I’ve been alerted to three short papers published at academia.edu, on the subject of the invincibility of Ray Rogers’s Thermochimica Acta paper (which was coincidentally the subject of my last post), by a Polish sindonologist who goes by the initials O.K. He has a website called Apologetyka (apologetyka.info), and I think I know his identity, but here respect his wish to remain anonymous.
Part 1 – “How Raymond Rogers PROVED that the 1988 C-14 dating of the Shroud was WORTHLESS.”
O.K. offers an idiosyncratic defence of Rogers, hovering between the the hagiographical and the patronising. His opening words are “in a peer-reviewed article,” but the rest of that paragraph explains that Rogers’s “work is a bit confusing at times, as rationales and conclusions are actually scattered all across his article, instead of being grouped in clear manner.” O.K. will help us distinguish between “what is actually important in Rogers’ examination, and what is largely irrelevant,” which, it turns out later, is almost all of it. The presence of madder root dye in a plant gum medium is “quite irrelevant,” the presence of cotton contamination is not sufficiently well quantified to be conclusive, and even Rogers’s careful determination of Arrhenius rate coefficients and the decay of lignin give “a very crude estimate of the upper limit of the Shroud age, and the exact values are in fact unimportant for the question of whether reweave theory is correct or not.”
The really important thing, according to O.K., is that the radiocarbon corner contains lignin, while the rest of the Shroud does not. That’s all, and that’s sufficient. “THIS IS THE PROOF THAT THE C-14 CORNER HAS [A] DIFFERENT ORIGIN THAN THE REST OF THE SHROUD AND [THE] 1988 C-14 DATING IS INVALID!!!!”
Rogers, more formally, says (‘Studies on the Radiocarbon Sample from the Shroud of Turin’):
“The lignin at growth nodes on the shroud’s flax fibers (Fig. 1) did not give the usual chemical spot test for lignin (i.e., the phloroglucinol/HCl test for vanillin). The Holland cloth and other medieval linens gave a clear test. This suggested that the rate of loss of vanillin from lignin could offer a method for estimating the age of the shroud. The phloroglucinol–hydrochloric-acid reagent detects vanillin (4- hydroxy-2-methoxybenzaldehyde) with good sensitivity. The lignin on shroud samples and on samples from the Dead Sea scrolls does not give the test.”
This statement is accompanied by Figure 1, a tangle of linen fibres “from the back of the ankle. […] Dark lignin deposits are easily visible at the growth nodes. The deposits do not give the spot test for lignin.”
If this section of Rogers’s paper is crucial, as both O.K. and I agree, then it deserves careful analysis. It is a pity that it is so poorly referenced and somewhat contradictory, but we must make of it what we can. I have commented on it before, but recent searches have changed my mind about some aspects of it, not that I’m really much the wiser.
Here are my observations (Rogers in italics):
a) “The lignin at growth nodes on the shroud’s flax fibers did not give the usual chemical spot test for lignin (i.e., the phloroglucinol/HCl test for vanillin).” The black lines across linen fibres are mechanical deformations, not growth nodes. Flax cells are spindle shaped, with pointed ends. They do not grow like bamboo, even though fibres made of them look a bit like it.
b) “Fig. 1. […] from the back of the ankle.” This exact portion of this exact slide is photo number 278 in the Nitowski collection, where it is among numerous slides from 3AF, iddentified as an image slide from the fingers.
c) “Dark lignin deposits are easily visible at the growth nodes. The deposits do not give the spot test for lignin.” I don’t know what this means. We can see lignin but it isn’t lignin? Then what is it?
d) “The Holland cloth and other medieval linens gave a clear test.” Not according to Heller and Adler it didn’t. Among their 22 slides were two pieces of the Holland cloth and a piece of patch. All their samples were given the phloroglucinol/HCl test, and all gave negative results.
e) “The lignin on shroud samples [….] does not give the test.” It is not clear whether Rogers himself retested the Holland cloth and the Shroud samples at all, or even partially. According to Eugenia Nitowski’s ‘Criteria for Authentication: A Procedure for the Verification·of Shroud Samples,’ 1986, “As far as I know, Rogers has 3 slides, Adler has 22, Levi-Setti has 18, and I have 21, which totals 64. This matches the original 32 which Rogers says he took from the Shroud, which McCrone divided in two.” In his posthumous book, ‘A Chemist’s Perspective on the Shroud of Turin,’ Rogers wrote: “Another final disaster befell the tapes. I had transferred them to Professor Alan Adler for additional microchemistry and identification of the blood. When Al died unexpectedly on 12th June 2000, his wife sent the samples to Turin. There is still much scientific information available in those type samples; however, I have no idea where they are or how they are being kept and preserved.” And elsewhere in the same document: “Unfortunately, the tape samples were inadvertently returned to Turin after the death of Al Adler, and they have been lost to scientific observation.” These remarks strongly suggest, or are meant to suggest, that Rogers had no samples left by the time he wrote his Thermochimica Acta paper. If that is true, then all his information about the Shroud fibres comes from Heller and Adler, whose finding regarding the lignin content of the Holland cloth was the opposite of what Rogers claimed.
f) “The lignin […] on samples from the Dead Sea scrolls does not give the test.” I’m afraid I don’t think this is true. It was remiss of Rogers’s peer-reviewers not to request a reference for this statement. I have been scouring the internet for evidence regarding ancient lignin, and invariably find that in fact lignin does not decay at all easily, not even after 4000 years. See, for example, ‘Ageing of Cellulose: Pt. VI. Natural Ageing of Linen over Long Periods of Time,’ 1972, Holzforschung, by Theodore Kleinert, who found “no significant difference” in lignin content between 2000 BC and 1500 BC linen samples and modern linen. Rogers’s claim that the Dead Sea scrolls contain no lignin is not referenced, and such evidence there is tends to refute his suggestion. I think his remark was wishful thinking, not scientific evidence. The dead Sea Scrolls are largely parchment, which contains, ancient or modern, between a quarter and a third lignin. Linen, ancient or modern, contains only about 2% lignin, which may make it difficult to assess on samples consisting only of a few fibres. Cotton, incidentally, contains almost no lignin at all, so the more cotton interpolation there is in any given sample of linen/cotton mix, the less the lignin.
Part 2 – “Why critics of Rogers’ 2005 work refuting the 1988 C-14 dating of the Shroud are wrong.“
Five critics, or groups of critics, are chosen for particular analysis, Mechthild Flury-Lemberg, myself, John Jackson, Rachel Freer-Waters & Tim Jull, and Marco Bella, Luigi Garlaschelli & Roberto Samperi. O.K.’s conclusion is that “there were many attempts to undermine Rogers’ 2005 work, yet they all failed. As far as I know, no critic ever seriously challenged the key evidence in Rogers’ work, that is the vanillin tests.” Well, I’m challenging them now – above – and here will address O..K.’s attempts to defend the reweave on visual grounds.
Firstly, he tries to counter Mechthild Flury-Lemberg’s knowledge and experience with experts of his own. Flury-Lemberg was well acquainted with the restoration of medieval fabrics, and carefully distinguished between coarse-woven tapestries and delicate fabrics like the Shroud (O.K. ignores the difference). Of the latter, she insists that no repair would be invisible to minute inspection, and, as one of the very few people who has given the area in question minute inspection, her report that she had seen no repair carries some weight.
O.K. brings two experts to the table – only they do not refute, or even deny, Flury-Lemberg. Michael Erlich, of the New York invisible mending company ‘Without A Trace,’ has never claimed that his work is truly invisible, and Robert Buden, of ‘Tapestries and Treasures,’ admits that he has never seen any examples of invisible mending, and although he thinks it possible, his expertise is in tapestry, which, as Flury-Lemberg mentions too, is much coarser, and woollen rather than fine linen. Even so, he does not discuss whether a mend could be invisible on both sides.
Moving on to me, who emphasised that no interweaving (doubling of threads at the sides of a repaired hole) is visible on light, or X-ray photographs of the area, O.K. invents a method of his own, never previously mentioned or observed, by which after reweaving, new and old threads are both cut at the same place, so that an appearance of a single continuous thread is achieved. It’s a clever idea, but in practice would render the patch hopelessly insecure, as it relies on the friction of the overlapping threads. No wonder there is no evidence of any such repair ever having been made or even considered, on the Shroud or any other textile.
John Jackson demonstrated continuity in the threads across the radiocarbon area with photographs and X-rays. O.K. denies their relevance. “There may be other possible factors responsible for the appearance of the bands, besides common origin of the threads, like surface contamination through the ages propagating with moisture along the threads. We do not know.” Yes, we do. It’s not just bands of threads, but individual threads that can clearly be traced across the sample. The bands stretch the whole width of the cloth, associating them with the hanks of which they are made. Rogers himself was particularly insistent on this point, and attributed the bands to “hank-bleaching,” and concomitant contamination. O.K.’s invention of some kind of moisture drift is easily refuted by observation of the well known water stains, which display no such characteristic.
Rogers does claim (in ‘A Chemist’s Perspective on the Shroud of Turin’), and O.K. quotes him, that: “some bands do not extend from the main part of the cloth into the radiocarbon-sample area: There is a different ‘plaid’ pattern in that area,” but he is wrong. Neither his nor O.K.’s accompanying images are good enough to show it one way or another, which may account for the inaccuracy of the observation, but high quality images clearly show that the radiocarbon corner in no way differs from the rest of the cloth, in terms of the continuity of threads and bands. Similarly, an examination of Shroud 2.0 shows absolute continuity of threads, and no doubling.
Rachel Freer-Waters and Timothy Jull observed no incongruities in the small piece of the Arizona sample retained in Tucson, and, thanks to its subsequently being photographed by Barrie Schwortz, anybody else can confirm their observations. O.K,’s claim that the alleged dye / cotton / thread interpolation is invisible even in photography of such resolution, but would be seen under higher magnification sounds increasingly forlorn.
Finally Marco Bella et al. discussed the two incongruous mass spectrograms published by Rogers, particularly; noting a pattern in the Raes sample that resembled that from a long chained carbon compound such as exadecan-1-ol, suggesting that it could be minor contamination of some sort, and claiming that without it, the two spectra (from the Raes Sample and the main body of the Shroud) would look much the same. O.K. dismisses this as irrelevant and insists that it’s the vanillin proportion, and only the vanillin proportion, which really matters. Bella et al. do not discuss that at all.
Part 3 – How Much Contamination is Needed to Shift the C-14 Date from the 1st to the 14th Century?
For some reason O.K. believes that “despite fierce discussion, many commentators rarely mention [a] fundamental issue: how much of the later, contaminant material is needed to skew the dating results from the 1st to the 14th century?” This is nonsense. I do not believe I have ever read a skeptical look at the radiocarbon dating which doesn’t cover it, often in detail. Fortunately, like the skeptics, O.K. finds that the amount of contamination must amount to well over half the sample, and uses that information to dismiss surface contamination as the reason why the radiocarbon date was wrong. He uses this conclusion to reinforce his conviction that interpolated threads – invisible mending – is the “THE ONLY VIABLE OPTION to save the claim that the Shroud dates from the time of Christ.” This, he believes has been proved by Rogers, via the enhanced cotton content of the radiocarbon corner compared to the rest of the Shroud, the coating of soluble dye on the radiocarbon corner which is not present on the rest off the Shroud, and, most importantly, the fact that the radiocarbon corner gives a positive phloroglucinol test, while the rest of the Shroud does not. Sadly, although I accept that the dye has been experimentally verified, I can’t go along with either of the others. By far the simplest reason for the radiocarbon date being medieval is that the Shroud is medieval.