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New Paper by Pam Moon
Pam Moon has uploaded another paper she wrote to her Shroud of Turin Exhibition site: Bl Sebastian Valfrè: The Black Thread, Reweave, and Unravelling the Shroud. It begins:
It was an enormous privilege to attend the St Lewis Shroud conference and to meet so many of the world’s greatest Shroud experts. Can I give my congratulations to the organisers. The comments below are based on some of the conversations I had at the conference.
I am very grateful to Joe Marino for allowing me to present the Oxford photographs and Donna Campbell’s report, to Barrie Schwortz for finding the information online and to Russ Breault for recording the conference. Donna Campbell wrote: ‘there are signs in the Shroud sample that direct the notion of mending or reweaving of the actual woven fabric.’ One of the items mentioned in the presentation was the large black thread which is visible on the Oxford and Arizona samples. A comparison was made with the small black and large white threads also present.
I was delighted to discover from Emanuela Marinelli and Will Meacham that the large black thread was probably stitched in 1694 by Bl Sebastian Valfrè. The invisible reweave hypothesis of Joe Marino and Sue Benford supported by Donna Campbell may refer to two or three different episodes of stitch repair and Bl Sebastian’s repair was one episode. The best demonstration of invisible reweave (both French and in-weaving) I have seen is by the company Without a Trace and can be seen in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIgC_IeuzKE. Please look at that before continuing! The black thread also points to the possibility that the corner strands were unravelled, rewoven back together and then stitched back into place with reweaving techniques. Below is the large black thread seen in th Oxford and Arizona photographs see: https://archdams.arch.ox.ac.uk/?c=1203&k=1bcdc90a8b [|] http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/arizona.pdf. Investigating a Dated piece of the Shroud of Turin, Radiocarbon, 52, 2010.
Black Thread
OK writes:
In a recent paper "The black thread and other repairs?", linked recently on shroudcom, Pam Moon considers the matter of a dark thread visible on the photo.
I just would like to remind similar things have been reported for a long time. They may clarify the issue. First in a paper Joseph G. Marino, Edwin J.Prior, Chronological History of the Evidence for the Anomalous Nature of the C-14 Sample Area of the Shroud of Turin have a following note:
Entry: #17
Date: 1996
Data Category: Evidence of anomalous nature of C-14 corner and C-14 aspects
Evidence: Even though Riggi had given assurances that the excised C-14 samples given to the
labs were free of foreign threads, The University of Arizona, one of the laboratories that
performed the Shroud C-14 dating, documented both red silk and blue satin in its sample.
Source: Petrosillo, Orazio and Marinelli, Emanuela. The Enigma of the Shroud: A Challenge
to Science. San Gwann, Malta: Publishers Enterprises Group, 1996, pg. 86.It has been also mentioned in Marinelli’s paper from the Valencia conference:
In Tucson a thread of red silk and blue fibers were found on the sample238 which points to the Sox as original source of information 238 D. SOX, How an age of mystery ended, in The Times, October 15, 1988, p. 36.
According to the scheme from Ian Wilson’s 1998 The Blood and the Shroud (scan here, published by Stephen E. Jones on his blog). According to the scheme there was blue surrounding frame sewn onto Shroud by Princess Clotilde, 1868 nearby, as well as her stitching on the edge of radiocarbon sample. I presume she is the main suspect for leaving such dark threads in the radiocarbon sample. I don’t know whether that means she made some manipulations in the radiocarbon sample. It may indicate towards this direction, as well as those traces might have been accidentally left there during her work on the Shroud.
Is the Shroud real? Probably.
The Shroud of Turin may be the real burial cloth of Jesus. The carbon dating, once seemingly proving it was a medieval fake, is now widely thought of as suspect and meaningless. Even the famous Atheist Richard Dawkins admits it is controversial. Christopher Ramsey, the director of the Oxford Radiocarbon Laboratory, thinks more testing is needed. So do many other scientists and archeologists. This is because there are significant scientific and non-religious reasons to doubt the validity of the tests. Chemical analysis, all nicely peer-reviewed in scientific journals and subsequently confirmed by numerous chemists, shows that samples tested are chemically unlike the whole cloth. It was probably a mixture of older threads and newer threads woven into the cloth as part of a medieval repair. Recent robust statistical studies add weight to this theory. Philip Ball, the former physical science editor for Nature when the carbon dating results were published, recently wrote: “It’s fair to say that, despite the seemingly definitive tests in 1988, the status of the Shroud of Turin is murkier than ever.” If we wish to be scientific we must admit we do not know how old the cloth is. But if the newer thread is about half of what was tested – and some evidence suggests that – it is possible that the cloth is from the time of Christ.
No one has a good idea how front and back images of a crucified man came to be on the cloth. Yes, it is possible to create images that look similar. But no one has created images that match the chemistry, peculiar superficiality and profoundly mysterious three-dimensional information content of the images on the Shroud. Again, this is all published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
We simply do not have enough reliable information to arrive at a scientifically rigorous conclusion. Years ago, as a skeptic of the Shroud, I came to realize that while I might believe it was a fake, I could not know so from the facts. Now, as someone who believes it is the real burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, I similarly realize that a leap of faith over unanswered questions is essential.
My name is Dan Porter. Please email me at DanielRobertPorter@gmail.com
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