Rosa Rubicondior: Fake of Turin - More Evidence that the 'Shroud' of Turin Was a Medieval Creation

3D analysis reveals Shroud of Turin image likely came from sculpture, not Jesus’ body | Archaeology News Online Magazine

The 'shroud' as displayed in Turin Cathedral

More evidence has emerged indicating that the so-called 'Shroud of Turin'—which legend claims was the cloth used to wrap the body of Jesus for burial—is in fact a medieval artefact, likely created for use in religious ceremonies.

As I noted in a 2013 blog post, the 2D image on the cloth could not have been produced by wrapping it around a 3D human body. This can be easily demonstrated using an artist’s mannequin: coat it in paint, and while the paint is still wet, wrap a cloth around it as if preparing a body for burial. The resulting imprint bears little resemblance to the facial features or body contours of the mannequin, because the 3D form cannot transfer accurately to a 2D surface in that way.

There are, of course, many other reasons to doubt the shroud's authenticity. For example, the biblical account is inconsistent with the notion of a single burial cloth. The Gospel of John (20:5–7) clearly describes two cloths—one for the body and another for the head. But this inconsistency pales into insignificance compared to the forensic evidence showing that the cloth was woven on a loom not invented until the early Middle Ages in southern Germany, using flax grown in medieval France.

Even after disregarding or dismissing this wealth of contradictory evidence, believers are still faced with the insurmountable task of proving that the body supposedly wrapped in the cloth was that of the legendary founder of Christianity—Jesus of Nazareth.

In fact, the shroud was denounced as a forgery as far back as 1390 by Bishop Pierre d’Arcis, who, in a letter to Pope Clement VII, wrote:

[The Shroud is] a clever sleight of hand [by someone] falsely declaring this was the actual shroud in which Jesus was enfolded in the tomb to attract the multitude so that money might cunningly be wrung from them.

Bishop Pierre d’Arcis, Bishop of Troyes, 1390.

A. Image obtained from wrapping cloth round a body. B. The image on the 'shroud'. C. The image obtained from relief sculptures.

Moraes, C. 2025.

Arguments for and against the Authenticity of the Turin 'Shroud': Arguments For the Authenticity of the Shroud

Image Characteristics
Proponents claim the faint, negative-like image of a man on the cloth cannot be replicated by known medieval techniques and shows features that allegedly reflect real crucifixion wounds.[1]
Pollen and Plant Traces
Some researchers argue that pollen grains and microscopic plant traces found on the shroud suggest it once resided in the Middle East.[2]
Bloodstains and Wounds
Supporters maintain that the bloodstains are anatomically consistent with crucifixion, including marks that could indicate a crown of thorns and a spear wound.[3]
Absence of Paint or Pigment (per earlier tests)
Some analyses claimed no pigments or dyes were used, suggesting the image was not painted.[4]
Supportive Carbon-14 Retesting Claims
A minority of researchers question the 1988 radiocarbon dating results (see below), arguing that the tested sample may have come from a patch added during medieval repairs.[5]

Arguments Against the Authenticity of the Shroud

Radiocarbon Dating (1988)
Multiple independent labs dated a sample of the cloth to AD 1260–1390, placing its origin squarely in the Middle Ages—well over a millennium after Jesus’s time.[6]
Textile and Weaving Analysis
The weave pattern (a herringbone twill) and loom technology were not in use in 1st-century Palestine but are consistent with 14th-century European textile practices.[7]
Anatomical and Artistic Inaccuracies
Modern analysis, including Cicero Moraes’s 3D modelling, shows that the body proportions and pose are inconsistent with human anatomy. The image appears stylised, not naturalistic.[8]
Biblical Inconsistency
The Gospel of John (20:5–7) refers to two separate cloths: one for the head and one for the body—not a single shroud.[9]
Historical Silence and Sudden Appearance
There is no record of the shroud before the mid-14th century, when it suddenly appeared in France. Even at the time, church authorities (e.g. Bishop Pierre d’Arcis) denounced it as a forgery.[10]
Documented Motive for Forgery
Bishop d’Arcis alleged the shroud was created to attract pilgrims and generate income—hardly unusual for relics in medieval Europe.[11]
Lack of Provenance
There is no verifiable chain of custody or documentation tracing the cloth back to the 1st century or to Jerusalem.[12]

Now, a modern scientific analysis by Brazilian digital graphics expert and 3D designer Cicero Moraes has confirmed what I stated back in 2013. His findings are presented in a paper published in the journal Archaeometry.

The researcher has shown that the image could have been produced by draping a cloth over a relief sculpture made of wood, stone of metal and painting the embossed area. Cicero Moraes explains that this would produce the smooth, flat image on the two-dimensional cloth, unlike the distorted image that would have been produced by wrapping the cloth round a body - an effect known as the 'Agamemnon' effect after the distorted image of Agamemnon used as a funerary mask at Mycenae, an ancient Greek archaeological site.

'The mask of Agamemnon'. A gold funerary mask recovered from a site at Mycenae, Greece. There is no evidence that it is Agamemnon.

Producing separate image for the front and the back of the figure would also explain the unrealistically small gap between the front and back of the head, where the 'artist' has failed to allow for the length from front to back of the human skull - about the same as the length of the face. In the image on the shroud, the figure appears to have had a zero-length skull - highly suggestive of two relief figures rather than a single body.

Comparison between 3D human model projection (right) and low-relief model (left), showing distortion differences.

Moraes, C. 2025.

Moraes's finding adds significant weight to the argument that the Shroud of Turin is not an authentic relic of Christ’s burial, but rather a skilfully executed medieval creation. By reconstructing the face depicted on the cloth using advanced 3D modelling techniques, Moraes demonstrated that the proportions, positioning, and symmetry of the facial image are anatomically implausible when compared with natural human anatomy. The image appears not to have been transferred from a three-dimensional body, as would be expected from a burial cloth, but rather created as a stylised representation of a face—flattened, elongated, and artificially aligned to produce a visually compelling result when viewed front-on.

This supports the idea that the image was crafted with artistic intent, rather than produced through physical contact with a corpse. Moraes’s work shows that the figure’s features match neither the distortions expected from a cloth wrapped around a body, nor the irregularities that would naturally arise from bodily decomposition or hasty burial practices, as described in biblical accounts. Instead, the image seems to have been carefully composed to evoke a sense of piety and reverence, aligning with the aesthetic conventions and devotional aims of medieval Christian art. These findings are consistent with other lines of evidence, such as the 14th-century radiocarbon dating, the cloth’s weave pattern (which matches medieval European textile production), and historical records indicating that the shroud first appeared in France around the 1350s—where it was immediately suspected of being a forgery by church authorities. Taken together, Moraes’s forensic study reinforces the growing scholarly consensus that the Shroud of Turin is best understood not as a relic of Christ, but as a product of medieval craftsmanship, likely designed to inspire devotion, attract pilgrims, and serve as a powerful visual aid in religious ceremonies.

ABSTRACT
This study investigates the origin of the image imprinted on the Shroud of Turin, a linen artifact displaying the frontal and dorsal figures of an adult man with marks of physical violence, using 3D digital simulations. Through free and open-source software, parametric modeling of a human body, fabric dynamics simulation, and contact area mapping were performed. Two scenarios were compared: the projection of a three-dimensional human model and that of a low-relief model. The results demonstrate that the contact pattern generated by the low-relief model is more compatible with the Shroud's image, showing less anatomical distortion and greater fidelity to the observed contours, while the projection of a 3D body results in a significantly distorted image. 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 medieval work of art.

Moraes, C. 2025.
Image Formation on the Holy Shroud—A Digital 3D Approach.
Archaeometry 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1111/arcm.70030.

© 2025 John Wiley & Sons Inc.
Reprinted under the terms of s60 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is also entirely consistent with the opinion of the Brish historian, Charles Freeman, who said:

It was common in medieval Europe, especially in southern Germany, for churches and cathedrals to put on plays depicting events from the Bible, the most important being the supposed discovery of the empty tomb, or Quem Queritis. This enacted the various accounts of this event and required several different versions including one with two Mary's, one with three Mary's and one with several women and Peter and 'the disciple whom Jesus loved' because of the several different and irreconcilable versions in the 'inerrant' Bible but they all tended to finish with one of the actors going into the tomb to get the shroud and holding it up to the astonished crowd who were led to believe they were witnessing an enactment of the real thing.

Some of these shrouds were decorated like the Turin Shroud for added authenticity and to give the crowd a view of what dead Jesus would have looked like having been scourged, crucified and stabbed with a sword. Lots of fresh-looking blood would have been essential.

The props used in this annual event would have been kept in the church's treasury and would have become venerated much like the depictions of Jesus and Mary which are still paraded through the streets in Catholic and Orthodox countries today still are.

It looks then like the real criminal who has been deceiving people for money for centuries, is not the skilful artist who created a picture to be used in passion plays - he or she is an anonymous as the craftsmen who built and decorated the Medieval cathedrals - but the Catholic Church which has been presenting his or her work as the genuine 1st century funerary shroud of Jesus, which miraculously appeared without history in Early Medieval France, while ignoring the inconvenient fact that the Gospel of John flatly contradicts them by describing two cloths, not one.

The 'shroud' is as authentic as the multiple foreskins of Jesus, the many thigh-bones of Mary together with gallons of her 'milk' and yards of her multicoloured hair and the myriad finger bones of polydactylous saints which fill the reliquaries of Europe's Catholic and Orthodox cathedrals.

Will the new Pope order the fraud to be taken down and apologise to the crowds who flock to the Cathedral of Turin to put their hard-earned cash into the bottomless coffers of a church which will spend it, not on relieving poverty or healing the sick, but on the aggrandisement of the church and its clerics?

No chance! Without these fake holy relics and phoney 'miracles' how else can the Catholic Church continue to hoover up the wealth of the third world?

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