carbon 14
The Flat Earth Society
“We have shown the shroud to be a fake,” Teddy Hall, the director of Oxford’s Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art said following carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin in 1988. “Anyone who disagrees with us ought to belong to the Flat Earth Society.”
That should have been the end of it. The big piece of cloth with two life-size images, front and back, of an apparently crucified man was not—could not be—the burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth. Science had just proven that. It originated, so the scientists said, in the Middle Ages sometime between 1260 and 1390, or thereabouts. We must say thereabouts because in such scientific measurements, there are margins of error. But the margin of error was small. We might really say it was irrelevant. The work was done at three different prestigious laboratories by thoroughly qualified, highly respected scientists. The carbon dating should have been the end of it. For most people, it was. It was until it wasn’t. Serious mistakes had been made.
Skeptics
DictionaryEach attempt to reproduce the images presumed that the carbon dating was correct. When it became obvious, to some, that the cloth was very much older, some skeptics modified their stance. Robert Carroll, in his popular, thorough and well written Skeptics Dictionary, wrote, “Of course, the cloth might be 3,000 or 2,000 years old . . . but the image on the cloth could date from a much later period. (1)
Wilson commented along the same lines, “However, it [new evidence about the age of the cloth] doesn't impact my theory much at all. A handy place for some profiteering villain to grab a good burial shroud for purposes of forgery, is from a tomb in Palestine. . . . a BC date won't necessarily toss the Shadow Theory.” (2)
Others were seemingly unaware that serious research was being published in the recondite, specialized, peer-reviewed journals of science; articles that proved that the carbon dating was invalid and articles that characterized the chemistry and physical attributes of the images.
Molly from Alaska
This unawareness was underscored for me when one day, in 2005, I received an email from Molly, a high school student in Alaska. Her chemistry teacher had handed out a sheet of paper with the title, “Carbon 14 Dating Successes.” It was a list and the topmost item read, “Shroud of Turin proven fake.” She had questioned the accuracy of the two words, proven fake.
“I asked my teacher about it,” she wrote, “but was ridiculed for not being scientific.” In front of the entire class her teacher said that she could believe anything she wants about her religion, but when it comes to science, the shroud is a fake. It was, he had said, a scientific fact.
For a class examination, she had to agree that the shroud was fake or be marked down. She objected. She brought to class an article from Wikipedia, the controversial online, community-edited encyclopedia banned by many teachers because of its sometimes questionable reliability. But, she also brought an article from the New York Times and another one from BBC News. They all said the same thing: There were substantive reasons to doubt the 1988 carbon dating results. She was looking for a copy of an article from a peer-reviewed scientific journal that had been mentioned in the news articles. Did I have a copy? I did, and I sent it to her.
The Shroud is a religious object
The shroud is a religious object, believed by many to be the actual burial cloth of Jesus and hence a relic. We should not be surprised that after the carbon dating, many people attempted to challenge the results, often inventing highly imaginative, creative explanations. One was that the images of Jesus, seen on the cloth, were created when Jesus dematerialized and rematerialized during the Resurrection and this may have (somehow) rejuvenated the cloth and made it appear newer than it was. Dematerialize: the very word, was an invitation to mockery. We have all seen Hollywood’s version of dematerialization. “Beam me up, Scotty,” says Captain Kirk asking to be dematerialized from the planet on which he is standing and rematerialized on the starship Enterprise.
Dematerialization
Fortunately, the very word dematerialization has itself mostly dematerialized among the majority of serious Shroud researchers. It is given no credence by scientists. Few proponents of the Shroud’s authenticity will so much as whisper the word. But, read newspaper stories or Internet blogs, and you might easily think that this was the belief of anyone who thinks the Shroud is real. There was an overwhelming amount of other evidence that suggested that the shroud might be authentic. There were other, more meaningful attempts to understand, in light of all the evidence, why the carbon dating might be wrong. But that is not what you will read in newspapers. Journalist, as late as 2009, in writing about the Shroud, note that carbon dating had proven it was medieval but that “hardnosed believers” say that the image formed when Jesus’ body dematerialized during the Resurrection. Some, in a more temperate way, write that scientists were at a loss to explain how the images were formed.
When I became interested in the Shroud—quite by accident, impressed by the evidence, and intrigued but not necessarily convinced by unexplained mystery—I kept mostly silent for fear of being thought of as some sort of fanatic. I did write some material and put it up on the Internet. I sought out and discussed it with those who seemed to me to not be part of the lunatic fringe. Eventually, I did provide my email address and that is how Molly and thousands of others were able to contact me.
Finally, a clear explanation for the carbon dating
It would be several years before a clear explanation why the carbon dating was invalid would be published in a secular, peer-reviewed journal. It would take as long for hypotheses to emerge that might explain how the images might have been formed that was not paranormal, did not seem to violate the laws of nature, and did not assume fakery either. Dematerialization, as far as I was concerned, was beyond reason and not theologically sound. Even betting on the idea that no one had figured out how the images were formed was pseudoscience. I was now giving occasional lectures on the Shroud. After, one such talk at a nearby Catholic Church, I met two men who would profoundly affect my thinking about the Shroud.
Lenny’s Opinions
· It is perceived as being part of an argument for the existence of God and as an effort to prove the Resurrection.
· The claim by proponents that the images cannot be recreated is fallacious. It is fair to say that no one has yet figured out how. But to imply that the images are miraculous, as some do, is no different than God-of-the-gaps arguments voiced in opposition to evolution.
· The attempts by skeptics to recreate the images (and even claim that they have), is equally fallacious. In essence they are saying that if they were able to produce a forgery of the shroud, then the shroud itself must be a forgery as well.
· Unsubstantiated claims such as images of coins or arguments about dematerialization are more than distractions. They are so over the top that skepticism becomes a reflex reaction.
· Fake claims about history such as the claim by skeptics that there is no history before 1350 or the hearsay claims of a jealous French bishop are anti-intellectual. Notice that it is never historians that say this. They know better.
· The notion that carbon dating is somehow infallible because it was performed by three laboratories is preposterous. Each of three labs performed the same one test on a fragment of the same one sample. No one ever wondered if the sample might be bad, as we now know it was.
Richard Dawkins on the Shroud
In September of 2009, Richard Dawkins, in his new book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, seemed to trip over many of these points, directly or by implication:
[Carbon dating] has revolutionized archaeological dating. The most celebrated example is the Shroud of Turin. Since this notorious piece of cloth seems mysteriously to have imprinted on it the image of a bearded crucified man, many people hoped it might hail from the time of Jesus. It turns up in the historical record in the mid-fourteenth century in France, and nobody knows where it was before that. It has been housed in Turin since 1578, under the custody of the Vatican since 1983. When mass spectrometry made it possible to date a tine sample of the shroud, rather than the substantial swathes that would have been needed before, the Vatican allowed a small strip to be cut off. The strip was divided in three parts and sent to three leading laboratories specializing in carbon dating, in Oxford, Arizona and Zurich. Working under conditions of scrupulous independence—not comparing notes—the three laboratories reported their verdicts on the date when the flax from which the cloth had been woven died. Oxford said ad 1200, Arizona 1304 and Zurich 1274. These dates are all—within normal margins of error—compatible with each other and with the date in the 1350s at which the shroud is first mentioned in history. The dating of the shroud remains controversial, but not for reasons that cast doubt on the carbon-dating technique itself. For example, the carbon in the shroud might have been contaminated by a fire, which is known to have occurred in 1532. I won’t pursue the matter further, because the shroud is of historical, not evolutionary, interest. It is a nice example, however, to illustrate the method, and the fact that, unlike dendrochronology, it is not accurate to the nearest year, only to the nearest century or so. [Emphasis mine]
Dawkins is either clueless or selective. One wonders if he even checked Wikipedia. On the matter of the historical record he implies that the absence of evidence is itself evidence or as Donald Rumsfeld famously put it, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” He was trying to justify his belief that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Besan
style='font-style:normal'>çon Records?But where are the records for it in Besançon if it was there? The city's Cathedral of Saint Etienne was struck by lightning in 1349 and burned to the ground along with countless records in its archives. That may explain why there are no records before the 1350s. That is not proof, of course. It is not proof of anything. But it does offer an example of why a claim of a lack of any history before the 1350s is not a sound historical argument.
There certainly was a burial shroud relic in Constantinople and there is extensive evidence, both historical and scientific, that this shroud is the same shroud found in Turin. We’ll see that as we proceed. But what about the verdict of the carbon dating from Oxford, Arizona and Zurich, dates “all—within normal margins of error—compatible with each other. . .”? We should not be surprised that the dates seem close. Actually, if we dig a bit deeper, we see that there are some serious statistical problems with the dates the laboratories measured. Dawkins only gives us averages of many tests that the labs performed. He implies this is a final verdict. He is praising carbon dating.
The Mummy at the Georges Labit Museum in Toulouse
The list that Molly’s teacher distributed to the class might have also contained a reference to a certain mummy at the Georges Labit Museum in Toulouse, France. Carbon dating had been used to show that it was from about 1800 B.C. The tests had laid waste to the opinion of some Egyptologists that it was only from around 700 B.C. That is a whopping difference of more than a thousand years. Thirty-eight hundred years old was the verdict. That should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. Scientists had tested the mummy's linen wrappings to arrive at the earlier date. In 2009, only months before Dawkins’ book was published, scientist tested some bone taken from the mummy's spine and concluded that the mummy was from about 700 B.C. after all. So, which is it? It is hard to say until someone can explain why the carbon dating of the linen cloth was so different than it was for the bone material. The floors of carbon dating laboratories are littered with such anomalies. In many cases these anomalies are eventually explained. Some have not been.
Historical Evidence and Scientific Evidence
There is historical evidence that the shroud is much older than the dates arrived at by carbon dating. We’ll see that this is so. We’ll also see scientific evidence that says the same thing. So, do we have an anomaly? If so, do we now have an explanation. The fact that three laboratories did the testing does not remove the possibility of an anomaly. The presumption in carbon dating is that all anomalies will eventually be explained, scientifically. But the fire contamination suggestion by Dawkins is old news. It never panned out. Neither did many other suggestions. Finally, one explanation did stick. It was published in a peer-reviewed journal and that was the paper that Molly from Alaska was seeking.
The paper was written by the late Raymond Rogers (1927-2005), a retired chemist from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Interestingly he was not trying to dispute the carbon dating but to refute yet another “crazy” suggestion why the carbon dating might be wrong.
Rogers in Turin
In 1978, Rogers had been selected as one of many scientists asked to go to Turin and study the shroud up and close. From his work on the shroud, Rogers’ only substantive conclusion was that the shroud images were not painted. He did not then offer an opinion on its authenticity. Following the carbon dating, he accepted the conclusion that the shroud was medieval. He had complete respect for the technology and the quality of work done by the carbon dating labs. In 2005, the same year that the student in Alaska contacted me, Philip Ball, a former editor of Nature, that most prestigious international journal of science, wrote in Nature Online that Rogers “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.”
Kim Johnson of NMSR wrote in an obituary for Rogers on the organization’s web site:
He was a Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and tried to be an excellent, open minded scientist in all things. In particular, he had no pony in the "Shroud of Turin" horserace, but was terribly interested in making sure that neither proponents nor skeptics let their scientific judgment be clouded by their preconceptions. He just wanted to date and analyze the thing. He died on March 8th from cancer. He was a good man, and tried his best to do honest science.
The Lunatic Fringe
Though Rogers had stopped doing research on the shroud, he had maintained a passing interest, in part because no one had figured out how the images had been made. He was quite sure that they were not somehow miraculously formed. He was annoyed by claims from those who thought they could explain away the carbon dating with pseudoscientific or non-scientific explanations. They were, in his words, the “lunatic fringe” of shroud research.
One hypothetical suggestion, seemingly off the wall, had been gaining traction, particularly on the Internet. Two researchers, Sue Benford and Joe Marino, were suggesting that the sample used in the carbon dating was significantly not part of the shroud but instead part of a medieval repair, a section of the cloth mended using a technique known as invisible reweaving. Rogers thought this was ludicrous, just so much more lunatic fringe thinking. He thought that he could prove they were wrong. He had in his possession some small thread samples taken from the shroud at a spot adjacent to where the carbon dating sample had been snipped away. It would be a simple matter to show that there was no evidence of mending.
Benford and Marino Onto Something
As it turned out, Benford and Marino seemed to be onto something. In 2002, after considerable research, Rogers, along with Anna Arnoldi, a chemistry professor at the University of Milan, wrote a paper that strongly suggested that Benford and Marino were right. More work needed to be done, however, and Rogers continued to study the matter with material that had been saved from the actual cuttings from which the carbon dating samples were taken. In January, 2005, following a lengthy peer-review process, Thermochimica Acta, an international journal from Elsevier, the world’s largest publisher of scientific journals, published a paper by Rogers entitled, “Studies on the Radiocarbon Sample from the Shroud of Turin.” In it Rogers wrote:
The combined evidence from chemical kinetics, analytical chemistry, cotton content, and pyrolysis/ms proves that the material from the radiocarbon area of the shroud is significantly different from that of the main cloth. The radiocarbon sample was thus not part of the original cloth and is invalid for determining the age of the shroud.
This wasn’t religious opinion. In fact, it wasn’t that much of a scientific opinion of the sort that newspapers and television like. If Rogers could have proven that the shroud was the genuine article or at least that it came from the time of Christ, this would have been exciting news. As it was he was only saying, that for all practical purposes, the 1988 carbon dating was meaningless. It was pure science. It was also a personal admission that he had been wrong in thinking that the carbon dating was the end of the story; that the shroud was certainly a medieval fake.
Letter to the Editors of
In a letter to the editors of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, in response to criticisms leveled at him by Joe Nickell, one of the magazine’s non-scientist columnists who had raised questions about Rogers’ scientific competence, Rogers wrote:
I accepted the radiocarbon results, and I believed that the "invisible reweave" claim was highly improbable. I used my samples to test it. One of the greatest embarrassments a scientist can face is to have to agree with the lunatic fringe. . . . Joe [Nickell] did not understand the method or importance of the results of the pyrolysis/mass spectrometry analyses, and I doubt that he understands the fundamental science behind either visible/ultraviolet spectrometry or fluorescence. He certainly does not understand chemical kinetics. If he wants to argue my results, I suggest that we stick to observations, natural laws, and facts. I am a skeptic by nature, but I believe all skeptics should be held to the same ethical and scientific standards we require of others. (1)
It would be unfair to blame the teacher in Alaska for not knowing the latest information about the shroud's carbon dating if Dawkins and so many others are seemingly unaware. But Molly was aware or became aware. Maybe her religious convictions led her to read about the shroud on the Internet. Maybe she was inspired by science class and wanted to know more. Perhaps she had no idea what the Shroud of Turin was and looked it up in Wikipedia. She went the extra mile by finding additional information. She was fully entitled, in fact one might say obligated, to question her science teacher's claim on scientific grounds. The teacher’s proper response should have been, “let me see what you have.” The teacher might very well have turned this into a learning experience for her and indeed the whole class.
Joe Nickell: Sour Grapes
With the 1988 carbon dating in shambles, the last convincing scientific argument that the shroud was a fake had gone up in smoke. This didn’t mean that the shroud was real. That is yet to be determined. But with the collapse of the last bit of what was thought to be a scientifically sustainable argument, a sense a palpable frustration seemed to be emerging among better informed shroud skeptics. This is perhaps no more evident than in Nickell’s 2007 book, Relics of the Christ:
Actually, their numerous criticisms of the carbon dating are little more than sour grapes . . . As we have seen, however, there is corroborative evidence that supports the radiocarbon date of 1260 to 1390. This includes the lack of any history before the 1350s. (2)
There we go again: lack of any history before the 1350s. But it gets more interesting.
Joe Nickell is the world’s single most unceasing critic of the shroud’s authenticity. He is an eloquent writer and during his long career as a book author and columnist for the Skeptical Inquirer he has done an admirable job of debunking all manner of dubious artifacts, hoaxes and outlandish beliefs in such things as the Loch Ness Monster. We get an interesting picture of Nickell, who describes himself as a paranormal investigator, from an article entitled, “An Interview with Joe Nickell.” It was written by Eric Krieg of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking. “Joe impressed on me the difference between being a scientist and an investigator,” Krieg wrote. “Joe seems to have no significant credentials . . . Joe remarks that a scientist tends to approach an investigation from the narrow view of his own specialty - where as a ‘jack of all trades’ would come up with more avenues of investigation.” (3)
Jack of All Trades
That described me. I have no significant credentials. I am a jack of all trades. I had once shared Nickell’s skepticism about the shroud, mostly for the same reasons he gives. But, over time, I have changed my mind. Well, mostly. I now think the shroud may be real. Nonetheless, I agree with Nickell that many arguments from some proponents of the shroud’s authenticity cannot be supported by science or history. We will explore these in due course. We are a long way from being able to prove it is real. We may never be able to do so by today’s rigid epistemological standards—how it is that we know things to be true. This is largely due to our very advanced scientific and historical methods.
Nickell’s use of the phrase “sour grapes” is a peculiar choice of words. We can suppose (Nickell’s has a PhD in literature), that he referring to the Aesop Fable in which a fox, after not being able to find a way to reach some grapes on a vine, gives up and declares, “The grapes are sour anyway.” The implication is that scientists who had challenged the 1988 findings were doing the impossible and resorting to comical explanations. It is a peculiar way to characterize what scientists do regularly; that is to question, confirm, amplify or correct the findings of others who came before them.
Nickell does give a few reasons to doubt the validity of various challenges to the carbon 14 dating, but none that are in a sense scientific have anything to do with Rogers’ findings. Consequently, he falls back on one of his oldest argument, the one he has been stating over and over for years; the same argument Dawkins employed, the lack of any history before the 1350s.
It's a dicey proposition given that the carbon dating was once thought to override any historical claim that the shroud was authentic. Then, given that the carbon dating was challenged, he attempts to bolster it with an absence-of-evidence historical claim.
Skeptics Dictionary More Closely
It helps to look a bit more closely at what Carroll writes in the Skeptics Dictionary:
Of course, the cloth might be 3,000 or 2,000 years old, as Rogers speculates, but the image on the cloth could date from a much later period. No matter what date is correct for either the cloth or the image, the date cannot prove to any degree of reasonable probability that the cloth is the shroud Jesus was wrapped in and that the image is somehow miraculous. To believe that will always be a matter of faith, not scientific proof. (4)
First of all, Rogers did not speculate that it was 3,000 or 2,000 years old. What Rogers argued was that the lack of vanillin in the fabric of the shroud was a serious challenge to the carbon dating. Flax, like the vanilla bean, contains vanillin. Over time, a very long time, it decomposes. How long it takes, depends on temperature. Given a plausible range of average ambient temperatures during the life of the cloth, chemical kinetics demonstrates that the cloth is somewhere between 1,300 and 3,000 years old and not about 700 years old as the carbon dating suggested. Rogers carefully demonstrated that.
Second of all, we need not ascribe miraculous causation to the image, as Carroll suggests, to infer at some level of certainty that it might be the shroud Jesus was wrapped in. There might be, as Rogers and other think, a perfectly natural chemical explanation for the images. The suggestion that the image might be from a much later period is interesting but improbable. This is what Wilson thought. We will address this possibility, but not yet. We have some work to do in understanding the science and the history, none of it very difficult and all of it entertaining, before we tackle this.
The Shroud of Many Myths
Shortly after Rogers published his finding, in Thermochimica Acta, Philip Ball wrote an opinion piece for Nature, the same journal that had published the carbon dating results in 1989. Ball wrote:
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 . . . . And yet, the shroud is a remarkable artifact, 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. (4)
Ball’s assertion that it is not known how the image was made echoes what so many repeatedly say over and over. It isn’t just those who try to prove the shroud is fake by creating look-a-like images. Scientists who think the shroud might be real—or not—don’t know how the images were made. They are not even close. There is no best explanation; not yet. There is no theory. Though there are some guesses, some hypotheses, none seem to qualify in terms of chemistry and physical characteristics. The images remain inexplicable, baffling, downright weird. Forget about how some medieval forger might have made the images. Even with the best of modern technology no one has been able to replicate them. That doesn’t mean they won’t. It may just be a matter of time and new ideas. It is a challenge. The mysterious qualities found in the images are among the most intriguing aspects of the shroud.
Ruth Gledhill
Ruth Gledhill, Britain’s most famous and outspoken religion journalist has a sense of this. Gledhill, who writes for The Times (of London), was discussing two stories that were breaking around Eastertide of 2009. The first was about a television documentary airing in the U.K that detailed Rogers’ findings. The other story was about documented evidence just recently found in the Vatican archives that explained that medieval Templar knights had venerated the shroud for more than a hundred years before the 1350s and before the earliest possible date determined by the now refuted carbon dating. She wrote:
Year after year, we get stories on the Turin Shroud. It is medieval fake, it isn't a fake. It is Jesus, it isn't Jesus. Now to top them all, we get archives from the Holy See itself supporting the involvement of the Knights Templar. This is Dan Brown-meets-the-Pope territory. But what is great about this particular story is that it is based on verifiable fact. When was the last time that happened with the Turin Shroud? (5)
Actually, verifiable facts are frequently reported. But they go largely unnoticed, indistinguishable from the din of the mythical. Gledhill’s point is nonetheless valid.
Terry Eagleton
The quarrel between science and theology, then, is not a matter of how the universe came about, or which approach can provide the best "explanation" for it. It is a disagreement about how far back one has to go, though not in the chronological sense. For theology, science does not start far back enough-not in the sense that it fails to posit a Creator, but in the sense that it does not ask questions such as why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us. Perhaps these are phony questions anyway; some philosophers certainly think so. But theologians, as Rowan Williams [the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury] has argued, are interested in the question of why we ask for explanations at all, or why we assume that the universe hangs together in a way that makes explanation possible. Where do our notions of explanation, regularity, and intelligibility come from? How do we explain rationality and intelligibility themselves, or is this question either superfluous or too hard to answer? Can we not account for rationality because to do so is to presuppose it? (Terry Eagleton)
The study of the shroud, if it is a microcosm of the quest for God, must comply with the rules for as much as they are the best rules we have: the scientific method and the means for drawing the best explanations from the information at hand. We must avoid the pitfalls of pseudoscience. We must insist that everything is reasonably verifiable.
In the scientific quest for God, both sides of the fine-tuned universe are well represented by highly regarded scientists—cosmologist, astrophysicists, mathematicians, quantum physicists—and philosophers. There is or there isn’t a multiverse or there is some other explanation not yet understood. This quest will continue. The narrower quest for the historical Jesus is likely to continue unabated. So, too, the even narrower-still quest to understand the resurrection. There is a wide diversity of opinion and countless scholars. Wright lists more than 500 contemporary scholars in his book, The Resurrection.
One would hope that in the very granular study, the shroud, there would be the same give and take of scientists and historians. That just isn’t so. The last time it was so seems to have been in 1988 when dozens of scientists participated in the carbon dating of the shroud. The paper in Nature included 21 authors. Perhaps that was enough. It seemed so decisive. They are now almost universally silent. Perhaps that is justified by the new findings.
Scientists and historians long ago discovered that contending ideas is important when seeking the best possible understanding of anything even if we sometimes resist the impulse to do so. That was what Galileo was doing. It took a long time for the church to come around to his way of thinking. Darwin did the same. It took a long time for many people to accept evolution. The majority within Christian traditions—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and Mainline Protestant—have accepted evolution. Unfortunately, there is little debate about the shroud’s authenticity based on new evidence. There is one outstanding exception.
Missing McCrone
Thus, when in 1979, Walter McCrone, claimed that he found paint on a few shroud fibers, I didn’t notice. McCrone, having noted that the shroud had suddenly appeared in 1355 in the hands of a French knight who would not say where it came from and that a local bishop soon thereafter claimed that an artist “cunningly painted” it, declared it a painted fake. Had I noticed the story in 1979, I would have certainly accepted his conclusion. It would have made sense to me. It would have instantly fit into my worldview as a scientifically-minded Christian. A decade later, when three radiocarbon dating laboratories “proved” the Shroud of Turin was medieval, I didn’t notice. Had I, I would have certainly accepted the conclusion. I trust science and scientists. I did then, and more so than ever, I do now.
Crossan on the Shroud of Turin
Most of the questions to Crossan were about his many books and his theories about Jesus. And given his views about Jesus’ burial, it was no surprise that someone asked his opinion on the Shroud of Turin. He responded:
My best understanding is that the Shroud of Turin is a medieval relic-forgery. I wonder whether it was done from a crucified dead body or from a crucified living body. That is the rather horrible question once you accept it as a forgery. (14)
My first reaction was amazement. I might have thought that he answered carelessly was it not for one thing. I have read many of his books, and I have come to realize that his analyses and historical reconstructions are always meticulously researched, complex and well organized—even if I disagree with his conclusions. The Beliefnet interview was in 2002 and so it was no surprise that he recognized the prima facie case against authenticity; the carbon dating which had not yet been refuted. But he clearly understood the realism of the horrific and chilling images. He understood these forensically correct images of a naked, much wounded, crucified man in burial repose were more than art.
Hungarian Pray Manuscript
In the Budapest National Library there is an ancient codex, known commonly as the Hungarian Pray Manuscript or Pray Codex, named for György Pray (1723-1801), a Jesuit scholar and important historian who made the first detailed study of it, although we can reasonably suspect, with no realization that it might someday have some bearing on the shroud. The codex is the earliest known text in the ancient Finno-Ugric tribal languages of the people that occupied that region.
This codex was written between 1192 and 1195, within about 30 years of the Nerezi mural. An illustration, one of five in the manuscript, shows Jesus being placed on a burial shroud, a shroud with the identical pattern of burn holes found on the shroud. The artist has drawn the very unusual herringbone weave on the shroud and a number of other graphic characteristics consistent with the shroud. Jesus is shown naked with his arms modestly folded at the wrists, the fingers are unusually long in appearance as they are on the shroud, and there are no visible thumbs. There are no thumbs visible in the images of the man of the shroud either. This seems artistically strange. But forensic pathologists tell us that this makes sense. Why? It was once stated that nails driven through the wrist would likely cause the thumbs to fold into the palms. But Fred Zugibe disagrees.
In the drawing, there is also a clear mark on Jesus’ forehead where the most prominent 3-shaped bloodstain is found on the forehead of the man of the shroud. There can be little question that this illustrator of the Pray Codex, far removed from France—working at a time before the sacking of Constantinople by French knights, before the earliest date assigned to the shroud by carbon 14 testing—knew something of the details about the shroud, the Holy Mandylion, the Image of Edessa.
Testing History
Part of the task of the historian can be likened to a prospector panning for gold and being able to distinguish between the real stuff and fool’s gold, little bits of pyrite that glitter and shine, that look like gold but are all but worthless.
We started our journey through the Edessa to Constantinople history by looking at the shroud that is in Turin, in an obvious sort of way, so that we might test the nuggets of history we found and see if they were gold. We have a long ways to go. We need to find a plausible way for the cloth to get from Constantinople to Turin. We need to then look at the history of astonishing discoveries that happened in the 20th and early part of the 21st century. The journey gets very exciting.
The divided images looking out of and into the cloth of the shroud and the burial garment of the Hymn of the Pearl, the tetradiplon fold marks, the unusual images that seemed like sweat or fine pigments, seemingly not made by human hands, the poker holes. We took a detour through Spain to look at the Oviedo cloth. At first it looked like we might in this cloth have extraordinary confirmation. Then we were not so sure. How significant is the carbon dating of the Oviedo Sudarium? Not much, as we will see.
The Decomposition of Vanillin
Vanillin is of interest to us because it is found in the lignin component of newly harvested flax fibers. Over time, a very long time, vanillin decomposes and disappears from the fibers. For instance, if you leave a piece of linen lying around—that hasn’t had all its lignin removed by modern bleaching—for about 650 years and you then examine it for vanillin, you will find that nearly two-thirds of the vanillin has disappeared. Leave it around for another 650 years and it is all gone, or nearly so. Temperature affects the process but not drastically within the range of normal ambient temperatures. In other words, under normal conditions, it takes at least 1300 years for all of the vanillin to disappear. Raymond Rogers noticed that . . .
A linen produced in A.D. 1260 [the earliest possible date that the cloth could have been produced according to the 1988 carbon dating] would have retained about 37% of its vanillin in 1978. . . . all other medieval linens gave the test for vanillin wherever lignin could be observed on growth nodes. The disappearance of all traces of vanillin from the lignin in the shroud indicates a much older age than the radiocarbon laboratories reported. (37)
Vanillin as a Validation of Carbon Dating
It is not as good a way of dating a piece of linen as carbon dating. But the carbon dating was flubbed. And so for the time being this as good as it gets, scientifically. It really doesn’t tell how old the cloth is, only that it is at least 1300 years old and quite possibly older. It certainly existed when someone illustrated a burial shroud in the Hungarian Pray Manuscript with holes that resemble the poker holes on the Turin cloth. It certainly existed when the Image of Edessa was brought from Edessa to Constantinople. It certainly existed when Leo III was attempting to banish images of Christ and John of Damascus was objecting.
And if all this is so, the shroud that is now in Turin may well have existed when the words, “Peter ran with John to the tomb and saw the recent imprints of the dead and risen man on the linens” were made part of the Mozarabic Rite in Spain. Vanillin testing can’t tell us that. Inference can. It may well have existed when Abgar the Great was baptized. It may have existed at the time that the body of Jesus was buried in a tomb.
Leonardo Struck a Chord
The Leonardo da Vinci theory struck a chord with those who doubted the shroud’s authenticity and had come to realize it was not a painting or some other form of art. It stuck. It wasn’t, after all, until 2005 that we learned that the carbon dating was invalid. It stuck despite the fact that there isn’t the slightest bit of scientific or historical evidence that Leonardo had anything to do with the shroud or even knew about it. It stuck even though it was historically implausible to think that Leonardo or anyone like him leapfrogged all the optical and chemical technology of later centuries to create two life-size photographs on a fourteen-foot long piece of cloth; technologies never exploited or documented by the man who documented so much. And if this isn’t enough, Leonardo carefully added the poker holes, limestone dust from the environs of Jerusalem, nearly invisible persistent creases and real human blood as though anticipating modern forensic science.
Biggest Carbon Dating Mistake
There is a lot of other evidence that suggests to many that the shroud
is older than the radiocarbon dates allow, and so further research is certainly
needed. Only by doing this will people be able to arrive at a coherent history
of the shroud which takes into account and explains all of the available scientific
and historical information.
- Christopher Ramsey, head of the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit which participated in the 1988 Carbon 14 Dating of the Shroud. (March 2008)
[T]he age-dating process [in 1988] failed to recognize one of the first rules
of analytical chemistry that any sample taken for characterization of an area
or population must necessarily be representative of the whole. The part must be
representative of the whole. Our analyses of the three thread samples taken
from the Raes and C-14 sampling corner showed that this was not the case.
- Robert Villarreal, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) chemist who headed a team of nine scientists at LANL who examined material from the carbon 14 sampling region. (August 2008)
It may well go down as the biggest radiocarbon dating mistake in history; not because there is anything wrong with the measurement process (there may not have been); not because there is anything inherently wrong with carbon 14 dating (there is not); not because of shoddy sample taking (which indeed was shoddy); not because of red flags that should have raised serious questions (there were quite a few); and not even because basic tenets of archaeological dating were ignored by good scientists as was the case.
No, the reason is because, now, two decades later, whenever carbon 14 dating is discussed in high school or college classrooms, students like the student from Alaska are likely to raise a hand and ask some probing questions: What about the Shroud of Turin? Was it dated correctly? If not, how could so many scientists from so many reputable radiocarbon dating laboratories screw up so badly?
Twenty-One Scientists
Consider that no less than twenty-one scientists from the University of Oxford, the University of Arizona, the Institut für Mittelenergiephysik in Zurich, Columbia University, and the British Museum wrote in a peer-reviewed paper published in Nature in 1989:
The results of radiocarbon measurements at Arizona, Oxford and Zurich yield a calibrated calendar age range with at least 95% confidence for the linen of the Shroud of Turin of AD 1260 - 1390 (rounded down/up to nearest 10 yr). These results therefore provide conclusive evidence that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is mediaeval.
How can anyone argue with this? The radiocarbon measurements were done, not at one laboratory, but at three highly regarded institutions. The authors are emphatic. The results provide not just evidence but conclusive evidence. Does this not suffice to answer the students’ questions?
No, not if we wonder what prompted the questions. The Shroud of Turin is a religious relic. Many people believe it was the burial cloth of Jesus of Nazareth and history. Were the questions prompted by religious beliefs that run contrary to science? Or is there new information that suggests that, indeed, mistakes were made?
Inappropriate Question
It might be tempting to say that the subject is about a religious relic and thus discussion is inappropriate for the science classroom of a secular institution. But that is the wrong answer. This is a religious relic, but it is also an archeological artifact, one that has been rigorously studied scientifically. This happened in 1978 when several scientists examined it in Turin. This happened when the radiocarbon tests were conducted in 1988. This happened, also, when in 2004, a U.S. government publication revisited the tests. And in 2005, another secular, peer-reviewed scientific journal, Thermochimica Acta, published a paper that severely challenged the results of the 1988 radiocarbon dating. It didn’t stop there. Los Alamos National Laboratory chemist, Robert Villarreal recently reported that a nine member team of scientists chemically characterized threads from the carbon dating region of the cloth with some of the most advanced equipment available in that lab. And in August of 2008, the science journal, Chemistry Today, published a twelve page article on the shroud’s carbon dating. It is the wrong answer simply because the matter of the radiocarbon dating has nothing to do with religion.
It is the wrong answer because it denies the student a chance to take a critical look at the methods, procedures and data; from there to learn from the experience. Here is a chance to understand what can go wrong in radiocarbon dating and other scientific endeavors. Here is a chance to see how scientific conclusions are continuously being challenged by new information. And here is a stimulating case study for students to learn about radiocarbon dating and indeed more about our world and universe.
Carbon
Without carbon there would be no life as we know it. By that we don’t mean we wouldn’t have charcoal for Sunday barbeques or diamonds to wear on our fingers or graphite composite tennis rackets. We simply could not exist. Our bodies are made up of about 18% carbon in the form of carbon compounds. There are well over 10,000 carbon compounds including sugars and amino acids and DNA. We consume carbon in one form or another when we eat. We expel carbon dioxide when we breathe, which is a good thing because plants need it for photosynthesis. And that plants like it is a good thing because too much carbon dioxide is toxic. Nature, through metabolism, does an outstanding job of keeping carbon dioxide levels reasonable for the sustenance of life.
There are sixteen known types or isotopes of carbon but only three are thought to be naturally occurring on earth. They are known by the total number of protons and neutrons in the carbon atom. All forms of carbon have six protons, hence carbon 12 has six neutrons, carbon 13 has seven and carbon 14 has eight. Carbon 12 and carbon 13 are stable, meaning that short of being blown apart by an atom smasher or a nuclear reaction, they should last forever. Carbon 14, on the other hand, is not stable. It will, in time, if left alone, destroy itself all by itself.
Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea and Bacteria
Carbon 14, or radiocarbon as it is frequently called, is the big exception. The carbon 14 we find on earth is not from distant stars. It is made right here on earth; well not exactly on the earth but in the upper atmosphere above 30,000 feet, up where jetliners fly.
In living things—Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Protista, Archaea and Bacteria—there is one carbon 14 atom for every trillion or so other carbon atoms. To put that in perspective, if every carbon atom was the size of a ping pong ball and we lined up one trillion of them end-to-end, it would form a line long enough to reach from the earth to the moon. Only one of those ping-pong-ball-sized atoms would likely be carbon 14 isotope. If we could walk along that line, twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, examining those atoms at the rate of one per second, it would take us nearly 32,000 years. In other words one in a trillion is a very small number. So how do those carbon 14 atoms get made? How do they get to be in living matter? And why is that important to a study of the shroud?
The Making of Carbon 14
Our world is being constantly bombarded by tiny subatomic particles from outer space. Some of these particles come from our sun; others are from far away in our galaxy. Some even come from beyond our own galaxy, from the farthest reaches of the universe. These particles and may have travelled for millions and billions of years before entering our atmosphere where they collide with oxygen or nitrogen atoms. When they do they unleash a witch’s brew of new particles, which in turn smash into other atoms, unleashing even more particles. Some of these particles, either the ones from outer space or the ones produced in our atmosphere make it to the surface of the earth. Unless you are a speed reader, your body was struck by at least 100 of these particles by the time you finished this one sentence. Some like neutrinos may pass right through you, and then pass through the entire earth, then go off into space never to be heard from again. Some loosed particles, neutrons, interact with nitrogen atoms, specifically nitrogen 14, the most common form of nitrogen. When they do so they turn the nitrogen atom into a carbon 14 atom.
As it turns out, when carbon atoms meet oxygen atoms, and the circumstances are right, the atoms combine to form the chemical compound carbon dioxide (CO2). The oxygen atoms are not all that fussy because they don’t care if the carbon atom is good old fashioned stable carbon or the radioactive variety. Then, because air in the atmosphere is always in motion, going sideways and up and down, the carbon dioxide with the unusual carbon 14 atom is fully mixed together with all other carbon dioxide molecules in the lower atmosphere. Plants use carbon dioxide in photosynthesis to create a host of organic compounds, mainly sugars; and some of those compounds have carbon 14 atoms. Animals eat plants or the eat the flesh of animals that eat plants and so those one-in-a-trillion carbon 14 atoms get spread around among all living things in very close to the same proportions found in the atmosphere. That means that one in every trillion of the trillions and trillions and trillions of carbon atoms that make up you and me, one in every trillion is a carbon 14 atom. That is true of everything inside the bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich as well as the bread. Well, it is true if you eat the sandwich while it is fresh. But if you put it away and forget about it for a very long time—a very, very long time—it is not quite so true as it was when you made the sandwich. That is because carbon 14 atoms don’t stay around forever. As we said, they do destroy themselves.
Carbon 14 Has a Mind of Its Own
They seem to have a mind of their own. They are unconventional. They are unstable. They don’t seem to want to be carbon atoms. They want to be nitrogen atoms again. And they know how to do it. By throwing off an electron an anti-neutrino and voilà, the carbon 14 atom becomes a stable nitrogen 14 atom. In other words, the carbon 14 atom is radioactive. The process is called radioactive decay. Decay is the right word because it implies a time duration. How long before a carbon 14 atom reverts to being a nitrogen 14 atom?
Actually, no one knows the answer for a single atom. It might happen in the next second or 50,000 years from now. No one knows how to predict it or even if it is predictable. What we do know is that for a quantity of atoms, say a million or more, half of them will decay 5730 years. Then in the next 5730 years, half of the remaining half will decay. And again, of the half remaining of that half, half again will decay in another 5730 years. In other words carbon 14 has a half life of 5730 years.
5730
As soon as a plant dies it stops taking on carbon dioxide. And animals stop taking in any form of carbon. That means that the slices of tomato in your sandwich are only half as radioactive after 5730 years. That means that if we could count the regular carbon atoms and the carbon 14 atoms and calculate the ratio, we could figure out how old something is. And that means that means we should be able to figure out how old the shroud is because the linen cloth would have been made from newly harvested flax plants. That is, we could do so if we knew how much carbon 14 was produced year-by-year throughout history.
The astonishing thing is that the production of new carbon 14 atoms in the upper atmosphere and the decay of carbon 14 takes place at about the same rate. It’s uncanny. It is one of those amazing balancing acts that takes place in nature. In a sense, for every C14 atom that dies another one is born. It isn’t exact but it close enough. Scientists are quite certain that it has been this way for tens of thousands of years, perhaps millions of years. It does vary a bit year by year and estimated adjustments have been calculated by dating the rings of very old trees. Well, that is until we started exploding nuclear bombs when we significantly upset this one of many, many balances of nature.
Geiger and Libby
Photographic plates were not the only way to detect radiation. In 1908, Hans Geiger, following up on some of the work of Marie Curie, developed the first Geiger counter which counted particles of radiation. It would go through many years of evolution and improvement to make it practical. One of the people who spent considerable amounts of time improving the device so that it would be sensitive enough to measure weak radioactivity was a young physicist at University of California’s Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, named Willard Libby. It was at this same lab that carbon 14 was discovered in 1940.
With the outbreak of World War II, Geiger, an ardent Nazi, joined Germany’s efforts to build an atomic bomb.***source*** Meanwhile Libby worked on the Manhattan Project. He developed the gaseous diffusion method for enrichment of the uranium used for the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.
Carbon Dating: The Idea
After the war, Libby moved to the University of Chicago, where in 1949, he surmised that material from once living organisms could be dated by the amount of carbon 14 in the material. He realized that with a sensitive Geiger counter and a sufficient amount of carbon derived from something that had once been alive, he could arrive at a fairly accurate age for anything that had once been alive. In 1960, Libby was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for leading a team that developed Carbon 14 dating.
Accelerator Mass Spectrometry
The Shroud of Turin was not a good candidate for Libby’s new carbon dating method because too much of the cloth would have needed to be cut away and destroyed by incinerating it to extract the carbon. But a new method using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry would allow the cloth’s age to be determined using a much smaller sample. And that is what happened in 1988. And Teddy Hall made his flat earth quip.
The radiocarbon dating results did stimulate debate. The first responses from shroud apologists were a series of poorly developed and scientifically questionable hypotheses. For instance, some suggested that a fire in 1532, which nearly destroyed the shroud, somehow changed that ratio of carbon 14 to carbon 12 and carbon 13 isotopes in the cloth. Others suggested that a biological polymer had grown on the fibers of the cloth and that this newer material skewed the results. But these ideas, when understood, did not gain much support among scientists.
What Rogers Discovered
But Ball, in his commentary, explained two distinctly different scientific empirical findings that challenged the accuracy of radiocarbon dating results. These findings, by chemist Raymond Rogers, clearly demonstrated that the area of the cloth from which the samples were taken was chemically unlike the rest of the cloth in several ways. Thus he concluded that the samples were not representative of the cloth. Moreover, one of those chemical differences, the amount of vanillin, provided a new clue about the cloth’s age. Samples from the main part of the cloth, unlike the carbon 14 sample area, did not contain any vanillin. If the shroud was only as old as the radiocarbon date, it would have plentiful vanillin.
It should also be noted, as Ball makes clear, that
Rogers had not set out to prove that radiocarbon dating was wrong. He had complete
respect for the technology and the quality of work done by the labs. He had
already rejected the two media-popularized theories as to why the tests might
be invalid (the scorching fire and the biological film). Rogers had a disdain
for pseudo-science, for those who ignored scientific methods and for those who
questioned unquestionable scientific observations. Rogers called those who
persisted in defending and promoting unscientific theories, the “lunatic
fringe” of shroud research.
It is perhaps human nature at its best or its worst that when something in science or history contradicts what we already believe we challenge it. There must be something wrong with the science. That was what happened to Galileo, was it not.
Mixed Reaction to the Carbon Dating
That is what happened when the carbon dating results were announced for the Shroud of Turin. Many who already were convinced (or hoped) it was a fake, were gleeful. But those who had become convinced from the avalanche of historical and other scientific evidence—good or bad evidence, interpreted one way or another—were sure that there must be something wrong with the carbon dating. They argued so. And they expressed their frustration. Physicist Peter Carr would later write words that expressed that frustration.
When the testing was complete, the scientist reported their findings . . . giving the age as 1260 to 1390, therefore the cloth was mediaeval. This was the limit to their remit, to date the cloth. But they exceeded their remit by making comments about the nature of the cloth, ie that the shroud was a mediaeval forgery. In making such a sweeping statement, they showed complete arrogance of other disciplines and a blind faith in a piece of technology. No self respecting scientist would be so bold. They ignored, or were ignorant of the wealth of historical information that shows that a cloth of some form has been in existence for many centuries, and it predates the carbon dates. The carbon dating information should have been presented along side all other information, and an objective discussion taken place. (44)
If arrogance was a strong word to use, it seemed justified. The official press conference to announce the results really didn’t go beyond the boundaries of science. Newspapers did that. The photograph that appeared along with the story said a lot. There were three people in the picture. There was Teddy (Edward Thomas) Hall, the director of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art at Oxford who had previously played a significant role in exposing the Piltdown Man hoax. Robert Hedges also from Oxford and Michael Tite of the British Museum and were the dates 1260 to 1390 with a big explanation mark. The faces and the body language seemed arrogant. Perhaps there was nothing of the sort in those faces or in the way Hall crossed his arms in front of his chest. Perhaps it was an unfortunate Kodak moment.
But it wasn’t the frustration steeped with emotion that caused people to question the carbon dating. The picture in the Hungarian Pray Codex, the very convincing history from Constantinople, the apparent pollen data, the mysterious and so far inexplicable image characteristics, the forensic pathology all combined to trigger a cascade of research.
Cardinal Ballestrero
The German newspaper Die Welt reported that Cardinal Ballestrero, the custodian of the shroud at the time of the carbon 14 dating thought Free Masonry had played a role in producing false results. Quoting him from an interview with his private secretary, the newspaper reported:
With the examinations that I had myself authorized, as soon as the solemn exposition (of 1978) was over, science became unleashed and centres for study of the Shroud shot up everywhere, for the most part in Protestant countries. This context gave rise to the most insistent requests for an examination to be conducted using carbon 14. At the same time, vicious calumny about the Church was purposely being spread around, accusing it of being the enemy of science because it feared the truth and was frightened of losing the relics from which it made money.
Asked, pointedly if he thought that freemasonry had not played a certain role in all this campaign. "Without question,"
There emerged, too, some rather wildly unscientific explanations posing as scientific explanations. One that has a great deal of unfortunate currency on the web is that extreme heat such as that caused by the fire in 1532 that so severely damaged the shroud could induce a change in carbon 14 content and hence alter the carbon dating results.
Dmitri Kouznetsov
This had been proposed by a Russian archeological biologist and chemist, Dmitri Kouznetsov. In 1994, he claimed to have experimentally proven that the carbon 14 content of a piece of linen could be changed by intense heat. *** biofractionalization and the chemical bonding, under heat, of extrinisic C14 to the linen Scientists who understand carbon dating doubted it. No one could reproduce his experiments. It seemed to many people that he never conducted the experiments that he claimed. His claims of having collected samples of ancient cloth from specific museums turned out to be false as well. Kouznetsov, the scientist, was coming unraveled. He was busy going about claiming that biological evolution was impossible. Papers written by him were found to have numerous references to other papers that did not exist.
William Meacham on Kouznet
In 2007, Hong Kong archeologist William Meacham wrote a stinging article in Antiquity revealing that Kouznetsov had managed to have three papers published in peer-reviewed journals (International Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Archaeological Science, Studies in Conservation) with faked data, references to non-existent journals as well as fictional institutions.
The one in the Journal of Archaeological Science pertained to his faked science trying to refute the carbon dating. The last one was, however, the most blatant fabrications. Kouzentsov was already known as a fraud and a crook. He had already been convicted of writing bad checks. Meacham quotes from a letter from Mary Cahill, Assistant Keeper in the Irish Antiquities Division of the National Museum of Ireland to the International Institute for Conservation. The letter says about all that needs to be said about Kouznetsov:
The burials which [Kouznetsov] describes containing the remains of some named individuals are unknown to Irish archaeology. The institutions and the individuals which he names as having provided the samples do not exist....Excavations at the sites described have not taken place....The author seems to have gone to some trouble to 'identify' sites and names of persons which are clearly Irish in origin but to anyone familiar with the archaeology and history of the country are immediately suspect....Suffice it to say that the information on Ireland given in the article has no basis in truth.
In closing Meacham wrote:
Despicable as these kinds of fraud are, there is a certain 'bottom feeder' function that they provide, calling attention to flaws in the procedures of science publishing. That Kouznetsov could pull off such an amazing con on a prominent peer-reviewed journal clearly illustrates the need for fact-checking and background-checking of potential contributors, even if it adds time to the review process, especially when important claims are made. Failure to do so can obviously result in considerable embarrassment to the editor and publisher. (45)
Snails
And indeed shroud researchers, who for awhile embraced Kouznetsov’s finding, were embarrassed. But the claim that scorching heat affected the carbon dating lives on in web site after web site. The Internet has an amazing propensity for replicating bad information, even expanding it.
But the Internet is also capable of spreading other information about. And many creationists, convinced that the world was but about 6,000 years old, were listing instances where carbon dating was producing wrong results, even extraordinarily wrong results. One example was the story of how living snails were carbon dated and the results were that they were 27,000 years old. People who make sport of challenging creationists were calling this utter nonsense. “No person in their right mind would try to date [that is radiocarbon date] a living snail,” was a typical response. “Where do you get such ridiculous garbage.”
It wasn’t garbage. Alan Riggs with the U. S. Geological Survey did so. In 1984 he published a paper in The American Association for the Advancement of Science’s prestigious journal, Science, which reported that a live snail from an artesian spring in Nevada was found by carbon dating to be, yes, 27,000 years old. This and many other such reports have taken on almost mythical proportions. What such reports often ignore are the explanations. Riggs had attributed the obvious error to the . . .
fixation of dissolved HCO3 [bicarbonate] with which the shells are in carbon isotope equilibrium. Recognition of the existence of such extreme deficiencies is necessary so that erroneous ages are not attributed to freshwater biogenic carbonates. (46)
Got that? What this means in simple terms is that the shells of the snails were formed from existing ancient material that was depleted of much of its carbon 14. It is an exception to the normal way carbon 14 is absorbed by living things. There is nothing wrong with carbon dating, per se. But we need to know, and this was Riggs’ whole point, what causes anomalies and account for them. To hold this example up as a reason to distrust carbon dating is bogus. But to suggest that there might be reasons, yet unknown, for being wary of tests on certain organic material was quite reasonable. Was linen such a material? What about Egyptian mummies? They are wrapped in linen.
The Manchester Museum Mummy Project
K. C. Hodge and G. W. A. Newton in a book, The Manchester Museum Mummy Project, go into great detail on the carbon dating, showing the calculations and adjustments for variations in carbon 14 content in the atmosphere based on standards derived from tree rings. Here are the measured dates and the adjusted dates:
From the right shoulder blade (scapula): 822, 900 B.C.
From the left shoulder blade (scapula): 868, 1100 B.C.
From the outer bandage: 364, 441 A.D.
From an inner bandage: 245, 323 A.D.
“The conclusion is clear,” they write, “that the bones appear older than the bandages, and this conclusion is independent of any corrections.” They continue:
It is possible that the bones contain more organic carbon of fossil origin, example bitumen from the Dead Sea area which could have been used in the mummification process. However, because of the careful pretreatment of the samples we consider this unlikely. The remaining conclusion is that the body was wrapped or rewrapped in bandages some considerable time after death. (48)
Garza-Valdes and the Mayan Jade Artifact
In 1983, Leoncio Garza-Valdes, a medical doctor in San Antonio, Texas, and an amateur archaeologist, was examining a Mayan jade artifact that was assumed to be modern forgery. He was puzzled by lacquer-like coating on the object that he speculated might have been produced by bacteria. Garza-Valdes took the artifact to the radiocarbon dating lab at the University of Arizona. Scientists there were able to scrape off enough of the coating, as well as some bloodstains on the object, to give a date of about A.D. 400. The carving style suggested that the age should have been about 200 B.C.. However, if the bioplastic-polymer, for that is what it seemed to be, had been forming over the centuries, it would be a mixture of older and newer material. So perhaps the object really was 600 years older.
Following the carbon dating of the shroud, it occurred to Garza-Valdes that perhaps the fibers of the shroud were also coated with a bioplastic coating. And perhaps this also affected the carbon dating of mummy 1770. If ancient linen was subject to such a coating, then all bets were off on the carbon dating of the shroud until it was examined.
Garza-Valdes managed to inspect *** in Turin. Stephen Mattingly ****
The Ibis Mummy
Things were heating up. Harry Gove, a prominent radiocarbon dating expert from the University of Rochester in New York, who had wanted to be part of the carbon dating of the shroud and not been selected, was now involved. Ann Rosalie David, who had been part of the team that had studied mummy 1770, was involved as well. They met at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Austin. David brought a mummy of an ibis, a bird that the ancient Egyptians considered sacred. They had been careful to select one that seemed unlikely to have been rewrapped. They extracted samples of both tissue and bone from the bird as well as linen fabric from its wrappings. These they took to the National Science Foundation Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility at the University of Arizona, one of the same labs involved with the shroud’s dating.
The linen appeared to be newer than the bird it wrapped. And unless the bird was rewrapped—which seemed implausible to the four researchers—then appearances contradicted reality. They clearly saw something that seemed to be a bioplastic coating. But they entertained another possibility as well: the bird’s diet.
Conflicting Results
They noted that radiocarbon measurements on charcoal and snail shells from the Graeco-Roman period in Egypt gave very conflicting results. The snail problem has surfaced. Not only might snails be a problem, but so to might anything that ate snails from water rich in depleted carbon like those found in artesian spring in Nevada.
But they seemed to prefer “bacterial infestation.” And the concluding paragraph of their paper makes this clear, but with a significant amount of caution.
Meanwhile, although the results of the present measurements include the possibility that the bioplastic coating observed on the cloth fibers of the wrappings of the ibis cause it to yield a radiocarbon age several hundred years younger that it true age, they are far from definitive. It would be premature to draw any conclusions about the true age of the Turin Shroud from these measurements. (49)
U.S. News & World Report
It didn’t play out that way. If you were looking for a way to dispute that carbon dating of the shroud, you had it. Though it may have been premature of draw any conclusions about the true age of the shroud you could say, quite validly, that the sheen was off the carbon dating of the shroud. Unless Gove, et. al. were proven wrong, there was reason for reasonable doubt. Jeffery L. Sheler, writing in the July 24, 2000, issue of U.S. News & World Report, quotes Gove as saying, “There is a bioplastic coating on some threads, maybe most.” Gove goes on to say that if there is a sufficient quantity of bioplastic it “would make the fabric sample seem younger than it should be.”
M. Sue Benford and Joe Marino
There was another hypothesis floating about to explain why the carbon 14 testing might be wrong. It was gaining traction among some shroud researchers and on the internet. Two shroud researchers, M. Sue Benford and Joe Marino suggested that the sample used in the carbon dating was from a corner of the cloth that had been mended using a technique known as invisible reweaving – an actual technique practiced by medieval tapestry restorers and practiced today by tailors to repair tears in expensive clothing.
At the behest of Benford and Marino, several textile experts examined documenting photographs of the radiocarbon samples and found what they believed was visual evidence of reweaving. Based on estimates from these photographs, and based on a historically-plausible date for reweaving, Ronald Hatfield of the radiocarbon dating firm Beta Analytic provided estimates that show that the cloth might be 2000 years old.
Patches applied to the shroud following the 1532 fire were obvious; as noticeable as leather patches sewn to the elbows of an old sweater. Would repairs in 1531 (a plausible date from the historical records) or at any other time, have been so expertly done that that they would have gone unnoticed when the carbon 14 samples were cut from the cloth?
Ray Rogers and Anna Arnoldi in 2002
It was close examination of actual material from the shroud that caused Rogers to begin to change his mind. In 2002, Rogers, in collaboration with Anna Arnoldi of the University of Milan, wrote a paper arguing that the repair was a very real possibility. The material Rogers examined was from an area directly adjacent to the carbon 14 sample, an area known as the Raes corner. Rogers found a spliced thread. This was unexpected and inexplicable. During weaving of the shroud, when a new length of thread was introduced to the loom, the weavers had simply laid it in next to the previous length rather than splicing. Rogers and Arnoldi wrote:
[The thread] shows distinct encrustation and color on one end, but the other end is nearly white . . . Fibers have popped out of the central part of the thread, and the fibers from the two ends point in opposite directions. This section of yarn is obviously an end-to-end splice of two different batches of yarn. No splices of this type were observed in the main part of the Shroud.
Cotton
Several years earlier, a textile expert, Gilbert Raes (for whom the Raes corner is named), had been permitted to cut away a small fragment of the shroud. In it he found cotton fibers. Rogers confirmed the existence of embedded cotton fibers and noted that such cotton fibers are not found in other samples from anywhere else on the shroud. Cotton fibers were sometimes incorporated into linen threads during later medieval times, but not earlier, and not even as early as the carbon 14 range of dates. This, along with the dyestuff, suggested some sort of alteration or disguised mending.
Rogers also noted that fibers in the Raes material contained less lignin than the rest of the shroud. Lignin is a chemical compound found in plant material including flax, the plant from which linen fibers are sourced. The most plausible explanation for this difference was that material in this area contained threads that had been bleached more efficiently. It was already known from the shroud’s faint variegated appearance that the shroud’s thread was probably bleached before weaving, probably with potash. This is not an exacting method and thus some hanks of yarn were whiter than others. As the cloth aged and naturally yellowed, the variegation became more pronounced, as can be seen in contrast-enhanced photographs. This form of ancient bleaching removed very little lignin.
Arguably, from a historical point of view (but not a scientific one) the linen cloth used for the shroud was not produced in medieval Europe. Even by the timeframe suggested by the radiocarbon dating, linen was “field bleached” after weaving. And it removed most of the lignin.
Lignin and Vanillin
Lignin is significant not only because of the observed disparities but because it is the raw source for vanillin. Vanillin is produced from lignin by thermal decomposition. Rogers knew that if the shroud had been correctly carbon dated, the cloth should produce measurable amounts of the aromatic substance. Found in medieval linen, but not in much older cloth, vanillin diminishes and disappears with time. Rogers discovered that there was no detectable vanillin in the flax fibers of the main part of the shroud just as there is no vanillin in the linen wrapping from the Dead Sea Scrolls. There was, however, vanillin in the corner from which the carbon 14 samples were taken. He concluded that the main part of the shroud and the carbon 14 sample had a different age.
If the cloth had been manufactured in 1260, the earliest date suggested by carbon dating, it should have retained about 37% of its vanillin. Paraphrasing Rogers, Ball writes, “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… (ellipsis are Ball’s).
While this is not an accurate method for determining the age of linen because it depends on the average storage temperature over many centuries, it is useful as a sniff test for checking carbon 14 dating. Not only does this information verify that the carbon 14 sample is chemically different from the rest of shroud, it demonstrates that the carbon 14 sample probably contained much newer material than the rest of the shroud.
Vanillin Analysis Significant
The chemical differences and the vanillin analysis were significant. Ball, however, was not convinced that invisible reweaving was the underlying explanation. “Well, maybe,” he wrote, then added:
There is no explanation, however, of how the ‘repaired’ threads used in the 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.”
Indeed, as Ball recognized, “This is by no means the end of the story.”
Rogers Exercises Caution
Rogers had been careful. Before submitting a paper for peer review, Rogers obtained some threads reserved from the middle of the radiocarbon sample. For the radiocarbon dating, one sample had been cut directly adjacent to the Raes corner. It was partially shared with the labs, one share by weight for each of the labs. About half of the full sample was reserved. In radiocarbon dating, whatever is being dated is incinerated until all that remains is carbon or carbon dioxide gas. It is therefore prudent to save some of the sample for further testing, should that become necessary. With these reserved threads, Rogers was able to confirm and expand his findings developed with material from the Raes corner.
Lloyd A. Currie
As the Associated Press, the BBC and The New York Times reported on Rogers’ paper, some people wondered, just as Ball had, if it was possible that threads “were woven into the old cloth so cunningly that the textile experts who selected the area for analysis failed to notice the substitution.” Others wondered if there was perhaps more to the story. Was this the whole story? How could such a mistake in radiocarbon dating happen? Was there something to learn from this?
About a year before Rogers’ paper was published, in early 2004, the Journal of Research of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (U.S. Department of Commerce, NIST, U.S. Government Printing Office) published an important paper by Lloyd A. Currie. Currie, a highly regarded specialist in the field of radiocarbon dating and an NIST Fellow Emeritus, wrote a seminal retrospective on carbon 14 dating. Because the Shroud of Turin was such a famous test, Currie devoted much of his paper to it.
Like Rogers, Currie dismissed any argument that radiocarbon labs had done anything wrong in dating the Shroud of Turin. Currie also rejected, as Rogers also had done, the theories of scorching effects or contamination caused by a bioplastic polymer. Significantly, Currie acknowledged that disguised mending was a viable explanation. He cited the work of Rogers and Arnoldi. He found it credible.
William Meacham
Currie also raised an important issue of faulty procedures that could have prevented an error from invisible reweaving. According to Currie, the original sampling protocol required multiple samples from different locations on the cloth. Archeologist William Meacham disagrees on historical detail but not scientific principle. In a recent email to about 100 shroud researchers, Meacham stated that the original protocol called for a single sample to be divided among seven labs. He wrote:
Al Adler and I argued forcefully but unsuccessfully . . . for at least a second sample . . . the original protocol was seriously flawed, so it should not be described as some sort of properly designed scientific procedure that was put aside.
Had multiple samples been taken, the chemical differences between the sample area and the rest of the shroud would certainly have been obvious to the labs in 1988.
Rogers blamed church authorities in Turin for not following standard scientific protocol. In the interview with Inside the Vatican magazine, Rogers said:
The sampling operation should have involved many persons from different fields before cutting anything . . . if you really want to get a radiocarbon data, take a lot of samples.
Ultraviolet and X-ray
Ultraviolet and x-ray photographs taken in 1978, before the carbon 14 dating samples were removed, indicated that there were chemical differences between the sample area and surrounding areas of the cloth. Moreover, Alan Adler, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry at Western Connecticut State University, had found a significant quantity of aluminum in yarn segments from the general area of the sample. It is not found on other samples from elsewhere on the shroud. Alum, an aluminum compound, the common mordant used with Madder root dye, was certainly an explanation. Many wondered if the labs or church authorities had considered this evidence or were even aware of it when they changed (or adopted) the protocol. The article in Inside the Vatican addressed this:
Asked whether he [Rogers] thought the authorities at Turin had been aware of such evidence as the 1978 photographs indicating that the corner of the Shroud from which they took the sample was unlike the rest of the cloth, Rogers responded that “it doesn't matter if they ignored it or were unaware of it. Part of science is to assemble all the pertinent data. They didn't even try.”
Red Flags Ignored
There were other clues, as well. All of them were warning signs that something might be wrong with the carbon 14 samples:
- Giovanni Riggi, the person who actually cut the carbon 14 sample from the Shroud stated, "I was authorized to cut approximately 8 square centimetres of cloth from the Shroud…This was then reduced to about 7 cm because fibres of other origins had become mixed up with the original fabric …" (emphasis mine)
- Giorgio Tessiore, who documented the sampling, wrote: “…1 cm of the new sample had to be discarded because of the presence of different color threads.” (emphasis mine)
- Edward (Teddy) Hall, head of the Oxford radiocarbon dating laboratory, had noticed fibers that looked out of place. A laboratory in Derbyshire concluded that the rogue fibers were cotton of “a fine, dark yellow strand.” Derbyshire's Peter South wrote: “It may have been used for repairs at some time in the past…”
- Gilbert Raes, when later he examined some of the carbon 14 samples, noticed that cotton fibers were contained inside the threads, which could help to explain differences in fiber diameter. This may also explain why the carbon 14 samples apparently weighed much more than was as expected.
- Alan Adler at Western Connecticut State University found large amounts of aluminum in yarn segments from the radiocarbon sample, up to 2%, by energy-dispersive x-ray analysis. Why aluminum? That was an important question because it is not found elsewhere on the Shroud.
- The radiocarbon lab at the University of Arizona conducted eight tests. But there was a wide variance in the computed dates and so the team in Arizona combined results to produce four results thus eliminating the more outlying dates (reportedly they did so at the request of the British Museum, which was overseeing the tests). Even then, according to Remi Van Haelst, a retired industrial chemist in Belgium, the results failed to meet minimum statistical standards (chi-squared tests). Why the wide variance in the dates? Was it because of testing errors? Or was it because the sample was not sufficiently homogeneous? The latter seems very likely now, and the statistical anomaly indicates something very suspicious about the samples.
- Bryan Walsh, a statistician, examined Van Haelst’s analysis and further studied the measurements. He concluded that the divided samples used in multiple tests contained different levels of the C14 isotope. The overall cut sample was non-homogeneous and thus of questionable validity. Walsh found a significant relationship between the measured age of various sub-samples and their distance from the edge of the cloth. Though Walsh did not suggest invisible reweaving, it is consistent with his findings.
Facts vs Explanations
It is important to distinguish between observed facts and likely explanations. The sample used for the radiocarbon dating is chemically unlike the shroud. That is observed fact. It invalidates the sample and thus the conclusion of the tests. Completely! The spliced thread and the dyestuff suggest disguised mending. Disguised mending caused consternation among some. Ball wondered why it was not seen. He is not alone.
Archeologist William Meacham was skeptical when Benford and Marino first proposed mending; long before Rogers examined the material. He had previously discussed this possibility with the archeological scientist Stuart Fleming who said that it was within the realm of possibility. But Meacham was not yet convinced. He challenged Benford and Marino, “to find at least one textile historian who could answer these questions [about it escaping notice] in support of their thesis.”
They did so. According to Benford and Marino, Dr. Thomas Campbell, Associate Curator, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Arts, described the sixteenth century French weavers as ‘magicians.’ It was very difficult to identify their repairs. (2002)
Robert Villarreal from the Los Alamos National Laboratory
In a presentation The Ohio State University’s Blackwell Center, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) chemist, Robert Villarreal, disclosed new findings showing that the sample of material used in 1988 to Carbon dating could not have been from the original linen cloth because it was cotton. According to Villarreal, who lead the LANL team working on the project, thread samples they examined from directly adjacent to the sampling area were “definitely not linen” and, instead, matched cotton. Villarreal pointed out:
the [1988] age-dating process failed to recognize one of the first rules of analytical chemistry, that any sample taken for characterization of an area or population must necessarily be representative of the whole. The part must be representative of the whole. Our analyses of the three thread samples taken from the Raes and C-14 sampling corner showed that this was not the case.
Villarreal also revealed that, during testing, one of the threads came apart in the middle forming two separate pieces. A surface resin, that may have been holding the two pieces together, fell off and was analyzed. Surprisingly, the two ends of the thread had different chemical compositions, lending credence to Rogers’ finding in Thermochimica Acta.
After conducting analysis at high vacuum with the ToF-SIMS, the “spliced thread” broke into three distinct pieces; a fuzzy end (Region 1), a tight woven end (Region 2), and a micro-sized circular cocoon-shaped brown crust that seemed to be connecting the two end pieces. The ToF-SIMS results were the first to show that the spectra from the two ends were similar to cotton rather than linen (flax) and the Spectroscopist recommended that the next analysis should be with the FTIR instrument. After several scans of individual fibers or strands, the FTIR data showed that the two ends (Region 1 and 2) were definitely cotton and not linen (flax). The crust appeared to be an organic-based resin, perhaps a terpene species, with cotton as a main sub-component. After showing the FTIR data to Barrie Schwortz and Sue Benford, they were quite surprised at the results and decided to send me two other pieces of thread (No. 7 and 14) that were from the same sampling area and that had been in John Brown’s Lab in Marrietta, Georgia.
The results of the FTIR analysis on all three threads taken from the Raes sampling area (adjacent to the C-14 sampling corner) led to identification of the fibers as cotton and definitely not linen (flax). Note, that all age dating analyses were conducted on samples taken from this same area. Apparently, the age-dating process failed to recognize one of the first rules of analytical chemistry that any sample taken for characterization of an area or population must necessarily be representative of the whole. The part must be representative of the whole. Our analyses of the three thread samples taken from the Raes and C-14 sampling corner showed that this was not the case. What was true for the part was most certainly not true for the whole. This finding is supported by the spectroscopic data provided in this presentation.
The recommendations that stem from the above analytical study is that a new age dating should be conducted but assuring that the sample analyzed represents the original main shroud image area, i.e. the fibers must be linen (flax) and not cotton or some other material. It is only then that the age dating will be scientifically correct.
Trusting Carbon Dating
Carbon 14 testing is another scientific method that we intuitively trust. But field archeologists and historians who regularly use radiocarbon dating know only too well how anomalous radiocarbon dating results can be. They know that carbon 14 dating procedures are best used for testing organic archeological finds that have been left undisturbed and protected from the environment and people. That, of course, was not the case with the shroud. Archeologists also know that it is important to obtain multiple samples at diverse places on an object to be tested, and then by statistical method determine a reasonable range of ages for the object. That also, was not the case with the carbon 14 testing of the shroud.
Yet, even with ideal conditions, carbon 14 results are sometimes highly erroneous. In one test, living snails – at least alive until just before testing – were found to be 26,000 years old. In another test, a newly killed seal was found to have died in A.D. 700. Bone tools made from caribou ribs were once found to be twenty-seven thousand years old while a core sample from the innermost portion of the same caribou bone was found to be only 1,350 years old. There is the unexplained mystery of Mummy number 1770 at the Manchester Museum in England that has wrappings that date 800 to 1000 years younger than the body they contain. Other mummy samples have demonstrated this same peculiarity in which cloth wrappings are measured to be newer than the bodies they contain. This could only make sense if the mummies had been rewrapped hundreds of years later. Egyptologist cannot support such supposition.
Inexplicable Results in Carbon Dating
Sometimes, erroneous results in Carbon 14 testing remain inexplicable. In most cases adequate reasons for improbable dates are found. Contamination, not properly cleaned from samples, can seriously affect results. Sometimes, newer or older matter is introduced into samples, as was the case with the caribou bones that had absorbed chemically rich ground water.
In the case of the shroud, three independent laboratories used a recently developed Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) method for measuring the date. AMS has proven to be an accurate measurement technology that does not require that large samples be burned, as was necessary with older radiocarbon dating methods. The labs used control samples to ensure proper calibration. The few anomalous results encountered during calibration were thought to be few enough to be within appropriate margins of error. Unfortunately, the labs used identical testing protocols, thus it was really only one test performed three times. They also used an identical unproven cleaning procedure on three snippets of cloth; regrettably all cut from a single sample. The single cutting was taken from a corner of the shroud, which was probably the most contaminated part of the entire old dirty piece of linen, and one that had been mended with new thread.
William Meacham Summarizes
Knowing all too well about such problems, archeologist William Meacham wrote in an essay entitled, Radiocarbon Measurement and the Age of the Turin shroud: Possibilities and Uncertainties:
No responsible field archaeologist would trust a single date, or a series of dates on a single feature, to settle a major historical issue, establish a site or cultural chronology, etc. No responsible radiocarbon scientist would claim that it was proven that all contaminants had been removed and that the dating range produced for a sample was without doubt its actual calendar age. The public and many non-specialist academics do seem to share the misconception that C-14 dates are absolute.
If we are to consider the authenticity of the shroud, we must be willing to stretch the envelope of our worldview and we must be careful not to be selective with evidence on the basis of what fits our worldview.
Trusting Science
Intuitively, we trust what we think we know about science. For instance, we know that carbon 14 testing is regularly used for testing all manner of artifacts and so it must be right. We intuitively trust Nature, the very prestigious science journal, the British Museum, and three radiocarbon dating laboratories associated with academic institutions. We don’t think about it. We trust that they know what they are talking about when they “prove” that the shroud is medieval.
We also intuitively trust what we think we know about history. The first historically reliable documented record of the shroud dates from 1355. We can trace the cloth’s history, year by year, owner by owner, and place by place from that date forward. Any historical record before that date is a bit loose (which, by the way, was not uncommon for that time in history). Luther and Erasmus complained about fake relics. We think; it must be medieval.
Gary Viken
We intuitively trusted Biblical Archeological Review, when in the November-December 1998 issue; it carried two articles on the shroud. One by Walter McCrone merely restated his findings of paint particles and his conclusion that it was a painting. The other by Gary Vikan, the Director of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore, Maryland, revisited the carbon 14 dating, the d’Arcis Memorandum, and argued that the shroud was produced for the lay brotherhoods of Francis of Assisi . . .
. . . that his piety and his cult of self-mortification engendered. These Christians appreciated and understood Jesus’ wounds in a very physical way. This is the world of the holy shroud; these are the people for whom it would have held special meaning; and these, certainly, are the people for whom it was made . . . these medieval Christians would have understood that the nails must have gone through Jesus’ wrists in order to hold the body to the cross (although in medieval art these wounds are invariably in the palms). And their cult images would match this physical understanding of crucifixion, even to the point of adding human blood . . . All of which is to say that the indication of nail holes in the wrists and what some claim is the presence of blood on the linen need not add up to a miracle.
Is there any basis for this claim? The best Vikan can do is to assume that medieval penitents are comparable to modern-day Spanish American Catholic penitents in New Mexico who practice self-mortification and self-crucifixion, very much incorrectly. He also claims in his article that there are many images like those of the shroud. That is true if we allow for paintings that are not negatives, are not height-fields that produce 3D representations in 2D space. Vikan is right if we also ignore the medically accurate bloodstains and images resulting from inexplicably caused chemical changes to the linen.
Biblical Archeological Review
It is interesting to note that in a preface to the Vikan article, the editors of Biblical Archeological Review acknowledged the problem with the mysterious images and some of the forensic pathology. They wrote:
. . . although radiocarbon tests have dated the shroud to 1260-1390 A. D., no one has been able to account for the shadowy image of a naked 6-foot-tall man that appears on the shroud. With bloodstains on the back, wrists, feet, side and head the image appears to be that of a crucified man. The details - the direction of the flow of blood from the wounds, the placement of the nails through the wrists rather than the palms - displays a knowledge of crucifixion that seems too accurate to have been that of a medieval artist.
The real keystone of Vikan’s argument was a simple appeal to common sense. And because it may resonate with our worldview, we intuitively trust his polemics. He imaginatively and fictively quotes students of the shroud and then interprets what they think:
‘It doesn’t look like any known work of art,’ they say. The implication is that its creation was somehow miraculous, perhaps caused by a sudden burst of cosmic energy as the cloth came into contact with the dead body of Jesus.
We intuitively trust him though there is no truth in this statement. In fact, most shroud researchers, to their credit, avoid metaphysical or supernatural interpretations and stress the point that science and objective history cannot provide such explanations. Most students of the shroud are highly critical of those few who posit unfounded hypotheses to support a miracle.
The Most Studied Artifact in History
The shroud is very probably the most studied artifact in all of history. Those who study it are not, as some skeptics charge, religious fanatics or overzealous Christian apologists. Many of them believe in miracles and many of them do not. Many of them are not Christian. A fair number of them are Jewish. Some are agnostics. Those that are Christian span the full spectrum of progressive-liberal to conservative theological and Christological thought. They include Roman Catholics, Anglicans and Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Evangelical Christians.
They include archeologists, historians, chemists, physicists, botanists, palynologists, forensic pathologists, image analysts, art historians, textile experts, and technical photographers. Most of them are from leading academic institutions or from prestigious scientific establishments including the Los Alamos Laboratory, the Sandia Labs, the Israel Antiquities Authority, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago. Their work, which is well documented, formidable in detail, and much of it carefully peer reviewed, warrants consideration. Most of the researchers who have studied the shroud extensively, conclude, that at some level of understanding, it is authentic.
Yet the myth persists that the shroud has been proven to be medieval. Crossan said that it was his best understanding that it was a medieval relic-forgery. Some skeptics will say that it has not been proven that the carbon 14 tests are false. That is true. They may not be scientifically definitive and are suspiciously inaccurate, but they have not been proven wrong. Skeptics will argue that Pierre d’Arcis has not been proven a liar. That is also true. But what are we to make of all the contradictions, the preponderance of other evidence?
The Real Flat Earth Society
At the time of the 1988 carbon 14 tests, when an Oxford researcher commented that anyone who now believed that the shroud was real must be a member of the Flat Earth Society, there really was a Flat Earth Society.
The Flat Earth Society was, and still is, a worldwide organization with a few members, headquartered in Lancaster, California. The worldview of its members is rooted in the tenets of the Universal Zetetic Society, which flourished in England in the nineteenth century. Charles K. Johnson, its president in 1988, had, as he saw it, “reduce[d] truth to factuality, either scientifically verifiable or historically reliable . . .” His history was right out of the King James Bible and from a collection of highly imaginative conspiracy theories, mostly in his head. “It’s the Church of England that’s taught that the world is a ball,” proclaimed Johnson. “George Washington, on the other hand, was a flat-earther. He broke with England to get away from those superstitions.” What is true, at least, is that in the late nineteenth century, a Yorkshire Church of England vicar, the Rev. M. R. Bresher, was so horrified by the Zetetic movement that he went about England strenuously arguing that the world was certainly round like a ball.
Looking At Evidence that Contradicts Worldview
If we are to truly understand this historical artifact, we must look at the preponderance of evidence that contradicts worldview assumptions. We must consider all of it. We must weigh its significance. We must look for patterns of corroboration and examine all problems with any of the evidence. As I said at the beginning of this book, there has been a paucity of fact-embracing skepticism on the shroud. The skeptics are selective with the evidence and generally will not go beyond the carbon 14 testing, the d’Arcis memorandum and McCrone’s finding of paint pigments. They may, like Vikan, offer speculative explanations but they don’t address the contradictions. That is regrettable. The crime against Galileo was not that he was arrested or silenced. It was that his evidence, his contradictions, his conclusions were dismissed for no other reason than that they were incredulous to a prevailing worldview. Crossan took a step in the right direction in acknowledging the problem of the realism in the bloodstains and the images.
The shroud is important because it challenges worldview thinking. It challenges what we may think we know historically about the passion sequence, Jesus’ crucifixion and his burial. It potentially challenges what we may think about the resurrection. It challenges biblical scholarship and our modern day distrust of the Gospel accounts. It challenges two centuries of progress in the scholarly quest for the historical Jesus. It challenges the discourse on science and religion. And as Pope John Paul II states — a man keenly aware of intellectual dilemma — the Shroud of Turin “challenges our intelligence.”
It may turn out that the shroud is a medieval relic-forgery, as Crossan supposes. It may be that the shroud is authentic and that a perfectly natural explanation for the images eludes us for now. Absent such explanations, we may wonder: did something happen in the tomb? Did something happen within that linen shroud? Did something happen that was so powerful that an image was translated to the cloth?
Works Consulted and Considered
1. Rogers, Raymond N. Reply from Ray Rogers (to Joe Nickell). Skeptical Inquirer. 2005, February.
2. Nickell, Joe. Relics of the Christ. s.l. : University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
3. —. An Interview With Joe Nickel . [interv.] Eric Krieg. 2001.
4. To know a veil. Ball, Philip. New York : s.n., January 28, 2005, Nature: International Weekly Journal of Science: News. doi:10.1038/news050124-17.
5. Gledhill, Ruth. The Holy See and the secrets of the Turin Shroud. Times Online. [Online] April 6, 2009. [Cited: April 6, 2009.] http://timescolumns.typepad.com/gledhill/2009/04/the-holy-see-and-the-secrets-of-the-turin-shroud.html.
6. Gould, Stephen Jay. Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge. Scientific American. July 1992, pp. 118-121.
7. Johnson, Phillip E. Darwinism: Science or Naturalistic Philosophy? (at Stanford University). Access Research Network. [Online] April 30, 1994. [Cited: July 1, 2009.] http://www.arn.org/docs/orpages/or161/161main.htm.
8. Begley, Sharon. Sceince finds God. Newsweek. July 20, 1998.
9. Guth, Alan. Parallet Universes. [interv.] BBC Dilly Barlow. Science and Nature. s.l. : BBC Two, February 14, 2002.
10. Godart, O. and M. Heller. Cosmology of Lemaître. Tuscon : Pachart, 1985.
11. Russell, Bertand. The Problems of Philosophy. s.l. : Prometheus Books (September 1988), Kindle by Amazon (2008), 1912.
12. Halicarnassus, Herodotus of. Inquiries by Herodotus. [trans.] Shlomo Felberbaum 2003. s.l. : Lost Trails, Late 5th Century B.C..
13. Herzog, William R., II. Jesus, Justice and the Reign of God: A Ministry of Liberation . s.l. : Westminster John Knox Press, 2000.
14. Crossan, John Dominic. Faiths/Christianity/Your Questions to John Dominic Crossan. Beliefnet. s.l. : Beliefnet, July 2002.
15. Wilson, Kax. A History of Textiles. Boulder : Westview Press, 1979.
16. Cole, George S. A complete dictionary of dry goods and history of silk, cotton, linen, wool and other fibrous substances. s.l. : W.B. Conkey Co, W.B. Conkey Co.
17. Barber, E. J. W. Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages with Special Reference to the Aegean. s.l. : Princeton University Press, 1992.
18. Scavone, Daniel C. Acheiropoietos Jesus Images in Constantinople: the Documentary Evidence. Bronxville, NY : Shroud Story Web Site, 2006. Chapter of Book in Progress.
19. Krapf, Norbert, John DePol. Under Open Skys. New York : Fordam University Press, 1986.
20. AZahoor, Akram. Muslim History: 570 – 1950 C.E. Gaithersburg, MD : ZMD Corporation, 2000. translation by the author.
21. Beckwith, John. The Art of Constantinople: An Introduction to Byzantine Art 330-1453. London : Phaidon Publishers , 1961.
22. Wilson, Ian. Holy Faces, Secret Places: An Amazing Quest for the Face of Jesus. New York : Doubleday, 1991.
23. Treadgold, Warren T. A history of the Byzantine state and society. s.l. : Stanford University Press, 1997.
24. Sweetenham, Carol. Robert the Monk's History of the First Crusade: Historia Iherosolimitana. Paperback. Farnham, Surrey : Ashgate Publishing, 2006. Translation and Commentary.
25. Shopkow, Leah. Robert de Clari. Book Rags. [Online] [Cited: April 23, 2009.] http://www.bookrags.com/tandf/robert-de-clari-tf/.
26. Stone, Edward N (translator) Robert de Clari (author). Three Old French Chronicles of the Crusades. Seatlle : University of Washington publications in the social sciences, 1939 update to 1870 translation.
27. McNeal, Edgar Holmes. The Conquest of Constantinople. New York : Columbia University Press, 2005.
28. Janin, Raymond. La Géographie ecclésiastique de l'Empire byzantin. 1953.
29. Carson, D. A. The Gospel According to John. Grand Rapids, MI : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1991.
30. Scavone, Daniel C. Greek Epitaphioi and Other Evidence for the Shroud In Constantinople Up To 1204. Shroud of Turin Web Site Paper from the 1999 Richmond Conference. [Online] June 1999. [Cited: April 26, 2009.] http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/scavone.pdf.
31. Brown, John E. The Gospel and Epistles of John: a concise commentary. s.l. : Liturgical Press, 1988.
32. Nickell, Joe. Relics of the Christ. s.l. : University Press of Kentucky, 2007.
33. Wilson, Ian. The Turin Shroud. London : Book Club Associates, 1978. (Wilson, I., "The Turin Shroud," Book Club Associates: London, 1978, pp.61-62).
34. Nickell, Joe. The Joe Nickell Files: The Shroud of Turin. [interv.] John C. Snider. 2000, revised 2004.
35. Harvard Law School Staff. Seeing Faces. The Situationist - Harvard Law School. [Online] Feb 23, 2008. [Cited: May 14, 2009.] http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/seeing-faces/.
36. Flury-Lemberg, Mechthild. Secrets of the Dead: The Shroud of Christ. [interv.] PBS Television. 2002.
37. Studies on the radiocarbon sample from the Shroud of Turin. Rogers, Raymond N. 2005, Thermochimica Acta, Vol. 425, pp. 189-194. - Raymond N. Rogers, Thermochimica Acta Volume 425, Issues 1-2, 20 January 2005, Pages 189-194 .
38. Runciman, Steven. History of the Crusades. Harmondsworth : Penguin Books, 1965.
39. Walsh, J. E. The Shroud. New York : Random House, 1963.
40. Adler, Alan D. The Nature of the Body Images on the Shroud of Turin. Shroud of Turin Web Site. [Online] 1999. [Cited: May 3, 2009.] http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/adler.pdf.
41. Photogrammetric Responses from the Shroud of Turin. Schumacher, Peter M. Richmond : Shroud of Turin International Research Conference, 1999. Shroud of Turin International Research Conference.
42. Picknett, Lynn and Prince, Clive. The Turin Shroud: How Da Vinci Fooled History. New York : Simon and Schuster, 2007.
43. On the invisible rays emitted by phosphorescent bodies. Becquerel, Henri. Paris : French Academy of Science, March 2, 1896, Comptes Rendus 122, 501 (1896)), Vol. 122, p. 501. translated by Carmen Giunta.
44. Carr, Peter. Dating and Formation of the Shroud. s.l. : Shroud of Turin Web Site, 1999.
45. The amazing Dr Kouznetsov. Meacham, William. 313, York : Department of Archaeology at the University of York, September 1, 2007, Antiquity: A Quartly Review of the World of Archaeology, Vol. 81, pp. 779-783.
46. Major Carbon-14 Deficiency in Modern Snail Shells from Southern Nevada Springs. Riggs, Alan C. s.l. : The American Association for the Advancement of Science, April 6, 1984, Science, Vol. 224, pp. 58-61.
47. Ikram, Salima. Egyptologist, American University in Cairo. [interv.] editor of NOVA online. PBS Nova Television Series Susan K. Lewis. November 17, 2005.
48. Hodge, K. C., G. W. A. Newton. Radiocarbon Dating. [book auth.] Ann Rosalie David. The Manchester Museum mummy project: multidisciplinary research on ancient Egyptian mummified remains. s.l. : Manchester University Press, 1979, pp. 137-148.
49. A problematic source of organic contamination of linen. Gove, H. E., S. J. Mattingly, A. R. David, L. A. Garza-Valdes. s.l. : Elsevier, 1997, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research, pp. 504-507.
50. Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin. Damon, P. E., et al. 1989, Nature, Vol. 337, pp. 611-615.
51. Rogers, Raymond N., Anna Arnoldi. Scientific Method Applied to the Shroud of Turin: A Review. Shroud of Turin Website. [Online] July 2002. http://www.shroud.com.
52. Knight, Edmund. Bleaching. [book auth.] Hugh Chisholm. The Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition. New Yorl : The Encyclopedia Britannica Company, 1911, pp. 49-55. Professor of Technological Chemistry, University of Manchester.