This is the Bibliography "W" page of my book outline,
[Left: Ian Wilson's, "The Blood and the Shroud" (1998), Amazon.com. Second only in importance to his, "The Turin Shroud" (1978), in laying out the evidence for and against the Shroud of Turin being the burial sheet of Jesus.]
authors' surnames beginning with "W" of books and journals that I will probably refer to.
© Stephen E. Jones
BIBLIOGRAPHY "W"
Walsh, B.J., ed., 2000, "Proceedings of the 1999 Shroud of Turin International Research Conference, Richmond, Virginia," Magisterium Press: Glen Allen VA.
Walsh, J.E., 1963, "The Shroud," Random House: New York NY.
Weaver, K.F., 1980, "Science Seeks to Solve ... The Mystery of the Shroud," National Geographic, Vol. 157, June, pp.730-753.
Whanger, M. & Whanger, A.D., 1998, "The Shroud of Turin: An Adventure of Discovery," Providence House Publishers: Franklin TN.
Whiting, B., 2006, "The Shroud Story," Harbour Publishing: Strathfield NSW, Australia.
Wilcox, R.K., 1977, "Shroud," Macmillan: New York NY.
Wilson, I., 1979, "The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus?," [1978], Image Books: New York NY, Revised edition.
Wilson, I., 1986, "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London.
Wilson, I., 1991, "Holy Faces, Secret Places: An Amazing Quest for the Face of Jesus," Doubleday: New York NY.
Wilson, I., 1998, "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY.
Wilson, I. & Schwortz, B., 2000, "The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence," Michael O'Mara Books Limited: London.
Wuenschel, E.A., 1954, "Self-Portrait of Christ: The Holy Shroud of Turin," Holy Shroud Guild: Esopus NY, Third printing, 1961.
PS: See `tagline' quotes below (bold emphases mine), one from each of the above.
Posted 14 November 2007. Updated 4 May 2025.
"The radiocarbon dating performed on the Shroud of Turin in 1988 by laboratories located in Oxford, Tucson and Zurich concluded with a 95% probability that the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin dated from between 1260 - 1390 AD. A reanalysis of the data used to derive this range of dates suggests that the statistical tests performed earlier assumed 14C homogeneity in the samples and as a result may have lead to a misleading range of dates. A different series of statistical evaluations has been applied to this radiocarbon date data leading to the conclusion that the Shroud subsamples each contained differing levels of 14C. An evaluation of this conclusion was conducted and found to be statistically supportable. Further analysis revealed that the sample dates observed were directly related to the physical location of the sample on the Shroud linen. This necessarily implies that the linen samples were non-homogeneous as regards 14C and the radiocarbon date derived for the Shroud samples are of questionable validity. The hypothesis of a relationship between the sample location on the Shroud cloth and the date measured was evaluated and found to be statistically significant." (Walsh, B.J., 2000, "The 1988 Shroud of Turin Radiocarbon Tests Reconsidered," in Walsh, B.J., ed., "Proceedings of the 1999 Shroud of Turin International Research Conference, Richmond, Virginia," Magisterium Press: Glen Allen VA, p.326).
"Only this much is certain: The Shroud of Turin is either the most awesome and instructive relic of Jesus Christ in existence-showing us in its dark simplicity how He appeared to men-or it is one of the most ingenious, most unbelievably clever, products of the human mind and hand on record. It is one or the other; there is no middle ground." (Walsh, J.E., 1963, "The Shroud," Random House: New York NY, pp.xi-xii).
"It would not be the shroud's first brush with science. That happened eighty years before, in 1898, with the first photographs of the relic. Those pictures uncovered the most surprising of the shroud's many mysteries. When the photographer, Secondo Pia, examined his first glass-plate negative as it emerged from the developing bath, he almost dropped it in shocked excitement. He was looking not at the usually unrealistic, confusing photographic negative, but at a clear positive image. Highlights and shadows were reversed from those on the cloth and were far more lifelike and realistic. Moreover, they showed details never before seen in the shroud, which was now revealed as a negative image. A negative image? Hundreds of years before the invention of photography? The idea that the shroud was a hoax suddenly seemed less plausible, for how could a medieval artist have produced a negative image, and why would he choose to do so?" (Weaver, K.F., 1980, "Science Seeks to Solve ... The Mystery of the Shroud," National Geographic, Vol. 157, June, pp.730-753, 743. Italics original).
"PRIOR TO RELEASING OUR FINDINGS ON the Pantocrator icon and the Justinian II solidus, we had read about the work of Father Filas on the identification of coins over the eyes of the Man of the Shroud. The possibility of the presence of coins over the eyes was first raised when three scientists, John P Jackson, Eric J. Jumper, and R. W (Bill) Mottern, the instigators of the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project, put a photograph of the Shroud face in a VP-8 Image Analyzer (a specialized computer device which converts the density of an image into height) and saw, to their astonishment, an accurate three-dimensional representation rather than the irregular and distorted image resulting from all ordinary photographs and paintings. Two button-like objects, one over each eye, were visible; it was suggested they might be coins which had been used to keep the eyes of the dead closed, a practice common to many peoples for many centuries [Jackson, J.P., Jumper, E.J. Mottern, B. & Stevenson, K.E., ed., "The Three Dimensional Image On Jesus' Burial Cloth," in Stevenson, K.E., ed., "Proceedings of the 1977 United States Conference of Research on The Shroud of Turin," Holy Shroud Guild: Bronx NY, 1977, pp.90-91]. British historian Ian Wilson mentioned several coins from the time of Pontius Pilate which would correspond to the size of the `buttons,' about fifteen millimeters or five-eighths of an inch in diameter. In 1979, more out of curiosity than anything else, Filas re-photographed an enlargement of a photograph which had been made from a second-generation 1931 Enrie print of the face. To his surprise, he noticed something he had not seen before-a sort of design directly over the right eye. He took this photograph to Michael Marx, a numismatist (coin expert) who had earlier volunteered his professional expertise. Marx became excited as he scanned the photograph with a magnifier, for he could identify four curving capital letters, UCAI. There also was something that looked like a shepherd's crook. Filas next obtained a copy of Madden's History of Jewish Coinage, and of Money in the Old and New Testament and a catalog of all Pontius Pilate coins in the British Museum. He found only one coin which had as its main motif a `shepherd's crook,' actually an astrologer's staff or lituus: this was a lepton (small coin) or `widow's mite' of Pontius Pilate, and it was the correct size. Then, also in 1979, numismatist Bill Yarbrough obtained several Pontius Pilate lepta and gave one to each of several Shroud researchers, including Filas, as a souvenir. Filas became convinced that there are indeed images of coins over the eyes. He identified the one over the right eye definitely as a lituus lepton of Pontius Pilate; and on very minimal evidence (three very short curving lines that seemed to spread away from each other from a common source) suggested that the one over the left eye was likely also a Pontius Pilate lepton but of a different design, that of a sheaf of barley, which is found on a Pontius Pilate lepton known as the Joulia (Julia) lepton, which was struck only during a six-month period in A.D. 29 in honor of Julia the mother of Tiberius Caesar. " (Whanger, M. & Whanger, A.D., "The Shroud of Turin: An Adventure of Discovery," Providence House Publishers: Franklin TN, 1998, pp.23-24. Emphasis original).
"Not all the pollens present on the Shroud had been identified previously by Frei, because many were found to be coated in a calcium-rich mineral that made classification difficult. Considering that the underside of Christ's burial shroud had been in hard contact with the limestone burial platform of the cave-tomb, the intriguing question was whether the mineral coating on these pollens had come from rock in the same area. This question was taken up in 1986 by optical crystallographer Dr Joseph Kohlbeck, resident scientist at Hercules Aerospace, Colorado. He gained the support of archaeologist Dr Eugenia Nitowski, an expert in ancient Jewish tombs of Israel, who obtained for him some limestone samples from a first-century tomb in Jerusalem. Dr Kohlbeck closely analysed and compared his samples from the underside of the Shroud with Dr Nitowski's samples. In both instances he identified the calcium component to be of the aragonite variety, and in both he also uncovered traces of strontium and iron. In scientific terms, these points meant a close match. [Kohlbeck, J.A. & Nitowski, E.L., "New evidence may explain image on the Shroud of Turin," Biblical Archaeology Review, Jul/Aug 1986, p.23] There was still more that Dr Kohlbeck could do to test his evidence. He took his mineral-coated pollen samples and the limestone tomb samples to Dr Ricardo Levi-Setti at the Enrico Fermi Institute in the University of Chicago. The two scientists studied the patterns of spectra produced by the comparative samples through a high-resolution scanning ion microprobe. Although they were unable to prove beyond doubt that the Shroud aragonite had come from the Jerusalem area, the samples were found to be an unusually close match. This led Dr Kohlbeck to assess the strong probability that the Shroud limestone is of Jerusalem provenance." (Whiting, B., "The Shroud Story," Harbour Publishing: Strathfield NSW, Australia, 2006, pp.129-130).
"If I had known Stewart would need a profile of the man in the shroud, I would have brought along the photographs made by Leo Vala, a photographer of British royalty and a pioneer in the development of the 3D visual process and cinemascope movie screens. By manipulating light through photo transparencies, he produced an image on a normal screen that enabled sculptors to make a three-dimensional model which could then be photographed in profile or indeed from any other angle. In perfecting the process Vala had selected the shroud face as a subject `because it's such a beautiful image.' After publishing the results of his experimentation in the March 8, 1967 issue of Amateur Photographer, he became an outspoken critic of anyone who thought the image could have been produced by human hands either through artistry or technology. `I've been involved in the invention of many complicated visual processes, and I can tell you that no one could have faked that image. No one could do it today with all the technology we have. It's a perfect negative. It has a photographic quality that is extremely precise.'" (Wilcox, R.K., "Shroud," Macmillan: New York NY, 1977, pp.130-131).
"Even from the limited available information, a hypothetical glimpse of the power operating at the moment of creation of the Shroud's image may be ventured. In the darkness of the Jerusalem tomb the dead body of Jesus lay, unwashed, covered in blood, on a stone slab. Suddenly, there is a burst of mysterious power from it. In that instant the blood dematerializes, dissolved perhaps by the flash, while its image and that of the body becomes indelibly fused onto the cloth, preserving for posterity a literal `snapshot' of the Resurrection. However the image was formed, we may well be entranced by the fourteen-foot length of linen in Turin. For if the author's reconstruction is correct, the Shroud has survived first-century persecution of Christians, repeated Edessan floods, an Edessan earthquake, Byzantine iconoclasm, Moslem invasion, crusader looting, the destruction of the Knights Templars, not to mention the burning incident that caused the triple holes, the 1532 fire, and a serious arson attempt made in 1972. It is ironic that every edifice in which the Shroud was supposedly housed before the fifteenth century has long since vanished through the hazards of time, yet this frail piece of linen has come through almost unscathed. Frustratingly, the Shroud has not yet fully proven itself to us-not uncharacteristic of the gospel Jesus, who at certain times seems almost deliberately to have made his presence obscure, as in his post-Resurrection appearance to Mary Magdalen when she mistook him for a gardener, and in his walking, shortly after, as an unrecognized stranger with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. But one cannot help feeling that it has its role to play, and that its hour is imminent." (Wilson, I., "The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus?," [1978], Image Books: New York NY, Revised edition, 1979, pp.250-251).
"Attempts to simulate some aspects of such a process have been made by Drs. Jackson and Jumper and colleagues in a comprehensive review of the comparative plausibility of every conceivable variety of image-forming process. But although images were produced, as in so many other experiments, these fell far short of the photographic realism of the Shroud. As Jackson and Jumper felt obliged to conclude: `We have examined a variety of image formation processes in a generic sense and found that ... no single hypothesis seems to simultaneously explain them all ...' [Jackson, J.P., Jumper, E.J. & Ercoline, W.R., "Correlation of image intensity on the Turin Shroud with the 3-D structure of a human body shape," Applied Optics, Vol. 23, No. 14, 15 July 1984, pp.2244-2269, 2269] Nonetheless a quite new and in its own way remarkably revelatory achievement has been made in the course of other studies by Jackson, this time working with Bill Ercoline. As has long been recognized, during whatever image forming process occurred the Shroud must have been draped, as opposed to being flat, over the body it wrapped. This should have caused lateral distortions in the image large enough to exceed natural variations in human anatomy. Ercoline and Jackson determined these, then plotted the actual distortions that would occur with the natural drape of a cloth over a body laid out in the manner indicated on the Shroud. They found good correlation. [Jackson, J.P. & Ercoline, W.R., "The Three-Dimensional Characteristics of the Shroud Image," IEEE 1982 Proceedings of the International Conference on Cybernetics and Society, October 1982] The effect of this research is to demand that if the Shroud is the work of an artist, he took account of the effects of cloth drape among his many other intricate calculations. Super artist, or supernormal event, consistently these have proved the only two alternatives in the midst of all the many facets of Shroud research." (Wilson, I., "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, 1986, p.126).
"But there is one example that is almost spectacularly different. Out on the Via Portuense, which runs south-westwards out of Rome, there lies one of Rome's least-known catacombs, the Catacomb of S. Ponziano, or St Pontianus. It goes unmentioned even by the authoritative Blue Guide to Rome, and can only be visited by special permission from the Pontificia Commissione di Archeologia Sacra, the Pontifical Commission of Sacred Archaeology. Importantly, since the whole catacomb was closed down after AD 820, any decoration inside it almost inevitably has to be of an earlier date. On one wall, slightly damaged, but its colours still fresh, is to be seen a very fine fresco ... of Christ Pantocrator iconographically so close to that of the coins of Justinian II that its date is almost certainly the same, the end of the seventh century. But its real feature of interest is the one which lies between Christ's eyebrows, and would be well nigh impossible to convey on anything as small as a coin. This is a sharply delineated topless square ... exactly corresponding in shape and positioning to that so unnatural mark between the eyebrows on the shroud. Now there can be no question of this feature perhaps being the result of some later tampering with the fresco. Not only did Vignon feature it in his book of 1939, thus dating it back at least fifty years, there are many indications that it was the work of the original seventh-century artist. Throughout the work, for instance, the artist used only a very limited range of colours, and it can be seen to have been painted in one of these. Furthermore, it has been created in fresco, thereby having been made integral to the original wall plaster, and can be adjudged as such by any expert. And if this originality is accepted, its significance in relation to the shroud's date is difficult to over-estimate. Just as the viewing of a single footprint on fresh sand provided for Robinson Crusoe the conclusive evidence that there was another human being (later revealed as Man Friday) on his island, so the presence of this topless square on an indisputably seventh/eighth-century fresco virtually demands that the shroud must have been around, somewhere, in some form at this early date. Since that form can have been scarcely other than the `holy face' of Edessa, the shroud's history is effectively established at least as far back as the sixth century, with the Abgar story offering a glimmer of how it may have arrived in Edessa back in the first." (Wilson, I., "Holy Faces, Secret Places: The Quest for Jesus' True Likeness," Doubleday: London, 1991, pp.167-168).
"Yet none of this, of course, means that the Shroud cannot be the work of a `cunning' mediaeval forger. Perhaps, whoever he was, this individual enjoyed such power that he could arrange for a six-foot man, possibly some prisoner, to be crucified in the exact manner of Jesus Christ? Perhaps he was able to obtain authentic ancient weaponry for the carrying out of details such as the scourging? Perhaps, given that Jews were well established throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, he knew the special burial requirements that pertained to those of this religion who had died a bloody death and arranged for an all-enveloping cloth accordingly? Of course, even if he had managed all this, how he managed to get the image onto the cloth still remains unexplained. Also is it not rather incredible that this unknown individual should have gone to so much trouble and effort to deceive in an age in which, as twentieth-century journalists have reminded us [Sheridan, M. & Reeves, P., "Turin Shroud shown to be a fake," Independent, 14 October 1988], a large proportion of the populace would have been very easily duped by a feather of the Archangel Gabriel or a phial of the last breath of St Joseph?" (Wilson, I., "The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World's Most Sacred Relic is Real," Simon & Schuster: New York NY, 1998, pp.58-60) .
"However, as early as 1984, when he was still in good health, Paul Maloney began corresponding with Dr Avinoam Danin of the A. Silberman Institute for Life Sciences at Jerusalem's Hebrew University about the Frei tapes. Danin is an acknowledged world authority on the flora of Israel, and much to Maloney's surprise and satisfaction, he responded with considerable courtesy and lack of dismissiveness, despite his academic eminence and his unswerving Jewishness. This encouraged Alan Whanger, in company with his wife Mary, to call upon Danin (who in the meantime had become Professor) during a visit to Jerusalem in September 1995. As guests at his home they showed him some of their photographs of the portions of the Shroud on which they `see' flowers, whereupon, after less than twenty seconds' perusal Danin exclaimed `Those are the flowers of Jerusalem!' One `flower' that he had no difficulty perceiving (and with regard to which even I can acknowledge a flower-like shape in the relevant sector of the Shroud), was the very first one that Alan Whanger had identified on the Shroud, the crown chrysanthemum or Chrysanthemum coronarium. Danin further noted, to the side of the man of the Shroud's right cheek, several flowers of rock rose or Cistus creticus. Despite having remained oblivious throughout his life to any flower images on the Shroud, Dr Max Frei found this rose represented among the pollens from a sticky tape, 6bd, taken from the centre of this very same area. Two years later, upon visiting the Whangers at their North Carolina home, Danin observed on a Shroud photograph an image that he regarded as most interesting of all - that of a bouquet of bean caper plants, namely Zygophyllum dumosum. As he has remarked: `During rainy winters this species sprouts leaves whose petioles look like sausages with two leaflets at their head. When summer comes, the leaflets drop and only the petiole is left. The petioles shrink slowly during the summer ... The only species of Zygophyllum that exhibits this behaviour is Zygophyllum dumosum'. [Danin, A., "Pressed Flowers." Eretz Magazine, November/December 1997, p.37] The overwhelmingly important feature of this discovery is that Zygophyllum dumosum grows only in Israel, Jordan and the Sinai. The northernmost extent of its distribution in the world coincides with the line between Jericho and the sea-level sign on the road leading from Jerusalem to Jericho. Westwards it does not reach as far as the Suez Canal, southwards it peters out before St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai desert, and eastwards it extends no further than the longitude line of the Jordanian capital, Amman. ... Then at last there appeared a circular-shaped pollen grain, quite unmistakable, and large as pollen grains go. As was immediately revealed by cross-comparison with images of pollen grains stored in the Whanger computer, this was Gundelia tournefortii, a plant that Max Frei had already identified on the Shroud, and which Danin had reported as present on the Shroud in abundance pollenwise, and also in image form. ? As Danin sums up, particularly from superimposing the known distribution sites of Gundelia tournefortii, Zygophyllum dumosum and Cistus creticus, together with three further specific pollen types confirmed to be on the Shroud, the very narrow geographical region that all these plants share in common is the mere twenty miles between Hebron and Jerusalem. [Danin, A., "Micro-traces of plants on the Shroud of Turin as geographical markers," in Scannerini, S. & Savarino, P., eds, "The Turin Shroud: Past, Present and Future," International scientific symposium, Turin, 2-5 March 2000," Effatà : Cantalupa, 2000, pp. 495-500] So the conclusion is inescapable, in the very teeth of the radiocarbon dating, that at some time in its history the Turin Shroud positively must have been in the same environs in which Jesus of Nazareth lived and died." (Wilson, I. & Schwortz, B., "The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence," Michael O'Mara Books: London, 2000, pp.85-86, 88, 92. Italics original).
"Most remarkable of all was the fact that Yves Delage took an active part in the investigation. He was an agnostic with a strong prejudice against anything that savored of the miraculous or the supernatural, but he was also a first-rate scientist of international reputation and a member of the French Academy of Sciences. .... After a year and a half the investigation came to an end with a resounding climax. These hard-headed scientists were convinced of the authenticity of the Shroud. ... They decided to bring their findings before the Academy ... What was still more startling, it was Yves Delage who proposed to put the case before his fellow Academicians. ... It was April 21, 1902 ... The Shroud is not a painting at all, said Delage, either of the fourteenth or of any other century. No matter what the documents in question may say, that hypothesis is absurd. Here is the proof before our eyes-the Shroud itself reproduced with perfect fidelity in these two photographs. They show that the two figures are negatives. The idea of a negative was unknown before the era of photography, and se no artist before that time could even have thought of painting a picture like that on the Shroud. Not only that, but these two figures, though outlined by a rather faint stain on the cloth, are as exact as a negative formed by light on a photographic plate. That is why the positive version reveals such a clear and natural portrait, anatomically correct, with true perspective, and with an aesthetic character that one would never have expected. ... In the hypothesis that this is a painting, continued Delage, you must imagine an artist who conceived the idea of a negative centuries before the invention of photography. Then you must imagine that this incredible genius knew how to place the lights and shades so that the photographic inversion of his hand-designed negative reveals this unrivaled portrait with its haunting, complex expression. The artist himself could not have seen this positive image while he did his work, since he would be doing everything in reverse. And he would have to do everything with perfect precision ... There would, of course, be no conceivable reason why the hypothetical artist should want to do a negative. Presumably, he would be painting for his contemporaries, not for the Academy of Sciences or for the parties of the present dispute; nor could he foresee the invention of photography, the only means that could reverse his negative into a positive. He would be taking infinite pains to conceal forever a masterful portrait in an apparently crude sketch. He would also have used materials and applied a technique unknown before the photograph of the Shroud inspired some clumsy imitations. There is not the slightest trace of any pigments here, nor the least sign of any preparation of the cloth to receive the twofold image. There is nothing but the delicate stain completely absorbed by the fabric, and it is of this stain that that perfect negative is formed. Yes, the painting hypothesis is absurd, no matter what any written documents may say to the contrary. In this conclusion the members of the Academy agreed with Delage. After examining the two glass plates provided by Secondo Pia, they admitted that the images on the Shroud could not be the work of any artist." (Wuenschel, E.A., "Self-Portrait of Christ: The Holy Shroud of Turin," [1954], Holy Shroud Guild: Esopus NY, Third printing, 1961, pp.17-20).
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