Calling All Presenters….

Ladies and gentlemen,

I’ve been watching some recent Shroud videos on YouTube. Many are of pastors talking to their own, or other’s congregations, and are well-meaning but poorly focussed, and others are discussion blogs, in which notable Shroud presenters are interviewed by the hosts, mostly with the object of fortifying their, and their audiences’, convictions that the Shroud is authentic. In almost every case, it doesn’t take five minutes before they commit some sindonological solecism that instantly marks them out as a fraud. Now I know you don’t want to appear a fraud, even if none of your audience sees through you, so I’ve compiled a list of red flags, any of which, as soon as I hear them, confirms to me that the presenter is a mountebank. The question is, are you one of them? Luckily for you, most of your audience either isn’t listening, or doesn’t care, and nearly all mostly only want their pre-convictions bolstered, not challenged, and you will be lulled into a false sense of authority by their gratitude. However, if you want to make headway into less certain waters, where people want to be given information they can check for themselves, you would do well to have your laptops open and your fingers on the Ctrl-F keys so you can reassure yourselves that you haven’t made any of the crass faux pas listed below. This especially applies to all you presenters at St Louis next month. The list of speakers is one of the most impressive I’ve ever seen collected in one place, so don’t spoil your credibility, and by extension the credibility of the entire conference, for want of a horse-shoe nail. Are you ready? Let’s begin. In alphabetical order…

AB +
Most of you won’t have kept up with the research on the identification of ancient blood, so I’ll let the AB pass, but “positive”? Somebody in the ignorant past seems to have misread “tested positive for blood type AB” for “tested as blood type AB positive,” which doesn’t mean the same thing. No doubt he just didn’t know the difference, but whatever he wrote was influential, and the error spread. It has generally been corrected nowadays, but I see that at least one of you is still propagating it, so cut it out. Nobody has even researched the Rhesus factors of Shroud blood, let alone determined them.

ATHEISTS
Reference to atheists has almost no relevance to the study of the Shroud and is nearly always simply a term of hate-speech towards anybody who thinks the Shroud may not be authentic. Don’t use it that way; it’s probably best not to use it all. By far the largest – or certainly the most vociferous – group of people who think the Shroud can’t be genuine are fundamentalist Christians, who don’t think the Shroud fits the gospel descriptions of Jesus’s burial or Isaiah’s description of the ‘man of sorrows.’ And most of the current scholars of the Shroud, the ones who have studied its science and its history and think it medieval, are Catholics.¹

BAYESIAN
Bayesian statistics are a well founded method of calculating the probabilities of future events from data derived from previous ones. At no point are guesses or estimations part of these calculations, so if you have ‘supposed’ the probability of there being blood on the Shroud at 95%, or the probability that there is pollen from Palestine at 80% or any other such estimate, then throw your whole paper in the bin. It’s not mathematics, it’s blarney. If you are a statistician you know that very well, and if you’re not, then you’ve no business to be meddling with it. Who, after all, are you trying to fool? Making up nonsense that purports to show that the Shroud is 99.9% probably real sounds much more like someone trying to convince himself rather than anybody else.

CONGRUENCE
As in “points of congruence.” Unless you can physically show some, don’t use this phrase, which was introduced into Shroud studies by Alan Whanger, and has been used to compare the Shroud with coins, artwork, and more recently the sudarium. According to Whanger he had “tabulated and documented for anyone who cares to look, 211 points of congruence between the computer enhanced image over the right eye of the Shroud and the Pontius Pilate coin of Filas.” Well, I’ve cared to look – I was even in an interview with Whanger once – but no such tabulation has ever been published. Even worse is to make up stories that “you only need [pick-a-number] points of congruence to establish identity in a court of law,” which is nonsense, especially if you can’t in fact demonstrate any at all. Really, you all know this very well, so if you’re going to use ‘points of congruence’ you’d better be able to show them.

CUBIT
Now I know you know what a cubit is in theory, but in practice? Have you seen the Roman period cubits in the British Museum? Or measured the length of the various walls of Herod’s palace – built, presumably, to a ‘cubit’ measure? Then you’ll know that cubits are too short for the Shroud to be two cubits wide, and you’ll know that, since the side-strip has been cut and rejoined, it was once even wider than it is now. For years the Shroud was given the convenient fiction of being 14’4″ long and 3’7″ wide (an 8:2 ratio), but that was never true. Since 1998 its width has been variously assessed as between 111cm and 114cm (3’8″ – 3’9″), which, if it were four times longer, would make its length between 444cm and 456cm (14’8″ – 15’0″), but it isn’t that long, being something between 435cm and 443cm (14’3″ – 14’6″).

EXPERT
Whatever you do, don’t call yourself an expert, don’t let your host call you an expert, and don’t pretend you have spent x years studying the Shroud… even if you have! It shouldn’t, but the very word gives you away, as it is invariably accompanied by one of more of the other ‘phoney-signifiers’ you can find on this page. Barrie Schwortz probably knew more about the technical details of the Shroud than any of you, but he was at some pains to declare, often, that he was not a scientist. John Heller, when introduced as a blood specialist, declared that it was “the last thing in the world that I am.” Both these people were, by any standards, experts in their field, but, being experts, they knew their limitations. Do you?

FLAGRUM
I can’t really blame you for this; I used to get it wrong too. The word flagrum does not appear in the bible. It just sounds more vicious than its diminutive flagellum, which is the word used by the evangelists. Either way, if you must mention it, don’t pretend that the scourge marks on the Shroud match the dumb-bell shapes on any known archaeological find, or that the picture you’re using to illustrate the kind of weapon that was used is either of an actual archaeological artefact or modelled on an archaeological artefact. It isn’t. The reconstruction was based on the Shroud, so it’s hardly surprising its lead tips match the marks on it.²

LEPTON
A couple of minor errors, which won’t damage your credibility much unless you aim to focus on these subjects, but you might as well get them right. This one refers to the alleged coins over the eyes of the Shroud image, which are prutah, small coins each worth two leptons, which were small Greek coins. You can call them dileptons, if you like, but just leptons, without qualification, demonstrates that you haven’t really researched the subject. Similarly….

MEDULLA
I think Ray Rogers started this, and it has been corrected since, but if you’ve used it, it will weaken your case, as it has weakened his. Contrary to his ideas, flax fibres do not grow like bamboo, there are no ‘growth nodes,’ and the hollow tube down the middle is the lumen, not the medulla. Heller and Adler didn’t get this wrong, which suggests that Rogers didn’t read their paper. Pontificating on the properties of flax fibres without knowing what you’re talking about is not confidence-inspiring.

NASA
Now what have you said about NASA? Does it appear in your presentation, and if so, in what context? Do you say NASA used VP-8 Image Analysers to make contour maps of the moon? If so, delete that passage and reflect on what you’ll say instead. Not only is it completely untrue, it exposes details about you that badly undermine your credibility as any kind of sindonologist. It suggests that you don’t know how a VP-8 analyser works, it suggests that you’ve never bothered to find out, it suggests that you don’t read much about the Shroud any more, and it suggests that you don’t really care about facts at all. That’s OK, perhaps, in a proselytising sermon about the meaning of the Shroud in a church, but if you persist online, or at St Louis, you will lose all credibility.³

PATCH
If you’ve used the word in connection with the radiocarbon corner, you’ve really not kept up with Shroud studies and have no right to be presenting at all. I bet you’ve also said that it was the Poor Clare nuns of Chambéry who ‘patched’ the Shroud after the 1532 fire. You have, haven’t you? I can see you looking embarrassed. Where did you get that idea from? It certainly wasn’t from Joe Marino and Sue Benford, the originators of the ‘patch’ hypothesis, as you’ll know if you’ve read their paper or followed the subsequent discussion. But of course you haven’t, have you?⁴

PEER
As in ‘peer-review.’ Are you for it or against it? More importantly, do you use it as an argumentum ad auctoritatem? In your presentation, do you add weight to the credibility of STuRP findings by mentioning that they were published in ‘peer reviewed’ journals? It’s OK if you do, but you must remember that not one of STuRP’s peer-reviewed papers claim that the Shroud is 2000 years old. Most of them include a wish that the Shroud be radiocarbon dated as soon as practicable. On the other hand, other peer-reviewed papers in even more prestigious journals do state positively that the Shroud is medieval. To claim that peer-review is some kind of guarantee of truth when you want it to be, but not when you don’t want it to be is very dishonest, so don’t do it.

PROTOCOL
If you’ve got the word ‘Protocol’ in your presentation, there’s a strong probability that it is part of the phrase ‘Turin Protocol.’ Well, this may surprise you, but check it out. There never was a ‘Turin Protocol,’ so don’t waste your breath pretending that it was ‘violated.’ You can’t violate something which doesn’t exist. There was a conference in Turin in 1986, and various criteria were discussed, but nothing formal came of it. Some of the criteria were eventually adopted, and some rejected. There was a protocol for the radiocarbon tests, and it was infringed, which you might like to go into, but the moment you invoke the ‘Turin Protocol,’ you lose credibility.

QUAD
Let’s face it; you don’t know what this means, do you? Yes, I know you know it refers to ‘four’ of something, but what? Have you used it in the phrase ‘Quad Mosaic Images’? And have you illustrated your talk with a picture of one small corner of one of the four images available on shroud.com, rather than a picture of the whole image, or better still, pictures of all the images? And are you claiming that because the radiocarbon corner looks green in the image, that proves the corner is different from the rest of the cloth? Well, stop it; delete it; it makes you look ignorant, discredits your presentation and by extension, as I mentioned above, the whole conference. For a start the different colours are mostly artefacts of the lighting (hence the bright blue band across Jesus’s face), for a second they only encapsulate surface reflexivity, not the chemical composition of anything, and for a third, most importantly, the greener the image, the older the radiocarbon date, meaning that any visible contamination makes the Shroud look older, not younger, than it really is. That’s not what you want, so best not to mention it at all.

QUANTUM
Also ‘Hologram,’ ‘Quark,’ ‘Event Horizon,’ ‘Biophotonics,’ and other ‘sciency sounding’ words about which you know practically nothing. Don’t go there. You may succeed in bamboozling some of your audience who know even less than you, but in the unlikely event that there are any particle physicists present, you will expose yourself as a snake-oil salesman in your first three sentences. (What’s that? You say you are a particle physicist? Stop it. If you had any idea what you were talking about you wouldn’t apply it to the Shroud.)

STURP
Ah! The Gold Standard of scientific enquiry. A shorthand way of saying that Science has proved the Shroud is authentic. Top Scientists, Dozens of Peer Reviewed Papers, Thousands of Photographs, Thousands of Hours… This deserves a post all of its own, so I’ll just say this here: are you sure what you’ve said about STuRP is true?

TEMPLARS
Speculate, by all means, but remember that a) there were no Templars at the Siege of Constantinople in 1204, and b) that no family connection has been found between senior Templar Geoffroi de Charney and Lord of Lirey Geoffroi de Charny, so don’t pretend there must have been.

VINLAND
Sometimes mentioned in an attempt to discredit Walter McCrone, who declared the Vinland Map a forgery in 1972. For 50 years it was the subject of intense scrutiny (far more than the alleged ‘most studied artefact of all time’) before being comprehensively demonstrated to be a forgery in about 2015, completely vindicating McCrone’s conclusion of 40 years earlier. If you’re still using this, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Take it out.

WATTS
What have you written about Watts? That you would need trillions of Watts of UV light to make the image on the Shroud, and that’s more energy than a Super Bowl Stadium uses? Or something similar? Do you in fact know what a Watt is? Or how much energy was calculated to be necessary? A few of you do, but most of you haven’t a clue. If you don’t know, don’t use it; it sounds impressive to the ignorant, but won’t fool anybody who knows what a Watt actually is.⁴

PROOF
I’ve left these last two topics to the end, as they are probably the most important. Firstly, however certain you may be of your opinion, you can be pretty sure that others are not. So don’t pretend that something is ‘proved,’ or the ‘only possible’ explanation, or even ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ to anybody except yourself. You may think that, but lots of people don’t, and there is little more damaging to your reputation than insisting you have established something beyond reasonable doubt to people who disagree.

LIAR
And finally you will definitely weaken your argument if you suggest that anybody who disagrees with you is either lying or stupid or insane or evil. They may be wrong – some may actually be lying, stupid, insane or evil – but without any evidence other than the fact that they hold a different opinion from you, your accusation will do nothing but reflect on your own honesty, intelligence, sanity or Christianity. Some of your colleagues will go along with you, but if you want to be taken seriously by a wider community, you won’t go down that road. Judge people’s evidence, not their hearts and minds.

Are there any I’ve missed? Do feel free to suggest others, and I’ll slot them into their proper place….

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In response to some comments below, some references…

1). The leading Medievalist scholars are currently myself and Andrea Nicolotti, both Catholics. One half of the Garlaschelli/Borrini team, whose paper on the Shroud’s BPA patterns was published in the Journal of Forensic Science, is Catholic. Paul Damon and Douglas Donahue, first authors of the famous Radiocarbon paper, were Catholics. All the members of the 1973 Italian Commission, many of whom decided that the Shroud was medieval, were Catholics. All the senior members of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, including any who were involved with and studied the radiocarbon results, were Catholics. Famously, Ulysses Chevalier and Herbert Thurston were Catholics. As were Bishop Henri de Poitiers, Bishop Pierre d’Arcis and Pope Clement VII, but I concede that they’re not exactly current!

2). Teddi Pappas (below) points out that the verb ‘mastigoo’ is also used in the bible. So it is, but it is a verb, not a noun. John’s Gospel says that Jesus made a ‘flagellum’ to cleanse the temple with, and was subsequently ’emastigosen’ by Pilate. As the other evangelists make quite clear, Jesus was ’emastigosen’ with a ‘flagellum.’

3). NASA launched the Landsat program in the early 1970s, and acquired thousands of images of the earth. It subsequently sponsored independent institutions, mostly universities, to work on projects using the data, and some of them used the VP-8 Analyser to do what Adobe Photoshop calls ‘posterisation,’ which is the grouping of similarly coloured areas into a single, simplified patches. Thus areas of, e.g., ‘woodland,’ ‘fields,’ ‘wetland’ and ‘urban’ could be more easily distinguished and quantified. NASA never used the VP-8, and the institutions it sponsored did not use the Analyser’s ‘3D’ facility.

4). I have often remarked that the energy required to make the marks of the Shroud as proposed by Paolo di Lazzaro is about the same as is needed to boil a kettle.