New Information in 2008:
A team of nine scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory
has confirmed that the carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin is
wrong. See
Shroud of Turin for Journalists,
Fact Check at
Shroud of Turin Blog
&
Ohio State University Shroud of Turin
Conference
The
thoughtful skeptical inquirer's highest aim is not to achieve
this or that outcome for something controversial. Rather, the
thoughtful skeptical inquirer honors the process of careful
reasoning.
Imagine slicing a human hair lengthwise, from
end to end, into 100
long thin slices, each slice one-tenth the width of a single red blood cell. The
images on the Shroud, at their thickest, are this thin. The faint
images, golden-brownish, formed by a caramel-like substance, are wholly
part of
a super-thin film of starch fractions and sugars. Where this film
is not brown, it is clear. Knowing the way certain ancient linen
was made, the film covering on just some of the cloth's
fibers can be expected. And knowing that dead bodies produce
gaseous cadaverine and putrescine that react
with sugars to form caramel-like substances called melanoidins,
the color is not only possible, it is expected:
Strange coatings of saccharides turned
brown. Spectral data, chemical
tests and photomicrographs show that this is so. All this is documented in
secular peer-reviewed scientific journals. The honest skeptical inquirer
must wonder, How can this be?
It is preposterous to think the Shroud of
Turin was
painted.
The notion that such super-thin images were
painted is preposterous. Yes, it is true that one scientist did
look
through a microscope and find components of what might have been
paint. And because of this he concluded that the Shroud was
painted. Walter McCrone was a world-renowned microscopist,
deservedly so. He was a true scientist and he knew his craft well.
We should not doubt that he found iron-oxide and mercury-sulfide,
both constituents of paint. But there are many reasons why such
chemical particles might be found on the Shroud. Water used for
retting flax introduced iron. And centuries of dust, particularly dust in
churches with frescoed ceiling and walls, introduced all manner of
trace contaminants. All other scientists
who examined the image fibers -- many of them every bit as renowned and
qualified -- have disagreed with McCrone. There is,
simply, an
insufficient amount of paint constituents to form a
visible image. Spectral analysis proves that. So does the now
certain knowledge of the image bearing super-thin film. Ironically, McCrone identified the super-thin
starch substance that ultimately became part of the proof that
his conclusions were wrong.
So what are we to make of a 14th century bishop,
Pierre d'Arcis, who wrote in a memorandum that a painter confessed
to painting the Shroud's images? In isolation his document is
damning. But the skeptical inquirer, being true to his ways, must
challenge such a claim with the full conspectus of what was being
written at the time. Pierre's peers doubted his veracity and
questioned his motives. It was all about money. Pierre was the
bishop of Troyes. The Shroud was being exhibited at nearby Lirey;
and it was to that town that pilgrims with bags of coins were
flocking. The d'Arcis memorandum is pointless. The skeptical inquirer
is fully justified in his skepticism; for no
painter painted on a caramel substance and a surrounding clear
substance that was a hundred times thinner than a single brush hair.
The carbon 14 dating sample from the Shroud
of Turin was invalid.
Did not carbon 14 demonstrate that
the Shroud was medieval? Could it possibly be wrong? Carbon 14
dating, the skeptical inquirer knows, is useful for dating
material going back about 50,000 years. And it is extraordinarily
accurate for material less than 10,000 years old. Yes, there can be
problems with contamination. But the labs that do this work do a
very good job of removing contamination with combinations of alkaline and
acidic baths. And yes, absolute precision is impossible. In the
Shroud carbon 14 samples there was less than one carbon 14 atom for every trillion
or so carbon 12 and carbon 13 atoms. But the quantity of material
was sufficient and the methods accurate enough to estimate that
the material tested produced a statistically certain range of dates: 1260 to 1390 CE.
Even so, there might be a reason to suspect some error.
There have been claims that a biological polymer
was growing on the Shroud and that this could have affected the
date. Not so! The National Science Foundation Mass Spectrometry
Center of Excellence at the University of Nebraska, using highly
sensitive pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry,
could not detect any
such polymers on Shroud fibers. Furthermore, it is well
known
that a
biopolymer product would show the same carbon age as the
Shroud because the organism would use fixed carbon from the
cellulose fibers and not from the atmosphere. Similar claims that
a scorching fire in 1532 might have altered the carbon 14
isotope ratios are scientifically unsustainable. The skeptical
inquirer is right to pooh-pooh such ideas.
But as the skeptical inquirer knows,
material intrusion is a potential problem in carbon 14 dating. A
classic example is the dating of peat from ancient bogs. Miniscule
roots from much newer plants get entangled in the peat -- some
roots having decomposed into newer peat -- and this will distort
the results. Could something like this have affected the results
of dating of the Shroud? As it turns out, chemical and visual
analyses, done in just the last two years, show unmistakable proof of
material intrusion of new linen fibers -- enough material by some
estimates to make a 1st century cloth seem medieval. The
discovery of
alizarin dyes (from Madder root),
a hydrous aluminum oxide mordant and
plant gum along with twisted-in cotton fibers and spliced threads
in the carbon 14 sample region shows that the sample area was
discretely repaired. These substances are not found anywhere else
on the Shroud.
Shroud of Turin Story Breaking News
Other recent findings about the Shroud of
Turin are intriguing.
The skeptical inquirer knows about decomposition
kinetics. He knows that the cloth is linen.
Each thread of the cloth is made up of roughly a hundred fibers
from a flax plant. The skeptical inquirer knows about lignin, a
complex polymer compound, one of the constituents of flax
fibers. He knows that lignin's chemical
composition changes over time. He knows that if a microchemical
test for vanillin in lignin is negative that the cloth is more
than 1300 years old, twice the age that the carbon 14 dating
estimated. Clues
from vanillin showed something was wrong in the carbon 14 tests.
Something was very wrong.
The second face on the Shroud of Turin.
In 2004, a startling discovery was
made.
A faint second face was found on the back of the Shroud.
This second face was directly behind the face on the front of the
cloth as though paint or stain had soaked through. But when we
probe between the two facial images, when we look at the interior
of the threads, when we examine individual fibers, we discover
that nothing has soaked through. The faces are thin and
superficial to the extreme outer surfaces of the Shroud.
History weighs to support a very early Middle East provenance
for the Shroud.
Whatever the Shroud of Turin is, it is not a
painted, medieval fake-relic. The unmistakable images of a
crucified man were not created by any known artistic method. And
thus, the honest skeptical inquirer will turn to history for
clues. In doing so he discovers that newly found, newly translated
and newly interpreted documents provide a plausible historical scenario
for something that is not a medieval fake-relic.
Almost certainly, an image-bearing piece of cloth taken from
Edessa in 944 by the armed forces of the Byzantine Emperor, a cloth described
on that occasion by Gregory Referendarius, the archdeacon of Hagia Sophia, is the
Shroud of Turin. This
image-bearing cloth disappeared from Constantinople in 1204 in the
hands of French crusaders. We can trace it to Athens in 1207. But
there
the trail grows cold. If the Edessa Cloth -- later in Constantinople
called the Holy Mandylion -- is indeed the Shroud, it reemerges in the
annals of history in Lirey about 1355. The gap of about 150 years
is uncomfortable. But such gaps are not unusual in the pursuit of
history. It is in the plumbing and searching for details
that historians find connections that bridge historical gaps; all
too common gaps in ancient history. The description by
Gregory, a drawing from the late 1100s, tantalizing clues sifted
from commonly redacted and exaggerated legends and letters, and
citations from documents that no longer exist: these things are
plausible.
It may have ended up in Besançon. There is some
reason to think so. There is good reason to believe it was acquired by the French knight, Geoffrey de Charny
by 1349 but not much earlier. We know, without any doubt, that it was displayed
in Lirey just before Geoffrey was killed at the Battle
of Poitiers. And there is no doubt, whatsoever, that cloth displayed in Lirey is the cloth
that now resides in Turin.
Botched carbon 14 dating, images
formed by the caramel-like substance, a plausible history that tracks back to the
6th century while suggesting an earlier provenance: all that is
undeniable. But is that enough? Is the Shroud of Turin the
genuine burial shroud of the historical Jesus as millions believe? While the evidence
is good, it is not
conclusive.
Some claims in support of the Shroud of
Turin's authenticity are
dubious.
Some claims, sometimes presented to try and
establish the cloth's authenticity, are just not evidentiary.
For instance, claims of barely perceptible images of Roman lepta
coins over the eyes of the man are flimsy and
so far lack scientific confirmation. And speculation, sometimes touted as
theory, that the images were formed by radiation released from a
miraculous resurrection event, is scientifically preposterous. We need not
debate resurrection or cerebrate on the physical nature of a
miraculous resurrection.
That work belongs to philosophers who might wonder if God, in
performing miracles, might leave bits of sub-atomic particles
lying about in all the right places, in just the right measures,
at just the right time, to imprint, on purpose or by accident, an
image on the cloth?
Radiation, almost certainly, could not have
formed the caramel-like substance that makes up the images: not
electromagnetic radiation; not ionizing particles such as protons,
electrons, and alpha particles; and not non-ionizing particles
such as neutrons. Enough energy to induce a chemical change in the
super-thin film that holds the image would have visibly altered
the characteristic molecular arrangement, the fibrillar structure
of the flax fibers. That did not happen.
In the historical context, some evidence is
dubious. That the Shroud may have been the hands of the Knights
Templar; or the Cathars (the Albigensians) in Languedoc or in
Greece or hidden away in Constantinople, as some have proposed,
are at best only possibilities. Possibilities don't close gaps and
don't make for good history. The skeptical inquirer is right to
question such arguments. But he is not right to assume that gaps mean there is
no history.
It is the face on the Shroud of Turin that intrigues
us the most.
The Shroud is a fourteen foot long
piece of linen cloth. On one half of its length (the lower half
in the accompanying picture), there is a frontal image of a man
from head to foot. On the other half, upside down as though
standing on his head, is an image of the man's backside. We can
clearly see the shape of the man's head, torso and legs. We
notice that his arms are before him and crossed at the wrists. If we look carefully, we
can see features of the man's face: his eyes, his nose, his
mustache and beard.
It is that face that is the most intriguing
issue for the skeptical inquirer. There is something in
the passionate exactness of the picture, something of a sleight-of-hand quality
that resonates with whatever we believe. The picture is quite
astounding. To the unquestioning believer in the Shroud's
authenticity, it is not an image made by the hand of an artist:
God made the image or it is an unlikely accident of nature. On the
other hand, the hardened skeptic, both the atheist and the
miracle-eschewing believer in God,
cannot help but believe that the images are faked. He is skeptical
of the Shroud just as the
creationist-fundamentalist is skeptical about the evolution
of the earth and its creatures: each in his own way must reject
the conclusions of science and history. It is to the honest
skeptical inquirer, whether motivated by faith in the unexplained or
by doubt born of modern sensibilities, that the quest for elusive truth
belongs.
The skeptical inquirer knows well that the
familiar face, the so photorealistic face that astounds, is not the
face that is actually on the Shroud. The face on the Shroud is
bleary, ghostlike picture. It
looks something like a soaked-in, blurred stain. However, when the
Shroud of Turin is photographed -- something that happened
for the first time in 1898 -- a startling image emerges on the
photographer's film. The image on the negative, on the film, is a
positive picture. That can only be so if the images on the Shroud
are, themselves, negative images. What can that mean?
Are we to imagine, in an age before photography
was invented, before anyone saw a photographic negative, that someone
would or could create images like those on the Shroud? Why? How
so, without an example of a continuous-tone, grayscale negative?
Without a camera and film, how would an artisan know that he got it right? Perhaps,
we might think, it was an accident. But surely, that is as
improbable as Jackson Pollock dribbling paint onto a canvas from
atop his twelve foot ladder and accidentally producing a perfect
replica of the Mona Lisa.
There are plentiful odd
qualities in the Shroud of Turin images.
Why does a computer plot of the image's color
density produce a 3D terrain map,
an inexplicable 3D optical illusion
phenomenon? No pictorial work of art does
so; nor does a photograph. Why can't you see the image if you
stand very close to it? It really isn't a mystery; but it is very
telling about the image. Why does the man look so gaunt? In
reality, the image isn't of a narrow face. An optical illusion
caused by the way the cloth was bleached makes us see the man as
having a very thin face.
And why is the blood of the
bloodstains red? It really is blood. That has been proven over and
over by many scientists working independently of one another. Old blood normally turns
black. The reasons it is red are simple. Ancient cloth, as it was
manufactured in the the Middle East during the first century, was
starched on the loom and then washed in suds of the Soapwort
plant. Ingredients of this natural soap are hemolytic,
which would keep the blood red. We know, as well, that the
blood on the Shroud is rich in bilirubin, a bile pigment produced
when a human body is under severe traumatic stress. Bilirubin is
bright red and stays red.
The biggest mystery of all is if
the Shroud of Turin is a grave cloth, which is something that we
might infer, then how is it that it survived the grave? Why did it not rot away? Why are there no signs of
decomposition fluids that would occur within about three days?
Why, indeed, was it separated from the body it covered?
This photo-rich website addresses many of these
issues. It is organized like a museum website. Select a general
topic, click on thumbnail picture, and browse through the dozens
of pictures and the captions. Bookmark the site and visit often.
The true skeptical inquirer
should not be confused with the magazine, Skeptical
Inquirer. The Skeptical Inquirer is the journal of
CSICOP, the "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of
Claims of the Paranormal," an organization that has included such
scientific luminaries as Carl Sagan and Steven Jay Gould.
Skeptical Inquirer is an
interesting and
entertaining magazine. It usually does an
excellent job of debunking outlandish myths, urban legends and all manner of
unscientific claims. But when it comes to the Shroud of Turin it
has failed. For the
editors of Skeptical Inquirer, everything they find
distasteful in religion and Christianity is mimicked in pitiable fashion as they struggle to
attack the Shroud's authenticity. They recast history to their own
fancy. They ignore scientific facts unless they suits their
purpose. Hilariously, without any sense of exegetical perception,
they cite the "Christian Bible," as though they thought the text
literally true, to argue that the Shroud of Turin is not authentic.
Were they honest to the principles of
skeptical inquiry, the magazine would question the carbon 14
dating. As it is, in their failing, they will leave that to
ethical, peer-reviewed, scientific journals. They would be skeptical of
Walter McCrone. They would wonder why, of all the scientists who directly examined
Shroud fibers, only Walter McCrone claimed to find paint. How is
that possible if the documented, accessible, peer-reviewed
spectral analysis proves otherwise? Why is it that McCrone's
work cannot be reproduced by anyone? Why is it that he did not
submit his work to peer review in the normal way that scientists
announce their findings?
The Skeptical Inquirer
magazine, with a series of articles by
Joe
Nickell has fooled itself by not being an inquirer and not being
truly skeptical; for skepticism fueled by selective use of
information is not skepticism at all.
Shroud of Turin Story Breaking News
NEW 2005 SHROUD OF TURIN BROUHAHA: SCIENCE vs PAPAL CUSTODIAN
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