Posted on 02/25/2008 12:33:54 PM PST by BGHater
The Oxford laboratory that declared the Turin Shroud to be a medieval fake 20 years ago is investigating claims that its findings were wrong.
The head of the world-renowned laboratory has admitted that carbon dating tests it carried out on Christendom's most famous relic may be inaccurate.
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Professor Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford University Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, said he was treating seriously a new theory suggesting that contamination had skewed the results.
Though he stressed that he would be surprised if the supposedly definitive 1988 tests were shown to be far out - especially "a thousand years wrong" - he insisted that he was keeping an open mind.
The development will re-ignite speculation about the four-metre linen sheet, which many believe bears the miraculous image of the crucified Christ.
The original carbon dating was carried out on a sample by researchers working separately in laboratories in Zurich and Arizona as well as Oxford.
To the dismay of Christians, the researchers concluded that the shroud was created between 1260 and 1390, and was therefore likely to be a forgery devised in the Middle Ages.
Even Anastasio Alberto Ballestrero, the then Cardinal of Turin, conceded that the relic was probably a hoax.
There have been numerous theories purporting to explain how the tests could have produced false results, but so far they have all been rejected by the scientific establishment.
Many people remain convinced that the shroud is genuine.
Prof Ramsey, an expert in the use of carbon dating in archeological research, is conducting fresh experiments that could explain how a genuinely old linen could produce "younger" dates.
The results, which are due next month, will form part of a documentary on the Turin Shroud that is being broadcast on BBC 2 on Easter Saturday.
David Rolfe, the director of the documentary, said it was hugely significant that Prof Ramsey had thought it necessary to carry out further tests that could challenge the original dating.
He said that previous hypotheses, put forward to explain how the cloth could be older than the 1988 results suggested, had been "rejected out of hand".
"The main reason is that the contamination levels on the cloth that would have been needed to distort the results would have to be equivalent to the actual sample itself," he said.
"But this new theory only requires two per cent contamination to skew the results by 1,500 years. Moreover, it springs from published data about the behaviour of carbon-14 in the atmosphere which was unknown when the original tests were carried out 20 years ago."
Mr Rolfe added that the documentary, presented by Rageh Omaar, the former BBC correspondent, would also contain new archeological and historical evidence supporting claims that the shroud was a genuine burial cloth.
The film will focus on two other recorded relics, the Shroud of Constantinople, which is said to have been stolen by Crusaders in 1204, and the Shroud of Jerusalem that wrapped Jesus's body and which, according to John's Gospel, had such a profound effect when it was discovered.
According to Mr Rolfe, the documentary will produce convincing evidence that these are one and the same as the Shroud of Turin, adding credence to the belief that it dates back to Christ's death.
you cannot be that stupid, therefore I’ll believe that you are just misinformed.....destroyed documents.....misinformation as to the true meanings of documents....please....you are pathetic, ...the Catholic church changed NOTHING...and is the only Christian denomination that presents the ENTIRE truth.....not just parts of it as does EVERY protestant denomination.....!!!
Anyone reading the thread can go up a couple of posts and see that.
My point is that your arguments from lack of corroborating stories are plainly insufficient as *proof* one way or another; although they are consistent with your allegations.
I then gave *plausible* mechanisms by which the Glastonbury legends might *happen* to be true, while by no means insisting that they were.
And bolstered this with an analogous historical situation (Troy) in which the historical elements were known to be mixed in with a lot of embellishments, etc.
I was critiquing the soundness of your chain of reasoning, rather than disputing your conclusions.
Cheers!
Nobody was asking you to.
You are only finishing off your own credibility by making such unfounded accusations.
Try reading the actual posts in this thread -- I know it's difficult, because you're used to having the forces of superstition scatter before you. At least, that's the way you're acting.
But what you haven't noticed is that people here aren't posting superstition -- there is nothing fanciful about cadaverine and putrescine, nothing fanciful about independent testing, nothing fanciful about re-weaving.
Your insistence that this requires belief in fire-breathing reindeer evinces some problem in your own attitudes.
Cheers!
“But, oh, what those five feet could do...”
“But, oh, what those five feet could do...”
Thanks for the ping!
McCrone did two of the tests done in 1973, and he either did or did not get the ‘blood’ into solution before proceeding with the benzidine and sulfuric acid tests; if he got the ‘blood’ into solution, even as the Italians did not, then McCrone could not have honestly said “I find it impossible to fault the [1973] work.” I conclude that the other possibility is the correct one: McCrone did not get the ‘blood’ into solution, in which case, his negative results with the two tests, like the 1973 results, are meaningless.
McCrone performed the phenolphthalein test, which is much more difficult to do than the benzidine test. 54 Since McCrone could not even properly handle the benzidine test, I conclude that he could not have properly done the much more complicated phenolphthalein test, in which case his obtaining negative result(s) with the latter is worthless. The Takayama and Teichman tests yielded McCrone negative results, yet since they are so insensitive, negative results with them does not mean blood is absent
Fischer, writing with the assistance of Nickell and Mueller, alleges that they found that hydrazine also dissolves “tempera paint composed of the pigments and medium identified by McCrone” and produces a pink hemochromagen-like color, thereby suggesting that H&A’s hydrazine test is given to false positives. 133 I strongly suspect that the medium referred to is a proteinaceous tempera made from animal collagen (the sources being muscle, skin, tendons, bones, cartilage, etc.), 134 and that the pigments referred to are iron oxide, vermilion/ mercury-sulfide, and rose madder. Since McCrone believes he saw merely “a few particles” of rose madder pigment, 135 since he thinks that “nearly all of the colored particles on the [Shroud] tapes are red ochre,” 136 and since McCrone’s writings give scant mention to rose madder, I fail to see the basis for Fisher et al.’s viewing rose madder as being somehow significant to discussions of what the ‘blood’ is. Parenthetically, the color “madder” was derived from the root of the field plant Rubea tinctorum; a chemical substance in the root called “alizarine” is responsible for the red color of madder.
Those are quotes from pages 4 and 10.
If someone wants to hold onto the principle that "anything's possible," no matter how fatuous or improbable, then yes, but in the nitty gritty of history the objections I laid out are pretty unanswerable. The situation with Troy is not analogous.
nature can't fight the law of averages every time. but diet and genes play an important role, of course.
As you please, but I haven’t misdirected the conversation into personalities.
Linen is flax... ALthough there might be some flax pollen on the Shroud it is not the indicative pollen from the Middle East. Dr. Avinoam Danin, a botany professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a leading authority on the flora of Israel, along with Dr. Uri Baruch, a pollen specialist with the Israel Antiquities Authority, found
The problem is that we KNOW what the image is chemically composed of... and it cannot be caused by rubbing any bas-relief. In addition, Bas-Relief rubbings fail to duplicate almost all other features of the image on the Shroud. The negative nature is only superficially similar. The image on the Shroud is actually a terrain map... with image density being proportional to distance of the body part from the cloth. THAT trumps the bas-relief theory.
Sorry, but a little correction is needed here. The Image is NOT fastened within a coating of raw starch and various saccharides... the image IS COMPOSED of the starches and various caramelized saccharides. This coating is very non-contiguous and fibers lying next to a fiber with image may completely lack the image coating showing that it was not applied by manual means. This coating is less than 1/100th the thickness of a human hair.
The only person who has found vermillion (HgS) and red ochre on the Shroud in sufficient quantities to rise to visibility, even under a microscope, is Dr. Walter C. McCrone, who claims to have seen "large quantities" of both pigments on the shroud image areas, and who refused to submit his work for peer review. No other microscopist, using both visible light and electron microscopy, have found such quantities. While they did find small amounts of both red ochre and vermillion, they were randomly distributed over the Shroud with no concentration in any image areas.
McCrone claimed that the blood was vermillion because of eyeballing it in a visible light microscope... however, much more sophisticated tests done by world renowned specialists in blood chemistries and hemoglobins and porphyrins their decendent compounds, who reported their findings in peer reviewed scientific journals, have found that it is indeed blood remnants... in fact, human blood remnants.
"Dr. Alan Adler, an expert on porphyrins, the types of colored compounds seen in blood, chlorophyll, and many other natural products concluded that the blood is real. In collaboration with Dr. John Heller [an expert on Medical Physics] the conclusions that the blood is real was published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Applied Optics [19, (16) 1980]. The heme was converted into its parent porphyrin, and this was confirmed with spectral analysis.Heller and Adler concluded that it was actual blood material on the basis of physics and chemistry based testing, including:
Baima Bollone also found both the heme porphyrin ring of blood and the globulin in flakes of blood from Shroud samples, independently confirming the work of Adler and Heller.
In addition, the x-ray-fluorescence spectra showed excess iron in blood areas, as expected for blood. Microchemical tests for proteins were positive in blood areas but not in any other parts of the Shroud.
...but it is very crude, requiring much fudging and a number of blatant, scientifically-impermissible "corrections" to produce anything resembling a human face and body
Actually, you don't. I've done it myself... and it does NOT require fudging. The original VP-8 Image analyzer did not even allow such manipulation.
Joe Nickell was the first person to suggest this method of producing the Shroud. He observed that contact imprints from bodies are invariably grossly distorted, and hypotheses involving a vapor or radiation would cause the image to penetrate the cloth, unlike the superficial Shroud image that is observed. After experimenting with various techniques, the Shroud artist prepared a suitable mixture of pigments and tempera binder, molded a wet linen sheet over the bas-relief he had constructed, and used a dauber (also termed a pounce or tamper) to apply the mixture to the surface of the linen.Again, there are NO pigments or binders on the Shroud creating the image.
As for Joe Nickell being the first to suggest the bas-relief rubbing technique, he isn't. It was suggested and tried before he was born.
Grey, the corner where the sample was taken was not burned in the fire - although the reweaving repair may have been done at the same time as the fire repairs. The corner was the corner where generations of priests had held the shroud when holding it up for display. It was often nailed to boards (in fact, when the Shroud was brought in for the 1978 STURP investigation, the scientists were shocked to find it had been thumb-tacked to a backing board! The thumb-tacks had already put a ring of rust on the Shroud.) This handling damage is what most likely lead to the repair on the corner. Because of this handling, an even later, more obvious, patch was added to that corner a century or so later.
You are begging the question. The fact is that there are no pigments to go deeper or less deep on the shroud. Fibers with image are often right next to fibers without image...
There we agree. Even the Catholic Encyclopedia states this history of Joseph of Arimathea is "fabulous"... a fable.
No. He got permission from the Romans... they didn't care a whit who got the body.
It wasn't a thousand years of silence. There are various reports of the acheiropoietos (not-made-by-hands) image of Christ throughout the period. The image of Edessa, the Mandylion, the Veronica are all echoes of the Shroud image in a frame work. that hid most of the body. This time period spanned centuries of iconoclasm where icons and images of all types were destroyed routinely. The image of Edessa/shroud was known to have been walled up in the City Portico of Edessa during the arab occupation starting about and only rediscovered after an earthquake in 525 - 544 or so after the city had returned to Christian hands. The image of Edessa remained there until it was brought to Constantinople in 944... where it was revealed to be a full figured image rather than just a face. At this time the inventory dropped the Mandylion from its listing and added The Burial Shroud of Our Lord to the list. In 1204 the city was sacked... and all of its relics were stolen, including the shroud.
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