“All the forger would have needed was a human body, some linen, iron oxide, fire, and water.”
I found this concerning iron oxide on the shroud (pg.80-81,“The Blood and the Shroud”):
“Dr. John Heller of Connecticut, a professor of internal medicine and medical physics at Yale University, and research chemist Jewish-born Dr. Alan Adler of Western Connecticut State University…analysing under the microscope the very same sticky tapes (used by the STURP team), tried to find the iron oxide that both sides agreed were present. They quickly found it,but the immediate surprise to them was that it was quite exceptionally pure. As they were aware, most artists’ pigments tend to be contaminated by impurities…As they gradually determined, the answer to where this iron came from probably lay in the fact that when flax is retted,that is soaked in water, during the linen manufacturing process, it draws up into itself iron, along with calcium and strontium, as trace elements from the water…But they felt adamant that wherever this iron came from, it was not responsible for what the eye sees as the Shroud’s body image.”
Also this(pg.90, same book):
“…if the Shroud’s ‘bloodstains’ truly are composed of just iron oxide and vermilion,then they could not possibly provide meaningful results for the presence of DNA, the code of life.”
Dr. Victor Tryon Director of the Center for Advanced DNA Technologies and chief technician Nancy Mitchell Tryon “had no difficulty obtaining a positive reading that it was human blood.”
And on pg.217:
“As for the Shroud ‘bloodstains’,…like the ‘cunning painting’ theory, necessarily requires that these were no more than daubings-on for effect, despite all the attestations by pathologists and doctors of their medical convincingness. And this is again all quite aside from the historical evidence that something very like the Shroud really does seem to have existed well before the period that this amazing piece of forgery is supposed to have been performed.”
