by Stacey Reiman ~ 8/10/20018
When I began this site maybe 6 weeks ago, I had never undertaken the effort to research aspects of the Shroud evidence 1 point a time. Rather, like most people - I had read a wide variety of articles, read some PDFs, and seen maybe 10 to 15 videos that were unfortunately not as balanced as they seemed.
The underyling theme behind the great majority of movies and articles produced by people who believe the Shroud to be real, is that they present the evidence in a way that the whole is supposed to be irrefutable. Evidence is selected in order to build a case. Sadly, many conflicting pieces are just omitted. Not all are guilty of this! But many Shroud researchers seem to begin from the vantage point of how they can prove the Shroud is real, rather than how they can discover whether it is real or not.
The only place I found where things were geniunely analyzed on their own merit, point by point, was Dan Porter's blog, Shroud Story. That's why I built the Shroud database from 70,000+ posts left by over 1300 people who came to his site to debate the merits of these pieces of evidence.
I was quite heartbroken to see that point after point of the supposed evidence I had formerly thought was some kind of lock, was in fact quite plainly disputed, in some cases with the opposition having just as solid (or moreso) arguments. Yet on go the articles and speakers listing these talking points 1 by 1, as facts, in an attempt to convince the reader that there is no denying Shroud authenticity.
Such materials do not do Christianity any favors. God is all around us! He is light. He is love. He is truth. Belief in Jesus does not need to come from thinking that we have evidence in the form of a Shroud, because Jesus is all around us. You see Him in others, and you can even see Him in yourself! Jesus is selflessness and love. When you feel that, you feel Him. When you act out of selflessness, He works through you.
My reasons for wanting the Shroud to be real are somewhat quirky: I am hoping we have scientific evidence that could move our thinking forward about the overall state of man. Sure, may sound farfetched, but I hoped that the physics and any other encoding on the Shroud would be something God left for us, intentially. And who knows where that could lead.
Alas, as of right now, I am not sure such enlightenment is to be.
In case anybody comes along and feels indignant about my notion that the Shroud evidence is not a lock, I would like to list some talking points from a Shroud "expert" we had at our church. Here are some points she presented as irrefutable:
1- the Shroud is the "only image on the planet" that has shown 3d qualities when run through the VP8 Analyzer
- this is a patently false statement, and she should have known that. 3d ultrasound images are the easiest example, but many more examples have already been put forth.
2- the Shroud contains blood that is type AB positive, and male.
- STURP sent the blood flecks found in the sticky tapes to a laboratory devoted to the study of ancient blood at the State University of New York (SUNY), and the result was that the blood was too old and badly fragmented to be typed. Further, Dr. Kelly Kearse, a STERA board member and Catholic immunologist, has written several PDFs on this subject in recent years that you can find in my Resources page - and his final statement is that while is could be AB blood, you cannot state that conclusively at this time. The tests done by Bollone lack the crucial second part. He says that at best, we can call the Shroud blood primate.
This is where I have a very serious bone to pick with people hawking all over that the blood is AB, and matches a bunch of eucharistic miracles, as well as the supposedly AB Sudarium of Oveido (which has serious carbon dating problems of its own, among other things).
Why not state that the blood is at the very least primate, and leave it at that? Why state as sure things that are not? Well I can answer that for you. Because these presentations want to leave no room for doubt. They are not explorations of the veracity of the Shroud evidence: they are attempts to build a case, much as a lawyer for one side would do.
Only this ISN'T a legal case. This relates to our faith in God, Jesus, and our understanding of things as complicated as the afterlife. Using the Shroud as a piece of evidence is the last thing a priest should do. Using it to instill a sense of wonder, to get people thinking about committing to living more through their faith and showing more love and selflessness to others - that's great. But don't use misstated and highly skewed "facts" about the Shroud to convince people that your schpeal at the pulpit must therefore be solid. How lazy is that. And in the end, you could end up driving people away from faith.
3- the pollen evidence means there is no doubt the Shroud was in Jerusalem
- Sorry, but there is in fact doubt. One of the researchers here later backed out of comments he had made about the pollen. The pollen findings could be real, which is exciting. But to say that they are a sure thing is misleading. An article about some of the problems, written by former editor at the British Society for the Shroud of Turin, Hugh Farey, is here: pollen problems.
4- the aragonite dust evidence means there is no doubt the Shroud was in Jerusalem
There is in fact dispute about this, and the studies that made this connection have not been peer reviewed. This thread here on Shroud Story details some of the weaknesses of the evidence, and why you cannot just say this evidence is conclusive without further testing. I would note also that Gabriel and DaveB are both very active posters who are not in fact skeptics, and both say the evidence for aragonite cannot be considered conclusive at this time.
5- the 1988 carbon dating is wrong because it was definitely a reweave
- Here I'll not argue whether or not that could be true, because that is not what I found bothersome. What bothers me is somebody presenting that as a fact, when in fact there are several very serious and intelligent Shroud researchers such as Mark Antonacci and Robert Rucker, who believe there was no such reweave. If I were going to present this to an audience, I would state that we have reasons to doubt the carbon dating, and here are a couple of the leading hypotheses.
I don't think it's unreasonable to share research and opinions with people about the Shroud. It's an exciting topic! The fact that there is any chance at all that this thing could be real is kind of amazing. But the evidence is not in fact "overwhelming" - it's really more of a small possibility, but authenticity still has a couple of big hurdles to get over.
the carbon dating by 3 laboratories. It's not good enough to just say that the corner must have been off by 1300 years - per Rogers, Benford, Marino and the invisible reweave hypothesis. It could be true, but in fact a variety of serious researchers who support authenticity (Mark Antonacci, Robert Rucker, etc) think there was NO reweave. So then you have to examine the physics based theories like neutron absorption.
It seems to me that the strongest statement you can make is that the carbon dating MIGHT be wrong. And I wouldn't go bringing up the Sudarium of Oveido (as our presenter did...) - which has apparently been carbon dated to 700 AD, twice. The single biggest problem here is the fact that both the Sudarium and the Shroud have been carbon dated to the exact timeframe when each relic enters the historical record. Funny how she didn't mention that. Bringing up the Sudarium and its supposed AB positive blood (not done in a peer reviewed study) just gives you more things to explain away.
the blood spatter patterns need to be realistic. The woman told our church Garlaschelli and Borrini's study was "fake news" (the ultimate form of intellectual laziness in the form of a rebuttal...). Say what you want, but this study in the Journal of Forensic Sciences was not fake, it was real. Peer reviewed as well. If you want to offer a rebuttal, great - I'd welcome that! But find an actual forensic expert who doesn't show inherent bias (how about a guy who hasn't been writing about the crucifixion for decades?) - and offer a point by point rebuttal of the study itself. Drs Bucklin and Zugibe wrote a ton of stuff about the Shroud, but both of these guys were highly committed Christians, who had been thinking about the crucifixion and its wounds for years before they studied the Shroud. I'd frankly like to see what a secular pathologist has to say about this.
The problem many lament is that you can never actually prove the Shroud to be real. So that's where people end up on this slippery slope of the "preponderance of the evidence" - which is a false concept when it comes to proving a miracle. You can't just say something is a miracle because you haven't been able to prove that it cannot be a miracle. That isn't good enough. To believe a miracle, there should be little to no contradictory evidence. In fact, the vast majority of miracles approved by the Vatican have been medical in nature, because they are the easiest to prove. Person survived where they shouldn't have. Ok, wonderful! But if you put an iphone into the deepest jungle in the Amazon, and some naked guy with a spear found it (taking liberties here...) - he shouldn't assume that just because he can't prove what this thing is, that it's a miracle.
Bottom line is that we don't yet know how the Shroud of Turin was formed. Colin Berry has done some interesting experiments, as have Thibault Heimburger and others. Robert Rucker and Mark Antonacci's work merits a look - although not easy to get through for non scientists. I am open and hopeful that the Vatican will open what's left of the Shroud evidence post the 2002 "restoration" - and we can get some further answers about things. In particular if a new carbon dating showed a date around the time of Christ, we'd be looking at a whole new ball game. But until then, I'd be wary of any articles concluding that evidence for authenticity is overwhelming. I plan to keep looking at things point by point, as each piece of evidence should stand on its own legs, and not be seen in the least skeptical light, or using our faith as part of our interpretation.
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