ABSTRACT
The probabilistic analysis performed on a gold solidus of Justinian II, which shows the face of Christ, among the many others coined during the Byzantine Empire, demonstrates that the Byzantine engraver almost surely had the occasion to view the Shroud before molding the coin. This chapter considers only one of the many coins showing a face of Christ molded by the Byzantine engravers. It analyzes to determine the probability of the peculiar features on the face being minted without the engraver viewing the Shroud. Byzantine coins depicting the face of Christ show additional features similar to the Shroud, but the probabilistic analysis is performed to consider only the following features of the coin in question. The evaluation of the unknown probability is therefore performed by applying the Bayes formula where three kinds of probabilities appear. They are the a priori, the a posteriori probability, and the likelihood.
