Skeptic Arguments Against the Shroud of Turin's Authenticity

[Pieman333272]

WARNING: BORING STORY. PLEASE SKIP THIS IF YOU DON’T WANT TO READ HOW THIS CAME TO BE.

This morning, I was rooting through some stuff in my closet, trying to find a novel I read a few years back and ended up putting back there for some reason. Anyway, I happened to unearth a box with all my stuff from a project I did on the Shroud of Turin’s Authenticity in 7th Grade (about 4-5 Years ago, give or take a few months), and remembered the research I did on this relic in the 2 Month period of time I was given for the project (the reason I was allocated 2 months for a 7th grade project is due to a rather odd, in retrospect, system my teacher used for projects I will explain if prompted). I had the slides I used for the overhead projector, the 2, 300+ page books my parents bought for the purpose of the project, the accompanying script and paper I used (I gave an overhead presentation on it due to the absence of the genius invention of the SMART Board or the Computer Projector in that room, they were not made district wide until later), some printed articles, and my citation. This was all for Medieval History class, as it says so on the script. But as I remember, after the project, I continued to follow the Shroud in the news for a few months, but ultimately just, oddly, didn’t check for it in the news online anymore.

Long STORY OVER. THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE.

Anyway, finding it got me thinking: What are skeptic arguments against the authenticity (authenticity meaning both as Jesus’ Burial Cloth and as a Miraculously formed Image) of the Shroud? Of course, I mentioned some skeptic arguments in my presentation, but didn’t get to debunk all of them (I only got to debunk 2 of 4, actually) due to the nature of the project and the time limits on it. I also didn’t get to see any new arguments against it, so I would like to see if I missed any big ones or any came up in the last 2 years. I am also catching up on the latest theories and news on it, and will be referring back to my resources if I can to answer skeptics. So tell me, what are your objections to it?

 

[Touchstone]

Forensic expert Walter McCrone, invited by the Church to analyze specimens from the Shroud, as printed in Biblical Archaeology Review:
Walter McCrone:

I beg to differ with the recent statement in BAR (and in Time magazine) that “no one has been able to account for the image” on the Shroud of Turin.

Nearly 20 years ago the Catholic Church invited me to determine chemically what the image is on the Shroud of Turin.

I obtained 32 samples from the shroud: 18 from areas where there are images both of a body and of bloodstains) and 14 from non-image areas (some from clear areas that served as controls, others from scorch and water stains caused by a fire in 1532). The samples were taken with squares of sticky tape, each of which exceeded a square inch in area and held more than 1,000 linen fibers and any materials attached to the shroud. They were excellent samples. I used standard forensic tests to check for blood. I found none. There is no blood on the shroud.

To determine what substances are present in the shroud images, I conducted tests based on polarized light microscopy. I identified the substance of the body-and-blood images as the paint pigment red ochre, in a collagen tempera medium. The blood image areas consist of another pigment, ver-milion, in addition to red ochre and tempera. These paints were in common use during the Middle Ages.

The paint on the shroud was dilute (0.01 percent in a 0.01 percent gelatin solution). I made up such a paint and an artist friend, Walter Sanford, painted an excellent shroud-like image (see photo at right and my book Judgement Day for the Shroud [Chicago: Mccrone Research Institute, 1996]. pp.145.149). Known as grisaille, the style of the painting, with its very faint, monochromatic image, was also common in the 14th century.

Based on the complete absence of any reference to the shroud before 1356, Bishop Henri of Poitiers’s statement that he knew’ the artist, the 14th-century painting style and my test results, I concluded in two papers published in 1980 that the shroud was painted in 1355 ('to give the paint a year to dry"). A third paper in 1981 confirmed these results with X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray determination of the elements present (iron, mercury and sulfur) in the two paints. Eight years after my published results, the carbon-dating results were reported as 1325 ± 65 year - thus confirming my date of 1355.

Have you debunked this analysis yet?

-TS

 

[The_Exodus]

The unbelievers will get their sources which seem to show scientific evidence against its authenticity, the believers will do the opposite. It has not been declared miraculous by the Church, so, in my eyes, there won’t be much gained on either side by debating the matter.

 

[The_Exodus]

Forensic expert Walter McCrone, invited by the Church to analyze specimens from the Shroud, as printed in Biblical Archaeology Review:

Have you debunked this analysis yet?

-TS

Many men testified seeing Christ crucified and raised from the dead. Some died tortuous deaths because they wouldn’t renounce this “story.” Seems rather odd that they would purposefully die for something they knew to be a lie.

Have you, or anyone in the world, debunked the witness of the martyrs yet?

 

[edwest2]

The Holy Shroud has not been officially declared to be the burial cloth of Jesus.

theholyshroud.net/

God bless,
Ed

 

[Touchstone]

Many men testified seeing Christ crucified and raised from the dead. Some died tortuous deaths because they wouldn’t renounce this “story.” Seems rather odd that they would purposefully die for something they knew to be a lie.

Even granting that (I personally think that if any of them died as martyrs, they likely did not believe the resurrection of Jesus to be a lie), it’s far less odd than RESURRECTION OF A MAN THREE DAYS DEAD. We can pile up stories of people doing all sorts of crazy things, and doing them to extremes, and find a whole lot of them “rather odd”.

But we’ve nothing to point to as a comparable for the fact of reanimation of a corpse that had been dead (parts of) three days.

So if I nod, for the sake of discussion, and say “Ok, that’s rather odd”, it gets me no nearer to accepting the resurrection claim, does it? It’s still far more plausible than the resurrection claim itself.

Have you, or anyone in the world, debunked the witness of the martyrs yet?

No, not in the sense that we can document what really did happen. There’s little reason to expect such knowledge is obtainable now. But there’s also little need, as the evidence available for the Resurrection is so poorly matched with the extraordinary nature of the claim. The claim doesn’t hold in light of plausible alternatives that don’t invoke events like the resurrection of a man three days dead.

Back during the Lakeland Revival, led by the illustrious Todd Bentley, many reports of God doing a powerful work (at Bentley’s behest) came out which claimed that the dead had been raised back to life – see here, for example of the kind of reports that came in:

As of June 26, 2008 the Lakeland Revival, Florida Outpouring, is in it’s 86th day! There have been over 10,000 testimonies of healing and over 25 resurrections from the dead. If you heard about Val Thomas, the woman who came back to life after rigor mortis had set in, then you’ve heard of one of the resurrection testimonies from the Florida Outpouring. Geraldo Rivera interviewed Todd Bentley, and Todd has sent him documentation of the healings. There will also be an NBC Nightly News story surfacing shortly.

Now, unlike the reports of Jesus’ resurrection, there’s a good chance that such a claim could be fully debunked, especially if we have specific starting points (name of the deceased/revived, for example) to work from.

But it’s hardly interesting, is it? Such a claim, just bubbling out of the advocates and beneficiaries of such a message, matched with the fantastic nature of the claim, and the actual newsworthiness and documentability of such a happening if it were to happen, makes it just something to roll one’s eyes at. The plausibility of these claims as embellished/fabricated reports that arise from a fervor in the participating faithful is just overwhelming against the idea that one Val Thomas was dead-unto-rigor-mortis, and was brought back to life, with documentation of said miracle furnished to Giraldo Rivera, to boot.

-TS

 

[cjforJesus]

Some people use the shroud as a proof Jesus was crucified throught he wrists though on review of the stigmatic saints it seems the wounds were in the hands as was believed for centuries in accord with scripture.St Padre Pio is an example.

I have read some accounts of saints actually describing the crucifixion in detail.

Why the discrepancy? God is not a God of confusion. he would not reveal something as a lie.though mystics and visionaries may color their accounts with personal beliefs,they would not have visions totally contrary in the manner of the crucifixion.

 

[Windfish]

Forensic expert Walter McCrone, invited by the Church to analyze specimens from the Shroud, as printed in Biblical Archaeology Review:

Have you debunked this analysis yet?

-TS

That very web-page published several other articles which refute his claim, and all of them had access to the Shroud and all are highly credentialed.

 

[GEddie]

The Holy Shroud has not been officially declared to be the burial cloth of Jesus.

theholyshroud.net/

God bless,
Ed

Because it can’t be. Even if it were proven to be the correct age, it can never be proven that the thing was ever wrapped around Him.

ICXC NIKA

 

[Touchstone]

That very web-page published several other articles which refute his claim, and all of them had access to the Shroud and all are highly credentialed.

I don’t think you read to the end. McCrone responds throughout the document.

-TS

 

[Touchstone]

Because it can’t be. Even if it were proven to be the correct age, it can never be proven that the thing was ever wrapped around Him.

ICXC NIKA

Wouldn’t “revelation” suffice as the basis for such a declaration?

-TS

 

[GEddie]

Some people use the shroud as a proof Jesus was crucified throught he wrists though on review of the stigmatic saints it seems the wounds were in the hands as was believed for centuries in accord with scripture.St Padre Pio is an example.

I have read some accounts of saints actually describing the crucifixion in detail.

Why the discrepancy? God is not a God of confusion. he would not reveal something as a lie.though mystics and visionaries may color their accounts with personal beliefs,they would not have visions totally contrary in the manner of the crucifixion.

There is no conflict with the Holy Scriptures. In Greek, the word for “hand” includes the forearm. So a nail in the wrist would, in Greek, be properly described as in the “hand.”

Medical experiments done with dead bodies and limbs have shown that a nail put through the palm will not hold the body’s weight.

However, it is possible that a nail put obliquely through the palm and out the back of the wrist, would hold, anchored by the wrist bones. We do not see the front of the Shroud body’s hands, as they are hidden against the body, so we do not know where the nails were initially placed.

Also, stigmata are not, a priori, a source of scientific information on how our LORD died.

ICXC NIKA.

 

[Windfish]

I don’t think you read to the end. McCrone responds throughout the document.

-TS

And his response was followed up by other responses. He insists that what he found was red ochre. Another researcher published in his findings that it was blood.

 

[rossum]

What are skeptic arguments against the authenticity (authenticity meaning both as Jesus’ Burial Cloth and as a Miraculously formed Image) of the Shroud?

One of the most thorough sceptical analyses of the shroud I have seen is: The Great Gothic Art Fraud. Be warned that it is from Secular Web so it doesn’t pull any punches. It analyses the shroud as a Gothic painting. The proportions of the image on the shroud are not those of a real person but more closely match the standard proportions of a Gothic painting.

It also makes the points, which are obvious when you look at the image, that one of the lower arms (elbow to wrist) is much shorter than the other and that the the hair is arranged as if standing vertically, rather than falling straight back from the face towards the back of the head as with a corpse laid out on a slab.

To quote the article:If Jesus had the proportions of the image in the shroud, then he was a severely deformed and pathological person who would have cut a shocking figure as he walked down the streets and paths of the Holy Land. Exceptionally tall for his time and place, his rather narrow head was so shrunken and low browed that it would have indicated a unique form of hypocephaly … Overly long arms would have hung at his sides, with one exceptionally elongated, the other less so because of an atrophied lower arm. It is hard to see how such bizarre attributes would have not been mentioned in an account of his life, … Because the proportions of the shroud image are essentially impossible, the figure cannot represent that of an actual person.
The shroud is a Gothic artist’s version of what Jesus’ shroud would have looked like. It uses the proportions to be expected in Gothic art and not the proportions of a normal human body.

rossum

 

[Pieman333272]

Walter McCrone:

I beg to differ with the recent statement in BAR (and in Time magazine) that “no one has been able to account for the image” on the Shroud of Turin.

Nearly 20 years ago the Catholic Church invited me to determine chemically what the image is on the Shroud of Turin.

I obtained 32 samples from the shroud: 18 from areas where there are images both of a body and of bloodstains) and 14 from non-image areas (some from clear areas that served as controls, others from scorch and water stains caused by a fire in 1532). The samples were taken with squares of sticky tape, each of which exceeded a square inch in area and held more than 1,000 linen fibers and any materials attached to the shroud. They were excellent samples. I used standard forensic tests to check for blood. I found none. There is no blood on the shroud.

Alan Adler and John Heller analyzed it later to find the blood on it is, in fact blood. And here’s something interesting: there are high iron levels on the blood, but nowhere else, revealed by the X-Ray fluorescence spectra, and proteins were found on the blood but nowhere else on the Shroud.

To determine what substances are present in the shroud images, I conducted tests based on polarized light microscopy. I identified the substance of the body-and-blood images as the paint pigment red ochre, in a collagen tempera medium. The blood image areas consist of another pigment, ver-milion, in addition to red ochre and tempera. These paints were in common use during the Middle Ages.

The paint on the shroud was dilute (0.01 percent in a 0.01 percent gelatin solution). I made up such a paint and an artist friend, Walter Sanford, painted an excellent shroud-like image (see photo at right and my book Judgement Day for the Shroud [Chicago: Mccrone Research Institute, 1996]. pp.145.149). Known as grisaille, the style of the painting, with its very faint, monochromatic image, was also common in the 14th century.

While it is plausible, though not likely, for the blood, the image is almost certainly not painted - no pigment was detected by the X-Ray Florescence. Also, a good few liquids that might remove paint were tested on it and nothing happened. And do you really believe a painting on a cloth would survive over 500 years of sweaty hands touching it, waving it, spreading out in front of churches and being heated without any paint chipping or being removed in the slightest (besides where it was burned)?

Based on the complete absence of any reference to the shroud before 1356, Bishop Henri of Poitiers’s statement that he knew’ the artist, the 14th-century painting style and my test results, I concluded in two papers published in 1980 that the shroud was painted in 1355 ('to give the paint a year to dry"). A third paper in 1981 confirmed these results with X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray determination of the elements present (iron, mercury and sulfur) in the two paints. Eight years after my published results, the carbon-dating results were reported as 1325 ± 65 year - thus confirming my date of 1355.

The Shroud wasn’t revealed to the masses (as the Shroud) until 1356. But one of the books I read, called The Blood and the Shroud, theoretically traced its history back to a long time before the crusades, and by linking it to another, now lost, relic called the Image of Edessa, which was supposedly given to Edessa’s king by Paul himself, it is possible it is indeed authentic. The Bishop’s statement, while indeed referring to the Shroud, is unclear and his non-mention of the artist leads some, but not all, scholars to think he was only giving that answer as a way of saying they shouldn’t be too enthusiastic about it as the image of Christ. I’ll try to look that up, it mentions that in one of the books I’ve read, I think.
The Carbon-Dating has been proven to be flawed for the use of part of the Shroud with a repair seam from the 15-Hundreds which was made of cotton and altered the results. Raymond Rogers, one of the main Carbon-Daters, found this to be true on another part of the sample they took - there was, indeed, a repair seam in it. Research, sadly, has yet to continue from hear due to Rogers’ death and separation of the seam and the sample.

 

[Pieman333272]

Rossum - Here’s something on the article for you:
shroud.com/piczek.htm
Isabel Piczek:

The untrained human eye does not note the differences created by anatomical foreshortening on the frontal and dorsal image of the Shroud. Foreshortening and the TRUE DISTANCES of body parts from the surface go hand in hand. While a general research opinion sees a flatly reclining body on the Shroud, the professional figurative artist with extensive training in art anatomy can see substantial differences to caution him/her to accept the flatly reclining position as true.

The foreshortenings describe very precise angles which the torso creates with the pelvis, the pelvis with the thighs and the thighs with the lower legs. The problem with all the time was that these angles could be easily calculated from a profile view, but the profile view is missing on the Shroud. Art anatomy, however, can restore that information.
Is there conclusive proof, which even the untrained eye can see, that the body on the Shroud is not flatly reclining?

The experiment with the model provides us with the clue. The one sure difference between the flatly reclining figure and one which is bent with the knees pulled up is the position of the crossed hands in relationship with the genitals. As the model in a reclining position leans forward more and more and slowly pulls up his knees, there comes a point at which the genitals become naturally covered by the crossed hands. At this point the model looks exactly like the body of the Man on the Shroud, – the two match each other line by line, form by form. The true position of the body has been found and the missing genitals on an otherwise perfect male body are explained. They are not missing, they are simply covered by the hands due to the bending of the body and the pulled up knees.
A microscopist does not have to be an expert in art anatomy. Dr. McCrone makes a natural mistake regarding art anatomy when he states that the arms of the Shroud Man are too long – a mistake a medieval artist made painting the Shroud. His error provides us with further proof of the true position of the body on the Shroud.

The arms would be too long if the Shroud Man would be flatly reclining. The arms, however are entirely parallel with the surface of the Shroud and we see them in linear full length. The torso, the thighs, the lower legs on the other hand we see shortened by geometric perspective and not in full length. They stand at an angle to the surface. Actually, Dr. McCone comes to our aid again. The discrepancy in the length of the arms he points out proves that the body on the Shroud is not in a flatly reclining position.

The professional arts cannot find any such discrepancies and distortions in the anatomy of the Shroud Man, which cannot be explained experimentally and which would prove it to be a painting.

Keep in mind this person was Crucified - it had to skew your proportions to some extent. I honestly don’t care if Jesus had a weird hairdo, and as for the small head, it seems nobody either asserts or debunks that theory other than the people who wrote that article. I’ll try to look into it.

 

[cjforJesus]

There is no conflict with the Holy Scriptures. In Greek, the word for “hand” includes the forearm. So a nail in the wrist would, in Greek, be properly described as in the “hand.”

Medical experiments done with dead bodies and limbs have shown that a nail put through the palm will not hold the body’s weight.

However, it is possible that a nail put obliquely through the palm and out the back of the wrist, would hold, anchored by the wrist bones. We do not see the front of the Shroud body’s hands, as they are hidden against the body, so we do not know where the nails were initially placed.

Also, stigmata are not, a priori, a source of scientific information on how our LORD died.

ICXC NIKA.

Catholic saints approved writings are usually pretty good sources of info.

Yes,I have heard that argument before about the wrist being called part of the hand,but that does not account for the mystics visions stating the nails were placed in His palms.

 

[edwest2]

Because it can’t be. Even if it were proven to be the correct age, it can never be proven that the thing was ever wrapped around Him.

ICXC NIKA

This makes no sense. God provides evidence of His presence. It’s only people that refuse to see them. Jesus has sent Mary to give important messages to the world, but again, though having eyes and ears, some refuse to hear or see.

God bless,
Ed

 

[Faith1960]

Catholic saints approved writings are usually pretty good sources of info.

Yes,I have heard that argument before about the wrist being called part of the hand,but that does not account for the mystics visions stating the nails were placed in His palms.

Unless Jesus was also tied to the cross in addition to nails being driven through his hands, the nails had to have been in his wrists. He was too heavy to be able to hang from his hands.

 

[Windfish]

You’ve impressed me, Pieman. It looks like that research project paid off!