imageStephen Jones doesn’t pull his punches in what is now Part 6 of his marvelous [C]ritique of Charles Freeman’s "The Turin Shroud and the Image of Edessa: A Misguided Journey,"

So, as previously observed, either Freeman has not read Wilson’s book thoroughly (which would be scholarly incompetence) or he has read the above, but is concealing it from his readers (which would be scholarly dishonesty).

And what was it that was above? This:

"For westerners, the most familiar example of the genre will probably be the famous Veronica cloth. This is popularly associated with the story of a woman called Veronica wiping Jesus’s face with her veil as he struggled with his cross through Jerusalem’s streets on his way to be crucified. According to the story, Jesus’s ‘Likeness’ became miraculously imprinted on Veronica’s veil. Dozens of medieval and Renaissance artists depicted the scene, and thousands of Roman Catholic churches have it included among their ‘Stations of the Cross’, leading many to suppose the story must be in the gospels … In fact the story in this form dates no earlier than the late Middle Ages, seeming to have been invented to spice up ‘miracle play’ dramatizations of the Passion story. In a twelfth-century version" there was no woman called Veronica, though at that time the canons of St Peter’s, Rome were already keeping under close guard a cloth that was supposed to be the Vera Icon or ‘True Likeness’ of Jesus. Reputedly this likeness was imprinted not during Jesus’s carrying of the cross but when he wiped his face after the ‘bloody sweat’ in the Garden of Gethsemane. A popular attraction for pilgrimages to Rome during the Middle Ages, this cloth can be traced historically no earlier than the eleventh century. It seems to have been an official ‘copy’ for the western world of something that was altogether older and more mysterious being preserved at that time in the Byzantine east, in Constantinople." (Wilson, 2010, pp.110-111).

And, part 7 is promised. This may turn into a book of sorts.