Although the following article was not published in the mainstream media, it was authored by Ray Rogers and contains some important observations by Rogers. The article also has 2 excellent color photographs. It was published at: http://www.shroud.it/ROGERS-5.PDF. Ghiberti's pronouncement on my analyses Raymond N. Rogers Fellow, University of California, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA January 23, 2005 It is interesting that Msgr. Ghiberti thinks I am supporting the Benford and Marino hypothesis that the radiocarbon sample was taken from an "invisible reweave." Much to the contrary: I believed that it would be easy completely to refute them. It is highly embarrassing that I could not. This is the first time I have had to present information that seemed to support what I consider to be the "lunatic fringe." However, an ethical scientist absolutely must publish accurate information no matter what the emotional implications. The fact that there is any controversy over my results shows how dangerous it is implicitly to trust visual observations without any confirmation and to accept the unconfIrmed testimony of "experts." The importance of the sampling operation should have shown the necessity for careful independent observations and confirmation before cutting. I received some of the 1973 Raes threads from Luigi Gonella on 14 October 1979. If they were spurious, a person I consider to be a good scientist, Luigi, lied to me. The fact that they agreed with Raes' observations seems to confirm their validity .Their location on the Shroud shows that they must share at least some yarn segments with the radiocarbon sample. They proved to my satisfaction that the radiocarbon sample was spurious. I then received samples of the authentic radiocarbon sample on 12 December 2003. Their composition was identical to that of the Raes threads, proving the relationship between the samples. AM*STAR received the authentic radiocarbon samples from Luigi. Unless he lied again, they are authentic samples. The fact that they show identical compositions to the Raes samples seems to confIrm their provenience. Incidentally, I am not a member of AM*STAR, they did not fund my work, and they did not have any control over my methods or conclusions. I also have many fibers from different parts of the Shroud and the Holland cloth that I took with adhesive tape in 1978. I marked them in Turin, and I know they are authentic. The radiocarbon sample can be compared against real fibers from the Shroud as well as real samples from the Holland cloth, which certainly has a known age. Given valid samples that show obvious chemical differences from the Shroud, does Msgr. Ghiberti believe that I have made a mistake? There is absolutely no question that the composition of the radiocarbon sample is unique. Almost every proof of that statement has been confirmed by independent analyses with different methods. Msgr. Ghiberti does not have to rely on my chemistry to observe a difference between the radiocarbon sample and the main part of the Shroud. He can look at the ultraviolet fluorescence photographs taken by Vem Miller in 1978. They show the sampling area as a dark zone, proving that its chemical composition was not the same as the main cloth. The dark area is not a result of dirt or a shadow. I can explain fluorescence in great detail, but it is based totally on chemical composition. I do not make any claims about how the radiocarbon sampling area became spurious. I am not a textile expert, but I did find a strange end-to-end splice among the Raes threads (macrophotograph and photomicrograph attached). Anna Maria Donadoni, a conservator in Turin, showed me how separate lengths of yam were overlaid in weaving the main Shroud cloth. The splice is totally different. It is also obvious that the two ends of the splice are different: one is fluffy and white, the other is stained and tightly twisted. Although I am not a textile expert, I am a recognized expert in chemistry, and my paper in Thermochimica Acta (not a US journal but published in the Netherlands) withstood peer review. Few persons believed that the radiocarbon age determination could be in error: it was hard to convince the doubters. I have known Paul Damon, lead author on the 1989 dating, for many years, and I trust his honesty totally. I also originally believed that the age determination proved that the Shroud could not be the Shroud of Jesus. Why do the persons in Torino support nonsense with regard to the age determination? Contamination could not be the problem (it would take too much), and the papers about isotope fractionation were complete nonsense. I have written peer-reviewed papers on kinetic isotope effects, and I know the fundamentals. Indeed, I have published dozens of peer-reviewed papers on chemical kinetics, the same methods I used to show that the Shroud had to be between 1300 and 3000 years of age. I am not suggesting that anyone rely on the words of another "expert." I would suggest that any interested person study the facts. I understand how many persons can be upset by the proof that the radiocarbon sample was spurious. Honest science can accept such bruises. |
Local Scientist Dates Cloth to Christ's Time Thermochemist admits he can't debunk hypothesis that Shroud of Turin covered Christ's body after crucifixion If God hand-picked someone to prove to the world that Christ's burial cloth was not a hoax after all, Raymond Rogers probably wouldn't be the first name to come to mind. Rogers belonged to the Episcopal Church for a few years and studied about Christ on his own. But he could never quite find the proof he needed to support a "deep, abiding faith" in religion. His disbelief caused a rift with his wife. They divorced. He stayed devoted to what he knew: science. "I am a scientist," he said. "This is the way I live." Over the years, the Los Alamos thermochemist gained a reputation for his work with archaeologists. That's why a priest called him in 1977. He wanted Rogers to take a look at the Shroud of Turin. Rogers had never heard of it. The priest sent booklets that told about a 1412-foot-long linen cloth wrapped around Christ after the Roman crucifixion. It bore his imprint. "They were so pious, I just about threw them out," Rogers said of the booklets. Rogers noticed a photograph that made him curious. It showed scorched spots on the cloth caused by a church fire in 1532. If the shroud was a fake -- made with paint of some kind -- the material wouldn't look like that. An expert on how heat affects materials, Rogers knew this. He agreed to join the Shroud of Turin Research Project. He brought 32 samples from the shroud, which is stored at a museum in Torino, Italy, back to his home in Los Alamos and published articles. But he quit after the leader of the project screamed at him, "Ray, you are not a soldier for Christ!" In 2000, new information prompted him to reopen the case. Some "true believers" sent him a paper that suggested the samples tested were from a section rewoven in medieval times. "I can prove they're full of blank, blank, blank," Rogers recalled thinking. "I still had archive samples from the right area." In a peer-reviewed scientific journal, Thermochimica Acta, he published startling findings on Jan. 20. In the 1980s, scientists from three universities concluded the cloth wasn't very old. The linen sheet was determined to be a medieval fake. But this month, Rogers said he determined the cloth was between 1,300 and 3,000 years old -- which could have easily put it at the time of Christ. "I was really embarrassed that I had to admit that these people were right," Rogers said. "This (patched) area was not chemically or physically similar to the rest of the cloth. I could prove it in spades." The samples used in the 1988 tests came from a section of the cloth that was rewoven in the Middle Ages, according to Rogers. Rogers said he hasn't become an instant believer, however. At 78 and battling terminal cancer, he's sticking to science. "Here you've got blood spots. You've got a real shroud. You draw your own conclusions," he said. "I am not a theologian. I don't want to be a theologian. I want to keep my objectivity toward this thing, and so I don't go past this point." Rogers admits he can neither prove nor disprove many things. He has determined the drops of blood are authentic -- but until he gets results from the DNA tests he ordered from a international expert, he cannot be sure a human shed that blood. Another problem: Jesus wasn't the only man crucified. And Rogers has struggled with the authenticity of the Bible. "I cannot accept any of the written stuff (the biblical accounts of Christ's death) as gospel," Rogers said. "But I can say the scientific evidence does not rule it out." He knows he is walking a fine line. And he's nervous about it. "I say I know a lot about the chemistry and the physics of this object. It's not like a UFO or a ghost. I could pick this thing up and look at it under a microscope, and I could take samples of it. It's not one of these spooky things. It's a real piece of material," he said. "If I could reject the hypothesis that this was the shroud of Jesus, I would have done it. But being an honest guy -- and it's embarrassing sometimes to be honest when what you're finding out agrees with the lunatic fringe or the true believers -- but to be perfectly honest, I'd have to say at this moment that I cannot prove that this is not the cloth that was used to wrap the body of Jesus that was crucified." Journey to Turin Long ago, Rogers wanted to be an archaeologist. When he was a chemistry student at the University of Arizona, he wondered why the archaeology field wasn't making more use of chemistry. He considered becoming an archaeologist, but his archaeology professors said he'd make a better living as a chemist. But he took classes with top archaeologists. When he could, he ran tests on the residues inside ancient pottery. His career took him to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was a chemist from 1952 to 1988. And word got around that he was willing to look at odd samples. When he could, he tested artifacts. One day, Norris Bradbury, then the lab director, stopped by to talk. Rogers said Bradbury gave him permission to analyze materials for archaeologists and museums, even though such research wasn't part of the lab's mission. The thermochemist got drawn into major discoveries. He became an expert on early-man sites in the Southwest. "I did so much of it, they elected me to be a fellow for it," he said, referring to an esteemed status given to some lab scientists. At work, explosive components of nuclear weapons were Rogers' main focus. What he learned about the radiation effects on organic materials and the chemical properties of polymers served him well with the shroud research, he said. But in other ways, he was not prepared for this high-profile artifact. "It is the most frustrating, and in some cases degrading thing, I've been involved in," Rogers said. At the lab, his colleagues were what he described as "ethical, rigorous, hard-nosed scientists," such as Enrico Fermi. When he got involved with the shroud investigation, he saw some of the "shallowest, most idiotic" science he had ever seen. "There were people who have been working on the shroud who would have sold tickets to the crucifixion," he said. "There are an awful lot of dishonest people involved in this." He says he's "an old grump," and his body doesn't feel as good as he'd like. But at least his mind is active. His fascination is swelling again. He is full of ideas for more research papers to write on the shroud. "You always have some ammunition you haven't fired yet," Rogers said. Story from REDNOVA NEWS: http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=125172 Published: 2005/02/05 21:00:08 CST |
Published online: 28 January 2005; | doi:10.1038/news050124-17 muse@nature.com: To know a veil Philip Ball Attempts to date the Turin Shroud are a great game, says Philip Ball, but don't imagine that they will convince anyone. The most recent scientific study of the Turin shroud will not surprise anyone with even a passing interest in this mysterious bit of cloth. Retired chemist Raymond Rogers claims that the sample used for radiocarbon-dating studies in 1988 - which suggested that the shroud was a medieval forgery - is quite different from the rest of the relic. Rogers, who worked on explosives at the US Los Alamos National Laboratory, presents chemical arguments for the shroud being much older than those datings implied. It is, he says, between 1,300 and 3,000 years old. Let's call it somewhere around the middle of that range, which puts the age at about 2,000 years. Which can mean only one thing... But it would be unfair to imply that Rogers has steered his study towards a preconceived conclusion. He has a history of respectable work on the shroud dating back to 1978, when he became director of chemical research for the international Shroud of Turin Research Project. At the time, he says, he suspected that taking the job was " a good way to destroy my scientific credibility". And when he found that some of his findings did not fit with what some wished to hear, he was reproached: "Ray, you are not a soldier for Christ." "That," he says, "is the kind of goal-directed approach I had feared." Cloth of old Rogers has spoken of "the pseudoscience surrounding the shroud". Future studies, he says, "must be carefully planned and executed, and they cannot involve management by dilettantes". He has complained about the uncooperativeness of the shroud's guardians in Turin, saying that because of this, "competent scientific efforts to understand the shroud have a bleak future". This should not, perhaps, make anyone terribly distraught. The scientific study of the Turin shroud is like a microcosm of the scientific search for God: it does more to inflame any debate than settle it. Believers' ability to construct ingenious arguments is more than a match for the most exhaustive efforts of science. The shroud literature leaves no stone unturned in casting doubt on 'evidence' that the relic was faked, while embracing with blind rapture every argument for its authenticity. So why study it at all? And yet, the shroud is a remarkable artefact, one of the few religious relics to have a justifiably mythical status. It is simply not known how the ghostly image of a serene, bearded man was made. It does not seem to have been painted, at least with any known historical pigments. And the relic is surrounded with legend and linked to Cathar sects, shady secret societies and papal conspiracies. If all this sounds like a popular current novel about hidden codes and religious mysteries, that may be no coincidence: among the flaky theories about the shroud's origin is one that it was created by Leonardo da Vinci, using a primitive photographic technique to record his own image. You couldn't make it up (although people do). The photographic hypothesis has been developed (so to speak) in some detail, notably by South African art historian Nicholas Allen. He has even used medieval materials to create faint photographic images on linen cloth saturated with silver nitrate. But Allen failed to convince other shroud scholars, who reasonably asked how an invention as marvellous as photography could have remained otherwise unknown until the nineteenth century. Besides, this is a crowded field. Among the wilder entrants is the idea that Christ's image was burned into the cloth by some kind of release of nuclear energy from his body. Winding sheet The international team of scientists who convened in 1987 to put a date on the shroud probably did not expect to banish such fantasies. But by applying radiocarbon dating to the fabric, they were at least employing the most definitive of archaeological tools. Or so they thought. The textile sample was cut from the shroud in Turin Cathedral in April 1988, under the supervision of textile experts, representatives of the laboratories in Arizona, Oxford and Zurich selected to perform the analyses, a conservation scientist from the British Museum, and the Archbishop of Turin. The three measurements indicated with 95% confidence that the shroud's linen dated from between AD1260 and 1390. This, the researchers said, was "conclusive evidence that the linen of the shroud of Turin is medieval"(1). Needless to say, the ink was barely dry before others started to quibble. Professor of history Daniel Scavone collected examples of erroneous radiocarbon dates and problems with the method that were "well known to the 14C community". And microbiologists Leoncio Garza-Valdes and Stephen Mattingly proposed in 1996 that bacteria and fungi on the fibres had skewed the dates, by a thousand years or so. Patch work Rogers has pursued another objection. Originating as it did from a couple who research 'pyramid energies' and 'the existence of the soul', the suggestion that the carbon-dated fragment was taken from a patch repaired in the sixteenth century did not look promising. The shroud was indeed damaged by fire and patched up in 1532, but those patches, called the Holland cloth, are obvious. Rogers thought that he would be able to "disprove [the] theory in five minutes". But he now says that there is something in it. Luigi Gonella, the Archbishop of Turin's scientific adviser, provided Rogers with a few threads from the piece cut for dating, which he compared with the samples he collected during the Shroud of Turin Research Project. The radiocarbon sample, but not other parts of the shroud, seems to have been dyed with madder, a colorant not widely used in Europe until after the Crusades, Rogers writes in Thermochimica Acta (2). This suggested that the fabric could have been inserted during repair, after being dyed to match the original, older cloth. Well, maybe. Perhaps more compelling is that most of the shroud lacks vanillin, a breakdown product of the lignin in cotton fibres. There is vanillin in the Holland cloth, and in other medieval linen. Because it decomposes over time, this suggests that the main body of the cloth is considerably older than these patches. By calculating the rate of decay, Rogers arrives at his revised estimate of the shroud's age. Facing faith There is no explanation, however, of how the 'repaired' threads used in radiocarbon dating were woven into the old cloth so cunningly that the textile experts who selected the area for analysis failed to notice the substitution. This is by no means the end of the story. Will scientists ever accept that trying to establish the true status of the Turin shroud is a vain quest? The object itself is too inaccessible, and its history is too poorly documented and understood, to permit irrefutable conclusions. And of course 'authenticity' is not really a scientific issue at all here: even if there were compelling evidence that the shroud was made in first-century Palestine, that would not even come close to establishing that the cloth bears the imprint of Christ. References Damon P. E. et al. Nature 337, 611-615 (1989). |
lamonitor.com, Thursday, January 27, 2005 |
Terra Chile, Sept. 28, 2002. Scientists criticize secret Sheet restoration Santa (www.mundomisterioso.com/article.php?sid=950) ******************************************************************************************************************* |
Pescanova. August 20, 2002. Several scientists state find errors in the dating of Shroud of Turin (in spanish). http://www.elcorreogallego.es/periodico/20020820/Cultura-Sociedad/N130465.asp |
MORE QUESTIONS BEING RAISED ABOUT SHROUD OF TURIN TEST Friday, August 30, 2002 NEWS - FAITH & VALUES 01D By Dennis M. Mahoney THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH Illustration: Photo Two Northwest Side researchers believe their theory casting doubt on a 1988 test of the Shroud of Turin was the catalyst behind a new examination of the shroud that is under way. Sue Benford and Joseph Marino have questioned a 1988 test of the shroud that concluded that it could not have been the burial cloth of Jesus because was a product of the 14th century, not the first century. Marino, a former Roman Catholic monk who has been studying the shroud for more than 20 years, and Benford, who has been researching the shroud since 1997, presented their theory at an international conference in Italy in 2000. For centuries, the shroud has been revered by many Christians. Kept in a church in Turin, Italy, it contains the image of a man who was crucified and scourged. Benford and Marino believe the section of the shroud that was used in the 1988 carbon-14 testing contained material woven into it to repair damage caused when a piece was cut for a relic. That occurred in the 16th century, they said, and a mixture of cloths from different eras skewed the test results. Carbon-14 testing determines the age of materials by measuring the amount of radioactive carbon-14 in them. Benford and Marino don't dispute the test findings; they say only that the sample used was flawed. They have said samples from other parts of the shroud should have been used. Some consider the 1988 test result to be proof that the shroud is a fake. Barrie Schwortz, a Los Angeles imaging expert who was part of the team of scientists that examined the shroud in 1978, supports the Benford-Marino theory. Schwortz said a textile expert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York concluded that ''invisible reweaving'' -- similar to what Benford and Marino say happened to the piece of shroud used in 1988 -- was done so well in medieval times that it could go undetected for years. Ray Rogers, another member of the 1978 team who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, also said in a recent paper that the sample used in 1988 was invalid. The 1978 team of 31 scientists studied the image on the cloth but concluded: ''The question of how the image was produced or what produced the image remains, now, as it has in the past, a mystery.'' Although he accepts the Benford-Marino theory, Schwortz said it apparently has nothing to do with the current examination of the shroud. Recently, the National Committee for the Conservation of the Shroud revealed that 30 patches sewn onto the cloth in the 16th century after it was damaged by fire had been removed, and that the shroud was being examined again. The committee also said the backing cloth had been removed, and a new one sewn onto the shroud. The details of what is being done to the shroud are unknown, but the committee reportedly will make an announcement next month. Schwortz said there is enough scientific evidence to discount the 1988 test result. ''We need to set aside the conclusions based on that one test, and probably in the future allow for additional and better testing,'' he said. Benford and Marino are not professional researchers; Marino works in the library at Ohio State University and Benford is executive director for an education-related nonprofit organization. But both said most scientific evidence leans toward the shroud being a first-century artifact. But, Marino said, ''You can never get to 100 percent (sure). We don't have Jesus' original dental records or blood type to check.'' Benford said there has been such an emphasis on the shroud's scientific aspects ''that the big picture has not been fully explored.'' Marino agreed that the shroud has a spiritual aspect and said its image of what Jesus may have looked like is unnerving for some, because it is a reminder of his words about an afterlife. "People don't want to think about death and judgment,'' he said. ''We're so earth-oriented, most of the time we don't think about those things." "And this is a thing that brings us to the threshold of the other side. And that's scary for people.'' dmahoney@dispatch.com |
Turin Shroud Undergoes New Tests By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News Aug. 23 New tests on the Shroud of Turin are being carried out this summer in a secret experiment in the Turin Cathedral's new sacristy. In an effort to solve the mystery shrouding one of the most controversial relics in Christendom, the Vatican confirmed that thirty triangular patches had been removed from the Shroud. The patches were carefully sewn onto the cloth by nuns in 1534, after a fire had blackened parts of it. The modern operation, which also includes the replacing of the cloth's backing, was conducted by Swiss textile expert Mechtild Flury-Lemberg between June 20 to July 22. "There is no mystery. The interventions and new tests on the Shroud have been carried out in agreement with the Holy See," Marco Bonatti, spokesperson for the Shroud's custodian, Severino Poletto, told reporters. He added that the new tests were "non-invasive" and that the results, along with pictures, will be made public in mid-September. Scientific interest in the 14-foot-long linen cloth, remarkable for its smudged outline of a body, began in 1898, when it was photographed by lawyer Secondo Pio. The negatives revealed the image of a bearded man with pierced wrists and feet and a bloodstained head. In 1988, the Vatican approved carbon-dating tests. Three reputable laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Ariz., concluded that the shroud was a medieval fake, dating from 1260 to 1390, and not a burial cloth wrapped around the body of Christ. But now many believe that the Vatican's unexpected and radical intervention on the cloth could be a prelude to important announcements. "We are wondering if Flury-Lemberg is now doing secret C-14 testing," shroud scholar Sue Benford told Discovery News. In collaboration with Joseph Marino, another renowned scholar, she has just published two scientific articles claiming that the 1988 carbon dating tests were altered by the presence of invisible patches dating back to the 16th century. Independent tests carried out on some of the fragments used for the C-14 tests showed that 40 percent were 1st-century fibers and 60 percent were 16th-century material. Their study has been supported by the research of Ray Rogers, a retired chemist from Los Alamos National Laboratories and former member of the STURP team of American scientists that examined the Shroud in 1978. "There seems to be ample evidence that an anomalous area was sampled for the radiocarbon analysis. The reported age is almost certainly invalid for the date the cloth was produced," he writes in a scientific review of the methods applied to the Shroud. "At this point, we definitely urge the Vatican to do more C-14 dating using the material they must have collected from beneath the 30 patches," said Benford. The shroud has survived several blazes since its existence was first recorded in France in the 14th century, including a mysterious fire at Turin Cathedral in 1997. Kept rolled up in a silver casket, it has been on display only five times in the past century. The next display will be in 2025. |
From the Times News Service, London, August 21, 2002 ITALY: EXPERTS ATTACK LATEST TESTS ON TURIN SHROUD By Richard Owen A FRESH attempt by Catholic officials to prove that the Turin Shroud is genuine and not a medieval fake has provoked a row after experts said that the tests could damage the cloth. The shroud, preserved in Turin Cathedral, is held by many Christians to be the cloth in which Jesus Christ was wrapped after the Crucifixion. Venerated for centuries as the Holy Shroud, it preserves the image of a tall man with crucifixion marks which only came to light when the 4.37m-by-1.11m (14ft4in-by-3ft7in) cloth was first photographed at the end of the 19th century. Carbon-dating tests conducted in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Arizona, in 1988 indicated that the shroud was a forgery and had been made between 1260 and 1390. Two years ago Vatican officials said that there would be no further tests in the foreseeable future. However, members of the official Committee for the Conservation of the Holy Shroud have disclosed that testing has begun again. They said that the cloth's backing and around thirty triangular patches used to mend the shroud in the 16th century after it was damaged by fire, had been removed in a "secret experiment". They added that the committee as a whole had not been consulted and instead the testing had been authorised by a small number of church "insiders". Officials in Turin confirmed that the shroud had been removed from its case and would not be on display while the experiment was in progress. They said that the operation was being conducted by the Swiss textile expert, Mechtild Flury-Lemberg. Supporters of the latest move said that there was a "plausible theory" that the 1988 tests on tiny fragments taken from the shroud had been "skewed" by the possible fusion of the original 1st-century cloth with the fibres of later additions, giving a "confused and inaccurate" carbon dating. Removing the patches would enable scientists to test the original cloth with less likelihood of contamination. Two American shroud scholars or "sindonologists", Sue Benford and Joseph Marino, told Il Messaggero, the Rome daily, that independent tests conducted on some of the fragments of cloth used in the 1988 carbon dating showed that 40 per cent were 1st-century fibres and 60 per cent were 16th-century material. That would have produced a "median date" of around the 13th century, they said. Emmanuela Marinelli, a leading expert on the shroud, is angry about the decision to remove the patches and the cloth's backing. "This is bound to cause damage of some kind. It is at odds with the great prudence with which it has always been handled until now." The existence of a Holy Shroud was first recorded at Edessa (now Urfa in modern Turkey) in the 2nd century and again at Constantinople in the 10th century. In the 14th century the "burial cloth of Christ" was allegedly brought to France by Crusader knights. A linen cloth purported to be the shroud was later entrusted to an order of nuns in Chambery, who repaired it after a fire in 1532. |
ZENIT - The World Seen From Rome Code: ZE02082021 Date: 2002-08-20 Scientists Find Errors in Dating of Shroud of Turin Believe That Medieval-Era Mending Skewed Results ROME, AUG. 20, 2002 (Zenit.org).- New studies reveal that the 1988 carbon-14 dating analysis of the Shroud of Turin did not take into consideration the mending done to the cloth in the Middle Ages. "The mending was medieval, not the shroud," wrote Orazio Petrosillo in the Roman newspaper Il Messaggero. Petrosillo is the author of several books on the cloth widely believed to be the burial linen of Jesus. Petrosillo explained that during the Middle Ages it was very common to use a type of sewing -- invisible to the naked eye -- to reinforce fabrics of artistic or historical value. According to Petrosillo, whose thesis is based on studies by U.S. scientists Sue Benford and Joseph Marino, researchers from laboratories at Oxford, England; Tucson, Arizona; and Zurich, Switzerland, examined the shroud in 1988 without realizing it was mended with linen in the 16th century. That study concluded the shroud was made sometime between 1260 and 1390. The new thesis was articulated after scientists presented fabric experts with a series of photographs of one of the small pieces of cloth of the shroud taken in 1988 for carbon-14 dating, as well as a section which was not used. The three experts agreed that there are different weaves in the sections analyzed. According to Beta Analytic, a radiocarbon-dating service, a mixture of 60% of 16th-century material with 40% of first-century material could lead to a dating of the 13th century. The calculation of percentages is based on the observations of the three fabric experts. Petrosillo also quotes the study of chemist Ray Rogers, who was part of the Sturp group of U.S. scientists that examined the shroud in 1978. Rogers had linen fibers of both the area of the cloth taken to carry out the carbon-14 analysis (cut out by the Belgian fabrics expert Gilbert Raes in 1973) as well as other parts of the shroud. Both in the section extracted by Raes as well as that used in 1988, the fibers are impregnated by a dark yellow substance, whose color varies in density from one fiber to another. However, the fibers of the rest of the shroud do not have this substance. According to the experts, it is a type of yellow vegetable glue, often used in the past. Rogers has verified that there is an invisible mend in the piece taken out by Raes, like those made in the 16th century. In fact, a thread of Raes' section was dated with the carbon-14 method at the California Institute of Technology. Half the thread turned out to be covered by starch. The thread was divided into two equal parts: the part without starch turned out to be of the third century, while the part with starch was dated in the 13th century. Petrosillo concluded that the shroud continues to raise scientific questions calling for new and more adequate study. |
Below are various articles in the media about the theory that there was a 16th century patch in the area from which the 1988 C-14 sample was taken. The full text is provided as well hot links to the articles are where available. Please note that some hot links, which are provided where available before the full text, are sometimes not functional after a period of time. |
IL MESSAGGERO Friday, August 9, 2002, page 8 (Translated from the original Italian.) Other polemics The 1988 dating is questioned Two scholars: there are also invisible seams on that linen cloth. The radiocarbon test may have been altered «According to the 14C test the cloth appeared Medieval. Perhaps only some threads were.» by Orazio Petrosillo ROME - Medieval was the darn, not the Shroud. Just while 30 visible patches are removed, some scholars direct their attention to the invisible darns on the Turinese Sheet. They were widely used in the Middle Ages for very precious cloths, just like the one venerated as the holiest of relics. Therefore, the result of the dating tests of the Shroud with the radiocarbon method (14C), carried out by the laboratories of Oxford, Tucson and Zurich in 1988 and dating the Shroud cloth between 1260 and 1390, has been altered by the presence, just in the area of the dating of the small linen samples, an invisible darn dating back to the 16th century. Sue Benford and Joseph Marino, two American sindonologists, claim this. A series of pictures of one of the samples taken in 1988 for the radiocarbon dating and of the remaining part that was not used were submitted to three textile experts, independently and without saying the samples had been taken from the Shroud. All the three experts recognized a different weaving on one side of the samples. According to the calculations of Beta Analytic, the largest provider of radiocarbon dating in the world, a mixture of 60% of material, from the 16th century, with 40% of material from the 1st century would carry a 13th century dating. The proportion of more recent material has been evaluated on the basis of what the three textile experts observed. Interesting observations have been carried out by Ray Rogers, a chemist who was a member of STURP, the group of American scientists who examined the Shroud in 1978. Rogers has linen fibres (which the Shroud is made of) coming both from the same area of the sample for the 14C analysis (they had been cut by the Belgian expert Gilbert Raes in 1973) and from other areas of the Shroud. In only the Raes' corner, where the 1988 sampling had been carried out, the fibers appear coated and soaked by a yellow-brownish amorphous substance, whose color varies in intensity from one fiber to the other. On the contrary, the fibers coming from the other parts of the Shroud do not have such a coating, which is almost certainly a yellow-rubber vegetable, very likely the gum-arabic, once used for textile applications. Moreover, Rogers has observed a superimposition (splice) in the center of a thread of the Raes sample: it is an invisible darn, widely used in the 16th century. In 1982 a thread of the Raes sample had already been dated with a radiocarbon method at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). Half of the thread appeared covered with starch. The thread was divided in half: the non-starched part turned out to date from the 3rd century A.D., while the starched end gave a date of the 13th century A.D. This is a message for the Holy See to plan a new 14C test with serenity but in a multidisciplinary context and with a particular attention to the representativeness of the sample. |
ZENIT - The World Seen From Rome Code: ZE02082021 Date: 2002-08-20 Scientists Find Errors in Dating of Shroud of Turin Believe That Medieval-Era Mending Skewed Results ROME, AUG. 20, 2002 (Zenit.org).- New studies reveal that the 1988 carbon-14 dating analysis of the Shroud of Turin did not take into consideration the mending done to the cloth in the Middle Ages. "The mending was medieval, not the shroud," wrote Orazio Petrosillo in the Roman newspaper Il Messaggero. Petrosillo is the author of several books on the cloth widely believed to be the burial linen of Jesus. Petrosillo explained that during the Middle Ages it was very common to use a type of sewing -- invisible to the naked eye -- to reinforce fabrics of artistic or historical value. According to Petrosillo, whose thesis is based on studies by U.S. scientists Sue Benford and Joseph Marino, researchers from laboratories at Oxford, England; Tucson, Arizona; and Zurich, Switzerland, examined the shroud in 1988 without realizing it was mended with linen in the 16th century. That study concluded the shroud was made sometime between 1260 and 1390. The new thesis was articulated after scientists presented fabric experts with a series of photographs of one of the small pieces of cloth of the shroud taken in 1988 for carbon-14 dating, as well as a section which was not used. The three experts agreed that there are different weaves in the sections analyzed. According to Beta Analytic, a radiocarbon-dating service, a mixture of 60% of 16th-century material with 40% of first-century material could lead to a dating of the 13th century. The calculation of percentages is based on the observations of the three fabric experts. Petrosillo also quotes the study of chemist Ray Rogers, who was part of the Sturp group of U.S. scientists that examined the shroud in 1978. Rogers had linen fibers of both the area of the cloth taken to carry out the carbon-14 analysis (cut out by the Belgian fabrics expert Gilbert Raes in 1973) as well as other parts of the shroud. Both in the section extracted by Raes as well as that used in 1988, the fibers are impregnated by a dark yellow substance, whose color varies in density from one fiber to another. However, the fibers of the rest of the shroud do not have this substance. According to the experts, it is a type of yellow vegetable glue, often used in the past. Rogers has verified that there is an invisible mend in the piece taken out by Raes, like those made in the 16th century. In fact, a thread of Raes' section was dated with the carbon-14 method at the California Institute of Technology. Half the thread turned out to be covered by starch. The thread was divided into two equal parts: the part without starch turned out to be of the third century, while the part with starch was dated in the 13th century. Petrosillo concluded that the shroud continues to raise scientific questions calling for new and more adequate study. |
IDNUMBER 200208210163 BASNUM 3762503 PAPER The Ottawa Citizen DATE 020821 PDATE Wednesday, August 21, 2002 EDITION Final SECTION News PAGE A1 / FRONT LENGTH 963 words STOTYPE News HEADLINE A fresh attempt to prove Shroud of Turin is no fake BYLINE * Randy Boswell SOURCE The Ottawa Citizen; with files from Citizen News Services The Ohio woman who appears to have discovered a critical flaw in the 1988 carbon dating of cloth samples from the Shroud of Turin says her insights into the controversial Christian relic were communicated to her by Jesus Christ himself. Sue Benford, who co-authored a research paper in 2000 with her partner Joseph Marino, a respected shroud scholar, told the Citizen yesterday she's "excited" that their findings could help refute the 1988 tests that have led most experts to conclude the shroud was a medieval forgery and not the burial cloth of Christ. Roman Catholic officials in Italy have confirmed that new experiments are being performed by a Swiss textile expert, apparently to test the Benford-Marino theory: that the cloth sample chosen in 1988 - and which yielded a date of origin between 1260 and 1390 A.D - was actually a blend of original material almost 2,000 years old and newer threads woven into the shroud as recently as 400 years ago to repair damaged or pilfered portions of the sacred object. Ms. Benford, a former nurse who now runs a nonprofit educational organization near Columbus, said it was a "divine revelation" in March 1997 - followed by months of arduous research with Mr. Marino - that produced their theory that the 1988 study was fundamentally flawed. "I was working at my computer when a voice told me to go watch TV," said Ms. Benford, 45, who began flipping channels until she happened upon a show about the Shroud of Turin. "I was just stunned," she said, because she instantly recognized that the face on the shroud belonged to the same man whose voice had instructed her to watch television, and which later explained to her why scientists had mistakenly concluded the shroud was a fake. "I don't want to sound like a nut case, but that's what happened," she said. "I was given the answer." The couple's theory was presented at a conference in Italy in August 2000, around the same time the Vatican announced there would be no further testing on the age of the shroud in the immediate future. But members of the official Committee for the Conservation of the Holy Shroud have disclosed to the Italian newspaper Il Messaggero that testing has begun again. They said that the cloth's backing and about 30 triangular patches used to mend the shroud in the 16th century after it was damaged by fire have been removed in a "secret experiment." They added that the committee as a whole has not been consulted and instead the testing has been authorized by a small number of church "insiders." Officials in Turin also confirmed that the shroud has been removed from its case and would not be on display while the experiment was in progress. They said the operation is being conducted by Swiss textile expert Mechtild Flury-Lemberg. As startling as Ms. Benford's story might seem, the central argument she and Mr. Marino have advanced has also been embraced by a prominent U.S. scientist who first studied the shroud in 1978 and still possesses samples of the cloth. Ray Rogers was part of an international team 20 years ago that performed a chemical analysis of shroud fibres and determined that the image on the cloth was not painted. That finding ruled out an obvious hoax and left open the possibility that the shroud was authentic. But most of the scientific community - including Mr. Rogers himself - were later convinced by the 1988 carbon dating that the cloth was a fake after all. Mr. Rogers, a retired chemist living in Los Alamos, New Mexico, told the Citizen yesterday that he dismisses Ms. Benford's story about speaking with Jesus. But the observation itself - that old and new fibres had been mistakenly mixed in the 1988 experiments - is valid, he says. "When I first saw Benford and Marino's study, I said they're full of it," recalls Mr. Rogers, who re-analysed his shroud threads based on the Ohio couple's hypothesis. "But I have to agree with what they're proposing. The 1988 radio-carbon analysis was probably the very best ever done, but it was done on the worst, most stupidly selected sample of cloth." The 1988 sample, explains Mr. Rogers, comes from the lower left corner of the shroud which, it appears, has been "cleverly rewoven" over the centuries to disguise the fact that cuttings have been taken from the outer edge of the cloth from time to time. But several threads studied by Mr. Rogers in 1978 came from a section of the shroud slightly closer to the famous image of a crucified man that appears in the middle of the cloth. Some of those threads had been expertly "spliced" to connect older and newer fibres. In 1982, says Mr. Rogers, one of the threads from his samples was carbon dated - unbenownst to himself and against the wishes of Roman Catholic officials who had authorized the chemical analysis. Nevertheless, that test showed an age difference of more than 1,000 years between the newer and older fibres - and suggested the original portions of the shroud dated from around the year 200 A.D. "I have not been able to find any information on the accuracy and precision for the dating method used," says Mr. Roges. "However, the dates determined are so different that I could believe a real difference between the ends of the threads." The shroud, preserved in Turin Cathedral, is held by many Christians to be the cloth in which Jesus Christ was wrapped after the Crucifixion. Venerated for centuries as the Holy Shroud, it preserves the image of a tall man with crucifixion marks which only came to light when the 4.37-metre-by-1.11-metre cloth was first photographed at the end of the 19th century. DOB 20020821 UPDATE 020821 NDATE * 20020821 NUPDATE 20020821 |
From the Times News Service, London, August 21, 2002 ITALY: EXPERTS ATTACK LATEST TESTS ON TURIN SHROUD By Richard Owen A FRESH attempt by Catholic officials to prove that the Turin Shroud is genuine and not a medieval fake has provoked a row after experts said that the tests could damage the cloth. The shroud, preserved in Turin Cathedral, is held by many Christians to be the cloth in which Jesus Christ was wrapped after the Crucifixion. Venerated for centuries as the Holy Shroud, it preserves the image of a tall man with crucifixion marks which only came to light when the 4.37m-by-1.11m (14ft4in-by-3ft7in) cloth was first photographed at the end of the 19th century. Carbon-dating tests conducted in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Arizona, in 1988 indicated that the shroud was a forgery and had been made between 1260 and 1390. Two years ago Vatican officials said that there would be no further tests in the foreseeable future. However, members of the official Committee for the Conservation of the Holy Shroud have disclosed that testing has begun again. They said that the cloth's backing and around thirty triangular patches used to mend the shroud in the 16th century after it was damaged by fire, had been removed in a "secret experiment". They added that the committee as a whole had not been consulted and instead the testing had been authorised by a small number of church "insiders". Officials in Turin confirmed that the shroud had been removed from its case and would not be on display while the experiment was in progress. They said that the operation was being conducted by the Swiss textile expert, Mechtild Flury-Lemberg. Supporters of the latest move said that there was a "plausible theory" that the 1988 tests on tiny fragments taken from the shroud had been "skewed" by the possible fusion of the original 1st-century cloth with the fibres of later additions, giving a "confused and inaccurate" carbon dating. Removing the patches would enable scientists to test the original cloth with less likelihood of contamination. Two American shroud scholars or "sindonologists", Sue Benford and Joseph Marino, told Il Messaggero, the Rome daily, that independent tests conducted on some of the fragments of cloth used in the 1988 carbon dating showed that 40 per cent were 1st-century fibres and 60 per cent were 16th-century material. That would have produced a "median date" of around the 13th century, they said. Emmanuela Marinelli, a leading expert on the shroud, is angry about the decision to remove the patches and the cloth's backing. "This is bound to cause damage of some kind. It is at odds with the great prudence with which it has always been handled until now." The existence of a Holy Shroud was first recorded at Edessa (now Urfa in modern Turkey) in the 2nd century and again at Constantinople in the 10th century. In the 14th century the "burial cloth of Christ" was allegedly brought to France by Crusader knights. A linen cloth purported to be the shroud was later entrusted to an order of nuns in Chambery, who repaired it after a fire in 1532. |
Turin Shroud Undergoes New Tests By Rossella Lorenzi, Discovery News Aug. 23 New tests on the Shroud of Turin are being carried out this summer in a secret experiment in the Turin Cathedral's new sacristy. In an effort to solve the mystery shrouding one of the most controversial relics in Christendom, the Vatican confirmed that thirty triangular patches had been removed from the Shroud. The patches were carefully sewn onto the cloth by nuns in 1534, after a fire had blackened parts of it. The modern operation, which also includes the replacing of the cloth's backing, was conducted by Swiss textile expert Mechtild Flury-Lemberg between June 20 to July 22. "There is no mystery. The interventions and new tests on the Shroud have been carried out in agreement with the Holy See," Marco Bonatti, spokesperson for the Shroud's custodian, Severino Poletto, told reporters. He added that the new tests were "non-invasive" and that the results, along with pictures, will be made public in mid-September. Scientific interest in the 14-foot-long linen cloth, remarkable for its smudged outline of a body, began in 1898, when it was photographed by lawyer Secondo Pio. The negatives revealed the image of a bearded man with pierced wrists and feet and a bloodstained head. In 1988, the Vatican approved carbon-dating tests. Three reputable laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, Ariz., concluded that the shroud was a medieval fake, dating from 1260 to 1390, and not a burial cloth wrapped around the body of Christ. But now many believe that the Vatican's unexpected and radical intervention on the cloth could be a prelude to important announcements. "We are wondering if Flury-Lemberg is now doing secret C-14 testing," shroud scholar Sue Benford told Discovery News. In collaboration with Joseph Marino, another renowned scholar, she has just published two scientific articles claiming that the 1988 carbon dating tests were altered by the presence of invisible patches dating back to the 16th century. Independent tests carried out on some of the fragments used for the C-14 tests showed that 40 percent were 1st-century fibers and 60 percent were 16th-century material. Their study has been supported by the research of Ray Rogers, a retired chemist from Los Alamos National Laboratories and former member of the STURP team of American scientists that examined the Shroud in 1978. "There seems to be ample evidence that an anomalous area was sampled for the radiocarbon analysis. The reported age is almost certainly invalid for the date the cloth was produced," he writes in a scientific review of the methods applied to the Shroud. "At this point, we definitely urge the Vatican to do more C-14 dating using the material they must have collected from beneath the 30 patches," said Benford. The shroud has survived several blazes since its existence was first recorded in France in the 14th century, including a mysterious fire at Turin Cathedral in 1997. Kept rolled up in a silver casket, it has been on display only five times in the past century. The next display will be in 2025. |
MORE QUESTIONS BEING RAISED ABOUT SHROUD OF TURIN TEST Friday, August 30, 2002 NEWS - FAITH & VALUES 01D By Dennis M. Mahoney THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH Illustration: Photo Two Northwest Side researchers believe their theory casting doubt on a 1988 test of the Shroud of Turin was the catalyst behind a new examination of the shroud that is under way. Sue Benford and Joseph Marino have questioned a 1988 test of the shroud that concluded that it could not have been the burial cloth of Jesus because was a product of the 14th century, not the first century. Marino, a former Roman Catholic monk who has been studying the shroud for more than 20 years, and Benford, who has been researching the shroud since 1997, presented their theory at an international conference in Italy in 2000. For centuries, the shroud has been revered by many Christians. Kept in a church in Turin, Italy, it contains the image of a man who was crucified and scourged. Benford and Marino believe the section of the shroud that was used in the 1988 carbon-14 testing contained material woven into it to repair damage caused when a piece was cut for a relic. That occurred in the 16th century, they said, and a mixture of cloths from different eras skewed the test results. Carbon-14 testing determines the age of materials by measuring the amount of radioactive carbon-14 in them. Benford and Marino don't dispute the test findings; they say only that the sample used was flawed. They have said samples from other parts of the shroud should have been used. Some consider the 1988 test result to be proof that the shroud is a fake. Barrie Schwortz, a Los Angeles imaging expert who was part of the team of scientists that examined the shroud in 1978, supports the Benford-Marino theory. Schwortz said a textile expert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York concluded that ''invisible reweaving'' -- similar to what Benford and Marino say happened to the piece of shroud used in 1988 -- was done so well in medieval times that it could go undetected for years. Ray Rogers, another member of the 1978 team who works at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, also said in a recent paper that the sample used in 1988 was invalid. The 1978 team of 31 scientists studied the image on the cloth but concluded: ''The question of how the image was produced or what produced the image remains, now, as it has in the past, a mystery.'' Although he accepts the Benford-Marino theory, Schwortz said it apparently has nothing to do with the current examination of the shroud. Recently, the National Committee for the Conservation of the Shroud revealed that 30 patches sewn onto the cloth in the 16th century after it was damaged by fire had been removed, and that the shroud was being examined again. The committee also said the backing cloth had been removed, and a new one sewn onto the shroud. The details of what is being done to the shroud are unknown, but the committee reportedly will make an announcement next month. Schwortz said there is enough scientific evidence to discount the 1988 test result. ''We need to set aside the conclusions based on that one test, and probably in the future allow for additional and better testing,'' he said. Benford and Marino are not professional researchers; Marino works in the library at Ohio State University and Benford is executive director for an education-related nonprofit organization. But both said most scientific evidence leans toward the shroud being a first-century artifact. But, Marino said, ''You can never get to 100 percent (sure). We don't have Jesus' original dental records or blood type to check.'' Benford said there has been such an emphasis on the shroud's scientific aspects ''that the big picture has not been fully explored.'' Marino agreed that the shroud has a spiritual aspect and said its image of what Jesus may have looked like is unnerving for some, because it is a reminder of his words about an afterlife. "People don't want to think about death and judgment,'' he said. ''We're so earth-oriented, most of the time we don't think about those things." "And this is a thing that brings us to the threshold of the other side. And that's scary for people.'' dmahoney@dispatch.com |
Pescanova. August 20, 2002. Several scientists state find errors in the dating of Shroud of Turin (in spanish). http://www.elcorreogallego.es/periodico/20020820/Cultura-Sociedad/N130465.asp |
****************************************************************************************************************** |
****************************************************************************************************************** |
*************************************************************************************************************** |
Terra Chile, Sept. 28, 2002. Scientists criticize secret Sheet restoration Santa (www.mundomisterioso.com/article.php?sid=950) ******************************************************************************************************************* |
****************************************************************************************************************** |
******************************************************************************************************************* |
******************************************************************************************************************** |
******************************************************************************************************************** |
Shroud Studies bring Good News 1/15 February 2003 by Louis C. de Figueiredo Sunday News, Sao Paulo Brazil |
The recent restoration carried out on the Turin Shroud by the Swiss textile expert Mechthild Flury-Lemberg generated controversy involving Cardinal Severino Poletto of Turin, the relic's papal custodian, and some Shroud scholars who felt that sufficient scientific associations had not been consulted. Some thirty patches and the backing of Holland cloth that had been sown onto the Shroud centuries ago were removed and replaced by a new backing said to be "made of a cloth whose properties should prevent the formation of micro-organisms and therefore protect the relic." Judging by the detailed report issued by the conservation commission member Msgr.Giuseppe Ghiberti, the restoration was a success. In the view of some scholars, however, procedures like the one adopted in this recent restoration, where even the Pontifical Academy of Sciences was not consulted, can bring bad results. Their fears are justified. The 1988 carbon dating test was a major blunder and the amount of discredit being thrown on its results is increasing. It had been authorized by the late Cardinal Anastásio Ballestrero, who declared that he had been the victim of " manipulation" shortly before his death. To avoid situations like these that petitions have been sent to the Pope, for it is with him that the final word lies. The ailing philosopher-pontiff, who has lately expressed himself in somewhat Heideggerian terms, will feel the weight of another Church-made burden. |
Back in the fourteenth century the Avignonese Pope Clement V had had a heavy burden to bear. But this was a royal one. The king himself. The ruthless French monarch Philip IV ( Philippe le Bel ) had pressured him to quash the crusader order of Knights Templar by issuing the bull Vox in Excelso. He appeared to have had no choice. His predecessor, the intellectual Boniface VIII, had excommunicated Philip ( till the reconciliation ) and interdicted him as well as France by a papal ban. He ended up dying as a physical and mental wreck after being kidnapped by this same king's agents, instructed by the royal councillor Guillaume de Nogaret. Now a fairly recent report by London Times correspondent Richard Owen brings news about the rediscovery in the Vatican of some important documents, including the long-lost Chinon parchment. Researcher Barbara Frale is recorded as saying that it "proved that the Pope had in fact manoeuvred with 'skill and determination' to ensure that his own emissaries questioned de Molay and other leading Templars in the dungeons of Chinon Castle in the Loire in 1308 in what amounted to a papal trial." Although the warrior-monks were absolved by the Church and allowed to receive Christian sacraments this had absolutely no effect on events, for according to the Italian scholar Adriano Forgione "the Pope had failed to make this absolution public because the scandal of the Templars had aroused extreme passions and he feared a Church schism. Philip IV had Jacques de Molay and other Templar leaders put to death before the Pope's verdict could be published, and it was subsequently lost." |
Since it is now known that this important document was not lost when Napoleon looted the Vatican, historians are enabled to rewrite that part of history where the Knights Templar are portrayed as heretics and Philip as the heretic hunter. A notable exception is Shroud history, for which the Chinon parchment can only come as good news. The Shroud's prominent historian Ian Wilson, who had already "reversed the roles" more than twenty years before this document was found , thus gains more credibility for his theory that it was this crusader order that posssessed the relic during at least a part of the "missing years", that is, from 1204, the year it disappeared in Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade -- - it was then known as the "Image of Edessa" --- till its exhibition in France in the 1350s by the French knight Geoffrey de Charny. It also becomes crystal clear why Templar Grand Master Jacques de Molay and Geoffrey de Charnay, the order's Master of Normandy, requested to be placed facing Notre Dame cathedral while being burnt at the stake in Paris. While it is presumably Philip who is now feeling the heat, this does not automatically make de Molay and de Charnay candidates for canonization as martyrs. The most that can be said is that like the knight and porte-oriflamme ( standard-bearer of the Oriflamme de Saint-Denis, France's sacred royal battle standard ) Geoffrey de Charny, they were also devoted to Notre Dame, an important link that may have bound the three of them. Again, like de Charny, these Templar leaders may have carried away some of the Shroud's "unknown history" with them. |
No such document relating to these "knights of the Shroud" was found in the United States, but it is from that country that has come a clear and persuasively-written scientific paper entitled "Could the Shroud's radio-carbon date have been skewed due to 16th century repairs?" by the Joseph Marino/Sue Benford duo, with supportive comments written by Dr.Ray Rogers, retired chemist, Los Alamos National Laboratory. They argue that the theory that "the Shroud has literally been patched with material from the 16th century, in the C14 sample itself, explains the medieval carbon dating results." This darning is likely to have occurred on February 20,1508 when Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy, wanted to leave a portion of the Shroud to her church. There are some reasons that lend support to this hypothesis, calling for it to be included in the Shroud custodian's agenda. Giovanni Riggi, the person appointed to take the C14 sample, had been authorized to cut approximately 8 square centimetres to be distributed between the laboratories in Oxford, Zurich and Tucson, but was apparently forced to reduce this to 7 cms because, in his own words, "fibres of other origins had become mixed up with the original fabric." Riggi contributed to Ballestrero's blunder in this way, but he at least noticed that there were extraneous fibres. It was he himself, together with Prof.Luigi Gonella, who had chosen this very ill-advised location, also the dirtiest part of the Shroud. After arguing for some two hours with Gonella about the spot from where the sample had to be taken, keeping scientists from at least five countries waiting patiently. |
As noted an authority as the late Dr.Alan Adler --- interviewed by Time for their cover story on the Shroud --- fell in line with the theory by writing that there was "no way of knowing if the area you took the sample from represents the whole cloth. That's an area which has obviously been repaired. There's cloth missing there. It's been rewoven on the edge. The simplest explanation why the date may be off is that it's rewoven cloth there." He even produced a graph to illustrate his conclusion that "the radiocarbon samples were not representative of the non-image samples that compose the bulk of the cloth." Additional support has come from Mark Hatfield, scientist at Beta Analytic, the world's largest radiocarbon dating service, according to whom "a merging of threads from AD 1500 into a 2000 year old piece of linen would augment the C14 content, such that a 60/40 ratio of new material to old, determined by mass, would result in a C-14 age of approximately AD 1200." This is just one among several theories purporting to demonstrate why the 1988 C-14 test results may have been skewed, yet the inaccessibility to the most forcible arguments taking the Shroud back to the time of Jesus is also very evident. The imaging expert Barrie Schwortz, who was the official documenting photographer of the STURP team in 1978, and has done projects for the US Congress, was one of those interviewed by a TV channel that intends to produce a documentary claiming that Leonardo da Vinci painted the Shroud. He was unable to convince them that they had taken the wrong direction. For this is the sort of sensationalism that sells really well, originally appearing in England, and ignoring the fact that the Shroud was already documented more than sixty years before da Vinci was born. More recently, Schwortz made a successful presentation to the American Chemical Society, pointing out to the analytical chemists present why the late Dr.Walter McCrone had failed to take all the available data into account before proclaiming the Shroud a painting. Dr.McCrone may have had the best of intentions, but his declaration that the Vinland Map was a fraud was also contested successfully. The empirical data demonstrates that the Shroud has nothing to do with medieval artistry, making the painting hypothesis untenable. |
If the Shroud is not a painting from Italy, much less was it manufactured there. According to the Israeli botanist Dr.Avinoam Danin, "it comes from the land of Israel." In 1973 and 1978 the Swiss criminologist Dr.Max Frei took sticky tape samples from the Shroud and discovered pollen grains on them. He was able to identify 58 species. Unfortunately Dr.Frei died before he could complete his study, but this was taken up first by Paul Maloney in the US, who found hundreds of pollen grains, and later in Israel by Dr.Danin, assisted by Dr.Uri Baruch, whose M.Sc and Ph.D dissertations were on that country's flora. Dr.Baruch examined 165 pollens, out of which nothing less than 45, or 27.3 % , were from the thorn gundelia tournefortii . These may have come from the "crown of thorns" that according to the New Testament was placed on Jesus's head. Little known is that there are also plant and floral images on the Shroud. The German physics teacher Oswald Scheuermann was the first person to observe them, in 1983. Intensive work on this discovery was done in the US by Dr.Alan Whanger and his wife and co-researcher Mary, who took the images and matched them to drawings in the authoritative botanical work Flora Palaestina, identifying 28 types of plants. As the foremost authority on the flora of Israel, as well as the plant images and pollen grains on the Shroud, Dr.Danin published his findings and spoke at congresses in Italy and the US. At a congress last year he stated that "the assemblage of Zygophyllum dumosum, Gundelia tournefortii and Cistus creticus occurs in only one rather small spot on earth, this being the Judaean mountains and the Judaean Desert of Israel, in the vicinity of Jerusalem. Hence the Shroud of Turin carrying the image of these three species has to come from the area where they could be collected and placed together with the body of the man of the Shroud, inside the Shroud." As anyone can see, just this small statement, taken in isolation, says a lot about the authenticity of the Shroud. |
One small problem is that while there are no doubts regarding the plant and floral imprints, Prof.T.Litt of the University of Bonn has taken exception to the presence of pollen grains from gundelia tournefortii, having written that "the images of light microscopy ( interference contrast ) and by confocal laser-scanning microscopy show clearly that waxes are preserved and cover the structure and sculpture of the pollen grains. This is the precise reason why I cannot make a precise identification of the pollen at the genus level, even less at the species level. However, with a high level of probablility, I can exclude that the pollen I have seen from the sticky tapes belong to Gundelia." For Professor Danin this is no finding, but just a claim. It is Professor Litt who has not done his homework and jumped to conclusions instead. The findings will remain claims as long as they are not published. An expert like Prof.Litt would have to obtain free grains, and not attached to sticky tapes, clean them as needed in pollen investigations, and then determine them. Sadly, the authorities in Turin did not respond to Dr.Danin's recommendations. ******************************************************************************************************************** |
Jesus' Shroud? Recent Findings Renew Authenticity Debate Bijal P. Trivedi National Geographic Channel April 9, 2004 |
The Shroud of Turin--believed by many to be the burial cloth of Jesus and one of the most venerated relics of the Christian church was declared a fake in 1988 by three independent scientific institutions. Yet interest in the cloth has remained intense, and new science suggests the shroud deserves another look. Raymond Rogers is a retired physical chemist and former leader of the explosives research and development group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He proposes that the samples used to date the shroud in 1988 were flawed and the experiment should be repeated. His conclusion is based on a recent chemical analysis of the shroud and previous observations made during a 1978 examination. Rogers was one of two dozen American scientists who participated in the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) an intense five-day scientific investigation of the shroud in Turin, Italy. In 1988 the Vatican allowed postage stamp-size pieces to be snipped from one corner of the shroud and distributed to three laboratories at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Oxford University in England, and the Swiss Federal Institute in Zurich for a sensitive form of carbon dating. The results, published in 1989 in the journal Nature, revealed that the fabric was produced between 1260 and 1390 |
Dyed and Repaired In December 2003 Rogers received a sample of the shroud from a physicist colleague who had collaborated on STURP. The sample was taken from the same strip of cloth distributed for carbon dating in 1988. Using chemical and microscopic analysis, Rogers revealed that a madder dye and mordant and gum mixture had been wiped onto yarn used on that particular corner of the shroudindicating that the cloth had been repaired. (The mordant gum would have been used to bind the dye to the fibers. Madder dye is derived from the root of the madder plant.) What's more, these ruby colored madder dye-mordant mixtures did not reach France or England until the 16th century. "The cotton fibers look like they have been wiped with fuzzy cherry Jell-O, and the linen fibers a little less so," Rogers said. "The area is certainly dyed to match the sepia color of the old [original] cloth. There is ample chemical and microscopic proof of that." |
Rogers also found evidence of a "splice site," suggesting that this patch of the cloth had not only been dyed but also repaired and rewoven. He suspects that the dye and repair job was probably done in the Near East during the Middle Ages, coinciding with the carbon dating results. "The 1988 date was undoubtedly accurate for the sample supplied. However, there is no question that the radiocarbon sampling area has a completely different chemical composition than the main part of the shroud," Rogers said. "The published date for the sample was not the time at which the cloth was produced." This reinforces the earlier finding of STURP scientists who, using ultraviolet fluorescence, also revealed that the sampled corner was unlike any other region of the shroud and had been excessively handled over the years. Rogers's analysis of the 2003 sample has been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal for publication. |
Forging Religious Artifacts Douglas Donahue, a retired physicist from the University of Arizona, traveled to Turin in 1988 to collect the shroud samples for testing. He was co-director of the National Science Foundation-University of Arizona Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Laboratoryone of the three labs chosen to date the shroud. "I'm satisfied with the way it was sampled. We had several textile experts present from a number of countries, and all unanimously agreed that the sample we received was representative of the whole cloth," Donahue said. "It wouldn't be unreasonable to sample other spots of the cloth, though you can understand that they wanted to preserve it and didn't want holes cut all over the place." Even if carbon dating links the shroud to the first century, proving it belonged to Jesus will still be near impossible the closest scientists are likely to get is validating the time and place where the cloth and its haunting image were made. The shroud, an approximately 14-foot-by-3-foot (4-meter-by-1-meter) cloth, is bloodstained and imprinted with a faint image of a tortured man's face, hands, and body. According to the Gospels, Jesus was removed from the cross and placed in a tomb, where he was wrapped in cloth in accordance with Jewish custom. But few, if any, records exist from that time to detail that shroud's whereabouts. The Shroud of Turin entered public awareness in 1349, when a French knight named Geoffrey de Charny is said to have acquired it in Constantinople (now Istanbul) and brought it to the attention of Pope Clement VI. The shroud was held in a church in Lirey, France, and was first shown publicly in 1355. |
More Evidence Contradicts Carbon Dating Since that first exhibition many have questioned the shroud's authenticity, since forging religious artifacts was big business during medieval times. The 1988 carbon dating results satisfied many skeptics that the Shroud of Turin was a clever hoax, and the findings stymied further research. But some scientists have persisted. In 1999 Avinoam Danin, a botanist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, stated at the 16th International Botanical Congress that he found pollen grains on the shroud from plants that could only be found in and around Jerusalem, placing its origins in the Middle East. Further comparison of the shroud with another ancient cloth, the Sudarium of Oviedo (thought to be the burial face cloth of Jesus), revealed it was embedded with pollen grains from the same species of plant as found on the Shroud of Turin. The Sudarium even carries the same AB blood type, with bloodstains in a similar pattern. Since the Sudarium has been stored in a cathedral in Spain since the eighth century, the evidence suggests that the Shroud of Turin is at least as old. Regardless of whether the shroud belonged to Jesus Christ, it lures millions of visitors at each public display. |
"Its allure is both scientific and spiritual," said Phillip Wiebe, a professor and chair of philosophy at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia. "It's a very mysterious object. How was the image formed and who was on it?" Wiebe is presenting a lecture, "The Shroud of Turin: Authenticity and Significance for Theology," at the "Man of the Shroud Exhibit" this week at the Good Shepherd Church in Surrey, British Columbia. Archaeological Triumph If the image on the Shroud of Turin is a fake, then much mystery remains about how it was created. Some suggest it was painted. But STURP, using methods standard for art analysis, found no evidence of paints or pigments. "This may well be an artifact of Jesus," said Barrie Schwortz, a photographic, video, and imaging specialist based in Los Angeles, California. Schwortz served as the official documenting photographer for STURP. When Schwortz embarked on the study, he said, he was highly skeptical. "I fully expected to see brush strokes essentially a manufactured relic and walk out," Schwortz said. "But I've followed the science over 30 years. And when you have eliminated other possibilities, the one remaining no matter how unlikely must be the truth." What will carbon dating another sample prove? "This artifact is very important. It deserves at least as much respect as Ghengis Khan's sword, the Gutenberg Bible, or something like the Rosetta stone," Rogers said. "For me, it is not going to prove the Resurrection or any theological point. But it might bring us a little closer to the truth. And determining the actual date will be a real archaeological triumph." |
****************************************************************************************************************** |
AVVENIRE - Saturday, January 22, 2005, page 23 (translated from the original Italian) A new USA study makes scholars debate: the C14 dating is not reliable because it is based on a Medieval "patch". The darn of the Shroud by Giorgio BALLABIO -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Peso el tacòn del buso"? Luckily the popular wisdom (in this case, from Veneto a region of Northern Italy, translator's note) helps us once again, as we are confronted by another scoop involving the Shroud and which could deepen the gap in its supporters' front. "The darn is worse than the tear": and this time in a literal meaning, because news from overseas bases the re-debating of the Sacred Linen C14 dating just on the theory of a "darn". In fact, in "Thermochimica Acta", an American scientific magazine, an article by a Los Alamos scientist was published, which would demonstrate how, in 1988 that is, when the famous and highly disputed C14 test, which dated the Shroud between 1260 and 1390, was carried out it was not used a genuine sample from the relic, but a fragment of "re-woven", that is, a sort of "invisible darn" dating back just to the Middle Ages. The signatures affixed to the new revelation are authoritative: it is the Amstar's (The American Shroud of Turin Association for Research), a serious scientific organization that devotes itself to the research on Turin Linen, and the chemist Raymond Rogers', a member of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and who has always been one of the most reliable Shroud researchers. Rogers, having come into possession of some residual threads of the 1988 sampling, has subjected them to rigorous tests and has concluded that "the results of mass spectrometry of the pyrolysis of the sample zone, together with the microscopical and microchemical observations, demonstrate that the sample for the radiocarbon was not part of the original sheet of the Shroud." Indeed, "the radiocarbon sample has completely different chemical properties from the main part of the Shroud relic," Rogers chimes in. The analyzed border has been dyed using a technique that appeared in Italy in the age when the Crusaders' last stronghold fell in the hands of the Turks, in 1291. The radiocarbon sample cannot therefore be older than 1290, just what the C14 tests assessed. But the Shroud itself is in fact much older." Surely, it is not the first time the 1988 tests of Oxford, Tucson and Zürich laboratories (authorized by Cardinal Anastasio Ballestrero) are disputed, and with several charges: for example, the percentages of mistake of C14 itself, the unavoidable contaminations of the sample for moulds or fungi, the alterations of radioactive isotopes due to a fire, up to the perplexities about the correctness in the test carrying out, so much so that today a consisting group of scientists is not afraid of being accused of "apologetics", if they advance their reservations on the "certainty" of the results obtained on the Shroud with the carbon method. But recently the theory of the "darn" or, in more scientific terms of the "Medieval interwoven" (risen, to tell the truth, not in a scientific environment, but from a sort of mystical "revelation" due to a would-be seer) has gained more and more ground. Joe Marino and Sue Benford, for example, have subjected high definition photos of one of samples taken in 1988 to three experts, without saying that they were from the Shroud, and all three of them have recognized a different weaving on one side of it. But, how was it possible that the scientists, who carried out the sampling in 1988, did not notice the existence of a "patch"? The question was passed to Mgr. Giuseppe Ghiberti, president of the Commission for the Shroud of Turin diocese, and his answer came soon after: "It was possible because, in fact, there is neither a 'patch' nor a 'darn.' During the last checks, carried out in 2002 during the preservation and cleaning intervention, the Swiss expert Dr. Mechtild Flury-Lemberg (the greatest world-wide authority in the ancient cloth field) has examined the Shroud with great care and has not seen absolutely any sign of a textile addition." "It is indisputable that there is no textile remaking in this cloth," states, in fact, her scientific report, published in three languages in 2003. Mgr. Ghiberti goes on: "Even the lining has been removed and for the first time after 500 years we have seen the back of the Sheet: there is no sign of a 'darn.' Moreover, a reconstruction is made only where there is a hole, while the sample has been taken in a corner area, where is unreasonable to think of any 'Medieval interwoven.' Moral? "I am astonished that an expert like Rogers could fall in so many inaccuracies in his article. I can only hope, indeed, also think that the C14 dating is rectifiable (the method, in fact, has its own uncertainties), but not on the basis of the 'darn' theory." |
******************************************************************************************************************** |
BBC NEWS UK EDITION--Thursday, 27 January 2005 Turin shroud 'older than thought' The Shroud of Turin is much older than suggested by radiocarbon dating carried out in the 1980s, according to a new study in a peer-reviewed journal. A research paper published in Thermochimica Acta suggests the shroud is between 1,300 and 3,000 years old. The author dismisses 1988 carbon-14 dating tests which concluded that the linen sheet was a medieval fake. The shroud, which bears the faint image of a blood-covered man, is believed by some to be Christ's burial cloth. Raymond Rogers says his research and chemical tests show the material used in the 1988 radiocarbon analysis was cut from a medieval patch woven into the shroud to repair fire damage. It was this material that was responsible for an invalid date being assigned to the original shroud cloth, he argues. "The radiocarbon sample has completely different chemical properties than the main part of the shroud relic," said Mr Rogers, who is a retired chemist from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, US. Fire damage He says he was originally dubious of untested claims that the 1988 sample was taken from a re-weave. "It was embarrassing to have to agree with them," Mr Rogers told the BBC News website. The 4m-long linen sheet was damaged in several fires since its existence was first recorded in France in 1357, including a church blaze in 1532. It is said to have been restored by nuns who patched the holes and stitched the shroud to a reinforcing material known as the Holland cloth. "[The radiocarbon sample] has obvious painting medium, a dye and a mordant that doesn't show anywhere else," Mr Rogers explained. "This stuff was manipulated - it was coloured on purpose." In the study, he analysed and compared the sample used in the 1988 tests with other samples from the famous cloth. In addition to the discovery of dye, microchemical tests - which use tiny quantities of materials - provided a way to date the shroud. These tests revealed the presence of a chemical called vanillin in the radiocarbon sample and in the Holland cloth, but not the rest of the shroud. Vanillin is produced by the thermal decomposition of lignin, a chemical compound found in plant material such as flax. Levels of vanillin in material such as linen fall over time. 'Older date' "The fact that vanillin cannot be detected in the lignin on shroud fibres, Dead Sea scrolls linen and other very old linens indicates that the shroud is quite old," Mr Rogers writes. "A determination of the kinetics of vanillin loss suggests the shroud is between 1,300 and 3,000 years old." In the 1988 study, scientists from three universities concluded that the cloth dated from some time between 1260 and 1390. This ruled it out as the possible burial cloth that wrapped the body of Christ. That led to the then Cardinal of Turin, Anastasio Alberto Ballestrero, admitting the garment was a hoax. Michael Minor, vice-president of the American Shroud of Turin Association for Research, commented: "This is the most significant news about the Shroud of Turin since the C-14 dating was announced in 1988. "The C-14 dating isn't being disputed. But [the new research] is saying that they dated the rewoven area." But since the announcement of the 1988 results, several attempts have been made to challenge the authenticity of these tests. "The sample tested was dyed using technology that began to appear in Italy about the time the Crusaders' last bastion fell to the Mameluke Turks in AD 1291," said Mr Rogers. "The radiocarbon sample cannot be older than about AD 1290, agreeing with the age determined in 1988. However, the shroud itself is actually much older." Some now hope the Vatican will give approval for samples of the shroud to be re-tested. But, says Mr Minor, "the church is very hesitant, very reluctant for that to be done, because they've been given so many conflicting opinions". |
******************************************************************************************************************** |
lamonitor.com, Thursday, January 27, 2005 |
Shroud may be older after all ROGER SNODGRASS, roger@lamonitor.com, Monitor Assistant Editor A Los Alamos scientist has refuted modern scientific claims that date the Shroud of Turin to medieval times. Raymond N. Rogers, a retired chemist from Los Alamos National Laboratory, said a 1988 radiocarbon study of the purported burial shroud of Jesus was flawed. While the early conclusions from laboratories in Arizona, Cambridge and Zurich narrowed the time period for the shroud from 1260-1390 AD, well after the time of the historical Jesus, Rogers' review of sample threads from the shroud has widened the window to a period at least 1,300 years ago and going back as far as 3,000 years. The problem with the earlier story, which was meant to end decades of controversy marked by a great deal of junk science, said Rogers in an interview Thursday, was that the sample that had been analyzed using carbon 14 dating techniques had a peculiar coating that set it apart from the main piece of cloth. In a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Thermochimica Acta, Jan. 20, Rogers concluded that a new radiocarbon analysis would be needed for a more accurate determination of the age of the shroud. Rogers' interest in the dispute is only one aspect of his broader interest in using chemical analysis for archaelogical purposes. He assisted in dating a skull found at Murray Springs in Midland to the Folsom period and has published many papers on the shroud. In 1978 Rogers led a major scientific delegation to Turin that included a number of LANL scientists. The project, called the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP) involved a 30-member team, carrying some 22,000 pounds of equipment, Rogers said. The investigators were granted 24 hours of access to the shroud, but ended up having a week to study the object. Rogers had a special kind of tape made by the 3M Corp. to take samples from all parts of the shroud, including the image areas, blood spots and scorched places, subjecting them later to an array of tests, including x-ray fluorescence, transmission spectroscopy and spectrometry and thermal emission. The results were published in peer-reviewed journals between 1979 and 1982, Rogers said. His wife, Jean Rogers, also a chemist, has worked closely with him on these projects. "People in Turin made me sign a legal document agreeing that none of the samples, or anything of substance, would be used for dating the cloth," he said. "I would have bet 10 to one," he said, based on those results, "that that piece of cloth was from Roman times," using a technique described by the Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder who was born in 23 AD. But the radiocarbon dating that came along a few years later seemed to settle the matter differently. Then, a few years ago, another group came along and said the medieval origin was all wrong because the sample came from a patch, recalled Rogers. They also made a number of other claims that Rogers considered typical of "the lunatic fringe," - that an intense beam of particles had created the image at the time the body dematerialized. "This one was the last straw," Rogers said, who was confident he could disprove their claim. So he got his archived thread samples out and began looking at them again, only to conclude that the idea of the patch that threw the carbon dating off might be correct. "By god, these people might be right," he said about the moment of realization. "That's very hard for a scientist to agree with the lunatic fringe." He decided to do an in-depth study, which led to the recent paper and many new insights on the nature of the shroud. "I don't believe there's anything magic about it," he said. "I'm just trying to find out as much as possible about the technology that was used and what can be said about this object." |
******************************************************************************************************************** |
Published online: 28 January 2005; | doi:10.1038/news050124-17 muse@nature.com: To know a veil Philip Ball Attempts to date the Turin Shroud are a great game, says Philip Ball, but don't imagine that they will convince anyone. The most recent scientific study of the Turin shroud will not surprise anyone with even a passing interest in this mysterious bit of cloth. Retired chemist Raymond Rogers claims that the sample used for radiocarbon-dating studies in 1988 - which suggested that the shroud was a medieval forgery - is quite different from the rest of the relic. Rogers, who worked on explosives at the US Los Alamos National Laboratory, presents chemical arguments for the shroud being much older than those datings implied. It is, he says, between 1,300 and 3,000 years old. Let's call it somewhere around the middle of that range, which puts the age at about 2,000 years. Which can mean only one thing... But it would be unfair to imply that Rogers has steered his study towards a preconceived conclusion. He has a history of respectable work on the shroud dating back to 1978, when he became director of chemical research for the international Shroud of Turin Research Project. At the time, he says, he suspected that taking the job was " a good way to destroy my scientific credibility". And when he found that some of his findings did not fit with what some wished to hear, he was reproached: "Ray, you are not a soldier for Christ." "That," he says, "is the kind of goal-directed approach I had feared." Cloth of old Rogers has spoken of "the pseudoscience surrounding the shroud". Future studies, he says, "must be carefully planned and executed, and they cannot involve management by dilettantes". He has complained about the uncooperativeness of the shroud's guardians in Turin, saying that because of this, "competent scientific efforts to understand the shroud have a bleak future". This should not, perhaps, make anyone terribly distraught. The scientific study of the Turin shroud is like a microcosm of the scientific search for God: it does more to inflame any debate than settle it. Believers' ability to construct ingenious arguments is more than a match for the most exhaustive efforts of science. The shroud literature leaves no stone unturned in casting doubt on 'evidence' that the relic was faked, while embracing with blind rapture every argument for its authenticity. So why study it at all? And yet, the shroud is a remarkable artefact, one of the few religious relics to have a justifiably mythical status. It is simply not known how the ghostly image of a serene, bearded man was made. It does not seem to have been painted, at least with any known historical pigments. And the relic is surrounded with legend and linked to Cathar sects, shady secret societies and papal conspiracies. If all this sounds like a popular current novel about hidden codes and religious mysteries, that may be no coincidence: among the flaky theories about the shroud's origin is one that it was created by Leonardo da Vinci, using a primitive photographic technique to record his own image. You couldn't make it up (although people do). The photographic hypothesis has been developed (so to speak) in some detail, notably by South African art historian Nicholas Allen. He has even used medieval materials to create faint photographic images on linen cloth saturated with silver nitrate. But Allen failed to convince other shroud scholars, who reasonably asked how an invention as marvellous as photography could have remained otherwise unknown until the nineteenth century. Besides, this is a crowded field. Among the wilder entrants is the idea that Christ's image was burned into the cloth by some kind of release of nuclear energy from his body. Winding sheet The international team of scientists who convened in 1987 to put a date on the shroud probably did not expect to banish such fantasies. But by applying radiocarbon dating to the fabric, they were at least employing the most definitive of archaeological tools. Or so they thought. The textile sample was cut from the shroud in Turin Cathedral in April 1988, under the supervision of textile experts, representatives of the laboratories in Arizona, Oxford and Zurich selected to perform the analyses, a conservation scientist from the British Museum, and the Archbishop of Turin. The three measurements indicated with 95% confidence that the shroud's linen dated from between AD1260 and 1390. This, the researchers said, was "conclusive evidence that the linen of the shroud of Turin is medieval"(1). Needless to say, the ink was barely dry before others started to quibble. Professor of history Daniel Scavone collected examples of erroneous radiocarbon dates and problems with the method that were "well known to the 14C community". And microbiologists Leoncio Garza-Valdes and Stephen Mattingly proposed in 1996 that bacteria and fungi on the fibres had skewed the dates, by a thousand years or so. Patch work Rogers has pursued another objection. Originating as it did from a couple who research 'pyramid energies' and 'the existence of the soul', the suggestion that the carbon-dated fragment was taken from a patch repaired in the sixteenth century did not look promising. The shroud was indeed damaged by fire and patched up in 1532, but those patches, called the Holland cloth, are obvious. Rogers thought that he would be able to "disprove [the] theory in five minutes". But he now says that there is something in it. Luigi Gonella, the Archbishop of Turin's scientific adviser, provided Rogers with a few threads from the piece cut for dating, which he compared with the samples he collected during the Shroud of Turin Research Project. The radiocarbon sample, but not other parts of the shroud, seems to have been dyed with madder, a colorant not widely used in Europe until after the Crusades, Rogers writes in Thermochimica Acta (2). This suggested that the fabric could have been inserted during repair, after being dyed to match the original, older cloth. Well, maybe. Perhaps more compelling is that most of the shroud lacks vanillin, a breakdown product of the lignin in cotton fibres. There is vanillin in the Holland cloth, and in other medieval linen. Because it decomposes over time, this suggests that the main body of the cloth is considerably older than these patches. By calculating the rate of decay, Rogers arrives at his revised estimate of the shroud's age. Facing faith There is no explanation, however, of how the 'repaired' threads used in radiocarbon dating were woven into the old cloth so cunningly that the textile experts who selected the area for analysis failed to notice the substitution. This is by no means the end of the story. Will scientists ever accept that trying to establish the true status of the Turin shroud is a vain quest? The object itself is too inaccessible, and its history is too poorly documented and understood, to permit irrefutable conclusions. And of course 'authenticity' is not really a scientific issue at all here: even if there were compelling evidence that the shroud was made in first-century Palestine, that would not even come close to establishing that the cloth bears the imprint of Christ. References Damon P. E. et al. Nature 337, 611-615 (1989). |
******************************************************************************************************************** |
Local Scientist Dates Cloth to Christ's Time Thermochemist admits he can't debunk hypothesis that Shroud of Turin covered Christ's body after crucifixion If God hand-picked someone to prove to the world that Christ's burial cloth was not a hoax after all, Raymond Rogers probably wouldn't be the first name to come to mind. Rogers belonged to the Episcopal Church for a few years and studied about Christ on his own. But he could never quite find the proof he needed to support a "deep, abiding faith" in religion. His disbelief caused a rift with his wife. They divorced. He stayed devoted to what he knew: science. "I am a scientist," he said. "This is the way I live." Over the years, the Los Alamos thermochemist gained a reputation for his work with archaeologists. That's why a priest called him in 1977. He wanted Rogers to take a look at the Shroud of Turin. Rogers had never heard of it. The priest sent booklets that told about a 1412-foot-long linen cloth wrapped around Christ after the Roman crucifixion. It bore his imprint. "They were so pious, I just about threw them out," Rogers said of the booklets. Rogers noticed a photograph that made him curious. It showed scorched spots on the cloth caused by a church fire in 1532. If the shroud was a fake -- made with paint of some kind -- the material wouldn't look like that. An expert on how heat affects materials, Rogers knew this. He agreed to join the Shroud of Turin Research Project. He brought 32 samples from the shroud, which is stored at a museum in Torino, Italy, back to his home in Los Alamos and published articles. But he quit after the leader of the project screamed at him, "Ray, you are not a soldier for Christ!" In 2000, new information prompted him to reopen the case. Some "true believers" sent him a paper that suggested the samples tested were from a section rewoven in medieval times. "I can prove they're full of blank, blank, blank," Rogers recalled thinking. "I still had archive samples from the right area." In a peer-reviewed scientific journal, Thermochimica Acta, he published startling findings on Jan. 20. In the 1980s, scientists from three universities concluded the cloth wasn't very old. The linen sheet was determined to be a medieval fake. But this month, Rogers said he determined the cloth was between 1,300 and 3,000 years old -- which could have easily put it at the time of Christ. "I was really embarrassed that I had to admit that these people were right," Rogers said. "This (patched) area was not chemically or physically similar to the rest of the cloth. I could prove it in spades." The samples used in the 1988 tests came from a section of the cloth that was rewoven in the Middle Ages, according to Rogers. Rogers said he hasn't become an instant believer, however. At 78 and battling terminal cancer, he's sticking to science. "Here you've got blood spots. You've got a real shroud. You draw your own conclusions," he said. "I am not a theologian. I don't want to be a theologian. I want to keep my objectivity toward this thing, and so I don't go past this point." Rogers admits he can neither prove nor disprove many things. He has determined the drops of blood are authentic -- but until he gets results from the DNA tests he ordered from a international expert, he cannot be sure a human shed that blood. Another problem: Jesus wasn't the only man crucified. And Rogers has struggled with the authenticity of the Bible. "I cannot accept any of the written stuff (the biblical accounts of Christ's death) as gospel," Rogers said. "But I can say the scientific evidence does not rule it out." He knows he is walking a fine line. And he's nervous about it. "I say I know a lot about the chemistry and the physics of this object. It's not like a UFO or a ghost. I could pick this thing up and look at it under a microscope, and I could take samples of it. It's not one of these spooky things. It's a real piece of material," he said. "If I could reject the hypothesis that this was the shroud of Jesus, I would have done it. But being an honest guy -- and it's embarrassing sometimes to be honest when what you're finding out agrees with the lunatic fringe or the true believers -- but to be perfectly honest, I'd have to say at this moment that I cannot prove that this is not the cloth that was used to wrap the body of Jesus that was crucified." Journey to Turin Long ago, Rogers wanted to be an archaeologist. When he was a chemistry student at the University of Arizona, he wondered why the archaeology field wasn't making more use of chemistry. He considered becoming an archaeologist, but his archaeology professors said he'd make a better living as a chemist. But he took classes with top archaeologists. When he could, he ran tests on the residues inside ancient pottery. His career took him to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was a chemist from 1952 to 1988. And word got around that he was willing to look at odd samples. When he could, he tested artifacts. One day, Norris Bradbury, then the lab director, stopped by to talk. Rogers said Bradbury gave him permission to analyze materials for archaeologists and museums, even though such research wasn't part of the lab's mission. The thermochemist got drawn into major discoveries. He became an expert on early-man sites in the Southwest. "I did so much of it, they elected me to be a fellow for it," he said, referring to an esteemed status given to some lab scientists. At work, explosive components of nuclear weapons were Rogers' main focus. What he learned about the radiation effects on organic materials and the chemical properties of polymers served him well with the shroud research, he said. But in other ways, he was not prepared for this high-profile artifact. "It is the most frustrating, and in some cases degrading thing, I've been involved in," Rogers said. At the lab, his colleagues were what he described as "ethical, rigorous, hard-nosed scientists," such as Enrico Fermi. When he got involved with the shroud investigation, he saw some of the "shallowest, most idiotic" science he had ever seen. "There were people who have been working on the shroud who would have sold tickets to the crucifixion," he said. "There are an awful lot of dishonest people involved in this." He says he's "an old grump," and his body doesn't feel as good as he'd like. But at least his mind is active. His fascination is swelling again. He is full of ideas for more research papers to write on the shroud. "You always have some ammunition you haven't fired yet," Rogers said. Story from REDNOVA NEWS: http://www.rednova.com/news/display/?id=125172 Published: 2005/02/05 21:00:08 CST |
******************************************************************************************************************* |
IL GIORNALE - Wednesday, February 2, 2005, page 14 "Certainly not medieval! The Shroud dates back to Jesus' times" So the miracle of the scientific method lives again - The mystery and the science by Franco BATTAGLIA -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The case of the Holy Shroud is, perhaps, just for its peculiarity, the most interesting example of the power of the scientific method as an instrument of enquiry. Surely, it is not the only one: to understand the world around us we also need art, philosophy, religion; however, science is an utterly special and unique activity, because, unless any other, it obeys two rules: 1) submitting its own statements to the test of the other scientists; 2) abandoning those statements if they do not pass that exam. The scientific activity is, therefore, constantly a "work in progress" one, and every "truth" is always temporary, or, in any case, is considered like that. In a word, as a definition, science or, better, the scientific method refuses prejudice. For centuries we have believed that the Holy Shroud was the cloth where the body of the dead Jesus was wrapped; for centuries until 17 years ago, when a powerful and reliable dating method, scientifically codified, established in an "unequivocal" way that that cloth was a medieval forgery. What we are interested in here are those inverted commas, which are obligatory today. Raymond Rogers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and leader chemist of the team who, since 1977, have taken part in the project of dating the Holy Shroud, declared that he would have "proved Sue Benford and Joseph Marino wrong in five minutes"; five years ago, they claimed the unreliability of the C14 dating, carried out in 1988. Well, here is how the scientific method works: Rogers, who had started with the purpose of proving his colleagues wrong, has had to recognize their reasons, or, at least, their conclusions. The sample taken in 1988 from the Holy Shroud for the C14 dating was divided among three different laboratories (in the USA, in England and in Switzerland) for three separate datings. The three laboratories agreed in establishing "with a confidence of 95 %" the date of those samples between 1260 and 1390: the Holy Shroud seemed, beyond any sensible doubt, a medieval forgery. The C14 dating method is, as we have already said, powerful and reliable and, even if they have to take a lot of care in avoiding possible contaminations of the sample they are analysing, the skilled operators succeed in giving answers with little mistake margins. In any case, from the 1st to the 14th century there is a lot of time: too much to think of mistakes in the C14 method; its answer was, in fact, correct. What the devil has happened, then? It happened that the devil himself seems to have come between: the sample taken for the dating was not representative of the whole relic and, therefore, was not valid to determine its age, as Rogers' research, published in the latest issue of Termochimica Acta, has "unequivocally" (this time the inverted commas are mine) defined. Later the Shroud was mended and, as ill luck (or the devil, if you like) would have it, the sample taken in 1988 contained a wide part of the "patch" added later, a patch which, apparently, was added with such a skill as to make it invisible at the naked eye. In fact, Benford and Marino had to use high resolution photographic techniques to notice the darn and to suppose it could have been a later addition, as Rogers, against any expectation of his own, has just confirmed. For the origin of the darn, Benford and Marino have suggested a far more poetic story, which dates back to Margaret of Austria, emperor Maximilian I's daughter, queen of Holland and, after marrying, as a second marriage, Filiberto II, the duchess of Savoy (and, for that reason, the custodian of the Holy Shroud). Margaret had a particular passion for the textile art, a passion she must have transmitted to her nephew Charles V, whose guardian she was and who, when Maximilian died, became the last emperor of the Holy Roman Empire crowned by the Pope. Margaret made testamentary disposition that, at her death (occurred in 1531), an edge of the Shroud, slightly wider than a square decimetre, would be cut and given to the Catholic Church. Charles, besides having that interest in fulfil that last will of Margaret's (driven by the interest of strengthening his bonds with the Church), would also have had the desire to preserve the beauty and the integrity of the Shroud; his desire came spontaneously from the passion for the textile art Margaret had transmitted to him and which had driven him to surround himself with high quality weavers, surely able to carry out the darn perfectly. The presence of a more recent portion of cloth in the sample used for the C14 dating, mixed to an older one, would have, therefore, determined the date announced 17 years ago. The scholars of the Shroud will be able to answer the many questions everyone of us asks himself spontaneously in front of this fascinating story. In the meantime, we wait, more prosaically, for a C14 dating carried out on samples more carefully chosen. |
****************************************************************************************************************** |
Although the following article was not published in the mainstream media, it was authored by Ray Rogers and contains some important observations by Rogers. The article also has 2 excellent color photographs. It was published at: http://www.shroud.it/ROGERS-5.PDF. Ghiberti's pronouncement on my analyses Raymond N. Rogers Fellow, University of California, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, USA January 23, 2005 It is interesting that Msgr. Ghiberti thinks I am supporting the Benford and Marino hypothesis that the radiocarbon sample was taken from an "invisible reweave." Much to the contrary: I believed that it would be easy completely to refute them. It is highly embarrassing that I could not. This is the first time I have had to present information that seemed to support what I consider to be the "lunatic fringe." However, an ethical scientist absolutely must publish accurate information no matter what the emotional implications. The fact that there is any controversy over my results shows how dangerous it is implicitly to trust visual observations without any confirmation and to accept the unconfIrmed testimony of "experts." The importance of the sampling operation should have shown the necessity for careful independent observations and confirmation before cutting. I received some of the 1973 Raes threads from Luigi Gonella on 14 October 1979. If they were spurious, a person I consider to be a good scientist, Luigi, lied to me. The fact that they agreed with Raes' observations seems to confirm their validity .Their location on the Shroud shows that they must share at least some yarn segments with the radiocarbon sample. They proved to my satisfaction that the radiocarbon sample was spurious. I then received samples of the authentic radiocarbon sample on 12 December 2003. Their composition was identical to that of the Raes threads, proving the relationship between the samples. AM*STAR received the authentic radiocarbon samples from Luigi. Unless he lied again, they are authentic samples. The fact that they show identical compositions to the Raes samples seems to confIrm their provenience. Incidentally, I am not a member of AM*STAR, they did not fund my work, and they did not have any control over my methods or conclusions. I also have many fibers from different parts of the Shroud and the Holland cloth that I took with adhesive tape in 1978. I marked them in Turin, and I know they are authentic. The radiocarbon sample can be compared against real fibers from the Shroud as well as real samples from the Holland cloth, which certainly has a known age. Given valid samples that show obvious chemical differences from the Shroud, does Msgr. Ghiberti believe that I have made a mistake? There is absolutely no question that the composition of the radiocarbon sample is unique. Almost every proof of that statement has been confirmed by independent analyses with different methods. Msgr. Ghiberti does not have to rely on my chemistry to observe a difference between the radiocarbon sample and the main part of the Shroud. He can look at the ultraviolet fluorescence photographs taken by Vem Miller in 1978. They show the sampling area as a dark zone, proving that its chemical composition was not the same as the main cloth. The dark area is not a result of dirt or a shadow. I can explain fluorescence in great detail, but it is based totally on chemical composition. I do not make any claims about how the radiocarbon sampling area became spurious. I am not a textile expert, but I did find a strange end-to-end splice among the Raes threads (macrophotograph and photomicrograph attached). Anna Maria Donadoni, a conservator in Turin, showed me how separate lengths of yam were overlaid in weaving the main Shroud cloth. The splice is totally different. It is also obvious that the two ends of the splice are different: one is fluffy and white, the other is stained and tightly twisted. Although I am not a textile expert, I am a recognized expert in chemistry, and my paper in Thermochimica Acta (not a US journal but published in the Netherlands) withstood peer review. Few persons believed that the radiocarbon age determination could be in error: it was hard to convince the doubters. I have known Paul Damon, lead author on the 1989 dating, for many years, and I trust his honesty totally. I also originally believed that the age determination proved that the Shroud could not be the Shroud of Jesus. Why do the persons in Torino support nonsense with regard to the age determination? Contamination could not be the problem (it would take too much), and the papers about isotope fractionation were complete nonsense. I have written peer-reviewed papers on kinetic isotope effects, and I know the fundamentals. Indeed, I have published dozens of peer-reviewed papers on chemical kinetics, the same methods I used to show that the Shroud had to be between 1300 and 3000 years of age. I am not suggesting that anyone rely on the words of another "expert." I would suggest that any interested person study the facts. I understand how many persons can be upset by the proof that the radiocarbon sample was spurious. Honest science can accept such bruises. |
*************************************************************************************************************** |
****************************************************************************************************************** |
BOOKS THAT DISCUSS THE BENFORD/MARINO PATCH THEORY: Balsiger David W. and Michael Minor. The Case for Christ's Resurrection. Orlando: Bridge-Logos, 2007. Iannone, John C. The Image and The Rose...Behind Vatican Walls (Fiction novel). Kissimmee, FL: Northstar Production Studios, LLC, 2007. Iannone, John C. The Three Cloths of Christ: The Emerging Treasures of Christianity. Kissimmee, FL: Northstar Production Studios, LLC, 2010. Meacham, William. The Rape of the Turin Shroud. www.lulu.com, 2006. Picknett, Lynn and Clive Prince. Turin Shroud: How Leonardo da Vinci Fooled History. Completely revised and updated. London: Time Warner Books, 2005. Saucelo, Bart. M., M.D. Resurrection Documented. Second Edition, Updated. South Bend: God and Country Publishing, 2007. Tribbe, Frank C. Portrait of Jesus? The Shroud of Turin in Science and History. Second Edition, Updated. St. Paul: Paragon House, 2006. Whiting, Brendan. The Shroud Story. Strathfield, New South Wales: Harbour Publishing, 2006. Wilcox, Robert K. The Truth About the Shroud of Turin: Solving the Mystery. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2010. Zugibe, Frederick. T. The Crucifixion of Jesus: a Forensic Inquiry. Second Edition, completely revised and expanded. Previously titled The Cross and the Shroud. New York: M. Evans and Co., 2005. |
