Roman Produced Jewish Coins
 Images
of coins, minted by Pontius Pilate for use in Palestine, have been
tentatively identified over both eyes of the man whose image is
seen on the Shroud. But is the identification valid?
About 1980, the Rev. Francis Filas, S.J., of Loyola University in
Chicago and Michael Marx, an expert in classical coins, examined
the area over the right eye and detected patterns of what appeared
to be the letters UCAI (from TIBERIOU CAISARUS). They also found a
lituus design (an auger's staff). Father Filas concluded that this
was a lituus lepton coin minted by Pontius Pilate between 29 and
32 CE. Over the left eye, Father Filas also identified what he
believed to be a Juolia lepton with a distinctive sheaf of barley
design. The Juolia lepton was only struck in 29 CE in honor of
Tiberius Caesar's wife, Julia.
Subsequent computerized image enhancement analysis at the Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and State University's Spatial Data Analysis
Laboratory supports, though cautiously, the existence of the
lituus lepton over the right eye and an outline of a coin over the
left eye.
By overlaying polarized images, Alan Whanger at Duke University
identified both coins. Alan found 74 points of congruence with an
existing lituus lepton and 73 points with a Juolia lepton. But
such identification is highly interpretive and other researchers
do not find the same level of congruence.
The UCAI Problem
Though the lepta (plural of lepton) minted in Palestine were Roman
produced coins, the inscription of Tiberius Caesar would have been
written in Greek as TIBERIOU KAISAROS. Was the C, where a K was
expected, a misspelling? This was a problem that seemed to
preclude positive identification until an actual lituus lepton was
found with the aberrant spelling. Several have since been found.
This anomaly seems to give credence to the coins identification.
Other Problems
Barrie Schwortz, a technical photographers who photographed the
Shroud, disagrees. Having studied numerous high quality negatives
of the Shroud taken in 1978, he concludes:
My personal opinion, based
on my photographic experience and my close examination of the
Shroud itself, is that the weave of the cloth is far too coarse to
resolve the rather subtle and very tiny inscription on a dime
sized ancient coin...What he (Filas) saw as inscriptions, I saw as
random shapes and noise. Such is the subjective nature of image
analysis. For these reasons however, I cannot accept these coin
"inscriptions" as viable evidence of a first century Shroud
"date"...I do not argue that there appears to be something on the
eyes of the man of the Shroud, and it may well be coins or
potshards, since they were used in some first century burial
rituals, but I do not believe we can resolve coin inscriptions.
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