The Shroud of Caiaphas
   -- a story of Maillard Reactions and Melanoidins

Though scholars may debate how significant a role he played in the death of Jesus or how accurate are the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ trial for blasphemy, his name will forever be part of the story of Jesus’ arrest, trial and crucifixion. There can be no dispute that Joseph Caiaphas was the high priest in Jerusalem and head of the Temple high court, the Sanhedrin, when Jesus was executed. After Jesus’ death, Caiaphas would go on to persecute many in the early Jerusalem Church before being dismissed from his post in 37 CE, by Lucius Vitellius, the Roman governor of Syria under Tiberius.

Though no longer the high priest, Caiaphas was still a man of privilege. He had married into the powerful high-priestly family of Annas and he was undoubtedly a man of means. He certainly was among the Jerusalem elite who, when he died, would be buried in one of tombs carved into the limestone outcroppings on the outskirts of Jerusalem. As was the Jewish custom then, his family would plan to return to his tomb, perhaps in a year or two, after his flesh had rotted away, to gather his bones and place them in a bone box. The 1990 discovery of his ossuary with the Aramaic inscription, Yehosef bar Kayafa' tells us they did return for his second burial.  

Many people are familiar with second burial, particularly since the discovery of Caiaphas’ ossuary (pictured) and the recent announcement that an ossuary had been found with the authenticity-disputed Aramaic inscription: Ya'akov bar-Yosef akhui diYeshua, “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus.” But few people are familiar with a chemical process that certainly took place in the tombs in and about the Jerusalem of the late-second temple era. An understanding of the process could profoundly affect our thinking in the ongoing quest for the historical Jesus and our understanding of the early church. It is the stuff of modern crime scene investigation forensic science applied to history.  

Unknown to anyone then, something quite sensational happened in the minutes and hours after a great sealing stone was moved in front of the entranceway to Caiaphas’ sepulcher. What happened, happened silently, in the dark solitude and stillness of his tomb. There were no witnesses. But a modern day chemist can reconstruct what happened.  

Slowly, two ghostlike, bleary images began to take form on Caiaphas’ fine linen burial wrapping, his shroud. Had there been light in the tomb and had someone been able to bear the stench of the amine vapors of cadaverine and putrescine, he might have been able to pull back Caiaphas’ shroud and witness the slowly forming straw-yellow images. Then again, the witness might have seen nothing even though ‘images’ were forming. Because of temperature or humidity or any number of other reasons, the images might still have been invisible to the human eye. They might only have been latent images, like the images on camera film before the film is developed; images that are there but not seeable.

No darkroom chemicals would be needed to develop these images of Caiaphas; one of the front of his body and face on which the cloth rested and one of his back laying on the other half of his shroud. The images, if not already so, would eventually be straw-yellow and quite discernable. All that was needed was time; time for a seemingly magical process to run its course.

No modern chemist would call the process magical. No, it’s a Maillard reaction, a complex chemical process that produces caramel-like products or Melanoidins. This image forming process probably happened frequently in the limestone tombs outside the walls of ancient Jerusalem tombs. Heavy volatile amine molecules came forth from the body and reacted with a mixture of glycoside sugars and starch fractions that coated the outermost fibers of linen burial cloths in those days in that part of the world.

We can be confident that residues of starch and saccharides were there on the cloths. Thanks to the great Roman encyclopedist, Gaius Plinius Secundus, the man we know as Pliny the Elder (23-77 CE) we understand how linen was made in the first century. After hand spinning the fibers of the flax plant into yarn, individual hanks of yarn were bleached and dried. When it was time to weave the yarn (thread) into cloth, warp threads were strung vertically on a loom so that weft threads could be passed over and under them. On the loom, the warp threads were lubricated with crude starch to make weaving easier. Doing so reduced friction and lessened the chance of fraying. When a length of linen cloth was finished it was removed from the loom and washed in the suds of the Soapwort plant (Saponaria officinalis). After washing out most of the starch, the linen was laid out across bushes or hung to dry.

Where Pliny leaves off, the modern chemist picks up. Washing, even with repeated rinsing, is not perfect. Soapy residues and small amounts of starch would remain in a water soaked cloth. As the cloth dried, moisture would wick its way to the surface to evaporate into the air. As the water made its way to the surface it carried with it dissolved starch fractions and saccharides: glucose, fucose, galactose, arabinose, xylose, rhamnose, and glucuronic acid. As the water evaporated into the air these chemicals were deposited as a superthin coating on the crown fibers, the very outermost fibers of the thread. Chemists say this superficial residue of reactive saccharides is at the evaporation surface of the cloth.

Thus linen cloth made in this ancient way, with the yarn bleached before weaving, lubricated with crude starch and washed in Saponaria officinalis is ready for image formation. All that is needed are the right reactive chemicals and a mechanism to get the right quantity of the chemicals to the cloth’s surface in the right places at the right time. The amines that come from a dead body before it decomposes are just what is needed.

Many things would affect how the images would form as the amines met the saccharides: ambient temperatures and humidity in the tomb; the body chemistry of the corpse influenced by diet, disease and possible trauma; the application of different burial spices; and the quantity of residue and evenness of its coating on the cloth. Even the tightness of the weave that affects porosity is a factor. Nonetheless some imaging would take place. The process would continue until the reactants were exhausted or until fluidic bodily decomposition products formed and ravaged the images and the cloth. Soon the cloth would rot away along with the body. So when Caiaphas’ family returned to gather his bones into an ossuary, there would have been no flesh, no cloth and no images.  

However, at the right moment, had the cloth and the body it enshrouded become separated, and had the tomb been opened then so that cloth might be preserved, we might very well have something of a picture of Caiaphas today. But that didn’t happen.  

But was there once an exception when by some means a burial shroud and a dead body were separated? Was there an exception when a tomb was open so that the cloth might be taken from it and preserved? Is that cloth the Shroud of Turin? As we will see, from a chemist’s perspective, the answer must be an almost certain yes. But it is a chaotic, untidy yes.  

It is important to note that linen cloth, as typically produced after the twelfth century and into our era, will not produce amine/saccharides images. In Pliny’s time, each hank of yarn or thread for the cloth was bleached before weaving. Such bleaching did not result in uniformly white yarn and because many hanks of yarn were required to make linen cloth, the cloth was not uniformly white. We see this, for instance, in the Turin Shroud. It has a broad variegated appearance where yarn from one hank was joined with yarn from another batch during weaving. The yarn ends were laid side by side pressed together. The overlapping ends are often visible to the unaided eye and correspond to streaks of different off-white color in the weave. One place this is particularly noticeable is in the face image where darker bands of cloth affect the way we see the image. The darker bands, because of their location at the edge of the face, make the face look gaunter than it really is. Bleaching after weaving, as was done in the medieval bleaching fields of Europe and as it is done in modern mills, prevents a reactive coating. Bleaching after weaving makes for better quality linen but it does not allow an image to form. 

It is also especially important to note that there will be two such chemical coatings on the cloth. The side of the cloth that faced the sun and dried the fastest will have a dominant coating of starch fractions and saccharides from the soap. The other side will have a lesser coating. Both sides will react to the amines since some of the vapors will diffuse through the cloth. Indeed, we should have a more distinct image on one side of the cloth and a less distinct image on the other side. That is the significance of the discovery of a second facial image on the Shroud as recently reported in the peer-reviewed scientific Journal of Optics of the Institute of Physics in London (April 14, 2004).

From spectral analysis, microscopy and image analysis, we see that this is how the cloth of the Shroud of Turin was manufactured. From this, and from a modern knowledge of pathology and chemistry, we can hypothesize that this was how the images were formed on it.  

Modern chemistry actually lets us examine the images on the Shroud of Turin, which may be our only known surviving burial shroud with chemical images. On the Turin cloth, they are formed of conjugated, complex carbon-carbon double bonds within a carbohydrate layer of starch fractions and expected saccharides. In many places this layer is clear. It is only in some places that complex carbon structures have formed; structures that absorb the right spectrums of the colors of light so they appear straw-yellow. Spectra analysis confirms this. Microchemical tests with iodine also detected the presence of starch impurities on the surfaces of linen fibers from the Shroud. The impurity layer can be seen by phase-contrast microscopy. And with a scanning electron microscope the fine crystalline structure of the coating can be discerned. The image resists normal bleaching by chemicals or by sunlight, as is expected. But it can be reduced with diimide, also as expected. The images are not paint, stain, dye or any form of pigment applied to the cloth by hand or mechanical means. They are a pattern of melanoidins, the same chemical products that give beer its color, toasted bread its brown, and bodies their tan from sunless tanning lotions.

The layer in which the color resides is as thin as the transparent scratchproof coating on eyeglasses. It is as thin in places as180 nanometers and as thick in other places as 600 nanometers, and it coats only the extreme outermost fibers. By comparison, the average diameter of a linen fiber is 15,000 nanometers. The average human hair is 100,000 nanometers thick.  

We can imagine that such a natural process occurred on thousands of shrouds of thousands of the wealthy and privileged Jews. From excavations, we know that men and women and children were buried this way. In a rare exception, where groundwater had created a sealed environment conducive to some degree of preservation in a tomb, a carbonized shroud has been found in the Hinnon Valley. And other, non-Jewish, Nabatean burials shrouds made from linen, wool and leather have been found giving evidence that such burial cloths were common in the region among Semitic peoples.  

But there are many unsolved puzzles. How is it that such near perfect images formed? It is as though the very molecules of amine vapors ignored Graham’s Law of Diffusion and the contours of the cloth draped across a body. And how is it that the chemical reaction ran just long enough to produce a discernible image yet stopped soon enough to avoid washout or over-saturation? In the parlance of photography we have, surprisingly, a well focused image that is not underexposed or overexposed.  

It is these near perfect images—photorealistic may be the right term here—that convinces so many that the images are the work of an artist or crafter of fake relics. And that is understandable until one recognizes that the images we actually see, and perhaps marvel at, are the product of modern technology. The images on the Shroud itself are in a sense latent. It is only when we photograph the Shroud and look at a negative that we see a positive image. The color of the image on the Shroud is so pale, so confined to a narrow range of color between white and not-so-white, that we must enhance the contrast. It is unfathomable to think that someone, before the advent of modern technology, reverse-engineered clear images so as to make them not recognizable. Why so? Indeed, how so? How were the images formed within a super thin carbohydrate layer of starch and sugar, as thin as the wall of a soap bubble?  

We should not think that we have the answer – not yet. What we have is a new starting point for further thinking. Modern day revisionists who wonder if Jesus was buried in a tomb, must ask if the Shroud is possible evidence that he certainly was; that he was buried with the intention that family or friends or maybe his followers would someday return to rebury his remains in an ossuary? Were those plans interrupted, the Shroud separated from the body, and tomb somehow open, so that the cloth might be preserved?

Those who place great stock in the literalism of John’s Gospel might ask what it was that the Beloved Disciple saw. Did he see an image on the cloth? No amount of exegetal analysis, no amount of struggling with the ancient Greek and no plausible redaction theory for the “saw and believed” account has provided an answer.

Those who struggle to find the stories within the stories might ponder what it was that the disciple Thomas saw in the upper room? And we might ask anew, where these lines of poetry came from; buried in the "Hymn of the Pearl" (also known as the Hymn of the Soul and perhaps as old as the first half of the first century), itself imbedded within the apocryphal Acts of Thomas:   

But all in the moment I faced it / This robe seemed to me like a mirror,
And in it I saw my whole self / Moreover I faced myself facing into it.
For we were two together divided / Yet in one we stood in one likeness. 

Like a mirror . . .  my whole self . . . faced myself facing into it . . . we were two together divided . . . stood in one likeness; these are words that resonate with the two head-to-head images seemingly reflected on the Shroud.

From the facts of the image chemistry and from the mystery of how these images (after being photographed) are so photorealistic we must probe, more and more, seeking to better understand what we may suspect: Something very unusual happened in the making of those images.

Consulted and Considered:

Rogers, Raymond N. and Anna Arnoldi, "The Shroud of Turin: An Amino-Carbonyl Reaction (Maillard Reaction) May Explain the Image Formation," Melanoidins, a journal of the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities (Ames J.M. ed, Volume 4): pp 106-113. {a peer reviewed scientific journal} Raymond Rogers, a chemist, is a Fellow of the University of California, Los Alamos National Laboratory and a charter member of the Coalition for Excellence in Science Education. He had published many papers in scientific peer-reviewed journals. In 1978 he, with several other scientists, personally examined the Shroud of Turin in Italy for several days and collected numerous samples of fibers and particle materials for further study. He continues to do so. Anna Arnoldi is a professor at the University of Milan.

Fanti, Giulio and Roberto Maggiolo, "The Double Superficiality of the Frontal Image of the Turin Shroud," Journal of Optics: Pure and Applied Optics, a journal of the Institute of Physics. (April 2004). {a peer reviewed scientific journal}

Trivedi, Bijal P., "Jesus' Shroud? Recent Findings Renew Authenticity Debate," National Geographic News Release, April 9, 2004.

Rogers, Raymond N., "Pyrolysis/Mass Spectrometry Applied to the Shroud of Turin" in the scientific archives of shroud.com. 

Rogers, Raymond N. and Anna Arnoldi, Scientific Method Applied to the Shroud of Turin: A Review  in the scientific archives of shroud.com. 

Consider these topics: 

• The Mozarabic Rite
• The Sudarium of Oviedo
• The Hungarian Pray Manuscript
• Pictures of Jesus and the Shroud
• Pixels, Negativity and 3D
• Travertine Aragonite on the Shroud
• Pollen and Floral Images

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Home Page & Introduction: The Shroud of Turin Story - A Guide to the Facts 2005
 

© 2004 Daniel R. Porter, Bronxville, New York