…and Hugh Farey is always wrong! (lol!)

Since I wrote this, I have been grateful for some comments from Bill Meacham, who was mentioned in Dale’s interview, and, as a consequence, by myself below. Unfortunately they arrived too late to be posted in the discussion section – at the time WordPress closed comments after three days – so I have incorporated them below, in red, with a response, in blue, as necessary.

Welcome to a new voice in the sindonological blogosphere, Oliver Pearce, a Somerset man, translated to Canada a few years ago, with a blog called Ignotus. His foray into the Shroud has begun with a couple of sessions with Dale Glover and myself, individually and without knowing the other was also being interviewed. We each covered the Radiocarbon dating, the Blood, the Limestone and the Textile. In the comments to Dale’s interview, which included some good-tempered reference to some of our differences of opinion, Dale wrote, “Just remember, I’m always right and Hugh Farey is always wrong lol :P” Well, I know he doesn’t mean it, and that the number of people who watch either of our podcasts can be listed on a postage stamp with room to spare, but, well, challenges are very often a help to a researcher, as they encourage him to check his own sources and develop ideas that he might not have clarified, even to himself, as comprehensively as he could have done.

The same does not apply to those who have already closed the book. Their account of the Shroud has been reduced to a simplified fantasy, supported by half-remembered science and appeal to authority and emotion, recounted to newbies as established truth. Dale has been studying the Shroud intensively for some time and his blog is a veritable compendium of papers, opinions, and references to videos on all sorts of topics and from all sorts of opinions, and after all this, he has concluded that the Shroud is authentic. There’s nothing wrong with that; he’s in good company. However, for some aspects of the subject I feel that the trench of certainly he has dug for himself is now so deep that he has lost sight of anything that doesn’t live in it with him, and misremembered, misquoted, or simply invented the hostile world outside. We may use his account to Oliver as a salutary reminder to try to remain open-minded, and always to check our sources.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. Direct quotes from the podcast (youtube.com/watch?v=-JFiEnNEiAU&t=3486s) are timestamped, as you’ll probably need more context fully to understand either Dale’s comments or my responses, and in bold.

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Part One – the Radiocarbon Date

6:10
In a journal called Nature […] It’s medieval; it’s a fake; all you Christians who believe in this – you’re fools.

This is simply scurrilous. Nature is one of the most respected and scholarly publications in the world, and never speaks in those terms. This kind of abuse is far more typical of authenticist diatribe than it is of medievalist research.

6:58
They only dated a single Shroud sample. […] Every carbon-14 scientist in the world, every archaeologist in the world: that’s just rubbish.

This is wholly untrue. Particularly at that time, when most radiocarbon dating tests required large quantities of material, it was very unusual for more than one sample to be tested. Even today, it is quite normal for single samples of individual artefacts to be tested, simply because of the expense, although several different artefacts from a single site are often tested, to act as checks on each other.

7:16
Bill Meacham: […] “No responsible radiocarbon scientist would claim that it was proven that all contaminants had been removed and that the dating range produced for a sample was without doubt its actual calendar age.”

Meacham, and others, were very concerned about contamination, and indeed, some people who wanted the Shroud radiocarbon dated, including STuRP, were a bit too blasé about it. However, the labs which finally undertook the test were the best in the world – and still are – and knew very well what the dangers were and how to mitigate them.

Meacham comments: Not quite. They knew and followed their standard protocols to remove contamination. They did not consider possibilities outside those normally encountered, which in this case should have been done. This was not a NORMAL carbon-14 dating run, every precaution should have been taken, including various tests for any substances not normal to linen.

Sort of fair enough. The labs knew how to mitigate the dangers of contamination rather than eliminate them altogether, and their standard protocols removed almost everything, although there may have been residues of “possibilities outside those normally encountered,” which in turn, may have contributed to the chronological gradient.

For what it’s worth “no responsible radiocarbon scientist” ever did “claim that it was proven that all contaminants had been removed.”

It ain’t worth much! I wrote that in 1986, before the Shroud’s dating and before meeting the C14 hotshots that year in Turin. Sadly, several of them did in fact prove me wrong. The claim was later made by several of them that there was no contamination; Wolfli wrote me that they had proved there was none. 

Underlining mine.

7:40
Shroud skeptics in your audience are going to say, “Well, Bill Meacham here; he’s a pro-Shroud guy; he’s one of those crazy Shroudists, so you’re not going to take his word for it.”

No. Calling people crazy and fools is what authenticists do of medievalists, not what medievalists do of authenticists.

8:36
[Harry Gove] said, quote unquote: “this is bound to produce a dating result that will be questioned in strictly scientific terms by many scientists around the world who will be very sceptical of the arbitrarily small statistical basis for our testing […] The use of a single sample is ill-advised, as it will not generate a reliable date, but will rather give rise to world controversy, we suggest that it would be better not to date the Shroud at all.”

The “quote unquote” passage is not, in fact, a direct quote from Gove’s letter to the Pope (the words underlined are not as quoted), which has enabled Dale to imply a unity of purpose between Meacham and Gove that is wholly unwarranted. They were working with completely different agendas, and were openly contemptuous of each other’s motives in their respective books. Meacham, in The Rape of the Shroud, called Gove “underhanded and unscientific,” and Gove said, in Relic, Icon or Hoax, that Meacham was “out of his depth” and “should never have been allowed” to get involved.

Some of the lab directors were reasonable and generally personable fellows, others not. I won’t mention any names, but Gove was […] arrogant [and] over-bearing, and events since then have borne out who was wrong and should never have been involved in the process. At least Gonella got that one right, excluding Gove from the testing, although Gonella’s attempting to run the C14 project single-handed was also a disaster. 

Neither of them, in these references, was particularly bothered about the number of samples extracted or where they came from. Meacham was mostly concerned about possible contamination…

Not sure what “these references” are, but the statement is generally incorrect. I presume that Hugh read my book but may have forgotten my account of the 1986 consultation in Turin.  Yes, I was very concerned about contamination, but it was certainly not the biggest concern in my mind, which was the fire. I argued vigorously against just taking one sample, as did Al Adler, but Gonella sided with the C14 lab directors and the very bad decision was made for a single sample. Then we argued strongly against using, for the sole sample, the charred material under the patches, and it was finally agreed not to use that material when Otlet supported us.

My post is not a comprehensive review of the entire radiocarbon dating process, but a discussion of one interview with a prominent, and well-informed, authenticist. The references to Meacham and Gove’s remarks relate to Dale’s “quote unquote” statements, which come from Meacham’s article ‘Radiocarbon Measurement and the Age of the Turin Shroud: Possibilities and Uncertainties,’ from 1986 (now at shroud.com), and Gove’s book ‘Relic, Icon or Hoax.’ In Meacham’s article, the word contamination occurs over 50 times; reference to the number of sampling sites about 5, and although he did recommend taking five samples, one was a piece of char, one from the backing cloth, and one from the side-strip, all of which might reasonably have been expected to give different dates. The only two which might reasonably have been expected to confirm each other were the site next to the Raes sample which was the one actually used, and “a single thread from the middle of the cloth between the dorsal and ventral images.” If this could have been enough for a dating, then I agree that it would have been a worthwhile addition.

…although all the illustrations of contamination he gave refer to artefacts buried in the ground.

Most of the cases of contamination that I have come across as an archaeologist derive from excavated objects; I don’t see exactly why that merits an “although” from Hugh since many of the same contamination processes could occur during handling or storage. 

In theory they could, but in practice they haven’t, with vanishingly few exceptions.

Gove was fighting a desperate rear-guard action to try to keep his laboratory included among those who were allowed to do the tests, after the seven laboratories recommended to be involved were reduced to three by Cardinal Ballestrero.

9:07
I would say you’re unjustified if you just say, look, they carbon dated it to the medieval period, therefore it is medieval? No. I would say no.

Dale would indeed say no, but not, on the basis of the evidence produced so far, on grounds that elevate this statement above anything other than an opinion.

10:38
Since 2002, [carbon dating the Shroud itself] is not going to work, because there was this restoration project, and that apparently damaged its ability to be carbon dated and produce reliable results.

In the urge to demonstrate that only the scientists of STuRP know anything about the Shroud, it has been suggested that the thymol (oil of thyme) applied to the Shroud as a mild disinfectant in 2002 might have reacted with the cellulose of the cloth, infusing it with modern carbon – with a modern proportion of C14 – and making all dating tests give a more modern result than they should. This is only a guess. A paper from 2013 (Piotr Kołaczek et al., ‘The Late Glacial and Holocene development of vegetation in the area of a fossil lake in the Skaliska Basin (north-eastern Poland) inferred from pollen analysis and radiocarbon dating,’ Acta Palaeobotanica, 2013) specifically finds that storage in thymol has no effect on radiocarbon dating if the thymol is washed off. Either way, as Dale admits, there are enough fragments of Shroud extant not to require recourse to the relic itself.

11:29
There is cotton interwoven into the linen threads only in this one sample location. Cotton is not found anywhere else on the Shroud, woven into the material.

Cotton is found in abundance all over the Shroud, and the only way one can discover if it is entirely adventitious or integral to the cloth is by teasing a thread apart and observing the spun fibres individually. Until recently it was not recorded that this had ever been done to threads from anywhere other than the radiocarbon corner. However, very recently a recording of the 1981 final conference of STuRP has been posted at shroud.com, amongst which this comment, from an unidentified woman – could it be Eugenia Nitowski? – is informative:

“We have evidence, first off, indeed there is cotton in the weave itself of the main body of the cloth. The reason I state this very emphatically is that we have one tiny, tiny little thread, the so-called Zina thread, from the heel area, about a quarter of an inch long, that was wrapped in polyethylene. […] This has been poked and prodded with a lot of maybe dissecting needles and things because lots of people were interested in it. What interested me most was, the thread [I think she means fibril] that had the most blood specks on it was cotton: it was not linen, and it was indeed twisted in with the linen […] We subsequently looked [at the whole thread] and I think we found that all the cotton on it [the thread] was not an accident.” (From Tape 10, Side B , 8:21 onwards)

12:06
There’s this helpful visual image of what’s called the Blue Quad Mosaics.

The Blue Quad Mosaic images are the least helpful, most misleading, and most deliberately misinterpreted images ever taken of the Shroud. It is claimed that the dark green colour of the radiocarbon corner (bottom right in the images below) demonstrates that the corner is chemically different from the rest of the Shroud.

If this were so, then surely the broad blue bands across the back, face and thighs should indicate that the material there is also chemically different from the rest of the Shroud. What’s more, the dark green corner and blue band also occur in two other of the four photos. The changing colours are quite evidently artefacts of the lighting and not related to chemistry at all. Even if they were, and the increasing intensity of the dark green towards the corner of the Shroud reflected increasing contamination, then it is evident from the radiocarbon dating that the contamination makes the Shroud appear older, not younger, than the uncontaminated area.

12:48
It’s been statistically proven… […] They [The British Museum] were forced to reveal all 16 of the raw dates or data that they got. They only published 12 in 1989, so they kind of fudged the data a little bit to make it work.

This is another deliberate misinterpretation of the evidence. There were literally hundreds of “raw dates” obtained from different scans of 12 tiny sub-samples from the Shroud, 3 in Oxford, 5 in Zurich and 4 in Arizona. The British Museum published derived dates for each of the 12 subsamples dated. No data was “fudged.”

13:14
Once the full data was properly revealed to the public, various statisticians went to work and totally falsified the findings.

No, of course they didn’t. Given slightly more information than was available to the British Museum in 1988, statisticians discovered a chronological gradient across the sample which had the effect of pushing the earliest possible date of manufacture a few years earlier than originally determined. That’s all.

13:36
In 1988, they would say, well, 1260 was the line of best fit.

This is statistically and graphically meaningless. Clearly Dale has no idea what he is talking about. The Nature authors never said that or anything like it.

13:53
This line has a slope of about 36 years per centimetre, so what that means is, as you’re dating from the outer edge of the cloth and going inwards to the centre of the cloth, for every centimetre that you go in, the dates are changing by 36 years. It’s getting younger by 36 years. That’s weird. That actually establishes that there is a 96.8% probability of a systemic bias.

Nonsense. According to STuRP scientist Larry Schwalbe (Larry Schwalbe and Bryan Walsh, ‘On Cleaning Methods and the Raw Radiocarbon Data from the Shroud of Turin,’ International Journal of Archaeology, 2021) it suggests that the Oxford laboratory, in particular, removed either more or less minor residual contamination than the other laboratories, making its date slightly older than theirs.

14:34
Systemic just means it’s directional.

No, it doesn’t.

14:43
So when you plug that into the calculations, it gives about a 3-sigma level difference. I understand this is all technical jargon, but just so you understand, statistically, according to international statistic standards, you have to be within 2-sigma level differences, and that’s what translates to say, well, we have a 95% degree of confidence that these results are accurate.

This is pure mumbo-jumbo, and reflects neither the Nature report nor the subsequent statistical analyses. Dale is way out of his depth here, and has no idea what any of this means. It is in fact derived from some reasonable, if misguided, calculations of Bob Rucker, but it is obvious that Dale doesn’t understand them at all.

15:42
We have a proven systematic bias at play in the results obtained, which means we have no confidence as to those results being accurate.

We do not have evidence of any kind of bias, let alone proof, and although, as suggested by the new evidence referred to above, there is evidence of a chronological gradient across the same area, none of the statistical surveys have suggested that an overall date of, say, 1200 AD – 1400 AD, can be rejected.

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Part Two – Blood

22:23
In terms of the Shroud’s bloodstains in particular, I think it’s important to note that these are often neglected.

I don’t think the blood has been neglected at all; quite the reverse. Concentration on the blood has obscured proper investigation of the image, the plain, unmarked cloth, and the waterstains, the last two of which have a great deal more to tell us.

23:07
We can tell the blood clots were transposed to the linen fabric during something called fibrinolysis. […] It just means the clots were liquified sufficiently for the blood to transfer from the body to the cloth as a serous-laden liquid.

This encapsulates a major difficulty with an authenticist model. Fresh blood can drip onto and along, and penetrate cloth, and probably did. However, in the authenticist model, most of the bloodmarks on the cloth appear to have derived from marks on the crucified body that must have been dry by the time the cloth was laid over it. As dry blood does not transfer, various speculations have been made to try to liquify it again. Maybe it rained, or the body was wiped with water, or some physiological process which only occurs in living blood in a living body (fibrinolysis) somehow occurred outside the body even after the blood had dried. None of these are adequate.

23:45
What’s also amazing is that these bloodstains appear more or less intact. […] They’re in the same size, shape and form as ordinary bloodflows would have formed on a human body and congealed on a human body. There’s no evident smearing, alteration or damage or disruption to these bloodstains.

It doesn’t amaze me. Dribble some blood on a cloth and let it dry and you’re there. Of course, it’s probably difficult to wrap a bleeding corpse in cloth and expect to get unsmeared bloodstains, but then, it’s probably easier if all the stains are dry and only become wet again after being wrapped in the cloth. This is a very post-hoc-proper-hoc attempt at an explanation.

24:20
In 2018 there were a couple of Shroud skeptics, who performed a blood-pattern analysis, and they claimed the opposite of the pro-Shroud side. They said, well, guess what, the blood-flows are totally unrealistic. It [the blood flows on the Shroud] didn’t conform to the results they got in their series of six experiments.

Determinedly misrepresenting non-authenticist research is typical of the desperation of the authenticist cause. Matteo Borrini – a Roman Catholic – and Luigi Garlaschelli demonstrated two simple findings, and published them in the peer-reviewed (and don’t we just love peer-review when it supports our cause, but hate it when it weakens it!) Journal of Forensic Science (‘A BPA Approach to the Shroud of Turin,’ 2017). They showed that blood, paint or any other liquid will not flow down an incline unless it is much closer to vertical than is usually thought probable in a crucifixion, and they showed that blood (paint, etc.) flowing from a lesion in the chest of a body lying down will flow sideways off the body, not along the thorax towards the hip. Authenticist criticism of these findings has been petty (an article on Garlaschelli once appeared in Playboy) and irrelevant (they used a mannequin and simulated blood instead of a tortured man), and has largely missed much more sensible objections.

24:44
Their methods and their assumptions are utterly flawed. They don’t take into account various variables that would have applied to the Shroud man such as sweat, or did he have dirt on him? This would affect the blood flows. What about the effect of his injuries on the blood flows, the various positions of the body when blood was flowing? You know, things like temperature, or was the body washed or not, or was it maybe just a partial washing?

This is grasping at straws. Some of these considerations are irrelevant, and others are trivial, to the aim of the experiments. The “various positions of the body when blood was flowing” was the point of the experiments, and was “taken into account.” In an attempt to prove this paper to be irrelevant, John Jackson, it is claimed, supervised a series of much better experiments, specifically designed to refute Borrini and Garlaschelli’s findings, and either presented his results, or was due to present them, at a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in 2019. Nothing whatever has been heard of these experiments since the AAFS program was published shortly before the meeting.

25:24
For some of the experiments the stuff they used as, quote unquote, “blood” was essentially runny red water.

Well, blood really is “essentially runny red water.” In the paper’s words “In experiments 1, 5, and 6, synthetic blood was used for convenience. Preliminary tests confirmed that the behavior of whole human blood and synthetic blood were identical, and that the results of the experiments were super imposable.” The synthetic blood used was from a reputable forensic science supplier, Sirchie, and (from the Sirchie website) “developed to have the same physical characteristics as human blood, such as viscosity, surface tension and color.” Incidentally, for the other experiments (2, 3 and 4), real human blood was used.

25:32
That has nothing comparable to the viscosity of the blood of the Shroud man. [He] would have been in hypovolaemic shock; and he’d been scourged and crucified, and that sort of thing. The resources of the blood would have been depleted over that time, so there’s just no comparison between the runny red water they used in their experiments and actual human blood that’s depicted on the Shroud man.

I beg to differ. And so, I guess, did the peer-reviewers of the Journal of Forensic Scientists. The viscosity of the blood is an important characteristic, but there is no suggestion that it was so viscous that it could not flow through the capillaries of the body, and it order to do that at all, it needs to be very fluid. Consequently it cannot have had a very high viscosity as it left the body. It may be that the synthetic blood and blood from a severely dehydrated man are slightly different, but the idea that “there’s just no comparison” is absurd.

26:15
Many of the bloodstains also are darker around their perimeters. There’s a darker red perimeter with a milder red to pinkish colour in the centre. It’s an effect similar to paper chromatography.

This isn’t true, and suggests that Dale has not, in fact, studied the bloodstains in detail. Some of the bloodstains seem to have a lighter area within them, but none can be said to have dark perimeters. Many of the bloodstains are darker in the middle than they are at the edges. If there is any chromatographic effect at all, it is that the pale to colourless medium has seeped further out from the centre than the red particulates, be they paint particles or erythrocytes. Here is a picture of three of the most prominent bloodstains, contrast enhanced to show all the above clearly:

26:34
Also many of the bloodstains feature an invisible serum retraction ring. It’s only visible through ultraviolet fluorescence.

A very few of the bloodstains feature a fluorescent border otherwise undetectable. Whether this caused by serum or a different liquid is undetermined. Here are the same bloodstains as above seen by ultraviolet fluorescence to illustrate this:

A faintly more fluorescent border can be seen along the top edge of the spear wound, and around the extending prong of the wrist wound. The forehead epsilon shows no fluorescent border at all.

26:48
I know Hugh denies this. […] There are no body images underneath the bloodstains.

Hugh does indeed deny this, and his recent survey of Mark Evans’s micrographs demonstrates clearly why. The evidence of Heller and Adler is dependent on observations that Eugenia Nitowski, examining the same raw material, was unable to confirm. She wrote, “Alan Adler photographed the surface of Shroud image fibres and noted that they appeared corroded. This was not reported, to my knowledge, by anyone else, however, on my own Jerusalem Test Cloth 4 I found image fibres to be corroded, but I never observed this on Shroud fibres.” (Unpublished file of documents headed ‘Criteria for Authentication,’ 1986.) It may be significant that none of Heller and Adler’s micrographs have been published. A close comparison between the colours of non-image fibres, image fibres, and fibres from blood areas that appear freed of their adherent blood shows that the latter look more like image fibres than non-image fibres.

27:08
There are on-image and off-image bloodstains.

There is indeed a trickle of blood off one elbow, which seems to suggest very liquid blood, although it emanates from the alleged “clotted” trickle of blood down the arm. This is inconsistent. Medievalists suppose that all the blood was trickled on in a liquid form.

27:35
Certain bloodstains that would have been on the side of the man’s face or head for example: those are on the Shroud of Turin.

This is a rather ad hoc explanation for the unrealistic bloodstains down the outer surface of the hair. If the Shroud was wrapped around the head, and collected stains on the sides of the cheeks, and then lifted up off the body to lie in a horizontal plane to collect the image, vertically above the body below, then the bloodstains off the cheeks could appear to be wider apart than they really were, with the image of the hair superimposed upon them. However, we do not spot anything similar regarding any blood from the sides of the arms or legs.

29:17
Blood expert Dr Alan Adler, who suggested that the bilirubin, during Jesus’ […] being tortured and crucified, this would have had a physical effect on him, and it would have caused the bilirubin to cause the blood to remain red for ever.

More clutching at straws. Adler was not a blood specialist as such. His expertise was in porphyrins, which are the roots of numerous biological materials such as chlorophyll as well as blood. Bilirubin is a breakdown product of blood, and it’s yellow (it is the cause of jaundice), not pink. No experiments with blood have ever succeeded in producing the pink stain associated with the Shroud “blood,” and arch-authenticist Giulio Fanti has decided that the blood must have been “reinforced” with a colouring agent.

30:26
Paolo di Lazzaro’s done experiments showing that ultraviolet radiation would keep the bloodstains enduringly red.

No, he hasn’t. His paper in Applied Optics (‘investigating the Colour of the Blood Stains on Archaeological Cloths: the Case of the Shroud of Turin,’ 2018) shows that ultraviolet radiation, although altering the brown colour of old blood very slightly towards a redder spectral analysis, has almost no effect visually.

Left: a Shroud blood stain (from Shroud 2.0)
Right: High-biliubin blood stain just after lamp irradiation with UV. (From di Lazzaro, op. cit.)

30:40
Other scientists have also said that neutron radiation would also keep the Shroud’s bloodstains red, or perhaps some combination of neutron and ultraviolet radiation working together.

There is no data to support this at all. It is an optimistic guess.

31:50
It has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt. Even the Shroud skeptic, your friend Hugh Farey, confirms it is in fact real blood.

The fact that I think the bloodstains contain real blood is not confirmation that they are, and it is certainly not proof. The blood on the Shroud does not respond to the usual “tests for blood” at all, and Heller and Adler had to resort to attempting to identify chemical derivatives rather than intact blood. The trouble is that these derivatives can also derive from other biological material than blood. My own view is that their battery of tests, coupled to the less well described tests of Pierluigi Baima-Bollone, amount to an overall probability that there is real blood, but to describe that conclusion as either confirmation or proof is unjustified.

32:35
We haven’t proven it’s specifically human blood.

If the blood on the Shroud really is blood, I think it is more likely to be human than anything else. Human blood would not only be more appropriate to a religious context of manufacture (as opposed to a fake relic factory, which I don’t think was the source of the Shroud), but was also easier to obtain in a studio environment, as blood-letting was such a common medical procedure.

32:45
In the first place the ultraviolet fluorescence studies prove that there are these serum retraction rings…

No, of course they don’t. To place this evidence “first” clearly demonstrates the weakness of the blood identification case. Assuming that these ‘rings’ (there are very few places where any fluorescent borders are visible at all) are associated with the medium in which the red chromophore is carried, there are nevertheless numerous biological liquids which fluoresce, some being associated with anti-coagulants, and many not being associated with actual blood at all.

32:50
… and they’re invisible to the human eye. Imagine some medieval artist trying to paint bloodstains with invisible retraction rings – I don’t buy it.

This a ludicrous straw-horse. Protein based tempera fluoresces whether the artist knows anything about it or not.

33:06
That’s an incredible thing right? That’s something that only blood can do.

No,It isn’t. Tempera paint does it too.

33:11
My friend Teddi Pappas has done her own experiments for her upcoming book, and even if the artist painted using real blood, it’s still impossible for painting with a paintbrush and using blood to obtain these invisible serum retraction rings.

The fact that one determinedly authenticist scholar has not obtained by experiment a result which she very clearly did not want to obtain in the first place is not, to my mind, proof that such a result is “impossible.” We await her report on her experiments with eagerness.

33:42
There’s also something called the Teichmann test that was performed…

Four different independent examinations of the alleged blood have been performed, using different tests and producing different results. Two determined that there is blood on the Shroud, and two that there was no evidence of blood. Each successive group decried the incompetence of the ones before. As I have said, on the whole, the findings persuade me that blood is in fact, probably present, but quoting any individual result is an unfair summary of the evidence.

33:57
There was also spectroscopy, which detected certain blood proteins, like haemoglobin.

The spectroscopy measurements most certainly did not detect haemoglobin, and in fact are some of the weakest evidence for blood, as they do not closely resemble any recognised blood spectra at all. They are explored at length and in detail elsewhere at medievalshroud.com.

34:05
There’s actually multiple studies on this front; independent studies that all detected this, all published in the peer-reviewed literature.

No. The STuRP studies, by Heller and Adler, Sam Pellicori and Roger and Marion Gilbert are deeply contradictory.

34:36
In 1985, Baima-Bollone came in…

Pierluigi Baima-Bollone extracted his samples from the Shroud immediately before the STuRP team carried out their tests in 1978. The fact that the Americans did not attend to the Italians’ findings for seven years speaks of cultural imperialism, not science. Even now, Baima-Bollone’s work is not considered as thorough or as accurate as STuRP’s, even though he was working from whole thread, not detached fibres.

36:36
There’s also the Amido Black test. […] McCrone kinda cheated on this front – and I know Hugh’s not going to appreciate that language […] McCrone used an insufficient sample size…

Dale is so confused here that it’s no wonder all he can do is say that McCrone cheated. The Amido Black test is for proteins, and McCrone used it to demonstrate the presence of proteins on the image fibres, not, as Dale says, the absence of proteins on blood fibres. He tested numerous fibres from numerous different blood, image and non-image tapes. Where Dale got his “only one fibre” claim from I can’t guess, but it’s a profound misunderstanding.

37:25
STuRP did the same test on many blood Shroud fibres, and they used an actual sufficient sample size with proper controls, and guess what, they got a positive result.

No, Dale’s got this completely the wrong way round. Neither McCrone nor “STuRP” (by which we mean Heller and Adler; nobody else investigated the chemistry of the Shroud) denied that there was protein on the bloodstains. They would test positive for protein whether they were blood or paint. Heller and Adler were trying to demonstrate that there was no protein on the image fibres. Unfortunately they, like McCrone, also got a positive Amido Black result from the image fibres. They explained this to themselves by saying that Amido Black not only stains protein, but also cellulose, and therefore was not diagnostic for protein. However, McCrone points out in his book, three times, that you have to wash the sample with acetic acid to remove excess stain from the cellulose. He both stained and then unstained non-image samples in this way. There is at least one photograph in his book showing a blob of blue-stained material attached to a fibre – that’s clearly not the fibre itself.

37:36
I believe them. Their methodology was sound science. Walter McCrone’s wasn’t.

Of course. How very authenticist. I’ve no idea what they said, what they were testing or what their results were, but I believe them anyway. Yay!

==========================

Part Three – Limestone

48:56
Limestone is typically contaminated with strontium and calcium and both of these elements are found on the Shroud.

Contaminated with calcium? Pure limestone is calcium carbonate, not ‘contaminated’ with calcium.

49:31
César Barta […] says that the rock from Calvary is noticeably purer than other limestones (dust) around the world.

How would he know? He only looked at samples from two very precise locations, and quotes no references for any others. This lack of control is both typical and fatal to his argument.

49:43
Apparently it’s a ratio of 0.24, calcium to strontium.

We’re getting out of our depth again. The 0.24 is a strontium to calcium ratio, not calcium to strontium, and it’s actually 0.24 Sr/Ca x1000. However, this is indeed quite a small proportion, as limestones go.

49:47
The limestone found on the Sudarium and the Shroud match that ratio.

Absolutely false. The ratio of strontium to calcium in the Sudarium was measured at 0.75 Sr/Ca x1000, which is 3 times more than the Calvary limestone, and the ratio in the Shroud, derived from the µm/cm² values calculated in Morris, Schwalbe and London, varies from 5.2 to 15.8 Sr/Ca x1000, which is enormous. It is true that the Sudarium ratio is much less than that of the limestone of Oviedo, where that relic is now kept, but it exactly matches the limestone of Southern Spain, where it probably originated. A few more examples of limestones from “around the world” would have made this clear.

50:18
[Riggi] found that there was limestone dust in [the dust he vacuumed from the space between the Shroud and the backing cloth in 1978] and it’s, again, similar to that found in the rock in Jerusalem.

Only in the sense that they’re both limestone. No quantitative analysis was carried out.

50:42
Eugenia Nitowski and another researcher performed actual experiments in Israel, in Jerusalem, and they said that spectral analysis, as well as these two independent investigations, found interesting concentrations of elevated calcium and low strontium amounts in certain body image areas, […] the left knee, the bottom of the feet, and also the tip of the nose.

All very muddled. Nitowski’s report includes a summary of other findings. Her team analysed the strontium/calcium ratio from dust on a ‘foot-area’ sticky tape slide, but nowhere else on the Shroud. Morris, Schwalbe and London took spectra from adjacent spots along two lines, from the nose outwards and from the edge of the heel outwards. No sticky tape slides were taken from the nose or the knee, and no spectra were taken from the knee at all. Morris did not find “interesting concentrations of elevated calcium and low strontium” anywhere.

51:19
They found it [the limestone from the feet] was a match.

No, they didn’t. They obtained spectra of limestone from the Shroud foot and from Jerusalem, and declared that they matched, but as I have shown in detail, they don’t.

52:02
[Levi-Setti] actually tested limestone samples from about nine other tomb complexes throughout Israel […] and guess what, according to him only the tomb in Jerusalem was a match to the foot sample on the Shroud of Turin.

No. Levi-Setti looked at various samples in different ways. The Shroud and the Jerusalem samples were the only two subject to Scanning Ion Microprobe analysis, with the results discussed above. In Nitowski’s report, eight samples were taken from seven different sites, one of which was too closely associated with a volcano to be worth comparison. Samples from the remaining six sites (including Jerusalem) were subject to X-Ray Dispersive Analysis, and their charts printed, but no comparison chart of the Shroud was also included, so it is impossible to judge whether the Shroud matched any of them. Incidentally it is disappointing that Dale uses Mark Antonacci’s popular book Test The Shroud as his source of information rather than the report of Eugenia Nitowski herself.

54:04
César Barta has responded on my show directly to this claim of Hugh’s [that the Sudarium limestone does not match that of Calvary] and provided his counter response.

To listen to Dale, you might think that my claim was merely a skeptical reaction rather than a clear demonstration of my point of view using the evidence provided by Nitowski and Barta themselves. This would be a serious misunderstanding. Barta’s ‘counter response’ is on Dale’s website, and is feeble. It begins with the assumption that the Sudarium is authentic. That being so, says Barta, “Therefore, the dust found on the Sudarium should come from the burial site. A contamination prior to the 13th century is not probable because the documentation says that the Sudarium was inside the Holy Ark. If the Sudarium were in Spain in another place other than Oviedo, it would be inside the Ark, and it was not being contaminated.” This is putting the conclusion before the evidence. Radiocarbon dating and historical record place the origin of both the Sudarium and the Holy Ark in southern Spain at around the 7th/8th century. There is no evidence at all that either of them came from Israel. Barta concludes, “The ratio of strontium to calcium in these areas is consistent with the dust of the Calvary. We can only say that.” This, as I have demonstrated, is simply untrue.

54:09
Hugh denies this. He says, well, it’s not close enough of a match, and in fact, there are other areas [which], if we sampled the limestone dust, would be even closer than the Jerusalem limestone is to the Shroud limestone.

This sounds like hopeful speculation, and is a mischaracterisation of my research. It is not a hope that “if we sampled” other areas, we “would” find a closer match; I actually quote an actual analysis of limestone from southern Spain and it actually is a closer match.

54:37
In 2015, César Barta did an X-Ray Fluorescence comparison between the spectral studies of the Shroud […] at the tip of the nose, and then the Sudarium of Oviedo tip of the nose, and they found this remarkable statistically significant higher presence of this unique signature of this limestone dust, these calcium and strontium levels. […] And this unique signature matches precisely on the Sudarium of Oviedo and the Shroud of Turin.

Nothing of the kind. Morris , Schwalbe and London measured calcium and strontium levels on a series of ten contiguous spots outwards from the tip of the nose, and derived these values, in µg/cm²:

These can be graphed as follows (strontium values multiplied by 80 for clearer comparison):

Barta measured calcium and strontium levels at 57 places around the Sudarium, rather indistinctly indexed on a photo of the whole cloth. Spot 689 is on the bridge of the nose, and 690 just above the tip. Below it, clustered around the mouth, are 691 – 698. Values are in parts per million.

These can be graphed like this (strontium values multiplied by 1000 for clearer comparison):

It is strikingly clear that there is no “remarkable statistically significant higher presence” of anything at all, and no similarity between the Sudarium and the Shroud.

56:23
That unique signature also corresponds to the rock of Calvary in Jerusalem.

No, it doesn’t. See above.

56:57
César Barta […] directly responds to this criticism.

Not well. See above.

==========================

Part Four – The Textile

And so to our last fantasy. To be fair, Dale is much less dogmatic about the antiquity of the Shroud as a fabric, but even so, continues to plug contentious and long-discredited ideas as if they were fact.

1:01:10
Rebecca Jackson has proven that the Shroud dimensions are multiples of an alleged Syrian Cubit.

I think it was Ian Dickenson who first scrabbled around looking for ancient cubits that might fit the Shroud, and finally discovered an Assyrian cubit from a palace 900 km from Jerusalem and built 700 years before Jesus was born. Whoopee! This, some authenticists claim without any justification at all, was the standard cubit of the Middle East at the time of Christ. In fact, Roman, Hebrew and Egyptian cubits from the time of Christ all seem to have been considerably shorter, and the Shroud doesn’t fit them at all.

1:01:50
The bottom line is we can’t prove the shroud as following an ancient cubit system, but we can prove it’s consistent with some of them.

As usual with these “consistencies,” the Shroud is actually more consistent with the medieval ell than it is with the ancient cubit.

1:02:37
The Shroud is […] almost supernaturally flexible. It’s not brittle. All the other textiles… Whether it’s medieval or first century, it’s too flexible, it’s in too much of a good condition, it’s almost like the feel of a modern-day T-shirt. Even if this thing dates to the 1300s it should be way more brittle, like all other textiles are. This thing’s been amazingly preserved, or maybe even supernaturally preserved…

Nonsense. Plenty of ancient and medieval textiles are as flexible now as they ever were. The Tarkhan dress, from 5000 BC, is flexible enough to be fitted over a mannequin, and medieval textile museums are full of examples of linen clothing that has preserved its flexibility just as well as the Shroud.

1:04:05
Mechthild Flury-Lemberg found that the stitching pattern of the seam is actually most similar to the stitching found in the hem found in cloths at the tombs of Masada.

No. She noticed that the seam resembled a diagram in Avigail Sheffer and Hero Taylor-Granger’s account of the textiles excavated from Masada (‘Textiles from Masada – a Preliminary Selection’, in Masada IV: the Yigael Yadin Excavations 1963-1965 : Final Reports), but does not seem to have commented on whether it also resembled seams found anywhere else, which indeed it does.

1:05:08
You can find the same patterns [from other periods] but the ones in the first century are slightly more similar to the Shroud, in [Flury-Lemberg’s] expert opinion.

That’s not what she said. All we have recorded is: “Examples of this same kind of seam are again to be founded among the textile fragments of Massada [sic] already mentioned above. To conclude this chapter, it can be said that the linen cloth of the Shroud of Turin does not display any weaving or sewing techniques which speak against its origin as a high quality product of the textile workers of the first century.” (‘The Linen cloth of the Turin Shroud: Some Observations of its Technical Aspects,” Sindon, 2001)

1:07:15
[John Tyrer’s] conclusion, as an expert, was “The impression I’m left with is that the cloth is a much cruder and probably earlier fabric than the backing and patches. This lifts the Shroud out of the Middle Ages more than anything I have seen about the textile.”

To describe the 3/1 herringbone as “cruder” than the Holland cloth and patches surely requires a bit of unpacking. The latter two were both simple tabby ‘over-one-under-one’ cloths, and very easy to make in vast abundance, whereas the set-up and the weave of the Shroud required considerably greater skill and concentration. As for “earlier,” so it was, about 200 years earlier than the backing.

What’s more, Tyrer’s account of the Shroud being “a very poor product by comparison [with the backing]. It is full of warp and weft weaving defects, many mistakes in ‘drawing-in’ ” (‘Shroud X-Radiographs,’ in the BSTS Newsletter, 1984) contrasts rather oddly with his slightly earlier, “The point has been made that the regularity of the yarns in the Shroud would indicate a later date than the first century for its production. So far as I can judge from photographs, they appear to be quite even and regular.” (‘Looking at the Turin Shroud as a Textile,’ Shroud Spectrum International, 1983)

1:10:50
There is an independent argument […] stronger than Hugh’s argument, that the Shroud has to date to the first century or pre-date the medieval period. It can’t be medieval.

Wanna bet?

1:11:06
This comes from the Italian textile expert Piero Vercelli, and he said, based on the loom, the Shroud is, quote unquote, “without warp and weft regulators.” This proves it must be ancient, not medieval.

Naturally Dale has no idea what this means, but it’s quite a good argument nevertheless. Vercelli claims that the weft threads of the Shroud undulate as they cross from one side of the Shroud to the other, which, he thinks, demonstrates that the loom on which is was made did not have a whole-width reed, which is a feature of treadle-looms, and that therefore the Shroud was not made on a treadle loom. Let’s unpack. Here is a simplified diagram of a loom:

The weaver sits on the right hand side, lifting the ‘Heald shafts’ one by one with his feet on the treadles, and pushing the shuttle (here labelled ‘Filling yarn’) through the space between the lifted and unlifted threads. He then pulls the ‘Reed’ (also called the ‘Beater’ or ‘Comb’) towards him to squash the weft thread tightly against the previously woven cloth. On page 55 of his book La Sindone della sua Struttura Tessile, Vercelli illustrates an early treadle loom, and describes its working. Here is the loom:

And here is Vercelli’s description: “This loom, despite being of very rudimentary manufacture, presents, compared to previous ancient looms, the innovation of the movement of the healds operated by pedals controlled by the feet of the weaver who, having both hands free, can operate the fixed comb with one hand and insert the weft-carrying shuttle with the other, considerably speeding up the weaving operation.” (translation by Google). Note that Vercelli refers to a “fixed comb” which captures all the warp threads. He goes on: “These devices allow the threads and wefts to be kept absolutely perpendicular to each other and with uniform density even in the presence of different diameters,” and concludes, “By comparing the weaves of the wrappings of mummies with the Shroud cloth, […] I can deduce that the latter was certainly not built with such an advanced concept machine. In fact, the previously listed characteristic [the absolutely horizontal weft] is not present.”

Vercelli’s evidence for this is a collection of photos of the back of the Shroud – on which the weft threads appear much more clearly than on the front – in Gian Maria Zaccone’s book, The Two Faces of the Shroud. Here is one that Vercelli reproduces, with enhanced contrast and a few weft threads emphasised to illustrate the undulation:

Game, set and match? Well, no. What, you must be asking, would the Shroud look like if the whole-width comb was actually used? Vercelli’s book contains a small sample of modern, machine woven 3/1 herringbone twill glued to the inside cover, but that’s a far cry from hand-weaving, and the difficulty of pulling the ‘comb’ really tightly into the emerging cloth. Here, for example, is a representative sample of my own replica “Shroud” cloth, showing that the undulations Vercelli claims are eliminated by a whole-width comb, are still present after all.

What’s more, on page 91 of his book, the last page before the appendices, Vercelli reproduces a picture of a slightly more sophisticated loom, from the 15th century ‘Historia Ordinis Humiliatorum,’ and says it “depicts a weaving workshop with a monk preparing the warp and another weaving on a horizontal pedal loom. Only with the advent of this type of loom, equipped with pulleys and balance wheels, was it possible to create the twill pattern similar to that of the fabric of the Shroud. The characteristic of this design is that the crossing point, at each weft insertion, is moved by one warp thread. This weave can give the fabric, depending on the passage of the threads in the healds, an appearance of diagonal parallel lines from left to right or vice versa or a herringbone appearance.” (Bolding mine) Here is the loom:

Like most of the other experts who have examined the Shroud, Vercelli knew that there was no evidence of the kind of loom that might reasonably be expected to have created the Shroud before the Middle Ages, so found himself, as a convinced authenticist, in a dilemma. His concluding words are: “It must be assumed, however, that, since the Shroud was known about some centuries before 1421 [the date of the book above], it was woven on an ancient vertical loom, with the heddle rods being moved by hand,” and on the cover of his book is an imaginary reconstruction of what he thought must be required.

Left: ‘Upright or Vertical Looms from the Tomb of Thot-nefer at Thebes, c. 1425BC,’
from H. Ling Roth, Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms, 1913
Right: Reconstruction of “probable” loom on which the Shroud could have been woven,
Piero Vercelli, La Sindone nella sua Struttura Tessile, 2010

And… that’s it. 75 minutes of Dale being “always right,” and me being “always wrong.” LOL!