This is the Bibliography "H" page for authors' surnames beginning with "H" of books
[Left: Dr. John H. Heller's, "Report on the Shroud of Turin" (1983). Heller is a biophysicist and was a member of the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP). This is his report of STURP's investigation of the Shroud October 8-13, 1978. The `tagline' quotes below (bold emphases mine) are all from this book.]
that I will probably refer to in my book outline, "The Shroud of Turin: Burial Sheet of Jesus?"
© Stephen E. Jones
Heller, J.H., 1983, "Report on the Shroud of Turin," Houghton Mifflin Co: Boston MA.
Hoare, R., 1978, "Testimony of the Shroud," St. Martin's Press: New York NY.
Hoare, R., 1995, "The Turin Shroud Is Genuine: The Irrefutable Evidence," , Souvenir Press: London.
Hulse, T.G., 1997, "The Holy Shroud," Mysteries of the Ancient World, Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London.
Humber, T., 1978, "The Sacred Shroud," Pocket Books: New York NY.
Hynek, R.W., 1951, "The True Likeness," Sheed & Ward: New York NY.
"In 1978, I had never heard of the Shroud of Turin, let alone seen a picture of it. When I did, I was surprised. I thought I would see something analogous to all the paintings and statuary of Jesus that I had ever seen. ... This was different. It was anything but artistic. In addition, everything was reversed. Its images were like photographic negatives, with black and white, left and right, reversed. The cloth was also very bloody, with the `nail holes' in the wrong place; they were in the wrists, not in the palms. There were large scorch marks and burn holes down both sides of the fabric. The man was nude, his hands folded over the groin. I did not know at the time that the photograph I was looking at had been enhanced; the actual images were so faint that they could not be seen from up close, but only at a distance of about one or two yards. Yet if one was too far away, they faded into the background of the cloth. I could not imagine a more unlikely object for veneration. Then I was shown photographic negatives of the Shroud, which made the human images become positive. This helped considerably by showing a man in a way familiar to our perception." (Heller, J.H., 1983 , "Report on the Shroud of Turin," Houghton Mifflin Co: Boston MA, pp.1-2).
"About a month later I read a report by Dr. Robert Bucklin, the deputy coroner and forensic pathologist of Los Angeles County. Dr. Joseph Gambescia, a pathologist in Pennsylvania, concurred in the findings. Forensic pathologists specialize in causes of violent death, and it was this report which first caused my eyebrows to rise a bit. I have, tucked far away in my background, an M.D., though I do not use it much. I had also spent eight years on the faculty of Yale University School of Medicine: two in pathology and six in internal medicine. The forensic report said (with some translation from the medical jargon): `Irrespective of how the images were made, there is adequate information here to state that they are anatomically correct. There is no problem in diagnosing what happened to this individual. The pathology and physiology are unquestionable and represent medical knowledge unknown 150 years ago.' That, I thought, is a remarkable statement." (Heller, J.H., 1983, p.2).
"`This is a 5-foot, 11-inch male Caucasian weighing about 178 pounds. The lesions are as follows: beginning at the head, there are blood flows from numerous puncture wounds on the top and back of the scalp and forehead. The man has been beaten about the face, there is a swelling over one cheek, and he undoubtedly has a black eye. His nose tip is abraded, as would occur from a fall, and it appears that the nasal cartilage may have separated from the bone. There is a wound in the left wrist, the right one being covered by the left hand. This is the typical lesion of a crucifixion. The classical artistic and legendary portrayal of a crucifixion with nails through the palms of the hands is spurious: the structures in the hand are too fragile to hold the live weight of a man, particularly of this size. Had a man been crucified with nails in the palms, they would have torn through the bones, muscles, and ligaments, and the victim would have fallen off the cross.' I had never known or thought of that, but, of course, that is just what would happen." (Heller, 1983, pp.2-3).
"`There is a stream of blood down both arms. Here and there, there are blood drips at an angle from the main blood flow in response to gravity. These angles represent the only ones that can occur from the only two positions which can be taken by a body during crucifixion.' That made physiological sense to me." (Heller, 1983, p.3).
"`On the back and on the front there are lesions which appear to be scourge marks. Historians have indicated that Romans used a whip called a flagrum. This whip had two or three thongs, and at their ends there were pieces of metal or bone which look like small dumbbells. These were designed to gouge out flesh. The thongs and metal end-pieces from a Roman flagrum fit precisely into the anterior and posterior scourge lesions on the body. The victim was whipped from both sides by two men, one of whom was taller than the other, as demonstrated by the angle of the thongs.'" (Heller, 1983, p.3).
"`There is a swelling of both shoulders, with abrasions indicating that something heavy and rough had, been carried across the man's shoulders within hours of death. On the right flank, a long, narrow blade of some type entered in an upward direction, pierced the diaphragm, penetrated into the thoracic cavity through the lung into the heart. This was a post-mortem event, because separate components of red blood cells and clear serum drained from the lesion. Later, after the corpse was laid out horizontally and face up on the cloth, blood dribbled out of the side wound and puddled along the small of the back. There is no evidence of either leg being fractured. There is an abrasion of one knee, commensurate with a fall (as is the abraded nose tip); and, finally, a spike had been driven through both feet, and blood had leaked from both wounds onto the cloth. The evidence of a scourged man who was crucified and died from the cardiopulmonary failure typical of crucifixion is clear-cut." (Heller, 1983, pp.3-4).
"The description read like a modern coroner's report of a violent death. The parallels between Bucklin's report and the Gospel accounts were obvious. The departures from convention - the size of the man, the form of the crown, anterior scourging, two men, flagrum, wrist holes, all the accurate pathological physiology - gave the Shroud an aura of verisimilitude." (Heller, 1983, pp.2-4).
"The VP-8 image analyzer has at its heart a computer. It was designed for the space program. .... The VP-8 is so programmed that it interprets `darker' as farther away. It can take the signals coming in from Saturn, for example, and show them on its television screen as a 3-D picture of a planet. In contrast, let us take a picture of a man whose face is illuminated from a light to the right of him. The left part of his face is in some shadow. Put this photograph in the VP-8, and you will see a grossly distorted face, with the darker part of the countenance farther away and the bright part in the forefront. Indeed, any photograph of a man or a statue or a landscape - which are, after all, flat or 2-D results in a badly contorted image on the VP-8 screen. It is only when actual depth or remoteness is shown by less light that the VP-8 can produce a 3-D picture. The description of `less or more light' depends on the number of quanta or photons of light. Jackson had never heard of a VP-8, but when he drove over to Sandia, he took photos of the Shroud with him. Mottern asked him why he wanted to use the Wratten filters. Jackson, always ready to chat about his baby, launched into the story of the Shroud. Obligingly, the Sandia scientist brought out the filters. And then he put forward a really dumb idea. `Why,' he suggested, `don't we put the photos of the Shroud into the VP-8?' Never loath to try a new idea, Jackson agreed. All in all, it should have been a stupid waste of time, for a flat photo will, and can, give only a warped picture. They placed the Shroud photo in the VP-8 and twiddled the dials, focus, and rotation. Suddenly, both men saw, swimming up from the electronic fog of the screen, a perfect three-dimensional image of a scourged, crucified man. Impossible! Ridiculous! Outrageous! Yes. But it was there. The two scientists just stared. The positive photograph of the man in the Shroud had the appearance of a two-dimensional face. The VP-8's three-dimensional image was as stunningly different from the photograph as a statue is from a painting. The long hair, full beard and mustache, the serenity on the face of a badly battered, crucified man, came alive, giving Jackson and Mottern the eerie impression that they were gazing at an actual face of a man, not at a painting or a sculpture. Finally, Jackson took a deep breath. `Bill,' he said, `do you realize that we may be the first people in two thousand years who know exactly how Christ looked in the tomb?'" (Heller, 1983, pp.39-40).
"Rogers' review began by stipulating that, for an appropriate scientific study of the Shroud, all possible hypotheses should be stated. Then, after each hypothesis was framed, it must be scientifically tested. The three proposed hypotheses were: 1. The Shroud is a painting. 2. It was produced naturally, by chemicals or volatile products from a body, or fluids produced by a combination of processes involving organic reactions and/or materials. 3. Rapid heating might be the cause of the images. Those were the three specific possibilities as Rogers saw them. Of course, there was no mention of any miraculous creation or a by-product of Resurrection; that type of thing is totally outside the purview of science. Scientists are in the data business or, as they phrase it, mass, energy, time, and so on. And after all, the Shroud was not a mythic object like the Holy Grail, but an actual linen cloth with images on it. It was made up of atoms and molecules, which science can measure." (Heller, 1983, pp.84-85).
"Rogers went on to say that if the images were painted (or printed or stained or dyed), they would have been done with colored materials. What colors were available in the fourteenth century, when the Shroud first came to light, or before? First, they had to be inorganic or organic. These two terms are general convenience categories for chemists. Inorganic materials usually contain a metal salt, like arsenic oxide, zinc sulfide, or sodium chloride. Organic substances contain carbon. ... Organic substances are usually divided into two classes, one, such as protein, starches, and fats, formed by biological processes, the other more usually made by synthesis. ... Because of the fire that the Shroud had been exposed to, there must have been a temperature gradient, from the hottest portion, where the molten silver burned holes through the folds of fabric, through the area of scorch, to that portion of the linen which was relatively unaffected. The gradient of temperature, Rogers had calculated, went from about 900°C to well below 200°C. If an inorganic color had been used on the Shroud, it would have had a binder of some type to make the color stick to the fabric. The binders most often used were egg white, gelatin, milk products, and oil. Any of these would have changed color along the line of the heat gradient. But the Shroud showed no color change of this kind, as evidenced by the color photographs that were available. Organic or biological colors could be ruled out by the same reasoning, for anything organic would have changed in hue; it would be darker, lighter, discolored. But there was no evidence of this kind of change, which seemed to rule out the use of any familiar coloring agent." (Heller, 1983, pp.85-86).
"There was also a serious problem with hypothesis number 2, reactions produced naturally by a body acting on the cellulose of which linen is made. In 1973, when an Italian team examined the Shroud with microscopes, they saw that the color of the images of the man was contained in the crests of the topmost microfibers. Assume that your arm is a single thread of the Shroud. The hairs on top of your arm would be equivalent to the topmost microfibers of the linen. Imagine that the color of the images is confined to the crowns of those arm hairs, with no indication of capillary action nor any evidence of diffusion. That would immediately rule out liquids and vapors. Further, the intensity of color did not seem to vary from one microfiber to the next. The front and back images appeared to have the same intensity of color, even though the body had clearly been lying on its back. Had the images resulted from body chemicals, the back image should have been more intense or saturated than the front one. This also was not the case." (Heller, 1983, pp.85-86).
"As for hypothesis number 3, that the images were produced by rapid heating, there was no imaginable physical mechanism that could produce a 3-D image by heat." (Heller, 1983, p.86).
"Then Roger and Marty Gilbert came on line for a twenty-four hour run with the reflectance spectroscopy. After they had measured the background (the off-image areas), they were to begin at the foot and work up the body to obtain spectra, in the hope of developing some understanding of the nature of the images. Once they obtained the initial series of spectra on the heel, they began slowly to move up the leg. The spectra were totally different. .... By the time the Gilberts had reached one knee, all the spectra were alike, except for the heel. `What,' wondered Eric, `is peculiar about the heel?' He called in Sam Pellicori, who rigged the macroscope and slid it down the support system until it was right over the heel. He looked at it carefully under full magnification, and after a long examination turned to Eric and said, `It's dirt.' ... Deep into and between the threads dirt particles could be seen. Thoughts rocketed through Jumper's mind. What could be more logical than to find dirt on the foot of a man who has walked without shoes? Obviously, no one was crucified wearing shoes or sandals, so he was barefoot before they nailed him to the cross. There is not enough dirt to be seen visually, so it follows that no forger would have put it there, because artists aren't likely to add things that cannot be seen. It is only because of the anomalous spectra that the team looked at the heel macroscopically. Could it be a genuine grave cloth? What other explanation could there be? It was a single data point, but Eric and Sam realized it was not a trivial one." (Heller, 1983, p.112).
"As Pellicori and Evans continued their macroscopic examination, and took photomacrographs of everything with different magnifications, certain salient points became clear. The body images were straw-yellow, not `sepia,' as all the accounts stated. The yellow did not vary significantly in either shade or depth. In short, it was essentially monochrome, with the color only on the crowns of the microfibers of the thread. Where one of these fibrils crossed over another, there was a white spot on the underlying one. Some microfibers looked like yellow and white candy canes, the white area resulting from one thread crossing another and protecting the underlying area from the image-making process. The straw-yellow fibers showed no sign of capillarity - the principle that makes ink spread on blotting paper. If the corner of a blotter is put into an ink drop, fluid is sucked up into it. Liquid goes into polysaccharide fibers (paper, cotton, rayon, and linen) by capillary action. The absence of capillarity is evidence that no fluid was used. By definition, paint has a liquid base. When the base is water, usually a starch or a protein is added as a suspending agent. If, then, paint had been used on the Shroud, the fibers should have adhered to one another and matted together. An oily vehicle would have had the same effect. But neither matting of fibers nor adhesion between them was seen on the Shroud image." (Heller, 1983, pp.112-113).
"However, wherever there was a bloodstain in the image area, there was matting and capillarity, as would have to be the case with actual blood, which is a mixture of water, cells, and blood proteins. Finally, there was no meniscus effect in the images, but, again, there was in the areas where there was blood. A meniscus can be seen in a glass of fluid, such as water. Where the fluid touches the glass, it curves up: this is the meniscus. Lack of it in the images was further evidence that a liquid paint was not used, but its presence in the bloodstained areas posits fluid." (Heller, 1983, p.113. Emphasis original).
"With all this in mind, Adler and I began a gedankenexperiment to see what would be required of an artist. As mentioned earlier, you cannot see the man in the Shroud unless you are one or two meters away. An artist cannot paint if he cannot see what effect his brush is producing. Our putative artist, then, must have had a paintbrush one to two meters long. It must have consisted of a single bristle, since it painted single fibrils that were 10 to 15 microns in diameter. The finest paintbrush bristles I know of are sable, and a sable hair is vast in diameter compared with a linen fibril. In addition, the artist would have had to figure out a paint medium that had no oil or water, because there were no indications of capillarity. Now, to see what he was painting he would have needed a microscope with an enormous focal length that would permit the brush to operate under it. The physics of optics preclude such a device, unless it is attached to a television set. In this case, it would have had to be a color TV, for the straw-yellow is too faint to register on black and white. Another constraint the artist must have-dealt with is the limit of the human nervous system. No one can hold so long a brush steady enough to paint the top of a fibril. One would need a twentieth-century micromanipulator, which would have to work hydraulically at a distance of one to two meters. It would have to be rigged to a device called a waldo, which is an invention of the atomic era. Also, the artist would have to know how many fibrils to paint quantitatively, and do the whole thing in reverse, like a negative." (Heller, 1983, p.202).
"Our hypothetical artist obviously must have used blood - both pre-mortem and post-mortem. And he had to paint with serum albumin alongside the edges of the scourge marks. Since serum albumin is visible only under ultraviolet, not white light, he had to paint with an invisible medium. If an artist had painted the Shroud, the blood must have been put on after the images. We decided to check that point. We took some blood- and serum-covered fibrils from a body image area. If the images were there before the blood, and if we removed the blood, we could expect to see straw-yellow image fibers. We prepared a mixture of enzymes that digest blood and its proteins. When all the blood and protein were gone, the underlying fibrils were not straw-yellow; they were ordinary background fibrils. This was strong evidence that the blood had gone on before the images. It suggested that blood had protected the linen from the image-making process. Surely this was a weird way to paint a picture." (Heller, 1983, pp.202-203).
"Finally, I told Adler that, ignoring whatever artistic method might have been used, the artist would have had to crucify somebody to get the pathophysiology just right. Emperor Constantine had outlawed crucifixion in the fourth century. Western and Byzantine art depictions of crucifixions are medically incorrect. Our presumptive artist, however, knew what was correct, and outside of crucifying a few people to get the anatomy and pathophysiology right, he could hardly have come by this arcane knowledge. I recognize that human capability can incise a page of text on the head of a pin, that Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, probably on his back by candlelight, and that man can accomplish extraordinary works of genius. But these works have to be within the limits set by the laws of physics and chemistry. How could a man create reversed, monochrome images with numerical data encoded with acid or heat? " (Heller, 1983, pp.203-204).
"How could a man create reversed, monochrome images with numerical data encoded with acid or heat? Along with the rest of the team, we tackled this question. It is in our nature and our training to refuse to accept the mystical as an explanation of an object. The Shroud is an object - palpable, measurable. Well, we had measured, and done so in extenso. We would just have to persevere until we had the answer to the question `How did the images get there?'" (Heller, 1983, p.204).
"Adler and I had reached the conclusion that the images could not have been made by artistic endeavor. Jackson, Jumper, and Ercoline had tackled the problem by asking the same question in a slightly different way. Could the images have been made by eye/brain/hand? Their approach was physical, as opposed to chemical. They began by analyzing the 3-D images in the VP-8. It is only when actual depth or remoteness is manifest by less light that the VP-8 can produce an authentic 3-D picture. Could an artist produce a 3-D image? There are paintings that were made from the Shroud itself by some of the masters. In the VP-8, they are dimensional disasters. To take experimentation and measurement one step further, Jackson, Jumper, and Ercoline obtained the services of some police artists, who copied the Shroud as faithfully as they could. The results in the VP-8 were badly contorted. Then they had the artists draw from the 3-D VP-8 images. Again, the VP-8 images were seriously aberrant." (Heller, 1983, p.207. Emphasis original).
"At this point, the investigators took a different tack. They procured a life-size plaster bust of a bearded man. A photograph of the statue put in the VP-8 produced a badly misshapen image. They coated the bust with phosphorescent paint, and the outcome was worse. Ingeniously, they contrived an experiment to encode brightness and dimness as authentic distance dimensions. They took the bust, still with the phosphorescent coating, and submerged it, nose up, in a large container of dilute black ink. The nose, which was closest to the top of the inky solution, was brighter; the eye sockets and the hairline, darker. A photograph of the surface of that liquid, when placed in the VP-8, produced an authentic 3-D image of the head. They then went on to test the hypotheses based on the hot statue, block print, engraving, and bas-relief transfer. All resulted in seriously deformed images. They carried their analysis further. They went to a stereometric laboratory, where they placed a volunteer of the same stature and weight as the man in the Shroud on a glass-topped table. They crawled beneath to make measurements and photographs and saw that the weight of the man caused a flattening of certain areas. Over the shoulder blades there were two bilaterally symmetrical, almost trapezoidal flat areas, just as seen in the VP-8 image of the back. There was also flattening of both buttocks, thighs, and calves. One leg made an impression identical with that seen in the VP-8. The other did not. Jumper looked at the front image of the VP-8 and saw that one knee was slightly raised. They raised the knee of the volunteer so that the sheet covering him showed the same amount of prominence. There was a proportionate marginal rounding of the thigh and calf of the partly flexed leg, and now the subject's back and the VP-8 back image were alike. To my knowledge, these nuances could not have been known by anyone who did not do the glass-table experiment." (Heller, 1983, pp.207-208. Emphasis original).
"Nor was this the end of it. On the hands there appear only four digits. The thumbs are missing. It may not be `artistic,' but it is neurological. If a spike is driven through the wrist between the radius and ulna, it is likely that the ulnar nerve will be damaged, which will cause the thumb to flex acutely into the palm of the hand. Rigor mortis would keep it that way. The fingers in the Shroud image are longer than average, but they are still within the normal range (Gaussian distribution). This may be reasonable anatomy, but it is not, I suggest, reasonable for an artist. One wrist is not seen on the Shroud. When the volunteer crossed his hands and flexed the thumb of the upper hand, the cloth tented at about a two-inch distance from the lower wrist. All the above, including the blood and wound pathophysiology, require knowledge not known until the nineteenth century and demand artistic information available only from inside the Shroud covering both sides of a corpse. The conclusion of the physical scientists was that the Shroud could not be the result of eye/brain/hand. They had come to the conclusion that Adler and I had reached through a different route." (Heller, 1983, p.208).
"Sam Pellicori, a champion of the body-contact hypothesis, had done some interesting experiments. In three separate experiments, he had placed oil, lemon juice, and perspiration on his fingers. Then he placed linen on top of his hand and pressed it gently to his flesh. He then placed the cloth samples in an oven at low temperature to produce an accelerated aging effect. In each case there was indeed a yellowing of the contact area. He had brought the linen samples with him. The team examined them and, although there was a surface effect, several of us insisted that we could see some capillarity in several of the fibrils, which is not the case on the Shroud. We all agreed with Sam that the torso of the man had had to be in contact with the Shroud, or the transfer of the scourge marks would not have appeared as they did. For example, there were many such lesions that were invisible in white light and could be seen only in the UV. The hemoglobin and serum ooze could have come only from direct contact. However, the recessed areas of the face could not have been in contact with the cloth, as proved by the VP-8 images and the Shroud-body distance data. Pellicori agreed that that was still a problem for his hypothesis. It was not a problem, but rather the problem." (Heller, 1983, pp.209-210. Emphasis original).
"However, as a group we raised every reasonable and even unreasonable chemical hypothesis and scenario. One by one, each was destroyed. There seemed no apparent or even remote chemical mechanism produced by a body with and without anointing oil that could explain the image formation." (Heller, 1983, p.210).
"How were the images of the man conveyed to the linen? Virtually the only mechanism left was radiation, which we then examined. The first candidate was ionizing radiation. .... Ionizing radiation produces alkaline oxidation, not the acid form. ... Furthermore, most ionizing radiation is very hard or penetrating. As such, it will not be attenuated by air. If the man was, by some unknown mechanism, emitting radiation, the rays from the noncontact areas - the space under the nose and the eye sockets, for example must have been partly absorbed by air before they hit the cloth. Otherwise, we would have no distance information in the VP-8. In addition, radiation from a source radiates in all directions (isotropic), as it does from a light bulb. The only time it is unidirectional and parallel is when it comes from a laser. ? visible light causes no chemical change in linen .... Ultrasoft X rays and radiowaves are attenuated by water, but that got us nowhere. We had just about exhausted the electromagnetic spectrum." (Heller, 1983, p p.210-211).
"We turned once more to heat. A hot bas-relief - of all the models measured by the physicists - gave some distance information, but it was seriously flawed. When the bas-relief was hot enough to cause the recessed areas to show on linen, the hot spots, like the tip of the nose, burned through the cloth. Considering the heat conductivity of linen - wet or dry - the mechanism did not work." (Heller, 1983, p.211).
"We had now reviewed all the new and the old experiments. The only possible mechanisms were molecular transport and radiation, and we had just demolished both of them. This was extremely unsettling." (Heller, 1983, p.211).
"I came across a group of woodcut prints of dozens and dozens of clerics, each holding the Shroud. (Small wonder that there was such a melange of fibrils on it.) As we burrowed further, we found that at least sixty artists - Van Dyke and Rubens among them - had painted the Shroud from `life.' We already knew the proclivity of viewers of the Shroud to touch something to the cloth. It was a safe bet that some of these artists had placed their finished work on the Shroud. An artist painting in the same room as the Shroud would be enough to explain such microscopic `accidentals' as a speck of vermilion from a palette or brush. ... If we added this spatter factor to the fact that many artists touched their finished product to the Shroud, the finding of such accidentals is not only logical, but virtually mandatory." (Heller, 1983, p.212).
"We began our presentation. One by one, we gave our short talks with slides, graphs, spectra, and tried to make them intelligible to the nonscientist. Everything that had been done was included, from mathematical models, VP-8 and physical experiments, to pathology. ... We all wanted to be very careful that we did not overstate anything. We were extremely cautious to make no statement of any kind that could not be supported by the data. Bit by bit, the complex story involving optics, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine unfolded. Most of the questions were excellent. Adler was asked how he could answer McCrone's claim that there was no blood, but merely a mixture of red ocher and vermilion. Adler flashed on the screen the following table from our paper. Table 5 Tests confirming the presence of whole blood on the Shroud 1. High iron in blood areas by X-ray fluorescence 2. Indicative reflection spectra 3. Indicative microspectrophotometric transmission spectra 4. Chemical generation of characteristic porphyrin fluorescence 5. Positive hemochromogen tests 6. Positive cyanomethemoglobin tests 7. Positive detection of bile pigments 8. Positive demonstration of protein 9. Positive indication of albumin 10. Protease tests, leaving no residue 11. Positive immunological test for human albumin 12. Microscopic appearance as compared with appropriate controls 13. Forensic judgment of the appearance of the various wound and blood marks Then, after explaining each item briefly, Al said, `That means that the red stuff on the Shroud is emphatically, and without any reservation, nothing else but B-L-O-O-D!'" (Heller, 1983, pp.215-216. Emphasis original).
"Many people in the audience and in the press asked, in more ways than I thought were possible, whether the scientific evidence indicated that the Shroud was the authentic burial cloth of Jesus. We thought we had answered this question as many times as it was asked. Finally, Ray Rogers took the floor. `In science, you're entitled to any hypothesis you choose, including the one that the Shroud was made by elves from the Black Forest. But if you don't have a test to examine that hypothesis, it's not worth anything. We do not have a test for Jesus Christ. So we can't hypothesize or test for that question.' It did not work. The question still came, over and over: `But do you think it is authentic?' We would reply, `That's not a scientific question. We're here to present the scientific findings. We can't answer that question. ... At that point, one of the real people asked, `Have you found anything that would preclude the Shroud's being authentic?' `No.' And that question is not a trivial one. Nothing in all the findings of the Shroud crowd in three years contained a single datum that contravened the Gospel accounts. The stigmata on the body did not follow art or legend. They were of life. They were medically accurate evidence of a man who had been scourged with a flagrum-type device, both front and back, by two men; who had carried something rough and heavy across his shoulders, which had been bruised; who had had something placed on his head that had caused punctate bleeding wounds over the scalp and forehead; who had lesions on nose and knee commensurate with a fall; who had been beaten about the face; who had been crucified in the anatomically correct loci, the wrists; whose blood running down the arms had drips responding to gravity at the correct angles for the position of the arms in a crucifixion; whose legs appeared unbroken; who had an ellipsoid lesion in the side, whence cells and serum had come, and, lying on the cloth, had post-mortem blood dribbling out of the wound and puddling along the small of the back; whose lacerating scourge marks were deep enough to be bloody, with serum albumin oozing at the margins; whose feet had been transfixed with a spike and bled; and on the soles of whose feet there was dirt. All in all, it is a startling medical documentary of what was described so briefly in the Gospels. Nor was there anything else on the Shroud that would negate the actual presence of a scourged, crucified man lying in that linen." (Heller, 1983, pp.216-217. Emphasis original).
"Then, of course, there came the other question that we had been wrestling with for nine months: `How did the images get on the cloth?' We answered by discussing all the possibilities we had been able to conjure up: And then we explained that we had had to reject all of them, one by one. `Where,' we were asked, `does that leave you?' `We just do not know!' And that is the nub of it. No member of the team had worked in a vacuum. When confronted with a problem, he would discuss it with other colleagues at his own or other institutions. Each of the forty STURP members must have consulted at least ten other investigators who were not part of the Shroud team. Thus, at least four hundred scientists had added their input. In addition, all of us had given lectures before meetings of Sigma Xi, the scientific society to which most research scientists belong, at chapter meetings of the American Chemical Society, at universities across the country and their alumni groups, such as MIT's, at meetings of other scientific societies - from physical engineering to the medical sciences. From all of these we had received contributions of knowledge and suggestions. But on the subject of how the body images got on the Shroud, every suggestion had been invalidated by the data. The Shroud remains, as it has over the centuries, a mystery." (Heller, 1983, p.218).
"So where does all this huge amount of science leave us? The Shroud of Turin is now the most intensively studied artifact in the history of the world. Somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000 scientific man-hours have been spent on it, with the best analytical tools available. The physical and chemical data fit hand in glove. It is certainly true that if a similar number of data had been found in the funerary linen attributed to Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, or Socrates, there would be no doubt in anyone's mind that it was, indeed, the shroud of that historical person. But because of the unique position that Jesus holds, such evidence is not enough." (Heller, 1983, p.219).
"The images are the result of dehydrative acid oxidation of the linen. The blood is human blood. How the images got on the cloth is a mystery. We would love to have the answer to this mystery, to explain the science of it. If it turns out that some form of molecular transport we have not been able to fathom is the method whereby the images of the scourged, crucified man were transferred to the linen, we shall have solved only another little micropart of the puzzle. We do know, however, that there are thousands on thousands of pieces of funerary linen going back to millennia before Christ, and another huge number of linens of Coptic Christian burials. On none of these is there any image of any kind. A few have some blood and stains on them, but no image. The Shroud bears the images of a man who has had incredible, violent damage done to his body, yet whose face is filled with serenity and peace. It is an extracanonical witness to what happened to Jesus Christ, whether the man in the Shroud was Jesus or not." (Heller, 1983, p.220).