Official Junk
First of all, isn’t that image for the quote-unquote official site strange. Or is it just me?
Anyways, Joe Marino writes:
I just noticed that at the Turin archdiocese sindone.org site which bills itself as "Holy Shroud Official site," the page on "cloth dating" mentions the Garza-Valdes bioplastic coating study and the (disgraced) Kouznetsov fire-model study, but makes no mention of Rogers’ work. (Beware of many typos.) When Rogers was doing his studies, he wrote the Cardinal of Turin at the time 3 times and never got the courtesy of a reply. I’m just glad that Rome is supposed to be more involved with the Shroud and not just leave everything to the Turinese. I’ll also be anxious to hear what the new Pope’s take on the Shroud is.
Good grief! Well, official doesn’t mean right. I noticed that if you click on the strange image in the top banner of almost any English language page, the site takes you to a page that advises that “From Tuesday 18 May the visiting hours of the Holy Shroud Exhibition will be extended. On 18, 19, 20, 21 and 22 May,” Wasn’t that three years ago? Maybe they are a bit behind the times. Kouznetsov? How many years ago was it that his made up science was exposed?
Sad!
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Is the Shroud real? Probably.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
No one has a good idea how front and back images of a crucified man came to be on the cloth. Yes, it is possible to create images that look similar. But no one has created images that match the chemistry, peculiar superficiality and profoundly mysterious three-dimensional information content of the images on the Shroud. Again, this is all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
We simply do not have enough reliable information to arrive at a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Years ago, as a skeptic of the Shroud, I came to realize that while I might believe it was a fake, I could not know so from the facts. Now, as someone who believes it is the real burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, I similarly realize that a leap of faith over unanswered questions is essential.
My name is Dan Porter. Please email me at DanielRobertPorter@gmail.com
They could remain factual, present the radiocarbon dating, and quote Pr Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, who claimed :
Let’s hope the next wave of articles surrounding the Shroud’s technological exposition will have this much needed critical look.
I find Ramsay’s attitude intriguing and promising particularly as a young assistant at Oxford his name was on the original carbon dating paper.