The brown box below is a picture of part of the back cover of Fanti’s new book. If you look closely you will see that someone inserted [Jackson] into a quotation from an editorial review by Robert W. Siefker of the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado.
This bracketed insertion is repeated at Amazon, in my blog at Update on New Book by Giulio Fanti and Pierandrea Malfi and a couple of other places on the web.
The insertion is a small mistake. Bob Siefker of the Turin Shroud Center of Colorado kindly forwarded a copy of his actual book review comments on Fanti’s new book.
A Nice Review
The Shroud of Turin: First Century after Christ
“But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written” (John 21:24-25).
This passage from the Gospel of John comes to mind in endeavoring to provide a brief review of the new, large, technical and detailed work on the Shroud of Turin by Professor Giulio Fanti, from the University of Padua, written with the assistance of Pierandrea Malfi. This is one of the books John may have had in mind for publication after hundreds of man-years of collective research even two thousand years after the death of Jesus. This book is unique and timely. It is being published at the time of the 2015 public exhibition of the Shroud in Turin Italy, and it is unique in the depth of material covered that supports dating the Shroud progressively back to the first century. The book includes an intriguing chapter on a numismatic investigation that strongly supports the conclusion that the Shroud existed as an archetype for coins minted in the seventh century AD, well before the 1988 carbon dating that declared the Shroud linen cloth dated from 1260 to 1390. Even more important are chapters that cover alternative dating methods for ancient linen that appear to strongly support a first century provenance for the Shroud linen. A detailed critique of the 1988 carbon dating effort is also included that gives the authors’ analysis of why and how the effort failed to correctly ascertain the true age of the Shroud. Other topics touched on in the book include Shroud history, medical forensics related to the suffering of the man of the Shroud, detailed image characteristics and image formation hypotheses.
Overall this book will be a valuable source book for the general public as well as for Shroud scholars for many years to come. The book is an outstanding contribution to Shroud studies.
The Turin Shroud Center of Colorado
Robert W. Siefker