Hugh Farey’s blog posting, The Most Studied Artefact? is a must read for everyone who studies, writes, gives presentations, or takes interviews on the Shroud. And it should also be a must read for those of us who listen to what others say.
Hugh writes:
Of all the most widely circulated canards about the Shroud, probably the commonest is that the Shroud is the most studied artefact, “in human history,” “in Christendom.” “in the history of the world,” “of all time” . . . .
But it’s all nonsense. The truth is that the Shroud has hardly been studied at all, . . .
The scientists who carried out the 1978 investigations subsequently wrote reports, . . . Shroud.com lists thirty-five papers of which one or more members of STuRP were authors or among the authors, to which at least one by Walter McCrone should be added, but was omitted out of personal animosity.
And on and on it goes in a most informative way. Do read it.
BTW: Canard derives from the expression “half-sell a duck,” which makes no sense at all. It has evolved over time to mean a fabrication, a tall tale, a falsehood, an absurdity, and an exaggeration. The Oxford English Dictionary tells it better:
| {trli} canard, n [Fr.; lit. ‘duck’; also used in sense 1: see note there.] 1. An extravagant or absurd story circulated to impose on people’s credulity; a hoax, a false report. Littré says Canard for a silly story comes from the old expression ‘vendre un canard à moitié’ (to half-sell a duck), in which à moitié was subsequently suppressed. It is clear that to half-sell a duck is not to sell it at all; hence the sense ‘to take in, make a fool of’. In proof of this he cites bailleur de canards, deliverer of ducks, utterer of canards, of date 1612: Cotgr., 1611, has the fuller vendeur de canards a moitié ‘a cousener, guller, cogger; foister, lyer’. Others have referred the word to an absurd fabricated story purporting to illustrate the voracity of ducks, said to have gone the round of the newspapers, and to have been credited by many. |
Yes, Dan, Hugh Farey’s latest paper is probably the most important, most informative review re TS authenticity- promoting history (post-STuRP) that has appeared these last 40 years and more.
Sorry to have come back here, having stated earlier a couple of months back that I was taking my leave from internet-communicated TS. (It was the resuscitation of that pathetic screwed-up colour-confused bilirubin story from that late-recruited STuRP team member (Dr.Alan Adler) that prompted it).
This is now my final goodbye.
I shall resist the temptation to get re-involved from now on – having now said all I wish or need to say).
See my final experimentally-science-based, hypothesis-testing/re-testing Model 10 (arriving finally at Flour Imprinting plus second-stage Thermal Development plus Final Soap/Water Wash. ).
Ta ta finally one and all….Ta ta internet….
Farey’s comments in his posting (and not a “paper” as Colin Berry described it) deserve a closer look. I want to preface what follows by saying that Farey and I are on an online Shroud group. I can think of at least two occasions where he stated “I don’t believe for a second that ….” In both cases two STURP members confirmed the very thing that he said he didn’t believe. This should indicate the lens he uses to evaluate some data.
Farey begins:
“Of all the most widely circulated canards about the Shroud, probably the commonest is that the Shroud is the most studied artefact, “in human history,” “in Christendom.” “in the history of the world,” “of all time” (to quote just the front page of a Google search), and no doubt many more. This claim is generally justified on the grounds that the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STuRP) spent “hundreds of thousands of hours” studying it, not to mention all the work carried out by other researchers since, and certainly not to mention (especially if you are American) the 1973 Italian commission, who also studied the Shroud and by and large concluded that it was not authentic
“But it’s all nonsense. The truth is that the Shroud has hardly been studied at all, let alone so extensively as to place things like the tomb of Tutankhamun, Stonehenge or the Dead Sea Scrolls in the shade….”
My comment: The 1st thing that jumps out is that Farey apparently is setting the ground rules for what can constitute the Shroud being studied. He later focuses on the number of peer-reviewed journals STURP published in (while minimizing their value), as if that should be the main criteria.
I remember reading as far back as the 1980s that STURP had spent “hundreds of thousands of hours” studying it. How does he know it’s “nonsense?” Is it another case of him just “not believing for a second” that such was the case? Perhaps the people that reported that STURP had spent that much time on it had actually interviewed STURP members and got that directly from them. Further on, Farey says, “It is part of the banner page of shroud.com, in its most common manifestation: “It is, in fact, the single most studied artifact in human history, and we know more about it today than we ever have before.” Presumably this was written by Barrie Schwortz, but on what basis is impossible to say.” Well, considering that Barrie was part of STURP, he would have been privy to how much time STURP members would have spent analyzing their data. I can also add that about 5 years ago or so I asked Dr. John Jackson how much time he had personally spent on the Shroud. He told me at that time about 40,000 hours. One can add many more thousands of hours since then.
When claims are made that it is the most studied artifact in history, people are considering the number of hours STURP spent as well as the number of hours other commissions researchers have spent writing books, reports, thousands of articles, putting on dozens of conferences, producing hundreds of videos, blog postings(!) and so on. Farey says that the 1969/1973 commission “by and large concluded that it was not authentic.” That fits very well with his unequivocal statement at the top of his blog “Exploring the medieval context of the Turin Shroud.” But so what if the 1969/1973 commission “by and large concluded that it was not authentic”? Some people in medieval times asserted that the earth was flat but they were later proven wrong. The 1978 STURP team had more advanced equipment than used by the Commission. And his statement: “The truth is that the Shroud has hardly been studied at all.” Most people (I believe) would characterize that statement as the very nonsense he was attributing to the most-studied-artifact claim.
Farey also writes,
“Shroud.com lists thirty-five papers of which one or more members of STuRP were authors or among the authors, to which at least one by Walter McCrone should be added, but was omitted out of personal animosity.”
My comment: McCrone’s paper(s) were not omitted because of personal animosity! The situation is understandably confusing, but Farey could have easily gotten clarification from shroud.com’s Barrie Schwortz, who didn’t list McCrone’s paper(s) because McCrone was not an official member of STURP. It was inappropriate for Farey to say it was because of shroud.com’s (=Barrie Schwortz’s) animosity. In fact, shroud.com has included a direct link to the Shroud page on McCrone’s website (that listed ALL of McCrone’s papers) since shroud.com first went online on January 21, 1996! (They have since taken down all his “The Microscope” papers for a reason that’s easy to discern but that’s another story.)
It’s easy to think that he was because he was given sticky-tape samples by Ray Rogers. He did sign a non-disclosure agreement but it was a different one that members signed. Now the confusion comes in because Heller says in his 1983 book (pg. 184) that Jackson and Jumper offered McCrone membership and that he accepted. And McCrone claimed he “was drummed out of STURP.” On October 5, 2022 I called John Jackson on the phone. John says that Heller’s account is incorrect. He said that McCrone “may have thought he was a member, but he wasn’t.”
Farey wrote,
“According to several academia.edu articles by Joe Marino, these papers were published in “twenty-four peer reviewed journals,” but this is both incorrect and somewhat irrelevant. Several of the papers were merely descriptive of methods and/or results, and some were summaries, without original observations or conclusions. Few of the listed authors showed any further interest in the subject, and few of their investigations have been investigated further.”
My comment: It would have more accurate to have said, “over twenty peer-reviewed journal papers.” In several academia.edu articles, I did carelessly repeat another researcher’s characterization of the papers. Some of those papers were in the same journal, eg., Applied Optics, which is notoriously hard to publish in. Many STURP members are now deceased, but my guess would be that most, if not all, would bristle at the suggestion that any of their papers were “irrelevant.” After all, STURP did the most extensive examination ever. And even if some STURP members didn’t follow up on their own work, many other researchers have. What’s irrelevant here is Farey’s characterization of the STURP papers. See https://www.shroud.com/78papers.htm for a list of the important STURP papers, including those after 1978-1981 period.
Farey also writes,
“But the trope [that the Shroud is the most-studied artifact] persists, sometimes bolstered by its alleged endorsement by “a statement in a scientific, peer-reviewed journal” (Joe Marino), namely the Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, whose article, “The Remarkable Metrological History of Radiocarbon Dating [III] (Volume 109, No. 2) does include the words: “The Shroud of Turin is the single, most studied artifact in human history.” However Marino quotes this right out of context. In fact, the renowned journal simply says that the metrological impact of the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud “is shown, in part, by widely accepted statements,” such as “the Shroud of Turin is the single most studied artefact in human history.” The journal does not say that it thinks the widely accepted statement is true, and, although it is in quotation marks, it does not give a source for it.”
My comment: Although the journal doesn’t say it thinks the statement is true, it also doesn’t dispute it in any way. It’s actually used a springboard for the author to conclude that the official C-14 results on the Shroud (which Farey accepts fully despite numerous documented irregularities) can be questioned: “Apart from the effects of such factors on the Shroud, the issue of organic reactions and non-contemporaneous contamination of ancient materials can be a very serious and complex matter, deserving quantitative investigation of the possible impacts on measurement accuracy,” which Farey doesn’t cite. So who exactly has taken the quote out of the whole context?
Perhaps the biggest canard about the Shroud is that skeptics, despite not having any idea or viable method of how the image got on the cloth (not a proof that the Shroud’s authentic but an indication that it very well could be), continue to present arguments they believe show that the Shroud is nothing but a medieval forgery.
Grateful to read a well-informed and balanced response to Hugh’s remarks.
Thanks, Joe!
Joe makes a couple of valid criticisms, and I have amended my post at medieval shroud.com accordingly.
The position of Walter McCrone as a member of STuRP is difficult to settle without primary sources. He claims he joined in 1977, and attended a meeting in Albuquerque in March 1977, and another in London in September 1977, went to Turin on a planning trip with Jackson and Jumper in September or October 1977, and attended another meeting in Turin just before the hands-on investigation in October 1978. That’s quite a close association. He quotes a non-disclosure agreement, but how different it was from others is impossible to say. He does not appear on the list of researchers in the 1978 Test Plan, but then, neither do John Heller or Alan Adler, who, like him, were not present during the investigation, but did get very involved later. All in all I’m not sure it was clear what “being a member of STuRP” actually meant or involved until 1979.
However, perhaps I was too strong in my reason for McCrone’s exclusion from the list at shroud.com, so, as I say, have amended my post, and thank Joe for pointing it out.
Secondly, Joe suggests that I not only “set my own ground rules” for what studying an object means, but also didn’t explain what they were, at least not explicitly. He’s quite right. And in fact, just to make things more confusing, I used several definitions along the way. To start with, I used the idea that to study an object, you had to have it, or bits of it (like fragments of moon-rock, or flakes of paint or shreds of textile) in front of you. The STuRP team in Turin certainly studied the Shroud, and so did the Italian commission, and the radiocarbon textile specialists. Pieces have been studied by McCrone, Heller, Adler, Rogers, Villarreal, Riggi, Baima Bollone, Fanti, Lucotte and the radiocarbon team, to name only the most prominent. However, it is still true that more people, by far, have looked at pieces of the moon under their microscopes than have ever had similar access to the Shroud.
But such a definition excludes many more secondary studiers, such as of photographs or historical documents, and those who have analysed the primary studies, or who have carried out related experiments of their own. There are an uncountable number of them (including me, for instance), but then, surely the same can be said of many other topics of multidisciplinary investigation, such as Stonehenge or the Mona Lisa.
I have no difficulty in accepting that John Jackson has studied the Shroud for over 40,000 hours. That’s equivalent to eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year for twenty years, and perhaps he had the resources and determination to be able to do that. I wouldn’t be surprised if one or two others, such as Joe, have done the same. But they are in a vanishingly small minority, and no doubt every significant archaeological discovery has its dedicated adherents.
One possible way of comparing the extent of this overall involvement, although not quantifying them, is by looking at the publications each phenomenon has engendered, hence my JSTOR comparisons.
Finally, Joe is completely correct that from time to time I make sweeping dogmatic generalisations, but let’s face it; would anyone have paid any attention to “I have my doubts about the validity of….”?
And anyway, I have learned from the best!