Teddi, I hope you know I’m not picking on you for sport. I respond because, in much of what you write, I see reflections of my own thinking from the time when I strongly supported the Shroud’s authenticity. You make your case with clarity and conviction, and you’ve become a formidable and thoughtful voice in the conversation.

To everyone else, I recommend your paper, Beyond Imagination, and I recommend Hugh Farey’s careful analysis. Read them both (and the comments).

Teddi, in a recent comment you wrote:

My paper with many important highlights of evidence that goes towards proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth.
https://urfjournals.org/open-access/beyond-imagination-evidence-of-rigor-mortis-and-cadaveric-spasm-on-the-shroud-of-turin.pdf

I’ve taken the time to read your paper again, and I want to offer a respectful but candid response to that claim. The phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt” carries significant weight. It implies that all reasonable objections have been thoroughly addressed and resolved, leaving no serious alternative explanation. However, in your paper, many key issues remain unsettled.

I’m reminded of Michael Minor, a longtime Shroud researcher and author of A Lawyer Argues for the Authenticity of the Shroud of Turin. He served as host and master of ceremonies at the 2005 Shroud conference in Dallas, where he confidently asserted that he could prove the Shroud’s authenticity in a court of law. I don’t recall whether he used the phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt,” but I do remember him claiming that the preponderance of evidence would be enough to override the medieval dates established by radiocarbon testing.

As Yogi Berra might have said, it’s déjà vu all over again. Let’s see.

Perhaps the most enduring challenge is the 1988 radiocarbon dating of the Shroud. Three independent laboratories dated the cloth to the medieval period. Despite extensive efforts by authenticity proponents to disprove those results—suggesting contamination, invisible mending, radiation effects, or conspiracy theories—no accredited expert in radiocarbon science has endorsed these objections. The dating remains a cornerstone of the mainstream scientific view, and any claim that seeks to overcome it must engage directly and convincingly with that reality. Otherwise you are faced with reasonable doubt.

Your paper presumes that the Gospel accounts provide a forensically reliable record of Jesus’s burial. But the Gospels were written decades after the events they describe, and scholars recognize that their differences in detail, symbolism, and theological intent limit their reliability as historical documentation. Raymond E. Brown, the preeminent Catholic Johannine scholar, highlighted the ambiguity in the phrase “he saw and believed.” Did the disciple believe Jesus had risen, or simply believe Mary Magdalene’s report that the body was gone? This makes any effort to match the Shroud to the Gospel narratives—especially in support of a conclusion beyond reasonable doubt—particularly challenging.

In addition, there are alternative explanations for the Shroud that must be ruled out to reach anything approaching certainty. The possibility that it was a bier cloth (if the carbon dating is somehow proven incorrect), or that it captured the image of a crucified man in the medieval era, remains viable. So too do proposals suggesting the image was created by artistic or semi-natural processes, such as contact imaging, chemical reactions, or techniques like dry powder imprinting or intaglio printing. These theories have not been definitively eliminated. In fact, some have gained renewed respect in recent years, particularly as modern tests show such images can exhibit 3D (VP-8-like) properties. Thus, reasonable doubt.

I appreciate your emphasis on the forensic realism of the image, especially your interpretations of rigor mortis and cadaveric spasm. But even if such features are present, they don’t resolve the central questions of identity, origin, or image formation. As Hugh Farey has pointed out, interpreting faint image features as cadaveric signs is subjective and open to alternative readings. The appearance of realism does not eliminate the possibility of artistic intention or fabrication. Again, reasonable doubt.

There are also problems with how certain visual features are interpreted. The often-repeated claim that the Shroud is not a painting or rubbing because it lacks visible brushstrokes or directionality only rules out some forms of artistic creation. Known techniques such as dry powder daubing, bas-relief imprinting, or acid etching can produce images without those telltale signs. The absence of brushstrokes, then, is not conclusive. Reasonable doubt remains.

Likewise, the claim that the Shroud image encodes true three-dimensional information, unlike a photograph, has been repeatedly and credibly questioned. The VP-8 Image Analyzer can generate a visually striking relief map from a photograph of the Shroud. But modern experiments show that many ordinary images with smooth tonal gradients—including drawings, death masks, and even coins—can produce similar results in the VP-8, and even better ones using modern 3D modeling software.

Crucially, the VP-8 does not detect actual spatial data—it interprets brightness as elevation. If shading in an image happens to resemble depth, the device produces a 3D-looking result. This doesn’t mean the image itself contains encoded spatial information. In fact, the VP-8 performs poorly on high-contrast images and often creates noise. Knowing this creates reasonable doubt.

A favorite demonstration at Shroud conferences was placing a checkers board under the VP-8 Image Analyzer. On the screen, a dramatic cityscape would appear—black squares rising like skyscrapers, white squares flattening into street-level plazas. Of course, no one believed the VP-8 was detecting real spatial information; it was simply interpreting brightness as height. One glance at this experiment is enough to introduce reasonable doubt about any claim that the VP-8 reveals encoded 3D data on the Shroud.

The assertion that photographs cannot produce undistorted anatomical reliefs is demonstrably false. That was tested and documented years ago. As Farey and others have shown, it depends on the photograph and the processing method—not on anything exclusive to the Shroud. More reasonable doubt.

Moreover, to argue that the image’s 3D effect rules out photographic or artistic origin presents a false dichotomy: either it contains encoded spatial data, or it’s fake. But the real question is whether similar 3D effects can result from known artistic or physical processes—and the evidence says they can.

Another frequent argument is that we still don’t know how the image was made. That mystery is sometimes offered or implied as indirect support for authenticity. But that’s an argument from ignorance: the lack of explanation does not prove a specific conclusion. Mystery alone isn’t evidence. The unexplained is not, by default, the miraculous. “How could it be?” is an important question—but it is a question, not an answer. More reasonable doubt.

Finally, the venue of publication also matters. Your paper appears in URF Journals, a publication not widely recognized for rigorous peer review or scholarly impact on topics like this. As is often the case with “pay-to-play” open-access journals, there are legitimate questions about editorial standards and review quality. This is not a criticism of you or the journal, but a broader issue that scholars across disciplines must acknowledge. Without a transparent peer review process involving experts in radiocarbon dating, textile archaeology, forensic pathology, biblical studies, and image analysis, any claims—however sincere—must be treated with caution. Perhaps no single journal can cover all those fields, which highlights just how complex and interdisciplinary the Shroud really is. Still, reasonable doubt persists.

In the end, the claim that the Shroud’s authenticity has been proven “beyond a reasonable doubt” is not only overstated—it is contradicted by the enduring weight of evidence. The 1988 radiocarbon dating has withstood decades of scrutiny and remains unrefuted by any AMS expert. Public opinion further complicates the story: according to multiple polls, between 25% and 33% of American Christians do not believe in a physical resurrection, suggesting that the tomb was not open or empty. If the body remained in the tomb, how could a burial cloth have emerged at all? For non-Christians, this baseline skepticism is even stronger. The forensic features—including rigor mortis and cadaveric spasm—are drawn from an image that is not only incomplete but, in a sense, mutilated by centuries of rolling, folding, and fire damage. What remains is a degraded and ambiguous artifact whose details are subject to interpretation. There are simply too many uncertainties, too many viable alternatives, and too much interpretive flexibility. Thus, the burden of proof is far from met. Rather than closing the case, the current evidence calls for continued questioning and thoughtful inquiry—not courtroom certitude.