A telephone caller (it happens every now and then) suggested bringing a recent comment by Joe Marino to the forefront. “This is important information,” he said. I agree.
Joe had commented in Cat Among the Pigeons:
Some clarifications about the order and circumstances of the invisible reweave theory.
We did not start out with the Quad Mosaic photos when we first presented our theory in 2000. We had shown some experts photos that included a very high-quality photo of the C-14 area that’s in the excellent book by Gino Moretto (of the Shroud Museum in Turin) called Shroud Guide. It was only brought out in 2008 in the Chemistry Today article from 2008 and the presentation made at the Ohio Shroud conference that year.
Regarding the experts we showed it to, one was Thomas Ferguson & Co. Ltd, world-renowned makers of Double Damask Linen, another was Louis Harner of Albany International Research Company, and the third was European-trained weaver David Pearson, owner of the French Tailors in Columbus, Ohio, who was very familiar with the French invisible reweave technique. I will leave it to others to decide if the fact that they aren’t academics is significant.
Going back to the Quad Mosaic, there’s a very fine article on Barrie’s site about it at http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/quad.pdf, with some important comments by the late Jean Lorre, an imaging expert from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Worth throwing these into the discussion in case they get overlooked.
John Jackson, 2008: ‘While this hypothesis [the reweaving theory] has been argued on the basis of indirect chemistry [the Quad Mosaics?], it can be discounted on the basis of evident bandings in the 1978 radiographs and transmitted light images of STURP. These data photographs show clearly that the banding structures (which are in the Shroud) propagate in an uninterrupted fashion through the region that would, ten years later, be where the sample was taken for radiocarbon dating.’ In other words the undisturbed banding showed that this was the original cloth and had not been rewoven.
Flury-Lemberg, ‘The Invisible Mending of the Shroud, the Theory and the Reality’, 2005. Having argued in this paper that invisible reweaving was always detectable by the trained eye, in particular because it could not be concealed at the back of a cloth, Flury-Lemberg noted that the fabric of the Shroud was in a good state of preservation and when she examined the corner where the radiocarbon sample had been taken, she reported that ‘its weaving structure is cohesive and untouched even at the corners. Therefore at no time has the need to reinforce the corner parts arisen!’ Flury-Lemberg concluded that ‘neither on the front nor on the back of the whole cloth is the slightest hint of a mending operation, a patch or some kind of reinforcing darning to be found.’
If Lyfe is right in saying that Wilson also rejects the reweaving theory then there is a lot of evidence against it, among the authenticists as well as sceptics. Hugh seems in good company.