The Second Face on the Turin Shroud

The Turin Shroud is the most famous relic in the world. Millions believe that it is the burial cloth of Jesus Christ bearing his crucified and bloodied image.

The cloth is kept at Turin in Italy. The cloth is an enigma. Many say it is a miracle.
 
The face part is suspiciously clearest! Whoever produced it knew what people wanted to see the most! They wanted to see what Jesus looked like!
 
In 2004, it was found that there is another face on the Shroud. It is on the other side of the existing face as if something had seeped through to the back of the cloth. The view that something did seep back is rejected for like the existing face it just sits on the top fibres and doesn’t penetrate. The new face can be barely seen. It is nothing like as plain as the face on the front.
 
We must ask why just the face?
 
Again it shows the maker of the cloth was most interested in the face and worked harder with it. This suggests intentional creation.
 
Is this new face different from the front one?
 
Incredibly enough it is! Professor Giulio Fanti of Padua University in Italy thought he saw the face in 2002 during restoration work on the shroud. The new face was confirmed in 2004. The nostrils are shown on the second face but only one is plain on the first.
 
Fanti said, "Though the image is very faint, features such as nose, eyes, hair, beard and moustaches are clearly visible. There are some slight differences with the known face. For example, the nose on the reverse side shows the same extension of both nostrils, unlike the front side, in which the right nostril is less evident."
 
The researchers deny that the cloth is a miracle. They say the image has chemical properties. The idea that the image was not touched to a body but made using body substances seems to have eluded them. For example, maybe the shroud was printed using a bas relief and body fluids? The only theory necessary is that a heated bas relief was used. But if body fluids were used, it is not that surprising. After all the cloth was supposed to contain emissions from the body of Christ. This method of making the cloth might have resulted in strange chemical changes and we all know there are strange chemical changes that have taken place on the cloth.
 
Compare the two negative images – the negative is the clearest.
 
 
 
You will see that the bloodstain on the forehead in both that is shaped like a 3 is clear.

Yet it sits on top of the cloth on each side.  It did not seep through!

Surely that is a clear sign of forgery. This indicates trickery and some say it is strange but it is not.  It should have seeped through. Why did that stain show on the other side when the bloodstained beard is so faint on the second face and so clear in the first? It makes no sense. The hair with the blood on it is actually plainer on the second face than anything else indicating that the hair image was put on by a separate process. It was put on separately ergo the cloth is a forgery.

Hairline corresponds. This is particularly noticeable on the left side of the faces (your left).

Eyebrows curve visibly in the second image. In first image, the eyebrow on left side of face is higher than eyebrow on the right and the other eyebrow doesn’t appear at all.

Right side of face is darker in the second image. The darker region extends downward from the hairline, along the nose on the left, to the top of the moustache. Correspondingly the left side of the face is lighter. In the first image this darkening doesn’t show up at all. The 3 mark appearing in it and other bloodier areas not appearing is suspicious.

In the first image (it’s a negative too), a dark cross-like shape is visible midway horizontally and about two-thirds of the way down from the top. This cross corresponds exactly with the tip of the nose in the front side image where it is absent. The early Christian symbol was the fish not the cross and a cross points to forgery.

The bright spot in the middle of the backside image (filtered out in figure 5 above), corresponds with an apparent protrusion on the nose just below eye level.

In the first image the crease that passed through the beard is barely visible on the bottom edge. In the front image a forked beard that starts just above the crease is very evident. There is some indication of the fork in the backside image exactly where it is expected.

The differences in the two faces indicate that the shroud is a fake. Whatever technique was used to make the Shroud, even if unexplainable, was not a miracle.

Conclusion
 
The Shroud man is not the real Jesus Christ.  Here is quote from an excellent book that sums up what we are saying,

In 2004 Fanti and Maggiolo reported in Journal of Optics A that they were able to find a faint image on the other side of the Shroud. This side was not seen for a long time because the Shroud had a cloth backing stitched to it. This backing was removed only in 2002 when there was an effort to remove all additions so as to restore the original Shroud. They reported that this ‘second’ image was different from the main image and that they were not compliments of each other as would be expected. What is more, while the main image is 1.95 meters long, the image at the back is 2.02 meters long. This conflict has not been solved yet. A single body will not, obviously, create two images of two different heights.

From: The Shroud of Turin!! Is it Genuine or is it a Forgery? Dr Johnson C Philip, Dr Saneesh Cherian, Edited by Gregory Anderson. Creative Commons. Copyright Philip Communication. First Edition 2014.

APPENDIX

The Second Face on the Shroud of Turin

Shows a phase-contrast photomicrograph of a fiber and its image bearing coating and says the coating is composed of starch fractions and saccharides.

The Shroud of Turin images may not the direct result of a miracle, at least not in a traditional sense of the word. But they are not manmade either. These seem to be the contradictory conclusions from an article in the peer-reviewed, scientific Journal of Optics (April 14, 2004) of the Institute of Physics in London. Giulio Fanti and Roberto Maggiolo, researchers at the University of Padua, Italy, discovered a faint image of a second face on the back of the Shroud of Turin.

This supports a hypothesis that the Shroud of Turin's images are the result of a very natural, complex chemical reaction between amines (ammonia derivatives) emerging from a body and saccharides within a carbohydrate residue that covers the fibers of the Shroud of Turin. The color producing chemical process is called a Maillard reaction. This is fully discussed in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, Melanoidins, a journal of the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities (EU, Volume 4, 2003).

The proposal, by chemist Raymond E. Rogers, a Science Fellow of the Los Alamos Laboratory, and Anna Arnoldi of the University of Milan, is hypothetical. But the chemical and physical nature of the Shroud of Turin's images is pure scientific fact.

Imagine slicing a human hair lengthwise, from end to end, into 100 long thin slices; each slice one-tenth the width of a single red blood cell. The images on the Shroud of Turin, at their thickest, are this thin. In selective places, an otherwise clear layer of starch fractions and saccharides, a mere 200 to 600 nanometers thick, as thin as the wall of a soap bubble, has undergone a chemical change into a caramel colored substance. Spectral and chemical analysis reveal that the chromophores of the Shroud of Turin's images are complex, conjugated carbon bonds.

PRESS RELEASE - Friday, March 11, 2005

New Analysis Confirms Second Face on Shroud of Turin and Raises Questions About Other Images

NEW YORK, March 11, 2005 -- Skeptics and people who believe the Shroud of Turin is the genuine burial shroud of Jesus have always shared one common perception: they thought they knew what the man on the shroud looked like. Now, new computerized image analysis suggests they may be wrong.

Results of this analysis suggest that many characteristics of the images on the shroud are optical illusions caused by random plaid patterns in the cloth. For instance, because of these patterns, the face of the man on the shroud appears gaunt and the nose abnormally long and narrow. By using image enhancement technology to reduce the effect of the variegated patterns, the shape of the face changes significantly. The face takes on a broader look and the nose becomes realistic looking.

Shroud researchers have discovered that these patterns are caused by alternating bands of darker and lighter threads in the cloth. Ancient linen was often manufactured by bleaching the thread in batches before weaving, thus producing nonuniform whiteness in the cloth.
The Second Face

The plaid patterns are also cloaking details. Last year, two researchers, Giulio Fanti and Roberto Maggiolo of the University of Padua in Italy, reported finding a faint second face on the backside of the cloth. They published their findings in the peer reviewed scientific Journal of Optics (April 14, 2004). Though the facial image was confirmed scientifically, it was not easy to see. However, by filtering out the plaid background with software developed by Robert Doumax, an expert in computerized image analysis, the second face becomes visible.

The second face was an important find because it virtually eliminates artistic methods while giving credence to a hypothesis that a natural amino/carbonyl chemical reaction formed the images. (See: Why No One Can Fully Explain the Pictures on the Shroud of Turin )

The Shroud of Turin is a fourteen-foot long cloth with front and back images of a man who appears to have been scourged and crucified. The shroud is stored in St. John the Baptist Cathedral in Turin, Italy.

Since the mid-1970s, the shroud has been the subject of many scientific investigations. In 1978 a team of researchers found that the images were not painted and the bloodstains were genuine. Scientists also showed that pollen and limestone dust on the cloth may be from the region around Jerusalem. However, in 1988, carbon 14 dating of a sample cut from a corner of the shroud indicated that the material originated between 1260 and 1390.

Undaunted by the carbon 14 results, scientists continued to try to explain how the images were formed. The images consist of caramel-like substances thinner than most bacteria. Historians pieced together records that suggested the shroud was the famed fourth century, or earlier, Cloth of Edessa that disappeared from Constantinople when the city was sacked in 1204. Researchers M. Sue Benford and Joseph Marino, working with several textile experts, determined that the Shroud had been expertly rewoven in the precise location from which the carbon 14 sample was taken.

We still don’t know how the images were formed. But we are well past thinking the shroud was painted or that it is a medieval fake-relic. Chemistry proves that. We can make a good case that it is a burial shroud of a crucifixion victim. With some historical reasoning we can infer that it might have been used by Jesus.

Earlier this year, chemist Raymond Rogers, a Los Alamos National Laboratory chemist, showed that the sample used for carbon 14 dating was indeed from discrete reweaving of the cloth. By examining remaining material from the carbon 14 sample, he proved that what was tested was chemically unlike the rest of the shroud. Rogers found splices and dyestuff used to make the reweaving discrete. He also found chemical evidence that the cloth was at least twice as old as the carbon 14 dating had suggested. He published his findings in the peer reviewed scientific journal Thermochimica Acta (Jan 21, 2005, Volume 425 Issue 1-2). John L. Brown, a retired Georgia Institute of Technology scientist, independently confirmed many of Rogers’ findings.

Casually accepting what we think we see on the shroud is one of the greatest pitfalls in shroud research. People see all sorts of things like teeth or skeletal features that may simply be different patterns in the thread.

Not seeing things is a problem as well. It took chemical and microscopic analysis to reveal the discrete patch that was used for carbon 14 dating. It took advanced image analysis to find the second face on the backside of the cloth.

Notice in particular:
1. Hairline corresponds. This is particularly noticeable on the left side of the face (your left).

2. Eyebrows curve visibly. Eyebrow on left side of face is higher than eyebrow on the right.

3. Right side of face is darker. The darker region extends downward from the hairline, along the nose on the left, to the top of the mustache. Correspondingly the left side of the face is lighter.

4. In the blue backside image, a bright cross-like shape is visible midway horizontally and about two-thirds of the way down from the top. This cross corresponds exactly with the tip of the nose in the front side image.

5. The bright spot in the middle of the backside image (filtered out in figure 5 above), corresponds with an apparent protrusion on the nose just below eye level.

6. In the backside image the crease that passed through the beard is barely visible on the bottom edge. In the front image a forked beard that starts just above the crease is very evident. There is some indication of the fork in the backside image exactly where it is expected.