For many years, students of the Shroud have been using a group of microphotographs included in the “Image Library” of the website shroud.com, taken from the “Mark Evans Collection,” and individually labelled “ME-02” to “ME-32,” although not consecutively, as not all the micrographs are included. Twenty-four of them can be seen on sindonology.com. There is […]
Dissing d’Arcis is a popular pastime among those who cling to the historical authenticity of the Shroud as the burial cloth of Jesus. His famous, undated, unsigned, amended and corrected memorandum has been roundly denounced as a deliberate falsification of the Shroud of Lirey, driven by his need to stimulate pilgrimage to Troyes, whose partly-built […]
On a “Reason to Doubt” podcast recently I demonstrated, as I have done before, that the alleged wrist wound was demonstrably through the ‘palm’ of the hand rather than the ‘wrist,’ although these areas are sometimes difficult to distinguish, so I refined my demonstration to show that the nail was between the metacarpals, not among […]
A common comment regarding the unlikelihood of a medieval provenance for the Shroud is that the figures of Jesus are naked, which some people think would have been anathema to medieval sensibilities. This is due to ignorance rather than research. Jesus is typically depicted nude as an infant, almost always at his baptism, and occasionally […]
An essay in fiction inspired by an idea from Joe Marino. 2025. The first year of the pontificate of the controversially named Pope Christopher has been marked by a succession of sweeping changes in the Catholic Church, stimulating enthusiasm and dismay in almost equal measure. Some of his reforms have followed precipitately from his predecessor’s […]
In 685 AD, at the age of sixteen, Justinian II became the sole emperor of the Byzantine Empire, and coins began to be struck bearing his image and name. However, it is unlikely that they bore the image of Christ as well. That had to wait until 692 AD, and the Trullan Ecumenical Council, whose […]
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 […]