We will have to get you on the Shroud of Turin next!
I’ve looked into it and I firmly believe it is a Medieval painting.
I can no longer access a post I made a few months ago on another messageboard but this is its core.
The shroud was separated from the backing cloth along its bottom left-hand edge and a strip (~10 mm x 70 mm) was cut from just above the place where a sample was previously removed in 1973 for examination.
The strip came from a single site on the main body of the shroud away from any patches or charred areas.
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The best known result of these tests was the report on pollen by MAX FREI, who claimed to have identified among 49 different species of pollen spores, 13 that were very characteristic of or exclusive to the Negev and Dead Sea area and 20 others suggestive of Anatolia (Edessa and Istanbul, specifically).
However, there were problems.
Olive pollen ought to dominate a cloth from Palestine, yet none was identified.
Max Frei’s credibility suffered a serious blow when, as a self-proclaimed handwriting expert, he announced that the 'Hitler Diaries’ were genuine and when it was revealed that a fellow Swiss police forensic scientist revealed that Frei had been
found guilty and censured by his superiors on several occasions for the
over-enthusiastic interpretation of samples. **
I might also add that after his death those tape samples he used were re-examined and were found to have a suspiciously
much higher level of pollen spores than other later samples that were taken by others???
[YEARS LATER and STURP is that committee that we have been using for all the claims of the 35 scientists]
"Pollen analysis carried out by STURP
failed to replicate the results obtained a few years earlier by Max Frei.
The team was critical of his findings and did not produce any new pollen evidence.
Nevertheless, supporters of the Shroud tend to cite Frei’s analysis, while glossing over the criticisms raised by the STURP team."
"There are problems with the pollen analysis, though: the Shroud was regularly exhibited in the open air until 1931, allowing it to pick up air-borne pollen (indeed, this is what enabled Frei to trace its alleged journey from the Middle East via Constantinople to France).
Species of plants producing the pollen that FREI had identified as Middle Eastern are
also to be found in Italy, meaning that the Shroud could have gained this pollen since its removal to Turin.
Frei had gathered the pollen by applying sticky tape to the surface of the Shroud without recording where he had done so and without assessing whether or not the areas from which he sampled might have been contaminated.
Members of the STURP team rightly criticised his methodology."
In 1979, using polarized light microscopy, Dr. McCrone determined that the image on the Shroud is made up of billions of submicron pigment particles (as in paint?).
He also conducted forensic tests for blood, which were consistently negative.
[SEPERATE TEST]
In 1980 the Electron Optics Group at McCrone Associates used electron and x-ray diffraction and found iron oxide and mercuric sulfide in the “blood” areas of the Shroud (both chemical compounds are used to make the (Blood) Red color of Vermilion).
Three different international laboratories performed carbon-dating test on the Shroud.
All concluded that the Shroud was manufactured between AD 1260 and 1390.
Proponents of the authentic Shroud claimed that a 1532 fire left carbon residue on the Shroud, thereby contaminating the C-14 results.
Labs call this suggestion “Ludicrous” because the tested samples go through a purification process that would clear away the residue from the fire.
A team of scientists also claimed that bacteria and fungi have been coating the fibers of the Shroud for centuries, and that this too, could contaminate the C-14 results .
While opponents agree that the fungi and bacteria could change the results slightly, they believe that more than a thousand year difference is highly improbable.
When those who wish to promote the Shroud as a genuine artefact of first-century CE date, they must explain:
How Bishop Henri of Troyes was fooled in the mid 1350s by someone who claimed to have painted the Shroud;
Why Bishop Pierre II of Troyes, the Avignon Pope Clement II and the de Charnay family accepted that the Lirey Shroud was an image and not the actual burial cloth of Jesus;
How the alleged contaminants in the fibres submitted for radiocarbon dating have produced dates that match so well the date of the Bishop’s alleged artist;
Why there are traces of vermillion and madder on the cloth in sufficient concentrations to produce an image using the medieval technique of grisaille;
The role of the natron found on the cloth;
Why the image on the cloth is anatomically impossible (the neck is too long, the legs are too long, one arm longer that the other, the arms have not flopped to the side which would have had the unfortunate effect of exposing the body’s genitalia);
Why the cloth has not draped itself around the sides of the body but remained miraculously on a single plane for the imprint of the image;
Why the weave of the cloth is one common in the European Middle Ages but not found on the only definite burial cloth of first century CE date to have been identified;
Why the Gospels refer not to a single cloth but to “small strips of linen” (Luke XXIV.12 and John XX.5).
