If you buy a horse with a visible defect, then you’ve only yourself to blame if it dies suddenly, when it is as old in years as the moon was in days when it was born.
After all, wrote Anthony Fitzherbert in his Book of Husbandry in 1534, “the byer hath bothe his eyen to se, and his handes to handell.” This publication, as far as the Oxford English Dictionary knows, contains the first mention of the phrase, “caveat emptor”, which means, literally, “let the buyer beware.”
Or, metaphorically in this post’s case, don’t trust everything you read in the papers, or hear in lectures, even if they seem authoritative.
1534 was not only the year of publication of Fitzherbert’s handbook. It was also, among other things, the year when the Poor Clare nuns of Chambéry sewed patches over the burn-holes in the Shroud of Turin, two years after the fire which had threatened to destroy it completely.
So why does one of the most popular evangelists for the Shroud (Fr Robert Spitzer, Faith and Science – The Shroud of Turin – Ignited by Truth 2018, YouTube, 2018) announce that “the Shroud was caught in a fire in 1458 called the Fire of Chambray”, and another (Dr Wayne Phillips, The Shroud of Turin Presentation By Dr. Wayne Phillips, YouTube, 2015) label a powerpoint slide: “1583 Burn Holes”? A newspaper article from 2011 (nationalpost.com/holy-post/a-brief-history-of-the-shroud-of-turin) lists: “1653: Shroud is damaged by fire while in the keeping of nuns in Chambéry”, which is doubly wrong, and a writer for the Daily Express (McGrath, Ciaran, ‘‘Not scientific!’ Catholic Church HITS BACK after Turin Shroud ‘fake’ claims’“, July 19, 2018) says: “the fire in 1534 at Chambéry” which is quite close. A site called quizlet.com (‘Biblical Archaeology – Chapter 18 – Holy Shroud of Turin‘) has: “caused by a fire between 3rd and 4th December 1531 in Chambéry were the shroud was kept in a silver box”, which is even closer. Four minutes into Episode 1 of a 12-part series, “Shroud expert” Tony Cherniawski says: “This was from a fire in 1552” (‘Mr Campbell Explains – Mystery of the Shroud’). But why don’t they get it right?
Another site, cyberpenance.wordpress.com, in an article entitled “The Shroud of Turin 1: The Facts and History of The Shroud” (2017), says: “There was a fire in the 15th century in the chapel where it was being stored.” And a “History of the Shroud of Turin” at allaboutarchaeology.org says: “It then made its journey from Lirey, France to become the property of the Dukes of Savoy in Austria and they, in turn, moved it to Chambery, England until the year 1578.” England?
A one-off article by an uninformed journalist filling up space may be forgiven, or at least ignored, but Spitzer and Phillips are widely regarded ‘experts’, with several YouTube lectures to their name, and considerable persuasive influence. There are a number of other popular lecturers, usually referred to as ‘experts’, with an equally cavalier disregard for facts. Sometimes it is only inconvenient facts, but in Fr Spitzer’s case, in the video mentioned above, he makes 22 factual mistakes in a lecture lasting barely half an hour, and Dr Phillips (described as having a “degree in Shroud Studies from the Vatican Apostolorum College” which isn’t true; there is neither such a degree nor such a college) achieves a similar rate in his lecture to the Jesuit High School in Tampa.
Here are Fr Spitzer’s first ten ‘schoolboy mistakes’, with time-stamps for anybody who wants to verify them:
4:57 “… since 1872, when Secundo Pia took the first set of photographs”
(1898, Secondo Pia)
5:38 “In 1978, in the Shroud of Turin Research Project, it was determined that they should take samples from seven different parts of the cloth”
(1986, and the Turin Protocol, which actually only stipulated seven laboratories, not seven different parts of the cloth)
6:02 “the Shroud was caught in a fire in 1458 called the Fire of Chambray”
(1532, Chambéry)
6:30 “[the Poor Clare nuns] used fibres, they used threads, they used cloths that actually came from the 15th century”
(1534, 16th century)
7:06 “that controversial corner [the radiocarbon sample] was one of the places where the Shroud had molten metal that had gone through, where the sisters had actually sewn in fabric into the cloth”
(No, it was nowhere near any of the patches sewn on by the Poor Clares)
7:29 “Lo and behold! The carbon dating said the Shroud of Turin came from the 15th century”
(1260 – 1390, that’s 13th/14th century)
8:22 “they put those sticky tapes over every square centimetre of that cloth”
(Max Frei-Sulzer took about 38 samples altogether and Ray Rogers about 36 samples. Each sample had a less than 10cm2 coverage)
9:14 “the sisters dyed the cotton with a gum-dye mordant [?] that only came into Europe in the 13th century”
(There’s no such thing as a gum-dye dye mordant. There has never been any suggestion that the radiocarbon corner was dyed by “sisters”. The earliest archaeological evidence of the madder dye suspected by Ray Rogers is 6th century)
12:2 ” … pollen fossils…”
(not fossils, just pollen)
14:07 “…the square above his nose from the beating that he had received”
(the whole point about the square (which Paul Vignon called the ‘carré supra nasal’ is that it was supposedly due to a deformation in the cloth, not to the image, or any beating of the man who inspired it at all)
And here are Dr Wayne Phillips’s first ten, for good measure:
PART 1
(The tomb was carved from the limestone of Jerusalem)
8:10 “in 1535 there was a fire” (1532)
9:53 “Every single mosaic, every single painting before 525 paints a person that’s clean shaven, short hair, young…”
(Not even close. There are several bearded Christs from before, and dozens of unbearded Christs after, 525)
PART 2
1:07 “To convict somebody in a court of law you need 45 points of congruence”
(Wholly untrue. Guesswork)
1:33 “There is in Hungary a bible with a painting on the front, and to show you what was going on at that time, somebody painted this picture [which] carbon dates to 1196”
(Very confused. The Pray Codex is not a bible, has no picture on the front, and has never been carbon dated)
4:20 “This is the picture taken in 1898”
(Of course not. It’s in colour. Pia’s photos were all monochrome)
5:38 “This is a picture from 1931”
(Of course not. The burn holes are not covered with patches, so it must have been taken after the restoration of 2002)
7:40 Slide: “NASA STARTS IT ALL / “VP-8 Image Analyser” / Scans Surface Moon / 3D Image Mountains by Colour”
(This is nonsense. The VP-8 Image Analyser was not invented for or used by NASA, and would have been no use for making 3D images of the moon anyway)
8:04 “Satellites would go to the moon and Mars and look down to the surface and take pictures that would show three dimensional information based on the degradation of grey and black, they could figure how high a mountain was, how deep a valley was. This was used all the time by NASA”
(This is meaningless. Photos of the moon were, are mostly still are, just ordinary photos. There is no ‘degradation of grey and black’, whatever that means. The tones and colours of the lunar surface are created either by different materials or by shadow. The VP-8 could not be used to create three dimensional images from them)
PART 3
0:17 “This Shroud contains three types of pollen [unique to Jerusalem] that was gathered in the wind”
(No. “There are on the Shroud no pollens from any plant which grows exclusively in Jerusalem or in South Anatolia” (Werner Bulst, ‘The Pollen Grains on the Shrud of Turin’, Shroud Spectrum International, Issue 10). Further more, those pollens alleged to come from Jerusalem are from entomophilous flowers, carried by insects, not “gathered in the wind”)
Is it churlish to go on? I don’t think so. Popular lecturers, almost invariably termed ‘experts’ claim to use facts, or ‘science’, about the Shroud to persuade their audience of its authenticity. If they get the facts wrong, then their argument crumbles. With this in mind, I have set out to track down other ‘experts’ with lectures on YouTube, to see if they vaunt their scientific pseudo-authority as prominently as the two just analysed.
Donald Nohs took part in a discussion with Fr Mitch Pacwa on EWTN Live in 2015. He is the Associate General Director of the Confraternity of the Passion International, and to be fair, his discussion was centred on the spiritual purpose and use of the Shroud rather than the scientific details. Nevertheless, he should have known better than this:
8:02 “In 1204, Constantinople was sacked by the Knights Templars”
(The Templars took no part in the Sack of Constantinople)
9:35 “Geoffrey de Charny, the son [of Geoffrey de Charnay, the Templar] took possession of the Shroud”
(The second Geoffrey was the son of Jean de Charny and grandson of Hugh de Charny. Nothing historical connects the two Geoffreys)
13:14 “In the Shroud […] we discover in the back of the neck, huge splinters”
(Huge? Leoncio Garza-Valdez claimed he had discovered ‘oak tubules’ in the occiput (back of the head) which are microscopic fragments, invisible to the naked eye. This has not been confirmed)
13:47 “When you look at the Shroud you can see on the left knee the skin is actually [turned back] and you can actually see bone fragment”
(No, you can’t)
19:29 “To give you an idea of what a fibril is; it’s like if you took a human hair, and sliced that ten times, one of those slices would be a fibril”
(Nohs actually uses the word ‘splices’ which is surely just a vocal typo. Human hair varies in width by a factor of ten, but an average of about 50 microns is normal. The average width of a Shroud fibril is 13 microns, about a quarter of a hair’s width)
21:39 “It only takes one of those threads to skew the whole carbon dating”
(But not by much. A single 20th century thread among a hundred or so 1st century thread would skew the radiocarbon date by a hundred years or so, not by a thousand)
42:26 “There is indication on the Shroud that it was used as a tablecloth at the Last Supper. We do find drip stains along one edge of the cloth that would be consistent with the chazeret that you would use in the passover meal, and you can actually count those drip marks and you come up with thirteen spots, one Jesus, twelve apostles, on one side of the cloth.”
(The alleged drip marks are easily identified as candle wax on close inspection. There are not thirteen of them. Chazeret is the ‘bitter herbs’ of the Seder meal and does not drip. Nohs may be thinking of Charoset, which is more paste-like)
Next up, we have Dr Corrado Altomare, addressing the Agora Institute in 2016 (‘The Face of God: Shroud of Turin and Orthodoxy’). Actually, he is one of the best, and certainly makes fewer mistakes than many, but still…
15:08 “In first century commercial units, it’s eight cubits by two cubits”
(Very little is known of “first century commercial units”, but they were certainly smaller than the 55cm or so implied by this statement)
17:38 “This is […] a photograph taken with really heavy duty light from behind it.”
(No; it’s an ordinary photo from 2002 or after, without any patches)
18:23 “These are water stains that were left there from the fire at Chambéry in the 1500s.”
(No. The large diamond shaped water stains are not associated with the 1532 burns)
23:43 “This was now showing you a depiction of what the Shroud looked like in 1578, and you can see the burn marks here, with the patches”
(No. The illustration is from post-2002.There are no patches)
25:28 “Not only were they going to handle it, but they were going to cut pieces of cloth out of it as well”
(No; the STuRP team had no plans to cut pieces off it, nor did they)
25:59 “It wasn’t […] the original Holland cloth, but it was another cloth, a satin cloth that Clothilde, the Princess, had sewn on there because she felt the white cloth just didn’t do it”
(No. The Holland cloth backing from 1534 was still there. That had been in turn protected by its own backing since 1694, when Sebastian Valfré had attached one of black silk. Princess Clothilde replaced that black one with one of crimson taffeta in 1868)
41:07 “A lot of these things are recreated from archaeological finds throughout the Roman world of the day.”
(There are no archaeological finds of flagra)
41:24 “Interestingly enough the lead […] little dumb-bells […] the size of these actually fit into what we see on the Shroud”
(This is not an archaeological finding. The models fit the Shroud because they were modelled on the Shroud)
45:07 “If they have the archaeological digs correct […] it was […] about a mile”
(It’s actually less than half a mile from the traditional site of the Praetorium to the traditional site of Calvary)
Now let’s go to Brian Cray, in “Brian Cray Presents – The Shroud of Turin” from Bristol (USA) United Methodist Church in 2017.
2:40 “[Barrie Schwortz] did a lot of the pictures and the infra-red pictures as well”
(Schwortz did not take infra-red pictures)
7:16 “The image is literally eight cubits by two cubits, to the mark”
(No, it isn’t. See above)
9:33 “How would they even know it’s a […] herringbone weave? Well, they’ve got and expert in textile and a microscope”
(The weave is perfectly clear to the naked eye)
11:23 “This literally is what the bible says in translation: Fine linen wrappings”
(No. The on-screen quotation is from John 19:38-42, and it only says ‘linen wrappings’, not ‘fine’ ones. The Greek word used by John in these verses is ‘ὀθονίοις’ which means strips of cloth, not necessarily linen, and certainly not necessarily fine. The word is used both for bandages and sailcloth in other contexts by classical authors)
12:59 “A textile expert said: ‘it’s a very unique cloth; it’s made from a process using separate spools of bleached linen or flax called a hank, and […] prior to 410 AD it was used, but after 410 the process of making things with a hank with separate spools stopped being used”
(This is desperately confused. All cloth is made from ‘separate spools’. The Shroud was made on a loom where the 4200 or so warp threads were probably all separate, and the weft, threaded through the warp, was on shuttles with perhaps 200m wound onto each one. When one shuttle-full was used up, another was threaded in alongside and the weaving continued. 200m would make about 7cm of cloth. Each shuttle held a ‘hank’ or ‘skein’. These were individually prepared, and did vary in thickness, and perhaps very slightly in colour, but most of the bleaching was carried out on the whole cloth. The year 410 did not mark any change whatever in weaving technique)
13:33 “[A forger] has got to know how to do a herringbone weave, which […] after a couple of hundred years was no longer used”
(Various kinds of herringbone were common all over Europe from the Bronze Age onwards. 3/1 herringbone (or more correctly chevron) weave became much easier after the invention of the treadle loom)
13:42 “He’s then got to know that the shroud is separate pieces of cloth. There are actually lines in the cloth representing different portions of this hank”
(Even more confused. The Shroud is not separate pieces of cloth. The lateral bands on the Shroud represent different shuttles-full of thread; each shuttle-full being a separate hank)
14:11 “Three over one: used primarily in the first century during the time of Jesus”
(No. There is no first century 3/1 chevron weaving from the time of Jesus at all)
36:38 “They came up with this: it’s called a VP-8 image analyser, which is supposed to do the contours […] of the moon […] That’s what they used it for.”
(No. See above)
42:53 “This physicist said this (and this is all scientific jargon). […] ‘It is an event horizon. It is an event called a singularity’.”
(This is a garbled reference to monumental stained-glass artist Isobel Piczek, who was not a physicist at all. The terms ‘event horizon’ and ‘singularity’ cannot refer scientifically to the Shroud)
46:37 “How do you date coins? […] On our coins it has the year, right? [But] that’s not how you date a coin. Not in the 1st century. You dated it by who was reigning at the time. And you had an image of him.”
(The prutah allegedly on the Shroud did not have an image of anybody on it, but it did have the date, in terms of the year of the emperor’s reign)
And finally here are the first ten from ‘Mr Campbell explains – Mystery of the Shroud’, and the Should ‘expert’ Tony Cherniawski.
PART 1
4:40 “This was from a fire in 1552”
(Sigh… 1532)
4:53 “There’s a painting that was dated from 1192 that actually has a smaller set of burns that are also on the cloth”
(This a reference to an illustration in a manuscript (the Pray Codex), not a painting)
13:31 “On the other side of the forehead you actually see a long trickle that was from some kind of aorta”
(There aren’t different kinds of aorta, which is the principal exit blood vessel from the heart. The forehead is served by the superficial temporal artery)
17:32 “Giuseppe Enrie, a Frenchman”
(An Italian)
23:11 “The left knee, especially, seems to be torn open, and on the Shroud itself we find blood, we find cartilage and we find skin, and we find dirt, on that area, in microscopic detail”
(No, we don’t. No sticky tapes nor close-up photos were taken of the left knee)
24:50 “By the way that same limestone was found also on the tip of his nose”
(No, it wasn’t. No samples have been taken of the tip of the nose)
PART 2
18:21 “There is a burial mound called the Warrior Mound, from 4000 years ago, and this warrior king was buried in a cloth that was thirty feet long, of the same type of weave of linen as we see Jesus buried in”
(This is the Cave of the Warrior, from about 3800 BC (more like 6000 years ago than 4000). The burial cloth was of linen and about 7m long, but was plain tabby weave, not the same type as the Shroud at all)
18:54 “… at Masada, […] they found the burial site of what may have been one of the Jewish High Priests, and he also had the very same cloth, the same weave, same linen, as what Jesus was buried in”
(Only two burial sites have been found at Masada, one in a bath house, containing three teenagers, now identified as Roman, and the other in a cave at the bottom of the cliff, where up to 24 people may have been buried, although only about 200 individual bones have been found. There is nothing to suggest that either site included a High Priest, and no burial shroud can be identified. Of the textile fragments, most are wool, and although some are in fairly fancy damask weave, none are the same, or even similar, to the Shroud)
PART 3
6:32 “There’s a machine called the VP-8 image analyser which was used by NASA to study the topography of planets”
(No! No! No! See above)
10:09 “I can count 28 of his teeth”
(Nonsense. It is impossible to see all 28 teeth even supposing the Shroud to be an X-ray)
And so on and so on. And these are not points of any contention. These fifty or so errors (though some are overlaps) are errors of simple fact, not of opinion. Real Shroud experts cringe with embarrassment when they hear their cause being so casually misrepresented, as they know only too well that with friends like these, the Shroud suffers more than it ever does from its enemies.