Shroud of Turin: Page 1

“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 proved 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 is a margin 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, until it wasn’t. Serious mistakes had been made.

Two decades later, people are still trying to prove the shroud is fake. One of the claims by proponent of authenticity is that even with modern technology, no one has been able to reproduce the images. Skeptics saw that as a challenge. Many attempts were made to show how a forger might have created the image. It was, some said, a fairly conventional painting. No, argued Emily Craig, a forensic anthropologist, it was some sort of portrait in dust that was transferred to a piece of cloth by rubbing the cloth placed over the portrait. No, said others, it was a medieval photograph, perhaps made by Leonardo da Vinci. Room size cameras were created to show that such a device

Shroud of Turin: Page 2

might have been invented. A life-size photograph of a statue was made on cloth. It was, as far as logic went, like making a printing press and printing a Bible to show that Leonardo might have invented printing. Nathan Wilson, an English teacher at a small mid-western college, very much convinced that the shroud was fake because it contradicted his literal reading of the Gospel of John, created an interesting shroud-like image by sun-bleaching unbleached linen with a mask painted on a piece of glass. But it, too, failed to reproduce many of the shroud’s features, in fact most of them. In October of 2009, Luigi Garlaschelli, a professor of organic chemistry at the University of Pavia, Italy, created an image that looked a lot like the shroud. It was a combination of body rubbing and bas-relief rubbing. He used a pigment laced with acid. When he washed the pigment away, the acid had etched an image on the cloth’s fibers. It, too, fails to reproduce the complex image on the shroud. Nonetheless, in each case, the media reported that the shroud had been reproduced, failing to note that they had previously reported this and instead writing that until now no one had been able to explain how the images might have been formed. Rebuttal to these claims, no matter how scientifically or logically justified, got scant attention.

Each attempt to reproduce the images presumed that the carbon dating was correct. When it became obvious, to some, that that the cloth was very much older, some skeptics modified their stance. Robert Carroll, in his popular 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.”

Wilson commented along the same lines, “However, it [=new findings about the date] 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.”