Yes, I’m afraid that’s me, with two ‘giants’ of the Shroud world and Arif Amer, of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, which firmly believes in the authenticity of the Shroud, as it conclusively proves a basic tenet of their faith, that Jesus did not die on the cross! More on this later, perhaps, when I explore the alleged anatomical accuracy of the image...
Funnily enough, it was an original member of STuRP, Joe Accetta, who put me onto the iron stain idea. Joe was the infra-red imaging specialist, but has long thought the Shroud to be medieval. He thinks it may have been stained with iron-gall ink, very common in the Middle Ages. And then a BBC programme from 1982 had attempted to make a copy of the image using Brazil wood (”so popular in the Middle Ages that they even named a country after it”). And then there were experiments of my own involving the degradation of linen by various acids, such as sulphuric, hydrochloric and vinegar. The chemical result of all these deliberations is iron acetate, an easily made stain produced by leaving iron (filings, ‘wool’, a nail) in vinegar. Lightly applied, this will only stain the upper fibres of a cloth, particularly a close woven one such as the Shroud, and explain both the “cellulosic iron” and the “hematite”. Experiments are ongoing rather than complete at present.
Incidentally, it is a common canard that any liquid applied to one surface of a cloth will seep through to the back. Try writing on a handkerchief with a fibre-tipped pen - or indeed. look at the back of almost any watercolour canvas. It doesn’t. I wonder who thought that up, and why almost everybody has seen fit to repeat it?
If you have personal knowledge of the activities of the STuRP team regarding the radiocarbon corner, then I will defer to that, but the detailed maps of all the sticky tap extractions do not show anything being taken from anywhere near it (except possibly the Holland cloth backing) so they could not have examined it chemically, or even microscopically at fibre level. Photographs were certainly taken, but not at any great magnification over that area. Gilbert Raes had hands-on experience of the corner, but had not characterised it chemically or physically (other than to make rather indecisive comments about cotton proportions), and the STuRP team had no access to his sample. It is not true that “the area fluoresced under ultraviolet light while the main-body does not”; if anything the radiocarbon area fluoresced rather less than the main body.
If you look at Barrie Schwortz’s photos of the samples, Shroud and control, retained by Arizona, you will see that if you were given a thread from any of them, you would easily be able to allot it to the correct sample.
You ask, “Also in what way would cleaning make the samples “reduce to nothing.” That makes no scientific or even technical sense.” You might like to refer to the Damon ‘Nature’ paper for clarification, if you have a copy of it. One of the Zurich control samples only has measurements for one half, as “the loose weave of sample Z3.1 led to its disintegration during strong and weak chemical treatments.” The individual filaments were not recoverable. I’m sorry it wasn’t clear, I assumed you would be familiar with it.
The fragments of material acquired from by the British Museum from Franz Bock are largely minute, and I’m only aware of a single 3/1 herringbone fragment. As such, it was certainly not available to be used as a control, as Tite knew very well.
Remi Van Haelst writes almost unreadably in capital letters and over expressive language, and misrepresents the British Museum’s statistics. Others have made the same mistake. Instead of attempting to understand its figures, he used his own methods, came to different results, and declared the British Museum wrong, even mocking the comments by Morwena Leese and Prof. Bray, who tried to explain. It is better to start from the results returned to the British Museum and work out what they actually did and why they did it.
Much is related to the method of determining the average of errors in reported measurements (e.g: the mean of 590±30, 690±35, 606±41 and 701±33). There are two or three methods, giving statistically acceptable, but different, answers. Van Haelst simply did not acknowledge that - he may not even have known about them.
Either way, the fact that the averaged results of the three labs was discrepant was not hidden by the British Museum, which clearly explained that there was statistically only a 5% “probability of obtaining, by chance, a scatter among the three dates as high as that observed, under the assumption that the quoted errors reflect all sources of random variation.” The problem, as I have mentioned before, was what to do about it.
I confess that I have read that “fact” in many articles, but on examining the photos purporting to show it, I have never seen it and have wondered what exactly I was supposed to see there that I was missing. I’ve even heard Barrie repeat that “fact.” I was deferring to those who were present during the 1978 examination because I know that the human eye can often see a quality in person that a photograph—especially a photograph printed in a book or magazine— will not easily reproduce, the eye being able to react across the spectrum. that one has to use differing films and filters to bring out in a photograph. Thanks for that information.
Incidentally, it is a common canard that any liquid applied to one surface of a cloth will seep through to the back. Try writing on a handkerchief with a fibre-tipped pen - or indeed. look at the back of almost any watercolour canvas. It doesn’t. I wonder who thought that up, and why almost everybody has seen fit to repeat it?
It is still questionable as to how a liquid could be applied that would only affect that soapwort coating on the fibers and not penetrate deeper into the linen fibers. Could a 14th Century artisan have come up with a way to aerosol spray something? Perhaps. . . but what would this artisan use to drill the holes? I am open to the 14th Century creation date, but I do think that then we are faced with an even greater miracle, an unsung artistic genius who created no other similar masterpiece and then hid his candle under some hermetically sealed vault, never to be heard from again.
The technology has to consistently NOT soak through to the back of the cloth or even deeply into the fibers. That’s a high bar to cross. Writing of the period used inks that required blotting to prevent it transferring before it was even stacked on another sheet because it took so long for the liquid carrying the ink’s pigment to evaporate. It wasn’t until sometime in the 20th century that the blotter and blotting paper were really able to be retired as a necessary accessory of writing.
You ask, “Also in what way would cleaning make the samples “reduce to nothing.” That makes no scientific or even technical sense.” You might like to refer to the Damon ‘Nature’ paper for clarification, if you have a copy of it. One of the Zurich control samples only has measurements for one half, as “the loose weave of sample Z3.1 led to its disintegration during strong and weak chemical treatments.” The individual filaments were not recoverable. I’m sorry it wasn’t clear, I assumed you would be familiar with it.
I did not recall that one of the control samples had problems. Even so, the carbon from that sample would have been recoverable.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of it any longer. Some years ago I donated all of my books, articles, and papers I had amassed on the Shroud to the church I belonged to at the time so others could benefit from that collection. The church’s librarian of the period was quite thankful to receive them; I had done a series of classes for the members on the Shroud’s history as it was known up to then and members were very interested. More unfortunately, I learned later that another, later volunteer librarian, an anti-Catholic, decided they were “icon twaddle” and systematically went through the church’s library and, on her own “authority,” culled and threw in the trash everything she did not like, including the entire Shroud related collection! So, as I mentioned above, I am responding working from my flawed memory, and using Barrie’s great repository of documents for citations and links when I can. My own resources are long gone. I am certainly no longer following it as closely as I did ten or even fifteen years ago.
You’re responses are whetting my Shroud info appetites, which I had put on the back burner, to read more of the later articles that the politics of that last three to four years have distracted me from paying the attention they obviously deserve. I have four books on the Shroud I bought in the last year sitting on my desk, unread. That is a direct result of the chaos of the political chaos that has kept me paying more attention to other things. Alas!