Debunking Debunkers Debunked (2)

Over the last few years, Jeremiah Johnston has flooded the internet with enthusiastic proselytisation for the Shroud’s authenticity, but with such scant regard for any kind of scientific or historical truth that no serious sindonologists, authenticist or medieval, can take him seriously. This month, however, Dan McClellan has taken him to task in a series of short podcasts of his own, succinctly presenting counter-arguments to a few of Jeremiah’s more egregious claims.

For the sake of those who require primary sources for everything, such as myself, here is a list of Dan’s podcasts and the presentations they criticise:
— 3 April. ‘This Technology shows the Shroud is Authentic?’
About the Shawn Ryan Show (#293), in a podcast bizarrely called “‘Jeremiah Johnston – The Book of Enoch, Nephilim and the Ark of the Covenant”
— 5 April. ‘The Shroud of Turin’s “Body of Proof.”
About a podcast from Lakepointe Church, called ‘Shroud of Turin: Physical Evidence for the Body of Jesus!?’
— 7 April. ‘The Debunked C14 Dating of the Shroud of Turin.’
No specific reference.
— 11 April. ‘This Shroud of Turin Expert Just Can’t Tell the Truth.’
Seems to be a response to several different podcasts, all featuring Johnston.

The first three of these appeared in an extraordinarily bi-polar criticism of McClellan’s work which sounds as if it were compiled during an exchange of personalities between Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, whose names will be used here to identify the individual responses.¹

Let’s start with Johnston: “The VP-8 Image Analyser is designed to study what happened to the surface of the earth after a nuclear explosion.” From a person who boasts of his familiarity with the leading atomic research laboratories of the United States, and with the leading researchers of the very machine he describes, this is a deliberate untruth, and it sets us up for a whole series of errors, more or less deliberate and ignoring any research to the contrary. McClellan crisply comments that “This is laughably false,” which of course it is, then goes on to show us the image of the Shroud on the VP-8 Analyzer screen, saying, quite correctly, that it looks much more like a bas relief than a full body image. Then he shows us Cicero Moraes’s computer simulations, which show, quite correctly, that the Shroud image looks much more like a print off a bas relief than it does like a print off a full body. McClellan concludes that “the image of the Shroud was not produced by a human body laying on a flat surface; it was produced by a low relief or a bas relief representation of a person. So what the VP-8 Image Analyzer generated actually shows what the surface looked like that the cloth was laid over.”

I agree with him, but Jekyll and Hyde disagree, and so begins an extraordinarily hour of Dissociative Identity Disorder, alternating reasonable criticism, and even some agreement, with wild irrationality and abuse. Dr Jekyll regrets that McClellan did not consider the alternative possibility that the image might have been generated by some kind of vertically collimated radiation. He thinks that the total lack of any lateral distortion on the image shows that information from every point on the body was “strictly vertically projected. No lateral distortions. Perfect vertical collimation.” Mr Hyde sneers at McClellan for not having read about this. “Did you not read the pro-Shroud STuRP papers? You should know this, but you seem ignorant of it.”

I wonder if Mr Hyde has read William Ercoline, Robert Downs and John Jackson’s ‘Examination of the Turin Shroud for Image Distortions,” in which they note “significant distortions which cannot be explained by anatomical variation or cloth stretching.”² Or John Jackson, Eric Jumper and William Ercoline’s ‘Correlation of Image Intensity on the Turin Shroud with the 3-D Structure of a Human Body Shape,’ whose abstract and conclusions suggests “The visible image on the Shroud is probably not the result of a hot bas-relief impressed into cloth, but such a mechanism seems capable of accounting for the Shroud image’s distance correlation, resolution, and similar chemical structure.” In the body of the paper they note “In addition to observing a lack of large scale relief correlation in the VP-8 [image] in the z direction, as discussed above, we also noted x-y deformations in the image as well (wide hips, elongated fingers and arms, displacement of hair from the face, etc.). These lateral distortions are discussed in a separate paper as being consistent with cloth drape assuming a near vertical mapping from body to cloth.”³

Nor does Hyde seem familiar with Giulio Fanti’s research into the image, on which he notices that “some distortions in the front body image are evident,” and that “the front and back images of the Shroud are distorted due to wrapping of the sheet on the body, and that “the wrapping of the sheet round the body causes a distortion of about 10% more with respect to the corresponding dimensions projected on a plane.”⁴ Then there’s Mario Latendresse: “there appear to be small image distortions coherent with the Shroud loosely laying on a body when the images formed.”⁵ There are, it seems, accepted small lateral distortions, which both authenticists and medievalists attribute to cloth drape. Nobody except cheap popularisers, it seems, claim that the image is “strictly vertically projected. No lateral distortions. Perfect vertical collimation.”

Actually, as I have demonstrated before (‘The Whirligig of Time’) even the ‘vertical collimation’ workaround will not reduce the Agamemnon mask effect from a cloth wrapped or draped over a human body. The only way it can be eliminated is if the cloth is stretched horizontally over the body. However, if that were so, and there was a body-cloth distance / image intensity correlation, the 3D image would look like an actual body, and not like a bas relief.

Of Moraes, Dr Jekyll comments mildly that in his paper, Cicero Moraes admits that his computer mode is not perfect. “It’s only much closer to the Shroud’s vertically collimated images, but it’s not perfectly vertically collimated.” Hardly surprising. Moraes’s image was never intended to show any kind of vertical collimation, it was intended to show a contact print, and the slight ‘lateral distortion’ it includes is no more than what other authenticist researchers, including senior members of STuRP, have recognised.⁶

McClellan goes on to mention Luigi Garlaschelli, whose experiments have guided many of us towards a better understanding of how the image was formed – by using a bas relief. Mr Hyde dismisses him outright. “No, he didn’t, Dan. You need to do your research here. I know Garlaschelli, and let’s just say say his method was an utter failure. It did not reproduce the Shroud images, and Dr Luigi Garlaschelli himself said, ‘Yep. My method sucks. It produces nothing like the Shroud. Can’t reproduce body image superficiality. Can’t reproduce the three-dimensionality. Can’t reproduce the vertical collimation.’ ” This is untrue, of course, and a grotesque distortion of anything Garlaschelli has said or written. His reproduction demonstrably achieved both body image superficiality and three dimensionality. And of course it doesn’t reproduce the vertical collimation; it was never intended to do so. It was intended to show a contact print, and the slight ‘lateral distortion’ it includes is no more than what other authenticist researchers, including senior members of STuRP, have recognised.⁶

But Hyde will have none of it. Garlaschelli is – of course he is – a liar. He fudges the data and says “Oh, yeah, I reproduced it perfectly. Ah, please, I want fame and money and attention.”

We have drifted away from Jeremiah Johnston, and McClellan’s next item is the d’Arcis memorandum, which has been discussed many times elsewhere. Here, let’s look, not at what evidence an authenticist might present, but how the dissociative double act presents it.

“It always baffles me how gullible shroud sceptics are. I’m trying not to be just using ad homs here, but there is this gullibility of Dan McClellan, and hypocrisy, sheer hypocrisy. [Not a good start] This is a document written forty years after the fact by a guy with a proven bias against the Shroud, [There is no evidence at all, let alone proof, that d’Arcis was biased against the Shroud] somebody who had a financial motive to want the Shroud to be stopped being shown and taking away profits from him and his church. So basically, greed and avarice were his motivations. We can prove that he had that motivation. [No, you can’t] Or at the very least, he was in circumstances that were conducive to that motivation. [Quite] You just blindly believe this document. No one with a PhD in history blindly believes this by the way. [No one? Not Dr Nicolotti? Not Dr Sarzaud? Dr Bourdeau, Dr Delaurenti? How many have you asked?] The majority of PhD historians, like Dr Cheryl White, say this is nonsense. [Dr White would never say anything so crass. In her book she says “Beyond the technical and scientific implausibility of the memorandum’s claims, there are also strong historical indicators that d’Arcis was motivated by something other than historical truth.” That’s what scholarship, even when it’s misguided, looks like] Only a fool would believe this document literally is true. [That’s what lack of scholarship looks like] Especially when we have absolute proof it’s false, scientifically falsified and proven it is not a painting. No artist cunningly painted the Shroud of Turin. Absolutely false. Published in all the peer-reviewed journals. [There is not one peer-reviewed journal article which claims it is proven that the Shroud is not a painting] And including the only sceptic, Dr Walter McCrone, who supported this finding, has now been utterly discredited by all Shroud sceptics, including you, Dan McClellan. You don’t believe the Shroud is a cunningly, traditionally, painted-with-a-paintbrush artistic work. [The word d’Arcis uses is depingere, which does not confine the method to painting-with-a-paintbrush] So this artist must have lied, then. You’ve scientifically proven that. [No, of course he hasn’t] And there’s no mention of a bas relief here; I don’t see that. But beyond that, historically nobody believes this. [Yes, they do] This is not a signed and dated document. It was never sent. [You don’t know that] It’s absent from the Vatican archives. There’s no mention in any of the surrounding letters which are signed and dated, that we have, about an official inquiry that took place, and there has to be records of that. [No, there doesn’t] All of the historical proof; none of it mentions an artist. None of it mentions that the Shroud is fake. [Yes, it does. All the papal bulls of Clement VII, the document passing the Shroud to Humbert de Villersexel for safekeeping, the report of Cornelius Zantiflet in Liège. In fact no document mentions that the Shroud is real until a hundred years after its first appearance] You’re just basically blindly saying, this guy tells me what I want to hear, so I’m just going to believe it. [And you’re “just basically blindly saying, this guy tells me what I don’t want to hear, so I’m just going to disbelieve it]“

Weak enough, but then Mr Hyde launches into a tirade of abuse, misrepresentation, downright untruths and general silliness that cannot but raise a sigh of despair in any true authenticist, and a sympathetic rueful shake of the head from the rest of us.

“Let’s show you the Gospel. The Gospel of Mark says that Jesus Christ was God in the flesh and rose from the dead. How about you just believe that? Let’s be consistent, sceptic. If you just believe a document written forty years after the fact against the Shroud, then you have to just believe the Gospel of Mark. [How do you know he doesn’t?] We can’t just accept historical documents at face value. We have to engage in critical assessment. And when the memorandum here is engaged in critical assessment by historians, PhD historians, they all reject this as nonsense, unprovable rubbish, just making stuff up by this bishop. [No, they don’t] None of it happened. There was never an inquiry. The Shroud was never proven to be a fake. There was never an artist who confessed to doing it. That’s the consensus view. Prove me wrong, sceptic. How many PhD historians do you have on your view? I have tons of them, including ones that are agnostics and atheists, not biased Christians. No one says what you’re saying here, McClellan. That’s a big problem of your bias. And it exposes you. You reject the Gospel of Mark [Does he?] – “Oh, I can’t trust that; that was written forty years after the fact” – just like this document was. Who cares? It’s a fraud. It’s all made up. It’s garbage and rubbage.”

“And what’s one of the main reasons we know that? Oh, it just so happens we have a letter, signed and dated to 1356, right when this inquiry was allegedly taking place, from Bishop Henry, the guy who’s supposedly doing this inquiry. And he doesn’t mention an inquiry. He doesn’t mention an artist. He doesn’t mention the Shroud’s a fake. [Because his letter was written before the Shroud appeared] Instead he says the exact opposite. He contradicts your memo from forty years later. He says, ‘I praise, ratify and affirm, and approve of the Lirey church showing that Shroud, the divine cult of showing that Shroud of Turin.’ ” [No he doesn’t]

And now it’s my turn. Apparently I agree with all that tripe. Or rather, I say, “Hmm; you’ve got a good point. I don’t know what to say about that.” Which is not a bad paraphrase of what I did think of Jack Markwardt’s detailed assessment of the Lirey episcopal documents. Specifically, I was impressed by his suggestion that the words “divinum cultum,” which Markwardt translated as “divine cult,” had to refer to a veneration of something specifically associated with a deity, and not, say, with a relic of the Virgin Mary or one of the saints. Unfortunately for the authenticist case, however, I later discovered that “cultum” doesn’t mean “cult,” in this or any similar context; it means “worship,” and the expression “divinum cultum” is a stock phrase meaning “divine worship,” generally referring to the Mass. Bishop Henry’s letter cannot be interpreted as referring to any kind of special devotion, so that far from being evidence for the existence of the Shroud, it is quite good evidence that neither the bishop nor de Charny knew anything about it. Sorry about that.

At this point in the podcast Dan McClellan’s T-shirt changes from white to black, so we are reviewing a different podcast of his, now “The Shroud of Turin’s “body of proof,” which he published on 8 April, which is commenting on Jeremiah Johnson’s appearance on Lakepointe Church’s podcast, ‘Shroud of Turin: Physical Evidence for the Body of Jesus!?’, on 30 March.

Johnston begins by calling John Heller and Alan Adler, “two Jewish haematologists, Helen [sic] and Adler. They’re Jews. They don’t have a theological axe to grind.” McClellan politely draws our attention to the first six words of Heller’s book, Report on the Shroud of Turin, which are “By faith, I am a Christian.” Oops! Neither McClellan nor I want to make a big thing of this, they’re probably just ‘oral typos,’ but Mr Hyde tries to imply that somehow Johnson was right and McClellan was wrong, on the grounds that McClellan doesn’t go on to agree that Adler was Jewish. And of course, Adler “objectively studied it as a world’s expert. [Hyde loves ‘experts] PhD expert. [Hyde loves ‘PhDs.’] Do you have a PhD, Dan? No. That’s right. You can’t judge.” Poor Dan. If only you had a PhD, you could join the ranks of the elite, and then you could judge. See footnote 7.

Johnston then expounds on the torture Jesus must have endured before carrying his cross to crucifixion, based loosely on the discovery by Elvio Carlino et al. of a few “biologic nanoparticles of creatinine bounded with small nanoparticles of iron oxide,” on some Shroud blood fibres, which they consider represent “a scenario of violence.” This is an unjustified conclusion in itself, but McClellan focuses on the paper in which it was published, which was retracted by the publishers.⁸ To my mind the most important reason for the retraction was that “the creatinine findings do not provide definitive evidence of trauma or violence,” which means that the following statements cannot be reliably supported, a) “the man wrapped in the TS suffered a strong polytrauma,” b) “the fiber was soaked with a blood serum typical of a human organism that suffered a strong trauma,” and c) “a scenario of great suffering [is] recorded on the nanoparticles attached to the linen fibers.”

Extraordinarily, Dr Jekyll first agrees that the paper is unreliable, based on advice from “credible pro-Shroud experts,” such as STuRP member Rudy Dichtl, and then Mr Hyde butts in and declares, in a five minute diatribe, that it hasn’t been retracted at all. That “officially and legally this paper is not retracted.” The point of this absurdity, based loosely on an interview with one of the disgruntled authors of the retracted paper, is solely to denigrate McClellan, and not to support its findings. As it happens Hyde doesn’t seem to have read the paper: he never quotes its first author, he doesn’t know how or where the response of the author (neither Liberato de Caro nor Giulio Fanti) was published, he hasn’t read PLoS One’s retraction guidelines, and above all, he doesn’t know whether to support the paper or not, as his authorities – and he is relying here entirely on argumenta ab auctoritate – present opposite conclusions.⁹

And on we go. Change of T-Shirt, change of podcast. We’re now on “The debunked C14 dating of the Shroud of Turin,” from 7 April. McClellan says the Shroud “first pops up in the historical record” in the 1350s, Jekyll quotes various alleged allusions to it earlier, only one of which actually refers to a shroud at all, let alone the Shroud of Turin. A conventional exchange between pro- and anti- authenticity, until Hyde bursts in again. “Prove I’m wrong!,” he snarls. “Don’t just assert it. You just beg the question and say ‘The first time it’s mentioned is in Lirey, France.’ Says who? Says you, Sceptic? Who cares about you? I say it was mentioned by Robert de Clari in 1203. Prove I’m wrong! If we’re just giving assertions, prove it!” And on he goes… “You don’t know what you’re talking about … You’re just begging the question … You just pretend like there’s no debate … Stop it … Be more responsible. Be more nuanced. Think critically before you speak on your show.” Pot, meet kettle.

Now the radiocarbon dating itself. Again. And a reasonably conventional exchange of views, until…

“The trouble is the textile experts¹⁰ did a piss-poor job. They chose a terrible location …. they should have brought in a real textile expert like Mechthild Flury-Lemberg. She wouldn’t have botched the job like they did in 1988. So, these experts, I don’t really trust them or what they say.” Although, as Jekyll immediately agrees, Flury-Lemberg didn’t think there was anything wrong with the sample area either. But what’s more, “She studied the Shroud in 2002, for the restoration project. And she didn’t just eyeball it and say, ‘Oh, well, I don’t see a French invisible reweave here. Obviously invisible, so you shouldn’t be able to see it with the naked eye. So who cares what these ’88 textile experts said with their little eyeballs? That’s irrelevant. But Mechthild Lemberg used a compound microscope to study the Shroud in detail, especially in this area, and on that front it would be scientifically physically impossible for there not to be any evidence of an invisible reweave, under a compound microscope like that.” Are we confused? The ’88 textile experts came to the right conclusion but for the wrong reasons? “I needed to educate you there, because your basis for that, based on the ’88 textile experts just studying the Shroud with their naked eyes when we know they did a piss-poor job of studying the sample area they selected. These guys are not really credible.” Clearly Hyde has never seen the magnifying equipment used by either the ’88 textile experts or Flury-Lemberg.

So we have a paper which was retracted because it contains research Dr Jekyll doesn’t believe in, coupled to Mr Hyde’s insistence that it shouldn’t be retracted after all, and although Dr Jekyll recognises that the radiocarbon area was identified as not rewoven by two experts, Mr Hyde calls them piss-poor, although in fact his own experts subsequently identified exactly the same.

And finally – why were the dates derived from the three radiocarbon samples not closer together? McClellan mentions peer-reviewed papers by Shroud PhD experts [and remember how much Mr Hyde loves peer-review, PhDs and experts] which suggest either some slight heterogeneity in the cloth, or some slight contamination added, or at least not removed. Neither of which, as the authors of those papers explain, would be enough to shift the date of any cloth by 1300 years.¹¹ Dr Jekyll replies calmly, “This is absolutely correct,” before Mr Hyde shoves him aside: “Bupkis. Jack all. Not a shred of evidence proves what you say. You’re just accepting it out of sheer Shroud-sceptical bias. […] I’ll accept anything; I don’t care what it is, I’m so desperate. Just tell me anything and I’ll believe it. Anything. That’s what Dan McClellan’s doing here. There’s no evidence that there was a difference in cleaning procedures that had any relevance in producing these heterogeneous results.” There is, actually, as described in the Nature paper and mentioned by Schwalbe and Lawrence in two peer-reviewed papers, but Hyde doesn’t care. “He’s just making stuff up to preserve his scepticism.” Then thankfully Dr Jekyll returns. “Now, we can’t just dismiss this stuff, I would agree. We need evidence, right, but is there any alternative speculation or hypothesis or explanation, that says the Shroud is from 30AD and explains all of this disparate medieval carbon-14 data? […] Yes! Absolute proof published in the Applied Optics Journal, that secular Science Journal that is world-renowned, by Dr Thomas McAvoy, and he absolutely proved there’s this incredible correlation between the ultraviolet fluorescence intensity levels of the Shroud man, both on his frontal and dorsal images, that was studied in 1978 independently of the carbon-14 dating, and nuclear engineer Bob Rucker’s MCNP computer calculations based on his neutron irradiation hypothesis, which precisely matches the 12 sub-sample carbon-14 samples. […] A precise correspondence. A precise match. Incredible. Impossible, unless the Shroud was neutron irradiated.”

Incredible indeed. Neither of the two papers published by Tom McAvoy in Applied Optics¹¹ even mention neutron radiation, let alone how well such hypothetical radiation might match his ultraviolet observations. In a long discussion of my own, including copious correspondence with McAvoy, I show that no such correlation actually exists at all.

Dr Jekyll hasn’t read any of this, so he’s not stupid or lying, just ill-informed. He’s even quite sensible about the supposed correlation. “We have absolute scientific proof… or evidence… let’s not overstate things… we have scientific evidence supporting the notion that neutron is a more probable explanation relative to the naturalistic ones Dan McClellan just gave you, for explaining the disparate carbon-14 data.” Sensible enough, but watch out! Dr Jekyll turns into Mr Hyde before our very eyes. We start with: “It’s so funny that these Shroud sceptics never mention that. Why do they hide the data? […] It’s like they close their eyes and say, ‘Please, please, make it go away. I’m so scared of this neutron radiation because it destroys my Shroud scepticism. […] It absolutely destroys and defeats your rational justification for believing the Shroud is medieval. And you left it out entirely.” And now full Hyde: “Man, your research sucks. You need to do way better research on the Shroud, friend, before you ever make another video again. Don’t open your mouth until you’ve done a full investigation like I have, for example. But if you did know about it, worse, and you’re so evil, so immoral, so Satanic (for lack of a better word) that you deliberately hid it… Oh, shoot, this actually works as an explanation. ‘Let me pretend it doesn’t exist, so atheists and fundy lay sceptics in the audience will think I’m so smart and so thorough in the research I’ve done on the Shroud.’ […] If that’s what you did, then shame, you have no business judging your moral superiors like Jeremiah Johnston. At least his mistakes are innocent [???!!!] and have some kind of moral basis. You are deliberately and intentionally withholding information from your fans to support your sceptical agenda. And if that’s the case, that’s terrible.”

And then a giant hairy hand smashed out through my computer screen and grabbed my throat…

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1). For my international friends who might not recognise the allusion to the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Lewis Stevenson, the dual personalities could perhaps also be likened to Dr Bruce Banner and Hulk.

2). William Ercoline, Robert Downs & John Jackson, ‘Examination of the Turin Shroud for Image Distortions,’ 1982

3). John Jackson, Eric Jumper and William Ercoline, ‘Correlation of Image Intensity on the Turin Shroud with the 3-D Structure of a Human Body Shape,’ 1984

4). Giulio Fanti, ‘A Review of 3D Characterisitics of the Turin Shroud Body Image,’ 2001

5). Mario Latendresse, ‘The Turin Shroud Was Not Flattened Before the Images Formed and no Major Image Distortions Necessarily Occur from a Real Body,’ 2005

6). As soon as I had listened to this podcast I emailed both Cicero Moraes and Luigi Garlaschelli, who both felt they had been misrepresented by Jekyll and Hyde and endorsed my point of view.

7). From Wikipedia. Daniel McClellan, known for popularizing critical Biblical scholarship on social media. Education: Brigham Young University (BA), University of Oxford (MSt), Trinity Western University (MA), University of Exeter (PhD). Oh, and while we’re at it, McClellan and his wife are both committed Christians. Like me.

8). Elvio Carlino et al., ‘Atomic Resolution Studies Detect New Biologic Evidences on the Turin Shroud,’ PLoS One, 2017

9). PLoS One’s ‘Corrections, Expressions of Concern, and Retractions’ can be found at journals.plos.org/plosone/s/corrections-and-retractions
Liberato de Caro’s explanation for why he thinks the retraction was irregular is at realseekerministries.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/liberato-de-caro-answers-to-skeptics-answers-to-x-ray-dating-dale-glove-real-seeker-questions-for-liberato-3.pdf

10). Gabrial Vial, Technical General Secretary of the Centre International d’Étude des Textiles Anciens, Lyons, and Franco Testore, Professor of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering,
Polytechnic University of Turin

11). — Tristan Casabianca et al., ‘Radiocarbon Dating of the Turin Shroud: New
Evidence from Raw Data,’ Archaeometry, 2019.
— Bryan Walsh and Larry Schwalbe, ‘An Instructive Inter-Laboratory Comparison: The 1988 Radiocarbon Dating of the Shroud of Turin,’ Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 2020
— Larry Schwalbe and Bryan Walsh, ‘On Cleaning Methods and the Raw Radiocarbon Data from the Shroud of Turin,’ International Journal of Archaeology, 2021

12). Thomas McAvoy, ‘Analysis of UV photographs of the Shroud of Turin,’ Applied Optics, 2019.
Thomas McAvoy, ‘Shroud of Turin Ultraviolet Light Images: Color and Information Content,’ Applied Optics, 2021

Source: YouTube, ‘Fan Requests (Part 3/3): Dan McClellan vs. Jeremiah Johnston on the Shroud.’