theory that emerged 600 years later which asserts the Shroud,
Mandylion, and the Image of Edessa are the same cloth;
--Encode the subtle appearance of Judean plants in the off-image area
of the Shroud that would not be seen for more than six centuries;
--Place microscopic samples of dirt and limestone at the foot of the
man in the Shroud that match the limestone found in Jerusalem, but
which would not be visible for centuries;
--Encode whole actual blood and watery fluid at the side wound and the
small of the back in a uniquely realistic manner and also encode this
and all other clotted bloodstains on the Shroud so that they remain
red and do not darken over time like all other actual blood;
--Encode the appearance of a Pontius Pilate lepton over the
right eye of the man so that only when photography, photographic
enlargers and three-dimensional reliefs are invented 600 years later,
the motif, letters, and outline of the coin can be ascertained. The
forger would not only have to anticipate this technology, but also the
development of the field of archaeology and the discovery in the late
twentieth century that coins were used in burials in Jerusalem and the
surrounding area between the first century BC and the first century AD;
--Encode the wound on the cloth at the man's left side so that when
the image was photographed 500 years later, the wound would be located
in the precisely correct location on the man's right side so that
blood and water would escape from the victim if he received a
postmortem wound at this location.
To encode these features, our forger would not only have to have
understood advanced scientific principles, but also have possessed a
knowledge of anatomy and medicine that was centuries ahead of his
time. Obviously, it would have been impossible for him to have
possessed such knowledge and understanding, but even if he had, he
still couldn't have seen any of these numerous features to know if he
was getting them right. The technology needed to visualize them
would not be developed for another five or six hundred years.
--How could a medieval artist have displayed a knowledge of physiology
that would not be known until centuries later?
--How could an artist paint without showing any evidence of
directionality?
--How could an artist encode three-dimensional information (on a
two-dimensional surface) that directly corresponds to the distance
between a body and a cloth?
--How could a medieval artist include details that are undetectable
with the human eye and become visible only under ultraviolet light, or
only through a microscope, or only on three-dimensional
reconstructions, or only with the most advanced, twentieth-century
computer scanning devices?