628-year-old fake news: Scientists prove Turin Shroud not genuine (again) First of all, Sacajaweau, Bishop Pierre d’Arcis letter has actually never been found, only his rough draft. Your article claims:
“D’Arcis told the pope that his predecessor as Bishop of Troyes, Henry of Poitiers, had fairly quickly discovered “the fraud” and obtained a confession from the artist who produced it that it was “a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed.”
Pierre d’Arcis claimed that his predecessor found that Geoffrey de Charny “being consumed with the passion of avarice, and not from any motive of devotion but only of gain, procured for his church a certain cloth cunningly painted, upon which by a clever sleight of hand was depicted the twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and front, he falsely declaring and pretending that this was the actual shroud in which our Saviour Jesus Christ was enfolded in the tomb, and upon which the whole likeness of the Saviour had remained thus impressed together with the wounds which He bore.” and that as proof, his predecessor, Bishop Henry of Troyes had found the “painter.”
This letter was never sent to either the Vatican or to the anti-Pope at Avignon, as searches of the archives have not revealed a final version of the memoranda letter in either location. There are several reasons why this claim cannot be true.
- As stated above, Geoffrey de Charny had been the most exalted of all the knights of French Chivalry, being selected by King Phillip the Just of France to be his Standard Bearer, to fight by his side in battle, carrying the king’s banner. Sir Geoffrey as the author of the French Code of Chivalry for all Knights to comport themselves with honor and honesty, was considered the epitome of that code, which all knights looked up to. As such, he would not knowingly be part of a con.
- When Sir Geoffrey built the little wooden chapel at Lirey, he funded it and the clergy there, entirely with a rente from his own family coffers, accepting no donations from pilgrims.
- Bishop Henry of Troyes did not file a complaint, his replacement, Pierre d’Arcis, some 25 to 30 years later started to, but did not complete it, when pilgrims started diverting from the Cathedral of Troyes, which had their own collection of relics, to go to Lirey to see the Shroud instead prompted him to do something. Only a single, rough draft with cross outs, and marginalia comments for corrections, exists in the files today.
- Pierre d’Arcis’ claim that Bishop Henry of Troyes had found and spoken to the artist who had “painted” the shroud we know for a fact today is a bogus claim because we know for a fact that there are no pigments of any kind on the Shroud to make either the image or the blood. There is no way any such artist could have painted the image on the Shroud as it is not any kind of a painting. It bears no relationship to any contemporary, previous, or ensuing technique, style or modality of artistry from that period or any other.
- Bishop Pierre d’Arcis, instead of having the Charny family enjoined from displaying the Shroud, was censured by the Pope for his efforts to suppress the Shroud’s display, and was placed under a lifetime order to cease and desist his efforts.
- The Charny family was allowed to continue to display the Shroud as “a representation of the Shroud of Our Lord’s Jesus Christ’s Suffering and Crucifixion Under Pontius Pilate”.
As for the article’s next section recapitulating the 1988 C14 testing showing a medieval dating, that has been falsified by no less than six peer-reviewed scientific and statistical proofs showing that the sample that was taken from the Shroud was contaminated with foreign, later dated material. The first red flag that should have been noted by the three C14 labs that did the testing themselves was that the four tested sub-samples—cut from the supposedly homogeneous master sample cut from the one area of the Shroud the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project scientist ALL agreed should be avoided in their agreed protocols due to it being different both chemically and physically from the main body of the Shroud—had tested dates none of which had degrees of confidence that overlapped the next adjacent sub-sample’s degrees of confidence. Not one. This red flag lead to controversy as the averaged date of the sub-sampled dating did not comport to some of the known history of the Shroud. Then peer reviewed science started falsifying the results of the C14 test:
- No less than THREE peer-reviewed articles were published by three qualified statisticians showing that the raw data published in the Nature article on the C14 test on the Shroud FAILED the standard CHI-Squared test to show the subsamples were homogeneous. I.e. that the sub-samples were taken from the same identical item, much less cut from the same master sample. These three statistical reports had a greater than 95% degree of confidence that the subsamples were NOT homogeneous. In other words, the sub-samples, obviously cut from what SHOULD have been all of the same age, were not, and were therefore, contaminated by something of vastly different ages.
- In 2005, Pyrology Chemist Raymond N. Rogers, in an attempt to falsify a hypothesis that the explanation for the Chi-Squared discrepancy was that what was tested in the 1988 C14 test was that the sample taken from the Shroud had been cut from a corner that had been repaired in the 17th Century using a technique called French Invisible Reweaving in which very skilled craftsmen/women using dyed cotton threads twisted the newer matching dyed threads into the older damaged material, in this case, original flaxen linen, and then matched the weave of the original cloth to repair moth eaten or frayed areas. Thinking it would be a simple thing to show the hypothesis false, Rogers, working with the retained fifth sub-sample, to his surprise, both physically and chemically proved instead it was true. Rogers found one side, the right side, toward the center, was original flax linen, but toward the bottom and left selvedges, was dyed-to-match, opposite twist, alum mordant treated cotton threads, intertwined into the original threads, and then re-woven to match the pattern of the three-over-one twill of the un-dyed linen of the Shroud.
- Two other scientists, independently, using other techniques, also proved conclusively that the area in which the 1988 C14 sample was taken against their own protocols, was a mixture of older and newer plant material sufficient to skew the C14 results, thereby falsifying the results of the 1988 test.
- The article you cite, typical of skeptic sites and articles, ignores this later peer-reviewed, published science.
Finally, the article relies on two skeptics work which is, to say the least, non-scientific in that it uses fake blood, which has no blood-clotting factors to attempt to discover the real blood factors of the blood seen on the Shroud of Turin.
What I find dispositive about there entire attitude is the following statement from their original paper:
This might also help to understand how this ancient death penalty practice—of which almost nothing is known—was performed. Thus, the current authors are only dealing with the patterning rather than the controversy about the nature of the stains (blood or tempera painting?) 6-11.
These two so-called experts give more space in their footnotes to the totally discredited reports from visual light microscopist Walter C. McCrone than they do to several world-class BLOOD EXPERTS (four self-published in-peer-reviewed articles in his own Journal, compared to two peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals for Heller and Adler) and none at all to electron-microscopy, electronmicro-spectrometry, and other tests, including human immunoassays which proved without a doubt there was no “tempera paint, pigments, or vermilion paint” which McCrone claimed to have seen on the image or blood areas of the Shroud of Turin to which these to BOZOS are implying there is still possible “controversy.” Only intransigent skeptics still lift up McCrone, and his unethical shenanigans, as dispositive of anything when it comes to the Shroud of Turin. This obvious, but unreported bias in their studies spills over into their methodology and scholarship by what they choose to omit from their reports and what they include.