Turin Shroud confirmed as a fake
by Richard Ingham
PARIS, June 21 (AFP) - A French magazine said on Tuesday it had carried out experiments that proved the Shroud of Turin, believed by some Christians to be their religion’s holiest relic, was a fake.
“A mediaeval technique helped us to make a Shroud,” Science & Vie (Science and Life) said in its July issue. The Shroud is claimed by its defenders to be the cloth in which the body of
Jesus Christ was wrapped after his crucifixion.
It bears the faint image of a blood-covered man with holes in his hand and wounds in his body and head, the apparent result of being crucified, stabbed by a Roman spear and forced to wear a crown of thorns.
In 1988, scientists carried out carbon-14 dating of the delicate linen cloth and concluded that the material was made some time between 1260 and 1390. Their study prompted the then archbishop of Turin, where the Shroud is stored, to admit that the garment was a hoax. But the debate sharply revived in January this year.
Drawing on a method previously used by skeptics to attack authenticity claims about the Shroud, Science & Vie got an artist to do a bas-relief — a sculpture that stands out from the surrounding background — of a Christ-like face.
A scientist then laid out a damp linen sheet over the bas-relief and let it dry, so that the thin cloth was moulded onto the face. Using cotton wool, he then carefully dabbed ferric oxide, mixed with gelatine, onto the cloth to make blood-like marks. When the cloth was turned inside-out, the reversed marks resulted in the famous image of the crucified Christ.
Gelatine, an animal by-product rich in collagen, was frequently used by Middle Age painters as a fixative to bind pigments to canvas or wood.
The imprinted image turned out to be wash-resistant, impervious to temperatures of 250 C (482 F) and was undamaged by exposure to a range of harsh chemicals, including bisulphite which, without the help of the gelatine, would normally have degraded ferric oxide to the compound ferrous oxide.
The experiments, said Science & Vie, answer several claims made by the pro-Shroud camp, which says the marks could not have been painted onto the cloth.
For one thing, the Shroud’s defenders argue, photographic negatives and scanners show that the image could only have derived from a three-dimensional object, given the width of the face, the prominent cheekbones and nose.
In addition, they say, there are no signs of any brushmarks. And, they argue, no pigments could have endured centuries of exposure to heat, light and smoke.
For Jacques di Costanzo, of Marseille University Hospital, southern France, who carried out the experiments, the mediaeval forger must have also used a bas-relief, a sculpture or cadaver to get the 3-D imprint.
The faker used a cloth rather than a brush to make the marks, and used gelatine to keep the rusty blood-like images permanently fixed and bright for selling in the booming market for religious relics.
To test his hypothesis, di Costanzo used ferric oxide, but no gelatine, to make other imprints, but the marks all disappeared when the cloth was washed or exposed to the test chemicals.
He also daubed the bas-relief with an ammoniac compound designed to represent human sweat and also with cream of aloe, a plant that was used as an embalming aid by Jews at the time of Christ.
He then placed the cloth over it for 36 hours — the approximate time that Christ was buried before rising again — but this time, there was not a single mark on it.
“It’s obviously easier to make a fake shroud than a real one,” Science & Vie report drily.
The first documented evidence of the Shroud dates back to 1357, when it surfaced at a church at Lirey, near the eastern French town of Troyes. In 1390, Pope Clement VII declared that it was not the true shroud but could be used as a representation of it, provided the faithful be told that it was not genuine.
A scientist then laid out a damp linen sheet over the bas-relief and let it dry, so that the thin cloth was moulded onto the face. Using cotton wool, he then carefully dabbed ferric oxide, mixed with gelatine, onto the cloth to make blood-like marks. When the cloth was turned inside-out, the reversed marks resulted in the famous image of the crucified Christ.
Thanks for providing an article that absolutely proves Daniel Porter's thesis that popular press reporting on the Shroud ignores the real science in favor of nonsense. The article you cite is twaddle published in June of 2005. I hope you don't accept this as proving anything.
The methodology of the "scientist" who tried to recreate the Shroud of Turin shows he does not even have superficial understanding of the nature of the images on the Shroud. His claim that the cloth's obverse (". . . cloth turned inside out. . .") resulted in making images of Jesus show that he does not know that the image does not exist on both sides of the Shroud or that the image does not exist inside the threads of the Shroud as would occur if any medium soaked through from one side to the other. (Note: there is a very faint image of the face that shows on the back-side of the Shroud, but none of the body image shows on the obverse. Larger blood stains DO soak through as would be expected.) This scientist seems to think the image is thought to be made up of "blood-like marks"—or at least the poorly written article's author thinks that is the case, but no scholar or scientist who has studied the Shroud for at least the last 40 years claims that. While there are blood stains on the Shroud, the image is not made of the blood stains.
This is well established science, Soliton.
The image is NOT made of Ferrous or Ferric Oxide (another name for Red Ochre), Hematite (naturally occurring Ferrous Oxide), or any other type of Iron Oxide). We now KNOW what the image is made of—but I'll get to that later.
Let's re-examine the claim that the image is made with Ferrous Oxide. There is no iron Oxide in the Shroud's image in sufficient quantities to make a visible image. While there is blood on the Shroud which does contain some iron, the image itself is not made of "blood-like marks" that the "scientist" dabbed onto his attempt to duplicate the Shroud.
"The Shroud was observed by visible and ultraviolet spectrometry, infrared spectrometry, x-ray fluorescence spectrometry, and thermography. Later observations were made by pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry, laser-microprobe Raman analyses, and microchemical testing. No evidence for pigments or [paint] media was found. . . . The reflectance spectra in the visible range for the image, blood, and hematite are shown in the figure. The image could not have been painted with hematite or any of the other known pigments. The spectrum of the image color does not show any specific features: it gradually changes through the spectrum. This proves that it is composed of many different light-absorbing chemical structures. It has the properties of a dehydrated carbohydrate."There are many more tests that have been done on the Shroud of Turin... if there was sufficient quantities of Ferrous Oxide "Dabbed" on the Shroud of Turin, sufficient to be visible to the naked eye, it would stand out like a neon light on those tests. It doesn't. So it is NOT there. Nor are there any other known pigments. Ferrous Oxide is a fairly standard artist's pigment.
What Iron that has been found on the Shroud IS associated with the blood stains. That Iron has been proved, again by scientists who are specialists in blood, porphoryns, hemoglobin, and other fields specific to the study of blood, using very sensitive instruments, to be part of degraded meth-hemoglobin, a derivative of hemoglobin that occurs as it ages. Other PEER REVIEWED scientific reports have shown that the blood is Primate blood that reacts to human antibody tests.
The image on the Shroud is composed of a very thin, superficial (less than 1/100th the thickness of a human hair—about 200 and 600 nanometers) coating on the fibers of the linen yarns used to weave the Shroud of a dehydrated carbohydrate. This coating is a residue left from washing the retting agents (starches and polysaccharides) used to soften the linen for spinning and weaving out of the finished cloth. In ancient times, a soap derived from the Soapwort plant (Saponaria officinalis). On the vast majority of the fibers of the Shroud, this very thin coating of polysaccharides is transparent and clear. In the image areas, the coating, only on the outwardly facing surfaces of the threads, has inexplicably turned to a caramel like substance that has a brownish color.
More recent studies (see the peer reviewed journal Melanoidin) show that the image is a caramel-like substance (a dehydrated carbohydrate), an unexplained, selective browning of an otherwise clear polysaccharide substance that coats the outermost fibers of the cloth. Two processes will cause such browning to occur – caramelization by heat and an amino/carbonyl reaction – but these do not explain other characteristics of the image.
Red Ochre, Ferrous Oxide, Hematite, gelatin, or any other man-made pigment had nothing to do with it.
The entire thrust of the article that started this thread is embodied in the article you posted—journalists ignoring the well proven SCIENCE to report on amateurish attempts to "duplicate" the Shroud—and I assure you that is what this French attempt is—as if finding a superficial similarity that does not meet all the criteria of actually reproducing a Shroud that meets all of the features of the original is proof of anything. It is especially egregious reporting when they do not even do due diligence by researching exactly what the SCIENCE has already proved and barrel ahead, taking the strawman points cited by the makers of the duplicate to claim they are the criteria needed to reproduce a cloth that matches the Shroud's features. Every one of these peer reviewed scientific results that I refer to were reported and available long before the French replicated Joe Nickells daubing technique in June of 2005. It is important to note that Science and Vie is not a peer reviewed journal—it is merely a magazine written for the public that has an apparently poor understanding of what good science requires.
So, did the "scientist" dabbing at a his damp linen on a Bas Relief prove the Shroud of Turin is a fake? Not by a long shot. He merely duplicated a technique demonstrated by Joe Nickell 20 years ago—one that has been thoroughly debunked by real scientists using definitive tests that have been peer reviewed and duplicated.