| "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.
"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 ultra-violet, not white light, he had to paint
with an invisible medium."
Dr. Heller continues:
"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 on that linen."
Dr. Heller further states:
"We do know, however, that there are thousands of pieces of
funerary linen going back to millenia 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 image of a man who has had incredible,
violent damage done to his body, yet whose face is filled with serenity and peace."
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