Jesus’ burial site found - film claims

http://www.ynetnews.com ^ | 2/23/07 | Ariella Ringel-Hoffman

[Swordmaker]

I remember reading an article in Popular Science by a fellow (Walter somebody?) who used an iron oxide powder and wrapped fabric around a 3-dimensional model. What he got was pretty close. You'll never have an exact duplication at this far a remove (fabric, chemicals, etc. are so different now).

The article was in Popular Photography and the image Joe Nickell produced was only superficially similar to the image on the Shroud. The modern "reproduction" used iron oxide dust but the image it created shows myriad particles of iron oxide in the image areas. There is no visible iron oxide or any other pigment on the Shroud. This has been proved by scanning electron Microscopy, Microspectrometry, and a host of other very discriminating tests and reported in peer-reviewed journals.

We now KNOW what the image is made of... and it is not pigment.

A clear polysaccharide residue coats the outermost fibers of the cloth. In selective places that residue has changed to a brown, caramel-like substance. That brown substance forms the images we see.

The residue is apparently a soap residue. It appears to be from washing the cloth in suds of the soapwort plant, a natural soap containing saccharides like glucose, fucose, galactose, arabinose, xylose, rhamnose and glucuronic acid. Washing to remove starch used as a lubricant during weaving was the final step in the production of linen in the first century.

The process that turned the coating into the carmel-like substance is a chemical reaction between the starch fractions and gasses, Putrecine and Cadaverine, that exude from a newly dead body.

[AnAmericanMother]

I'd like to see the chemical formulae and the reaction (my hubby is an analytical chemist, and he will know what it all means.)

[Swordmaker]

Since the fabric has been identified as of Mediterranean origin, the presence of pollen from that area is completely unremarkable. The negative image is explained by the impression-of-an-object theory.

The cloth is not just mediterranean in origin, which is a huge area, the pollens found on it were specific to plants that grow in Israel today. That does not mean, however, that those plants could not have been transported to France and shaken over the cloth. Why medieval forgers would have done such a thing, being totally unaware of pollen and microscopes needed to see them, is another question. Why, also, would they have gone to the trouble of acquiring a Mediterranean cloth when no one of the period, especially gullible pilgrims would have known the difference between it and an old sheet covered with sheep blood.

More provenencial, however, is the limestone dust that was found ground into the back of the cloth of the dorsal image (not the front) nor in the cloth of the frontal image on either side. This limestone is Travertine Aragonite which is only found in close proximity to Jerusalem and no where else in the world. It is consistent with the dust found in limestone quarries in the area... and consistent with the dust that would be on a niche or shelf in a hewn stone tomb.

The Shroud image is NOT a photographic negative in that the darks and light areas do not represent light. It is, instead, topographical map of the body it covered with the dark and light areas representing the distance of the body from the cloth. The closer the body part, the darker the image. Joe Nickel's impression dusting technique did not succeed in duplicating the quasi 3D qualities of the Shroud... and as I mentioned before it was created by copious amounts of red iron oxide, liberally coating the fibers in the image areas.

[Swordmaker]

My pet theory (about contamination with woodsmoke or finger grease) doesn't appear to be supported by the scientific papers. It is as you say - the threads that were C14 tested were chemically different from the rest of the shroud - the result of "invisible" mending.

You theory would require that approximately 60% of the material be 16th Century wood soot or finger grease to sufficiently skew the date from 1st Century to 14th.

The actual discovered explanation is that the sample was contaminated: with between 40% and 60% 16th Century threads, depending on which end of the sample the particular tested sub-sample was cut from.

This differing percentage of Medieval to 1st Century material explains the extraordinary spread of the reported ages, 1260 to 1390 +/- 35 years at each end, from what was thought to be a homogenous sample. It should have been a red flag for the testers when the youngest reported age and its degree of confidence did not overlap the oldest reported age and its degree of confidence! If the sample were truly homogenous and an accurate sample of the shroud, the reported ages should have all tested around a mid point and well within the degrees of confidence for all tests.

Harry Gove, the inventor of the C14 test used on the Shroud, when asked "What would be the age of the original material representing ~45% of a sample mixed with ~55% of material with a known provenance of 1535 to give a result of 1350AD when C14 tested?"

His answer, after doing some calculations, was "1st Century +/-100 years."

That percentage is the estimated percentage of one of the C14 Samples sent to the Swiss lab. Examining microphotographs of the other samples, the percentages of new material was estimated to be from 40% to 60% new. material.

[Swordmaker]

Walter Mccrone was a scientist who said he had microscopic evidence that the shroud was painted with vermillion and red ochre in a collagen medium in the 14th century.

Walter McCrone, a microscopist, published his findings in his own, in-house magazine "The Microscopist," of which he was editor and publisher. It is not a peer-reviewed journal and he refused to allow his article to be peer-reviewed.

No other scientist, using much more sophisticated instruments than McCrone's optical microscope, have been able to duplicate his findings. In fact other Optical Microscopists have failed to see what McCrone claims to have seen on the same samples.

All others have failed to find Iron oxide (red ochre) or Mercury Sulfide (Vermillion) in sufficient quantities to be visible or to add any color to the Shroud. On the other hand, the blood stains that McCrone claimed were Vermillion (HgS) have been conclusively proven to be human blood and blood derivatives by some of the top experts in blood chemistry in the world... and their findings WERE peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals.

McCrone got so off the wall that in one article he claimed the Iron Oxide was suspended in a 14% Albumin solution... despite the fact that once the suspension fluid has evaporated, there is NO WAY to tell what the concentration was. He also claimed that he could identify the source of the Iron Oxide... and that it was ground up with a technique developed in 1830.

[Swordmaker]

The US Air Force, which *also* tested the shroud, has stated unequivically that there are *no* microscopic traces of any pigments, of any kind on the shroud. How do you reconcile this?

We cannot say that the US Air Force tested the Shroud. Some US Air Force officers were part of the 1978 Shroud of Turin Project (notably STURP co-organizer and leader, Physicist Dr. John Jackson).

However, STURP did find that while there were random particles of pigments on the shroud they were not found in any concentrations in image areas sufficient to be visible... and that they were consistent with small flecks of paint that may have fallen off of paintings in the vicinity of the Shroud or from copies laid on the shroud to impart some authenticity to the copy.

In other words, what small pieces of pigment that were found on the shroud are randomly distributed and that distribution bore no relationship to the image.

[VeritatisSplendor]

I'm not a Mccrone backer myself - I was responding to a poster who said Walter somebody recreated the Shroud of Turin using iron oxide, written up in a Popular Science article.

I came up with Mccrone on googling but nothing that he successfully made a replication.

You might manage to get a similar image on the gross level doing something with a low bas-relief - not sure how it would turn out on the microscopic level.

If this was done by a fraudster, he was very disciplined to make only one - he could have done a few saints too - "This is the Blessed Mother's footprints, this is St. Augustine's right hand, this is St. Hermit's knee print - he spent ten years on his knees..."

Mrs VS

[Swordmaker]

Your wish is my command, Madam. How about the entire peer-reviewed paper published in Melanoidins vol. 4, Ames J.M. ed., Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, Luxembourg, 2003, pp.106-113.

The Shroud of Turin: An Amino-Carbonyl Reaction (Maillard Reaction) May Explain The Image Formation by Raymond N. Rogers and Anna Arnoldi - Adobe Acrobat Reader required.

As an arson investigator, you should find it interesting that the late Ray N. Rogers, a Laboratory Fellow (Ret.), University of California, Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1981-2005 was a chemist specializing in pyrolysis and super-energy explosives.

You might also be interested in this essay on the blood on the Shroud and McCrone's involvement (a sorry affair involving ego and sabotage of other researchers).

"The Shroud of Turin's 'Blood' Images: Blood, or Paint? History of Science Inquiry" by David Ford - Adobe Acrobat Reader required.

Most of the scientific and scholarly papers (both pro and con, good and bad) have been archived and are available on line from Barrie Schworz's Shroud.com website. Barrie, who is Jewish and a friend of mine, was the primary optical photographer for the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP). Another good source of Shroud research, and one that is a bit more accessible for the lay person, are our fellow Freeper Shroudie's various websites:

Shroud of Turin for Journalists.

Shroud Forum.

Shroud Story.

[Sam Ketcham]

I was in France and saw the remains of M. Magdelene in a Church; I was to Ephasis and that is where Mary went basically fdleeing the Romans. Somehow, the story doesn't seem to fly.

[AnAmericanMother]

It may be peer reviewed, but it does NOT show any actual tests on the Shroud. It proposes a possible mechanism for the coloration, but ran no direct experiments and expressly reaches no conclusion.

That is an interesting hypothesis, nothing more.

[Swordmaker]

If this was done by a fraudster, he was very disciplined to make only one - he could have done a few saints too - "This is the Blessed Mother's footprints, this is St. Augustine's right hand, this is St. Hermit's knee print - he spent ten years on his knees..."

This is the paradox of the Shroud. That paradox is why it is so fascinating and the single most studied object in history. Every answered question creates dozens more unanswered ones.

Either:

The Shroud is a self-portrait of the most important and enigmatic man in history miraculously imprinted on his burial shroud perhaps at the moment of resurrection...

or,

The Shroud is a miraculous artistic creation of an unsung genius with an encyclopedic knowledge of Roman Crucifixion techniques, Jewish burial customs, Forensic medicine, and a preternatural insight into scientific tests and technologies that would not be invented for another 600 years who made only one masterpiece artwork completely out of any contemporary genre and then disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Which is the more miraculous???

[Swordmaker]

It may be peer reviewed, but it does NOT show any actual tests on the Shroud. It proposes a possible mechanism for the coloration, but ran no direct experiments and expressly reaches no conclusion.

Good observation.

There are some experiments that have been done with some interesting results. The coatings on Linen have been duplicated using Rogers hypothesized reactions but not with an image with the clarity and detail found on the Shroud.

One of the seemingly insurmountable problems is the vertical collimation of the image creation mechanism which would tend to rule out any gaseous mechanism which would tend to diffuse in all directions. To my way of thinking, unless someone can come up with a mechanism that would allow a gas to move only in a laser like column upward or downward for several centimeters, that would rule out the putrecine/cadaverine gas model.

We have photomicrographs of the actual coatings... extremely thin... extremely fragile. The coating has been analyzed.

This photomicrograph shows the
places where two fibers were pulled out
of sampling adhesive leaving their colored
coating behind. The coating is too thin
to measure accurately with a standard
microscope; however, it appears to be
200-600 nanometers thick (in the range
of a wavelength of visible light).

The main thing is we now know what the image is made of... How it was made is another question that Rogers provided this hypothesis for.

Unfortunately, Rogers died unexpectedly before he could take the next step. Right now, getting access to the Shroud and Shroud samples is extremely difficult because of politics.

Would you like to be a member of the Shroud of Turin Ping list?

[AnAmericanMother]

The problem is, this whole thing is working backwards.

It's not really a true scientific experiment, because even the most disinterested scientist involved knows what he's dealing with and what answer everybody wants. He can't resist speculation, as in the paper you cite.

And my concern remains with the burden of proof going the wrong way here. The burden should be on the proponents, not the skeptics.

And as far as setting up an impossible standard for a forger, this idea that a forger would have to have some sort of encyclopedic knowledge of anything is not accurate. Our knowledge of the basic facts of life of that time (including scientific skills and artistic techniques) is in fact further removed from medieval times than the medieval man was removed from Biblical times. We are assuming much more than he did, and our knowledge is much more sketchy (much of our knowledge of Roman executions and Jewish burials of the type is fairly hypothetical, because there are few written accounts with that sort of detail and little archaeological evidence.) And the medieval man was growing his food, building his towns, weaving his cloth, making his art, reading, writing, and travelling in pretty much the same way that a man in the time of the late Roman Empire would have done.

We, on the other hand, are living in a completely different world on every basic level -- most people living today have never spun yarn or woven anything, harnessed a horse, walked more than a dozen miles or killed anything themselves for food. It's interesting that the scientists could find only ONE person (now deceased) who grew, retted, and spun her own flax . . . but it still wasn't done in the ancient manner (as the authors fairly noted) because she treated it with modern chemicals, washed it in modern chlorinated water, and ironed it with a modern iron!

And, btw, I had a little geology in college. I am not familiar with the geology of the eastern Med, but I find it hard to believe that there is any absolutely unique rock that comes only from Jerusalem, fragments of which just happened to wind up impregnated in the shroud.

Much of the cited material (like the chemical hypothesis) is a substrate of fact with a ton of speculation layered on top. That's not how science is done.

[49th]

There is also a third possibility;

The Shroud IS the genuine article but the man who appears on it is not Jesus, merely someone who bears a resemblance and died in a similar manner.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[Danette]

Mary never had other children.

[grey_whiskers]

More likely Judge Crater & Amelia Earhart

Howzabout John Kerry's SF 180 and some of the missing Rose Law Firm Billing Records?

Cheers!

[SunkenCiv]

:')

[ColdSteelTalon]

If any of this were to be true. Which I know its not. but if it were to be true.

The Jesus was not the son of God.

he did not die on the Cross for our sins.

He did not rise from the dead.

And there is no salvation, No afterlife and certainly no reason to live a good life or even try.

But I know that this is a hoax. If the graves go back to the period they might have been planted there by people who wanted to lie about Christ knowing that the caskets will be found in the future. The ruling Class at the time were afraid that body of Jesus would be stolen and his disciples claim that he rose from the grave. Thats the reason they wanted a roman guard at the tomb.

[Swordmaker]

And my concern remains with the burden of proof going the wrong way here. The burden should be on the proponents, not the skeptics.

The burden of proof actually goes both ways with such an extraordinary object.

The STURP scientists were fairly convinced that they were going to Italy to prove the shroud was a pious fraud. Their entire premise was to find the evidence of artifice and go home. As Barrie Schworz likes to say, "I expected to go there, find the pigments and the brush strokes, take some pictures and go home." They kept being surprised at what the found and what they didn't find.

All they had to do was find the negator of the theory: "The Shroud is the actual burial cloth of a 1st Century man who was scourged, crucified, crowned with thorns, stabbed in the side with a spear in the exact same manner as Jesus of Nazareth." All they needed was to find one thing that would not fit, be negative, and that theory is out the window. That is why the 1988 C14 tests were so important - it was the negative. However, the results of that test flew in the face of all other facts and scholarly research.

Science cannot prove that the Shroud is the grave cloth of the man called Jesus of Nazareth. It does, however, have the capability of telling us what and perhaps how, and maybe when. Who is beyond its ken.

However, the skeptics continually propose strawmen hypotheses to "prove" that the Shroud is a fake... and those who have studied the shroud continue to show them their strawman is made of straw. The skeptics would say "Look, I made a shroud! It looks like the Shroud of Turin! That proves the Shroud is a fake." At that point, the burden of proof moves to them to show that their shroud does indeed duplicate the nature of the one in question. They have failed in every attempt.

Others come up with the "AHA! I found the artist who created the Shroud!" Two of them, Picknet and Price, a "paranormal / psychic investigator and a journalist" decided the artist was Leonardo da Vinci and published a book claiming to have proved the shroud a hoax by good old Leo. Again, the burden of proof shifted to the skeptics and again they failed. Leonardo was born 102 years after the shroud was first displayed in Lirey.

Skeptics are actually very good for shroud research... they keep people looking. Although they often refuse to accept the disproofs of their claims, they challenge the researchers to go farther.

Very few of the skeptics are scientists... their prime leader Joe Nickel is a stage magician. What is also amazing to me is the amount of what the skeptics think they "know" that has been already disproved by scientists working in the lab or in the field. The data is there for everyone to use, but the "skeptics" simply discount it because it must have been done by "Christians." It is the scientists in this research that keep unearthing facts.

Research on the shroud is a multidisciplinary endeavor. You claim that "(much of our knowledge of Roman executions and Jewish burials of the type is fairly hypothetical, because there are few written accounts with that sort of detail and little archaeological evidence.)" but that is not really true. One of the things I have found amazing is how much we have learned because of the Shroud research as scholars dug into documents in archives that but for the Shroud probably would have kept gathering dust in closets and bookshelves around the world.

We have many records of that period (the Jews were copious record keepers as were the Romans, especially where cultural activities were concerned) and we have far more understanding of burial practices from scientifically excavating actual tombs than would any medieval artisan.

Medieval artists confabulated THEIR times with all times in the past. Their customs were extended to be the customs of foreign countries in their present age as well as ancient times. Their dress, their burial practices, etc. were used to depict, from the imaginations, what they assumed were the customs, dress, burial practices, etc. of Jerusalem 2000 years ago. We know this because we have their art, their writings, etc. Realism, as a genre of art, especially religious art, had not been re-invented in the 14th Century. That would come a century later with Leonardo and others of his period. The 20 or so existent copies of the Shroud from the period are crude caricatures of the shroud they were copying.

We know what techniques were used in weaving, fullering, retting, dyeing, and bleaching because we have many of their cloths still extant. You'd also be surprised at the amount of woven material that still exists from the 1st Century. These are all available for our scientific examination.

On the other hand, when I look at archaeology, I often see too much nose picking and speculation masquerading as "fact"... interpretations that don't hold water because they are built on a house of cards whose foundation built on quicksand is really shaky. (hows that for mixing metaphors?)