Papers by the Skeptic of STURP

Just yesterday, Joseph S. Accetta, who presented Speculations on the 14th Century Origins of the Turin Shroud (Paper and PowerPoint Presentation) uploaded five papers at Academia.com.  (Notice differences in titles)

They warrant your attention and your consideration.

• Speculations on 14th Century Shroud Image
• Probable Origins of a 14th Century Shroud Image
• Commentary on Science and the Shroud
• Commentary on the Shroud and STRUP
• IR Spectroscopy and Imaging of the Shroud of Turin

These paragraphs caught my attention in Joseph’s commentary on Science and the Shroud:

The Shroud has thus far eluded mainstream scientific scrutiny for several reasons; (After all its just a piece of medieval linen with an image on it. How interesting could it be?) It’s value to mainstream science is limited and the second because of the extremely limited access is there is a paucity of subject material on which to do physical investigations. Given full access to contemporary techniques, the 1978 investigations would pale in significance. So Shroud “science” proceeds in a very unorthodox fashion. Mainstream science does not deal with non-mainstream issues very well. Science usually has paradigms and precursors to guide its path. There are few here.

So to cast the cloth into the domain of mainstream arts and science for the moment it is, at best, of modest archeological and historical interest, perhaps of considerable scriptural/theological interest (although there is no explicit mention of an image in scripture) of interest to the art historians and art technologists and image scientists. That it is a manifestation of as yet a totally unknown “physics of resurrection” is at best pure speculation and at worst an oxymoron. God does whatever he wants whenever he wants for whatever purpose he deems. He has no mandate to render explanations to our hopelessly inadequate intellectual frameworks. These are matters for theologians to deal with.

Lastly, I have of late taken the view that if the Shroud is a 14^th century creation then it must be accounted for within the technological, historic and social circumstances of that era. This “if, then” proposition leads me to assert, for a number of compelling reasons, that the image is the remnant of a high quality 14^th century woodprint. I have documented this assertion in an accompanying paper entitled” Probable Origins of a 14^th Century Shroud Image.

BTW:  Back in June of last year we looked at some work by Joseph Accetta that was discovered by Colin Berry. See Good 3D from a conventional photograph

Here is the video of Joseph Accetta’s presentation in St. Louis: