The Whirligig of Time

It’s August. It’s the Silly Season!

Almost exactly a year ago, the internet exploded with the news that recent WAXS experiments had demonstrated that the Shroud was authentic, and the usual suspects bounced up and down with unrestrained glee. Of course, the excitement died down after a few weeks, and the mainstream media drifted off to seek new shocking news to keep its readers on board. Fast forward a year, and here we are again, but this time with the news that 3D modelling software has demonstrated that the Shroud is medieval.

Published in Archaeometry, ‘Image Formation on the Holy Shroud – A Digital 3D Approach’ by Cicero Moraes (25 July 2025) is a simple computer software demonstration that a cloth draped over a bas relief and coloured where it makes contact, produces an image much more similar to the Shroud image than a cloth draped over an actual body. When I first read it, I did not find it surprising or novel, as the ‘Mask of Agamemnon’ effect has been a staple of non-authenticist evidence for decades, and its refutation a staple of authenticist rebuttal. However, being brought to prominence has stirred the hornets from their nest, and resulted in an almost text-book collection of irrelevant criticism, erecting straw horses and Aunt Sallies, misrepresenting Moraes’s intent and experiment, complaining that he has not exactly reproduced the Shroud image, and, of course, abusing his atheism. The list of flaws triumphantly proclaimed by the ‘Union of Catholic Christian Rationalists’ (https://www.uccronline.it/eng/2025/08/03/was-the-shroud-laid-on-a-sculpture-a-study-full-of-errors/, 3 August 2025) include:
a). Using the Enrie photos to produce his model of the man in the Shroud rather than a more recent one such as Gian Carlo Durante’s.
b). Ignoring the dorsal image.
c). Putting the right hand and foot on top of the left rather than below them.
d). Using computer simulated cotton instead of linen.
e). Not mentioning pollen or Robert de Clari.

This kind of irrelevance tends to strengthen rather than weaken Moraes’s argument. All he actually concludes is: “The accessible and replicable methodology suggests that the Shroud’s image is more consistent with an artistic low relief representation than with the direct imprint of a real human body, supporting hypotheses of its origin as a mediaeval work of art.” And that’s quite true, as far as it goes.

A Podcast from ‘Capturing Christianity’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7gl5PscRNM, 2 August 2025), featuring Cameron Bertuzzi, begins by saying that Moraes’s study claims to “debunk” the Shroud, and that Moraes says “he can now prove that the Shroud never wrapped a real human body, let alone the body of Jesus Christ.” Of course he does no such thing; but Bertuzzi nevertheless finds “a huge problem, a critical flaw” in Moraes’s experiments, which he hopes will render them irrelevant. But before we get to the critical flaw, there’s a couple of other, presumably minor, errors, beginning with… wait for it… drum roll… that a medieval forger couldn’t have done it.

He moves on to criticising Moraes for not considering John Jackson’s cloth-collapse hypothesis, and for assuming that “the image had to result from direct contact, which Shroud scientists have known for decades simply isn’t the case.” This is very confused. For a start Moraes’s experiment was very specific and in no way intended to be a comprehensive run-down of the failings of every authenticist hypothesis, so the cloth-collapse hypothesis is irrelevant here, and for a second, although some authenticists think the cloth was hovering above the body when the image was formed, most of them think it was draped or even closely wrapped around the body, and that the extensive contact this created was closely related to the intensity of the image at that point.

Finally, we learn that Moraes’s experiment was worthless because it did not include consideration of the pseudo-negative or 3D effects, which derive from the variable intensity of the image, whereas the experiment was simply a dichotomous contact/no contact, black/white (or in this case red/blue) simulation. Well, as we shall see, Bertuzzi should be careful what he wishes for.

He concludes that “no study can truly claim to debunk the Shroud of Turin without even attempting to explain its defining characteristics,” and I agree with him. So too, I dare say, would Cicero Moraes. But then, that’s not what he set out to do, and what’s more, it makes very little difference.

This is Bertuzzi’s fatal flaw. Different Shroud scholars have different ideas about how the Shroud covered the body when the image was formed: was it horizontal, draped, or wrapped? If either of the last two, then the Agamemnon effect would still be apparent, even if the image was derived from collimated radiation. Attempts to reconcile both a naturalistic image and a closely wrapped Shroud have been extremely few: almost all authenticists accept both without noticing any discrepancy, covering the gaping hole with “vertical collimation.” In fact, that’s no solution.

AGAMEMNON RULES

A comment by Russ Breault sums up the authenticist evasion of the indefensible.
“With regards to the recent article, Moraes proposes that the image could not have draped a full human form as once the cloth is pulled flat the image would be highly distorted with the face looking like a round dinner plate as opposed to the correct proportions of the face seen on the Shroud. Therefore, they conclude that it could not have wrapped a three-dimensional human form. However, this is a conundrum that we’ve known about since the beginning of Shroud research and is precisely why physicists and other Shroud researchers have described the image as being “vertically collimated,” meaning that the image forming process appears to be perpendicular to the cloth itself, it is not a radial phenomenon.” [Italics mine]

Unfortunately for the detractors, the “vertical collimation” workaround, although it certainly helps with the pseudo-photographic and 3D effects, does not save the Shroud from spacial distortion. Here is a cloth draped over a shape, with the image created by contact (left) and vertically collimated radiation (right).

In both cases, when the cloth is laid horizontally, there is a substantial increase in the width of the body.

There is no escape from this. Cicero Moraes has demonstrated that whether the image was formed by contact or vertically collimated radiation, or any other method for that matter, it cannot have formed while the cloth was draped over or wrapped around a real body, and no irrelevances, like not considering the pollen or getting the hands in the wrong position, or even whether the Shroud is covered in paint or not, are refutations in any way.

Dan Porter has discussed this on his blog, shroud story.com, referencing a press release by Joe Marino (Shroud-posting-August-7-2025), which lists an embarrassingly inept collection of ‘refutations,’ including the two YouTube videos mentioned above, a longwinded and almost incoherent refutation by Otangelo Grasso, a polemic by Jeremiah Johnson and two slightly less extreme but just as irrelevant comments by Russ Breault and Guy Powell. To comment on them all would be repetitive and tedious, but a thread common to many of them is the resurgence of John Jackson’s “cloth collapse” hypothesis, a pseudo-scientific explanation appealing to unknown physical phenomena to attempt to justify a miraculous explanation for the image. None of its advocates here understand it (and to be fair it is in scientific terms incomprehensible), so they do not realise that it does little to prevent the Agamemnon mask effect.

In his article, ‘Is the Image on the Shroud due to a Process Heretofore Unknown to Modern Science?’ (https://www.shroud.com/pdfs/ssi34part3.pdf), Jackson posits that at the moment of resurrection, the dead body of Christ became “mechanically transparent,” and also radiated ultra-violet light “emitted from all points within that body.” This is almost meaningless. If the substance of the body becomes such that things can fall through it, then it will be able to fall through things – and the body will immediately drop into the substrate that was previously holding it up. And if ultra-violet radiation is emitted within a body, it is immediately absorbed and doesn’t go anywhere. It seems that Jackson is assuming that the body is not only “mechanically transparent,” but also electro-magnetically transparent. But it’s still there, and able to emit radiation. The attenuation rate through whatever the the body’s become is assumed to be that of air – such that all the radiation is absorbed in a few millimetres.

Exactly how this collapse imprinting works is not clear, but the diagram above seems to capture something of it, and sure enough, if the cloth were spread out flat, the Agamemnon effect would still occur.

Very few people have bothered to address this problem seriously, but those who have are divided into two camps, those who think the Shroud was lifted off the body into a horizontal position before the image was transferred, and those who think that there is indeed an Agamemnon effect, but that it is insignificant. This one is interesting. Mario Latendresse draped a body with a cloth marked out in little rectangles, and was able to measure the distortion that occurred. Here is one of his illustrations. The red and green amendments are mine.

Latendresse calculated that a 30cm width of his cloth covered 27 squares, so I’ve marked out 9 squares (10cm) in a reasonably good straight line, and then drawn a line three times as long, equivalent to 30cm, which extraordinarily is almost exactly the width of the model’s hips. Various anthropometric websites give between 34cm (https://multisite.eos.ncsu.edu/www-ergocenter-ncsu-edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/18/2016/06/Anthropometric-Detailed-Data-Tables.pdf) and 39cm (https://roymech.org/Useful_Tables/Human/Human_sizes.html), but 30cm is very small.

Next I’ve counted the number of squares of linen covering the body across the hips (35), which would measure 39cm if it was stretched flat, and drawn a 39cm line across the whole picture. Basically, by his own measurements, even a lightly draped shroud expands to about 130% when flattened out. In his paper (‘The Turin Shroud was not Flattened Before the Images Formed and no Major Image Distortions Necessarily Occur from a Real Body,’ academia.edu/9063899/The_Turin_Shroud_was_not_flattened_before_the_images_formed_and_no_major_image_distortions_necessarily_occur_from_a_real_body), Mario Latendresse concludes:
“In summary, measurements show that no distortions can be markedly perceived if the middle part of the body is projected on the sheet. Some observable widening of the hip is expected – it has been measured at 5.1 centimeters on one side in our experiment – and such an apparent widening has been observed for the Shroud by the work of Ercoline et al.” This is a little disingenuous. A widening of the hips by 5cm on each side is a substantial distortion, not inconsistent with Moraes’s experiment – 133% for the Latendresse’s well spread-out draped version compared to 152% for Morae more closely “dropped over” one. Measurements of the Shroud itself do not suggest any distortion at all.

I expect all this will die down soon, so I’ll not delay in publishing my review, but essentially, the fact that Moraes’s experiments tell us nothing new continues to confirm that “the Shroud’s image is more consistent with an artistic low relief representation than with the direct imprint of a real human body,” which has been the basis of my own investigations for several years.

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Addendum. It occurs to me that I should perhaps have referenced another, quite similar attempt to model the draping configuration of the Shroud, which can be found in papers by Giulio Fanti. These images, below, are from the online version of ‘Turin Shroud: Insights’ Review Confirming Biblical Reports About Etiology of Jesus,’ published in Medical & Clinical Case Reports Journal in November 2024, but earlier versions have I think also been published.

The green network, I believe, represents the cloth, and the red shading shows where there is image even where the cloth does not contact the body. In general, I think Fanti envisages the cloth quite closely wrapped around the body, which is why the lower image shows the cloth folded up around its flanks. On another model, Fanti attempts to show where the image areas actually are:

Ignoring the different configurations of the body, which are not important to this particular point, we can nevertheless see that the different configurations of the cloth must be incompatible. The upper half of the top photo shows the Shroud draped down the sides of the arms, legs and head, whereas the lower half of the bottom photo shows that in spite of the contact there, there is no image on the cloth. The lower halves of both photos show the dorsal side of the Shroud both in contact with, and imaging, the sides of the buttocks which would result, if the cloth were laid flat, on a substantial Agamemnon mask effect on the dorsal image, which is not seen on the Shroud itself. Both separately and together, these photos tend to support Moraes’ conclusion.