When I stopped blogging about the Shroud of Turin in December of 2015, I thought it was for good. For seven years I blogged almost every day. In that time I made over 4,000 postings. I was burned out. Completely burned out. I resolved to avoid discussions, papers, books and conferences about the Shroud, at least for a while. One technique I adopted was to use email filters. The problem with filters is that they thoughtlessly and unceremoniously toss most emails having anything to do with the Shroud into the trash. It may have been rude, but it worked. The problem was that Joe, who I think of as a friend, wrote a paper in late 2020 that I would have liked to have read. I didn’t know about it.
Now I’m back, at least for awhile, so I have opened the slough. Here comes the flood!
Academia.edu has a wonderful way of trying to catch you up. Today, they tossed a paper over the e-transom. Had I read, “Have There Been Multiple Secret C-14 Tests on the Shroud of Turin?” by Joe Marino, their computer wanted to know? According to a link-reference at shroud.com, it was uploaded October 12, 2020.
No, I had not read it. Now, I have. It’s good. I recommend it.
Here is a bit of a summary fair-use lifted from Barrie’s site:
Some people are aware that there was a putative secret C-14 test on the Shroud performed in 1982 on a thread of the so-called “Raes sample” extracted from the Shroud in 1973. (It was named after the late Belgian textile expert Prof. Gilbert Raes.) However, there are very few people who are aware that there may have been at least two other secret C-14 testings of the Shroud. Also little known are the facts that many more Shroud samples exist than previously thought, and that the number and provenance of at least some of the “Raes samples” are open to questions. Of course, the more samples that existed, the more chance there was that individuals would try to date them. The politics and intrigue here are a subset of what I have documented in my eight-hundred-page book, ‘The 1988 C-14 Dating of the Shroud of Turin: A Stunning Exposé.
Now I have to read the book. I notice that there are only 13 in stock at Amazon.
Joe’s first quote is from an article written in 1994 by Giorgio Tessiore, who writes that the Raes sample “was examined in Belgium, then returned and reapplied, divided into its two parts, previously sewn, in about the same place.” This is not true. I wonder who told him it was. The film of the unrolling of the Shroud in 1988 clearly shows the empty space where the Raes sample came from. Later the sample, somewhat ragged, is brought out, matched against the space it originally came from, and returned to a little plastic envelope. It’s a minor detail, but it calls into question the accuracy of anything else Tessiore might have written, and the crucial importance of finding primary sources if at all possible.
A little later on Joe quotes from an article by Philippe Dalleur, who claims that “in 1979, one of the pioneers of the new AMS technology, Prof. Gove (University of Rochester) and his colleague Harbottle, were allowed to conduct two dating measurements of this sample.” There is no evidence to suggest that this is true. David Sox publishes Gove and Harbottle’s 1979 proposal in his ‘The image of the Shroud,’ in 1981, but with no suggestion that it was accepted or implemented. In spite of this Dalleur even quotes dates achieved by their respective labs (1750 and 950 years BP, which correspond to about 300 and 1100 AD), and says that they were “graphed” by M.C. van Oosterwyck in 1997. Marie-Claire van Oosterwyck’s article in “Le Sel de la Terre” (Spring 1997) does graph the dates, but does not mention Gove or Harbottle. She gives her source as William Meacham, “Turin Shroud dated to 200-1000 A.D. in secret testing.” This was a press release from the time of the 1988 dating, beginning “a closely guarded secret testing of the Shroud of Turin in 1982 by an American C-14 laboratory yielded conflicting dates of 200AD and 1000AD.” As it happens, these calendar dates correspond to about 1850 and 1050 BP, so where did van Oosterwyck get her 1750 and 950 BP dates from?
The question is further complicated by the quoted conversation with Heller and Adler, in which they say that the dates “were not corrected by the dendrochronological curve.” So where did Meacham get his dendrochronologically corrected dates from?
Then we move on to the ludicrous Leon Garza-Valdes and his bioplastic coating, which, apart from his own material, has yet to be identified on any other archaeological artifact, and his new bacterium Leobacillus rubrus, which has yet to be recognised by any other bacteriologist. He obtained samples of the radiocarbon corner from Giovanni Riggi, from the rolled edges of the sample which had been cut away in 1988. Without apparently recognising that unless his bacteria were photosynthetic (which they weren’t), any carbon they were made of was the same age as the Shroud they were feeding on, he attempted to dissolve out the cellulose of the flaxen substrate using an enzyme and a Tris-borate buffer. The solution was filtered and dried, and samples sent to Tucson and Toronto, returning dates of 3000 and 2200 BC respectively. Garza-Valdes attributed these clearly incorrect dates to the petroleum the Tris-borate ingredients were prepared from, which contains no radiocarbon at all, thus seriously reducing the overall proportion of radiocarbon, and providing much too ancient a date.
He did not calculate how much of this ‘dead’ carbon is needed to shift a first, or even fourteenth century date, by thousands of years. Tris-borate buffer is about a third carbon, and even if all of it was radiocarbon free, between a quarter and a third of his sample would have had to be contamination in order to achieve the reported result. That smacks of highly incompetent purification. If he had used a buffer which only contained modern levels of radiocarbon, his results would still have been severely shifted, but in the other direction.
Alan Adler hoped that he could “undilute” the shroud powder from the contamination powder, but must have made some sheer guesses as to how much contamination had to be removed.
All in all, not much can be derived from the two alleged secret datings, if they actually occurred, and what their actual results were. The first seems to have involved an impossibly small quantity of the Shroud, and was allegedly carried out secretly, without either controls or documentation, and the second was too grossly contaminated to achieve any reliable results. To suggest that either of them casts doubt on the properly conducted tests of 1988 is, in my opinion, unwarranted.
Dare I suggest Dan that the new postings thus far on your revived site are too PLAYED DOWN.
Your message content needs to be PLAYED UP.
That’s given the nature of the continued trumpeting from pro-authenticity spokespeople – via their numerous outlets – to dominate, nay dictate their Gospel-promoting anti-sceptic agenda.
That’s given the increasing hardcore of evidence which points to a medieval origin for the Turin Shroud (whilst not necessarily excluding believer-held post-Crucifixion Gospel-narrative veracity!).
I refer not “merely” to the 1988 C-14 radiocarbon dating (persuasive though it was to some of us – and still is !)