What is wrong with the information cited by history.com? If it’s wrong I don’t mind being corrected.
What we have is a shroud that carbon dates from the late 13th to the mid 14th century. That’s exactly when it is reported to be a forgery, including a confession from the artist.
That’s pretty compelling evidence. Surely you can understand why this evidence would lead many to conclude the shroud is a forgery.
It is now.
I’ve seen that discussed. There’s no evidence of brush strokes, so it would have had to been applied without moving the applicator.
The problem there is that there are no known artistic or chemical techniques from the time that could have made the image on the Shroud. There were also church politics involved (including relic competition) that made it to d’Arcis’ benefit to assert it was a forgery.
The question of authenticity must be considered first, for if the Shroud of Turin is a forgery, all other objections are secondary or of no import, And indeed, STURP member Kenneth Stevenson writes: "The Shroud image seems so incredible that one might say the burden of proof rests on those who think it is a forgery. " [4]
The charge of fraud stems from four main sources.
First, the famous memorandum of Bishop Pierre d’Arcis in 1389. In this letter, adressed to Pope Clement VII at Avignon, he mentions that in 1357 his predecessor as Bishop of Troyes, Henri of Poitiers, had prohibited the exhibition of the Shroud, and that according to this same Bishop Henri an artist had confessed to having painted the cloth: “to wit that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed.” [5] On this basis D’Arcis asked that the Pope put a stop to these exhibitions, which were drawing hundreds of pilgrims to Lirey, and ban them once and for all.
For centuries, many routinely accepted this memo as conclusive, But even the most severe critics of the Shroud have had to admit that D’Arcis gives no evidence whatever of either an investigation or the alleged confession given to his predecessor a whole generation before. He does not even give the name of the supposed artist. Nor does any mention of the proceedings appear in any of the history annals of that period. This is most unusual, considering the medieval preoccupation with documentation and detail.
And when one considers that ,D’Arci’s successor in the See of Troyes, Bishop Louis Ragon, believed the Shroud to be genuine and permitted its open veneration, one wonders if D’Arcis was even describing the same object. In fact, there is reason to suspect that the memo may have referred to a mere copy of the real relic.
However, there is a more obvious possibility: It is true that D’Arcis claimed the image had been “cunningly painted.” But it is also true that he was locked in mortal confrontation with the owners of the Shroud–the de Charny family–who were at that very moment successfully challenging D’Arcis’ authority in the diocese. Motives come in to play here which should not be dismissed.
“Taken on its own merits, the memorial of Pierre D’Arcis is untrustworthy, because it was written in anger and betrays a strong bias against de Charny and the Dean of Lirey. [Clement VIII himself, in his rescript to de Charny and in his final decree, declares that Pierre D’Arcis was angry with his opponents for obtaining an indult to exhibit the Shroud without his permission. He was still more angry with them when they ignored his command to withdraw the Shroud from public veneration, and invoked the intervention of the king to prevent him from taking action against them. And he was hurt and humiliated when [Clement VII] upheld his opponents and put him under silence in the rescript to the layman de Charny, leaving the outraged bishop to learn of this censure from common report. Pierre D’Arcis’ memorial is a violent outburst over his grievances and a piece of special pleading in his own defense. He is so intemperate in his language, so bitter in his animus against those whom he accuses, so reckless in imputing to them the basest motives, that we cannot rely on his unsupported statement that they were guilty of the meanest kind of fraud.” [6]
Clearly, the D’Arcis memo-by itself-gives insufficient grounds for proof of forgery. On the other hand, someone might well object that it is hardly scientific to discredit the memo on the basis of its emotional tone. Opponents of the Shroud’s authenticity claim that science supports the D’Arcis accusation. Does it?"
(To be continued)
Do you think a sudden and intense burst of radiation will ever be part of a natural explanation for what happens to a body after it dies?
It seems like a rather strange coincidence that carbon dating would put the shroud in the same time period. Also, an argument from incredulity isn’t a sound foundation for a scientific argument, but I think it is entirely fair to point out that Truth and science are not synonyms.
For the purposes of what I was talking about, the existence of the accusations are fine. What is being pointed out is that the carbon dating puts the shroud at the very same time period where these accusations are made. That’s a pretty hard correlation to ignore.
I consider the 14C dates to be much more reliable than memos, but the correlation between the two strengthens both. If the accusations of forgery were true then we would expect carbon dating to support those accusations, and it does.
Kind of close? The first reports of the shroud were from the 1350’s and the age range from carbon dating puts the shourd at 1260-1390. That’s right in the middle of the range.
Also, the source you cited argues quite effectively that the section used for carbon dating showed no evidence of being added to the shroud. It starts on the bottom of pg. 15:
Earlier, you stated:
I followed your advice. That’s the paper I am using, and it shoots big holes in the invisible reweave hypothesis. From the article:
The correlation between the first years the shroud was displayed in Lirey, France (1350’s) and the carbon date (1260-1390). It was the shroud being displayed in Lirey, France that D’Arcis later described as a forgery.
If the shroud was from the 1st century then it should have that carbon date. If it was a 14th century forgery then it should have that date. The shroud has the 14th century date, and as described extensively by Rucker there is no evidence that the piece of the shroud used for carbon dating was added or changed in the 16th century.
Very nice summary!
Once in ten billion? I don’t know – that’s what makes it fun.
As with rocks from the sky, the problem is a mechanism, and that is a worldview problem.
What fascinates me is that the evidence from pollen and a bunch of other areas come up with wildly differing dates along with location of origin. The pollen analysis says it was made in Jerusalem before the eight century – which reminds me; have any radiation-hypothesis folks checked on what would have happened to the pollen grains?
Absence is not the same as incredulity. For example, if someone had an iron artifact from the tenth dynasty in Egypt apparently (by material analysis) formed by stamping, noting that there is no known way they could have achieved that is not incredulity, it’s saying the techniques for making that artifact were absent at the alleged time.
Can we think up ways it might have been done using just fourteenth-century technology? Sure, but that doesn’t show that anyone back then ever did, and without the evidence that at least someone did – apart from the object under examination – that’s barely more than conjecture.
I’m not aware of pollen dating. Do you have any references for that?
I did find the Nature article which appears to be a decent primary source. Interestingly, they have found pollen from the Americas on the shroud. They also suggest the linen was manufactured in India which seems peculiar to this article. They also claim that neither the early date nor the medieval date can be excluded by this technique.
I read a while back that whereas carbon dating at the time required material measured in square centimeters, today it could be done with about half a centimeter of one thread. If that’s the case, my hope is they’ll take threads from where the patches join the main fabric and from damaged areas, which would provide an expanded set of data points to compare to the alleged slope in the C^{14} graph.
Added? The most I can find is “re-woven”, which probably has a technical definition in terms of fabrics. I can’t tell if it means they redid the weave on a fringed area to restore the original thread pattern or if it means they wove in new material with the old to restore the original pattern where cloth was missing.
Without reading the paper . . .
does it address the molecular analysis of the lignin content that showed that the areas sampled had to be much younger than the rest?
This is based on what I’m most familiar with:
It also talks a lot about floral images retrieved from the Shroud.
We have full agreement on this point.
The Rucker paper addresses the invisible reweave hypothesis quite well, IMHO. Rucker believes the shroud is authentic, if that carries any weight. The TL;DR is Rucker doesn’t think there is any solid evidence for a reweave given the number of experts that looked at the section that was carbon dated, the techniques they used, and the mixture of new and old material that would be needed to get the observed carbon dates.
Not that I have seen.
Shroud of Turin Research at McCrone
In 1960, McCrone Research Institute was incorporated in Chicago, Illinois. Dr. McCrone and Mrs. Lucy B. McCrone founded McCrone Research Institute as a not-for-profit organization devoted to the teaching and research of light and electron microscopy. As directors of the Chicago Institute, they expanded its activities to include McCrone Research Associates, the sister organization in London, England. Since its beginning, McCrone Research Institute has taught more than 30,000 students in all facets of microscopy and remains a leading educational facility within the world of microscopy.
Dr. McCrone was also the editor and publisher of The Microscope (1965-1995, 2000), an international journal started by Arthur Barron in England, in 1937, and dedicated to the advancement of all forms of microscopy for the biologist, mineralogist, metallographer, forensic scientist, and chemist. The Microscope publishes original, previously unpublished, works from the microscopical community and serves as the proceedings of the Inter/Micro microscopy conference held each year in Chicago. It emphasizes new advances in microscope design, new accessories, new techniques, and unique applications to the study of particles, fibers, films, or surfaces of any material whether inorganic, organic, or biological…
If you had any genuine reasons to consider the shroud to be authentic, you wouldn’t need to classify people as “non-believers”.
I suspect the reason you hate discussing the shroud with “non-believers” is that they reject your ‘arguments’.
If th case for authenticity was strong, there’d be no need to resort to this sort of evidence-downplaying shenanigan.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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