A review of The Jesus Microbiome,
An Instagram from the First Century
By Stephen J. Mattingly and Roy Abraham Varghese
published by the Institute for MetaScientific Research, Texas
The idea that the Shroud owes much of its interest to bacteria was first explored in a paper entitled “A Problematic source of Organic contamination of Linen”, by Harry Gove, Stephen Mattingly, A.R. David and Leoncio Garcia-Valdes, in Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B, in 1997. It was the authors’ contention that
“most of the thread fibres have extraneous deposits that cover their surface. […] The name bioplastic coatings has been given to these natural accretions produced by the activity of microorganisms. Such coatings have not been previously observed not confirmed by other investigators.”
The last sentence was grimly prophetic. The idea that most of the Shroud consists of bacterial deposition has not found favour since this paper was published, not least because no similar bioplastic coating has been found on any archaeological artefacts, let alone the Shroud, which has led to the rejection of the general, as well as the particular, hypothesis. Another reason may be because the original paper described a test for bioplastic coating by comparing the radiocarbon dates of a mummified ibis and its wrapping. Sure enough, the wrapping appeared to be several hundred years younger than the mummy. But was this because the wrapping, covered in bioplastic, measured younger? Probably not, it turned out. Probably, as in numerous other anomalous radiocarbon dates, a diet including a proportion of terrestrial (radiocarbon-free) carbon made the ibis measure older. The paper concluded, rather lamely, “It would be premature to draw any conclusions about the true age of the Turin Shroud from these measurements.”
Garza-Valdes pursued his theme in “The DNA of God,” in 1999, which included further studies on the Shroud and was a bit of a sensation in its day, but the continued failure of anybody to find any “bioplastic coatings” on any archaeological artefacts, let alone the Shroud, tended to refute the hypothesis, and it has largely been discarded.
Stephen Mattingly, on the other hand, followed a divergent path. In 2001 he presented a paper at the Dallas Shroud Conference suggesting that the image on the Shroud and the medieval radiocarbon date were due to the activity of skin bacteria. Although this hypothesis was rejected, somewhat contemptuously, by Ray Rogers in 2002 (Scientific Method applied to the Shroud of Turin, Raymond Rogers and Anna Arnoldi, shroud.com/pdfs/rogers2.pdf), Mattingly published it more fully in 2015 (How Skin Bacteria created the Image on the Shroud of Turin, CreateSpace), and has done so again recently (2021), in The Jesus Microbiome, An Instagram from the First Century, published by the Institute for MetaScientific Research, Texas, presumably so titled because “the world’s first selfie” has already been used, by David Rolfe.
Stephen Mattingly has been a Professor of Microbiology for many years and has numerous research parpers to his name, so his work should be taken seriously. Unfortunately, he seems to be at pains in this publication to distance himself from any kind of objectivity, to denigrate anybody who might disagree with him in the most arrogantly bombastic terms ,and to blame the lack of acceptance of his ideas to a failure to recognise a paradigm change rather than the inadequacy of his case. The fact that the Institute for MetaScientific Research is no more than a front for the co-author’s views on Intellligent Design does not contribute to our confidence that Mattingly will establish his case, and will probably guarantee its rejection quite as much as any objective refutation of his research.
In common with the books of several other authors whose personal research has been concentrated on one aspect of the Shroud, two thirds of this one is devoted to an uncritical relisting of conventional authenticist ‘evidence,’ which need not concern us here. Even the first third is padded out with dogmatic assertions and patronising accusations, leaving us barely fifty pages of Mattingly’s actual argument, and an experimental justification of it. The experiments, as it happens, do justify the story – its the story which lacks justification in the real world.
Mattingly’s chief argument is that Jesus’s body became thickly coated with bacteria after his hours on the cross, that those bacteria, their excreta and Jesus’s own epithelial cells were transferred to the Shroud, forming the image,and that the subsequent additon of more adventitious microorganisms preserved the image and the cloth, and distorted the radiocarbon content of the cloth so as to make it appear medieval.
He justifies this by coating various textile samples, his face and hands with a bacterial soup, making images on cloth, and attempting to correlate the results with the Shroud and its image. Unfortunately his presentation is often exaggerated, patronising and aggressive, so that its flaws are more obvious than perhaps he realised when he wrote, although he must have known about them. Let’s look at three.
ONE. Everything depends on a thick, transferable coating of bacterial mulch on the body of a crucified man. The justification for this begins:
“for a man between 20 and 30 years old with a weight of about 70 kg (154 pounds) and a height of 170 cm (about 5′ 7”) … there would be about 39 trillion bacterial cells living among 30 trillion human cells. This gives us a ratio of about 1.3:1 – almost equal parts human to microbe.”
Of course this is absurd. Nobody is more than half microbe. Bacterial cells are much, much smaller than most biological cells, and constitute about 200g of our ‘bodies.’ Interestingly, Mattingly’s reference for this is not a scientific paper, but a popular report on it in the online magazine ScienceAlert. It would have be more scientific, and more honest, to direct readers to the paper on which there report was based, ‘Revised Estimates for the Number of Human and Bacteria Cells in the Body,’ by Ron Sender, Shai Fuchs, and Ron Milo, where they would learn not only that only 0.3% of our bodyweight is bacterial, but also that only 0.1% of the bacterial mass occurs of the skin – about 0.2g overall, or one hundred thousandth of a gram per square centimetre.
With this in mind, we can make better sense of Mattingly’s pronouncement:
“Every thirty minutes the bacteria doubled in number. Thousands of bacteria became multiple millions per square centimetre. The bacterial numbers literally exploded with time. The bacteria with the sticky polysaccharides oozed into his eyes and dripped from his nose and mouth.”
Even if the rate of doubling were true, which Mattingly knows very well it isn’t, and the bacteria were doubling for eight hours, which is his contention, there would still be less than a gram of bacteria per centimetre on the surface of the skin, quite insufficent to ooze or drip anywhere. This, and its subsequent extrapolation and variations, is a classic example of a “magnitude mistake” as described by Edward de Bono in his famous book on ‘Practical Thinking.’
Mattingly makes a similar error in his first ‘FAQ,’ explaining in detail why Alan Adler and Ray Rogers were wrong to deny the presence of bacteria on the Shroud, when in fact they did no such thing. What they denied was that there was sufficent microbial contamination to make a difference, which Mattingly, tellingly, does not respond to.
TWO. Bacteria do not jump, so Mattingly says that the Shroud was closely wrapped around the body of Jesus (“sealed to the body by the sticky polysaccharides”), and his experiments on his own hands and face demonstrate the result. Although it is clear that he did not wrap the cloth around his head, the hands appear unnaturally fat, the result of the ‘Agamemnon mask’ distortion, in which the sides of a curved surface are distorted forward, to appear as part of the front. This distortion has been a prominent bone of contention even among authenticists. Those who maintain it have to invent more or less pseudo-scientific ways by which the sides of the body are not represented on the image. Medievalists contend that the model on which the image was based was more or less flat – a bas relief. Mattingly does not address the problem at all. He also claims that
a) areas not in contact with the bacteria but which are nevertheless darkened by ‘image’, are due to the bacteria migrating outwards as they multiplied over the years, and
b) that the raised and more prominent parts of the body (such as the nose and forehead) would transfer more bacteria to the cloth than the recessive parts (giving the alleged 3-D effect shown in the Shroud), when his own experiment shows the opposite. Apart from the eyebrows, which, embedded with bacteria, appear very dark on his experiment, darker lines appear at the grooves of the wrinkles on the forehead, between the lips, and in creases in the cloth, compared to their surrounds. On the hands, the fingers are ‘outlined’ as the pressure over them has forced the bulk of the sticky layer to the less pressurised areas.
THREE. Later in the book, Mattingly addresses the idea that in order to contaminate a cloth sufficiently to adjust its radiocarbon date by 1300 years you need more than half your sample to be modern. Over three or four days, he loaded a 250mg rectangle of cloth with bacteria until it weighed 630g. Although the cloth had more than doubled in weight and was now almost rigid, Mattingly cheerfully announces that it was “quite similar to the fabric of the Shroud of Turin.” This is absurd. The Shroud is supple and loose, and similar in weight to linen sheeting of today. If it be supposed that almost two thirds of it has been converted to “biome,” then the integrity of the remaining original fabric would be so compromised as to make it far too fragile to handle. Mattingly’s counter to this is that the Shroud is now sealed in a coating of fungal hyphae and bacterial poly-β -hydroxyalkanoate, “widely used in Europe as biodegradable plastic.” I rather doubt this, as the one eats the other: that’s what biodegradable means.
Overall, for all his previous experience with microorgansims, this is book overwhelmingly led by its premise, which the evidence and experiments intended to support it fail to justify. Coupled to its semi-paranoic style, forever aggandising the importance of its authors’ contentions and denigrating the capacities of his detractors, it is increasingly difficult for anybody impartial, let alone one trained in scientific discipline, to take it seriously.