Was watching a show on NatGeo tonight and they were discussing supposed new evidence about the Shroud of Turin. I thought this had long since been put to bed, that the Shroud was tagged somewhere between the late 13th and mid 14th centuries…i.e. it wasn’t anything close to the time when Jesus was being buried.
However, according to the show, the reason the dates were ‘off’ had to do with repairs done to the Shroud following a fire. According to this (afaik unproved) theory, at some point someone used something called (and this is from memory) ‘French re-weaving’, when they wove contemporary clothe (16th century IIRC) into the damage section, actually unraveling part of the old Shroud and part of the patch and then weaving them back together. Supposedly, the reason the dates are off is that some of the clothe came from the original 1st century shroud and some came from the patch, thus the dates were something in the middle but leaning more toward the 16th century due to there being more patch than original clothe.
What’s the Straight Dope on all this? As I said, I thought this whole thing had been put to bed…and, frankly, given the range of programing I’ve been seeing on NatGeo (as well as the other cable ‘science’ type channels) I’m a bit dubious. But, figured this would be the place to ask, since I’m sure there is actually some ‘Doper who worked on the original dating project, or knows all about this subject and is rarin’ to comment about it.
AFAIK it’s entirely been put to rest that the shroud wasn’t created till years and years after the death of Jesus. There have been many “counter-theories” trying to disprove all the dating techniques that modern science has thrown at the Shroud, but not a single one of these theories really stands up to scrutiny. There will always be people that believe it is a relic of Jesus and that it’s impossible to replicate, and then there are the rest of us who know better
There’s some question on how exactly it was accomplished, but that’s the beauty of science. It looks for answers rather than try to prove an *a priori *assumption.
There are several potential explanations for the dating. They include soot from a fire that damaged a church it was in one, patches, bacteria, and sweat/skin/etc from being handled over the years.
No one has yet come up with a convincing explanation for how the image got there, either. There are several attempts, but none of them quite fit all the evidence.
I lean toward the carbon dating being accurate and the shroud being a fake, but there are some people who won’t be convinced until Christ comes back and assures them it wasn’t His.
I watched about 5 minutes of that before turning it off (and I only watched that much because Mrs. Geek likes to watch this sort of thing).
The 5 minutes I watched dealt mostly with them trying to prove that the blood patterns on the shroud and the shape of the hands proved that the nails went through the hands and not the wrists, and then some scientist type dude (I didn’t catch exactly who he was) went on to show how the hands could in fact support the weight of a body.
All of this is absolutely pointless, and proves nothing.
If you drove nails through the wrist, when you describe it in Greek you would say the nails went through the “χείρ” (cheir), which in fact is the word used to describe it in the original Greek versions of the Bible. This word usually gets translated into English as "hand’, but in reality it means anything below about the middle of the forearm. English doesn’t have a word that means “wrist-hand-part-of-forearm” so we just write "hand’ instead.
So the show was basically going to great lengths to “prove” that what basically probably amounts to a mis-translation is the way it really happened, and that this somehow adds credence to the shroud’s authenticity.
At that point, even though Mrs. Geek likes to watch these things, my stupidity meter had been pegged and I couldn’t take any more. I left the room and did something else.
If these kinds of arguments amount to a “controversy”, well, there you go.
I saw the Nat Geo show tonight it was, unsurprisingly, a load of crap. The show focused specifically on the claims of a pro-authenticity crank, Ray Rodgers, who is a credentialed scientist, but one who has been pro-athenticity from the beginning. The show tried to portray him as the classic, skeptical scientist, shocked by his findings, but the truth is that Rodgers has never been a skeptic. The show also tried to portray STRP as an objective scientific endeavor, when it’s actually a pseudoscience front group for pro-authenticity believers (akin to the Discovery Institute which propounds Intellegent Design).
Rodgers did publish for peer review his claims that the sample carbon dated in the 80’s was from a rewoven sample taken from a corner of the shroud, but his thesis has been thoroughly demolished. The short version is that he was simply wrong about all his major claims, incluing the claim that the corner which the sample was taken from was the only patch with cotton and madder pigment, when both those things are found throughout the body of the shroud. He also never examined the samples that were actually dated, but only made a tendentious argument from a couple of threads that were left over. The reality is that a team of textile experts were present when the samples were cut to make sure that they were cut away from any repairs or reweavings, and that they were representative of the body of the shroud. Rodgers’ claims (actually made several years ago. The Nat Geo show does not refelect any breaking news) are not shocking the scientific world. It’s not that they would prove anything in any case. Even if, hypothetically, the original carbon dating had been done on a younger, patched sample, that does not therefore prove that the shroud is authentic.
In actuality, the shroud is a demonstrable forgery for a plethora of other reasons. It’s a painting done in red ochre and vermillion. This has been definitively established, even though it is quite common to see claims that scientists are baffled by how the image got on the cloth, or that they can’t detect paint. Yes they can. Aside from that, the image is anatomically incorrect and cannot be from a real person. It contains front and back images with a space between the heads (meaning the images couldn’t have been made simultaneously from one model or the heads would be joined). The herringbone weave that the shroud is composed of did not exist in the 1st century. The shroud was known by the Church to be a forgery even in the 14th Century when a Bishop named Pierre D’Arcis investigated the shroud himself and wrote to the pope saying that not only had he discovered the shoud was a forgery, but that he had found and gotten a confession from the actual artist.
Pro-shroud authenticity nonsense is pseudoscience on a level with UFOs and Creationsim. It’s baloney, and the Nat Geo show was baloney. Don’t give it any more credence than you would give shows about Noah’s ark, or the ghostbuster shows.
I don’t understand why the Turin Shroud was ever taken seriously. It doesn’t even fit the description of Christ’s grave clothes that appears in the Bible.
Really? Not ever? Try to imagine being the first guy who photographed it.
I don’t have a dog in this hunt. My faith isn’t dependent on the authenticity of the Turin Shroud. What I do find interesting is the whole positive-is-negative/negative-is-positive aspect of the thing. Let’s face it - there are a lot of little details that don’t really show up unless you photograph the thing & view the negative. Why would a forger even bother? How did he pull it off without a method of checking his work?
I’ve read one book on this subject, & that was back in the 70s before any carbon dating was done.
I thought that it had been definitely established by a reputable organic chemist (who wasn’t even a Christian) that there were blood residues on the shroud. This has nothing to do with the dating, of course, but I was surprised when I read about paint above.
I’ve always wondered why they think this is the actual shroud of Jesus. I mean, of course there can be a debate about its actual age or whether a dead person was wrapped in it but where does the idea that the one and only Jesus was wrapped inside come from?
Well, I remember being impressed by a picture of it on the back of the door in my RE class at school, but I hadn’t read much of the Bible at that point. Now I have, I just don’t see how it can be claimed to be the genuine article when it doesn’t match the description in there:
So there are some strips (plural) of cloth, plus a separate bit for the head. Doesn’t sound like the TS at all.
Unless of course you argue that the Bible is wrong here, but that’s kinda self-defeating, for reasons I hope are obvious.
I reckon probably some of those effects are over-hyped by the people that do have an agenda, but even if they’re not, the presence of such details still doesn’t establish anything, other than that the details exist.
There has been so much written about the Shroud, with criss-crossing claims and counter-claims, that it’s very hard for anyone to get to the bottom of it all.
You can only really attach weight to claims that have stood the test of time, and that have been independently checked and verified. For example, the ‘blood residues’ claim is not one of these. It’s one guy’s opinion, and no-one else seems to think his ‘findings’ really prove anything. Even someone ‘expert’ in his field and apparently well-qualified can be prone to wishful thinking and biased interpretation of the evidence.
Here’s what I think is a fair summary to date.
There were problems getting an accurate date, even with advanced carbon dating. Why? Because the Shroud has been around a long time, it’s been through at least one fire, it has been repaired, we don’t know all of its provenance, there were restrictions on where the dating samples could be taken from, and so on.
Even while acknowledging these problems, we are entitled to conclude that the Shroud most probably dates from the 13th or 14th century, and was certainly not the burial Shroud of anyone from the time of Christ.
We will never know for sure how it was made, and it is a remarkable artefect for this reason. It seems possible that it was made using either a contact method (a sheet laid on an actual peron or corpse prepared with pigments or chemicals to create an imprint) or a primitive photographic method (using some basic light-sensitive chemicals, strong sunlight, and a human model, in an elaborate ‘pinhole camera’ setup). Maybe it was a combination of these methods. Various demonstrations and simulations have produced results that are a fairly close match for the Shroud itself, although of course in each case the degree of ‘resemblance’ is subjective.
However, it was made, it is genuinely remarkable that it has the photographic properties that it has. We are entitled to believe that these properties were largely an accidental by-product of the manufacturing process, rather than anything intended by the artist/creator. But this is not to detract from the wonder we can feel upon seeing the photo-negative image.
Holy relics were a big business back in the day. Europeans traveling to the Holy Land were almost guaranteed to bring back the bones of some martyr or bits & pieces of the True Cross. The Catholic Church never ruled one way or the other on the Turin Shroud. Not being a Catholic I might have the terminology wrong, but I think they considered it “an object worthy of veneration”, which might be their way of saying “if it puts you in a Godly frame of mind, go for it”.
I am sure I have read somewhere (unfortunately I don’t know where and when and I can’t find a reference on the interwebs) about a letter from a 14tn century priest in France to his bishop about the shroud where the author writes about having met the artist who had painted it and being told how it was done.
No blood has been discovered on the shroud, despite the extremely common claims made by pro-authenticity defenders. One pair of chemists (Dr.s Heller and Adler) made an interpretive determination that residue recovered from sticky tape used to pull fibers (not from the shroud itself) contained a lot of iron oxide and interpreted it as blood. They also identified it as type AB which didn’t exist until the 7th Century.
Their interpretations have been greatly disputed by other chemists and forensic experts (the pair in question had no experience in forensics, artistic pigments or detection of forgery). Other forensic tests done directly on the alleged “blood” on the shroud have shown it to be red vermillion paint. It was also shown that decayed temura pigments can and do produce exactly the same residue that Heller and Adler identified as blood.
Furthermore, the pianted “blood” on the shroud does not match real blood in terms of either color or behavior. The blood on the shroud is bright red, real dried blood is black. The blood is also depicted as flowing in a pattern that is clearly “drawn” and artificial, and not a representation of how blood actually behaves (it gets clotted in the hair, it doesn’t stream down it).
Even if there was blood on the shroud, it wouldn’t mean anything. It’s over 600 years old. Any number of people could have gotten blood on it over the centuries. The “bloodstains” are typical STURP tactics – find some interpretive bit of evidence which they can use to suggest authenticity or question the dating, and keep the possibility (no matter how contrived or specious) of authenticity alive in the public and popular press (who are sensationalist morons who believe anything), even if it has no genuine scientific currency at all.
I posted the link in my first post above. It was a Bishop writing to the Pope. He said he had found the artist (who he does not name) and gotten a confession that it was a forgery.
