A site that only gave the case for the cloth would not be worth reading. This page gives the case against it as its best advocates make it, in descending order of strength, with the reply that authenticity researchers give. The reader decides.
1. There is no trace of it before the 1350s
The strongest card. The cloth appears in history at Lirey, a village in Champagne, around 1355, in the possession of a knight who never said where he got it. The earliest written mention, about 1370, calls it a fraud. In 1389 the Bishop of Troyes told the Pope that his predecessor had investigated and the artist had confessed, and in 1390 the Pope ruled it could be shown only as a representation. Everything before 1355 is reconstruction: the Edessa cloth, the Constantinople sydoine, the Pray Codex. None of it names this cloth. For thirteen centuries, the most important relic in Christendom, if that is what it is, left no record anyone can find. Documented d'Arcis Sarzeaud 2025 Nicolotti
The reply: the d'Arcis memorandum is an unsigned draft, names no artist, and comes from a bishop in a money quarrel with Lirey. No painting was ever produced and no confession survives. The Pray Codex and de Clari are real documents whose descriptions fit. And absence of record is the normal condition of relics before the fourteenth century. Contested
2. Medieval Europe was full of fake relics
Other cloths claimed to be the true shroud were venerated across Europe. The Shroud of Cadouin, in the Dordogne, drew pilgrims for seven centuries until its woven border was read in 1934 as Arabic naming a Fatimid caliph; in 1936 the bishop ended the pilgrimage himself. Base rates alone favor fraud. Documented Cadouin
The reply: the other shrouds were painted, and show it. This one is not painted, and the chemistry has been looked at harder than any object in the world. The base rate argument says what to expect; it does not say what was found. Contested
3. Three laboratories dated it to 1260 to 1390
The one hard physical measurement for a medieval origin, obtained by three independent laboratories with the agreed method, announced by the Church itself, and consistent with the first appearance of the cloth at Lirey. Documented Nature 1989
The reply: see The Dating. The sample came from the most handled corner, the one place cotton was found, chosen the morning of the cut; the protocol was reduced; the raw data show more variation than reported. The date has never been re-run. Contested
4. McCrone found paint
The most famous microscopist in America looked at the 1978 tapes and found red ochre and vermilion in a collagen binder, and a known medieval technique for painting on cloth. He staked his reputation on it and never withdrew it. Claimed McCrone
The reply: the project's chemists found iron oxide at the same density on and off the image, and far denser at the water-stain margins, which fits iron from the flax's retting water and the 1532 soaking; no binder; no vermilion found by anyone else; and the color in the fiber rather than on it. The X-ray survey found no elemental difference between image and non-image areas. McCrone's answer was that the amounts were below those methods' sensitivity. The argument never ended. Contested Heller and Adler XRF 1980
5. A rubbing from a relief is a negative, automatically
The "no medieval artist knew what a negative was" argument assumes the artist had to know. A rubbing from a carved relief produces a negative by itself: the high points take the color. Joe Nickell showed this in 1978 and Garlaschelli produced a full-size version in 2009. A relief rubbing also encodes some relief, which is what the VP-8 reads. Claimed Nickell Garlaschelli
The reply: rubbing deposits pigment, and there is no pigment; rubbing leaves direction, and there is none; the acid version changes the chemistry; the blood goes on in the wrong order; and the depth encoding from a relief is coarse where the Shroud's is fine. Contested Heller and Adler
6. Scorch
Heat marks linen with the same chemistry as the image. A heated statue pressed to cloth gives a negative with some depth. The project's own summary says a similar change "can be obtained by sulfuric acid or heat." Documented STURP 1981
The reply: the lightly scorched areas on the cloth fluoresce under ultraviolet, a scorch the team made with a soldering iron fluoresced, and the image does not. Heat also penetrates the cloth; the image does not. The observation is documented; the inference that no form of heat could have done it is argued. Contested Miller and Pellicori
7. The pollen is worthless
Max Frei's pollen is the most abused evidence in the debate. Tape lifts from a cloth handled for centuries by pilgrims, clergy and insects are contamination-prone; his species identifications were never independently verified from his slides; and in 1983 he authenticated the forged Hitler diaries weeks before they were exposed. Documented Frei Frei bio
The reply: most authenticity researchers now set the pollen aside and do not rest the case on it.
8. The image is too good
The figure is elongated, the hair hangs as if the body were upright, the arms are long enough to cover the groin, and the image has no "mask" distortion that a cloth wrapped round a real head would produce. Several authors, most recently Moraes with three-dimensional modelling, argue that this fits a low relief or a standing model better than a corpse. Claimed Vatican News 2026
The reply: the lack of wraparound distortion is exactly what a non-contact, distance-dependent process predicts, and a wrapped body under a loosely draped cloth is not a tight mold. The modelling study has been challenged on method. Contested
9. Nobody has to explain it
The burden is on the claim. "No one has explained how the image was made" is not evidence for anything. There are objects whose manufacture is lost, and a medieval cloth whose technique is lost is far more likely than a cloth from a tomb in Jerusalem with an image made by no known process.
The reply: no one on the authenticity side disputes the logic. The reply is that the question of how the image was made is a real, open scientific question whatever the answer to the other one, and that the measurements are what they are.
10. The blood is inconsistent
In 2018 Borrini and Garlaschelli argued, from experiments with a volunteer and with synthetic blood, that the flows on the arms, the side and the back cannot all come from one body in any one posture. Claimed Borrini and Garlaschelli
The reply, published in 2019, disputed the experiments' model of the wounds and the posture. Contested
11. The medieval body
The strongest skeptical position does not need paint at all. A real body, medieval, crucified or mutilated in imitation, laid in a real cloth. Real blood, real serum, real wounds, no decay because the body was removed in time, and an image by some process now lost. Everything the chemistry shows survives this. Only the date is at issue, and the date says medieval. Claimed
The reply: a medieval crucifixion staged with Roman accuracy no artist of the period had, in a weave for which no medieval European match has been found, with an image no one can reproduce, is a larger claim than it looks. But the position is coherent, and it is the one a careful skeptic holds. Contested
What the skeptics do not claim
Serious skeptics do not claim the Shroud was painted by Leonardo da Vinci (who was born a century after it was shown at Lirey), or that it was made by the Templars, or that the image is a photograph of a crucified Templar. Those claims belong to television. The case above is the real one.
Last checked 2026-10-20.
