If the shroud was laid flat on the face without wrapping, then wouldn't the face image be more like a portrait like we see there?
Everything depends on the process by which a dead body might transfer an image of itself to a cloth. Certainly, a uniformly smeared body wrapped with a cloth would produce one of those weird distortions. No authenticist believes now, or ever has, that that was the process, which has been largely produced as a straw-man from time to time by anti-authenticists.
However, the alternatives are difficult to justify. Even authenticists agree that a cloth draped loosely over a body could not produce the image by contact, so some form of action at a distance is required, and that really opens a can of worms, regarding the attitude of the man (lying flat or with head up and legs bent?), the attitude of the shroud (following the contours of the body above and below, or above but not below, or completely horizontal above and below?), and the direction and dispersion of the emanation (vertical, with a spherical wave front, or convective in various directions?). None of these has been satisfactorily explained, let alone demonstrated.
A better option certainly seems to be some kind of bas relief, although the imagination balks slightly at somebody producing a detailed bas relief of the naked back of a man, just for it to be half of a transferred image.
Second, as to the blood on the arms, if the person is dying on a cross, then their arms are up in the air and the body leans forward. So the blood trickles against the direction of the body's hairs - ie toward the shoulders and clots that way. Then when the arms are laid down on the body, the blood flow looks like it went antigravity.
One problem here is the angle at which blood can actually flow down an arm without dripping straight off, closer to vertical than 45° being demonstrated by Garlaschelli. That's not impossible, as Giulio Ricci's reconstruction demonstrates, but the random twisting and twining of the stream seems precluded at that angle. Some pathologists think the blood would be thicker than normal, and others that it would be as thin as normal, even in a suffering man. It is very unlikely that any blood at all would be produced from a wrist wound after death.
It's these kinds of things that make me feel kind of helpless when reading the arguments. I see scholars arguing back and forth and back and forth. And then I see good arguments by one group saying there was Carbon 14 dating putting it at the 14th century. And then I see other scholars giving good-sounding counterarguments about the dating, adding on other pieces of evidence like the Pray codex showing it is older than that.
I sympathise, but for me, the solution is to proceed in very small steps. The overall appearance of the Shroud, especially the negative image, strikes many people as a staggeringly realistic portrait of a crucified man and others as a ridiculous caricature. These are just impressions, and can only be justified be detailed comparison with anatomical measurements and specific examples of Byzantine art, and that's just the start. The details of archaeological finds, the geology and botany of Jerusalem, medieval pigments and binders, the script of the Quem Quaeritis ceremony and the proportion of cotton fibres in a Shroud thread are all clues to a more exact understanding of what the Shroud really is.
So apparently it's either:
- (A) The shroud of Jesus produced by some miracle
- (B) The shroud of Jesus produced by a method we don't know
- (C) The shroud of someone killed in the 1st to 14th centuries in Europe or the Mideast like Jesus and produced accidentally by a process we don't know; or
- (D) The shroud of someone killed or a corpse disfigured in the 1st to 14th centuries AD in Europe or the Mideast like Jesus and produced intentionally by a process we don't know or haven't verified conclusively in order to make it look like the shroud.
Or not a shroud at all...