Shroudstory was, as I have said before, most interesting and informative, but it from time to time it was also great fun. The prime instigator of this was one Max Patrick Hamon, a self-styled professional cryptosteganographer, whose overweening self-assurance, and indignation whenever it was queried, was so over the top it made us laugh more […]

Abstract In 1988, three laboratories dated a small section of the Turin Shroud using the relatively new Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) method, and returned three dates, all round about the end of the thirteenth century. As these were collated, it was noticed that, even allowing for the errors suggested by the laboratories, two of the […]

A succession of ‘suggestions’ ‘in which I might be interested’ by academia.edu, cluttering up my inbox, has recently focussed my attention on the fact that much serious, not to mention intense, Shroud debate is not in English, and as such is largely ignored by those to whom French, Spanish and especially Italian is not easily […]

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 […]

The novelty of being able to convert areas of different shades on an image into a representation of a three dimensional landscape, with the darkest areas the highest and the lighter areas lowest, was so exciting in 1976 that all sense of scientific caution was blown to the winds, and wildly exaggerated statements of the […]

Even today, there is no shortage of Christ’s blood. It is preserved in reliquaries in Italy, France and Europe, and is even available for sale, for about £5000. From russianstore.com, whose selection changes regularly. And this, it should be noticed, is not blood collected from statues or pictures that drip miraculously at certain times of […]

Rather to some people’s surprise, Matthew Cserhati and Rob Carter of Creation Ministries International have recently published a thoughtful and reasonably well researched article deciding, on balance, that the Shroud is not the actual burial cloth of Jesus. (‘Is the Shroud of Turin Authentic?’, creation.com/turin-shroud) This was rapidly followed by a denunciation from Duane Caldwell, […]

Much has been made of the uniqueness of the Shroud’s distinctive 3/1 ‘herringbone’ weave, with rather bold and unjustified claims that it is ‘typical’ of various times and places, from Ancient Egypt to Medieval Denmark, which can hardly be justified by the evidence. Nevertheless, a close study of some of the errors in the weave […]

I recently took part in a discussion in which my interlocutor suggested that if the Shroud were a medieval artefact, it should be possible to name the artist who made it. She went on to imply that if I couldn’t, that in itself was evidence of authenticity, which, of course, I disagreed with, but let […]

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, I think the Shroud image was produced by a craftsman commissioned to provide some visible ‘evidence’ that the cloth displayed before the congregation at the conclusion of the Easter ‘Quem Quaeritis’ ceremony resembled one that might really have covered the body of Jesus. There was, I think, no claim at its […]