There is often confusion between the whole side strip and the proposed patch zone. What Adler was saying was that the side strip was part of the cloth.
I wish that the custodial authorities in Turin would allow testing. There are, from the the 2002 restoration (another subject), scrapings that could be cleaned and used for C14 testing. Regrettably, the work was done in secrecy and therefore there are serious chain-of-custody issues.
I think we are going to be in limbo for a long time. This leaves enough room for doubts and faith; and maybe that's a good thing.
Dan
I have a question about how the image might have been formed via a Maillard reaction described below:
http://www.shroudstory.com/faq-burial-of-caiaphas.htm
No modern chemist would call the process magical. No, it’s a Maillard reaction, a complex chemical process that produces caramel-like products or Melanoidins. This image forming process probably happened frequently in the limestone tombs outside the walls of ancient Jerusalem tombs. Heavy volatile amine molecules came forth from the body and reacted with a mixture of glycoside sugars and starch fractions that coated the outermost fibers of linen burial cloths in those days in that part of the world.
We can be confident that residues of starch and saccharides were there on the cloths. Thanks to the great Roman encyclopedist, Gaius Plinius Secundus, the man we know as Pliny the Elder (23-77 CE) we understand how linen was made in the first century. After hand spinning the fibers of the flax plant into yarn, individual hanks of yarn were bleached and dried. When it was time to weave the yarn (thread) into cloth, warp threads were strung vertically on a loom so that weft threads could be passed over and under them. On the loom, the warp threads were lubricated with crude starch to make weaving easier. Doing so reduced friction and lessened the chance of fraying. When a length of linen cloth was finished it was removed from the loom and washed in the suds of the Soapwort plant (Saponaria officinalis). After washing out most of the starch, the linen was laid out across bushes or hung to dry.
Where Pliny leaves off, the modern chemist picks up. Washing, even with repeated rinsing, is not perfect. Soapy residues and small amounts of starch would remain in a water soaked cloth. As the cloth dried, moisture would wick its way to the surface to evaporate into the air. As the water made its way to the surface it carried with it dissolved starch fractions and saccharides: glucose, fucose, galactose, arabinose, xylose, rhamnose, and glucuronic acid. As the water evaporated into the air these chemicals were deposited as a superthin coating on the crown fibers, the very outermost fibers of the thread. Chemists say this superficial residue of reactive saccharides is at the evaporation surface of the cloth.
Thus linen cloth made in this ancient way, with the yarn bleached before weaving, lubricated with crude starch and washed in Saponaria officinalis is ready for image formation. All that is needed are the right reactive chemicals and a mechanism to get the right quantity of the chemicals to the cloth’s surface in the right places at the right time. The amines that come from a dead body before it decomposes are just what is needed.
Many things would affect how the images would form as the amines met the saccharides: ambient temperatures and humidity in the tomb; the body chemistry of the corpse influenced by diet, disease and possible trauma; the application of different burial spices; and the quantity of residue and evenness of its coating on the cloth. Even the tightness of the weave that affects porosity is a factor. Nonetheless some imaging would take place. The process would continue until the reactants were exhausted or until fluidic bodily decomposition products formed and ravaged the images and the cloth. Soon the cloth would rot away along with the body. So when Caiaphas’ family returned to gather his bones into an ossuary, there would have been no flesh, no cloth and no images.
However, at the right moment, had the cloth and the body it enshrouded become separated, and had the tomb been opened then so that cloth might be preserved, we might very well have something of a picture of Caiaphas today. But that didn’t happen.
But was there once an exception when by some means a burial shroud and a dead body were separated? Was there an exception when a tomb was open so that the cloth might be taken from it and preserved? Is that cloth the Shroud of Turin? As we will see, from a chemist’s perspective, the answer must be an almost certain yes. But it is a chaotic, untidy yes.
It is important to note that linen cloth, as typically produced after the twelfth century and into our era, will not produce amine/saccharides images. In Pliny’s time, each hank of yarn or thread for the cloth was bleached before weaving. Such bleaching did not result in uniformly white yarn and because many hanks of yarn were required to make linen cloth, the cloth was not uniformly white. We see this, for instance, in the Turin Shroud. It has a broad variegated appearance where yarn from one hank was joined with yarn from another batch during weaving. The yarn ends were laid side by side pressed together. The overlapping ends are often visible to the unaided eye and correspond to streaks of different off-white color in the weave. One place this is particularly noticeable is in the face image where darker bands of cloth affect the way we see the image. The darker bands, because of their location at the edge of the face, make the face look gaunter than it really is. Bleaching after weaving, as was done in the medieval bleaching fields of Europe and as it is done in modern mills, prevents a reactive coating. Bleaching after weaving makes for better quality linen but it does not allow an image to form.
It is also especially important to note that there will be two such chemical coatings on the cloth. The side of the cloth that faced the sun and dried the fastest will have a dominant coating of starch fractions and saccharides from the soap. The other side will have a lesser coating. Both sides will react to the amines since some of the vapors will diffuse through the cloth. Indeed, we should have a more distinct image on one side of the cloth and a less distinct image on the other side. That is the significance of the discovery of a second facial image on the Shroud as recently reported in the peer-reviewed scientific Journal of Optics of the Institute of Physics in London (April 14, 2004).
From spectral analysis, microscopy and image analysis, we see that this is how the cloth of the Shroud of Turin was manufactured. From this, and from a modern knowledge of pathology and chemistry, we can hypothesize that this was how the images were formed on it.
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JFK_Lib -
Now if this is how the image was formed, then what is the gap between the time needed for enough amines to emerge to form the image and the point in time that the 'fluidic bodily decomposition products formed and ravaged the images and the cloth'? A few days? A Week or month? The longer this chronological gap the more likely it would seem that we should have other examples of such 'miraculous' images, but I have never heard of any other.
And also, why dont the amines also spread outward to form a more ambiguous outline if they are enough quantity to permeate the cloth itself?
And why dont the fibers between the back and the front of the image not have *any* bleaching effect as well if it was formed by a flow of gases from the interior to the external layer of fibers? Air does permeate the cloth and the chemicals for the bleach as well.
The presence of the second image on the backside seems to suggest to me something more akin to an electrical static layer as electrons do tend to move along a surface more readily, or something similar. It doenst strike me as purely chemical in nature.