Confusing Nails with the Shroud of Turin

Such thinking as we find by Michael Price (Michael Priceless) in his blog is inevitable, regrettably.

Yes, Michael you are probably right about the nails. They are almost certainly fake. The claim is junk science. But why does this remind you of the Shroud of Turin? There is a lot of junk science when it comes to the shroud, but the examples you give are not valid.

I’m not sure what to think about this except to say… It’s totally false! This junk science reminds me of the mystery surrounding the Shroud of Turin. After centuries of the Shroud being hailed as the cloth that wrapped Jesus after his death, Scientists were eventually allowed to test the shroud.

The results… It was a forgery. Carbon-dating proved that The Shroud was made centuries after Jesus’ crucification took place.

Wait a minute. Let’s focus on material published in peer-reviewed journals or on studies that can be independently confirmed. Even the director of the Oxford Laboratory thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant, scientific, non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the shroud’s dating. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in journals such as Thermochimica Acta, an international scientific journal from Elsevier, reads in part:

The combined evidence from chemical kinetics, analytical chemistry, cotton content, and pyrolysis/ms proves that the material from the radiocarbon area of the shroud is significantly different from that of the main cloth. The radiocarbon sample was thus not part of the original cloth and is invalid for determining the age of the shroud.

All this subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that what was tested was chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven in as part of a medieval repair. Robust statistical studies that are 100% reproducible support this theory. With so much doubt we must consider the carbon dating invalid or suspect. We do not know how old the cloth is. No junk science here.

You also wrote:

In addition, a modern artist proved how to duplicate the development of The Shroud using tools and resources available during the period of time Jesus was on Earth and thereafter.

You are, I suppose, speaking about the latest of several different claims in the last ten years, Luigi Garlaschelli’s, convolutedly complex method detailed in the peer-reviewed scientific Journal of Imaging Science and Technology.

Did you read it? He is not a “modern artist.” He is a chemist. He did not “prove” anything. Did you notice that in the same issue of the journal, another peer-reviewed paper by no less than six scientists explaining how profoundly wrong Garlaschelli was? The newspapers didn’t mention that.

Garlaschelli reproduced a full-sized shroud replica using materials and techniques that were available in the middle ages. But that materials were available in the middle ages does not mean that someone then could have reproduced the Shroud. For starters it was not known the Shroud was a photographic negative until the end of the 19th century. What Garlaschelli did was possible only in hindsight.

Michael, you do not need to think it is real. If we are looking for examples of junk science, the field of shroud studies has plenty. Garlaschelli’s work is an example, I’m afraid. The carbon dating is not. But it was fraught with errors.

Jesus Crucifixion Nails Found [VIDEO] | Michael Priceless