Conclusions

The puzzle of the missing penis on the shroud of Turin is now solved. The body which created the image was not lying on the flat stone floor of a tomb but was lying on a bed with pillows supporting the head. Even if you discount the radio carbon dating (which I do not) then this result is inconsistent with the shroud being the burial cloth of Christ. Anybody who asserts that the shroud of Turin is a holy relic of Christ's Tomb and Resurrection must first explain the missing penis.

If the shroud of Turin is the cloth which covered Jesus whilst in the tomb, then he was lying naked on a hard flat surface. In this case the image should have much shorter arms and an imprint of his penis. It does not, so the only sensible conclusion to draw is that the Turin Shroud does not depict a body in the circumstances in which Jesus was placed in the tomb as described in the Bible. There is no mention of him being supported with his head raised on a soft mattress. Hence the Shroud of Turin cannot be the burial cloth of Christ since the missing penis shows that the cloth records a quite different set of circumstances.

It is now easy to explain why there it no imprint of the penis on the shroud of Turin.

When a naked man is lying flat his penis is higher than the surrounding flesh of his legs and stomach. His hands are too far away from the groin area to support the linen cloth so the penis has to be in contact with the cloth and so must form part of the image, as the nipples, hands, face and hair etc do.

This image shows how the flaccid penis sits above the surrounding body parts.

But the whole disposition of the body changes when the head is supported. Under these circumstances the body bends in the centre but this can not be seen in the tansferred so the viewer interpretes it as being flat. This optical illusion causes the penis to disappear from the print.

When the head is supported on pillows and the body is no longer flat but is bent in the middle. not only do the arms appear longer in the image but the penis is now lower than the hands, which keeps the cloth from contacting it.

The upper images shows the body as we imagine it to be positioned and we will project what we see from the top view. We expect the line of the legs to form an horizontal plane which extends through the truck to the head. The centre view shows how this optical illusion creates the impression that the right arm is long enough to reach down to the left thigh. The lower image shows the true horizontal of all the images, revealing that the body is bent at an angle of about 20 degrees between the legs and the trunk. It is this bend which lowers the penis below the line of the thighs and the arms and so prevents it registering in the image. Compare this with the image of the same model lying completely flat, shown in the early image. In this position no print of the penis will appear, which is exactly what the shroud of Turin shows. This confirms that the body which created the image was not lying flat.

The image on the Turin shroud has no imprint of the penis. The experiments show this is caused by the subject being laid in a position where his head supported higher than his feet. This is typical of a body lying on a bed. It is not how the body of Christ was laid in the tomb so the puzzle of the missing penis means that the shroud of Turin can not be the shroud of Christ.