Posted on 09/28/2008 8:19:34 AM PDT by dascallie
PRESS RELEASE: Los Alamos National Laboratory team of scientists prove carbon 14 dating of the Shroud of Turin wrong
COLUMBUS, Ohio, August 15 — In his presentation today at The Ohio State University’s Blackwell Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) chemist, Robert Villarreal, disclosed startling new findings proving that the sample of material used in 1988 to Carbon-14 (C-14) date the Shroud of Turin, which categorized the cloth as a medieval fake, could not have been from the original linen cloth because it was cotton. According to Villarreal, who lead the LANL team working on the project, thread samples they examined from directly adjacent to the C-14 sampling area were “definitely not linen” and, instead, matched cotton. Villarreal pointed out that “the [1988] age-dating process failed to recognize one of the first rules of analytical chemistry that any sample taken for characterization of an area or population must necessarily be representative of the whole. The part must be representative of the whole. Our analyses of the three thread samples taken from the Raes and C-14 sampling corner showed that this was not the case.” Villarreal also revealed that, during testing, one of the threads came apart in the middle forming two separate pieces. A surface resin, that may have been holding the two pieces together, fell off and was analyzed. Surprisingly, the two ends of the thread had different chemical compositions, lending credence to the theory that the threads were spliced together during a repair. LANL’s work confirms the research published in Thermochimica Acta (Jan. 2005) by the late Raymond Rogers, a chemist who had studied actual C-14 samples and concluded the sample was not part of the original cloth possibly due to the area having been repaired. This hypothesis was presented by M. Sue Benford and Joseph G. Marino in Orvieto, Italy in 2000. Benford and Marino proposed that a 16th Century patch of cotton/linen material was skillfully spliced into the 1st Century original Shroud cloth in the region ultimately used for dating. The intermixed threads combined to give the dates found by the labs ranging between 1260 and 1390 AD. Benford and Marino contend that this expert repair was necessary to disguise an unauthorized relic taken from the corner of the cloth. A paper presented today at the conference by Benford and Marino, and to be published in the July/August issue of the international journal Chemistry Today, provided additional corroborating evidence for the repair theory.
Ahhhh....no. Christian faith doesn’t need any supposed relics, real or fake, as a foundation. God’s Word provides the foundation and the real enigma is why anyone today would spend their time pursuing such things.
Thanks for the ping!
The great minds can date a scrap of wood a thousand years old but cannot date a few scraps of cloth?
I have spent more than a month reading Everything on the shroud. It is a medieval fake without a doubt. These goobers at Los Alamos are not representing Los Alamos, they are part of STURP. STURP's whole history has been to try and undermine the science and history that shows the shroud to be a fake. Three separate labs carbon dated the shroud to no earlier than 1290. The repair crap came from Benford and Marino, famous for their "studies" of spontaneous human combustion and the ability of pyramids to sharpen razors. Photographs of the samples analyzed show them to be 3:1 weave like the rest of the shroud and NO THREADS ARE MISSING. NO scientist at the three labs that did the tests doubt their findings. The Los Alamos/STURP goobers were deliberately excluded from the C-14 tests and they have repeatedly tried to reinsert themselves into the process.
The Raes sample was NOT adjacent to the samples tested, but the Vatican DOES have the piece that was next to it. It was examined by experts under high powered microscopes and was found to have a (bioplastic film), but its authenticity wasn't questioned. The Thermochemica Acta article referenced has been thoroughly refuted. If the Vatican wants additional testing done, they have a sample in hand that could be used without disturbing the shroud, but they won't do it because they know it will verify that it is a fake.
Excellent! Thanks!
The veracity of the STURP scientists has never been invalidated. To the contrary. You are spinning misinformaiton.
What are your credentials? A “month” of internet data seeking? ...sites with a clear skeptic pov?
I’ve also read exhaustively about this ....much longer than a “month” I assure you...more like 15 years. I also know all about the Sue Benford and Joseph Marino data.
It is well known that the shroud was patched by nuns during the fire of 1532 and that molten silver also dropped on portions of it at that time as well . All documented.
Barry Swortz, the official STURP documenting photographer in 1988— maintians the best Shroud website is a devout JEW, never converted to Christainity and yet he firmly believes this is the first century burial cloth if the man Jesus. See below: from http://www.shroud.com/message.htm
Dear Guest:
It is with great pride and excitement that I welcome you to this web site. My name is Barrie M. Schwortz, and I am your host. As the Official Documenting Photographer for the Shroud of Turin Research Project, Inc., (STURP), I was privileged to be a member of the team that completed the first extensive scientific examination of the Shroud of Turin in 1978. Between October 8 and October 14, 1978, our team spent 120 hours with the Shroud of Turin.
In the earliest stages of my involvement , I wondered whether someone raised as an Orthodox Jew should be a part of such a “Christian” project. Even then I clearly understood that this was probably the most important relic of Christianity. In my heart I asked myself, “Should I be a part of this?” But my good friend and fellow team member, the late Don Lynn, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, was quick to remind me that the man in question was also a Jew. He urged me to “go to Turin and do the best job possible” and worry about “why and for what purpose” when I got back. He suggested that one day, I would know. I have never regretted taking his advice.
Now, over twenty years later, my “purpose” has become very clear. As the Documenting Photographer for the project, I felt a responsibility to complete what I began, and make available some of the 2700 photographs and other materials I collected during the four years of the project. And finally tell the story of what took place in my own words and from my perspective. Frankly, I am still Jewish, yet I believe the Shroud of Turin is the cloth that wrapped the man Jesus after he was crucified. That is not meant as a religious statement, but one based on my privileged position of direct involvement with many of the serious Shroud researchers in the world, and a thorough knowledge of the scientific data, unclouded by media exaggeration and hype. The only reason I am still involved with the Shroud of Turin is because knowing the unbiased facts continues to convince me of its authenticity. And I believe only a handful of people have really ever had access to all the unbiased facts. Most of the public has had to depend on the media, who always seem to sensationalize the story or reduce the facts to two minute sound bites from so-called experts who have “solved the mystery.” Very few of these “experts” ever took the time to research the subject, perhaps in part because so much of the information was hard to find.
So my purpose has become very clear. This website was built to give you, the viewer, an opportunity to have access to the same information that the researchers have used in their study of the Shroud. In fact, this site gives you access to the research itself in many cases.
Over the years, my photographs have been used by Shroud researchers and have appeared in many books, magazines, scientific journals, films and television documentaries. Now, this website allows you to examine those same high quality photographs of the Shroud, review scientific papers and articles, find books and other information, access Shroud resources, obtain Shroud materials and even interact directly with Shroud researchers. (Think of it as the first Interactive Center for Shroud Study in Cyberspace!) And all without anyone insisting that you accept their “theory” about the image on the Shroud of Turin. After all, intelligent people, given the facts, should be able to decide for themselves.
The goal is to make this website the definitive Internet resource for Shroud study in the 21st century. Your active participation is necessary for that goal to be achieved. So thank you for joining me. I hope you find the material on this site useful in your search to “see for yourself.”
Warmest regards,
Barrie M. Schwortz
1094 Highland Meadows Drive
Florissant, CO 80816, U.S.A
typo...STURP 1978
Thanks for the info dascallie.
I am much smarter than you and my one month is worth more than your 15 years. I will prove it.
Do you agree with Raymond N. Rogers theory?, "Rogers suspected contamination and, more important, reported that threads from the 1988 samples contain no vanillin, a compound in flax that gradually disappears. By his calculations, the shroud is 1,300 to 3,000 years old. Though it's possible the cloth dates from Jesus' lifetime, Rogers noted, actual connection to Jesus can never be proven."
And where does the Los Alamos National Laboratory team gets it finances?
I’m willing to bet that the Shroud of Turin is at least as authentic as a religious relic as the ‘magic rock’ in the black cube in Mecca.
Whatever they do they do it with my money, not yours. Barney Frank is flushing yours down the toilet as we speak.
This is new? Or are the scientists finally getting around to presenting the papers. I thought this was all released a few years back.
It is believed, in Islam, that the rock and some other objects there constituted a device previously identified as Abraham's Altar.
The black rock is, itself, embedded in a stainless steel bracket. The bracket was devised some time in the Middle Ages when the Arabs developed stainless steel (easy to do if you have iron/nickel meteorites around).
This device is housed in a structure with a large black curtain around it.
Many people believe the large black curtain and the structure to be, in fact, a rock. They are not. The rock is far smaller. I have several neighbors who have touched it.
I would be intereted in what all you have read.
Wow! Thank you for that link, dascallie. I didn’t know about that one.
Here's what you are having a problem with ~ the sheer mass and volume of representative works from the First Century AD.
Ain't much there.
In fact, there's so little of it they are now reduced to scouring the bottom of an Egyptian public latrine because it was found to contain parchment text from an ancient Torah.
Going back much futher, to 3000 years, our manuscript remains are really, really slim.
It's possible such an item (an ancient Torah of an unknown Jewish sect) served as a source for much of the Koran. You'd have to have special conditions to keep it in shape for early Medieval Damascene scribes to work with it ~ e.g. a very dry cave near Mecca ~ kind of what Mohammad said ~
Other than that everything is carved in stone or mud.
Ancient cloth is also in short supply.
This latest item, pulling apart a thread of hand twilled cloth and finding it separate into both cotton and linen, is interesting. Tell you a lot about how impoverished it was in the Middle Ages ~ lot of folks around knew how to do invisible reweaving to repair cloth. We, currently, are in short supply of such skilled folks. Almost a forgotten art. However, I'm old enough to remember dry cleaners with the sign "invisible reweaving" ~ but barely.
BTW, you can read this little discovery as two things ~ 1) as a repair, and 2) something done by someone willing to ignore ancient Jewish prohibitions on mixing two types of cloth.
That, at least, dates the repair to long after Jesus' day.
This is the book that changed my mind. Wilson takes a different tact on the search for evidence. He uses the detective method and traces the shroud through historical clues from Jerusalem to Constantinople where the Templars found it and brought it to Turin. New bio-tech finds are very interesting also. Pollens, etc. found only in the area of Jerusalem. As someone mentioned, the relic does not affect faith either way. Faith is faith and does not depend on anything but God’s Word. But isn’t it exciting to think that you are looking at the face and body of Jesus?
WILSON, Ian - The Blood and the Shroud: New Evidence that the World’s Most Sacred Relic is Real - Simon & Schuster New York 1998 (English) (Available from Amazon.com) In this book, Wilson presents new scientific evidence that challenges the 1988 carbon dating and other arguments against the authenticity of the Shroud. Current studies, presented here by Wilson, have reversed the views of many people in the scientific and religious communities.
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