Online Anonymous Discussion

S&V - Page 113
Several doctors carried out the medico-surgical and biological analysis of the shroud. They listed several wounds bloody or seeming such. They are mainly located on the right part of the face, which seems swollen. The nose appears fractured. Flows of blood, supposed to come from the pricks of the crown thorns, are visible on the face and the scalp.

The lesions of the body evoke flogging. The number of listed impacts is 100 to 120. Some light abrasions extend on a surface from 9 cm to 10 cm on the possible area of friction produced by the angle between the stipes (the vertical axis of the cross) and the patibulum (its horizontal axis). The knees are skinned...

According to Dr. Veronique di Costanzo-Etienne of the hospital of Toulon (France), the characteristics of all these lesions correspond with anatomical requirements and are difficult to forge without medical knowledge.

Such is not the opinion of Pr Claude Got, anatomo-pathologist and expert of the National Road Safety Council, for which this analysis is a mixture of description and interpretation. For him, the thought process is not restricted to describe the totality of the visible facts. It is connected with a search for explanation which tries, consciously or not to stick a posteriori to the passion of Christ. « The inaccuracy of the contour of these imprints does not enable me to advance a physio-pathological interpretation. Nothing in their form and their color says to me that these spots are of biological nature ». he concludes.

VSD - Page 25
...to look at there more closely, two things are particularly obvious :

. The image is so clear that one can see all the medical traces of the tortures practised by the Romans such as they are known by historians, quoted by the Gospels and reconstituted in the film of Mel Gibson, « the Passion of Christ ». Nothing misses, from the marks left by the very particular whip used then till the blow of lance intended to kill the condemned man, and the wounds in the face due to the crown of thorns. At the level of the shoulder and the knee are even contusions ascribable to the carrying of the cross and the falls on the way of the Calvary.

. The image shows that the wounds caused by the nails at the time of the crucifixion are on the wrists. However, the surgeon Peter Barbet discovered that, technically, it was obligatorily necessary to handle it thus. To insert the nails in the palm of the hands would have caused a tearing and the body of the tortured man would not have remained on the cross. In the Middle Ages, however, one believed that the nails were hammered in the middle of the hand, since thus Christ dying was always represented.

What have the partisans of the forgery got to say in reply ? Nothing much to our knowledge, and for a good reason, although they defend the idea of a very skilful counterfeit. Some of them went until advancing that, about 1350, somebody could have tortured a corpse of suitable size before wrapping him in a shroud. Really they go too far, since this sadist should have completely known the methods of the Roman torturers and known, with five centuries in advance, that the invention of photography would have as a consequence the revelation of his morbid « work ».