Shroud of Turin

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The Shroud of Turin (or Turin Shroud) is a linen cloth bearing the image of a man who appears to have been physically traumatized in a manner consistent with crucifixion. It is presently kept in the royal chapel of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy. Some believe it is the cloth that covered Jesus when he was placed in his tomb and that his image was somehow recorded on its fibers at or near the time of his imputed resurrection. Skeptics contend the shroud is a medieval hoax or forgery - or even a devotional work of artistic verisimilitude. It is the subject of intense debate among some scientists, believers, historians and writers regarding where, when and how the shroud and its images were created

Forceful arguments and evidence cited against the miraculous origin of the shroud images include a letter from a medieval bishop to the Avignon pope claiming personal knowledge that the image was cleverly painted to gain money from pilgrims; radiocarbon tests in 1988 that yielded a medieval timeframe for the cloth's fabrication; and analysis of the apparent "blood flecks" by microscopist Walter McCrone who concluded they are ordinary pigments.

The Shroud of Turin a Bad Fake

PARIS, June 21 (AFP) - A French magazine said on Tuesday it had carried out experiments that proved the Shroud of Turin, believed by some Christians to be their religion's holiest relic, was a fake.

“A mediaeval technique helped us to make a Shroud," Science & Vie (Science and Life) said in its July issue. The Shroud is claimed by its defenders to be the cloth in which the body of  Jesus Christ was wrapped after his crucifixion.

It bears the faint image of a blood-covered man with holes in his hand and wounds in his body and head, the apparent result of being crucified, stabbed by a Roman spear and forced to wear a crown of thorns.

In 1988, scientists carried out carbon-14 dating of the delicate linen cloth and concluded that the material was made some time between 1260 and 1390. Their study prompted the then archbishop of Turin, where the Shroud is stored, to admit that the garment was a hoax. But the debate sharply revived in January this year.

Drawing on a method previously used by skeptics to attack authenticity claims about the Shroud, Science & Vie got an artist to do a bas-relief -- a sculpture that stands out from the surrounding background -- of a Christ-like face.

A scientist then laid out a damp linen sheet over the bas-relief and let it dry, so that the thin cloth was moulded onto the face. Using cotton wool, he then carefully dabbed ferric oxide, mixed with gelatine, onto the cloth to make blood-like marks. When the cloth was turned inside-out, the reversed marks resulted in the famous image of the crucified Christ.

Gelatine, an animal by-product rich in collagen, was frequently used by Middle Age painters as a fixative to bind pigments to canvas or wood.

The imprinted image turned out to be wash-resistant, impervious to temperatures of 250 C (482 F) and was undamaged by exposure to a range of harsh chemicals, including bisulphite which, without the help of the gelatine, would normally have degraded ferric oxide to the compound ferrous oxide.

The experiments, said Science & Vie, answer several claims made by the pro-Shroud camp, which says the marks could not have been painted onto the cloth.

For one thing, the Shroud's defenders argue, photographic negatives and scanners show that the image could only have derived from a three-dimensional object, given the width of the face, the prominent cheekbones and nose.

In addition, they say, there are no signs of any brushmarks. And, they argue, no pigments could have endured centuries of exposure to heat, light and smoke.

For Jacques di Costanzo, of Marseille University Hospital, southern France, who carried out the experiments, the mediaeval forger must have also used a bas-relief, a sculpture or cadaver to get the 3-D imprint.

The faker used a cloth rather than a brush to make the marks, and used gelatine to keep the rusty blood-like images permanently fixed and bright for selling in the booming market for religious relics.

To test his hypothesis, di Costanzo used ferric oxide, but no gelatine, to make other imprints, but the marks all disappeared when the cloth was washed or exposed to the test chemicals.

He also daubed the bas-relief with an ammoniac compound designed to represent human sweat and also with cream of aloe, a plant that was used as an embalming aid by Jews at the time of Christ.

He then placed the cloth over it for 36 hours -- the approximate time that Christ was buried before rising again -- but this time, there was not a single mark on it.

"It's obviously easier to make a fake shroud than a real one," Science & Vie report drily.

The first documented evidence of the Shroud dates back to 1357, when it surfaced at a church at Lirey, near the eastern French town of Troyes. In 1390, Pope Clement VII declared that it was not the true shroud but could be used as a representation of it, provided the faithful be told that it was not genuine.

In January this year, a US chemist, Raymond Rogers, said the radiocarbon samples for the 1988 study allegedly were taken “from a piece that had been sewn into the fabric by nuns who repaired the Shroud after it was damaged in a church blaze in 1532.” (Naturally, modern researchers are going to carbon date a piece of the questioned Shroud that obviously was not original to the piece! Ed)

Rogers said that his analysis of other samples, based on levels of a chemical called vanillin that results from the decomposition of flax and other plants, showed the Shroud could be "between 1,300 and 3,000 years old." (It could also have been woven on Mars, 25,000 years ago by blind dwarves and brought to Turin by one of their UFOs. 1980’s testing showed very clearly that the “radiation image” was composed of a paint medium called egg tempera. Obviously, a model was covered with this substance, certainly known in the period of the real origin of this interesting hoax, and thena cloth was  pressed down on his body.     It is easier to part a Congressman from a bribe than a True Believer from his fantasies  Ed)

The Shroud of Turin and Other "Holy Relics"

Acharya S

Archaeologist, Historian, Mythologist, Linguist

Member, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Greece

Associate Director, Institute for Historical Accuracy

In the first place, the story of Jesus Christ is fictional, created by a multinational cabal of religions, cults, secret societies and mystery schools in order to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion. In doing so, the Church forged hundreds of texts, which were constantly reworked, mutilated and interpolated over the centuries. In its quest to create a religion to gain power and wealth, the Church forgery mill did not limit itself to mere writings but for centuries cranked out thousands of phony "relics" of its "Lord," "Apostles" and "Saints." Although true believers desperately keep attempting to prove otherwise, through one implausible theory after another, the Shroud of Turin is counted among this group of frauds:

"There were at least 26 'authentic' burial shrouds scattered throughout the abbeys of Europe, of which the Shroud of Turin is just one. . . . The Shroud of Turin is one of the many relics manufactured for profit during the Middle Ages. Shortly after the Shroud emerged it was declared a fake by the bishop who discovered the artist. This is verified by recent scientific investigation which found paint in the image areas. The Shroud of Turin is also not consistent with Gospel accounts of Jesus' burial, which clearly refer to multiple cloths and a separate napkin over his face."

As Gerald Larue says:

"Carbon-14 dating has demonstrated that the Shroud is a 14th-century forgery and is one of many such deliberately created relics produced in the same period, all designed to attract pilgrims to specific shrines to enhance and increase the status and financial income of the local church."

Walker comments on the holy relic mill:

"About the beginning of the 9th century, bones, teeth, hair, garments, and other relics of fictitious saints were conveniently 'found' all over Europe and Asia and triumphantly installed in the reliquaries of every church, until all Catholic Europe was falling to its knees before what Calvin called its anthill of bones. . . . St. Luke was touted as one of the ancient world's most prolific artists, to judge from the numerous portraits of the Virgin, painted by him, that appeared in many churches. Some still remain, despite ample proof that all such portraits were actually painted during the Middle Ages."

And Wells states:

"About 1200, Constantinople was so crammed with relics that one may speak of a veritable industry with its own factories. Blinzler (a Catholic New Testament scholar) lists, as examples: letters in Jesus' own hand, the gold brought to the baby Jesus by the wise men, the twelve baskets of bread collected after the miraculous feeding of the 5000, the throne of David, the trumpets of Jericho, the axe with which Noah made the Ark, and so on. . . "

At one point, a number of churches claimed the one foreskin of Jesus, and there were enough splinters of the "True Cross" that Calvin said the amount of wood would make "a full load for a good ship." The disgraceful list of absurdities and frauds goes on, and, as Pope Leo X exclaimed, the Christ fable has been enormously profitable for the Church. It must be therefore asked why force, forgery and fraud were needed to spread the "good news" brought by a "historical son of God."

Also, the claims of pollen supposedly found on the Shroud allegedly indicating that the Shroud was manufactured in the Middle East before the eighth century have been discredited as "fraud" and "junk science." The person who originally claimed to have found the pollen on the Shroud, Max Frei, has been accused of "sleight of hand" in reporting that pollen samples he took from living plants were subsequently “found” on the Shroud. The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Paranormal Claims (CSICOP) basically determines that Max Frei's "find" is an out-and-out fraud:

"POLLENS: It was reported that pollens on the shroud proved it came from Palestine, but the source for the pollens was a freelance criminologist, Max Frei, who once pronounced the forged 'Hitler Diaries' genuine. Frei's tape-lifted samples from the Shroud were controversial from the outset since similar samples taken by the Shroud of Turin Research Project in 1978 had comparatively few pollens. As it turned out, after Frei's tapes were examined following his death in 1983, they also had very few pollens--except for a particular one that bore a suspicious cluster on the 'lead' (or end), rather than on the portion that had been applied to the shroud. (See Skeptical Inquirer magazine, Summer 1994 pp. 379-385.)"

Researcher Mark Thompson says of the pollen:

"One thing that is well known to botanists is that the range within which many wild plants grow contracts under pressure from agriculture, civilization, industry and climate changes, and can expand due to the inadvertent or deliberate transport of seeds in cargo along trade routes.

"These shroud researchers asserted (using a database that covered only Israel, it seems, along with other available reports of the plant's range, which I presume to be reliable for the sake of argument) that Z. dumosum grows only in Israel, Syria and the Sinai peninsula.

"What I was working on before the likely fraud by Max Frei was pointed out here, is that Z. dumosum may have grown throughout the Middle East along the Mediterranean coast clear up into Byzantium and Constantinople during the 8th century. Other species of Zygophyllaceae grow throughout that range, from Turkey and Greece even into India and clear around the Mediterranean into the Levant and Northern Africa (including the related notorious hallucinogenic Soma/Haoma candidate plant Peganum harmala).

"So, the statement that 'As Zygophyllum dumosum grows only in Israel, Jordan, and Sinai, its appearance helps to definitively limit the shroud’s place of origin' seemed worth questioning, especially due to climate changes and population pressures in the region over the last 1100 years. . . .

"Another source of suspicion was that the odd appearance of vague flower images on the shroud are 'explained' in one of these papers as due to 'corona discharge.' This was also quite far-fetched, since corona discharge is more related to Kirlian photography than the residue of pressed flowers. Unless one insists that the Shroud and any enfolded bouquets were struck by Divine Lightning or something - an entertaining notion worthy of Steven Spielberg I suppose, but hardly likely."

The conclusion here is that the pollen does not only grow in the "Holy Land" and that other arguments are metaphysical, not scientific.

In addition, where these researchers came up with the "eighth century" date one can only guess, but even if said date were correct, such would no more "prove" that the Shroud was "authentic" in the sense that it was the "original burial cloth of Jesus," than does the spurious argument used by other apologists that the remains of a first century boat found in the Sea of Galilee provide “evidence” that Jesus existed! The latter argument runs thus: "Here is a boat from the first century A.D. found in the Sea of Galilee. Jesus and his disciples would have ridden in a boat like this." Such is completely puerile and utterly unscientific argumentation.

As concerns the so-called blood found on the Shroud, CSICOP says:

"BLOOD. The Associated Press reported claims that the shroud bears type AB blood stains. Perhaps this erroneous information has its origin in other fake shrouds of Jesus, since the Shroud of Turin's stains are not only suspiciously red (unlike genuine blood that blackens with age) but they failed batteries of tests by internationally known forensic experts. The 'blood' has been definitively proved to be composed of red ocher and vermilion tempera paint."

Regarding believers' claims that the carbon-14 dating is flawed, CSICOP relates that the 13th-14th century date revealed by C-14 was verified by three different labs:

"DATING. The assertion that blood and pollen matching prove the Shroud of Turin dates to at least the eighth century is - based on the evidence - absurd. The shroud cloth was radiocarbon dated to circa 1260-1390 by three separate laboratories. The date is consistent with a fourteenth-century bishop's report to Pope Clement VII that an earlier bishop had discovered the forger and that he had confessed."

The Shroud of Turin is a forgery, pure and simple, one of countless incidents of "pious fraud" committed by believers and vested interests who wish to shore up their flimsy faith. This latest attempt at "proving" what isn't true is motivated, as usual, by avarice, as the government of the "Holy Land" gears up for the millennium celebration and papal visit, which will bring millions of pilgrims and their tourist dollars to Israel.