Danin, Avinoam

Avinoam Danin and Uri Baruch

It would be up to Avinoam Danin, a botany professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Uri Baruch, a pollen specialist at the Israel Antiquities Authority, to try to salvage Frei's work. At a conference sponsored by the Missouri Botanical Society in St Louis, Missouri, Danin, speaking about the pollen evidence and floral images found on the shroud, reported that "In the light of our findings, it is highly probable that the shroud did in fact come from this part [the Jerusalem area] of the world."

But the problem was only compounded. The subject of floral images that Danin believed he saw on the shroud was being conflated with the Frei’s pollen observations because some of the plants were the same. That would be fine but many people doubted that Danin was really seeing these images of flowers. Danin wasn’t delusional. Others saw what seemed to be the same flowers.  But, as we will see later on when we have started to understand the shroud’s images better, they may simply appearances of flowers.

Baruch was Guarded

But Baruch was guarded in his reporting. He confirmed what Frei had observed but at the genus level and not a species level. That wasn’t very helpful for it greatly expanded the geographic area. A flower particular to a specific area in Frei’s interpretation might be found elsewhere in the world in places that even the greatest conspiracy theorists never thought to imagine that the shroud might have ever been.  Sadly, these concerns were ignored by many people who poured out web page after web page trying to prove that the shroud was real. Finally, in 1991, Danin clarified his position on the pollen evidence. It could not be used to show that the shroud had been in the Middle East. He did, however, argue that his identification of plant images on the shroud was sufficient. Was it?

I have yet to personally meet anyone who denies that there is an image of a man on the shroud. However, in cyberspace I have. One day I received an email from someone who claimed that what we think is an image is merely the happenstance accumulation of smudges and stains on the cloth. It was, he wrote, no different than an imaginary image of Jesus on a burned slice of toast or the Virgin Mary in the grain of a plank of wood. But, I wrote back, the image is too detailed, too realistic and too complex to be that. It is obviously an image of a man, whether real or fake.  But he persisted. His mind was made up. “You can’t prove it,” he wrote back. It could be pure coincidence. It raised an interesting question. Is there a threshold for perceiving an image?