This is disappointing for a couple of reasons.
I remember when the Shroud was tested. I remember the build-up and all the speculation. I remember the church authorities being so concerned that someone would need to cut off a piece of the Shroud to perform their C-14 testing. I remember reading about the fire damage in the past. I remember reading about the repairs. This was all known stuff BEFORE the sample was taken.
What is disappointing? First, I'm disappointed that the church authorities didn't supervise, or if they did supervise, that they didn't say, "Hey, Dude, you're cutting out a swatch in a repaired portion of the cloth." I mean, they knew it then. Why didn't they say something?
So, now we hear that the guy they chose is a charlatan who had an agenda to disprove the authenticity of the relic. Please help me. Couldn't one of them have found someone reputable before letting that guy cut out that important piece of cloth? It's starting to sound like "dumb and dumber," if you ask me. But....nobody's asking me, so I'll just offer an unsolicited opinion.
It sounds like the blind leading the blind from the start of this operation to the completion.
They let a charlatan be in charge. Then they allowed the guy to cut a swatch out of a KNOWN repaired section of the cloth. Then they didn't immediately protest. I'm gonna go take rolaids, tums, and motrin all at once. I've got a headache and indigestion at the same time.
So what do we do?
Cut out another piece. Get a real unbiased source to test it. Cut it out of the right portion of the cloth. Use modern measuring techniques.
This is all too easy. But someone will say, "Oh, it's too precious to cut on again!" Sigh. It was precious the last time they let a swatch get cut out of the wrong section by a nut.
Let's do it right.
And, in the meantime, I sure hope people manage to become Christians without these results. I mean, what with all the salvific weight that theology and doctrine have placed on this cloth through the ages.
Without the Grace of God the shroud means nothing. If the word of God does not convert..some piece of cloth will not . Man can not UNDERSTAND (Romans 3:1)
That is precisely why the book we have been discussing was printed and released. It details the thousands of tests conducted on the shroud.
"Unquestionably, the Shroud of Turin's most extraordinary feature thus far disclosed is the three-dimensionality of its body image. This characteristic was revealed in 1976 when scientiest examind a photograph of the Shroud with a VP-8 Image Analyzer, a piece of space-age imaging equipment. Working on the theory that three-dimensional information might be encoded in the Shroud image, physicist John Jackson contacted Bill Mottern, image specialist at Sandia Laboratory, who had access to a VP-8 Image Analyzer. After using the machine to process a Shroud photo, both men were stunned when a correctly proportioned three-dimensional image of a man appeared on their computer screen."
Millions of dollars in equipment were brought in to examine the Shroud. This book details the nature, methods and scientists involved in testing the Shroud.
Remember, the author is a lawyer. He was a committed agnostic when he began writing the book; he is now a baptized christian.