I hate it when I encounter someone much smarter than me. But I love it when they do all the heavy lifting.

Hugh Farey, medievalist, Shakespearean actor and director, mathematician, scientist, and blogger has done an excellent job of challenging authenticist YouTubers who tried to rebut biblical scholar Dan McClellan’s short podcast critiques of Shroud claims made by Mel Gibson (with Joe Rogan) and popular speaker Jeremiah Johnston. Farey defends McClellan’s accuracy while dissecting the authenticists’ rhetorical failures. See: medievalshroud

Cliff Notes Version Follows

Part 1: “No Apologies” vs. McClellan on Mel Gibson

Farey analyzes a response by a team called “No Apologies” (Phill Chambers and Harvey Ward) to McClellan’s nine-minute commentary on the Mel Gibson/Joe Rogan Shroud discussion. Ward pontificates with a version of the facts he seems to have half-acquired from an “Institute of Science and Faith” course, while Chambers plays a more neutral role.

Farey structures his critique around seven methodological failures, including:

  • Getting facts wrong: Ward misnames the de Charny family, misidentifies Giulio Fanti as an “Art Historian in Turin,” and refers to the Pray Codex as the “Payes painting.”
  • Misrepresenting Fanti’s “personal revelation”: Ward tries to recast Fanti’s explicitly stated religious vision as merely “an emotional response to facts,” reversing what Fanti actually wrote.
  • Confusing the WAXS methodology: Ward conflates the well-established WAXS technique in general with the specific and untested use of WAXS to date textiles of unknown age — exactly McClellan’s point — and then declares McClellan wrong while agreeing with him.
  • Misrepresenting the d’Arcis memorandum: Ward declares McClellan’s statement about it “completely false” when he actually means he disputes d’Arcis’s credibility — which is not the same thing at all.
  • Wildly misquoting Kelly Kearse: Ward claims Kearse found evidence of human blood on the Shroud; Kearse actually concluded that “cross-reactivity precludes a definitive assignment of human or even primate blood being present.”

Part 2: “Jekyll and Hyde” vs. McClellan on Jeremiah Johnston. Farey responds to McClellan’s four short podcasts critiquing Jeremiah Johnston. He nicknames the responding duo “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” for their wild swings between calm reasonableness and unhinged abuse.

Key episodes include:

  • The VP-8 Image Analyzer: Johnston falsely claims the VP-8 was “designed to study what happened to the surface of the earth after a nuclear explosion.” McClellan correctly calls this “laughably false” and uses Cicero Moraes’s simulations to argue the Shroud image looks more like a bas-relief print than a full-body print. Farey supports this, citing multiple STuRP researchers who acknowledge lateral image distortions — contradicting the authenticist claim of “perfect vertical collimation.”
  • Garlaschelli’s reproduction: Hyde claims Garlaschelli himself admitted his bas-relief reproduction “sucks” and “produces nothing like the Shroud” — a claim Farey calls “a grotesque distortion.” Both Moraes and Garlaschelli, Farey notes, confirmed to him they felt misrepresented.
  • The d’Arcis memorandum again: Hyde delivers a lengthy tirade claiming no credible historian accepts the memorandum, that it was never sent, and that “all the historical proof” contradicts it — assertions Farey systematically rebuts, noting that multiple documented papal bulls and other sources do describe the Shroud as a fabrication, while no document calls it genuine until a century after its first appearance.
  • The retracted PLoS One paper: Jekyll first agrees with credible pro-Shroud experts that the Carlino et al. paper on “biologic nanoparticles” was unreliable, then Hyde insists it was never retracted, basing this on an interview with a disgruntled author.
  • Neutron irradiation and radiocarbon dating: Hyde claims Thomas McAvoy’s Applied Optics papers prove a “precise match” between UV fluorescence and neutron irradiation calculations. Farey states flatly that neither McAvoy paper even mentions neutron radiation, and that in his own extended correspondence with McAvoy, no such correlation actually exists.

Overall Thesis

Taken together, Farey’s two posts make a pointed argument: the authenticist counter-response to McClellan is not only factually weak but actively self-defeating. This kind of thing, he writes, “discredits authenticity even more thoroughly than the actual research that I and like-minded medievalists publish ourselves.”