Posted on 07/21/2019 6:56:03 AM PDT by Kaslin
Important news about the Shroud of Turin, believed by millions to be the authentic burial cloth of Jesus Christ, has been flagrantly under-reported.
Nevertheless, the lack of mainstream media interest does not diminish landmark new research contesting the results of the controversial 1988 radiocarbon test that dated the Shroud between the years 1260 and 1390.
Immediately after those dates were cited three decades ago, and to this day, the Shroud has been tainted, maligned, disparaged and denigrated while wedded to the descriptions “not authentic,” a “forgery” or “medieval hoax.”
Meanwhile, the medieval date range is still continuously questioned and debunked by scientists and experts. The chief complaint is that the three small Shroud test samples were cut from the same outer edge on a piece of the cloth long thought to have been added later in the Middle Ages. This would have been part of a repair or reweave on a corner that had become worn and frayed due to frequent handling when the Shroud was held up for public exhibition. In fact, this theory was proven correct in 2005 by American chemist Raymond N. Rogers.
Thankfully now there is a new chapter in the 1988 dating debate. Raw data and documents from the original test that were “unavailable” (many scientists and researchers would say deliberately “hidden”) were obtained in 2017 by Tristan Casabianca, a French researcher.
In March, after two years of tests and analysis, Casabianca and his team of scientists published their results in the scholarly journal Archaeometry.
This month, in an interview with the French publication L'Homme Nouveau (Google translates into English), Casabianca discusses how he obtained the documents, his team’s methodology, and conclusion. Here is an excerpt:
“In 1989, the results of the shroud dating were published in the prestigious journal Nature: between 1260 and 1390 with 95% certainty. But for thirty years, researchers have asked the laboratories for raw data. These have always refused to provide them. In 2017, I submitted a legal request to the British Museum, which supervised the laboratories. Thus, I had access to hundreds of unpublished pages, which include these raw data. With my team, we conducted their analysis. Our statistical analysis shows that the 1988 carbon 14 dating was unreliable: the tested samples are obviously heterogeneous, [showing many different dates], and there is no guarantee that all these samples, taken from one end of the sheet, are representative of the whole fabric. It is therefore impossible to conclude that the shroud of Turin dates from the Middle Ages.”
Here is why Casabianca’s conclusions are important to someone like me.
Since the 1990s, I have been a proponent of the study of the Shroud of Turin — a 14.5- by-3.5-foot linen cloth, and indeed believe it is the authentic burial Shroud of Jesus Christ.
Meanwhile, the Shroud continues to be the most studied and analyzed artifact in the world, with its numerous unexplained properties continuing to baffle modern science. Chief among the mysteries is what “caused” a linear, front to back, anatomically correct, blood-stained image of a tortured, crucified man — with bodily markings that perfectly align with all the Biblical accounts of Christ’s suffering and death — to appear on the cloth.
The Shroud also possesses photographic-negative properties first discovered in 1898, that on the “positive image” clearly show every gruesome, agonizing, torment endured by the “man.”
Additionally, the Shroud displays three-dimensional “distance information” resembling a topographical map but within the cloth’s two-dimensional image of the man.
Furthermore, the image depth measures only two micro-fibers with no variation (such consistency is a feat impossible with human hands). And more unusual, the image does not penetrate the cloth but sits on top.
I could go into vast detail about many more fascinating facts, but the big takeaway is that the more you learn about the Shroud’s mysteries, the more you believe in its authenticity.
Shroud scientists and other experts who have never accepted the 1290 – 1360 date range are applauding Casabianca as his team who are calling for rigorous new testing to end the absurd notion that the Shroud is a medieval hoax.
Not only did those dates defy logic because of circumstantial evidence such as art, artifacts, and coins that mirror the Shroud face as early as AD 692, but the 1988 tests diminished the conclusions of the equally famous 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project known as STURP. As the first and last comprehensive research project authorized by the Vatican, STURP employed 40 esteemed scientists using 1970s-state-of-the-art equipment and given access to the Shroud for 120 hours. Here is the concluding paragraph from STURP's final October 1981 report:
“Thus, the answer to the question of how the image was produced or what produced the image remains, now, as it has in the past, a mystery. We can conclude for now that the Shroud image is that of a real human form of a scourged, crucified man. It is not the product of an artist. The bloodstains are composed of hemoglobin and also give a positive test for serum albumin. The image is an ongoing mystery and until further chemical studies are made, perhaps by this group of scientists, or perhaps by some scientists in the future, the problem remains unsolved.”
Barrie Schwortz, a world-renowned Shroud expert who was a STURP photographer and later founded Shroud.com, the most visited Shroud site, told me what happened in 1988:
“As soon as the dating results were leaked to the press, the world of the Shroud came to a complete and sudden halt. Many researchers took this as the final word and disengaged completely. The years of hard work by the STURP team and the many papers they published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature was immediately disregarded and ultimately, forgotten. These were indeed the bleak years of Shroud research.”
But now the Shroud is experiencing a renaissance.
Besides Casabianca’s breakthrough research, there are two new Shroud museums, a site for Shroud evangelization, a famous collection of Shroud photography now available online, much Shroud activity, and generally a renewed interest in the cloth.
I am proud to be a part of this movement by helping lead a team of Shroud experts to raise the $2.5 million needed to showcase the cloth’s mysteries in a unique exhibition at the popular and prestigious Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.
Of course, the Shroud will not be present at the museum because it does not travel. Since 1578, it has been housed in the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Turin, Italy — except during the Second World War when it was hidden from Hitler — but the Shroud will be there in spirit!
After the funds are raised, our team will assist the museum in producing the world’s most high-tech, creative exhibit, utilizing state-of-the-art display technology. The Shroud’s unexplained properties will be brought to life, leaving visitors spellbound.
Targeted for early January 2021, the exhibition will be open in time for the presidential inauguration at the U.S. Capitol, only three blocks from the museum.
The Museum of the Bible’s planned exhibit is part of a great Shroud awakening. Why do I believe that this is happening? The answer is the same as I have.
That article isn’t the only source of information about the Shroud, or the earlier carbon dating fiasco/set-up. Duh.
To characterize a test as “fraudulent” simply because it was flawed ... is in itself fraudulent.
whole lotta confirmation bias going on here.
No kidding.
But it was the one posted and the one I was commenting on, so...
“He doesn’t look Jewish, period.”
Fer corn’s sake, read some history.
There was a guest on the old Art Bell radio program who became a Christian because of the shroud.
You still don’t seem to get it, do you? The Shroud existed pretty much in an unchanged condition for one hundred years before Leonardo was even born! There are zero chemical elements found on the Shroud necessary for any of the proposed medieval creation techniques proposed by the authors of the Da Vinci book or documentary, a necessary requirement for any photographic or artistic image technique to show an image. The scientific tests used, X-ray micro-spectrometry and Raman spectroscopy, are so sensitive they could not only specify that the samples had been in an inert vinyl sample envelope before testing, but the testing lab could specify the manufacturer and batch number of the production run of those envelopes from the trace elements transferred to the samples! If those tests state there is no pigment or photographic light sensitive chemical residue on the fibers, nor any trace of such chemicals EVER being there, they aren’t and never were!
You may want Da Vinci to have built a time machine, and been prescient enough to know to obtain a 1sr Century cloth on which to create his "better" version of the Shroud, and also known he’d need to obtain both pollens which are from plants that grow only in a fifty mile radius of Judea, one of which went extinct in the eight century, and travertine aragonite limestone dust with the exact chemical makeup found only in rock east of the Jerusalem gate near Golgotha to carefully imbed in the cloth below the feet, buttocks, and shoulders on the backside of the Shroud. . . an amazing feat of foreknowledge that somehow Leonardo knew that he needed to provide so that late 20th Century paleontologists and geologists would find this "salted" evidence he hid on his creation (sarcasm off).
The question arises as to why would Da Vinci have bothered to use human blood in his fraud, especially blood high in bilirubin, the sign of a tortured person, and then also make sure the chest wound blood was a natural flow of blood with plural fluid, and separated plasma? What was the necessity for him to do all this to fool peasants, when paint would have sufficed? Beyond requiring Da Vinci’s invention of a time machine, Picknett and Prince’s off-the-wall claims require Da Vinci to know far too much science and scholarship which he could not have known to created the Shroud.
Picknett and Prince propose an early photographic technique using a camera obscura with long exposures. However, professional photographic experts are all in agreement that the image on the Shroud image is NOT an artifact of technology involving light. It shows zero light artifacting such as shadowing. It is instead best described as a 2D database of an analog 3d terrain map. No mere photograph can provide such 3D data.
Multiple photographers and even photography classes have attempted to replicate the image on the Shroud using light photography. . . and failed. Picknett and Prince wrote their book in a vacuum of ignorance having not bothered to research the nearly a century of good scientific and scholarly research that preceded their popularization and hysterical bastardized novelization of history.
By the way, Damascus steel process was never lost. It’s been understood by blacksmiths for centuries. It’s merely folded steel, with hammer welding. Damascus steel shotgun and rifle barrels have been around for centuries. In actual fact, even Samurai swords are a form of Damascus steel raised to a high art. In the firearms, problems arise because rust can form in the loser folded steel of the barrels, weakening the steel over time. They can fail spectacularly as the chambers can blow out under stronger modern loads. The rumor that Damascus steel was a lost art is a myth, mostly created by Hollywood.
It’s possible that’s the reason scientists keep coming up with a sore forehead and puzzled expressions on their faces. They’ve been trying unscrew the inscrutable. That doesn’t mean they won’t stop trying. "Man’s reach should out strip his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?"
It’s likely you’re correct, I’m working from a failing memory here. . . and been working hard packing to move to St. George, Utah in just over a month. We’re getting hell out of HELL, California’s suburb of Hell, that is.
It’s not just this one article but a the compendium of evidence starting in 1988 with the deliberate abandonment of protocols which I outlined for you. These protocols had been hammered out in a series of international meetings between the custodian of the Shroud, the Vatican, the labs, and other involved parties over a couple of years. Yet literally at the last minute, the entire agreed protocol was tossed for one that guaranteed failure.
Then the averaging of the data for public consumption. WRONG! Very unscientific, and not the standard of practice!
Then a gleeful news conference to report the Shroud was a 14th Century hoax, not their findings, with the announcer grinning ear-to-ear. Also inappropriate.
This was followed by outright refusal to show their work for peer-review, something all good scientist with nothing to hide welcome. . . for thirty years they’ve blocked every attempt to see the raw data.
Stonewalling the peer-reviewed articles that did appear without seriously responding.
This is a pattern of fraudulent science.
“This is a pattern of fraudulent science.”
Unmistakably.
I'm really not trying to be argumentative, just to understand your theory of the case.
These protocols had been hammered out in a series of international meetings between the custodian of the Shroud, the Vatican, the labs, and other involved parties over a couple of years. Yet literally at the last minute, the entire agreed protocol was tossed for one that guaranteed failure.
As I understand it the parties included the University of Arizona, Oxford, the British Museum and three independant labs and the others you mentioned.
These are all serious organizations. Did any of them complain when the negotiated protocol was abandoned?
If not, why not?
...for thirty years they’ve blocked every attempt to see the raw data.
It sounds like Casabianca has now obtained it. If I understand correctly, and I haven't read his entire paper, after his statistical analysis his issue is mostly with the 95% confidence interval claimed at the initial press conference.
He doesn't claim any fraud and explicitly says nothing in his analysis shows that a medieval origin date isn't correct, only that the range of years is possibly greater.
I'm just curious if you think the entire 1988 exercise is invalid and so we're back to square one, and if so why aren't there more complaints from all of the scientific and religious parties mentioned earlier?
The British Museum was involved only after the fact to my understanding as a custodian of the data, which was still under the control of Oxford University. The three labs were the University of Arizona, the Oxford University, and the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
No, the three labs did not complain at the time but many other parties involved in the forging of the protocols did when the learned of the last minute changes. Many of them complained about the choices of the Control Samples, and many complained about the failure to anonymize the sub-samples of the Shroud material or the control samples by chopping them into bits before sending them to the testing labs to prevent identification due to weave pattern as the administrating lab had been unable to find any ancient samples with comparable three-over-one twill weave patterns. Some at the time were stating that the breaking of the protocols was deliberate to bias any results by putting their thumbs on the scales, so to speak. It broke the double-blind requirement in the testing where the testers were not supposed to know which samples were the target sample. It was highly criticized by other scientists who knew the requirements for proper C14 testing when the details of the broken sampling and handling was exposed.
Why they did it? The politics of Atheists and skeptics in science seeking to denigrate Christian or any religious beliefs. That explains the absolute glee expressed in the news conference.
That 95% confidence comes from the Chi Squared statistical test of the raw data from each of the three labs finally obtained by a court order. It was obvious from the beginning even without that, just using the fact that not a single sub-sample’s reported age with its degrees of confidence overlapped another’s age and degree of confidence. Calculating the Chi Squared statistical tests on the massaged data back in 1989, and again in 1993, and in 1995, peer-reviewed papers on the statistical probability that the four sub-samples were identical, were falsified with results of also 95% certainty. Semimojo, in the Chi Square test anything above 4-5% is suspect for contamination from some foreign, differently aged material, and requires further investigation for the source. This 95% result is so high, the conclusion is that they are more likely to have come from four different, completely unrelated sources.
The University of Arizona lab had to have seen the Red Flag right away. . . because they got sub-samples A and E. . . The two sub-samples with the greatest variation in ages. Sub-sample A reported an age showing it had been created in ~1390 AD, plus of minus ~15 years, while sub-sample E tested to ~1220 AD, plus or minus 15 years. At between between ~170 to ~200 years difference in possible ages, the Chi Squared statistical testing on those two samples was simply off the charts. . . yet that discrepancy in ages was not emphasized or reported as an anomaly worth asking “why?” or even saying “Hmmmm, that’s funny. . .” and doing further investigation.
Real scientists don’t attempt to obscure and hide those data that fail to meet their preconceived and preferred results. That’s what these “pseudo scientists” did. They elected to hide and bury the raw data for almost thirty years from other researchers and claim it “settled science” and that “we did the C14 testing and it’s a 14th Century Hoax!” ignoring the weight of all the other scientific and historic evidence that the Shroud long predated that 14th Century date, thus likely invalidating the C14 test, but that was their preferred, expected, desired, and perhaps, pre-determined result.
Real scientists, who did look at the 99% of other scientific and historic data that showed the Shroud to be much older than the claimed C14 test’s 1350 AD 1%, did say “Hmmmmm, that’s funny” and went looking for reasons for the discrepancy and found the reason which totally, and absolutely falsified that 1988 C14 test. This paper is only the SEVENTH peer-reviewed scientific paper falsifying the 1988 C14 test. It is only the FOURTH peer-reviewed paper doing so using normal statistical means applied to all C14 samples to qualify they are homogenous with the overall item being dated. All four falsified the 1988 C14 test by proving the samples were NOT homogenous. They showed that the master lab which administered the testing, once they had the results in hand, especially the raw data, in the course of normal analysis, which includes applying the Chi Squared statistical test, HAD TO HAVE KNOWN THAT THE SAMPLE WAS NOT HOMOGENOUS IN ITSELF and was therefore contaminated with materials of different ages, yet they continued with a charade of reporting the dating of a sample that could NOT be assured to be homogenous with the item intended by the test to be dated, as if this contaminated sample were representative of the whole. They had to have known, because every C14 test requires the Chi Squared test be applied to the results, and that is the fraud.
The Shroud is not unique. Pyramids, Peruvian stonework, Stonehenge, Rongorongo boards (Easter Island), The Voynich Manuscript, etc. Lotsa theories on how, but no one has yet figured any of them out out.
I don’t know; at least they have plausible theories about those. (And the Voynich could be just nonsense.)
I think the shroud is unique. It seems to confound every theory that we can test. It’s also uniquely ‘loaded’ in terms of its potential influence - which could be a motive for fraud or attempts at suppression in its study. (For the record, I’m not Catholic, and I don’t have any particular ‘belief investment’ in the shroud.)
But it seems to me that if it’s a fraud, created with the idea of convincing people that it was the burial cloth of Jesus, we should today be able to easily figure out how it was done. (It wouldn’t have needed to be done as ingeniously as it appears to have been, to accomplish the goal of hoodwinking people those hundreds of years ago. And yet it’s confounding us even today.)
(And the Voynich could be just nonsense.)
Why they did it? The politics of Atheists and skeptics in science seeking to denigrate Christian or any religious beliefs.
This is the part I have the biggest problem with. I hesitate to assume bad faith on the part of such reputable institutions, including the Vatican, and so many scientists when a professional disagreement on methods seems more likely. To me this strays into conspiracy territory and I just don’t see the upside for the testers to risk their personal and institutional reputations.
It also doesn’t change my opinion of the execrable article that started this dialog.
“I hesitate to assume bad faith on the part of such reputable institutions, including the Vatican, and so many scientists when a professional disagreement on methods seems more likely.”
There are no reputable institutions. Every university, every research lab is rotten to the core with leftwad scoundrels.
Read more. Irredeemably corrupt individuals saw an opportunity to produce “evidence” against the existence of God, and they took it.
They thought a “scientific finding” that the Shroud was fake would contribute to their effort to eradicate religion, and they knew they could produce such “data” by testing a medieval patch instead of the Shroud itself.
The problem with dismissing an allegation as a “conspiracy theory” is that people do conspire. All the time.
(Rolls eyes into next *continent*.)
This isn't a difference between two different conventions, each of which has plausible validity under different circumstances.
Making sure the sample is
a) homogeneous
and
b) representative of the item from which it was taken
is something you learn in freshman chem.
These clowns didn't do that.
And motive and opportunity have already been amply demonstrated.
The fact that the age of the three samples varies systematically with the increasing fraction of what was already *known* to be a foreign substance, and consistent with the known age of that foreign substance...when the prior-agreed protocols all agreed to avoid that area of the Shroud, makes this a slam dunk.
The only other thing they could do more is closed circuit drone films of the people conspiring, and email logs of them discussing exactly how they'd do it.
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