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The real skeptical inquirer wonders . . .
Who was Geoffrey de Charny?
Geoffrey de Charny, a French knight, was first identified Western European owner of the Shroud. No records have been found to indicate who might have owned the Shroud before Geoffrey.
He wrote to Pope Clement VI stating that he intended to build a church at Lirey, France, to honor the "Holy Trinity" who answered his prayers for a miraculous escape while a prisoner of the English.
He is also already in possession of the Shroud, which some believe he acquired in Constantinople. It is just as likely that he acquired it elsewhere.
Large crowds of pilgrims visited the church at Lirey to view the Shroud and special souvenir medallions were struck. A surviving specimen that may be found at the Cluny Museum in Paris.
Geoffrey de Charny was killed by the English at the Battle of Poitiers, fighting at the side of the King of France.
The Shroud remained in the de Charny family for about one hundred years until it passed into the hands of the Savoy family. It remained a possession of the Savoy family until well into the 20th century.
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Shroud of Turin and the Skeptical Inquirer
Fact:
The 1988 carbon 14 dating used invalid samples snipped from a
discrete medieval repair. Furthermore, kinetics constants for the
loss of vanillin from lignin indicates that the cloth is at least
twice as old as the dates determined by the carbon 14 dating with
the faulty samples.
By some estimates, from
examination of documenting photographs, there is sufficient new
thread (about 60%) to allow adjusting the cloth's date to
approximately the first century.
Fact :
The images are formed by a brownish, complex conjugated carbon
substance within a carbohydrate layer of starch fractions no thicker
than 1/100 the diameter of a human hair.
The images are probably the
product of an amino/carbonyl reaction.
Fact :
The bloodstains are real blood. The blood is unusually red for
old blood.
The blood probably stayed red and
did not turn black as blood normally does because trace chemicals
found in the starch fractions are hemolytic. Also, the blood is rich
in bilirubin, a bile pigment produced when a human body is under
severe traumatic stress. Bilirubin is bright red and stays red.
Fact :
There is a faint, superficial face image on the back of the cloth.
This supports the hypothesis of an
amino/carbonyl reaction.
Fact :
There are sufficient descriptive historical records to suggest that
the Shroud of Turin is the Edessa cloth (ca. before 544 to 944 CE)
and the Bucoleon Palace grave cloth of Constantinople (ca. 944 -
1204).
Fragmentary evidence suggests that
the Edessa Cloth originated in Jerusalem in the 1st century and that
it is the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth.
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