SHROUD OF TURIN - SKEPTICAL INQUIRER - EDESSA TO TURIN HISTORY

Almost certainly, an image-bearing piece of cloth taken from Edessa in 944 by the armed forces of 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.

No one knows for certain if the Shroud of Turin is real. But if we focus only on what is published in peer-reviewed scientific journals then we know certain facts. The Shroud is certainly at least 1300 years old. It could be older. The images are unexplained. As Philip Ball wrote in Nature, in commenting on a 2005 article in Thermochimica Acta that proved that the 1988 carbon 14 dating was invalid, "It is simply not known how the ghostly image of a serene, bearded man was made" If we turn to a 2003 article in Melanoidins we find that the images on the Shroud of Turin are a chemical caramel-like darkening of an otherwise clear starch and polysaccharide coating on some of the shroud’s fibers It is not paint.

There is the mystery of the second face on the reverse side of the Shroud as reported in 2004 in the Journal of Optics published by the Institute of Physics. Other peer-reviewed evidence is clear: The bloodstains are real human blood. The images have peculiar 3D properties. The Shroud was bleached by methods used in the first century and not later in the medieval.

Throw in some history, and given what is known scientifically, and there is ample reason to infer that the Shroud of Turin is genuine. The thoughtful skeptical inquirers aims not to achieve this or that conclusion. Rather their aim is the process of honest skeptical inquiry. There is ample room for the thoughtful skeptical inquirer in Shroud of Turin research. But the articles that appear now and then in the Skeptical Inquirer magazine are preposterously polemic, filled with arguments refuted by peer-reviewed scientific observation and lack proper historical investigation.

The American Chemical Society website quotes a thoughtful skeptical inquirer, the late Raymond Rogers, the Los Alamos scientist who proved that the carbon 14 dating was invalid: "The observations do not prove how the image was formed or the "authenticity" of the Shroud. There could be a nearly infinite number of alternate hypotheses, and the search for new hypotheses should continue."

A PLAUSIBLE HISTORY OF THE SHROUD