THE SHROUD OF JESUS: AND THE SIGN JOHN INGENIOUSLY CONCEALED
by Gilbert Lavoie, MD, published by the Sophia Institute Press, 2023.
Gilbert Lavoie is a practising medical physician whose association with the Shroud goes back to 1978 and the STuRP investigation, some of whose lead scientists he knows well. However he has very much ploughed his own furrow into understanding what it shows and how it was made, and developed an individual hypothesis which is rarely considered valid by more mainline researchers.
‘The Shroud of Jesus’ is more of an update than a new work, and those who have read ‘Unlocking the Secrets of the Shroud’ will find changes of emphasis rather than much new observation since 2015. Almost all the research was published in Shroud Spectrum International in the 1980s. Both books are agenda-driven, and designed to strengthen Lavoie’s point of view, so in this book he does not dwell on evidence or arguments that detract from the main thrust of his theme, relegating much of the academic detail to the Notes and References section at the back.
Lavoie’s unique vision is that the Shroud image was formed while Jesus was hovering upright in the air, with the cloth draping down either side. He must be aware that although this opinion has been based on careful observation, plenty of other people, making just as careful observations, have not reached the same conclusion. In order to be at all convincing, he will have to explain why.
Although he is a medical man, this is primarily a book of theology and biblical exegesis. Although his main expertise as far as the Shroud is concerned is in its anatomical and pathological verisimilitude (and he does describe some interesting experiments on blood flows, albeit 30 years old) this is rather cursorily dealt with, together with a perfunctory glance at first century Jewish burial customs, in favour of a detailed exploration of how the Gospel of John can be interpreted as supporting the hypothesis. As I don’t accept the premises, I don’t accept any of the conclusions, so I’m afraid this section of the book will be sadly neglected in this review, in favour of commentary on some the more curious lacunae that occur along the way.
My attention to these was alerted early on in the book, in a discussion of the work of Max Frei-Sulzer, where Lavoie selects a scanning electron microscope image of a broken pollen grain “taken from the Shroud” and identified as Phillyrea angustifolia, accompanied by the quote:
It comes from “an evergreen plant that flowers between March and May, and adapts well to the difficult terrain of some Mediterranean areas that are characterised by extreme drought. This type of pollen was just the type classified by Frei in his work.“
The image and the description both come from Giulio Fanti’s book, “Shroud of Turin: First Century after Christ,” where the image is captioned “found in dust vacuumed from the Shroud,” rather than extracted from extracted from Frei’s sticky tapes. Curiously, though, Phillyrea angustifolia, the green olive tree, although a Mediterranean plant, is not found anywhere east of Greece, and is therefore very poor evidence for an Israeli origin for the Shroud.
This is very odd. Frei identified many very area-specific species of pollen among his collection. To choose one of the least diagnostic looks like lack of research.
Another oddity occurs during Lavoie’s description of the STuRP investigation of 1978:
“During the examination of 1978, sticking-tapes had been placed over the blood marks and image marks of the shroud. Some of these tapes were given to Dr. Alan Adler. Adler, a professor of chemistry from Western Connecticut State University, was an expert on porphyrins, which are organic chemicals, the form part of the structure of red blood cells. Adler analyzed the particles and fibres that adhered to the sticking-tapes.”
While this is true, it is astonishing that John Heller does not get a mention, here or anywhere else in the book (apart from the references at the back, and then only because Adler was his co-author). It was Heller who first invited Adler to collaborate on the Shroud, after he had studied the sticky-tapes himself for several weeks, and after that they worked on them together. His omission is remarkable, but we might let it pass were there not a couple of others. The first is that Lavoie publishes several micrographs of the Shroud taken by Mark Evans in 1978, but his name is ignored in favour of Vernon Miller, also of the Brooks Institute of Photography, to whom the micrographs are attributed. And in a similar vein, although Miller is acknowledged as the “chief scientific” photographer (which indeed he was, and contributed some very important UV-fluorescence photographs to the investigation), there is little mention of Barrie Schwortz, the “chief documenting photographer,” whose website, shroud.com, has become the largest, most authoritative and most impartial resource on the Shroud in the world.
All of these people’s contributions to the current understanding of the Shroud are germain to Lavoie’s research, so it is curious that they are not more mentioned, but the situation may help to explain why other researchers, whose work tends to obstruct Lavoie’s barn-storming progress, are also neglected or ignored.
From Chapter Three onwards we are taken us more deeply into the anatomical and pathological aspects of the Shroud image, but again are left confused. Some of Lavoie’s observations are contradictory, and some simply do not match the illustrations that accompany them. At one place we are told that the leaden ends of a Roman flagrum: “were dumbbell in shape and were designed to pick out flesh from the victim,” but a few pages later, “each strike of small bones on flesh would abrade and tear the skin, and blood would flow.” Small, leaden, dumbbell-shaped bones? And blood-flow? There is no sign of any “flow” on any of the scourge-marks, let alone “areas of torn skin [which] would ooze blood and clear body fluid (serum) like the scraped knees of one’s youth. These continually oozing injuries would remain moist for hours and would eventually allow for the transfer of the scourge wounds to the shroud cloth.” But on the accompanying illustration there is absolutely no sign of any vertical flow at all. This is particularly incredible given Lavoie’s insistence that the body was not washed, in order to preserve the “life-blood” adhering to it.
Of the ‘lance-wound,’ “the blood flows vertically through the open chest wound,” which it manifestly doesn’t. One of Mark Evans’s micrographs is shown to illustrate that “the yellowing of the individual fibres was uniform. [..] Each fibre that was yellow was yellowed to the same extent as the next image fibre. In other words, there was no graduating difference in yellowness of the fibers. Rather each fibre held most exactly the same quantity of yellowness.” The point is clear, but the photo doesn’t confirm it.
One of the reasons for this rather indiscriminate description is Lavoie’s indebtedness to the undoubted father of sindonological pathology, Pierre Barbet, a battlefield surgeon during the First World War, whose book, ‘La passion de N-S. Jésus-Christ selon le Chirurgien,’ translated into English by William Howard, Eighth Earl of Wicklow, was a best-seller in the 1950s. However Joe Marino has published a list of over 60 “Individual Medical Doctors’ Viewpoints on the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin” who have studied the Shroud since then, of whom Robert Bucklin, Forensic Examiner for Los Angeles County, and Frederick Zugibe, Forensic Examiner for Rockland County, New York, are the most prominent. Bucklin largely agrees with Barbet; Zugibe largely doesn’t, in that he doesn’t think the nails went through the Space of Destot, doesn’t think the thumbs retracted, doesn’t think nails through the palms would tear out, does think the body was washed, and attributes the cause of death to traumatic and hypervolaemic shock. It is curious, and a little disappointing that he is not mentioned at all by Lavoie, not even to be disagreed with.
The Chapter on Jewish burial customs is cursory, and focusses almost entirely on whether the body was washed or not. The concept of burial of the “whole body” was, and still is, important to Jews, but there is some room for interpretation amongst the minutiae of preparing one for burial. Severed limbs are definitely part of the whole body, but drops of blood can be ignored as insignificant. Large amounts of blood are a different matter, and some people have suggested that it should not be washed off, without realising that it can be wiped away and the soiled cloths buried with the body without defying the rule. However, concentrating on this aspect completely ignores any other aspect of preparing and burying a body, the relevance, if any, of myrrh and/or aloes, the kind of shroud and even the kind of tomb. The Second Temple Period was unusual in that bodies were typically exhumed from their loculi in excavated cave-tombs after a year or so and their bones reinterred in stone ossuaries, so too much reliance on a manual written over a thousand years later is not necessarily justified.
Lavoie eventually comes into his own with a series of carefully designed and executed experiments on blood, in an attempt to explain how it transferred from the body to the cloth, long after most of it must have dried. Some, of course, had been retained in the body and still liquid enough to flow after the body was moved into a suitable position. This not only dribbled down the body, but in a few places dripped onto the cloth or flowed across it. Lavoie also distinguishes the scourge marks, and the “blood flows on skin that developed into moist blood clots.” This description sums up a serious problem: how to get dried blood from body to cloth. This bothered Barbet, who had to invent a process whereby the dried blood either never really did dry, or somehow remoistened later, and it bothered Lavoie.
His first experiments involved putting small pools of blood onto plastic sheet, and covering them with cloth patches one at a time at intervals of half an hour for four hours. Even after that time, he says, blood transferred to the patches, so it hadn’t completely dried, apparently. A day later, when it had certainly dried, the crust was scraped off, and the little patches photographed. Some resemblance to Shroud blood marks could be observed if the patch was placed up to two hours after the little pools were made, but almost nothing on those placed later. Whether serum, or an artificially added moistener, was present seemed to be instrumental in how long the delay could be before the patch could be added and still give a noticeable result. Whether any of the experiments can be said to match the very dried-looking blood flows down the arms is difficult to say, but they make an important contribution to a debate which too often revolves around “what would have happened” as opposed to “what actually happened.”
Next is the more controversial idea that firstly the blood made contact with the shroud wrapped closely around the body, and then the image occurred while the cloth was more or less planar. Thus “off image” blood marks could be explained by being separated as the wrapped cloth opened out flat, and the blood trickles in the hair could have originated from blood flowing down the cheeks. For consistency, there should be many scourge-marks “off image” on either side of the legs, but there aren’t. Nevertheless, this idea has gained some traction among the authenticist world.
More controversial still, although paradoxically less easy for an authenticist view to deny, is Lavoie’s idea that the image formed while the body was vertical and suspended in air, and lit (literally) from in front and above. The first depends on observations that anybody can make, namely the vertical fall of the hair beside the face, and the fact that the back of the image shows no sign of being squashed against the cloth by the weight of the body. Different schools of thought address these in different ways, the second mostly in terms of rigor mortis, and it is interesting that Lavoie dismisses this as irrelevant in a couple of pages.
As for the lighting, Lavoie, like T.C. Newman (in ‘Follow The Light,’ 2013), sees shadows specifically under the nose, under the pectoral muscles, under the hands, and between the fingers. He sees the image on the Shroud as literally a photographic negative in the generally accepted sense, based on light from an exterior source (perhaps two exterior sources; he does not mention how the back of the Shroud came to be photographed) reflecting off the surface of the subject and being captured on the surface of the Shroud. For this to happen, the light has to be either focussed through a lens, or collimated, but Lavoie does not consider the ramifications of this at all. He does quote an account by Bob Rucker of his “vertically collimated” radiation hypothesis, but does not relate it to the horizontally collimated radiation implied by his own.