Who+Is+The+Man+of+the+Shroud

The Man of the Shroud is clearly intended to be the historical Jesus Christ. This in fact in the center of the controversy about the Shroud. The image of the Man of the Shroud possesses a combination of wounds that narrow the field to a man who was:
 * Beaten
 * Scourged
 * Crowned with thorns
 * Nailed through the wrists and feet (i.e. was crucified)
 * Speared in the side with a lance

This combination of wounds is unlikely to have been historically duplicated since two of the wounds are relatively unique to the charges (that he was King of the Jews) and the time of the crucifixion (the day before the sabbath).

Thus it would appear that the primary alternatives are that the Shroud is the actual burial shroud of Jesus Christ or an artifact intended by its artificer to portray itself as the authentic burial shroud of Jesus Christ. In the latter case there are a series of problems that relate to the character of the image:


 * the image is a negative (i.e. it has properties similar to a photographic negative, this is both technically challenging for an artist regardless of method and not obviously motivate. Why would it have been done?)
 * the image possesses three dimensional characteristics which encode in the form of image density the cloth to body distance. This has been very well established by Jumper and Jackson.
 * the image is superficial, it occurs only on the surface fibers of the thread and then does not coat the whole thread but instead appears to only slightly color parts of the thread (see Mark Evans micrographs of image areas).
 * the shroud has only a single color within a few percent of color density, the appearances of changes in color density are due to their being more or less patches of color between places where the image is darker and lighter, i.e. the image behaves like a half-tone image in the newspaper except that the color elements are straw yellow and not black.
 * the shroud image is anatomically accurate beyond the draughtmanship abilities of any period at or prior to its appearance in Europe in Lirey. The image is simply too good for an artist of the time to have produced.

These image characteristics are no less problematical if the Shroud is the authentic burial shroud of Jesus Christ. Experiments in body wrapping using facsimile shrouds were conducted by Jackson and Jumper and the shroud image was found to be consistent with having been produced by some mechanism delivering a chromophore density that encoded cloth to body distance in a roughly inverse square coloration from the body to a cloth wrapping the body. The coloring mechanism is unknown and no hypothetical mechanism so far proposed has been shown to be able to duplicate the list of image characteristics above. The cause of the image is unknown.