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Posted on 04/12/2006 11:34:58 AM PDT by Swordmaker
Author: Shroud of Turin wrongly condemned
Believes dating scientifically flawed, linen could be burial cloth of Jesus
A new book says the controversial Shroud of Turin – said to bear the image of the crucified Jesus Christ – has been wrongly condemned as a fraud and desecrated due to serious errors in its study and conservation.
"The Rape of the Turin Shroud – how Christianity's most precious relic was wrongly condemned, and violated," by William Meacham, contends the shroud was dismissed as a medieval fake by the general public after poorly planned Carbon-14 dating in 1988.
The linen also suffered major damage in 2002 through what Meacham calls an ill-advised and secretly executed restoration "conducted for cosmetic and misguided conservation purposes."
The author points out that in the early 1980s, the shroud was at the pinnacle of its prestige, as a considerable number of academics and scientists thought it could be the burial cloth of Christ.
But that perception changed almost overnight with the announcement in 1988 that Carbon-14 dating had placed the origin of the cloth at about A.D. 1260-1390.
Meacham insists, however, the relic was wrongly condemned, because the dating methodology was poorly planned, marred by petty rivalries and scientifically flawed.
He finds it remarkable that a second sample was never run to confirm the dating. From studies done in the last 10 years, the author asserts, it appears very likely the dating is invalid and the shroud is much older.
It could actually be Christ's burial cloth after all, the author says, but for unknown reasons, authorities at Turin and with the Catholic Church have refused requests for a new Carbon-14 measurement.
As WorldNetDaily reported in 2000, in the decade after the measurement, additional evidence called into question the process of carbon dating on certain materials – textiles in particular.
And a relic known as the Sudarium of Oviedo, believed to be the other linen cloth found in the tomb of Christ, also has been used as evidence of the shroud's authenticity.
The author Meacham says the "restoration" in 2002 resulted in the loss of valuable scientific data as materials were taken from the cloth without stringent controls.
Repairs dating from 1534 that constituted part of the shroud's visual heritage were removed, he points out.
The attempt to restore the shroud was done in secret, without peer review, he added, and "engineered by an opportunistic clique around the archbishop of Turin." The effort has been condemned by most shroud researchers as a conservation and scientific disaster, he said, as the relic and its study have been altered forever.
Fr. Peter Rinaldi of the Holy Shroud Guild said he found a paper Meacham did on his assertions to be "complete, lucid, cogent, one of the finest presentations I have ever read on the subject."
Shroud researchers Joe Marino and Sue Benford of Dublin, Ohio, said the new book shows how politics is playing a "significant role in Jesus' putative burial cloth."
Los Angeles-based photographer and webmaster of shroud.com Barrie Schwortz, who believes the shroud is authentic, said Meacham gives a "frank and often critical accounting of what he calls the 'desecration' of the Shroud of Turin. ... From its provocative title to its stinging criticisms of the shroud's custodians, this book was sure to spark controversy ... it also reveals a side of [shroud research] seldom seen by the general public."
You can take me off your ping list.
The differences in the two types of cloth are obvious and well-studied. The radio-carbon dating was done only on the newer material, but it definitely confirmed the date of the material used to repair the shroud.
Eventually a non-destructive/non-intrusive technique will be developed that can evaluate the older portion of the shroud.
I suspect that the Believers on both sides of this issue are impervious to the facts, whatever they may be.
Thanks for the ping.
Marking for later.
The original protocols required that EIGHT samples be taken from EIGHT different areas of the Shroud, including image and non-image areas. Instead ALL of the tested samples came from ONE area, and the tested samples were cut from ONE sample taken from that area... which was an area that had been extensively soiled, cut, patched... and now we know, patched even further using an expert technique called French Invisible Reweaving. The expert re-weaver prepares linen that approximates the same size as the original missing material, dyes it to match the aged color of the original cloth, and then skillfully re-weaves the new material into the old, duplicating the weave pattern. This is a technique that, when done by an expert, is invisible to the naked eye although it is discernable under magnification and chemical tests will show that differing materials were used.
On the Shroud, the new material has several distinct differences that are apparent when one looks. The threads hava a "Z" twist while the original Shroud threads are an opposite "S" twist throughout. The new threads have been dyed while the original linen is raw and undyed. The new Threads have been retted with a different technique and chemicals than the original material. The new threads have Cotton contamination spun into the threads (probably from the spinning wheel) while the older threads were hand spun and have no Cotton at all. The new threads still retain a fairly high content of vanillin, a chemical that disappears over time, while the original threads are completely absent of any vanillin. All of this proves that the sample taken from the Shroud was not exemplar of the shroud itself. Therefore the tests are completely invalid.
This sabotage of the agreed protocols resulted in taking the sample that incorporated approximately 60% medieval (16th Century) patching materials and only 40% original Shroud material. When tested, the combined C-14 percentages of the First and Sixteenth Century materials resulted in spurious date2 in the 13th and 14th Century, depending on the ratios of older to newer C-14 sources. In other words, the greater the percentage of 16th Century material, the younger the test reported the cloth to be. This variation in percentages of old to new materials is why the four tested sub-samples reported dates (1260 to 1390, all +/- 25 years) that spanned far beyond the degrees of confidence for each individual test even though the samples were thought to have been taken from the single "homogenous" master sample. Because of the sabotage (advertent or inadvertent) the master sample was not homogenous and was NOT representative of the whole body of the Shroud!
Thanks for the ping!
Essentially correct... just a few revisions.
1: The fire that did the damage occurred in the 16th Century (1532AD) not the 14th (1301 - 1400). Previous fire damage (the poker holes) predated the 12th Century since they are depicted on the Hungarian Pray Codex which has a known provenance of 1250AD.2: The area the C-14 sample was cut from was not damaged in the fire; it was damaged by handling, snipping sample relic for gifts to unknown persons in the past, and hanging the Shroud with nails during medieval expositions (even in the 1978 exposition the Shroud was affixed to plywood panels with thumbtacks!).
3: The testing actually tested an amalgam of old original material and newer patch material in varying percentages (depending on the sub-sample's distance from the bottom edge)... which combined to give an invalid dates (1260AD to 1390AD) between the actual ages of both.
With "degrees of confidence" for the four tested sub-samples ranging around +/- 17 years to +/- 30 years, the tests extended the possible invalid dates to 1235 to 1415... which is far too large of an error given the expertise of the labs involved and the supposed homogenity of the sample. In fact, none of the four sub-sample "Degree of Confidence" date ranges, even overlaped the adjacent date ranges. That fact alone should have raised a huge red flag for the investigators; that it didn't shows that the investigators were happy the invalid results "confirmed" their prejudices.
"Science has faltered once again in the face of overwhelming religious evidence."
Then they appear to have used the "invisible weaving" technique.
So, damages in the 16th century were repaired with 14th century goods which were then tested by radiocarbon dating and found to be from the 14th century.
There are disputes about how much damage was caused by the fire (which lead, of course, to disputes about which sections are old, and which sections are 14th century), but it's pretty clear that even some sections of the photographic negative were damaged.
I suggest that only those sections with signs of blood, on the body itself, be tested, and then only by whatever sort of non-intrustive technique can ever be developed for that purpose.
Nice and humorous quote from Reverend Lovejoy (*)... but in this instance, it should be stated as
"BAD Science has faltered once again in the face of overwhelming SCIENTIFIC evidence."
When all of the OTHER evidence says something is "so" and only one scientific test says "it's not so" then perhaps the test needs to be re-examined. The documentary and historical evidence for the shroud pre-dating even the earliest of the 1988 C-14 test dates should have called the "convenient" erroneous dates into question.
For example:
(* - Quotation from an episode of The Simpsons.)
Every time "scientific" studies are done on the Shroud, controversy ensues. Such "investigations" accomplish nothing but confirm the doubting in their incredulity and convince the believers that somebody is up to no good.
It seems to me that any tests made will only serve to accelerate the irreparable damage the Shroud suffers anyway due to the passage of time, and in the future this data will be of little use because more sophisticated techniques in the future would have their own methods, independent of current ones. Why inflict damage now? Why not just keep the Shroud in a stable, ideal humidity and temperature, perhaps without oxygen, so as to preserve it as intact as possible for future generations? Isn't that what we would have liked previous generations to have done for our sake?
I visited some museums in Europe about 20 years ago, and the one thing very common at the time was, they prohibited flash photography. They thought that the light exposure would accelerate deterioration of the paintings or other artifacts. I thought it was silly at the time, but in retrospect, perhaps it was really wise. After all, furniture kept indoors but exposed to daily sunshine through a window suffers sun damage over time. So why not things exposed to daily flashes of cameras?
If such prudence is used with things of relatively little significance compared to the Shroud, why not with the Shroud itself? The more poking and prodding it endures, the faster it would perhaps return to dust, and the more accountable we will be in the eyes of our children's children.
Actually the controversy is as intriguing as the Shroud itself. Even if (I'm saying IF, folks!) the Shroud is a fake, it's old enough and well made enough to still hold considerable attention: who made it, how, and why? What is the hold it has over us? The Shroud isn't quite the same thing as the Holy Grail, but it stands as important in the eyes of the faithful. If (and again I'm saying IF, people, you can put those rocks down) it's a fake, it is a pious fake, something created with reverance.
One Presby's thoughts.
I've read about eleventeengazillion times that the nuns who made the fire repair selected OLD CLOTH that had a similar weave and texture.
Mu, I have probably read just about everything written in English on the Shroud of Turin and have seen only ONE suggestion that the repairs done by the Nuns of Poor Clare used "old cloth" to repair the damaged areas. Since the nuns did not document what they repaired except to note the addition of the obvious patches and the addition of the Holland Cloth, one theorist went so far as to attribute the corner repair to Queen Clothilde (of the House of Savoy). Quite frankly, the person who made that suggestion did so ONLY because of the shocking C-14 date and it was his unsupported theory to try and explain away the results that accurately dated what was tested.
Picknet and Prince, in their absurd theory that Leonardo Da Vinci created the Shroud as a joke (ignoring the inconvenient fact that the Shroud was first exhibited in Lirey, almost 100 years before Leonardo's birth), also claimed Leo purposely selected OLD cloth so that "discriminating" shroud testers of the late 15th Century would be fooled into believing it was 1400 years old.
What I told you is the result of peer reviewed scientific tests (chemical analysis, ultraviolet and X-ray photography, photo-microscopic AND scanning electron microscopic examination, micro photo spectrometry AND Courier Transform Infrared Microspectrophotometry) of main body materiels and materials from the one surviving sub-sample (out of five) which was cut from the area between the sub-samples that were destroyed in testing. (I.E. If you number the sub-samples cut from the original master sample cut from the Shroud 1 to 5 from the bottom edge of the Shroud, this would be sub-sample #3.)
From the peer-reviewed work of M. Benford, G. Riggi, A. Adler, N. Rodgers, E. Hall, P.H. Smith, J. Marino and R. Hatfield, all completely qualified scientists, we KNOW that the sample was composed of varying amounts of original and newer material in about a 40-60% mixture at the selvage end to a 60-40% mixture at the end closest to the main body of the Shroud. The bifurcation of this mixture of old and new occurs on a lower right to upper left diagonal line/area. It is only this mixture of 16th Century material mixed with original material that can account for the extraordinary spread of dates. Only if original FIRST CENTURY material is mixed with 16th Century materials, in the observed percentages can the discrepency of the extraordinary dating spread of 130 years be explained.
In fact, that date spread is even worse than I told you because to get to the 1260 - 1390 spread, they cheated:
"The Arizona lab made eight measurements with dates that varied widely. The clearly suggested that the sample was not homogeneous. Rather than deal with the problem, the British Museum asked Arizona to discard the four outside measurements and use only those that were most similar. It was the only way they could calculate a satisfactory error distribution."
It was only "satisfactory" because that was the closest they could get the various sub-sample dates to agree. Incidentally, the Arizona lab got two samples... #1, the one closest to the selvage and the one with the greatest percentage of newer material, and #5, the sub-sample farthest from the edge and the one with the LEAST amount of newer material. They cut each of their two sub-samples into four... across the warp... and tested those. The two extremes reported dates so far out of the acceptable range (to the managing lab director at the British Museum) that they had to be discarded!!! Doesn't this smack of scientific fraud??? I think it does.
We now know that the left (newer material) side of the surviving C-14 sample contains not only cotton contamination, but up to 2% aluminum... while the right (original material) side has no discernable aluminum. The aluminum comes from the use of Alum as a Mordant which was only developed in Europe in the late 15th Century. We also can SEE the spliced threads where the change-over from original material to newer takes place... and, under a microscope, it is very evident but not so with the naked eye. We also have photomicrographs of the destroyed-in-testing samples that show they have similar splices. From all of this now undisputed evidence, we can make the very reasonable assumption that about half (+ or - 10%) of each tested sample was composed of 16th Century Linen fibers.
I suggest that only those sections with signs of blood, on the body itself, be tested, and then only by whatever sort of non-intrustive technique can ever be developed for that purpose.
Excellent suggestion... unfortunatly, as of now, C-14 testing is always destructive of the sample. It is getting better and smaller and smaller samples will be required in the future. Since the "restoration" of the Shroud ill-advisedly done a couple of years ago, there exists a reservoir of Shroud material that is no longer attached to the Shroud, having been clipped, scraped, or vacuumed away. Some of this is original Shroud material that existed at the edges of the charred areas and would be excellent C-14 test material... but I doubt the Shroud's custodians would allow any tests in the near future considering the results of the first C-14 fiasco.
By-the-way, Muawiyah, I notice you are not on my Shroud of Turin Ping List... would you like to be added?
Why inflict damage now? Why not just keep the Shroud in a stable, ideal humidity and temperature, perhaps without oxygen, so as to preserve it as intact as possible for future generations? Isn't that what we would have liked previous generations to have done for our sake?
That certainly is a good suggestion. The 1978 STURP team's protocols held as their FIRST priority to do no damage. They were appalled when they found that the Italians (Who had first crack at it for 24 hours before the STURP people) had left bright spotlights shining on the Shroud while the Italians had dinner... a two to three hour affair. They were also appalled to find that the custodians of the Shroud used steel thumbtacks in the humid Torino atmosphere, to hold the Shroud to a simple plywood backing and frame for the 1978 exhibition. Those thumbtacks left RUST RINGS in the shroud material!
The STURP team had made a $100,000 stainless steel (covered with inert material) rotating table to support the Shroud during examination. The Shroud would be held on the table with protected magnets. THUMBTACKS!...
A couple of years ago, in a secret "restoration", all of the charred areas were cut away because SOMEONE told them that the fire of 1532 might still be burning, turning more of the shroud to char through "autocatilytic decomposition". Scientists, including all of the STURP team were appalled, again, at the destructive "conservation" undertaken under non-peer reviewed conditions. This "restoration" and "cleaning" destroyed all data that could have been gleaned from the Shroud by examining contamination in Situ.
Just recently, before the "restoration", it was determined that stone dust on the back of the dorsal image's obverse was Travertine Agagonite... a form of limestone that is (so far as is known) found only in the rocks and caves outside of Jerusalem... yet ALL of that was vacuumed away and placed in little jars. NO one can compare image patterns with Aragonite concentrations to see if the Aragonite concentration is stronger where the body would have pressed the Shroud into the limestone of the rock shelf in a tomb... because it has been removed.
Today, the Shroud is stored in a hermetically sealed case designed to allow the Shroud to lay flat instead of being folded or rolled as past practice. The Shroud itself is visible through laminated bullet proof glass. The pressure controlled (with battery backed-up bellows) case is filled with inert Argon (95.5%) and Oxygen (.5%) to prevent as much chemical change as possible. It is kept in a light controlled environment and will only be displayed again under low-light conditions.
Next time, I hope the custodians of the Shroud will ASK some scientists before they send it out to be dry cleaned...
That is what makes it so intriguing. Its a miracle if its genuine; its a miracle if its fake. Sometimes I think it would be MORE of a miracle if it were made by an unknown genius of the 14th Century than if it were the remnant evidence the resurrection of a known worker of miracles, the Son of God. We EXPECT something like this from Jesus...
I know a priest who was custodian for about 2 years some time back. I wonder if he knows about these things?
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