A recent interview with Giulio Fanti (‘Shroud Wars: Panel Review (Part 3B) – Scientific Dating Evidence,’ at youtube.com/watch?v=2YHkaqLawTw&t=2796s) reiterates his opinion that the chances that Byzantine coins showing the face of Christ did not derive from the Shroud are billions to one against. In the transcript accompanying the podcast, he says: “The new probabilistic model […]
Alan Adler (‘Further Spectroscopic Investigations of Samples of the Shroud of Turin,’ The Orphaned Manuscript, 2002), and Robert Villarreal (‘Analytical Results on Threads Taken from the Raes Sampling Area (Corner) of the Shroud,’ Presentation at the Ohio Conference, 2008) made FTIR spectra of numerous extracts from the Shroud, and derived conclusions from their spectra, which […]
I hardly expected a reply to my last letter, communications from heaven to man being so intermittent these days, but a recent flurry of posts by Joe Marino on academia.edu seems to constitute the next best thing. They are: The first comprises your contribution to a paper published just after your death in March 2005, […]
1) An Intercomparison of Some AMS and Small Gas Counter LaboratoriesRichard Burleigh, Morven Lese and Michael TiteRadiocarbon, Vol 28, No 2A, 1986, pp571-577 Abstract: The performance of six laboratories with the capacity to date small samples (4 AMS and 2 small gas-counter laboratories) has been compared using 100mg samples of textiles from Ancient Egypt and […]
In September 2022, Liberato de Caro and his team published a follow-up to his previous papers (reviewed in the previous post, WAXSing and waning), called ‘Long-Term Temperature Effects on the Natural Linen Aging of the Turin Shroud,’ in an MDPI journal called Information. Starting with their previous conclusion, that the Shroud has suffered similar deterioration […]
Of all the odd things one might associate with the Shroud of Turin, this has got to be one of the oddest, but Googling “Shroud,” “Turin,” and “Freshly killed seal” returns an extraordinary 17000 hits. Not “recently dead seal” or “newly harpooned seal,” but always “freshly killed.” The use of exact phrases like this can […]
Among the most visible mysteries of the Shroud is the thin strip, about 8cm wide, which appears to have been originally part of the Shroud, then cut off, then sewn back on, in almost exactly the same place. That it is not from a different cloth can be shown by the correspondence of the weft […]
Of all the most widely circulated canards about the Shroud, probably the commonest is that the Shroud is the most studied artefact, “in human history,” “in Christendom.” “in the history of the world,” “of all time” (to quote just the front page of a Google search), and no doubt many more. This claim is generally […]
The most important questions for the Medieval hypothesis to answer are not How, or Why, the Shroud was created, and certainly not Who created it, but Where, and When. It might be supposed that the second of these was fairly rigorously satisfied by the radiocarbon dating, but although fifty years or so either side of […]
In 1973, a snippet of the Shroud was given to the Belgian textile expert Gilbert Raes for analysis. It was described as shaped as an irregular right-angled triangle, with sides 40mm, 13mm and 42mm. The hypotenuse was the actual cut, from the end of the Shroud, up one of the herringbone ‘spines’ and diagonally across […]