A confession: I am a Shroudie.
Well, not a full-fledged Shroudie, not someone who is actually obsessed with the mysterious artifact known as the Shroud of Turin - but I do have a more-than-average interest in that item.
The Shroud, for those few who don't know, is a long linen wrapping of the sort used to enfold a dead body in ancient times. On its front and back it bears the photonegative image of an apparently crucified man -- a man with holes in his wrists, where nails were driven in to bind him to the cross. A man whose forehead is dotted with blood, as if from wearing a crown of thorns. A man whose back is severely lacerated, as if from scourging.
Of course the man in question is believed, by some, to be Jesus of Nazareth. And the Shroud is believed to be the funerary wrapping in which his body was carefully enveloped when he was placed in his tomb.
Scoffers naturally deride this idea. Although they have proven notably unsuccessful at reproducing the image on the Shroud by any artistic or photographic method, they nevertheless assert that the relic is a medieval forgery.
This opinion has always been of dubious merit, given the vast, qualitative difference between the Shroud and any known medieval fake. It's one thing for an ambitious medieval huckster to dig up someone's skull and claim it as the skull of John the Baptist, or to find a hunk of old wood and call it a piece of the True Cross. It's quite another thing for the same medieval scam artist to create an anatomically perfect, detailed, realistic depiction of a man, seen from front and back, using an unknown method that defies rediscovery even in today's technological age.
Since the late 1980s, however, the skeptics have held a trump card. In 1988, radiocarbon tests on a small sample of the Shroud dated it at between AD 1260 and AD 1390, thus establishing conclusively that the Shroud was of medieval origin. Discussion over.
Right?
Wrong.
Because it turns out that the 10mm by 70mm sample clipped from the Shroud and carbon-dated was not part of the original cloth, but was instead a patch -- a patch so expertly made as to be indistinguishable, to the naked eye, from the Shroud itself. It took microscopic testing by the late Raymond Rogers, a member of the carbon dating team, to determine that this section of the Shroud is of newer origin than the rest.
Rogers analyzed some remaining cloth fibers from the 1988 sample. (Most of the sample was incinerated as part of the carbon dating process, but a few odds and ends weren't used.) He was able to date the sample by measuring the amount of a chemical compound called vanillin in the linen. Vanillin has the useful property of disappearing at a steady rate over the centuries. What Rogers found was that fibers taken from the sample area do indeed contain vanillin, in quantities that would be expected in a cloth of medieval origin. But fibers that were taken from the main part of the Shroud contain no vanillin at all, indicating that the main part of the cloth is much older than the sample.
Moreover, the fibers from the carbon dating sample had been dyed to match the color of the rest of the Shroud. The dye was applied "by wiping a viscous liquid on the outside of the yarn," Rogers wrote in an article for the chemistry journal Thermochimica Acta (volume 425, issues 1 - 2, 20 January 2005, pp. 189 - 194). "The yellow brown coating on the outside of the radiocarbon sample is so heavy that it looks black in transmitted light ... The main part of the Shroud does not contain these materials."
(Ultraviolet photography clearly shows the difference between the patch and the rest of the Shroud.)
From these two pieces of evidence - the differing quantities of vanillin and the presence of dye in only one corner of the Shroud - Rogers concluded that "[a]s unlikely as it seems, the sample used to test the age of the shroud in 1988 was taken from a rewoven area of the shroud. Indeed, the patch was very carefully made. The yarn has the same twist as the main part of the cloth, and it was stained to match the color ... The sample was dyed using a technique that began to appear in Italy about ... 1291... [Thus] the radiocarbon sample cannot be older than about 1290 ... However, the Shroud itself is actually much older" (as told to Discovery News).
Carbon dating, then, did give an accurate result -- but it was done using an unrepresentative sample. What was tested was only a medieval repair job, leaving the date of the rest of the Shroud as mysterious as ever.
Could the Shroud date to the first century AD? Numerous lines of argument are advanced by those who say yes. "The technique that was used to make that piece of cloth was exactly what Pliny the Elder reported for this time," Rogers says (quoted in an ABC News story). Pollen grains lifted from the Shroud match flowering plants native to Palestine. Using historical records, Ian Wilson has traced the Shroud back through a chain of custody to the first century. (See Wilson's The Blood and the Shroud, 1998.) Historically correct details seen in the Shroud's image, such as nailing the crucifixion victim through the wrists, were unknown in medieval times, when Christ was typically depicted as nailed through the palms. The blood patterns on the image match the actual flow of blood from open wounds, and the stains themselves have been verified as human blood. No medieval artist known to us could have depicted the human figure so realistically, even assuming he had figured out away to apply the image to cloth and produce a photonegative effect.
With the collapse of the carbon dating evidence, nothing militates against an early origin for the Shroud. Quite the contrary. The evidence, though not conclusive, at least points in the direction of a first century origin in Palestine.
But what of the image itself? How did it get onto the cloth? For years, scientists and would-be debunkers could only guess at the answer, but further research may have provided a solution to the mystery. The answer involves amines, gaseous chemicals that seep out of the skin after a person dies.
Amines can register a remarkably precise image of the deceased in cloth that is touching the body. Workers in hospices and hospitals sometimes observe this phenomenon. In one case, a dead patient left a perfect handprint on his bedsheet. The handprint was "drawn" in amines, which had soaked into the top layer of the fibers of the sheet.
Close analysis of the Shroud's fibers strongly suggests that its image was likewise produced by amines. In this sense, the image on the Shroud is an entirely natural phenomenon. And yet in another sense it is surely miraculous - because amine seepage almost never produces a complete representation of the body, front and back, from head to toe. And of all the people in history who have been buried in funerary wrappings, isn't it remarkable that the one and only perfect amine-produced image is consistent with what we know of the founder of a major world religion?
Skeptics often assert that there are no miracles, because a miracle would violate the laws of nature. This argument holds little force, since the laws of nature are known only by inference, and the rules of inference allow us to draw only provisional conclusions, which are always subject to revision. But even if it were true that the laws of nature can never be violated, does it follow that miracles can't happen?
Suppose a miracle is not the violation of natural law at all, but simply a way of using and directing natural properties to bring about a highly unusual outcome. Suppose, for instance, that our bodies have the latent ability to fight off cancer, but that it takes a miracle to actualize this ability and direct it .Such a process might help to account for miraculous healings, such as those at Lourdes, which have been extensively documented. (See D. Scott Rogo, Miracles: A Scientific Exploration of Wondrous Phenomena, 1991.)
By the same token, imagine that the natural process of amine seepage always has the potential to produce an image like the one on the Shroud, but that it takes a miracle to bring out that potential -- to guide and direct the process and produce a one-in-a-million result.
If there is any truth in this notion, then one lesson taught by the Shroud is that God does work miracles, but he accomplishes them by working through the natural order, rather than by circumventing it.
Perhaps the distinction between natural and supernatural is less hard-and-fast than we think.
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Damn that was interesting. I had written the shroud off as wishful thinking and I'm a believer. I believe in science and believed the carbon dating. I had only heard that a fire might've affected the dating but again that sounded like wishful thinking.
Like I alwasy say, it takes faith to be an atheist. Too many miracles exist. Too many coincidences. Too much history backs up too much of the Bible. And a man who said he was the Son of God did exist. Did die for his claim. And that means he was either a lunatic or telling the truth.
Great post.
Posted by: DH | May 20, 2005 at 01:02 PM
Interesting to see a widely "debunked" anomaly make a comeback. I've recently read an article with a similar story, this time the anomaly being the "Mars Face" of Cydonia. For details, go to http://www.suppressedscience.net/mars.html
Posted by: A.L. | June 06, 2005 at 04:34 PM