Contradictions involving the Shroud of Turin?

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undead_rat said:
has been proven to really be 2000 years old.
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You keep saying that, or words to that effect, but it is still not accurate. No matter how many times you say it. You can legitimately say that the evidence you have seen has convinced you, but you cannot legitimately say that it is proven as fact for all.
 
The word he used was “scienziati”, which means 'scientists".
(http://www.vatican.va/content/john-.../documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_24051998_sindone.html)

And you’re correct, of course. He did not categorise the word, and he did not have me, specifically, in mind. However, as I described above, I think he was referring to the scientific method, used by any investigators, rather than white coated laboratory workers in particular.

Undead-rat is perfectly correct that he did not mean that ‘scienziati’ had already determined the authenticity of the Shroud, and certainly not that it had been proved medieval. He entrusted scientists to “continuare ad indagare” - continue to investigate.

This is an ongoing investigation, and I don’t think I am alone in thinking that so far the conclusions of the British Museum have not been debunked, and that the Shroud as not been “proven” to be 2000 years old.
whatistrue said:
You can legitimately say that the evidence you have seen has convinced you, but you cannot legitimately say that it is proven as fact for all.
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Arrived while I was typing. Quite so.
 
Galileo Galilee built telescopes with which he made astronomical observations which provided sufficient evidence to prove the correctness of Copernicus’s theory of helio-centrism. In 1610 he published his conclusions and was subsequently put on trial by the Church. It took 200 years for his proofs to be generally accepted.


In 1898 Secundo Pia, using his primitive box camera, made an astounding discovery: the image of Jesus’ corpse on the Shroud of Turin had the characteristics of a photographic negative. The evidence produced by his simple observational instrument proved that the Shroud was genuine, but that evidence was “debunked” by Catholic clerics who “proved” that Pia’s negatives were the result of a “photographic accident.” In much the same way as Galileo’s evidence was disregarded, so was Pia’s.

In 1931 Enrie’s repeat photo’s vindicated Pia, but the skeptic’s continue to find ways to disregard the “elephant in the room,” which is the mysterious photo-negativity of the Shroud’s image. Presently, we see the allegation of an “optical illusion” as a new way to dismiss this marvelous proof, and we find out that the debunked conclusions of the British Museum are the real “elephant.”

The point of this discussion: just as in Galileo’s time, we have more than sufficient proof, but people’s theologies get in the way, and they cannot accept the evidence.
 
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The theology of the Shroud’s miraculous image is not generally understood. In the Gospels we notice Jesus talking about the “Sign of Jonah” whenever He was challenged by the Jewish authorities to provide them with a miracle that would prove that He was, indeed, the Messiah. In some accounts Jesus refers to His resurrection as that proof, but in Mathew He refers to His burial as the promised “Sign of Jonah” which will be made available to an unspecified “generation.” The problem here is that His burial was just an ordinary Jewish one that did not result in a miracle that could be witnessed by a great number of people. Theologian Beate Kowalski concludes that the sign of Jonah in Mathew “remains an enigma.”


Due to the bullying of the academic world by the British Museum, Kowalski cannot state the obvious answer to the enigma of the Sign of Jonah in Mathew which is Jesus’ miraculous Image on His Shroud, available for the whole world to witness.
 
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undead_rat said:
of course
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Of course.
undead_rat said:
Due to the bullying of the academic world by the British Museum, Kowalski cannot state the obvious answer to the enigma of the Sign of Jonah in Mathew which, of course, is Jesus’ miraculous Image on His Shroud, available for the whole world to witness.
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Either that or Dr Kowalski really does think it’s an enigma. But tell us, how has she been bullied by the British Museum?
 
Thanks for asking. When Prof. Teddy Hall read the “verdict” he also said that anyone who still believed that the Shroud was authentic was delegated to the “lunatic fringe” and would be considered a member of the “flat earth society.” Academic research on the Shroud came to an almost complete halt. Professors and researchers could not afford to jeopardize their academic careers over the Shroud. The British Museum had the bad manners to hold a public “Fraud” Exhibition which included the Shroud as well as Piltdown Man, etc. One has to consider that this Museum and the publication, NATURE, are regarded as the foremost authorities in the academic world.

Prof. Mark Guscin in his book, THE TRADITION OF THE IMAGE OF EDESSA, cannot say what he firmly believes, that the Image and the Shroud are one and the same. He is forced to circumspectly tell us the the Image was probably some type of burial shroud, just not the Shroud of Turin.
 
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thistle said:
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undead_rat:
Will it take another 200 years for the delusions of the skeptics to finally come to an end?
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Why do you keep insulting people in this thread. It’s despicable behaviour.
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(We wouldn’t want to loose this one!)
 
undead_rat said:
One has to consider that this Museum and its publication, NATURE, are regarded as the foremost authorities in the academic world
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The British Museum is a distinguished authority, and Nature a distinguished journal. But the BM does not publish Nature.
 
One if the reasons for my participation in this kind of forum is as a representative. It is inevitable that in forums such as this, prominent posters appear as representatives of all those with a similar point of view. If I stand for non-authenticists, I hope I give the impression that non-authenticists are far from rabid fanatics blinkered to any argument that contradicts their own. Indeed, in response to a recent podcast I took to task a journalist who claimed that non-authenticists were obstinate mules. In fact, of course, he didn’t know any non-authenticists at all, and had invented our persona so as to have something to throw mud at. Now I trust he views us medievalists in a milder light, even if he only knows one.

So although I myself do not mind Undead_rat’s invective, of which, to be fair, his pseudonym gives fair warning, I am sorry that to inquisitive or impartial visitors to this discussion, his prominence weakens the credibility of the whole authenticist argument, in spite of the many more rational contributors who are pursuing the same lines of evidence.

I am well aware of the “mysterious photo-negativity” of the Shroud image, and never disregard it, as I never disregard any of the unresolved factors that constitute evidence against the medieval origin of the Shroud. I believe I have investigated most of them more thoroughly than most authenticists. In the case of the ‘negative’ in particular, as in the case of the ‘perfect anatomical accuracy’ of the image, I believe that pareidolia plays a significant part, and have explored that idea at some length.

There is a common view that an inverted photo of the Shroud literally contains more information than the positive, which is literally untrue, any more than the negative photo of my house contains less information about it than a positive. What is true is that our brains interpret the two representations according to our experience, and therefore make more sense of the one which best fits previous memories. To a Western mind, brought up in a Judaeo-Christian culture, the identity and much of the character of the man of the Shroud is prefigured. It would be interesting to know how an oriental Hindu or Buddhist unfamiliar with Christian culture would view the same image.
 
I do not believe that either Beate Kowalski nor Mark Guscin nor anyone else was intimidated by the authority of the British Museum. My own experience is quite the reverse, it is non-authenticists who are reluctant to engage in Shroud research for fear of the abuse and acrimony they think they will receive from the more extreme wing of the authenticist party.

Also I can find no evidence that “Academic research on the Shroud came to an almost complete halt” after the publication of the radiocarbon results. Quite the contrary. Google Scholar is a bit of a blunt instrument, but over the years shows a steady geometrical increase in the publication of books, papers and articles on the Shroud, and 1988 marks no great hiatus.
 
Starting from the beginning of the 20th century the periodical, NATURE, has demonstrated a prejudicial attitude toward the Shroud. In volume 67, 1903, it published a review of Vignon’s 1902 work, THE SHROUD OF CHRIST, opening with this statement:

Whether the relic described, figured and discussed . . .is the veritable shroud which enwrapped the body of Christ is a question which need not be seriously considered in the columns of a scientific publication.

Here are excerpts from the letter by Dr. Thomas Phillips of Harvard University’s High Energy Physics Laboratory letter that NATURE refused to print:

[Nature’s 1989] article on dating [the Shroud] indicates that with 95% confidence the variations in the dates obtained by the three labs were too large to have been caused by chance alone. An 8% variation in the [neutron] flux between the samples, which is the variation expected from a naive (point source) model of the flux distribution, would explain the 100 year variation in the measured dates. If the amount of carbon 14 in the small sample taken from the corner of the Shroud has been affected by neutron radiation, . . .then the inferred radiocarbon date in inaccurate. Contrary to Hedges’ opinion, there are tests which could conclusively confirm the presence of absence of neutron irradiation. Until these further tests are made, we cannot conclusively state that the Shroud of Turin is medieval.

No physical mechanism has been proposed to explain the neutron flux, and yet our ignorance of the process does not change the possibility that it may have occurred. We do not understand the cause of the Big Bang, another unique physical event, but that does not keep us from studying its consequences. To not permit the possibility that the image on the Shroud was caused by a unique event, which may have had other consequences including a neutron flux, is serious scientific bias, especially when there are historical records which support the occurrence of such an event.
 
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Excerpts from The setting for the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud, Marinelli, 2012:

On completion of the measurements, the laboratories will send their data to Tite [British Museum] and to the Institute of Metrology in Turin for preliminary statistical analysis.

The agreements taken in London are completely disregarded. The laboratories did not maintain confidentiality, and did not even send the data to the “Colonnetti” Institute in Turin for the statistical analysis.

In my opinion there is an anti-Catholic conspiracy of specific milieus.

Hall said that nobody scientifically trustworthy could now deny that the Shroud is fake.

The British Museum will include a full-size replica of the Shroud among forgeries in the exhibition FAKE? THE ART OF DECEPTION, held from March 9 to Sept 2, 1990. In the exhibition catalog it is written: “What is a fake and why are fakes made? Did the forgers of the Turin Shroud and the Piltdown Man have the same motives?”

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone declares: “The analysis of carbon-14 seems to have been a mistake, particularly because of prejudices, because the verdict was decided even before performing the analyses.”

In the statement of the scientific committee of the International Symposium, held in Paris in 1989, it is written that there are strong reserves on the statistical analysis of the results, especially on the value of the chi-squared 6.4 for the samples of the Shroud, which have not provided homogeneous radiocarbon dates. Therefore, the Scientific Committee requested the release of all raw data obtained by the three laboratories.
In 1993 statistician Philippe Bourcier de Carbon listed fifteen points of failure in the radiocarbon history of the Shroud
6. refusal of interdisciniplinary documentation, which is usual in the procedures for radiocarbon dating.
7. exclusion of acknowledged specialists in the Shroud, particularly American scientists who participated in previous works of STURP.
11. refusal to publish raw results of the C-14 measurements.
13. unacceptable value of 6.4 published in the journal NATURE for the chi-squared statistical test of the results of the radiocarbon dosage on the Shroud.
14. rejection of any cross-debate on the statistical measures performed.
 
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For those unfamiliar with the story, I think it should be pointed out that Thomas Phillips did have a letter published in Nature (Vol 337, 16 Feb 1988) in which he made similar points, which were replied to, in the same edition, by Robert Hedges, of the Oxford Radiocarbon Unit. Of Phillips’s second letter, I think it significant that Undead_rat has omitted parts which seem to me to explain why it was not published, inverted two paragraphs, and failed to give a reference for the complete text for further impartial investigation. It can be found at shroud.com/pdfs/n22part5.pdf.

In his first letter, after suggesting that the image may have been related to heat or light radiation from the body, Phillips said: “It may also have radiated neutrons, which would have irradiated the shroud and changed some of the nuclei to different isotopes.” He suggested that C13 could have been changed to C14. (NB this is not the reaction now suggested by Bob Rucker) and that other measurable isotopes could be Cl36 and Ca41, although admitted that this measurement “may not be possible, however, because contamination from new sources of chlorine or calcium may have occurred from washings or other sources since the irridation [sic] took place.”

Robert Hedges replied that “the processes suggested by Phillips were considered by the participating laboratories,” so Phillips was a priori incorrect to claim “serious scientific bias” “to not permit that that the image on the Shroud was caused by a unique physical event.”

Hedges went on to explain why such an event was not further investigated, and why, in his opinion such an event “beggars scientific credulity.” Firstly, “no plausible scientific mechanism has been proposed to explain how the resurrection was accompanied by a significant neutron flux.” Phillips’s counter to this, comparing the Resurrection to the Big Bang, is, in my opinion, weak, and may have been the main reason his second letter was considered too religiously biased to be publishable in a scientific journal.

Secondly, Hedges felt that it would be “an amazing coincidence that the neutron dose should be so exactly appropriate to give the most likely date on historical grounds”. Phillip’s reply is in two parts. The first is fairly extreme special pleading, in that “known physical mechanisms are capable of releasing only minute fraction of the neutrons in any sample of matter”. Not in dead human bodies they aren’t.

Phillip’s second reply is that the co-incidence of dates was not all that amazing, but his reasoning here is confused. “Any date prior to 1203, when the Shroud was apparently seen in Constantinople by Robert de Clari and others, would have been consistent with our historical knowledge of the Shroud.” If he means that he would have accepted a date of 1000AD for the Shroud, then he would have accepted that the Shroud was just as much a forgery as a date in the 13th or 14th centuries. His idea that an “acceptable” date for the Shroud was anything between 1AD and 1200AD cannot sit happily with those who think it authentic.
 
undead_rat said:
[Emanuela Marinelli]: "The laboratories […] did not even send the data to the “Colonnetti” Institute in Turin for the statistical analysis.
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I do not believe this is true. In a letter dated 23 August 1988, to the directors of the three laboratories, Michael Tite wrote: “I am now enclosing a summary of the three sets of radiocarbon results for the Turin Shroud and associated control samples which has been prepared by our statistician, Dr Morven Leese. A copy of this summary together with the detailed results from each laboratory has been sent to Professor Bray at the Instituto de Metrologia “G. Colonnetti.” It would seem to me that the next stage in the project is to reach agreement between the three laboratories, Professor Bray and myself …”

Further, in an article in Shroud News No. 73 (at shroud.com/pdfs/sn073Oct92.pdf), Remi Van Haelst says: “I contacted all parties involved. None of the three laboratories, nor Mgr Saldarini of Turin, nor the Vatican, answered my letters. The only positive reaction came from Professor Bray of Turin. He gave the British Museum his permission to publish their correspondence concerning his review of the statistical analysis made by Dr Leese. Professor Bray was, in fact, one of the few people who saw the report made up by the British Museum.”

In her article, Emanuela Marinella implies that the Colonnetti Institute disassociated itself from the process, but that their Prof. Bray offered to take part “as a personal favour to Cardinal Ballestrero”. Her source for this seems to be Luigi Gonella, but unfortunately I cannot find his work in English.
 
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undead_rat said:
Excerpts from The setting for the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud, Marinelli, 2012:

On completion of the measurements, the laboratories will send their data to Tite [British Museum] and to the Institute of Metrology in Turin for preliminary statistical analysis.

The agreements taken in London are completely disregarded. The laboratories . . .did not even send the [raw]data to the “Colonnetti” Institute in Turin for the statistical analysis.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone declares: “The analysis of carbon-14 seems to have been a mistake, particularly because of prejudices, because the verdict was decided even before performing the analyses.”

Therefore, the Scientific Committee requested the release of all raw data obtained by the three laboratories.
In 1993 statistician Philippe Bourcier de Carbon listed fifteen points of failure in the radiocarbon history of the Shroud
  1. refusal to publish raw results of the C-14 measurements.
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https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/arcm.12467
Perhaps someone will obtain access to the entire paper.
 
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Of course. I know it well, and have explained its findings in other topics on this forum. As I have said elsewhere, the new statistical analysis does little more than confirm the findings of Riani and Atkinson that there is an apparent chronological gradient along the radiocarbon strip, from oldest, at the corner, to youngest, closest to the middle of the cloth. It does nothing to discredit the overall medieval finding, even going so far as to state that: “Our statistical results do not imply that the medieval hypothesis of the age of the tested sample should be ruled out.” Far from it. In fact much of the discussion is an attempt to explain the chronological gradient, not to reject the results as meaningless.

However, the British Museum is castigated for not acknowledging the statistical discrepancy clearly enough, perhaps with justification.

In the ‘Discussion’ the authors speculate on what might have caused this apparent gradient. Regular readers will know that Sue Benford and Joe Marino, supported by Ray Rogers, thought that varying amounts of interpolated thread are responsible, while Bob Rucker thinks it is due to neutron radiation from the dematerialising body of Jesus. Curiously, Casabianca seems to plump for surface contamination, quoting the existence of various adventitious fibres, fragments of a crystalline material like glass or salt, and a blob of 'apparently wax’. But all this junk was noticed and removed by the labs. Furthermore, as we have also noted previously, the proportion of ‘junk’ to cloth required to shift the radiocarbon date by 1300 years is prodigious - four times as much contamination as Shroud. If the apparent chronological gradient is caused by this kind of contamination, then there can only have been such a tiny amount as to shift the date by a few tens of years, not several hundreds. This explanation is no longer held even by the most ardent of authenticists.

If the interpolation or contamination hypotheses were true, it would mean either that the outer corner of the Shroud was actually less contaminated than further in along the edge, or that the contamination consisted of a material whose radiocarbon content was even less than the rest of the Shroud, which I have speculated could be a derivative of pitch. Ray Rogers’s discovery of a pigment suspended in some kind of gum in that area could be informative here, I think.

If the radiation hypothesis were true, then C14 would be expected to be successively enriched in the direction of the body, which is what is observed.

However, all these hypotheses, when developed in detail, assume that the proportions of radiocarbon found by the laboratories are accurate and precise. Should it ever be found otherwise, then the radiation hypothesis, in particular, would lose all the evidence upon which is it based and become mere speculation. Although various observations regarding interpolation and/or contamination would remain, complete uncertainly about the radiocarbon date would render them irrelevant, as they are fundamentally attempts to explain the 1988 findings, not academic discussions about the grubbiness of the cloth.
 
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