The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [59]
“What exactly is your point?” Castle asked.
“My point is simple,” Middagh answered. “We know from studying the Shroud that there were two distinct steps in which the image was formed: first the blood was deposited by direct contact, then the body image was formed subsequently by a process we don’t understand.”
“What can you tell me about the wrist wounds?” Castle asked Middagh, wanting to know what the Shroud might tell him about Father Bartholomew’s stigmata.
Middagh searched through his slides until he found the one he wanted, a close-up of the wrist wounds on the man in the Shroud. The image he displayed on the projection screen showed somewhat more of the man’s body than did the close-up of the hands and wrists that Morelli had brought with him from the Vatican.
Middagh continued: “Most classical pictures of Jesus show him being crucified by being nailed through the palms of the hands. But as you can see here, the man in the Shroud appears to have been nailed through the wrists. It is an interesting detail, but none of the four gospels that discuss the crucifixion—Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John—say whether Christ was tied or nailed to the cross. Most of the ancient crucifixion nails recovered by archeologists in excavations throughout the wider regions of the Roman Empire give no indication what limb they had pierced. But we know the ancient Romans nailed people to the cross if they wanted the crucifixion to be particularly brutal or particularly short, and Church tradition supports that Christ was nailed to the cross.”
Castle wanted to make sure he understood the negative image he was looking at. “Don’t most negatives have a mirror effect in which, for instance, right is transformed to left in the negative?” he asked. “The negative shows the left arm crossed over the right arm. Is this really the other way around?”
“You’re right, in that sorting out the right/left orientations of various images of the Shroud is confusing, even for experts,” Middagh said. “But since the Shroud itself is a negative image, the mirror-effect reversal occurs in what we see in the Shroud with the naked eye. If you look at the Shroud, it appears the right hand is crossed over the left. I’m showing you a photographic negative, which once again reverses left to right and vice versa. In other words, the photographic negative has it right. In the corpse of the man in the Shroud, the left hand was crossed over the right. All the photographic negatives I am going to show you are correct for the left/right orientation of the man in the Shroud as he was buried.”
“Thank you for explaining that,” Castle said. “I’m beginning to get the point that the photographic negatives are perhaps the best way to see the crucified body of the man in the Shroud.”
“I agree,” Middagh said. “I’m showing you the negative photographs because the image is more clearly seen when the brownish-red image on the Shroud is transformed into the white and gray-tone shadings of the negative. Also, I’m showing you the negative photographs because the left/right orientations you see in the negative are true to the left/right orientation of the crucified man himself. If you don’t follow all this technical discussion precisely, it doesn’t matter. Just remember that the images I’m showing you have been flipped appropriately so you are looking at the body the way it would have looked in death.”
Studying the wrist and forearms image, Castle could see the wound in the wrist of the man in the Shroud correctly positioned in the carpal area, the right place for a crucifixion, and the absence of the thumbs in the image confirmed once again Castle’s presumption that